Elisabeth Stark

Indefiniteness and Specificity in Old Italian Texts

The present study shows the necessity to assume, in the process of nominal determiner grammaticalization, an intermediate period between the early facultative marking of important referents and fully grammaticalized article systems. In this intermediate period, especially indefinite determiners seem to be distributed in a quite clearcut way according to the specificity of the referents introduced by the respective noun phrases. Statistical evidence for this is drawn from the distribution of the indefinites uno, alcuno, certo and bare noun phrases in a corpus of three Old Tuscan novella collections. Specificity, understood as the semantic property of non-varying, operator independent interpretation of the variable introduced by an indefinite noun phrase, which makes a continuous anaphoric reference to the respective discourse referent possible, is conceived as a phenomenon of information organization in texts. It seems to be, at this intermediate stage of nominal determiner grammaticalization, a lexical feature of indefinites rather than an effect of syntactic or pragmatic factors.

Introduction to the special issue: "Negation and Clitics in French: Interaction and Variation"

This introduction presents very briefly some of the main issues currently discussed around negation particles and clitics in contemporary French and taken up by the six contributions it assembles, namely language change (grammaticalisation of clitics into agreement markers, completion of the Jespersen Cycle) vs. stable variation, and external (sociolinguistic) or internal (phonotactic, prosodic, or syntactic) factors triggering variation in both cases; the hypothesis of a potential diglossia in French opposing two grammars with considerable syntactic differences. Five out of six contributions focus on modern standard and non-standard varieties of French, with a formal theoretical background, while one shows a more philological-descriptive approach and is dedicated to Old French manuscripts.

Indefinitheit und Textkohärenz: Entstehung und semantische Strukturierung indefiniter Nominaldetermination im Altitalienischen

The subject of this extensive corpus-based study is the distribution and the functional role played by a total of 22 indefinite nouns in 9 key texts for Italian linguistic and literary history dating from the late 13th to the early 16th century (including »Novellino«, »Decameron«, and Bembos »Prose«). The central issue is the semantic and functional differentiation of these indefinite forms as encountered in the texts. This is pinpointed by way of comparison with their Latin etyma and modern Italian equivalents. A further essential aspect is the problem of the grammaticalization of indefinite noun determinants in Italian and the Romance languages in general. Die Untersuchung hat die Distribution und funktionale Auslastung von 22 Indefinita in neun Schlusseltexten der italienischen Sprachgeschichte vom 13. bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts (u.a. Dantes »Convivio«, Boccaccios »Decameron«, die »Libri della famiglia« von Alberti, Bembos »Prose della volgar lingua«) zum Gegenstand. Fast 9000 Einzelbelege werden in den nach drei Zeitraumen und Diskurstraditionen kreuz-klassifizierten Texten anhand von mehr als 40 grammatischen und textuellen Kategorien analysiert und bezuglich ihres Zusammenhangs mit Generizitat, Pradikativitat, Negation, Spezifizitat und Zahlbarkeit diskutiert. Die Analysekategorien entstammen der aktuellen referenzsemantischen Literatur und werden erstmals in einer empirischen diachronen Studie in ihrer Gesamtheit auf eine grose Zahl konkreter Textbelege angewendet. Im Zentrum stehen die Frage nach der semantischen und funktionalen Ausdifferenzierung der Indefinita in den Texten im Vergleich zu ihren lateinischen Etyma und neuitalienischen Entsprechungen sowie insbesondere das Problem der Grammatikalisierung indefiniter Nominaldeterminanten im Italienischen und Romanischen. Die Motivation der Artikelentstehung im Romanischen im indefiniten Bereich wird in der Leistung der unbestimmten romanischen Artikel, einer neuen Art von >Nominalklassifikation< im weiteren Sinne als Kompensation der lateinischen Genus- und Numerusflexion, identifiziert.

L’accord du participe passé dans les SMS francophones du corpus SMS suisse

Abstract Based on a quantitative empirical analysis of more than 4600 French text messages from the newly established Swiss reference corpus of text messages (cf. www.sms4science.ch), we show that the (graphic) realization of past participle agreement, often considered to be particularly prone to orthographic errors and indicative of more formal registers of contemporary French, is realized in the overwhelming majority of cases in our data (89,9 %). This holds independently of the sometimes heavily deviant graphic character of the respective text messages and the (very rare) phonic realization of past participle agreement in contemporary French. Significant triggering linguistic factors for the absence of (full) past participle agreement are type and distance of the controller of the agreement (more deviant realizations with relative pronouns than with cliticized objects, more deviant realizations with the controller following the past participle in constructions with être as the auxiliary), and the features of agreement (more deviant realizations of gender than of number features on the past participle), this being in line with important universal typological and theoretical findings. External factors such as sex and education play a certain role, too, which makes past participle agreement in French a sociolinguistic rather than a stylistic variable bound to graphic forms of communication.

Neutrum und Individuum: zentrale Konzepte in der Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen

Gegenstand des Artikels ist die grundlegende Diskussion von Neutrum und Individuum als grammatischen Entitaten, die in der Geschichte und modernen Struktur der romanischen Sprachen eine entscheidende Rolle spielen. Der weitreichende Verlust des lateinischen Neutrums, das eine ganze Reihe wichtiger konzeptueller Werte signalisierte (u.a. Nicht-Zahlbarkeit, Ereignishaftigkeit, propositionalen Charakter usw., alles Kategorien, die keine raumliche Begrenztheit, also Nicht-Individuation, gemeinsam haben), fuhrt, so die Hauptthese, in den romanischen Sprachen zu verschiedenen Individuations- bzw. Nicht-Individuationsstrategien, die mit der jeweiligen Neuorganisation des nominalen Genus- (und auch Numerus-) Systems systematisch korrelieren. Nach eine ausfuhrlichen Begriffsklarung insbesondere des Konzepts des Individuums in Sprache und Sprachverwendung erfolgt eine Diskussion der beiden Konzepte einmal in Bezug auf Nominalmorphologie und Nominaldetermination der romanischen Sprachen und zweitens in Bezug auf Kasusmarkierung im Romanischen, insbesondere auf die weitverbreitete differentielle Objektmarkierung. Die weitgehend komplementare Verteilung von obligatorischer Nominaldetermination und ›Partitivartikel‹ einerseits und differentieller Objektmarkierung im Romanischen andererseits kann vor diesem Hintergrund als nominalsyntagmainterne vs. -externe Anzeige von (Nicht-)Individuation als ›Neutrumsersatz‹ verstanden werden.

Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

Plural marking in French NA/AN combinations: What liaison can tell us

Abstract Our paper discusses different patterns of plural marking in N(oun)A(djective)/A(djective)N(oun)-combinations in phonic French. We first show, based on previous observations, that French has incomplete plural agreement in complex nominal phrases and that there is a striking asymmetry between AN-combinations (plural marking on the determiner and prenominal adjectives via liaison, where possible) and NA-combinations (usually, only plural marking on the determiner and infrequent liaison between N and postnominal A). In order to understand this discrepancy, we have analyzed all the occurrences of AN and NA in two French corpora and found a strong tendency for liaison in NA only to appear systematically and independently from register variation in “proper-name like” expressions such as Jeux Olympiques ‘Olympic Games’ ([ʒøzolɛ̃pik]). In a third step, we discuss this empirical finding and consider it synchronically as a case of morphophonological “proper name marking” (cf. Nübling 2005).

Nominalmorphology and semantics - Where's gender (and 'partitive articles') in Gallo-Romance?

The phenomenon of clitic doubling is known to be especially interesting with respect to the Romance languages. As its name suggest, clitic doubling involves the doubling of a verbal argument by a clitic pronoun inside the same propositional structure. From a generative perspective it was initially investigated focusing on its properties as exhibited in those Romance languages where it is attested. Thus Jaeggli (1982) who was the first to notice its theoretical importance, describes it for River Plate Spanish (spoken in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). Over the years, different factors that make clitic doubling possible, likely or even obligatory have been studied. Grammatical factors such as e.g. pronominal vs. non-pronominal, accusative vs. dative, the occurrence vs. non-occurrence of different object marking together with semantic and pragmatic factors such as e.g. animacy, specificity or definiteness have been held responsible for the occurrence and distribution. This volume is a collection of papers given at the workshop “Clitic Doubling and the syntax/semantic interface in Romance DPs” held at the University of Hamburg in November 2014. The workshop was a joint event organized by NEREUS (Research Network for Referential Categories in Spanish and other Romance languages” and the DFG-project “Clitic Doubling across Romance”. The papers of this volume deal with different aspects of the clitic doubling construction and related issues, such as its semantic, pragmatic and morphosyntactic properties across the Romance languages and beyond, thereby contributing to the understanding of the nature of the cross-linguistic variation, as well as the micro-variation observed within.