International Journal of Lexicography, Jul 17, 2018
Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to ... more Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to women too, triggering the need for nouns to refer to these female professionals. Languages show differences with respect to the creation and use of these feminine profession nouns. Whereas in German, feminisation has been accepted for quite some time, in French, the use of feminine forms of profession nouns was not very common until recently, but this is changing. This paper investigates the inclusion of feminine forms of profession nouns in different editions of dictionaries of French and German over time. The results show a contrast between French and German when it comes to the presence of feminine forms of profession nouns in dictionaries. Still, the number of feminine forms present has, especially for French, massively increased over time, suggesting that changes are ongoing. Different factors that influence the discrepancy between French and German are discussed. * We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.
1. Project Information Sign language typology is a young research field with two related goals. F... more 1. Project Information Sign language typology is a young research field with two related goals. First, sign languages (SLs) are compared to spoken languages with respect to certain grammatical features to scrutinize which typological distinctions are valid across modalities and to determine whether theoretical accounts that are based on spoken language data can be applied to SLs. Second, SLs are compared to each other to further investigate whether they differ along similar lines as spoken languages do. In this project, both types of typological comparison are applied to the area of argument structure (AS). Verbs in all natural languages must be specified for how many participants they require (subject, (in)direct object); compare e.g. Peter laughed with the ungrammatical Peter visited. Interestingly, a given verb may be variable with respect to its AS; compare Peter broke the window to The window broke. In addition, there are syntactic and morphological means to change AS, e.g. in ...
In investigations of sign language grammar - phonology, morphology, and syntax - the impact of la... more In investigations of sign language grammar - phonology, morphology, and syntax - the impact of language modality on grammar is a recurrent issue. The term 'modality,' as used in this context, refers to the distinction between languages that are expressed and perceived in the oral-auditive modality (i.e. spoken languages) and those that are expressed and perceived in the gestural-visual modality (i.e. sign languages). Since the 1960s, an impressive body of research on various sign languages has demonstrated that many aspects of sign language grammar are in fact modality-independent and that theoretical models that were developed on the basis of spoken language can thus also account for sign language structures (see Sandler & Lillo-Martin (2006) for an overview). In this paper, we will claim modality-independence, at least from a structural point of view, for an area of sign language grammar that appears to be clearly shaped by the visual-gestural modality: the use of space in...
Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in the linguistic input plays a ... more Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in the linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. In the present study, we investigated whether such learning is also involved in acquiring a morpho-syntactic structure that carries meaning. We exposed children to a miniature language in which children had to learn a grammatical marker that expressed number, and which could only be acquired on the basis of the distributional properties in the input. Results of a study with 50 kindergartners (M = 5;5) show that young children are able to infer this meaning statistically.
Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role... more Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit, as often assumed. We trained 63 kindergarteners on a miniature language and assessed learning using a picture‐matching task. We used an opt‐out task to measure whether the kindergarteners possessed awareness of an acquired meaningful grammatical marker. In the opt‐out paradigm, participants demonstrate awareness by expressing uncertainty through a nonverbal response: opting out. Our results are compatible with an earlier study of which the present study is a partial replication, suggesting that kindergarteners can acquire this marker from distributional properties in the input. Furthermore, although none of the children could verbalize know...
Je tiens à remercier Alain Kihm ainsi qu'un relecteur anonyme pour leurs commentaires précis qui ... more Je tiens à remercier Alain Kihm ainsi qu'un relecteur anonyme pour leurs commentaires précis qui ont grandement contribué à améliorer cet article.
Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to ... more Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to women too, triggering the need for nouns to refer to these female professionals. Languages show differences with respect to the creation and use of these feminine profession nouns. Whereas in German, feminisation has been accepted for quite some time, in French, the use of feminine forms of profession nouns was not very common until recently, but this is changing. This paper investigates the inclusion of feminine forms of profession nouns in different editions of dictionaries of French and German over time. The results show a contrast between French and German when it comes to the presence of feminine forms of profession nouns in dictionaries. Still, the number of feminine forms present has, especially for French, massively increased over time, suggesting that changes are ongoing. Different factors that influence the discrepancy between French and German are discussed. * We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.
Peter Bakker's review of my book The emergence of hybrid grammars: Language contact and change, p... more Peter Bakker's review of my book The emergence of hybrid grammars: Language contact and change, published in Word 62, 4. 228-243, amounts to a catalogue of misrepresentations and misconceptions of the positions I developed there. These claim 12 of his 14-page review. In what follows, I first summarize the hypotheses I developed in the book, intended now for those who have not read it yet, and then I expose Bakker's inability or unwillingness to interpret the book accurately and critique it competently. 1. The emergence of hybrid grammars: background information and clarification In the abstract of his review, Bakker writes: Creoles are seen as a result of failed acquisition. It is shown in the article that Bantu speakers were more numerous than Gbe speakers, on the basis of historical, genetic and linguistic evidence. Still, Bantu languages are structurally quite different from the creoles, which can be taken for an argument that Gbe as well only had a minimal influence on the grammatical structures of the creoles. The analytic structures are argued in the article to be as diverse for creoles as they are for the Gbe languages. Some structures are found to be different in all three creoles and five varieties of Gbe. (228)
Recently, various views have been proposed in the literature which challenge this consensus, thus... more Recently, various views have been proposed in the literature which challenge this consensus, thus suggesting that languages can differ fundamentally in complexity and that the degree of complexity of a language may correlate with the context in which it emerged (e.g., L1 acquisition versus L2 acquisition), its age (e.g., pidgins/creoles versus older languages), or the size and social structure of its speaking community (small tightly related communities versus large and loose communities), see e.g., Bickerton (1981, 1984, 1988), Dahl (2004), Trudgill (2011), among many others. In such views, languages acquire more complex systems as they evolve, hence notions such as growth or maturation (or grammaticalization) as argued for in Dahl (2004: 2). In this book, I look at grammaticalization in the perspective of what I call maturitydmature linguistic phenomena being those that presuppose a non-trivial prehistory: that is, they can only exist in a language which has passed through specific earlier stages. Grammatical maturationdprocesses that give rise to phenomena that are mature in this sensedin general adds to the complexity of a language [.] Complexity is here seen, not as synonymous with "difficulty" but as an objective property of a systemda measure of the amount of information needed to describe or reconstruct it. Applied to the following examples from English and Gungbe, we may reach the conclusion that the morphosyntax of the English past verb is more complex than that of the Gungbe one. In English, one needs to specify that regular verbs must take an additional affix to encode past, while no such affix is required in Gungbe: the verb is always bare in this language and past is the default interpretation for eventive (or so-called dynamic) verbs (cf. Aboh, 2004a). While this characterization of complexity may sometimes suggest that more superficial distinctions in a language may increase complexity, this need not be the case since what matters here is the amount of information required to describe or reconstruct the system (cf. Dahl, 2004, Audring, this volume).
This paper discusses noun phrases in Haitian Creole (HC), a French-derived Creole, and in Gungbe,... more This paper discusses noun phrases in Haitian Creole (HC), a French-derived Creole, and in Gungbe, a Gbe language. These languages exhibit "bare noun phrases" (BNPs) in a wider range of positions than in French, English and the other most commonly studied Romance and Germanic languages. Studies on the formation of HC show that many of the creators of the earliest Creole varieties in 17th-century Saint-Domingue were native speakers of Niger-Congo languages including Gbe language. We believe that by close analysis of specific domains of the Creole (e.g. BNPs) and by comparing these patterns to their analogues in the languages in contact during the emergence of the Creole, we can better understand how Universal Grammar regulates the emergence of new varieties out of language contact.
The opening chapter of a collective volume on 'The morphosyntax of reiteration', this art... more The opening chapter of a collective volume on 'The morphosyntax of reiteration', this article challenges three common assumptions regarding 'reduplication': (i) that reduplication results from a morphological operation; (ii) that the semantic effects of reduplication are 'iconic'; (iii) that reduplicative patterns are more frequent or pervasive in creole than in non-creole languages.
The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and id... more The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and ideas regarding Romance linguistics. Prominent exponents of different approaches to the study of Romance linguistics are asked to answer some general questions from their viewpoint. The answers are then assembled so that readers can get a comparative picture of what’s going on in the field. After the first Inter-Views focused on (morpho)syntax more generally, the second Inter-Views focus more narrowly on Cartography. We invited six syntacticians, working on this topic from a variety of perspectives, to answer our questions.
Traditional linguistics assumes that verbs are lexical categories that typically merge in the pre... more Traditional linguistics assumes that verbs are lexical categories that typically merge in the predicate domain of a sentence: VP. This study shows that, in Gungbe (Kwa), a significantly large class of items functioning as verbs heading a VP in a sentence may also serve as functional elements that merge within the functional skeleton of the clause. The discussion builds on the analysis of Inherent Complement Verbs (ICVs). In the Kwa literature, ICVs are defined as verbs which require a complement in their citation form (e.g., dó wèzùn lit. plant race; 'to run'). This paper argues that these verbs can first merge in two syntactic positions: little v and V. When merged in v, such verbs select for a VP-complement involving an abstract empty V which necessarily takes a bare NP as complement (Hale & Keyser 1993). When merged in V, however, these verbs pattern like other Gungbe lexical verbs in selecting a DP argument. The paper concludes that Gungbe, (and possibly Kwa languages in...
International Journal of Lexicography, Jul 17, 2018
Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to ... more Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to women too, triggering the need for nouns to refer to these female professionals. Languages show differences with respect to the creation and use of these feminine profession nouns. Whereas in German, feminisation has been accepted for quite some time, in French, the use of feminine forms of profession nouns was not very common until recently, but this is changing. This paper investigates the inclusion of feminine forms of profession nouns in different editions of dictionaries of French and German over time. The results show a contrast between French and German when it comes to the presence of feminine forms of profession nouns in dictionaries. Still, the number of feminine forms present has, especially for French, massively increased over time, suggesting that changes are ongoing. Different factors that influence the discrepancy between French and German are discussed. * We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.
1. Project Information Sign language typology is a young research field with two related goals. F... more 1. Project Information Sign language typology is a young research field with two related goals. First, sign languages (SLs) are compared to spoken languages with respect to certain grammatical features to scrutinize which typological distinctions are valid across modalities and to determine whether theoretical accounts that are based on spoken language data can be applied to SLs. Second, SLs are compared to each other to further investigate whether they differ along similar lines as spoken languages do. In this project, both types of typological comparison are applied to the area of argument structure (AS). Verbs in all natural languages must be specified for how many participants they require (subject, (in)direct object); compare e.g. Peter laughed with the ungrammatical Peter visited. Interestingly, a given verb may be variable with respect to its AS; compare Peter broke the window to The window broke. In addition, there are syntactic and morphological means to change AS, e.g. in ...
In investigations of sign language grammar - phonology, morphology, and syntax - the impact of la... more In investigations of sign language grammar - phonology, morphology, and syntax - the impact of language modality on grammar is a recurrent issue. The term 'modality,' as used in this context, refers to the distinction between languages that are expressed and perceived in the oral-auditive modality (i.e. spoken languages) and those that are expressed and perceived in the gestural-visual modality (i.e. sign languages). Since the 1960s, an impressive body of research on various sign languages has demonstrated that many aspects of sign language grammar are in fact modality-independent and that theoretical models that were developed on the basis of spoken language can thus also account for sign language structures (see Sandler & Lillo-Martin (2006) for an overview). In this paper, we will claim modality-independence, at least from a structural point of view, for an area of sign language grammar that appears to be clearly shaped by the visual-gestural modality: the use of space in...
Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in the linguistic input plays a ... more Many studies demonstrate that detecting statistical regularities in the linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. In the present study, we investigated whether such learning is also involved in acquiring a morpho-syntactic structure that carries meaning. We exposed children to a miniature language in which children had to learn a grammatical marker that expressed number, and which could only be acquired on the basis of the distributional properties in the input. Results of a study with 50 kindergartners (M = 5;5) show that young children are able to infer this meaning statistically.
Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role... more Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit, as often assumed. We trained 63 kindergarteners on a miniature language and assessed learning using a picture‐matching task. We used an opt‐out task to measure whether the kindergarteners possessed awareness of an acquired meaningful grammatical marker. In the opt‐out paradigm, participants demonstrate awareness by expressing uncertainty through a nonverbal response: opting out. Our results are compatible with an earlier study of which the present study is a partial replication, suggesting that kindergarteners can acquire this marker from distributional properties in the input. Furthermore, although none of the children could verbalize know...
Je tiens à remercier Alain Kihm ainsi qu'un relecteur anonyme pour leurs commentaires précis qui ... more Je tiens à remercier Alain Kihm ainsi qu'un relecteur anonyme pour leurs commentaires précis qui ont grandement contribué à améliorer cet article.
Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to ... more Following societal changes, professions that were traditionally dominated by men are now open to women too, triggering the need for nouns to refer to these female professionals. Languages show differences with respect to the creation and use of these feminine profession nouns. Whereas in German, feminisation has been accepted for quite some time, in French, the use of feminine forms of profession nouns was not very common until recently, but this is changing. This paper investigates the inclusion of feminine forms of profession nouns in different editions of dictionaries of French and German over time. The results show a contrast between French and German when it comes to the presence of feminine forms of profession nouns in dictionaries. Still, the number of feminine forms present has, especially for French, massively increased over time, suggesting that changes are ongoing. Different factors that influence the discrepancy between French and German are discussed. * We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our own.
Peter Bakker's review of my book The emergence of hybrid grammars: Language contact and change, p... more Peter Bakker's review of my book The emergence of hybrid grammars: Language contact and change, published in Word 62, 4. 228-243, amounts to a catalogue of misrepresentations and misconceptions of the positions I developed there. These claim 12 of his 14-page review. In what follows, I first summarize the hypotheses I developed in the book, intended now for those who have not read it yet, and then I expose Bakker's inability or unwillingness to interpret the book accurately and critique it competently. 1. The emergence of hybrid grammars: background information and clarification In the abstract of his review, Bakker writes: Creoles are seen as a result of failed acquisition. It is shown in the article that Bantu speakers were more numerous than Gbe speakers, on the basis of historical, genetic and linguistic evidence. Still, Bantu languages are structurally quite different from the creoles, which can be taken for an argument that Gbe as well only had a minimal influence on the grammatical structures of the creoles. The analytic structures are argued in the article to be as diverse for creoles as they are for the Gbe languages. Some structures are found to be different in all three creoles and five varieties of Gbe. (228)
Recently, various views have been proposed in the literature which challenge this consensus, thus... more Recently, various views have been proposed in the literature which challenge this consensus, thus suggesting that languages can differ fundamentally in complexity and that the degree of complexity of a language may correlate with the context in which it emerged (e.g., L1 acquisition versus L2 acquisition), its age (e.g., pidgins/creoles versus older languages), or the size and social structure of its speaking community (small tightly related communities versus large and loose communities), see e.g., Bickerton (1981, 1984, 1988), Dahl (2004), Trudgill (2011), among many others. In such views, languages acquire more complex systems as they evolve, hence notions such as growth or maturation (or grammaticalization) as argued for in Dahl (2004: 2). In this book, I look at grammaticalization in the perspective of what I call maturitydmature linguistic phenomena being those that presuppose a non-trivial prehistory: that is, they can only exist in a language which has passed through specific earlier stages. Grammatical maturationdprocesses that give rise to phenomena that are mature in this sensedin general adds to the complexity of a language [.] Complexity is here seen, not as synonymous with "difficulty" but as an objective property of a systemda measure of the amount of information needed to describe or reconstruct it. Applied to the following examples from English and Gungbe, we may reach the conclusion that the morphosyntax of the English past verb is more complex than that of the Gungbe one. In English, one needs to specify that regular verbs must take an additional affix to encode past, while no such affix is required in Gungbe: the verb is always bare in this language and past is the default interpretation for eventive (or so-called dynamic) verbs (cf. Aboh, 2004a). While this characterization of complexity may sometimes suggest that more superficial distinctions in a language may increase complexity, this need not be the case since what matters here is the amount of information required to describe or reconstruct the system (cf. Dahl, 2004, Audring, this volume).
This paper discusses noun phrases in Haitian Creole (HC), a French-derived Creole, and in Gungbe,... more This paper discusses noun phrases in Haitian Creole (HC), a French-derived Creole, and in Gungbe, a Gbe language. These languages exhibit "bare noun phrases" (BNPs) in a wider range of positions than in French, English and the other most commonly studied Romance and Germanic languages. Studies on the formation of HC show that many of the creators of the earliest Creole varieties in 17th-century Saint-Domingue were native speakers of Niger-Congo languages including Gbe language. We believe that by close analysis of specific domains of the Creole (e.g. BNPs) and by comparing these patterns to their analogues in the languages in contact during the emergence of the Creole, we can better understand how Universal Grammar regulates the emergence of new varieties out of language contact.
The opening chapter of a collective volume on 'The morphosyntax of reiteration', this art... more The opening chapter of a collective volume on 'The morphosyntax of reiteration', this article challenges three common assumptions regarding 'reduplication': (i) that reduplication results from a morphological operation; (ii) that the semantic effects of reduplication are 'iconic'; (iii) that reduplicative patterns are more frequent or pervasive in creole than in non-creole languages.
The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and id... more The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and ideas regarding Romance linguistics. Prominent exponents of different approaches to the study of Romance linguistics are asked to answer some general questions from their viewpoint. The answers are then assembled so that readers can get a comparative picture of what’s going on in the field. After the first Inter-Views focused on (morpho)syntax more generally, the second Inter-Views focus more narrowly on Cartography. We invited six syntacticians, working on this topic from a variety of perspectives, to answer our questions.
Traditional linguistics assumes that verbs are lexical categories that typically merge in the pre... more Traditional linguistics assumes that verbs are lexical categories that typically merge in the predicate domain of a sentence: VP. This study shows that, in Gungbe (Kwa), a significantly large class of items functioning as verbs heading a VP in a sentence may also serve as functional elements that merge within the functional skeleton of the clause. The discussion builds on the analysis of Inherent Complement Verbs (ICVs). In the Kwa literature, ICVs are defined as verbs which require a complement in their citation form (e.g., dó wèzùn lit. plant race; 'to run'). This paper argues that these verbs can first merge in two syntactic positions: little v and V. When merged in v, such verbs select for a VP-complement involving an abstract empty V which necessarily takes a bare NP as complement (Hale & Keyser 1993). When merged in V, however, these verbs pattern like other Gungbe lexical verbs in selecting a DP argument. The paper concludes that Gungbe, (and possibly Kwa languages in...
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