Morphosyntax

This paper outlines the major structural differences between the English and Shupamem (an SVO Bantu language spoken in western part of Cameroon) relative clauses. It examines the structure of the relative morphemes, the relative clause types, and the relativization strategies in these two languages. In English, relative clauses are introduced by pronouns which indicate the position relativized and the syntac-tic/semantic role of the head noun (Comrie 1998). Also, English relative pronouns can be omitted in object relative clauses without affecting the sentence grammaticality and semantic interpretation. In Shupamem however, the relativizer is a dicontinuous morpheme which encircles the relative domain: the first item (jʉə́ for singular or ʃʉə́ for plural) introduces the relative clause while the second one (nə) closes the relative domain. Unlike the English relative pronouns, none of these morphemes encodes the syntactic/semantic role of the antecedent. Similarly, the deletion of a relative morpheme in Shupamem renders the sentence ungrammatical.

Dans ce cours nous allons recueillir et organiser des données d’une langue peu décrite (probablement une langue autochtone) et nous allons utiliser ces données pour préparer des résumés descriptifs de la langue, formuler et tester des hypothèses concernant des phénomènes particuliers dans cette langue, et finalement développer des analyses de ces phénomènes.

Ce cours va inclure la discussion des données, l’élicitation en classe auprès d’un locuteur natif de la langue ciblée, ainsi que les rencontres en petits groupes avec ce locuteur, hors de la salle de classe. Nous allons aussi enregistrer et transcrire une histoire pour obtenir un échantillon du discours connecté. Cette histoire devrait aussi nous présenter plusieurs énigmes grammaticales que nous allons examiner plus profondément dans les séances d’élicitation.

Este estudio investiga las motivaciones cognitivas y funcionales detrás del surgimiento de una construcción posesiva innovadora en el español de la Amazonía peruana. En esta variedad, el núcleo de un sintagma nominal no concuerda necesariamente en número con su modificador, cuando este es un pronombre posesivo. Así, sintagmas del tipo "sus canoa" son comunes en la Amazonía. Un estudio previo encontró que las probabilidades de uso de este patrón innovador aumentan cuando el pronombre hace referencia anafórica a múltiples individuos. El presente estudio examina exclusivamente contextos con poseedores múltiples para identificar los parámetros que rigen la alternancia entre patrones concordantes y discordantes. Las variables que juegan un rol son el género del hablante y la animacidad del poseedor y el poseído. El uso del patrón innovador es ligeramente más frecuente entre las mujeres, sobre todo cuando el pronombre posesivo hace referencia a múltiples entidades altas en animacidad y el sustantivo a una entidad
baja en animacidad.

Unlike written Hebrew, the analytic form of the possessive pronoun dominates in Modern Hebrew. The cases in which the synthetic form is used are described in this paper from three points of view: lexicosemantic, syntactic and sociolinguistic. The synthetic form is usually chosen with abstract nouns defining periods of time, opinions, feelings, social status and relations, while the analytic form is normally used with concrete nouns, especially names of objects and animals. The two exceptions are names of body parts and names of family relationship, which appear relatively often with synthetic possessive pronouns, especially in the speech of eldery people and Israelies from Yemenite families. Insertedclauses of various kinds, as well as direct address are always used with the synthetic pronoun.

En tachelhite, bu(tgmmi) et bab (n tgmmi) expriment le sens de 'propriétaire de (la maison)' respectivement par affixation et par périphrase. Ces noms n'ayant pas reçu de traitement adéquat dans la littérature sur l'amazighe, nous nous attèlerons aux détails de leur morpho-syntaxe, tout en accentuant l'existence d'affixe syntagmatique et de mot lié dans la langue. Nous passons également en exergue les défis que pose ce type de formation pour l'hypothèse de l'intégrité lexicale ainsi que pour la contrainte qui bannit les syntagmes à l'intérieur des mots. D'un point de vue typologique, nous postulerons ultimement que ce mode de formation nominale révèle l'existence d'une morphologie légèrement polysynthétique en tachelhite.

This study is concerned with the properties, structural representation and derivational patterns of deverbal nouns (DNs) in Modern Hebrew. A recurring question arises in the context of such 'hybrid' formations: precisely how similar or far-apart are these derivatives from the verbs from which they originate? Enlisting Hebrew, a language with rich morphological marking on both verbs as well as DNs, several loci of divergence between verbs and respective DNs in the domain of argument-and eventstructure are eliminated. Taking as a point of reference the influential view which equates the processes of nominalization and passivization, this study scrutinizes syntactic structure and its interaction with nominalization, showing that behaviours typical of passives are absent from DNs. Most notably, the 'demoted' status of external arguments, and rejection of unaccusative and unergative verbs as inputs to nominalization, are not intrinsic to Hebrew DNs, a finding which weakens long-standing beliefs bearing on this class. A novel area of exploration offered in this study is the examination of morpho-syntactic factors and their interaction with nominalization, a domain where inconsistencies do arise. What emerges from a comparison of some 3000 verbs based on verb-class (templatic) morphology is a significant asymmetry between DNs carrying Middle (intransitive) marking and DNs marked as Active, wherein Middle forms are found to be less productive in two well-defined syntactic contexts. Not entirely absent, however, the same roots which fail to surface with Middle morphology are perfectly licit when derived from the corresponding Active verb (in case of alternating roots). Building on the notions of competition and markedness, such paradigmatic gaps are analysed not as grammaticallydetermined incompatibilities, but as a consistent preference for less-marked forms (Active-marked DNs) over more complex ones (Middle-marked DNs), a trend which lies within the realm of performance. As such, Hebrew DNs constitute a case study of the interrelations between the syntactic and morphological modules, and pragmatics.

Mauritian Creole displays an alternation between a short and a long form of the verb, which is reminiscent of the conjoint–disjoint alternation found in some eastern Bantu languages. Based on comparison with other French-based creoles and socio-historical evidence, we conclude that the Bantu substrate must have had an impact on the grammatical system of Mauritian Creole. We compare the synchronic properties of the alternations in Mauritian Creole and the most likely substrate Bantu languages of northern Mozambique and examine two possible scenarios for the influence of Bantu on the Mauritian verbal alternation, concluding that probably only the (syntactic) basics of the Bantu alternation motivated the persistence of the alternation in Mauritian Creole.

It is well-documented that native speakers of languages which lack articles and have no morphological marker for definiteness show persistent variability in the use of articles in second languages where they are present and where definiteness is marked. It has been argued that these learners use articles to mark both specificity and definiteness. This paper shows that learners display fewer problems of this kind when acquiring a third language (L3) which has articles that mark definiteness in a similar manner to that of the second language (L2). The languages under investigation in this study are Japanese (L1), English (L2) and German (L3). Results from a gap-filling task show an effect of both L3 and L2 proficiency. Furthermore, inappropriate selections appear not to be based on participants selecting articles on the basis of specificity, but instead upon the grammatical Case of the noun in question.

This paper deals with grammatical aspects of code-switching between Italian and Italo-Romance dialects, and focuses on the case of negative constructions featuring a MICA-type particle (i.e. a particle deriving from the Latin MICA(M) " crumb ") in a corpus of Italian and bresciano speech data. The case at hand, which will be examined following the so-called comparative variationist method (cf. Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001 inter alia), will offer valuable insight into the conventionalization of mixing patterns and the interplay between code-switching and convergence in Italo-Romance.

American English has many word pairs and trios that are alike enough to be confusing. Word Choice Errors provides a novel way to empower writers of all levels to cut through the confusion to understand which word to use and why that's the word to use. Written in a user-friendly style, grounded in descriptive linguistics methods, and eschewing memorization, this book trains writers to detect, interpret, and act on language clues-with exercises, "wild idea" analytical tricks, and additional resources throughout. It is an excellent resource for instructors and students of grammar or writing/rhetoric, as well as for individuals looking to develop their language and writing skills. Free access due to COVID19
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429261251

This contribution deals with the linguistic expression of possession in Kukama-Kukamiria and examines potential correlations between possessive semantic relations (Heine 1997, Stassen 2009, Barker 2011) and construction types. Kukama-Kukamiria, a language spoken in the Amazon of Peru, does not have lexical verbs such as ‘have’, ‘belong,’ or a copula to predicate possession. Although the language does not have a dedicated possessive construction, possession can be inferred from several constructions, four of which are the focus of this paper.

Previous work on Inuit has analyzed the morpheme pi as a ‘dummy root’ or ‘empty stem’; a morphological or phonological filler which satisfies a language-specific requirement that words contain lexical roots. We argue instead that pi is a pro-form similar to English ‘do so’ and ‘one’. As evidence for this analysis we examine the use of pi to avoid repeating constituents, its ability to replace VP-sized constituents, the need for discourse markers in some constructions containing pi, similarities with ‘stem ellipsis’ in Arctic Quebec Inuktitut, and pi’s behaviour in noun-incorporation.

Pētījuma aktualitāti nosaka tas, ka latviešu gramatikas aprakstos darbības vārds vajadzēt parasti pieminēts tikai kā vajadzības izteikšanas alternatīvs variants (konstrukcijā vajadzēt + nenoteiksme) (sk., piem., Mathiassen 1997, 131; Paegle 2003, 119–120). Rakstā arī plašāk aplūkots vajadzēt sintaktiskais lietojums un tā saikne ar modālo semantiku.

his volume presents the latest research in linguistic modules and interfaces in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG has a highly modular design that models the linguistic system as a set of discreet submodules that include, among others, constituent structure, functional structure, argument structure, semantic structure, and prosodic structure; each module has its own coherent properties and is related to other modules by correspondence functions.

Following a detailed introduction, Part I examines the nature of linguistic structures, interfaces, and representations in LFG's architecture and ontology. Parts II and III are concerned with problems, analyses, and generalizations associated with linguistic phenomena of long-standing theoretical significance, including agreement, reciprocals, possessives, reflexives, raising, subjecthood, and relativization, demonstrating how these phenomena can be naturally accounted for within LFG's modular architecture. Part IV explores issues of the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of syntactic categories in grammar, such as unlike category coordination, fuzzy categorial edges, and consequences of decategorialization, providing explicit LFG solutions to such problems, including those resulting from language change in progress. The final part re-examines and refines the precise representations and interfaces of syntax with morphology, semantics, and pragmatics to account for challenging facts such as suspended affixation, prosody in multiple question word interrogatives and information structure, anaphoric dependencies, and idioms. The volume draws on data from a range of typologically diverse languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Icelandic, Kelabit, Polish, and Urdu, and will be of interest not only to those working in LFG and related frameworks, but to all those working on linguistic interfaces from a variety of theoretical standpoints.

This conversation-analytic paper reports on the structure and interactional use of what I term the 'do-construction' in English-language conversation: Utterances such as 'The kids do eat cake' (cf. 'The kids eat cake'). The argument developed here is that, at its core, the do-construction is used to index a contrast with a prior understanding. As will be shown, this prior understanding can be overtly demonstrated or merely presumed or potential, and it may be the understanding of the speaker him/herself, or that of the recipient. Similarly, the do-construction can be seen in a variety of sequential positions, and in conjunction with a range of social actions. Nonetheless, what binds this diversity of cases together is the use of the do-construction to introduce content into the interaction in a way that actively orients to a contrastive understanding. After establishing the contrastive work that this resource accomplishes as a general feature of turn design, we then consider how the use of the do-construction can be seen to be relevant to specific sequences of action. I conclude with a discussion of the relationship between the grammatical construction analyzed here and other-correction, and comment on some related resources for indexing contrasts in English.

This monograph focuses on modality in Spanish. It presents the theoretical approach to this category formulated by Bohumil Zavadil and, consequently, it analyses its possible application to Spanish. We concentrate on specific areas of the Spanish modal system where two modal meanings combine. Theoretical analyses are combined with corpus-based studies concentrating on the choice of mood or contextual interpretation of selected constructions. We veryfied that areas where two modal meanings meet are a natural part of the Spanish modal system and that the combination of modal meanings has consequences on the mood selection.

Las lenguas indoeuropeas son lenguas flexivas: esto significa que tienen declinaciones y conjugaciones. Los casos caracterizan la
flexión nominal en griego y en latín, de manera que declinando un nombre y, por tanto, cambiando sus terminaciones podemos
expresar diferentes funciones sintácticas. A la sintaxis casual se añade la sintaxis preposicional: las preposiciones completan las
nociones expresadas por los casos. En nuestro trabajo (que se dividirá en cuatro partes) estudiamos preposición por preposición,
comparando las dos lenguas para ayudar a los alumnos y profesores de secundaria en la enseñanza y aprendizaje del griego y el
latín.

In written Hebrew, the final tsere plene <-ֵי> as in <בְּנֵי> ‘sons of’ is the graphemic masculine plural construct marker, but throughout the history of Hebrew until the pre-revival period this morphogram has had no specific linguistic counterpart. This is valid not only for the morphophonology of Classical Hebrew, but also for all non-vernacular communitarian Hebrew orthoepies (reading traditions) throughout the Jewish diaspora. In D. Bolinger’s (1946) terms, the final <-ֵי> graphemic unit is a visual morpheme. With the advent of spoken Hebrew, however, the Ashkenazi dictum “tsere alef → ey”, though unfit vis-à-vis Sephardic ideal Hebrew, was maintained in colloquial Hebrew in instances of open syllable tsere plene, whence the final morpheme +ey as in /bney/ (Sephardic /bene/). This new colloquial Hebrew morpheme has originated ex scripto.

Latviešu un vispārīgās valodniecības katedra Latvistikas un baltistikas nodaļa Humanitāro zinātņu fakultāte, Latvijas Universitāte Visvalža iela 4a, Rīga LV-1050, Latvija E-pasts: [email protected] Latviešu valodā vērojama liela uzrunas formu dažādība-gan vīriešu un sieviešu person-vārdiem, gan dažādiem uz cilvēku attiecināmiem vārdiem (piem., tēvs, brālis, māte, māsa), kā arī to deminutīviem šai funkcijā tiek lietots vokatīvs, nominatīvs un pat akuzatīvs. Lai gan latviešu gramatikās šī daudzveidība vismaz daļēji tiek atspoguļota, tomēr līdz šim pietrūcis plašāka uzrunas formu lietojuma izvērtējuma normatīvā aspektā. Valodas lietotājiem tas ir ļoti svarīgi, jo ikdienā ikviens sastopas ar sava vārda, uzvārda, radniecības apzīmējuma, profesijas vai amata, kā arī sociālā statusa nosaukuma uzrunu ne tikai runātos, bet arī rakstītos tekstos. Nereti vīriešu personvārdiem vokatīva vietā tiek lietots nominatīvs, savukārt sieviešu personvārdiem vokatīvs iederīgāka nominatīva vietā. Raksts veltīts šo jautājumu analīzei, pārskatot uzrunas formu aprakstu latviešu gramatikās, kā arī esošo un vēlamo lietojumu valodas praksē. Uzrunas formu apskats balstīts uz personvārdu un cilvēku nosaukumu analīzi, jo tieši šie lietvārdi ir galvenie saziņas procesā, ar tiem cilvēki uzrunā viens otru. Atslēgvārdi: uzruna; vokatīvs; nominatīvs; akuzatīvs, dzīvums; deminutīvs; valodas normēšana. Raksta iecere saistīta ar latviešu valodas uzrunas formu lietojuma izpēti. Raksta autore šo formu aprakstam pievērsusies jau iepriekš pētījumā "Uzruna, vokatīvs, nominatīvs un akuzatīvs" (Kalnača 2017), kur plašāk tika aplūkota vokatīva un citu uzrunas funkcijā lietotu formu distribūcija, nepieskaroties normatīvajam aspektam. Pētījums "Uzrunas locījumi gramatikā un valodas praksē" veidots kā turpinājums, akcentējot tieši personvārdu lietojumu uzrunā. Uzrunas galvenais gramatiskais izteicējs ir lietvārda vokatīva locījums (Skujiņa 2007, 457). Vokatīva funkcija valodā ir vienkārša un skaidra-nosaukt uzrunāto personu, t. i., konkrētu cilvēku un pievērst viņa uzmanību (Daniel, Spencer 2009, 626): (1) a. Augsti godātais prezident! 1 (LVK2018) b. Jāni, kurš tavu runu rakstīja? (LVK2018) c. Lauriņ, mēs tūlīt būsim mājās! (www.satori.lv) 1 Visos piemēros saglabāts teksta autoru oriģinālrakstījums.

Jenjo is an Adamawa-Ubangi language group spoken in parts of Taraba State, Adamawa State and Gombe State in North East Nigeria. Jenjo is the name of the language and the tribe. The study was motivated by the need to document the language since it is one of the minority endangered African languages. The objectives of the study were: to describe the noun phrase structure of Jenjo; to analyze the Jenjo noun phrase using X-bar theory and to identify the syntactic functions of the NP in Jenjo sentences within X-bar. The New Testament Jenjo Bible and introspection were used. The study describes the structures and functions of Jenjo NP and analyses it in X-bar convention.  A descriptive research design was used for data collection. Qualitative data was collected from five systematically sampled books of the Jenjo New Testament Bible. Random sampling was used to select one chapter per book while purposive sampling was used to select noun phrases and sentences for the study. The study determined Jenjo as a head-initial language since almost all the elements within the Jenjo NP are post-head. We established that there are simple, complex and conjoined NP structures in Jenjo.  Secondly, a single noun can be a full NP and can be projected maximally in Jenjo. All the structures were accounted adequately by the X-bar convention. Lastly, Jenjo NPs function as specifiers, complements, and adjuncts in sentences.

As one of the primary means of constructing gendered identities, language is a matter of central concern to transgender people (Zimman 2018). In this paper, we present an analysis of non-binary singular they; that is, they as used to refer to individuals whose gender identity is not, or is not exclusively, masculine or feminine. Despite singular they’s widespread usage and long history in English, not all speakers judge this most recent innovation to be grammatical, even if they do not object to singular they in quantified, generic, or otherwise gender non-specific contexts, and even if they produce the latter sort of examples natively. We argue that resistance to this new use of they can, at least in part, be attributed to speakers’ level of participation in a grammatical change in progress. Further, we propose that this change can be categorized into three distinct stages, with they’s most recent broadening – that is, as a non-binary singular pronoun of reference – dovetailing with wider socio-cultural changes (as well as featural changes beyond the pronominal system) that underscore the difficulty in separating grammatical and social judgements. As we aim to show, linguists from all subdisciplines – both theoretical and applied – are especially well suited to leverage theoretical insights to advocate for trans-affirming language practice.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the Catalan and Spanish quotative recomplementation (QRC) in terms of pragmatic features encoded by morphosyntax. In QRC constructions, the second complementizer (que2) is used to set the boundaries between a reproduced discourse and the clausal elements that were implicit in the original discourse, which must be reintroduced in the new communicative situation because they are not shared by the interlocutor (e.g. Sp. Están sentados en la mesa --> Ha dicho que1 los invitados #(que2) están sentados en la mesa). QRC is an evidence for the existence of two types of complements for assertive verbs: quotative complements (embedded speech acts with a de dicto interpretation) and reportative complements (speech events that are stated, with a de re interpretation; e.g. Sp. Están sentados en la mesa --> Ha dicho que1 los invitados (#que2) ya están en su sitio). Quotative complements have the same propositional structure as the original sentence and can include some elements such as speech act adverbs —which are oriented to the original speaker (i.e. the matrix clause subject)—, Hanging Topics, or discourse connectors. On the contrary, reportative complements may be a summary of the original discourse and they have not such elements oriented to the original speaker or the previous discourse. Besides, reportative complements allow long-distance movement from the embedded CP to the matrix CP.

This is a morphological exploration of certain Asante settlement names. Naming can be regarded as an indiscriminate cultural practice. Every society on Earth uses names in recognising its members and locations. Moreover, the names' connotations differ according to society and culture. To the Asantes, naming practices is one of the essential customs and social institutions. Due to this, they attach so much importance to it, being naming of persons or places. The study investigates the morphological aspects of about one hundred and twenty-two (122) Asante habitation names. Additionally, it explores the typology of Asante habitation names through the lens of a morphological analysis. According to the morphological analysis, some Asante habitation names may be derived from single stems, compounds, affixation, or reduplication. The researchers supplemented the primary and secondary data sources with semi-structured interviews to establish the whole composition of the names, as some had been incorrectly written or had altered certain phonological procedures.

La presente investigación reflexiona entorno a las implicaciones gramaticales y semánticas de un idioma y una cultura por medio de su creación; se sirve de gramáticas de lenguas reales y creadas como base, así como de un fuerte componente tipológico y de antropología lingüística para su creación. A lo largo del documento se introduce la terminología formal a emplear y el recorrido de la creación de lenguas hasta el presente, pero principalmente se discuten las apreciaciones que se tuvieron en cuenta para el desarrollo de la lengua, el proceso que se siguió su creación, y describe los aspectos nucleares que se desarrollaron: sociedad (creencias, condiciones de vida y organización social) y lengua (gramática, semántica y escritura). El trabajo concluye con un análisis retrospectivo del ejercicio y consideraciones en torno a la creación de lenguas y un relato escrito en la lengua y del que se partió para el análisis.

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This research thinks about the grammatical and semantic implications of a language and a culture through its creation; it uses grammars of real and created languages as a basis, as well as a strong typological and linguistic anthropology component for its creation. Throughout the document, the formal terminology to be used is introduced, as well as the path of language creation up to the present. However, it mainly discusses the considerations that were taken into account for the development of the language, the process that followed its creation, and describes the nuclear aspects that developed: society (beliefs, living conditions and social organization) and language (grammar, semantics and writing). The paper concludes with a retrospective analysis of the exercise and considerations around the creation of languages and a story written in the language and from which the analysis was based.

Winner of the 2013 ALT Gabelentz Award --- Mian is a non-Austronesian (‘Papuan’) language of the Ok family spoken in the Highlands fringe in western Papua New Guinea. Mian has approximately 1,400 speakers and is highly endangered. This grammar is the first comprehensive description of the language. It is based on primary field data consisting of a text corpus that covers different genres of the oral tradition, namely myths and ancestor stories, historical accounts, accounts of the initiation ritual, conversations, and procedural texts. The corpus was recorded by the author during a total of eleven months of field work from 2004 to 2008. The book provides a thorough description of all areas of Mian grammar and gives an in-depth analysis of many points of typological interest, such as the complex system of lexical tone, the interaction between a gender system and a system of classificatory prefixes on verbs of object movement, manipulation or handling, which allows the highlighting of certain characteristics of a referent in a given situation, the complex verbal morphology which allows fine-grained tense-aspect-mood distinctions, and a switch-reference system in which switch-reference suffixes on medial verbs are homophonous with and derived from suffixes functioning as tense and aspect markers in final verbs. The book is rounded off by a collection of traditional and contemporary texts (fully glossed and translated) and a word list comprising some 1,600 items, giving lexical tone, word class and meaning.

Bantu languages, which are spoken throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, permit wh-questions to be constructed in multiple ways, including wh-in-situ, full wh-movement, and partial wh-movement. Shona, a Bantu language spoken by about 13 million people in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, allows all three of these types. In this dissertation, I conduct the first in-depth examination of Shona wh-questions, drawing on fifty hours of elicitation with a native speaker consultant to explore the derivational relationships among these strategies.

Wh-in-situ questions have received a wide variety of treatments in the syntactic literature, ranging from covert or disguised movement to postsyntactic binding of the wh-phrase by a silent question operator. In Bantu languages, wh-in-situ questions are often taken to be derived via a non-movement relation (e.g., Carstens 2005 for Kilega, Diercks 2010 for Lubukusu, Muriungi 2003 for Kîîtharaka, Sabel 2000 for Kikuyu and Duala, Sabel & Zeller 2006 for Zulu, Schneider-Zioga 2007 for Kinande), but alternatives have rarely been considered. I demonstrate how movement-based analyses that have been proposed for wh-in-situ in non-Bantu languages make the wrong predictions for Shona wh-in-situ, which lacks word order permutation, extraction marking, island effects, and intervention effects. These properties provide support for the traditional Bantuist view that the relation between the pronunciation site of an in-situ wh-phrase and its scopal position in the left periphery is not movement; I claim that in Shona it is unselective binding.

Many Bantu languages, including Shona, prohibit wh-phrases from appearing in the canonical preverbal subject position. Wasike (2007) demonstrates that this restriction applies to topicalized non-subjects as well as preverbal subjects. I replicate these results for Shona and argue that they cast doubt on Sabel & Zeller's (2006) attempt to characterize the ban with an appeal to improper movement. I argue instead that restrictions on the distribution of wh-in-situ in Bantu are tied to restrictions on the domain for focus licensing. This claim is further bolstered by an examination of crosslinguistic variation within Bantu with respect to whether the ban on in-situ preverbal wh-subjects applies in embedded clauses. I observe a previously unnoticed generalization: languages that universally ban in-situ preverbal wh-subjects (like Zulu) have immediately after the verb (IAV) focus effects; languages that do allow in-situ preverbal wh-subjects in embedded clauses (like Shona, Lubukusu, and Kîîtharaka) also lack IAV effects.

Full wh-movement in Shona gives rise to questions that bear a certain similarity to English wh-questions. However, using a range of diagnostics including extraction marking, island effects, reconstruction effects, and the distribution of temporal modifiers, I argue that what appears to be full wh-movement in Shona actually has a cleft structure: the wh-phrase moves to become the head of a relative clause, which is selected by a copula in the matrix clause. Just as in wh-in-situ, an ex-situ wh-phrase is pronounced lower than its scopal position, and the relation between these two positions is established via unselective binding. Additional evidence for this proposal comes from the sensitivity of partial wh-movement to island boundaries below but not above the pronunciation site of the wh-phrase, a pattern that has been predicted by previous analyses (e.g., Abels 2012, Sabel 2000, Sabel & Zeller 2006) but for which empirical support has been lacking until now. I therefore unify full and partial wh-movement under a single analysis for cleft-based wh-in-situ that involves a step of relativization (independently needed for relative clauses) and a step of unselective binding (independently needed for wh-in-situ).

Gender assignment and exponence changed dramatically from Old to Middle English. This paper provides insights on the mechanisms and chronology of this change by quantitatively analysing the annals 1129-1154 of the Peterborough Chronicle. A logistic regression reveals substantial effects of formal, semantic and extralinguistic parameters on gender reassignment.
Lexical-to-referential-gender transition is largely a directed development in which correspondence of sex and gender plays a major role. At the same time, instances of random gender-reassignment occur and produce gendered noun-phrases incompatible with both the Old English as well as the Middle English system of gender-assignment. Pronouns adopt referential agreement before adnominals as a diachronic application of the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979) predicts.

The feature of plurality specifies more-than-oneness on nouns. The choice of marking the distinction between singular and plural whenever a noun is used is obligatory in many languages and optional in some other languages. The processes involved in achieving plurality differ from language to language. Therefore, this study is aimed at establishing the formal properties of inflectional plural marking in the Idoma language.
Idoma is classified under Benue-Congo, a subgroup of the Niger-Congo phylum. This study is conducted by using both primary and secondary data. Primary data for the study were obtained from adult speakers who are competent in the language. The analysis of plural formation in the Idoma language established that plurality is marked via prefixation, mutation, quantifiers, and cardinal numerals. The study further demonstrates that non-human nouns can be construed as singular or plural in the sentence depending on the verb in such sentences. The study therefore, proposes rules to explain subject-verb agreement in the language. The study also established that adjectives can also express plurality on morphologically singular nouns via reduplication.

Il s'agit d'une tentative d'élaboration d'une théorie du discours fondée sur les pronoms personnels d'énoncés "je" ( discours égolocutif), "tu" (discours allocutif), "il" (discours délocutif). Sans chercher à heurter la sensibilité des partisans de l'opposition récit/discours, nous revenons sur cette question pour en relativiser la dualité cloisonnante au vue des travaux initiés par Genette. Ensuite, après avoir analysé, exemples littéraires à l'appui, les implications de cette triptyque dans la classification dynamique et des genres et textes littéraires, nous voyons comment elle permet d'approcher objectivement la polyphonie discursive des textes, et ce, dans le cadre d'une morphogenèse de formes discursives - Je pense notamment à mes maîtres: Pierre Cadiot (in mémoriam), Peer Aage Brandt (Case Uninersity). MERCi et Bonne lecture. J'attends vos avis, mon mail est indiqué sur la première page ( pas l'adresse: je n'y habite plus).

The Bunun language is spoken by one of the thirteen officially recognized Austronesian minority groups on the island of Taiwan. Its most marked characteristics are its complex verbal morphology and its unusual argument alignment system. Takivatan Bunun is the third-largest of its five extant dialects and is spoken by a number of small settlements two counties in the central mountains and at the east coast of the island.
Based on more than one year of field work data, this dissertation explores aspects of the grammar of Takivatan as spoken by the people of the villages Ma-yuan and Qi-mei in Hualien County. It is intended as a preliminary to a full descriptive grammar. After an introductory chapter and an overview of Takivatan phonology, Chapter 3 discusses how words and affixes can be defined in Takivatan and gives a general overview of word building processes. Chapter 4 is a concise treatment of compounding, an uncommon and unproblematic process in Takivatan. Chapter 5 discusses TAM affixes. Chapter 6 concisely describes the grammatical and derivational uses of focus suffixes. Chapter 7 is an elaborate discussion and classification of the large set of verbal prefixes in Takivatan. The final chapter concludes with an overview of definiteness markers, personal pronouns, demonstratives and other pronominal forms.

This dissertation explores Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portuguese-based language spoken in the Republic of Cabo Verde. The CVC subject domain has at least three types of nominative anaphora: a subject clitic, a null subject, and a double-subject construction. This study is the first to examine the distribution of these subject categories by combining a quantitative methodology with formal syntactic theory, as well as insights from functionalist, usage-based, cognitive linguistic, and typological approaches. In so doing, it offers a new perspective on this issue that is intended to move the field past protracted theoretical debates over the morphosyntactic status and discursive functions of these grammatical elements. For instance, the formal category underlying subject clitics has been contested in CVC and cross-linguistically; some have claimed that they are independent pronouns that cliticize at the phonological level (Déprez 1994; De Cat 2005; Costa & Pratas 2013), others have identified them as inflectional affixes in the VP layer (DeGraff 1993; Baptista 1995; Culbertson 2010), while in language typology they are analyzed as ‘person markers’ that can engage in local grammatical agreement or nonlocal anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002; Siewierska 2004; Creissels 2005; Kari 2017). Sociolinguistic interviews and picture description narratives were collected from native speakers of CVC from the islands of Santiago and Maio. Sampled speech was transcribed prosodically (Chafe 1993; Du Bois et al. 1993; Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019) in order to evaluate several aspects of discourse organization. Data were submitted to descriptive and inferential inspection in four analyses using R (R Core Team 2019): one was an exploratory test that served to delimit the variable context for SPE in CVC, the second involved a fixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, and the third and fourth were based on mixed-effects binomial logistic regressions. Results revealed highly significant effects for linguistic structural priming: double-subject and singleton tonic pronouns primed subsequent double-subjects, while null subjects primed additional null subjects. Lexical Determiner Phrase (DP) antecedents that were semantically referentially deficient (i.e. they bore inanimate, indefinite, or nonspecific reference) also promoted anaphoric zeros. These results lend partial support to the claims regarding the semantic properties of strong pronominals proposed under the Typology of Structural Deficiency (Cardinaletti & Starke 1994, 1999), and suggest that, as in Brazilian Portuguese, there is an “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint (Kato & Duarte 2003, 2005; Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) that is probabilistically active in CVC. The zero-to-zero priming effect and the favoring effect from referentially deficient lexical DPs were only active at short anaphoric distances, and were promoted when adjacent intonational units were prosodically linked or simultaneously prosodically and syntactically linked (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). The priming effect for double-subjects obtained at longer anaphoric distances; they are promoted when their antecedent is in a non-adjacent clause. Results suggest that double-subjects function as switch-reference devices, can establish contrastive focus, and reintroduce old discourse referents. These are much the same functional and discursive values that singleton tonic pronouns have cross-linguistically (Givón 1976; 2001[1984]; 2017). The realization of zero subjects is mostly contingent on antecedent accessibility (Givón 1976; 2017, Ariel 1990), but is also modulated by the aforementioned “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint. Inferring from the results for zero and double-subjects, it appears that CVC subject clitics are ‘ambiguous person agreement markers’ (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Siewierska 2004): like independent pronouns, they engage in nonlocal anaphoric agreement, but like inflectional affixes, they also engage in local grammatical agreement. This in-between morphosyntactic status is related to the infinitival origin of CVC verbs (Quint 2008b): the absence of bound person-number inflection is likely to have initiated grammaticalization on tonic pronouns, causing them to be eroded into subject clitics, and eventually become ambiguous person agreement markers, which are probabilistically dropped according to the properties of their controllers and the dynamics of antecedent accessibility. In line with Wratil’s (2011) ‘Null Subject Cycle’, it could be argued that CVC subject clitics are grammatical elements that have stagnated at an early stage of a grammaticalization cline, which entails the transformation of independent pronouns into clitics, and then eventually into bound affixes.