(It-)clefts in Palenquero Creole and the specificational copula

2009

Collected oral data from primary school children and transcribed data collection sessions using CHILDES code.

Journal of Memory and Language, 1992

Four studies investigated adults' uses and children's acquisition of the two Spanish synonyms of to be, ser and estar. The first study consisted of a distributional analysis of ser and estar in Spanish spoken by children and adults. The results revealed that the copulas were used contrastively across different syntactic contexts. Forms of ser were used exclusively with nominals, forms of estar were used as auxiliaries and with locations, and both forms were used with adjectives. Study 2 documented a semantic difference between ser and estar with adjectives for adults such that adjectives that were labelled with ser were weighed more heavily than attributes that were labelled with estar in a categorization task. In Study 3, a semantic contrast between objects and events with locations in adults was empirically demonstrated. Study 4 examined the use of the Spanish copulas with adjectives and locations by Spanish-speaking children from 3 to 11 years of age. The findings from Study 4 suggest that Spanish-speaking children honored fewer semantic contrasts than adults, and that their uses have a more syntactic basis. The study's implications for the structure of language and its acquisition are discussed. Q IWZ Academic press. hc.

VI EGG, 2013

Although the topic of estar has already been dealt with at great length in the literature, as one of the major subjects of analysis in Spanish grammar, a more accurate and precise account of its grammatical properties, regarding both structure and meaning, may yet be attained. In particular, besides being involved in a much studied complementary alternation with the copula ser, this verb can be said to be especially interesting for other reasons. In particular, over the past decades, grammarians and scholars have felt the need to explain the fact that clauses featuring estar (as only verb in the clause) essentially comprise two different constructions, briefly exemplified in (1). (1) a. Guillermo Moreno está furioso b. Guillermo Moreno está en Angola The general intuition behind this phenomenon is that these constructions involve two entirely different grammatical scenarios, if not two different verbs. However, the analysis can be simplified by addressing these constructions as alternative realizations of a same verb (copula). Moreover, the heads alternating as copular complement (AP, PP) can be deemed as semantically and syntactically alike if both (a)a lexical-syntactic decomposition is allowed and (b)we consent to regard attributive cases like (1a) as constructions encoding abstract places. The structural analogy ensues from lexical syntactic decomposition as AP are endowed with the same structural configuration than PPs since Hale&Keyser 1993. In fact, several studies support the consideration of the A as a non-primitive head resulting from the conflation of P+N (Mateu 2002, Jayaseelan 2007: ‘adjective’ is not one of the basic [i.e., primitive] categories of human languages). The same parallelism could be adopted for reading State and Place functions from sentential syntax, i.e., a copular structure would always contain a P(lace) structure realized either as P (or A). In short, the structures in (1) can be reduced to one: the P(lace) applying to L-syntactically ‘complex’ (derived) noneventive relational elements (AP) and to superficially ‘simple’ non-eventive relational elements (SP) as well. In addition, conceptual semantics also supports the analogy proposed. From a Jackendovian perspective, the Conceptual Structure assigned to (1a) can be argued to contain a relational element introducing an abstract Place (AT). In fact, this extension conforms to the Thematic Relations Hypothesis (Jackendoff 1983 inspired on Gruber 1965), according to which the same conceptual functions we use when dealing with physical space can also be applied to our conception of abstract space (e.g. : John is furious [the equivalent to ((1)a) would be ascribed with the conceptual structure [State BE [Thing John], [Place AT [Property furious]]]; cf. Jackendoff 1983:194 ). Thus, a formal analogy arises between As and Ps which can also be lined up with the syntactic structure assembled prelexically in the proposal of Hale&Keyser. In view of this, the question naturally arises of whether the same reasoning should be valid with respect to Spanish. Considering that it is generally assumed that the clause structure proposed for English copular clauses holds across languages, including Spanish, then there is no apparent reason to think that estar clauses in (1) —featuring AP and PP (as well as AdvP) complements— should not be comprised by the mainstream notion of copular clause. Moreover, the only restriction indicated is not connected with spatial PP complements; rather, our proposal is also vindicated by the observation that the only case that is generally not regarded as a copular sentence is that in which the copula is followed by a VP, “such as in John is coming here or John is to come here” (which are in fact expressions also involving estar in Spanish, as in Juan está viniendo, Juan está por venir, we may add) “since the verb be in these cases rather plays the role of an auxiliary or a modal respectively” (Moro 2007:18). On the other hand, the above-mentioned parallelism between physical and abstract spatial domains receives in turn further empirical support when considering the case of estar and the two kind of constructions yielded; thus, allowing us to regard them as the contrast between the primitive syntactic/conceptual relation and a derived syntactic/conceptual construction via conflation and abstraction, respectively. Thus, empirical motivation for the simplification initially suggested arises at a theoretical level. All in all, the simplification put forward in these subsections could be said to support our claim that the (apparently) different constructions yielded by estar can actually be seen as structurally alike at different grammatical levels.li Moreover, it could be shown to be not only empirically or theoretically supported, but actually welcome from a methodological perspective, since it offers a much more economical solution to the problem addressed in this paper. Further to this, a formal analogy also seems natural from a conceptual perspective, on the basis of the much studied parallelism between physical and abstract spatial domains.

Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2004

This paper explores the syntax of copular predication within and across the varieties of Cape Verdean Creole bringing new insights about the morpho-syntactic properties of the copula with respect to functional and lexical categories. The behavior of the copula will be shown to reflect both superstratal, substratal and universal influences present in other languages. Furthermore, the study of copular predicates in which the copula is absent will reveal the specific underlying conditions in which such type of predicates occurs. A cursory typological study of semi-creoles such as AAVE and other non-creole languages will show that the same underlying conditions are present in a number of other world languages. Finally, a theoretical analysis will account for two types of copular predicates in Cape Verdean Creole: the first part highlights the distributional properties of the Cape Verdean copula within and across varieties. The second part illustrates copulaless predicates and the conditions under which they occur. 1 This paper is based on data collected during field trips conducted from 1997 to 2003 on all nine islands of the Cape Verdean archipelago. Other data from other scholars such as Veiga (2002) and Cardoso (1989) will be used whenever relevant. This will eventually constitute a chapter from the book project I am currently writing which involves the comparison of all nine dialectal varieties of Cape Verdean Creole (hence, between the clusters of Sotavento and Barlavento and within each group).

2022

This thesis examines the copulas ialah and adalah in Malay on different levels of linguistic analysis, in different periods in time, and against different genetically related languages. Addressing the scarcity of research on copular clauses in Malay in all three areas, namely synchrony, diachrony, and typology, this thesis aims to serve as a point of reference for future study on nonverbal predication in Malay and beyond. The synchronic portion of the thesis begins with a demonstration of the monomorphemic nature of the two copulas, which no longer exhibit the morphosyntax, semantics, and information structure of the morphemes that they appear to comprise, viz. 3rd person ia, existential verb ada, and focus marker lah. Following that, several syntactic and semantic phenomena, including extraction from copular clauses, copular inversion, and overt vs. zero encoding of the copula, are investigated. Lastly, the derivation of clefts in Malay is examined, which I reveal to be a type of copular construction despite the absence of an overt copula. I then show that the derivation of a cleft feeds the further derivation of a pseudocleft via remnant movement. In the history of Malay, ialah and adalah are shown to have emerged relatively recently, that is towards the end of the Classical Malay era, circa the 18th to 19th century. Ialah grammaticalised from the combination of 3rd person pronoun ia and comment marker lah in a topical construction that involved left dislocation. Specifically, the topic was reanalysed as the canonical subject, which subsequently forced the resumptive pronoun to undergo Spec-to-Head reanalysis, resulting in ialah grammaticalising into a copula heading TP. Meanwhile, adalah grammaticalised from semantically vacuous support auxiliary ada, also in combination with comment marker lah. Both copulas originally developed from the need to provide a host for the comment marker as a way of avoiding a violation of the stray affix filter. The typological survey of copular clauses in Austronesian reveals that syntactic alignment and word order play a central role in the emergence of copulas in a language. Of the 40 languages examined, all the 19 languages that have overt copulas are accusatively aligned, except the ergatively aligned Formosan language Puyuma, which entails that ergative-absolutive and split ergative languages within Austronesian are statistically very unlikely to have overt copulas. In addition to that, 20 of the 25 accusatively aligned languages have SVO word order, whilst all of the 9 ergatively aligned languages have VSO word order. The word order of the language is relevant as all but two of the 19 languages with overt copulas have SVO word order. In consideration of these findings, I argue that the correlation among the three factors is such that change from ergative to accusative alignment triggers change in word order from verb-initial order to verb-medial order, and that this is conducive to the emergence of overt copulas. Furthermore, word order plays a crucial role in the emergence of overt copulas as they may develop in topical constructions following reanalysis of the left-dislocated topic as the canonical subject, as argued in the diachronic portion of the thesis. Given this path of development, I argue that pronominal copulas have not been able to develop in the ergatively aligned Philippine-type languages due to the lack of the notion of subject and the absence of the canonical subject position, which prevents reanalysis of left-dislocated topics as canonical subjects and subsequently resumptive pronouns as copulas, as undergone by the Malay copula ialah. In addition to that, verbal copulas cannot develop from posture verbs in the Philippine-type languages because of the clash between the unergative nature of posture verbs and the unaccusative nature of the copula, which presents a problem in the Philippine-type languages due to the encoding of the agent argument on the verb in the actor voice. Besides, the strict intransitive nature of the copular clause is incompatible with other voice alternations such as the benefactive and the locative, as the trigger in these voice alternations is encoded as an applied argument, making the clause transitive. Verbs of becoming also cannot copularise in the Philippine-type languages via semantic bleaching of the inchoative aspect, due to the robust morphological marking of aspect on the verb.

ULPA Languages and Literatures. Leipzig: Institut für Afrikanistik. No. 25, 2005

University of Texas at Austin Libraries - Texas Scholar Works - Electronic Theses & Dissertations, 2019

This dissertation explores Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portuguese-based language spoken in the Republic of Cabo Verde. The CVC subject domain has at least three types of nominative anaphora: a subject clitic, a null subject, and a double-subject construction. This study is the first to examine the distribution of these subject categories by combining a quantitative methodology with formal syntactic theory, as well as insights from functionalist, usage-based, cognitive linguistic, and typological approaches. In so doing, it offers a new perspective on this issue that is intended to move the field past protracted theoretical debates over the morphosyntactic status and discursive functions of these grammatical elements. For instance, the formal category underlying subject clitics has been contested in CVC and cross-linguistically; some have claimed that they are independent pronouns that cliticize at the phonological level (Déprez 1994; De Cat 2005; Costa & Pratas 2013), others have identified them as inflectional affixes in the VP layer (DeGraff 1993; Baptista 1995; Culbertson 2010), while in language typology they are analyzed as ‘person markers’ that can engage in local grammatical agreement or nonlocal anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002; Siewierska 2004; Creissels 2005; Kari 2017). Sociolinguistic interviews and picture description narratives were collected from native speakers of CVC from the islands of Santiago and Maio. Sampled speech was transcribed prosodically (Chafe 1993; Du Bois et al. 1993; Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019) in order to evaluate several aspects of discourse organization. Data were submitted to descriptive and inferential inspection in four analyses using R (R Core Team 2019): one was an exploratory test that served to delimit the variable context for SPE in CVC, the second involved a fixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, and the third and fourth were based on mixed-effects binomial logistic regressions. Results revealed highly significant effects for linguistic structural priming: double-subject and singleton tonic pronouns primed subsequent double-subjects, while null subjects primed additional null subjects. Lexical Determiner Phrase (DP) antecedents that were semantically referentially deficient (i.e. they bore inanimate, indefinite, or nonspecific reference) also promoted anaphoric zeros. These results lend partial support to the claims regarding the semantic properties of strong pronominals proposed under the Typology of Structural Deficiency (Cardinaletti & Starke 1994, 1999), and suggest that, as in Brazilian Portuguese, there is an “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint (Kato & Duarte 2003, 2005; Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) that is probabilistically active in CVC. The zero-to-zero priming effect and the favoring effect from referentially deficient lexical DPs were only active at short anaphoric distances, and were promoted when adjacent intonational units were prosodically linked or simultaneously prosodically and syntactically linked (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). The priming effect for double-subjects obtained at longer anaphoric distances; they are promoted when their antecedent is in a non-adjacent clause. Results suggest that double-subjects function as switch-reference devices, can establish contrastive focus, and reintroduce old discourse referents. These are much the same functional and discursive values that singleton tonic pronouns have cross-linguistically (Givón 1976; 2001[1984]; 2017). The realization of zero subjects is mostly contingent on antecedent accessibility (Givón 1976; 2017, Ariel 1990), but is also modulated by the aforementioned “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint. Inferring from the results for zero and double-subjects, it appears that CVC subject clitics are ‘ambiguous person agreement markers’ (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Siewierska 2004): like independent pronouns, they engage in nonlocal anaphoric agreement, but like inflectional affixes, they also engage in local grammatical agreement. This in-between morphosyntactic status is related to the infinitival origin of CVC verbs (Quint 2008b): the absence of bound person-number inflection is likely to have initiated grammaticalization on tonic pronouns, causing them to be eroded into subject clitics, and eventually become ambiguous person agreement markers, which are probabilistically dropped according to the properties of their controllers and the dynamics of antecedent accessibility. In line with Wratil’s (2011) ‘Null Subject Cycle’, it could be argued that CVC subject clitics are grammatical elements that have stagnated at an early stage of a grammaticalization cline, which entails the transformation of independent pronouns into clitics, and then eventually into bound affixes.

Amazonian Spanish, 2020

Direct object clitics in Spanish are morphological markers at the interface of syntax and phonology, morphology, semantics and information structure. We explore variability in direct object clitic doubling and argument marking in bilingual speakers of Shipibo-Spanish and Ashéninka-Perené-Spanish (Mayer & Sánchez, 2017b). We focus on the production of the dative versus the accusative forms of the clitic and on the expression of Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Aissen, 2003; Bossong, 1991; Dalrymple & Nikolaeva, 2011), in particular, on the extension of DOM to definite inanimate DPs and the lack of DOM with animate direct objects required in other varieties of Spanish. We analyze this variability as the coexistence of two different argument-marking systems in these contact varieties of Amazonian Spanish.

The term cleft is commonly used to describe a syntactic pattern which serves to separate a discourse prominent constituent structurally from the rest of the clause. It is formed by dividing a more elementary clause into two parts. One of the two parts is foregrounded, and the other, backgrounded. The structure is characterized e.g. in English by the presence of a proleptic pronoun (it), a copula (be), and a relative clause (the cleft clause). This process (foregrounding through cleaving) is not limited to Indo-European languages and can be observed in other languages, e.g. Zaar, a Chadic language spoken in Nigeria. However, in this language ‘cleft’ structures do not use a proleptic pronoun (since copulas do not require a subject in Zaar) nor is there any morphological exponent of relativization in the cleft clause. A further morphological reduction of the structure can be observed when the left-dislocation of the foregrounded element is not accompanied by a copula. I propose to examine what characterises these foregrounding structures beyond the formal components defining them in e.g. English or French, and to find a unifying definition that sets it apart from presentational constructions with a plain restrictive relative clause. In the process I argue that this type of syntactic structure is best accounted for within the framework of Universal Dependency Grammar (UD) which only considers content words as governors in dependency relations, thus accounting for the absence of copula. Finally, I present a brief description of copulas in Zaar.

Journal of West African Languages, 2020

Non-verbal predication and copula types are analysed in three Mande languages: Bambara, Guinean Maninka, and Eastern Dan. These languages display considerable divergences. In Bambara, there are three affirmative non-verbal copulas used in different construction types, comprising one formal class. In Guinean Maninka, there is only one non-verbal affirmative copula, and it can be omitted; there is a tendency toward its substitution with a focalization particle. The affirmative non-verbal qualitative construction is copulaless. In both these languages, there is also a verbal copula used in non-default context, and an ostentative copula going back to a verb whose lexical meaning is 'to look'. In Eastern Dan, copulas are diverse in nature: some are of verbal origin, while others go back to demonstrative adverbs. There are three series of inflectional auxiliary lexemes which are used both in verbal constructions and in constructions with non-verbal predicates, i.e. as copulas.

Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2015

In this paper we discuss the combinations of tenses in main and complement clauses of European Portuguese, focusing on the issue that restrictions on the tenses allowed in complement clauses are observed with some predicates but not with others. We show that these lexical restrictions are independent of the mood occurring in the complement clause, though an integrated analysis of mood and tense may be achieved. The proposal is made that the observed lexical restrictions on embedded tenses have a semantic basis and follow from the fact that Portuguese is an SOT-language; i.e., a language where embedded tenses have semantic import. A preliminary investigation is conducted on the sequences of tenses produced at early stages of language acquisition.

2007

This paper † examines the syntactic behavior of the Mauritian copula in predicative and extracted sentences. As it is the case in many languages, the Mauritian copula ete is absent in certain constructions: It only appears in extraction contexts. Our aim is to show that the postulation of a null copula, which has been proposed in various analyses, is inadequate for the Mauritian data. The phenomenon, as it is argued, rather lends itself to a strictly construction-based analysis within the framework of HPSG and is based on the distribution of weak pronouns and TAM markers.

… Wöllstein-Leisten & Claudia Maienborn (Hgg …, 2005

Ser and estar: The syntax of stage level and individual level predicates in Spanish * Studying the relevant works concerning the distinction between stage level and individual level predicates (SLP/ILP) in linguistics, one often encounters references to the Spanish copular verbs ser and estar (e.g. . In these copular verbs, the SLP/ILP-distinction seems to find its overt realization. The use of the verb ser is usually connected to ILP-characteristics, the use of estar to the SLP-phenomenon. We propose a minimalist account for the differences in semantic and syntactic behaviour of ser/estar (following Chomsky 1995). Contrary to Kratzer (1995), we assume an implicitly realized event argument for both SLPs and ILPs, which characterizes the spatiotemporal reference of the situation or eventuality expressed by the predicate (cf. Davidson 1967). This event position is localized in the predication phrase PrP as proposed by . The PrP represents an extension of the VP-shell analysis (s. Larson 1988) to non-verbal predication, as found in copulative constructions. We assume that complex interactions between the features of the Pr-head and the features of the minimalist T° (I°) (and probably also the C°) will result in either the SLP or the ILP interpretation. The Spanish data concerning ser and estar allow us to analyse the syntactical conditions which lead to the SLP/ILP-distinction, making the correlation between syntactic and semantic behaviour evident. We propose that both ser and estar are syntactical default strategies (last resort). If the predicate is a SLP and no verb is available in the numeration, then estar will be introduced into the derivation under Pr°. If the predicate is an ILP and no verb is available in the numeration, then ser will be merged under T°. Quantificational approaches to times, especially reference time are also taken into consideration. Where the SLP/ILP-distinction is not expressed syntactically (by ser or estar) we assume that the chosen interpretation results from spatiotemporal knowledge of the world, i.e. it is conditioned by pragmatics (s.

C. Rodrigues, A. Saab (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Languages of South America. New York: Springer, 2022

The goal of this chapter is to unveil the main properties of syntactic subjects in Chilean Spanish by addressing the following research questions: (i) To what degree is Chilean Spanish similar/dissimilar to Caribbean Spanish?, (ii) Is Chilean Spanish a partial pro-drop variety? According to the Null Subject Parameter (NSP, Rizzi 1982), null subject languages have the following properties: (a) rich verbal morphology, (b) null subjects in finite clauses, (c) postverbal subjects (VS order), (c) loose locality effects (absence of that-trace effects). Caribbean dialects have received particular attention as they show both pro-drop and non-pro-drop properties. However, it remains an open question to what extend those properties are found in non-Caribbean Spanish and, most importantly, in other linguistic varieties within the so-called Bajeño dialectal area. Data from corpora as well as from acceptability judgments indicate that Chilean Spanish displays some non-trivial overlapping with Caribbean Spanish with respect to pro-drop properties, and that it does not fit the partial pro-drop pattern consistently. This conclusion provides support for recent proposals according to which partiality in pro-drop properties is a matter of degree.