Multi-functional deictics in South Central Tibeto-Burman

A foot is an organizing unit of prosodic structure built on moras and syllables. Prominence falls on the heads of feet, and feet can be right- or left-headed (an iamb or a trochee, respectively). Feet can be constructed from the right or the left edge and lexical stress falls on the head of the leftmost or rightmost foot. The metrical system of a language can thus be defined by (a) the nature of the foot (trochee/iamb), (b) the direction of parsing, and (c) the foot that carries main stress. Each prosodic word minimally comprises a stressed foot. Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three branches, East Germanic (Gothic), West Germanic, and North Germanic. East Germanic has no modern descendants, unlike the latter two branches, which include, for example, English, German, and Dutch (West Germanic), and Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North Germanic), respectively. The status of the foot has remained remarkably consistent across the history of Germanic, remaining trochaic and quantity sensitive (although details differ across the relevant languages). This is despite significant changes to the quantity systems of Germanic languages, which have almost exclusively lost the distinction in either vowel or consonant quantity (whereas Proto-Germanic had both). The extensive borrowing from Romance languages across Germanic has also had a substantial impact. Germanic words rarely contain more than one foot, whereas Romance loans are largely longer than native Germanic vocabulary and therefore frequently comprise two or more feet. Due to the fact that native vocabulary was broadly stressed on the initial foot, whereas Romance loans often retained right-edge stress, a choice had to be made as to which foot to stress and the modern languages demonstrate that the right edge was selected in every case. Thus, while feet remain quantity sensitive and trochaic, the modern languages construct them from right to left and place main stress on the rightmost foot. This is in contrast to the early stages of the languages, when the opposite was the case.

Previous approaches to early bilingualism have argued either that children exposed to two languages from birth are not able to separate their two languages and experience massive cross-linguistic influence or that they do separate their languages from birth and lack crosslinguistic influence. The present paper assumes that both early language separation and crosslinguistic influence coexist in one bilingual individual during the same developmental stage for different grammatical phenomena. The goal of the present paper is to show that how crosslinguistic influence manifests itself depends on particular grammatical properties and is independent of language dominance. The direction of the influence is related to computational complexity (in the sense of Jakubowicz 2000). Data from a bilingual Italian/German child are discussed with respect to argument omissions, V2, and finite verb placement in subordinate clauses. For argument omissions, the Germanic language influences the Romance language and has a delaying effect. For V2 and finite verb placement in subordinate clauses, the Romance language has an accelerating effect on the Germanic language in the case of V2 and a delaying effect in the case of finite verb placement in subordinate clauses.

The acquisition of semantic knowledge is paramount for any application that requires a deep understanding of natural language text. Motivated by the problem of building a noun phrase-level semantic parser and adapting it to various applications, such as machine translation and multilingual question answering, in this paper we present a domain-independent model for noun phrase semantic interpretation. We investigate the problem based on cross-linguistic evidence from a set of four Romance languages: Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian. The focus on Romance languages is well motivated. It is generally the case that English noun phrases translate into constructions of the form P N in Romance languages where, as we will show, the P (preposition) varies in ways that correlate with the semantics. Thus, based on a set of 22 semantic interpretation categories (such as PART-WHOLE, AGENT, POSSESSION) we present empirical observations regarding the distribution of these semantic categories in a cross-lingual corpus and their mapping to various syntactic constructions in English and Romance. Furthermore, given a training set of English noun phrases along with their translations in the four Romance languages, our algorithm automatically learns classification rules and applies them to unseen noun phrase instances for semantic interpretation. Experimental results are compared against a state-of-the-art model reported in the literature.

Article Wiltrud Mihatsch / Inga Hennecke / Anna Kisiel / Alena Kolyaseva / Kristin Davidse / Lieselotte Brems (eds.): Type Noun Constructions in Slavic, Germanic and Romance Languages. Semantics and Pragmatics on the Move was published on December 1, 2025 in the journal Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (volume 23, issue 46).

In research on information structure and discourse cohesion, contrast has been defined in different ways, depending on the pragmatic/semantic relation established between the propositions involved in the contrast, on the text types and on other discourse conditions. As a whole, despite – or possibly because of – its vagueness, contrast has proved to be a useful heuristic tool for characterizing discourse cohesion phenomena. This paper focuses on results from our research concerning cohesion phenomena in elicited discourse in Romance (Italian, French) and Germanic (German, Dutch) languages and aims to offer a more precise characterization of contrast against several variation parameters. We take into consideration earlier work on three tasks (Finite Story, Polarity-Switch Dialogues, Map Task) and add a new one (Spot the Difference). The comparison between the results allows us to disentangle the following variables: information units involved in the contrast relation; discourse conditions (monologue vs. dialogue); speakers’ access to information (shared vs. non-shared); effect of contrast on information in the common ground (alternative maintained vs. rejected). The aim is to achieve a more fine-grained definition of contrast relations, which allows us to identify and characterize the divergent behavior of Romance and Germanic languages, and to relate intra- and crosslinguistic differences revealed by speakers’ preferences in speech with structural specificities of the two language groups.

The paper discusses the conditions for case marking on partitive constructions in direct object position in Turkish and some related languages. We focus on Turkish and then turn to some details of corresponding constructions in some other Turkic languages and in Standard Mongolian. Turkish exhibits Differential Object Marking, which primarily depends on the semantic-pragmatic factor of specificity. Partitive constructions with the ablative for the superset in Turkish come in different forms, depending on how the subset expression is realized: (a) by a lexical noun as head, (b) by the classifier tane ‘item’, functioning as a “dummy noun”, and (c) by a numeral, quantifier or adjective. Case marking of the direct object is optional for (a), and obligatory for (most instances of) (c). This type of obligatory case marking is dependent on the obligatory marking of the adjective, quantifier or numeral with a default 3rd person singular agreement suffix, which then requires case marking. Construction (b) does not allow for case marking, when the classifier is bare; when the classifier is followed by the default 3rd person singular agreement marking, that marking requires obligatory case morphology, just like in construction (c). We hypothesize that structural case marking can either express the semantic-pragmatic condition of specificity in terms of referential anchoring or it must obey a formal condition, namely the requirement of the agreement suffix to be followed by overt case. The languages we have studied show an interesting micro-variation. They differ (among other properties) with respect to classifiers – in particular, with respect to whether they have [+human] classifiers or not. In addition, one language among the languages under investigation, namely Kirghiz, substitutes the agreement marker in its function as a filler of the partitive’s nominal head by a different marker: a morpheme expressing a set. Here, the agreement marker is used to express specificity, given that its presence is not required for formal reasons. In direct object partitive constructions with subset expressions that are expressed as full noun phrase/lexical noun heads (option (a) above), overt accusative case indicates specificity in most of the investigated languages. In options (b) and (c), the investigated languages provide different patterns when marking the referential status of the partitive heads, thus indicating the variation among these languages with respect to the nominal category feature of the partitive heads involved.This article is part of the Special Collection: Partitives

Accent shifts in spoken noun phrases affect verification latencies of listeners in Dutch but not Canadian French

This book is the second volume of ‘The Dative’ series. In this volume some theoretical considerations, contrastive and diachronic aspects are presented. As in the first volume, this book gives us a typologically limited survey of ‘dativity’ since the languages investigated are mostiy Indo-European (mainly Germanic and Romance) languages. The traditional notions of case was developed on the basis of Ancient Greek and Latin, in which the main function of the dative was to mark the indirect object. As Blake (1994:20) points out, this traditional description of case systems presents two major problems. One is the problem of distinguishing the cases. How do we determine which argument is the dative when there is no case marking in a language? The second problem is how to describe the meaning and function of the dative. Traditionally cases are described as having various roles, for example, Goal, Experiencer, Possessor and Beneficiary. But there is another tradition in which cases have a single abstract meaning, and the concrete meanings are derived from this abstract meaning. In this book, eight different authors contribute to illuminating these problems.

Reviewed by: Objects and information structure by Mary Dalrymple and Irina Nikolaeva Helen de Hoop Objects and information structure. By Mary Dalrymple and Irina Nikolaeva. (Cambridge studies in linguistics 131.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 248. ISBN 9780521199858. $90 (Hb). Topics are usually pragmatically defined as what sentences are about. Usually, what is being talked about in a sentence are people, that is, what they do, how they behave, and why. Hence, the philosophical saying 'Small people talk about people, average people talk about events, and great people talk about ideas' has been challenged by linguists, who instead say: 'All people talk about people'. Corpus studies of spoken language have indeed shown that the subject of most sentences is human, or at least animate, and psycholinguistic research has revealed that in many languages there is a preference both in production and comprehension for constructions that start with an animate noun phrase (see van Bergen 2011). This principle has also been proposed in functional typology to account for crosslinguistic, canonical word-order patterns. Topics are what sentences are about, which explains why they often occur sentence-initially. Topics are often the subject of a sentence, or the other way around, the grammatical subject of a sentence is often the topic. Since topics are usually subjects and subjects are often agents, it is not surprising that topics are often agents, too. Brunetti (2009) argues for Spanish and Italian that the argument with the most proto-agent properties gets selected as the sentence-initial topic, and she shows that this approach can explain why topics are often, but not always, subjects. Subjects are often prominent or salient in the discourse: agentive, animate, and definite, but of course objects can be prominent and salient in the discourse, animate, and definite, too. Often, when a language shows differential object marking (DOM)—the phenomenon that some objects in a language trigger case marking or agreement on the verb while others do not—the marked objects are in fact these prominent or salient, animate, and/or definite objects. Dalrymple and Nikolaeva link this to the notion of topic in information structure. In their book they show that marked objects in DOM languages are often topical, while unmarked objects are nontopical. I believe this is an important insight. In their view a sentence is not simply divided into a topic and a comment, by which the object automatically ends up as part of the comment when the subject is the topic. D&N note that more than one referent can be under discussion at the time of an utterance, and hence, an utterance can have more than one topic, at least two. The two topics are not equally important, however, and that is why D&N dub them 'primary' and 'secondary' topics. Clearly, subjects are more often topical than objects, and even in contexts where objects are topical, subjects do not have to be less topical. D&N note that, although there is no one-to-one mapping between grammatical functions and information-structure roles, there are strong crosslinguistic tendencies. They propose that while subjects can be viewed as grammaticalized primary topics, grammatically marked objects can be viewed as grammaticalized secondary topics. The difference between primary and secondary topics is very important for their line of argumentation. If one assumes there is only one topic per sentence, the marking of objects could not easily be understood as topic marking, due to the presence of an often more topical subject. When an object is marked as a secondary topic, however, it immediately follows that there must be a primary topic (often the subject) in the sentence as well. I turn now to a discussion of the book's main claim on the basis of Chs. 6-10. Ch. 6 discusses the main evidence for the relevance of topicality in the grammatical marking of nonsubjects. Chs. [End Page 179] 7 and 8 present languages in which topical objects receive special (case or agreement) marking while nontopical objects remain unmarked. In Ch. 9 this general approach is extended to ditransi-tive constructions in languages with differential object marking, while Ch. 10 sketches a historical approach to differential object marking as...

The research aims to explore the etymology and semantic field of the zoonym “cow” in the linguocultural contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families. The article analyzes the origin of the word “cow” in Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, identifying its core and additional meanings, commonalities and specific features. This analysis makes it possible to determine the national characteristics in the expression of knowledge about people, animals, and the world in mythological and religious beliefs by the native speakers. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering the zoonym “cow” not only as a linguistic object, but also as a cultural phenomenon intertwined with history, mythology, religion, and human lifestyle. This zoonym is studied for the first time in a comparative aspect using data from Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, with the aim of identifying, analyzing, and describing national cultural features, similarities, and differences. As a result, the study proves that the etymology and semantics of the word “cow” in the contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families display shared roots, dating back to a distant past, and indicate profound connections between the peoples. Despite some differences among the peoples who speak Slavic and Turkic languages, such as national specificity of worldview, varying living conditions, traditions, history, and religion, the words designating the cow in various linguocultures are part of a unified history, connected to the use of this animal in human life.

This chapter concentrates on the principles that determine the relative order of constituents in the noun phrase. Shifts in the relative impact of these principles often cause fundamental changes in the ordering patterns of a language. These and certain other general properties of ordering principles are briefly discussed, and a tentative typology of ordering principles is presented. The principle of domain integrity is introduced, along with cases of discontinuity in the larger context of iconicity, a notion that proves to be fundamental in the explanation of word order patterns in general. A more general morpho-syntactic characterisation of the languages in the sample is given, concentrating on three major typological features: basic word order, relators (preposition, postposition, case marking), and the coding of referents in the predicate.

The present article examines the second language acquisition of prepositional case in German by primary school children whose first language is Albanian. I have conducted an experiment in which I examined how case within PPs is acquired and used. My study shows that the children have difficulties regarding the prepositional case marking. There is no difference between the error rate of prepositional accusative and dative. Furthermore, there is no difference among the case markings of the two-way prepositions which appears semantically driven in German with dative and accusative and the one-way prepositions which appears either with the dative or accusative. It will be argued that the morphological opacity within nominal phrases as parts of prepositional phrases in German makes the acquisition of prepositional case system difficult.

Just like many other Romance languages, French includes units known as object clitics, which exhibit characteristics of both affixes and noun phrases (NPs). They resemble affixes in that they need a prosodically strong host to attach to, and they are similar to NPs in that they fulfill a syntactic role in the utterance. These properties, coupled with their unique positioning compared to the phrases they replace, categorize them as special clitics (Zwicky, 1983). All these factors place them at the intersection of phonology, morphology, and syntax. Consequently, it’s not surprising that they pose a challenge for learners whose first language isn’t French.Learners of French as a second language (L2) often find it difficult to master the use of these units, leading to mistakes and various avoidance strategies. Errors can include incorrect agreements (with the antecedent, as well as with the past participle and adjectives), non-standard placement (such as placing the clitic between the auxiliary and the past participle), resorting to strong pronouns (likely influenced by languages that allow it, such as English), and an incomplete understanding of certain morphosyntactic or semantic properties (such as the distinction between animate and inanimate or verb subcategorization). On the other hand, avoidance strategies include NP repetition and omission (Wust, 2009; Emirkanian et al., 2021).Could deep learning be the solution to assist these learners? We believe so.To train a model capable of identifying sentences containing errors in the use of clitic object pronouns, a substantial amount of training data is required. This data should include a significant number of correctly written sentences in French L2, along with sentences containing errors in the use of clitic object pronouns. Once collected, this data needs to be prepared for use in a deep learning model. The data must be cleaned, normalized, and encoded into a format that the model can interpret. The data can also be augmented with variations of similar sentences, allowing the deep learning model to learn to generalize and recognize errors in a wider context.Our project involves adapting a pre-trained FlauBERT model (Le et al., 2020), based on BERT (Devlin et al., 2019), for a grammaticality judgment task. We fine-tuned this monolingual model on a dataset of 5272 sequences annotated as correct or containing errors. This dataset includes authentic productions from learners of French L2 (Jebali, 2018), along with data collected from the web containing both real productions and modifications introducing non-authentic but plausible errors.After fine-tuning FlauBERT, we used it to provide grammaticality judgments on a second evaluation corpus containing data the model had never seen before. On this dataset, it achieved an overall F-score of 0.93, which is higher than the scores obtained by GPT 3.5 (ChatGPT) and Antidote 11.After fine-tuning this initial model, we further fine-tuned it on a corpus of 6936 examples of errors related to the use of these clitics. The task was to discriminate between four types of errors regarding these units: agreement, position, resort to strong pronouns, and syntactic or semantic order errors. This second model achieved an evaluation F-score of 0.95, demonstrating excellent classification capabilities.Both deep learning models can be seamlessly integrated into an automatic correction system to help French L2 learners avoid errors related to the use of clitic object pronouns.The system pipeline we’ve established using these two models takes a sequence of words (ranging from a sentence to an average-length paragraph), checks for errors in the use of the object clitic, and provides feedback based on the error type. We later added an additional generative module, a model fine-tuned on another corpus and based on mBARThez (Kamal Eddine et al., 2021), which is built on BART (Lewis et al., 2019). This module can suggest a correction for the sequence containing an error in the use of the object clitic.

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.

This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) and complex sentences (e.g. quotatives). The volume offers survey chapters of type noun constructions in each language family as well as contributions focusing on specific aspects in one or two languages, such as their grammar, semantics and pragmatics, diachronic development, discursive and sociolinguistic variety. These complementary methodologies elucidate the unique cross-linguistic field of type noun constructions both descriptively and theoretically. Hence, this volume can also serve as a model for similar surveys in other functional domains.