Donna Jo Napoli

Secondary Resultative Predicates In Italian

English exhibits PP, AP and NP resultative secondary predicates (SPs). Italian freely exhibits PP resultatives and, less commonly, AP resultatives. This difference follows from two facts. First, resultatives, being arguments of the V except in constructions involving ‘fake’ objects (see section 4), may appear only in positions that non-predicative arguments of the V of their same category can appear in (a correlation stated in (155) below). Since English allows PP, AP and NP non-predicative arguments in the position immediately following the direct object, all three categories can also appear as resultatives in the same position. But since Italian allows only the first two types of non-predicative arguments in this position, only PP and AP resultatives can appear there. Second, Italian sentences with AP resultatives are subject to a rule of semantic interpretation by which the primary predicate must be interpreted as focusing on the endpoint of the activity it denotes (as stated in (110) below). English sentences with AP resultatives are only slightly sensitive to this interpretation rule. As a result, AP resultatives are appropriate in fewer situations in Italian. That AP resultatives are sensitive to this rule of interpretation is consistent with the fact that AP arguments of verb that appear in post-object position are marked in a number of ways.

Should All Deaf Children Learn Sign Language

Every year, 10 000 infants are born in the United States with sensorineural deafness. Deaf children of hearing (and nonsigning) parents are unique among all children in the world in that they cannot easily or naturally learn the language that their parents speak. These parents face tough choices. Should they seek a cochlear implant for their child? If so, should they also learn to sign? As pediatricians, we need to help parents understand the risks and benefits of different approaches to parent–child communication when the child is deaf.

Order of the major constituents in sign languages: implications for all language

A survey of reports of sign order from 42 sign languages leads to a handful of generalizations. Two accounts emerge, one amodal and the other modal. We argue that universal pressures are at work with respect to some generalizations, but that pressure from the visual modality is at work with respect to others. Together, these pressures conspire to make all sign languages order their major constituents SOV or SVO. This study leads us to the conclusion that the order of S with regard to verb phrase (VP) may be driven by sensorimotor system concerns that feed universal grammar.

Just for the hell of it: A comparison of two taboo-term constructions

The two English constructions exemplified in Lets get the hell out of here (type G) and They beat the hell out of him (type B) differ both syntactically and semantically, but in both the taboo expression has the force of an intensifier. History (through a corpus investigation) reveals that the B-construction started as a literal exorcism (beat the devil out of someone), where the hell substituted for the devil, and semantic bleaching ultimately made the literal sense give way to simple emphasis, with any taboo term jumping in. The G-construction may have developed simultaneously, always as an intensifier - or, perhaps, later, on analogy with B. Our analysis suggests that the use of taboo terms as intensifiers spread from wh-constructions to these constructions and, finally, to degree intensifier constructions. These two uses of taboo terms as intensifiers are best characterized in terms of constructions and thus offer evidence against theories lacking any notion of constructions as basic building blocks. Further, they give us information about language change: a pragmatically unified but semantically disparate class of expressions (namely, taboo terms) can extend its distribution in parallel.

Anthropomorphism in Sign Languages: A Look at Poetry and Storytelling with a Focus on British Sign Language.

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the range of possibilities for both manual and nonmanual articulators when the signer engages in (almost) complete embodiment of the nonhuman character, and how nonhumans are portrayed as communicating via sign language.

The right to language.

We argue for the existence of a state constitutional legal right to language. Our purpose here is to develop a legal framework for protecting the civil rights of the deaf child, with the ultimate goal of calling for legislation that requires all levels of government to fund programs for deaf children and their families to learn a fully accessible language: a sign language.

Reflexivization across clause boundaries in Italian

At first glance Reflexivization in Italian seems to obey the same restrictions we find in English. Thus, if we consider the proposal that reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must be clausemates in English, we find in Italian that the same clausemate condition holds and that for any two coreferential pronouns within the same clause, the second of them is a reflexive pronoun. If, on the other hand, we consider the proposal that a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent may be indefinitely far apart provided that certain circumstances are not present, such as an intervening specified subject or the reflexives being in a tensed S to which the antecedent does not belong (as in Chomsky (I973)), again the same conditions hold for Italian Reflexivization; as illustrated in (I)-(3).

Paratactic and subordinative So

The contrast between subordination and co-ordination, from both a syntactic viewpoint and a semantic viewpoint, is assumed by most formal theories of grammar today, so much so that generally only avowed a-formalists or anti-formalists seriously entertain the possibility that any other type of relationship may exist between clauses. Yet paratactic constructions persist in nagging us, undermining precisely that contrast, sometimes competing with co-ordination, sometimes with subordination, for the same semantic niche in language. In this article we focus on one such case in English, that of complex sentences containing the degree-adverbs so or such in which one clause serves to indicate an extent to which the predicate modified by so/such holds and the other clause expresses a result. As we argue below, there are two types of complex sentences with this general characterization, one of which is of the paratactic kind and is exemplified in (I):

Negatives in Comparatives

The negative element non appears in Italian comparatives when the speaker presupposes that his statement contradicts someone elses or his own previously held belief. Though this non appears in the comparative clause in the surface, it originates in a higher abstract S in embedded position. By proposing an abstract S in embedded position, we can account in a unified way for many sets of facts which would go unrelated in either a presupposition-dependent syntax model or an interpretive approach. This use of non is thus an example of a presuppositional fact which is accounted for by a syntactic analysis.*

Language Needs of Deaf and Hard- of-Hearing Infants and Children: Information for Spiritual Leaders and Communities

Leaders of spiritual communities should support a family welcoming a deaf or hard-of-hearing child in such a way that the entire community offers the child genuine inclusion. The ideal situation for protecting mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being is to raise the child bilingually. The community leader can guide as the community participates in nourishing the child by providing information and suggestions for action. The community needs to understand deafness as primarily a condition of gaining a culture and language rather than sensory loss, so that family and others evolve from grieving the loss of their expectations of what their childs life might be like to looking forward with hope to the unique contributions that child can bring to the world.