Plural Article Research Articles

Experimental evidence for the interpretation of definite plural articles as markers of genericity – How Italian can help

In the Romance languages, definite plural articles (e.g., le rane ‘the frogs’) are generally ambiguous between a generic and a specific interpretation, and speakers must reconstruct the intended interpretation through the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. Following the “polar bear” paradigm implemented in Czypionka & Kupisch (2019)’s investigation on German, the goal of the present study is to check the suitability of their test on article semantics, by establishing to what extent native speakers of Italian interpret ambiguous definite plural DPs as generic or specific in the presence of a nonlinguistic picture context. We present judgment and reaction time data monitoring the preferred reading of sentences introduced by different kinds of noun phrases (e.g., Le rane/Queste rane/Le rane di solito sono verdi/gialle ‘The/These/Usually frogs are green/yellow’), while looking at pictures showing prototypical or non-prototypical properties (e.g., green vs. yellow frogs). Our results show that both possible interpretations of definite plural articles are routinely considered in Italian, despite the presence of a picture with specific referents, validating the “polar bear” paradigm as a suitable test of article semantics.

The syntax and semantics of approximate indefinites in Spanish

ABSTRACT In Spanish, combining an indefinite plural article and a cardinal number leads to an approximative interpretation similar to that provided by approximators like ‘approximately’. In this paper, we advance a syntactic and semantic analysis of these structures. We show that the construction shares a number of properties with structures containing explicit approximative elements, so it justified to assume that a particular constituent contributes the approximative meaning. We propose that an approximative morpheme Approx is combined with the cardinal number; the morphological realization of this morpheme is as the plural affix on the indefinite article. We advance a denotation for Approx, and elaborate the necessary assumptions on the functioning of numerals for our analysis to work at a general level.

Production of Spanish Grammatical Forms in U.S. Bilingual Children.

The purpose of this analysis was to understand how grammatical morpheme production in Spanish for typically developing Spanish-English bilingual children relates to mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and the extent to which different bilingual profiles influence order of grammatical morpheme acquisition. Participants included 228 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4;0-7;6 (years;months). Grammatical morpheme accuracy was evaluated using an experimental version of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014). MLUw data were calculated from children's narrative samples. Production accuracy of plural nouns, singular and plural definite articles, preterite tense, imperfect aspect, direct object clitics, prepositions, subjunctive, and conjunctions was calculated and analyzed as a function of MLUw in Spanish. Level of accuracy on these forms was compared for Spanish-dominant and English-dominant groups. Accuracy was significantly associated with MLUw. The relative difficulty of Spanish grammatical morphemes is highly similar across different bilingual profiles. There are common elements of Spanish that are easy (imperfect, plural nouns, singular articles, conjunctions), medium (plural articles, preterite), or hard (prepositions, direct object clitics, subjunctive), regardless of whether a child is a Spanish-dominant or English-dominant bilingual.

Gender context effects in noun recognition: grammatical cues or co-occurrence effects?

ABSTRACTDeterminers with congruent gender facilitate the recognition of the following noun. We examine two explanations of this effect: either gender information is retrieved and influences lexical access, or gender effects are due to the determiner-noun co-occurrence. French nouns are either feminine or masculine and are preceded by feminine or masculine determiners in the singular. Plural articles are unmarked for gender. Because some nouns (peanuts) occur more frequently in the plural than in their singular, they frequently co-occur with determiners that do not provide gender information. Conversely, nouns that occur more frequently in their singular form (cathedral) co-occur more frequently with gender-marked determiners. We examined the recognition of plural- and singular-oriented nouns preceded by gender-marked and unmarked determiners. Singular-oriented nouns were recognised faster after gender-marked (singular) articles than after gender-unmarked (plural) ones. However, plural-oriented nouns were recognised faster after gender-unmarked (plural) articles, suggesting that articles/nouns co-occurrence outweigh abstract gender cue.

The capricious evolution of the indefinite plural articleunsand its relationship with lexical plurality in medieval French

The indefinite plural articleunsin medieval French conjoins the features of unity and plurality. Because of its grammatical nature,unsis not restricted to lexical plurals, but combines in a productive way to nouns having a regular singular-plural alternation in order to create a complex referent not reducible to the sum of its components. Moreover,unsexpresses not only quantitative unity ‘one single N’, but also qualitative unity ‘one same N’ and is not linked to lexical plurality in the latter case. Since its features of unity and plurality are considered as incompatible, plural indefinite articles have been assumed to emerge in an advanced stage of grammaticalization, when the numeral source meaning is bleached out, and to be not viable over time. Both hypotheses were invalidated in the present study.

Verb inflections and noun phrase morphology in the spontaneous speech of Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment

Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to typically developing same-age peers (TD-A) and younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) in terms of their use of grammatical morphology in spontaneous speech. The children with SLI showed high levels of accuracy on present tense and past tense (preterite) verb inflections. However, their use of definite articles and direct object clitics was significantly more problematic than for either the TD-MLU or the TD-A children. Substitutions and omissions were observed, especially in contexts requiring plural articles and clitics. Many of the details of the observed Spanish SLI profile were predicted by Wexler's (Extended) Unique Checking Constraint (EUCC) proposal. Remaining details in the data could be accommodated by making additional assumptions within the same general linguistic framework as the EUCC. Some of the differences between the findings from Spanish and those from previous studies on related languages such as Italian suggest the need for clinical assessment and intervention procedures that are shaped as much by language-specific details as by the language's typology.

La modification du nom propre dans une perspective contrastive

The translation of French modified proper names (Npr) into Swedish gives rise to cultural problems, in view of the fact that Swedes are not always familiar with the original referents of the Npr. Linguistic problems do also arise due to the difficulty in Swedish to create new interpretations of the Npr by adding a determiner in front of it. The article system is not so highly developped in Swedish as in French, the partitive article du, de la, de l’, and the indefinite plural article des lacking in Swedish. On the other hand, Swedish noun morphology is extremely complex: the definite article is agglutinated (-n, -en, -t, -et) and since there are seven declinations, plural endings show great variation (-ar, -or, -er, -r, -n, O, -s). The addition of one of these audible endings to the Npr comes in striking contrast with the fundamentally indeclinable form of the Npr. So even if most of the French types of modified Npr can be found also in Swedish, treated in the Grammar of the Swedish Academy as Npr converted into common nouns, their translation may be problematic due to differences in the morphological systems.On the basis of examples from texts mainly by Balzac and Proust, the translation into Swedish of French modified metaphoric and metonymic Npr is examined. As regards the metaphoric Npr, most of Newmark’s (1982) strategies for the translation of metaphors are applied, and that of explicitating the relation of similarity is most often used. The translation of metonymic Npr, which designate either (a part of) an artist’s or writer’s works or a person’s typical behaviour, usually needs an indication of what sort of referent is intended. In both cases, the Npr is “demodified” in the Swedish translation and appears in its prototypical use, as a rigid designator of its original referent.

‘The-skipping’ revisited in French: programming saccades to skip the article ‘les’

Three experiments were performed to verify O’Regan’s (1979) [ Perception & Psychophysics, 25 (6), 501–509] finding that in reading, the eye moves further forward when going towards the word ‘THE’ than when going towards a three-letter verb. The experiments were performed in French instead of English, and compared the plural article ‘les’ with different three-letter verbs. It was confirmed that the eye did indeed move about 1.5 letters further in the case of the article ‘les’. Further investigation of the phenomenon suggested that the effect was present even when the prior fixation duration was short: Only when prior fixation was around 200 ms or less, and additionally when the eye started from a launch position that was far from the word, was there a suggestion that the ‘les’-skipping effect disappeared.

The use of articles by Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment

Although children with specific language impairment often show significant limitations in their use of grammatical morphemes, little is known about their use of morphemes that belong to a single set or paradigm. This question was pursued in the present study by examining specifically language-impaired (SLI) children's use of the Italian definite article system. Fifteen Italian-speaking SLI children were found to produce all articles with lower percentages than a group of 15 control children matched for mean utterance length. However, both groups had greater difficulty with plural articles than singular articles, and more difficulty using articles with restricted phonetic contexts than articles with a freer range of permissible contexts. In addition, the SLI children's difficulty with one of the articles seemed attributable to phonotactic constraints. The findings are interpreted within a framework that assumes that SLI children split and fill out morphological paradigms in the same manner as younger normally developing children, but operate with a more limited capacity that is burdened when grammatical morphemes have difficult surface characteristics.

Material Handling Routes Planning onthe Plural Articles Having Different Starting Point and Appointment Place

Material Handling Routes Planning onthe Plural Articles Having Different Starting Point and Appointment Place

The ‘Weak’ Plural Article in Bohairic

The ‘Weak’ Plural Article in Bohairic

The 'Weak' Plural Article in Bohairic

The 'Weak' Plural Article in Bohairic