Search

Verbs like begin, continue, end etc. are called ‘phasal’ or ‘aspectual’ by different authors. The latter denomination seems to indicate the crucial role of aspect in the periphrases built upon them. This paper supports the idea that, despite some overlap with the aspectual component, phasal verbs and periphrases convey a peculiar type of information. PHASE is an autonomous semantic component, collateral to the major complex consisting of actionality, temporality, aspect, and modality. The compatibility between phasal and embedded verb within a periphrasis is also discussed.

People predict incoming words during online sentence comprehension based on their knowledge of real-world events that is cued by preceding linguistic contexts. We used the visual world paradigm to investigate how event knowledge activated by an agent-verb pair is integrated with perceptual information about the referent that fits the patient role. During the verb time window participants looked significantly more at the referents that are expected given the agent-verb pair. Results are consistent with the assumption that event-based knowledge involves perceptual properties of typical participants. The knowledge activated by the agent is compositionally integrated with knowledge cued by the verb to drive anticipatory eye movements during sentence comprehension based on the expectations associated not only with the incoming word, but also with the visual features of its referent.

The Zamucoan family only includes two surviving endangered languages: Ayoreo (AY) and Chamacoco (CH), spoken in the northern Chaco between Bolivia and Paraguay by approximately 4500 and 2000 people, respectively. The Zamucoan family also includes an extinct language, Ancient Zamuco (AZ), described in the 18th century by the Jesuit Father Ignace Chomé. AZ is very close to AY from the lexical point of view, but shows striking morphosyntactic correspondences with CH, so as to allow robust diachronic insights (Ciucci 2013; Ciucci & Bertinetto, submitted). This talk will address relevant typological features which turn out to be rarely attested in the world’s languages. It should thus be viewed as providing further input to the Konstanz Raritätenkabinett. Some of these rarities can be observed in both AY and CH and probably stem from Proto-Zamuco. One can mention: (a) the tripartite distinction within nominal morphology, which crucially involves one form specifically devoted to nominal predication; (b) the radical lack of tense and aspect in verb morphology (Bertinetto 2014); (c) the presence of both gender and classifiers, or more specifically of gender and number in possessive classifiers (Bertinetto & Ciucci, in preparation); (d) the so-called para-hypotactic strategy, involving the simultaneous presence of both coordinator and subordinator connectives in sentences including a dependent clause (Bertinetto & Ciucci 2012). Some typologically rare features, inherited from Proto-Zamuco, are only found in AZ and occasionally also in AY. They include: (e) the presence of nominal tense (AZ) and of nominal aspect (AZ, AY) – the latter being an absolute rarity – and (f) the traces of a conjunct/disjunct system (AZ). The diachronic reconstruction proposed by Ciucci & Bertinetto (submitted) reveals other rarities to be found in the verb morphology of individual languages, such as: (g) the first person zero marking in the AY realis mood; (h) the unexpected affix order in the CH third person plural; (i) the combination of greater plural and clusivity in CH. According to some scholars, the Gran Chaco constitutes a linguistic area (Comrie et al. 2010). Indeed, despite typological rarity, some of the above-mentioned features may also be found in other surrounding languages. See in particular features (d) and (h), and to some extent (c). The Zamucoan populations have certainly undergone cultural influence from other Chaco populations (Combès 2009) and have presumably borrowed elements from the neighboring languages. In at least one case, however, namely (h), there are reasons to surmise that the direction of the influence went the other way round (Ciucci, to appear).

The Zamucoan family consists of two living languages: Ayoreo (AY) and Chamacoco (CH), spoken in Northern Chaco (between Bolivia and Paraguay) by approximately 4500 and 2000 people, respectively. The Zamucoan family also includes the now extinct Old Zamuco (OZ), described in the early 18th century by the Jesuit Father Ignace Chomé (1958 [ante 1745]). The first stable contacts with the Ayoreos began around the half of the last century, whereas the Chamacocos were already in contact with the Western civilization at the turn of the XIX century, thus undergoing the linguistic influence of Spanish and Guaraní. The Zamucoan family is divided into two branches stemming from Proto-Zamucoan (PZ): According to glottochronological computations (Holman et al. 2011; Müller et al. 2013), CH split long ago from OZ and AY, and indeed it only shares 30% of its lexical roots with AY (Bertinetto 2009). This notwithstanding, all three languages present morphosyntactic correspondences, allowing robust diachronic insights (Ciucci 2013; Ciucci & Bertinetto, to appear). Like all Chaco languages, Zamucoan distinguishes possessable and non-possessable nouns (Fabre 2007). In most languages of the area, the former employ personal prefixes to agree with the possessor, while the latter cannot host possessive markers. The possessive inflection of the Zamucoan languages is reported in the Table below, based on data from Ciucci 2013. From a merely descriptive point of view, one can detect the Person Prefix, the Thematic Vowel and the Root, in this order. The segmentation in the table shows that the first two components are not always obligatory. In the third person there is a contrast between reflexive third person (RFL), expressing coreference with the subject, and non-reflexive third person (3-person) characterized by remarkable polymorphism. The paradigm also includes a generic-form (GF), indicating unspecified possessor. The aim of this paper is to present a diachronic reconstruction of PZ possessive inflection. OZ is the most conservative language, while AY and CH present some innovations: (1) in CH the original 1S-inflection was replaced by the most frequent GF allomorph, while a new kind of GF, not to be found in the other Zamucoan languages, emerged; (2) CH has lost the 1P- and 2P-inflections; (3) the AY 1P-inflection and 2S/P-inflections show prefixes stemming from free personal pronouns. Although CH is the most innovative language, one can find some relics of the original 1S/P-inflections, which are of fundamental importance for reconstruction. In particular, the rare CH exceptions concerning the 1P-inflection show the same prefixes as OZ, never observed in AY despite the genetic proximity between AY and OZ. The paper will also point out that the reconstructed possessive inflections of PZ share remarkable similarity with the verb inflection (in particular with the irrealis mood). Interestingly, some of these morphological exponents can be found in other surrounding languages (Ciucci 2014). This lends support to the hypothesis that the Gran Chaco constitutes a linguistic area over and above the genetic divergence between its main linguistic families (Comrie et al. 2010). Indeed, the Chaco populations, although traditionally in mutual conflict, have been in narrow contact for centuries, so that not only lexical, but even morphological borrowings had a chance to emerge.

The paper addresses the question of what constitutes the basic documental unit in the domain of oral archives and stems from the digitizing and cataloguing experience of the Gra.fo project (SNS, UNISI & Regione Toscana). Considering the extremely high variety of archives collected in field research by linguists, anthropologists, ethno-musicologists, and amateurs, it aims at identifying a set of criteria that could help cataloguers in editing oral documents. Genre, aims, research protocol, and communicative context are the guide elements chosen for the definition of the documental unit, which may occasionally appear controversial, since audio documents can be contextless and not supported by accompanying material.

After defining the notion of tenselessness, the paper presents arguments to treat Ayoreo (with exceedingly poor verbal morphology) as a radical tenseless language. Apart from mood, which is overtly expressed by the realis vs irrealis opposition, all possible candidates to the status of temporal-aspectual exponents turn out to be, on closer inspection, no more than adverbial elements, although the Tomaraho dialect of the cognate language Chamacoco might be on the verge of grammaticalizing a temporal morpheme.

Two perception experiments were run with Mandarin Chinese and Italian speakers. The aim was to comparatively examine the rhythmical role played by sentence accents. This study pursued previous work on the rhythmic features of Chinese and Italian as analyzed by means of the Control/Compensation model, according to which rhythm produces effects at two levels: level-I (phonotactical) and level-II (sentential). While previous work addressed the situation at level-I, the present study dealt with level-II, to check the respective strength of the accentual and syllabic oscillators.

The term “para-hypotaxis” is commonly used by Romance linguists to refer to sentences containing a proleptic dependent clause, with the main clause introduced by a coordinator. It is thus an intermediate structure between parataxis and hypotaxis; it should not be confused, however, with seemingly analogous phenomena, such as co-subordination. Traditionally considered as an idiosyncratic feature of the Old Romance languages (as well as Biblical Hebrew, Greek and Latin), para-hypotaxis has recently been discovered in at least one modern, genetically unrelated language (Swahili). This paper shows – with illustrations mostly stemming from the Zamucoan family (Ayoreo and Chamacoco) – that it is also widespread in several languages of the Chaco Boreal. The possible functional justifications of this peculiar syntactic phenomenon are discussed.