Subject Doubling in the Slovenian Dialect of Resia

The main goal of this chapter is critically to address from a comparative perspective some of the most important issues regarding the syntax of Romance subject clitics as currently found in northern and southern Gallo-Romance varieties, Francoprovençal, Raeto-Romance, and the dialects of northern Italy and northern Tuscany. Specific topics dealt with include: what counts as a subject clitic language?; person subject clitics; nmber subject clitics; deictic subject clitics; invariable subject clitics; lack of subject clitics in imperatives; enclisis of subject clitics in interrogatives and other non-declarative clauses; subject relative clauses; expletive environments; verb class; subject identification; position of the subject; type of subject; null subject (pro); tonic pronoun; full noun phrase; quantifier phrases; functions unrelated to the identification of a subject; place holders; auxiliary clitics; OCL-for-SCL phenomenon; left-peripheral functions.

Practically all Romance languages have complement clitic pronouns which basically replace the arguments of a verb. Only a sub-area of Romance, extending from France through northern Italy to the Adriatic Sea, also has subject clitics, connected to the syntactic subject of an inflected verb. The subject clitics of northern Italy have been studied in depth, and the resulting picture shows strong variation. A series of absolute and implicational generalizations, though, tells us that the variation is within a single system. The Occitan varieties of Piedmont and Southern France at first sight seem to belong to the same system; they have just fewer forms of subject clitics than other northern Italian dialects, and generally these clitics are optional. On closer inspection, though, more radical differences appear to exist between Occitan and northern Italian, in this respect. While in northern Italian and northern Romance it is possible to recognise links between subject clitics and subject agreement, in Occitan most of the functions of these elements appear to have a pragmatic nature. The only exception is the 3rd sg. impersonal clitic, which is obligatory. This property violates in a very interesting way the generalizations made on NIDs and leads us to conclude that while northern Romance varieties can be seen as types of non-null subject languages, Occitan dialects represent particular kinds of null subject languages. KEYWORDS: clitics, pronouns, null subject, Occitan, Romance languages

Like standard Slovenian, Polish, and several Romance languages, the Slovenian dialect of Resia forms impersonal clauses by combining transitive and intransitive verbs with reflexive clitics. Due to their syntactic and semantic properties, these reflexive impersonals have been analyzed as involving a subject with an arbitrary human referent realized by the reflexive clitic. Based on data from a recent translation of The little prince and other Resian resources, this paper brings forward hitherto unnoticed empirical evidence supporting this analysis. Unlike other Slavic languages, Resian has developed a set of subject clitics whose position in the clause differs from that of object clitics. Interestingly, when forming impersonal constructions, reflexive clitics are placed like subject clitics and not like object clitics as they are in other contexts. Furthermore, the distribution of the reflexive clitic variants se and sa in The little prince suggests that the latter is becoming the sole impersonal marker while the former is used to express all other reflexive meanings. This implies that sa is developing into a separate subject clitic. The general significance of these findings lies in the fact that they demonstrate a link between impersonal reflexives and subjects which does not depend on the assumption of a specific theoretical framework.

In this article, we analyze the order verb-(clitic) subject that characterizes Rhaeto-Romance languages in V2 and interrogative contexts. In these varieties, the subject is necessarily realized by lexical or pronominal elements in preverbal position, except in inversion contexts. Some of these varieties have subject clitics (SCls) that display a distribution similar to that of full pronouns. Furthermore, in some, subject-verb inversion involves the enclisis of SCls on the verb. Enclitics are distributionally different from proclitics and are characterized by distinct paradigms, which show specialized properties somewhat comparable to inflections. We will study subject syntax in inversion contexts within the Phase framework, where enclitics will be viewed as the result of syntactic Merge and of amalgamation with the verb stem in INFL. A crucial topic is the relationship between functional morphemes and spelling domains.

Reviewed by: The syntax of Cape Verdean Creole: The Sotavento varieties by Marlyse Baptista Don E. Walicek The syntax of Cape Verdean Creole: The Sotavento varieties. By Marlyse Baptista. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. xxii, 289. ISBN 158811290X. $132 (Hb). Written to promote a better understanding of Cape Verdean Creole (CVC), this study combines work from the author’s dissertation (Harvard, 1997) with an analysis of more recent data collected in the Cape Verde Islands. In it Baptista, a speaker of this creole, uses the framework of generative grammar, primarily the minimalist program, to analyze Barlavento and Sotavento varieties of CVC. The latter include four basilects, among which is the language of the Rabeladu (‘rebels’), a largely monolingual group relatively inaccessible to outsiders. The book includes eight chapters and a CD. Ch. 1 (1–11) serves as an introduction. Here B shares details concerning her fieldwork procedure and database construction. This includes an account of topics covered in interviews and a summary of the personal data she collected from CVC-speaking collaborators. Ch. 2 (13–21) highlights sociohistorical factors important in understanding the genesis of CVC. B gives attention to CVC’s development prior to Portugal’s political decline at the end of the sixteenth century, arguing that speakers shaped it via L1 and L2 acquisition. She points out that traders exported many slaves from Cape Verde to the Americas and discusses specific groups that acted as key intermediaries in the transfer of their language to Guinea-Bissau. Ch. 3 (23–74) covers three main topics: the full noun phrase, the pronominal system, and adjectival predicates. In discussing the determiner system, B shows that indefinite determiners can precede nonreferential NPs. Her data also inspire a fascinating discussion of pluralization strategies. Finally, B demonstrates that principled licensing conditions determine suffixation on nominal stems. Ch. 4 (75–138) examines two main topics: the CVC verb phrase and lexical categories. This dual approach helps account for the multiple functions of T(ense)M(ood)A(spect) markers. A particularly thought-provoking assertion made here concerns the existence of two interpretations of ta in CVC, one as infinitival marker and the other as a marker of aspect/mood. Basic syntactic patterns of this SVO language are reviewed in Ch. 5 (139–57). Topics covered include object constructions, secondary predicates, subject-verb inversion, topicalization, and questions. This discussion serves as a basis for B’s offering of a set of CVC functional categories in Ch. 6 (159–67). Templates of TMA patterns are presented, and additionally, B posits that CVC has a split IP and a biclausal structure. Chs. 7 and 8 each strike an impressive and illuminating balance between empirical data and syntactic theory. Ch. 7 (169–211) examines verbal syntax, probing theories of V-raising, especially the link between verbal morphology and movement. B invokes a learnability perspective to suggest that CVC verbs move even though the language is characterized by the absence of elaborate verbal morphology and subject-verb agreement. The final chapter (213–67) has three main parts. It begins with a description of the distribution of clitics and nonclitics. Next, B argues for the division of CVC pronominals into three classes: strong forms, weak forms, and clitics; she also reviews four categories of CVC clitics. Finally, showing that subject clitics are syntactic clitics, B concludes that CVC is a radical pro-drop language. Well-written and insightful, this book achieves its goals and emerges as an excellent model for work to be done on other creole languages. Don E. Walicek The University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

1. Introduction (by Rinke, Esther) 2. Part I. (2)L1 versus L2 versus child L2: Similarities and differences 3. 'Acquisition' in grammatical development: What does word order tell us? (by Carroll, Susanne Elizabeth) 4. Tense and Aspect in early French development in aL2, 2L1 and cL2 learners (by Schlyter, Suzanne) 5. Subject clitics in child L2 acquisition of French (by Preissler, Anne-Kathrin) 6. Placement of infinitives in successive child language acquisition (by Sopata, Aldona) 7. Part II. The acquisition of sentence structure and functional categories 8. The developmental pathway of nominal functional categories in early child Mandarin: Language specific features and other driving factors (by Chang-Smith, Meiyun) 9. The emergence of CP in child Basque: Evidence for a fine-structured CP? (by Kintana, Noemi) 10. Some directions for the systematic investigation of the acquisition of Cypriot Greek: A new perspective on production abilities from object clitic placement (by Grohmann, Kleanthes K.) 11. Strict Interfaces and three kinds of Multiple Grammar (by Roeper, Thomas) 12. Part III. Autonomous development vs. crosslinguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition 13. Delay and acceleration in bilingual first language acquisition: The same or different? (by Patuto, Marisa) 14. Intonation targets of yes/no questions by Spanish and German monolingual and bilingual children (by Lleo, Conxita) 15. Perception of German vowels by bilingual Portuguese-German returnees: A case of phonological attrition? (by Flores, Cristina) 16. Part IV. Language acquisition, language contact and diachronic change 17. Acquisition in the context of language change: The case of Brazilian Portuguese null subjects (by Kato, Mary Aizawa) 18. On the diachronic reanalysis of null subjects and null objects in Brazilian Portuguese: Triggers and consequences (by Nunes, Jairo) 19. On the decrease in subject-verb inversion in French declaratives (by Kaiser, Georg) 20. On the relation between acceptability and frequency (by Adli, Aria) 21. Index

This paper has two main objectives, to present some essential aspectual properties of Molise Slavic in comparison with other varieties in situations of strong language contact, and to discuss the role of language contact in each of these. Besides the grammatical categories of verbal aspect in the narrow sense, we deal with several more or less grammaticalised periphrases that also express aspectual functions or whose usage, at least, is triggered under the influence of verbal aspect. As in some other Slavic languages, having preserved traces of the original dual aspect system, Molise Slavic still displays a morphosyntactic aspectual opposition expressed by means of the perfect vs. imperfect, in addition to the Slavic derivational opposition between perfective vs. imperfective. Both oppositions combine with each other. The role of Romance in the reorganisation of these categories is discussed. The most salient innovation from a formal perspective is the imminentive calqued from Italian, but combinations of full verbs with phasal and modal verbs also show Romance influence. The results of the influence of dominant varieties on Molise Slavic in the area of aspectuality are compared with the development and behaviour of corresponding phenomena in the other languages and language families presented in this volume, in particular Resian and Slavic minority languages in Austria and Germany, Italo-Albanian, Italo-Greek, Baltic, German-based varieties in Northern Italy and Macedonian-based varieties in Albania and North Macedonia.

The dissertation investigates syntactic and semantic aspects of the indefinite pronoun system in Modern Hebrew and consists of an experimental part and a theoretical part. The experimental part presents the grammaticality judgment task conducted to test three theoretical questions: (1) the relation between negation and the licensing of AF `any' and KOL `any'; (2) the contrast between EYZE `some' and EYZESEHU `some' in terms of specificity; and (3) the correlation between syntactic position and free choice readings. Three main theoretical findings are contributed by this work. First, it is shown that from a typological viewpoint, Hebrew, a Semitic language, patterns with Romance and Germanic languages, rather than Japanese-type languages, in having indefinite pronouns specialized for particular operators available in the discourse. Second, the thesis proposes a novel unified syntax-semantics for KOL which accounts for its interpretational variability. Working with the Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002) framework where indefinite pronouns generate sets of individual alternatives, the semantics of a KOL--modified noun phrase is formalized as a variable and containing a restriction. When this restriction ranges over kinds, KOL receives a generic reading; when the restriction is over a contextually specified set of entities, KOL has an episodic reading. In these cases, the KOL--phrase moves to the argument position of a universal quantifier which binds the individual alternatives generated by the KOL--phrase. If KOL stays in situ, the individual alternatives are allowed to expand into propositional alternatives, resulting in the free choice reading. Third, I discuss the DP-internal structure of [eyze(N)se-hu (N)] and [(N) kol(N)se-hu], treating 'se-hu' as a CP. I propose that there is a correlation between the postnominal position and the free choice readings of these pronouns, suggesting that domain restrictions, usually derived in the semantics-pragmatics, may also be encoded in the syntax. If this hypothesis is on the right track, it could provide us with a better understanding of how and when in the process of language acquisition domain restrictions found with indefinite pronouns are acquired.

Deviations from typical word use have been previously reported in clinical depression, but language patterns of mild depression (MD), as distinct from normal sadness (NS) and euthymic state, are unknown. In this study, we aimed to apply the linguistic approach as an additional diagnostic key for understanding clinical variability along the continuum of affective states. We studied 402 written reports from 124 Russian-speaking patients and 77 healthy controls (HC), including 35 cases of NS, using hand-coding procedures. The focus of our psycholinguistic methods was on lexico-semantic [e.g., rhetorical figures (metaphors, similes)], syntactic [e.g., predominant sentence type (single-clause and multi-clause)], and lexico-grammatical [e.g., pronouns (indefinite, personal)] variables. Statistical evaluations included Cohen's kappa for inter-rater reliability measures, a non-parametric approach (Mann-Whitney U-test and Pearson chi-square test), one-way ANOVA for between-group differences, Spearman's and point-biserial correlations to analyze relationships between linguistic and gender variables, discriminant analysis (Wilks' λ) of linguistic variables in relation to the affective diagnostic types, all using SPSS-22 (significant, p < 0.05). In MD, as compared with healthy individuals, written responses were longer, demonstrated descriptive rather than analytic style, showed signs of spoken and figurative language, single-clause sentences domination over multi-clause, atypical word order, increased use of personal and indefinite pronouns, and verb use in continuous/imperfective and past tenses. In NS, as compared with HC, we found greater use of lexical repetitions, omission of words, and verbs in continuous and present tenses. MD was significantly differentiated from NS and euthymic state by linguistic variables [98.6%; Wilks' λ(40) = 0.009; p < 0.001; r = 0.992]. The highest predictors in discrimination between MD, NS, and euthymic state groups were the variables of word order (typical/atypical) (r = -0.405), ellipses (omission of words) (r = 0.583), colloquialisms (informal words/phrases) (r = 0.534), verb tense (past/present/future) (r = -0.460), verbs form (continuous/perfect) (r = 0.345), amount of reflexive (e.g., myself)/personal (r = 0.344), and negative (e.g., nobody)/indefinite (r = 0.451) pronouns. The most significant between-group differences were observed in MD as compared with both NS and euthymic state. MD is characterized by patterns of atypical language use distinguishing depression from NS and euthymic state, which points to a potential role of linguistic indicators in diagnosing affective states.

This chapter examines formal and functional types of indefinite pronoun. It first presents some examples of different indefinite pronoun series in a variety of languages, focusing on a formal element shared by all members of an indefinite pronoun series, such as some and any in English. This element is called indefiniteness marker, an affix or a particle which stands next to the pronoun stem. The chapter proceeds by discussing two main types of derivational bases from which indefinite pronouns are derived in the world's languages: interrogative pronouns and generic ontological category nouns like person, thing or place. It also looks at the main functional types of indefinite pronoun, namely: negative indefinite pronouns and negative polarity (or scale reversal). Finally, it analyses some alternatives to indefinite pronouns, including generic nouns, existential sentences, non-specific free relative clauses, and universal quantifiers.

Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar

This article is concerned with the investigation of variation, completed change, and change in progress, which are leading to a radical difference between everyday spoken European French and the standard written variety. We will focus on one small part of French grammar -- the subject pronouns -- and detail how grammatical and semantic change is contributing to an incipient diglossic situation in French, a situation which must be recognized by linguists and language teachers alike. Standard treatments (linguistic, reference, pedagogical grammars) of French agree that the subject personal pronouns/clitics (used with a verb) are: je ‘I’, tu ‘you’ (familiar/ singular), il, elle ‘he, she, it’, nous ‘we’, vous ‘you’ (plural, polite), ils, elles ‘they’, and, among others, the indefinite on ‘one’. This accounts quite well for written French, but it is quite inaccurate for everyday spoken French. Through the analysis of a corpus of everyday spoken European French, we have found that the subject clitics (especially the first and second person, and third person to a certain extent) have become grammatical prefixes. In addition, as we will show in detail, nous has all but disappeared as a subject clitic and has been replaced by on-. At the same time, the use of on- for ‘one’ is much less frequent than before: there has been a reversal of the basic/marginal relation in its meaning, such that the meaning ‘we’ occurs in by far the majority of its uses, and the meaning ‘one’ is now only a marginal meaning. There are, however, vague uses of on, which could be interpreted as either ‘we’ or ‘one’ -- thus showing the path of change from the one to the other both diachronically and synchronically. This indefinite meaning is now shifting over increasingly to tu (and only to a very small extent to vous), so much so that in our corpus, tu seems to have two basic meanings, split almost 50-50 between ‘you’ and ‘one’. This is inherently an unstable situation and probably presages more changes to come. It is clear, therefore, that more good corpus work is needed for a fuller understanding of spoken European French. Paradoxically, in addition, good corpus work is also needed on written French of many different varieties, since the reference and pedagogical grammars that focus on the written language tend to be based on the written French of only the ‘best’ authors and ‘good usage’. And finally, corpus-based reference works and textbooks are essential if we expect our students to develop any real, pragmatically appropriate, communicative proficiency in French.

Presented in the paper is a typological study of the functioning of negation in Germanic, Romance and Slavonic languages. The mono- or polynegative nature of a language is predetermined by the way indefinite pronouns and adverbs are realized morphology wise in the negative sentence. The parallel use of negative markers with the negative phrases preconditions the polynegative status of the language in question whereas the lack of negative marking testifies to its mononegative nature. Key words: negation, mononegation, polynegation, negative concord, double negation, typology.

Central determiner is as the main component in constructing noun phrase element as subject, objects, and complement in writing compositions. Meanwhile, determiner affects the meaning of noun. This research investigates the constructions of central determiners in abstracts of Journal Al-Tahrir Volume 17 No.1 Tahun 2017 and the reasons in applying those determiners in that journal. In gaining related information, types of central determiners, three diagram and table bracket were used. Qualitative research and syntactical analysis was conducted to analyze the data. The research finding revealed that central determiners were used in sentences of the abstracts. The terms of central determiners in subject were constructed through 7 determiners such demonstrative article, personal pronoun, possessive pronoun, indefinite pronoun, demonstrative article, definite article, and indefinite article. Having the function of object, central determiners were defined in 5 terms namely possessive pronoun, indefinite pronoun, demonstrative article, definite and indefinite article. Then, they were also used in sentences of the abstracts as complement. Here, central determiners were defined in terms of reflective pronoun, personal pronoun, possessive pronoun, indefinite pronoun, interrogative pronoun, definite and indefinite article.

The purpose of the study is to determine dialectal features of pronoun change in Seredniy Maidan village patois (Nadvirna district, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine); to describe the village patois forms of personal and reflexive, demonstrative, possessive pronouns coupled with joint group of attributive, interrogative (relative), negative and indefinite pronouns; to establish cultural and historical factors that influenced dialectal pronoun inflexion. The following linguistic analysis methods were employed in the study: selection and data classification (when forming an extract of pronoun dialect forms in patois), observation (when establishing patois evidence of pronouns change within the context of their declension in separate adjacent dialects of southwestern vernacular – Pokuttia-Bukovyna, Hutsul, and Naddnistrian dialects), contrastive (when comparing the changes of pronouns, adjectives and nouns patois forms), and descriptive (when analyzing the pronouns of different grammatical classes). Relying on the comprehensive description of pronouns various grammatical categories changes in Seredniy Maidan patois Nadvirna district, Ivano- Frankivsk region, Ukraine), the main dialectal features and cultural-historical factors that caused it have been identified. These are, in particular, various phonetic processes, the influences of grammatical analogy observed in different case-forms of personal, reflexive, demonstrative, possessive, attributive, interrogative (relative), negative, and indefinite pronouns in the studied patois. Patois features in the paradigm of the specified categories of pronouns are to the utmost revealed in the form of ablative, locative, and dative cases, whereas they are less markedly displayed in the form of nominative and genitive cases. The analysis of pronoun dialectal paradigm in the local patois in different caseforms of personal, reflexive, demonstrative, possessive, attributive, interrogative (relative), negative, and indefinite pronouns is testimony to the presence of some southwestern dialect traits in it, primarily that of Pokuttia-Bukovyna, Hutsul, and Naddniestrian dialects.