Romance Languages Research Articles

A longitudinal study of math skills in heritage bilingual children: profiles of strengths and weaknesses.

Many children are exposed to a heritage language in the home context, and they learn mathematics in the school context in the societal language (Italian in the present study). More evidence is needed on how Heritage Bilinguals (HBs) perform in different subtypes of numeracy and mathematics skills in a longitudinal perspective. This longitudinal study aimed to analyze the mathematical skills of heritage bilingual children. 220 HBs (50.5% female, from different linguistic/ethnic groups, including Indo-Iranian, Arabic, Chinese, Romanian, Albanian and Slavic languages) and 440 monolinguals (46.8% female, mostly Italian) were followed from second to third grade (aged between 7 and 9 years). The following tasks were administered: dictation, symbolic comparison, number line, mental calculation, multiplication tables, approximate calculation, problem-solving and written calculations. The results showed an advantage for HBs in approximate calculation, but they underperformed in problem-solving, multiplication tables, and mental calculations. A profile analysis highlighted the percentages of children at risk for math impairment. The study provides a longitudinal profile of strengths and weaknesses in the mathematics profile of children with HBs, with developmental trajectories that vary according to verbal load. The discussion focuses on the role of verbal load in math tasks in the assessment of HBs, and implications for clinical and educational contexts.

Negative concord by phase: multiple downward agree and the parametrization of edge features

Abstract We divorce Negative Concord (NC) among two or more n-items, which is invariably present in Romance languages, from the mutual exclusion or cooccurrence between clausal negation markers (CNMs) and other n-items. The standard minimalist treatment in terms of Agree with respect to a formal feature [n] (for [negation]) is maintained here. However, an EPP-like principle, conceived as a (parametrized) condition regulating the representation of [n] at phase edges is introduced to deal with CNMs. By divorcing the n-EPP condition from n-Agree, we eliminate Zeijlstra’s Upward Agree in favor of Multiple Downward Agree between a phase head probe endowed with Formal Feature FF and one or more elements endowed with the same interpretable feature FF in the WorkSpace. We argue that these theoretical moves are beneficial from an empirical point of view. Focusing on varieties spoken in Northern Italy, we argue that an exhaustive typology of Romance negative systems can be derived by the parametrized [n]-EPP. We claim that the present approach allows this variation to be accounted for within the syntax – specifically, no recourse is made to semantic variation.

Interleaved practice enhances grammar skill learning for similar and dissimilar tenses in Romance languages

BackgroundInterleaved practice (or interleaving), the strategy of alternating between categories or concepts during study or practice, can enhance second language grammar skills. It remains to be determined, however, whether that enhancement specifically involves identifying tenses, conjugating verbs, or both, and whether close similarity between tenses is essential. AimsThis study investigated the language skills that interleaving can enhance and the extent to which that enhancement is limited to highly similar tenses. SampleParticipants were college students (Experiment 1, 92 participants; Experiment 2, 109 participants) and adult learners (Experiment 3, 104 participants; Experiment 4, 88 participants). MethodsIn each experiment, participants completed two weekly learning sessions and a one-week delayed criterial test. In the blocked group, participants learned one tense per session. In the interleaved group, participants alternated between two tenses during each session. The criterial test assessed: verb conjugation skills (all experiments), tense identification ability for specific usage scenarios (Experiments 1–3), and the capacity to identify the language of a sentence written in a specific tense (Experiment 4). ResultsInterleaving improved verb conjugation skills in all experiments, tense identification ability in Experiments 1 and 3, and language identification skills in Experiment 4. Benefits of interleaving were observed across tenses varying in usage, meaning, and suffixes. ConclusionsInterleaving enhances multiple language skills, including verb conjugation, tense identification, and language identification. Those benefits are not limited to highly similar tenses. Accordingly, these results challenge assumptions about interleaving and underscore its potential as an effective approach for improving language learning.

‘A man of full-sin’

Abstract It is shown that the seemingly random alternation in the position of attributive adjectives in Old Irish can be explained by a system of referent/reference modification as first described by Bolinger (1967). The correspondence is prenominal = reference modification and postnominal = referent modification, not unlike some modern Romance languages. Comparing the Brittonic evidence, the phenomenon is found to be of Insular Celtic age, where it applied to a small class of underived prototypical adjectives.

Result lexicalization with manner verbs in French: an experimental investigation of the material/product alternation and the packaging of meaning

Abstract French is a typical verb-framed language, in which manner verbs cannot freely combine with result-denoting constituents in a single VP. Drawing on experimentally elicited production data on Hexagonal French, this study examines how the syntactic (in)flexibility of manner-of-creation verbs influences the lexicalization of the event result. As for result lexicalization within the VP headed by the manner verb, the study explores the occurrence of effected objects and resultative PPs. Thus, it addresses the availability of the material/product alternation (sculpter une poupée à partir du bois/sculpter le bois en (une) poupée) as a type of argument alternation, whose existence has been questioned for the Romance languages. Furthermore, it is explored how the verbs’ syntactic flexibility influences whether manner and result are lexicalized within a single VP at all or distributed onto different VPs. The results show that the material/product alternation does occur, but that only a limited set of verbs has the syntactic flexibility required for it. Additionally, it is shown that syntactic flexibility favors a denser packaging of conceptual components, since with verbs that admit an effected object, the result is realized more often in the VP than with verbs that do not.

Acculturation

The hypothesis of the history of humanity as a succession of acculturations was more appropriate to linguistic, social and cultural facts and to the continuity of history itself. One of the most assiduously upheld principles in historical linguistics was acculturation. There was no linguistic change without languages in contact, and both the history of languages in contact and linguistic change were part of acculturation, based on social and cultural diffusion, which implied the intrinsic relationship between linguistics, sociology and anthropology. From approximately 1970, the panorama of concern for space in the historiography relating to the Crown of Castile began to change. The entry of anthropology into history was one of the most significant historiographical data. The central idea of ecosystem and the key concept of acculturation were used by some Spanish historians, in order to offer a new interpretation of the behavior of Hispanic-Christian society. Our current working hypothesis has been an application of languages in contact, within a new project of anthropological history on the long process of formation of Hispanic Romance languages. In the history of humanity, the primary principle in the history of languages in contact and linguistic change was the acculturation of human groups.

“Não esqueça eu” - O uso do pronome sujeito EU em função de objeto no português popular do Brasil

Portuguese, like many other Romance languages, is traditionally classified as a pro-drop language with a nominative-accusative alignment in its pronominal system. This means that it basically encodes the subject function on the verb, whereas the object function is marked on the object pronoun itself. However, spoken Portuguese in Brazil has been known to have drastically readjusted its pronominal system due to the introduction of novel pronouns such as você and a gente that do not inflect for case and which both trigger the verb to be inflected for 3rd person singular. Obviously, such radical changes can affect the entire pronominal system. New evidence taken from various sources such as pop music and X (Twitter) show precisely this: loss of case distinction seems to affect also other pronouns in Spoken Brazilian Portuguese. This paper tries to follow this development with the example of the 1st person singular pronoun eu by analyzing data found on social media and comparing it to written sources as far back as the 15th century.

Nominativo latino y tema en español

In Latin, the nominative case is usually described as Subject case, but this role is a later derivation of its function as a Theme marker. The Theme expressed by the Indo-European nominative is the syntactic Theme, not to be confused with the Theme of the FSP first described by the Prague Circle. The syntactic Theme belongs to a different and broader syntactic axis than the transitive axis. While the thematic axis divides the sentence into two parts, Theme and Predicate, the transitive axis organizes the constituents of the predicate. The syntactic Theme has several semantic features that can be found in the Theme of the so-called thematic languages. The loss of the inflectional cases in Romance languages and, therefore, of the nominative case as such, brought about the need to express the Theme analytically. This paper briefly describes the behaviour of the thematic Theme in Spanish, its relation to the transitive axis and its contrast with languages in which the thematic axis is not in force, such as English.

Gender Bias in Linguistic Structures: A Comparative Study of French

Language is a form of power that can shape the cognitive thinking of its users and even serve as a tool of domination for those in authority. Historically, language has been an instrument of patriarchy, with its use under patriarchal systems that often serving to suppress women. However, in the modern era, with the rise of feminism, there has been increasing attention to issues of gender inequality. Many linguists have begun to question whether gendered languages exacerbate existing gender biases. Yet, few have undertaken comparative analyses across different language families. Considering grammatical structures and language origins, this paper will examine French from the Romance language family and German from the Germanic language family—both of them are gendered languages. This study will conduct a comparative analysis to identify the gender biases present in these languages and to explain the cognitive and linguistic causes underlying these biases. By highlighting these issues, the research aims to raise readers’ awareness of gender bias in linguistic structures.

Logical Spaces and Subjunctive Tenses

Apparently, Subjunctive tenses express temporal location, and, in some constructions, the past subjunctive can also express modal values. A long-standing debate exists over whether—even in the latter case—verbal tenses are temporal operators or whether in some constructions they convey temporal meaning, and in others they have a modal value, maybe derived from their basic temporal meaning. The assumption that the basic meaning of subjunctive tenses are of a temporal nature is challenged by the fact that the future subjunctive, which exists in Portuguese, has the same temporal interpretation as the present subjunctive, with which it is in complementary distribution. Moreover, no clear modal difference is observed between the future and present subjunctive tenses. In this paper, I present arguments against the separation of the temporal and modal values of the subjunctive tenses. I posit, instead, that a semantic analysis of subjunctive morphemes must consider ordered pairs of times and possible worlds; only in this way can we adequately capture the observed data and allow a comprehensive view of the system of subjunctive tenses in Portuguese (which will be extendable to Romance languages in general). If we accept this proposal, then the modal as temporal information associated with subjunctive tenses follows naturally, including the systematic futurate reading of subjunctive temporal clauses.

Is the Foot a Prosodic Domain in European Portuguese?

It is widely accepted that languages organize speech material into prosodic domains, which are hierarchically arranged. However, it is still a matter of debate whether this prosodic hierarchy is composed of a small number of universal categories, or whether these prosodic categories are language-particular and emergent. In this article, we concentrate on one of these categories, the foot, and we investigate its role in European Portuguese (EP). Whereas research on EP has shown that other prosodic domains commonly found crosslinguistically are active in the language, it seems that EP may lack this prosodic constituent. Therefore, the goal of this article is to systematically investigate the role of the foot in a number of areas within EP grammar. In our study, we defend some new approaches to several long-standing issues in EP phonology and we conclude that many facts of the language can be, in fact, better understood resorting to the foot domain. Namely, the distribution of stress in the most frequent morphological classes (thematic non-verbs and present tense verbs), -inh-/-zinh- diminutive formation, the domain for regular vowel reduction, obligatory glide formation, the stress window, and poetic rhyme seem to benefit from a metrically-governed account. By contrast, other facts, such as vowel lowering, word clipping, minimal words, secondary stress, and schwa deletion are shown not to be conditioned by the foot in EP. Importantly, the evidence we found for metrical structure only cues the prominent foot of the word, suggesting that pretonic material may not be footed. All in all, in addition to shedding light on facts previously poorly understood, and exposing some noteworthy specificities of EP in the realm of Romance languages and other varieties of Portuguese, we draw implications for the universal characterization of the prosodic hierarchy and its acquisition.

The Role of Non-State Actors in the Linguistic Policy in the Republic of Moldova

This article examines the evolving role of non-state actors in the politics of language, using the postSoviet Republic of Moldova as a case study. Over the past half-century, the increasing influence of non-state actors in global political systems has led to shifts not only in international relations but also in domestic policy areas such as language policy. Traditionally the exclusive domain of the state, language policy has become an arena of interaction between the state and various non-state actors, including political parties and non-governmental organizations. This interaction, termed the «politics of language,» extends beyond national borders, particularly in cases where a country's population is linked to kin states. In Moldova, the political landscape is divided between pro-Russian Moldovanists, who advocate for a distinct Moldovan identity and the use of “Moldovan” as the state language, and pro-Romanian Romanianists, who promote Romanian identity and language. The research identifies the key actors in Moldova's language politics and reveals that, during the country's independence, the politics of language has shifted from a conflict between the state and intellectual elites to a more complex set of relations between multiple actors, with Romanianists gaining influence. The role of the state has been significantly weakened, as evidenced by the Constitutional Court's reduced capacity to maintain constitutional stability, becoming instead a tool for non-state actors.

A case study of Eco’s notion of encyclopedia: the (ethno)racial lexicon and its semantic sphere

Abstract In the wave of Umberto Eco’s oppositional binomial Dictionary-Encyclopedia, the paper aims to apply the rhizomatic system to the practical case of the (ethno)racial lexicon as a broad semantic area of the word race, which previously involved both physical predisposition and cultural habits. Given its critical issues, the dictionarial approach is distinguished into two different stages, intra-dictionarial (properly dictionarial) and inter-dictionarial (resulting from the metaphorical chain of meanings). Originally, race referred to horses (stud and herds) and property (as ownership and essential attribute), which extended metonymically to other senses – general zoological-botanic, human (lineage, offspring) and typological qualitative ones. Comparing its correspondents in Romance and Germanic languages, reference to many different contexts and a continuous misalignment between lexeme and concept emerge. The liquidity within the semantic sphere of race (embracing the three semantic cores racial, ethnic, and typological) can be explained by taking a phenomenological and semiotic perspective. If the ethnic sense (people, nation, etc.) is connected to a socio-cultural Lifeworld in an interplay of identities and differences, the aporia of synonymy emerging from the inter-dictionarial analysis finds its balance in the local encyclopedic approach, which proves to be the real deterrent to Porphyry’s tree through the rhizome, conceived not in its entirety, but in the partiality and contingency of its branches.

Allophonic Variation in Romance Languages: Categorical and Gradient Processes

The distinction between categorical phonological alternations and gradual phonetic processes is an important one in the study of sound systems. However, the correct classification of specific phenomena as belonging to phonology or to phonetics is often difficult. In recent years some researchers have argued that many processes traditionally understood as phonological alternations actually belong to the realm of gradient phonetics. Here I focus on consonant lenition phenomena in Spanish and other Romance languages and examine the potential arguments for their traditional analysis as alternations between phonological categories.

Qui parle de qui/de quoi ? Vers la représentation de la source de lʼinformation dans les patois du Dacoroumain

The paper aims at presenting the grammaticalization/pragmaticalization processes as well as the semantic and functional behavior of certain lexical items in Romanian, such as: cică ( zice că „it is said that”), cea că ( zice că „it is said that”), ceancă ( ziceam că „I said that”), oz(â)că ( o zâs că „he/she said that”) and ozâncă ( o fi zâcând că „he/she maybe says that”). In fact, we are going to highlight that all these words configure in the spoken Romanian language and in particular in its dialectal register, a real microsystem of marking indirect citational evidentiality, while updating the tripartite distinction proposed by Willet (1988, p. 96) between: Second-hand evidence (hearsay) (ceancă) vs. Third-hand evidence (hearsay) (oz(â)că, ozâncă) vs. Information from the folklore (cică, ce că, cea că). Furthermore, all these discursive units found most often in the Oltenian sub-dialect of Dacoromanian and, in particular, in the patois of Oltenia area, implement a model of grammati¬ca¬lization and pragmaticalization, obtained by the combination of a dicendi verb agglutinated with the conjunction că „that”, extremely productive not only in Romanian, but also in other Romance languages (see, for example, Popescu & Duță 2023). In this context, our empirical and analytical approach, situated at the interface of linguistic pragmatics and dialectology, is composed of two large parts (except the introductory segment and the final considerations): (i) a first part which outlines the theoretical framework in the area of evidentiality and describes the model of grammaticalization/pragmaticalization of the lexical units of our research, also regarded from a Romance typological perspective and (ii) a second part which analyzes the semantic and functional behavior of these five words, while categorizing their uses and their discursive values according to the theoretical framework presented above.

The Problem of Teaching Romanian as a Foreign Language to Students at Faculties of Medicine II

The case study we propose is conducted on the practical courses of Romanian for foreign students in the first and second years of study at the Faculty of Medicine, who embark on a process of acquisition of phonetic and lexical information, grammar, culture, and especially notions of specialised communication. The assertion we start from is that the common feature that foreign students share is that they are speakers of various languages – Romance languages, Germanic, Slavic, Turkic, Finno-Ugric ones etc. The characteristic feature of student groups at Medicine is that there are few students with oral and written communication skills in Romanian (expect Slavic speakers, who live in neighbouring countries – Bulgaria, Serbia, etc) and they will be integrated, for methodological reasons in Group A. The proposed objective here is to study the role of language contact in making the teaching of Romanian more effective. Similarly few are the students who master theoretical notions of Phonetics and Morphology (German students and those who come from Albania) who belong to group B. The aspect to be studied in depth in the case of Group B students focuses on the need for a contrastive, comparative method of teaching Romanian. Arabic students, those coming from India, USA, Nordic countries, France, Portugal, Spain who never came into contact with speakers of Romanian do not have the ability to communicate with speakers of Romanian nor the capacity to understand various simple messages, reason for which they are placed in Group C. Access to theoretical concepts of Romanian grammar is very difficult for students in this latter group. The general conclusion to be drawn is that teaching Romanian as a foreign language to students of Medicine is a permanent challenge regarding methodology, didactic strategies, and particularities of their native tongues.

Rumänisch-deutsche Interferenzen in Herta Müllers Collagen

Abstract Herta Müller outlined several times the differences between the German and the Romanian languages. The presence of the Romanian language in the texts of Herta Müller has already been analysed in various publications. The present paper focuses however on the German-Romanian linguistic interferences in her collages. The paper investigates both the Romanian interferences in the collages of the German volumes and the German interferences in the collages of the Romanian volume Este sau nu este Ion by providing concrete examples. A German-Romanian collage is also highlighted.

VeLeSpa: An inflected verbal lexicon of Peninsular Spanish and a quantitative analysis of paradigmatic predictability

AbstractThis paper presents VeLeSpa, a verbal lexicon of Peninsular Spanish, which contains the full paradigms (all 63 cells) in phonological form of 6553 verbs, along with their corresponding frequencies. In this paper, the process and decisions involved in the building of the resource are presented. In addition, based on the most frequent 3000 + verbs, a quantitative analysis is conducted of morphological predictability in Spanish verbal inflection. The results and their drivers are discussed, as well as observed differences with other Romance languages and Latin.

Under-Represented Speech Dataset from Open Data: Case Study on the Romanian Language

This paper introduces the USPDATRO dataset. This is a speech dataset, in the Romanian language, constructed from open data, focusing on under-represented voice types (children, young and old people, and female voices). The paper covers the methodology behind the dataset construction, specific details regarding the dataset, and evaluation of existing Romanian Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, with different architectures. Results indicate that more under-represented speech content is needed in the training of ASR systems. Our approach can be extended to other low-resourced languages, as long as open data are available.

Prolegomeni allo studio dei parlanti ereditari di sardo

When a minority language holds a subordinate position and is neglected or abandoned in family communication, some speakers acquire it imperfectly, resulting in limited proficiency; these individuals are known as heritage speakers. However, some heritage speakers later develop an attachment to their ancestral language and choose to study it in formal or informal educational settings, becoming heritage learners. This study focuses on heritage learners of Sardinian, a Romance language spoken in Sardinia. Today, most Sardinian residents under fifty primarily speak Italian, but there is a growing interest in Sardinian language courses aimed at reconnecting community members with their linguistic heritage. This research examines the grammatical and lexical competence of a sample of these heritage learners, particularly focusing on areas identified in the literature as vulnerable to erosion and interference from Italian. Specifically, it will demonstrate that in instances of grammatical or lexical divergence between Sardinian and Italian, heritage learners tend to accept both idiomatic Sardinian forms and Italian-influenced forms, indicating significant interference in their proficiency of the minority language. This study aims to help language teachers develop targeted interventions to enhance the competence of heritage learners, differentiating from curricula designed for second language learners of Sardinian when necessary.