Subject-verb Inversion Research Articles

Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively speaking, in these varieties, subject-verb inversion may be absent under certain well-defined conditions. In this article I outline those conditions and the type of syntactic analysis required to account for them, claiming that an articulated left periphery is needed to account for the findings. The similarity of the V3 patterns found in these new varieties, which are geographically isolated from each other but which share a characterization in terms of the demographics of their speaker groups, invites a diachronic account in terms of language contact. I argue that transfer cannot account for V3, but that a scenario of sequential simplification and complexification is able to do so. Finally, turning to Old English, which exhibits similar (though not identical) V2/V3 alternations, I argue that a similar synchronic analysis can be upheld and that its diachronic origins may well also have been similar—a case of using the present to inform our approach to the past.

English Focus Structures in Arabic Translation: A Case Study of Gibran's The Prophet

The present paper aims to examine the translation of English focus structures into Arabic. The textual data is extracted from Gibran Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, being a good example of creative writing that may instantiate sufficient data of such structures. The extracted data (88 examples) feature four categories of focus structures: fronting (27), fronting plus subject-verb inversion (23), fronting plus subject-auxiliary inversion (28) and It-clefts (10). The findings show that English focus structures constitute a problematic area which requires a high degree of expertise on the translator's part. In addition to accounting for fronting as a major syntactic device for focusing a certain sentence constituent, which is successfully achieved in about two thirds of the examples, inversion and clefting as second-layer emphatic elements are largely missed in Arabic translation. The critical discussion of sample examples shows that such second-layer emphasis can be catered for by the use of both grammatical, e.g. pronouns or lexical, e.g adverbial emphatic markers, which can effectively support fronting and achieve a comparable degree of focus..

Locative Inversion and Stage Topics: A Cross-Linguistic Study

This paper seeks to identify the conditions which a clause-initial X phrase (XP) must satisfy to license locative inversion. Three SVO (subject-verb-object) languages with distinct degrees of word order flexibility are considered: English, French and European Portuguese (EP). We show that these languages only permit locative inversion with preposed XPs which are stage topics (sTOPs), i.e. presupposed XPs that define a (spatio-temporal) location. We further show that being a sTOP is both a necessary and sufficient condition for an XP to license this type of inversion. In addition to the structures typically classified as locative inversion, cases of “absolute inversion” in French, “free” inversion in sentence-focus contexts in EP, and inversion structures with preposed participial and adjectival phrases in English and French are argued to be licensed by (c)overt sTOPs and, thus, constitute forms of (covert) locative inversion. We conclude that there is a strong correlation between sTOPs and subject-verb inversion cross-linguistically.

ON ESTABLISHING COREFERENCE IN LEFT DISLOCATION CONSTRUCTIONS

The phenomenon of left dislocation (LD) has received relatively little attention in the generative literature. In Government & Binding theory and early versions of Minimalist Syntax, the left-dislocated expression is conventionally taken to be base-generated in its sentence-initial surface position and the resumptive pronoun in some other position in the structure. The establishment of an (obligatory) coreferential relationship between these expressions is usually ascribed to a special binding mechanism, A-bar binding, though this issue is seldom explicitly addressed in LD studies. The aim of this paper is to present, in broad outline, an alternative analysis of LD constructions, one that incorporates the core hypotheses of the nominal shell analysis of coreferential constructions put forward by Oosthuizen (2013a,b). On this analysis, the resumptive pronoun and the referring expression that is to serve as its antecedent are base-generated in a nominal shell structure which is headed by a presentational focus light noun, a functional category belonging to a natural class of identificational elements. The coreferential relationship between the two expressions is established within this structure by means of phi-feature valuation. The antecedent is subsequently raised into the left-periphery of the sentence, where it surfaces as the left-dislocated expression. It is claimed that such an analysis can account for the phenomenon of obligatory coreferentiality in LD constructions in terms of formal devices that are either already provided by or compatible with the basic assumptions and concepts of Minimalist Syntax. A tentative proposal is also put forward to account for the word order in LD constructions, specifically for the fact that left-dislocation does not bring about (surface) subject-verb inversion in V2 languages such as Afrikaans.

Wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance: A locative account

This paper explores the hypothesis that wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance is a type of locative inversion, involving a null locative argument. Ibero-Romance displays fine-grained, systematic variation determined by verbal class and variety, offering evidence that Ibero-Romance neutral word order is SVO, rather than VSO as claimed by some null-subject accounts. It is proposed that ‘locative’ subject-verb inversion is a consequence of grammatically-encoded deictic features correlating with the semantic properties of the verbs involved. The locative element, available unequally across Ibero-Romance, can surface in different positions in the left periphery, yielding the variation encountered. The data indicate that the licensing of these constructions depends neither on the null-subject parameter, since this type of inversion also occurs in non- and partial null-subject varieties, nor on the unaccusative/unergative division, though in both cases a degree of correspondence exists.

The status of interrogative subject–verb inversion in Spanish-English bilingual children

The present cross-sectional study examines the status of interrogative subject–verb inversion in Spanish among twenty-seven (n=27) Spanish-English bilingual children born and raised in the United States. Results from an oral elicited production task show significant low levels of target inversion in both matrix and embedded wh-questions, compared with monolingual children. Lack of inversion was more significant with embedded questions, and among the youngest children. It is argued that the differences observed stem from syntactic transfer from English, language dominance and the complexity of the structure. This leads to a process of syntactic optionality in child heritage Spanish similar to what is found in Caribbean varieties of Spanish.

Raising, inversion and agreement in modern Hebrew

This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

Revisiting the loss of verb movement in the history of English

Most of the discussions of the loss of verb movement in the history of English have focused on data related to the rise of do-support. In this paper, we extend the empirical basis to evidence from adverb placement. Our analysis of the distribution of finite main verbs with respect to adverbs in a range of prose texts in the history of English shows that the decline of V-movement in English starts in the middle of the 15th century and that verb movement past adverbs is lost to a large extent around the middle of the 16th century. These observations differ considerably from what data involving the sentential negator not indicate. According to that evidence, the loss of verb movement is a rather long process starting in the 16th century and coming to completion over 200 years later. In order to reconcile the conflicting diachronic evidence from adverb placement and the syntax of negation, we propose that the loss of verb movement in English is not a single event but occurs sequentially. In a first phase, verb movement to T is lost while movement to a lower inflectional head is maintained. In a second phase, verb movement starts being lost completely. We show that the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which has been very prominent in accounts of variation with respect to verb movement, cannot capture these developments in a satisfactory way. Instead, it is verbal morphology more generally that will be argued to play a role in connection with the occurrence of verb movement. However, we do not postulate a strong correlation between morphology and syntax and propose that the loss of verb movement in English is the result of a combination of factors: changes in the verbal morphosyntax (loss of subjunctive, rise of periphrastic forms), an acquisitional bias towards simpler structures, the decline of the subject-verb inversion grammar found in early English, and effects of dialect contact.

On the L2 Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Inversion

This study explores the acquisition of Spanish subject-verb inversion in wh-questions by Dutch L2 learners. The optional or obligatory application of this rule in Spanish wh-questions depends on the argument versus adjunct status of the wh-element. In Dutch,subject-verb inversionis obligatory in matrix clauses only and it is not subject to argumental restrictions. The empirical basis of this study comes from a Grammaticality Judgment Task offered to 46 participants: 33 Dutch learners of L2Spanish and 13 Spanish native controls. The results indicate that the L2ers’ performance is significantly different from native-like behavior at two different levels of proficiency.

Pour en finir avec la langue de Shakespeare par Jean-Luc Jeener, and: La langue française: chef-d’œuvre en péril par Paul-André Maur

Reviews 217 in discursive structures that are beyond the sentential pragma-syntactic level.Another chapter,by Maria Polinksy and Eric Potsdam,contains a universal hierarchical structure study of a Russian syntactic minimal pair, which contrasts with Lambrecht’s theoretical perspective on sentence focus (1994). Incorporating Lambrecht’s perspective on sentence focus, Cinzia Russi’s chapter analyzes subject-verb inversion and genericity to explain the status of two Italian unaccusatives. The second section of the book deals with several topics in French syntax, the area of Lambrecht’s expertise. The chapters analyze topics such as the connection between information structure and prosody (Caroline Féry), the various discourse paradigms of the lexeme pourquoi and the structures to which this lexeme is connected (Lindy Myers and Stéphanie Pellet), the role of information structure in second language processing (Robert Reichle), and the influence of prosody and typological factors on the well-formedness of two constructions in French and English: it-clefts and c’est-clefts (Stacey Katz Bourns). The final chapter, by Betsy Kerr, discusses the complementary nature of Information Structure and Interactional Linguistics with regard to the phenomenon of left dislocation in spoken French. With its diverse topics and approaches, this tribute to Lambrecht will be of great interest to linguists who study the interconnected phenomena of pragmatics, syntax,and discourse.Continuing a line of research that uses and enriches the Information Structure framework and containing a section that deals exclusively with French constructions, this volume could be a valuable addition to the reading lists of graduate students in French linguistics. With their novel theoretical and applied insights, these papers take the contribution of the Construction Grammar framework for linguistic analysis in a new and interesting direction. University of Delaware Ali Alalou Jeener, Jean-Luc. Pour en finir avec la langue de Shakespeare. Neuilly: Atlande, 2014. ISBN 978-2-35030-261-4. Pp. 160. 15 a. Maur, Paul-André. La langue française: chef-d’œuvre en péril.Versailles:Via Romana, 2014. ISBN 979-10-90029-74-3. Pp. 150. 16 a. These two volumes represent the most recent instantiations of the prescriptive impulse that has informed French language usage over the centuries.Voiture’s defense of the conjunction car (1637) may be considered among the earliest exemplars of this linguistic dirigisme. The legitimization of this three-letter word is but a skirmish in the full-fledged offensive against barbarismes and lexical borrowings from English, a battle waged primarily by French intellectuals, with tepid support from linguists. Both works echo Étiemble’s Parlez-vous franglais? (1964); despite his fulminations against the invasion of le sabir atlantique, its usage has become more widespread, this due to technological advances and the embrace of a global English (globish), whose usage signifies nothing less than American cultural imperialism. Jeener, a prominent figure in French theater and a reviewer for Le Figaro,is particularly outraged by the Loi Fiaroso (2013), which authorized the use of English in certain French university settings. Jeener’s histrionic scenario evokes centuries-old events to support his enmity toward the Anglo-American language. Is not the perfidy of English speakers illustrated by the burning of Jeanne d’Arc and the exile of Napoleon? Did not the intervention of the French military in the American Revolution ruin the treasury of Louis XVI and precipitate the French uprising and the end of the monarchy? Jeener slips easily from attacks on the English language to condemnations of radical Islam and Nazism.Granted, his screed may be contextualized as part of the series“Coup de gueule et engagement,” a favored site for outspoken opinion. However, I cannot resist savoring the irony that his tract was published by a press that boasts of being le leader in its category. His strategy for defending the French language is sadly unoriginal and inefficacious: it relies on the abstract notion of francophonie. Presumably a current of purist linguistic usage present in the former French colonies and those countries where French is (was?) the prestige language will reinforce the cultural particularism and support the integrity of this language under attack. In fact, the linguistic variation found in these countries hardly supports the advancement of a monolithic“classical”French. It...

English Sentences Beginning with there and their Vietnamese Counterparts

English sentences beginning with there, also called English there-constructions, do not constitute only existential sentences; most important among their other uses are presentational there-constructions. It is almost impossible to distinguish existential sentences beginning with Empty there, which is not stressed and has no lexical meaning, from presentational there-constructions beginning with Locative there, which is pronounced with some degree of stress and has its denotative meaning as opposite to that of the adverb here. Therefore, language users have to care for other sentence components, both obligatory and optional, that follow there in the clause in question. Comparing English there-constructions and their Vietnamese counterparts helps to identify translated versions of each subtype of English there-constructions, both semantically and pragmatically equivalent, irrespective of the fact that Vietnamese has neither the empty subject nor subject-verb inversion – the two phenomena quite easily observed in a Subject-prominent language like English.

The Right Periphery of Interrogatives in Catalan and Spanish: Syntax/Prosody Interactions

S’ha destacat en la bibliografia que les oracions interrogatives del castellà i del català es comporten de manera ben diferent respecte a la inversió subjecte-verb: mentre aquelles permeten la inversió VS ‘clàssica’ i, en especial, l’ordre VSO, aquestes recorren sistemàticament a la dislocació a la dreta en tots els casos (V(O)#S). En aquest article revisem aquesta observació a partir d’un estudi de corpus i afegim a la descripció els trets prosòdics i pragmàtics de les interrogatives. Mostrem que les interrogatives del català afavoreixen la dislocació a la dreta, en clar contrast amb el castellà, que prefereix la realizació in situ del material del rerefons. Aquesta última opció té conseqüències importants per als contorns prosòdics de les interrogatives castellanes, que marquen els constituents focals finals amb un to ascendent i el material del rerefons amb una lleugera caiguda.

Syntactic strategies of exclamatives

The study presented in this paper has two aims. First, it establishes pragmasemantic features of exclamations and exclamatives relying on three formulated approaches – a constructional approach, a presupposition approach, and a scalarity approach, and suggests distinguishing proper exclamatives, the syntactic structures of which are conventionally associated with an illocutionary force of expressivity, from improper ones that do not have such an association. Second, involving the data of 45 languages, the paper reveals and describes 5 syntactic strategies of exclamatives, which are as follows: subject-verb inversion, subordinate clauses, noun phrases, anaphoric adverbs and adjectives, and wh-phrases. The latter three are further divided into several sub-strategies.

Subject-Verb Inversion before a Quotation in the Media Discourse

Subject-Verb Inversion before a Quotation in the Media Discourse

Missing verbal inflections as a representational problem

A continuing concern in second language acquisition (SLA) research is whether problems with inflectional morphology are representational or related somehow to performance. In this study, we examine 25 non-advanced learners of L2 Spanish and compare them with 18 native Spanish speakers on three grammatical structures: subject-verb inversion, adverb placement and person-number inflections on verbs. We use self-paced reading as a measure of underlying sensitivity to grammatical violations. Our results clearly show that the L2 learners pattern like the native speakers on the two syntactic structures; both groups demonstrate sensitivity to grammatical violations while reading sentences for meaning. For person-number on verbs, L2 learners did not show sensitivity to grammatical violations whereas the native speakers did. We argue that these results suggest a representational problem for morphology in our L2 population.

Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax proper: Interrogative subject–verb inversion in heritage Spanish

This study examines the potential effects of crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of subject–verb inversion in Spanish matrix and embedded wh-questions among Spanish heritage language learners living in the United States. The results from an acceptability judgment task and a written production task administered to 17 US-born heritage speakers indicate crosslinguistic influence effects. The effects are more evident with embedded interrogatives than with matrix questions. A follow-up study with the heritage speakers also shows less inversion behavior with embedded questions in oral production but higher performance levels than in written production. The findings are discussed in relation to interface vulnerability approaches and current debates on the selective nature of crosslinguistic influence in L2 and bilingual development.

Negative inversion, negative concord and sentential negation in the history of English

It is claimed in van Kemenade (2000: 62) that clauses with initial negative constituents are a context in which subject–verb inversion occurs throughout the history of English. However, different patterns of negative inversion are seen at different periods of English. I argue that changes in the availability of negative inversion reflect changes in the way sentential scope for negation is marked in negative concord constructions. Thus, negative concord involving Middle and Early Modern English not does not co-occur with negative inversion, but negative concord involving Middle English ne does. Changes to negative inversion can be seen to parallel changes in the way sentential scope negation is expressed at successive stages of the Middle English Jespersen Cycle. I propose that the changes to negative inversion and Jespersen's Cycle should both be analysed as changes in the ability of negative items to mark sentential scope for negation. This observation can be formalised within a Minimalist framework as variation in the LF-interpretability of negative features, following the account of Jespersen's Cycle proposed by Wallage (2008).

Zusammenhänge zwischen Wortstellungen und Subjekt-Verb-Kongruenz in der lernersprachlichen Entwicklung bei L2-Lernern des Deutschen

Abstract The present work deals with production difficulties associated with German word order rules and examines how word order and subject-verb agreement relate to one another in the interlanguage development of learners of German as a second language, paying particular attention to the perspective of the learner regarding their language production. It will be argued that the production difficulties with subject-verb inversion (INVERSION) and verb-final placement in subordinate clauses (V-FINAL) as well as the tendency in learners to produce SVO structures instead of INVERSION and V-FINAL, are consequences caused by a specific way of processing used by the leaner in trying to realize the subject-verb agreement that is typical of German. Over the course of the interlanguage development, the processing of word order, in turn, influences the processing of subject-verb agreement so that learners rarely produce subject-verb agreement errors in structures having SVO word order, while on the other hand, they occur frequently in structures that deviate from SVO word order. It is assumed that factors such as the acquisition context (natural/instructed), transfer from previously acquired languages and age-related, cognitive maturity play an important role in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement.

Optionality in bilingual native grammars

This study investigates the vulnerability of mature native grammars at the interfaces in adult Spanish speakers who have been residing in the US for a mean period of five years but continue to use their L1 on a daily basis. Participants were tested on production and comprehension of subject-verb inversion on two wh-constructions: matrix questions and relative clauses. The crucial distinction between inversion in these two types of constructions is that in relative clauses it is regulated by extra-syntactic conditions such as pragmatic and/or phonological considerations, while inversion in matrix questions is syntactically obligatory. Results showed that pragmatic/phonological inversion is affected by language attrition in the bilingual speakers, whereas purely syntactic inversion remains intact. However, no optionality was found in the comprehension task and no differences in reaction times were attested between monolingual and bilingual speakers.

Evidence of V to I raising in L2 Spanish

This article focuses on the acquisition of verb placement (adverb placement, subject–verb inversion in yes/no questions, subject–verb inversion in direct, indirect and pseudo wh-questions) in L2 Spanish. Four different elicitation tasks (an identification task, a grammaticality judgment task, a preference grammaticality task and a production task) were used for data collection. The subjects were 41 English adult L2 learners of Spanish at different proficiency levels (beginners, low intermediate, intermediate and advanced) according to an independent placement test. In line with Lardiere’s (1998a, 1998b, 2000) and Prévost and White’s (2000) findings, evidence for developments in syntax which is independent of developments in morphology is found in support of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. Although L2 learners’ verb-placement is target like at the surface level, their knowledge of verb agreement is poor and limited. That is, L2 learners appear to have reset the verb movement parameter in Spanish (i.e., [+movement]), even though they fail to morphologically mark the verb for person and number correctly, showing lack of knowledge that the inflections in Spanish I are strong. These findings suggest that there is a strong dissociation between syntax and morphology (Lardiere, 2000), but they will also be discussed in the light of some current theories on the acquisition of new values for uninterpretable syntactical features (Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007).