Focus particles

This paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb quasi 'almost' by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of quasi (close in spirit to Hitzeman's 1992 semantic analysis of almost). When paired with suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when quasi modifies locational (e.g. quando 'when'), directional (e.g. fino 'until' and da 'since'), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e.g. prima 'before' and dopo 'after'). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the modification of fino and da by quasi, on the one hand, and the modification of prima and dopo by the same adverb, on the other. While quasi fino and quasi da behave symmetrically, a puzzling asymmetry is observed between quasi prima and quasi dopo. To explain the asymmetry, we propose an analysis of prima and dopo on which the former has the meaning of the temporal comparative più presto 'earlier', while the latter is seen as an atomic predicate denoting temporal succession between events (Del Prete 2008). We show that the same pattern of implication observed for quasi prima is attested when quasi modifies overt comparatives, and propose a pragmatic analysis of this pattern that uniformly applies to both cases, thus providing new evidence for the claim that prima is underlyingly a comparative. A major point of this paper is a discussion of the notion of scale which is relevant for the semantics of quasi; in particular, we show that the notion of Horn (entailment-based) scale is not well-suited for handling modification of temporal connectives, and that a more general notion of scale is required in order to provide a uniform analysis of quasi as a cross-categorial modifier.

Deutschlands (einzige) nationale Amtssprache ist das Deutsche. Die Dominanz des Deutschen in Schulen, Politik, Rechtswesen, Verwaltung sowie im gesamten (schriftlichen) offentlichen Leben ist so gros, dass das Fehlen einer koharenten Sprachpolitik lange Zeit nicht als Problem empfunden wurde. Die staatliche Zuruckhaltung in diesem Bereich hat einerseits historische Grunde; sie wurde andererseits durch das foderale System in Deutschland, das den Bundeslandern in den Bereichen Bildung und Kultur weitgehende Zustandigkeiten einraumt, befordert. In jungerer Zeit wachst die individuelle Mehrsprachigkeit der Bevolkerung und damit das Interesse, die Sprachensituation in Deutschland genauer zu erfassen und (insbesondere auch) die verschiedenen Minderheitensprachen in den Blick zu nehmen. Im Jahr 2017 gibt es, erstmalig nach etwa 80 Jahren, im deutschen Mikrozensus eine Frage zur Sprache der Bevolkerung. Das Institut fur Deutsche Sprache hat auserdem verschiedene Reprasentativerhebungen durc...

This study explores the comparative sentence construction of Myanmar and English through the lenses of structural and transformational linguistics. By examining the fundamental syntactic and morphological elements of both languages, the research highlights key similarities and differences, focusing on sentence patterns, transformations, and cultural influences. The study employs qualitative methods, utilizing a range of spoken and written examples to analyze sentence structures and transformational rules, including active-passive constructions, question formation, and negation. Findings reveal distinct sentence patterns, such as the subject-objectverb (SOV) structure in Myanmar and the subject-verb-object (SVO) structure in English, along with the implications of these differences for language acquisition and education. This research contributes to the fields of comparative linguistics and language education, providing insights that may inform curriculum development and teaching methodologies. Additionally, it identifies significant sociolinguistic factors influencing sentence construction, suggesting avenues for future research in language diversity and cultural context.

German synthetic compounds containing selbst have traditionally been treated as reflexive in nature. However, this view cannot cope on the one hand with the basic value of selbst as focus particle and not as pronoun and on the other with the non-reflexive value of many compounds whose meaning range from purely intensification of the understood agent of the activity as in Selbstbau 'do-it-yourself -construction' to anti-causativity like Selbstentzündung 'self-ignition'. In this paper, we will consider a different option, namely to interpret the focus particle selbst as a flag for signaling contrastive coreference. This option can be concretely operationalized in constructional terms as a case of constructional idiom.

This paper examines the cartography of the so-called "outer left periphery" in contemporary German, namely the array of functional projections surfacing to the left of the highest clause-internal position, ForceP, in this language. The latter projection acts as a convergence point between the informational content of the proposition and discourse in that it specifies the clause type and links the syntactic structure to pragmatic and discourse-organizational aspects of language. It helps organize how different parts of a sentence relate to each other, ensuring that the sentence be interpreted correctly according to the speaker's intent. The functional projections to its left lexicalize discourse-related elements of various kinds that are not syntactically integrated, i.e., do not interact with the intrasentential computation (e.g., with the Verb-Second word order, the EPP feature in C, the Bottleneck Effect, etc.). An analysis of the possible serializations in this area of the utterance, supported by corpus data, reveals that the CP-external domain exhibits a fixed hierarchy of structural positions just as the other layers of the clause. The present investigation only considers data from German, but paves the way for further studies exploring the very structure of this underresearched area of the clause in German and in other languages.

This discussion introduces the nature of the Burmese language, aiming to provide a comprehensive view for those interested in learning it as a foreign language. The initial study presented here is a window into the rich and diverse world of the Burmese language.

This dissertation investigates experimentally the role of Question-Answer Congruence (QAC, von Stechow 1990, Rooth 1985, 1992) in child language acquisition and adult sentence processing. Specifically, I present two case studies: sentences with "only" and sentences with the Rise-Fall-Rise contour (RFR, Jackendoff 1972). Case study 1 investigates a long-standing puzzle concerning the acquisition of "only." Since Crain et al. (1994), many studies report children display difficulties understanding sentences with pre-subject "only" while having no difficulty with pre-verbal "only." The current study manipulates the levels of QAC to study the puzzle. The results show that QAC plays a significant role in the asymmetry between Subject-only vs. VP-only, and more generally, both children and adults are sensitive to QAC, with congruence facilitating processing, and incongruence interfering with processing. We conclude that the cost of the accommodation ...

Ludo M LA PRÉPOSITION EN FRANÇAIS Paris, Ophrys, L'Essentiel français,  p.,  La préposition constitue un sujet vaste ayant donné lieu à une littérature abondante. Cet ouvrage, qui s'appuie, comme le précise l'auteur, sur plusieurs monographies et numéros thématiques de revues consacrés à cette catégorie, présente certains des problèmes, syntaxiques et sémantiques, que posent les prépositions en français. Le parcours suivi dans ce livre riche et dense s'organise en trois étapes : deux chapitres de syntaxe, qui encadrent un long chapitre de sémantique. Le premier chapitre, intitulé « La préposition et le groupe prépositionnel : questions de syntaxe », propose un examen critique des critères habituellement avancés pour définir la préposition. Prenant comme point de

Expressions from the semasiological domain of phasal polarity (ʻstillʼ, ʻalreadyʼ, etc.) tend to be highly polyfunctional, with their various uses often extending into a wide range of other linguistic domains, both time-related and non-temporal. Yet these patterns have hitherto been investigated mostly for individual languages or smaller groups. This vol- ume presents the first ever larger-scale survey of the numerous functions of expressions whose meanings include the notion of ʻstill’, making use of a global sample of 76 varieties from 45 distinct phyla. It is aimed at semanticists, typologists and descriptive grammar- ians alike.

Zhiyou and zhi are two variants of the same focus operator, the choice of which depends on the positions of the focused element. Zhiyou is used to modify the focused elements in the subject position, whereas zhi is used to modify the focused elements in the predicate.

It is a standard view that concessive clauses (concessives) cross-linguistically cannot be used in the scope of focus particles such as only, even, just, unlike the majority of other adverbial clauses (e.g. König 2006; Mizuno 2007). It is usually assumed that this is due to their lesser degree of integration with the main clause compared to other adverbial clauses (König 2006). We argue for an alternative view: standard concessives (concessives marking the standard concessive relation, cf. König 2006) are inherently focused, i.e. they compositionally include a (c)overt focus particle responsible for the scalar ranking of the asserted and presupposed propositions. We build on Lund's (2017) decompositional analysis of even though in English to provide theoretical and quantitative evidence from Serbian that standard concessives include a focus particle, which bans their combination with other focus particles, due to complementary distribution. Specifically, we analyze three main concessive conjunctions in Serbian-iako, mada and premda (traditionally considered fully synonymous), addressing the question of why only iako is compatible with the focus particle čak 'even'. We argue that this is a consequence of čak being an integral part of constructions with standard iako-concessives. We show that properties of concessives introduced by the three concessive conjunctions under discussion correlate with the meaning of (c)overt focus particles contained in them. We also sketch some consequences for the syntax of concessives.

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.

The main purpose of this paper is to contrast the realizations of elements-processes, participant roles and circumstances in the English and Myanmar transitivity configurations following the network developed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is found that: English and Myanmar show similarity in the realizations of processes as verbal groups, participant roles as nominal groups, nominalization, adverbial groups, prepositional phrases, embedded clauses, and circumstances as nominal groups, adverbial groups, or prepositional phrases. However, they differ in that processes are also realized by copulas and participant roles by adjective/adjective groups in English, while processes are also realized by compound verbs, reduplicated verbs, or attributive verbs and circumstances by qualifying reduplicated adverbs or embedded clauses in Myanmar. The findings are rooted in the functional and typological prominences of the two languages, which may further shed light on a new perspective on the research of transitivity system for Systemic Functional Linguistics. This study also makes an important contribution to further studies of contrasting the realizations of elements in the transitivity configurations of Myanmar and other languages.

De los elementos que mayor arraigo han tenido en los estudios gramaticales a lo largo de nuestra historia destacan dos: el análisis de la oración como unidad gramatical y la delimitación de las distintas partes de la oración. Aunque ambos son de especial interés e importancia en el análisis gramatical, el foco puesto sobre ellos por los gramáticos no siempre ha sido el mismo: el estudio de la oración comienza a cobrar verdadero interés a partir del siglo XIX (aunque con otros antecedentes, destaca específicamente la fecha de 1843 con la publicación del Análisis lójica y gramatical de la lengua española de Juan Calderón), mientras que la atención por clasificar y analizar las denominadas partes de la oración (o partes del discurso, clases de palabras, etc.) siempre ha sido una constante en los estudios gramaticales. Ya desde la primera gramática castellana de Antonio de Nebrija (1997 [1492]: 57) se clasifican las diferentes partes de la oración en diez (nombre, pronombre, artículo, verbo, participio, gerundio, infinito, preposición, adverbio y conjunción), un sistema que, a lo largo de la historia de la gramática, ha recibido diversas modificaciones y tendencias a otros sistemas de ocho, nueve o incluso tres (cf., al respecto, las clasificaciones de Gómez Asencio 1981 y Calero 1986). Aunque este último sistema ternario no ha sido, en efecto, el más seguido entre los gramáticos de nuestra historia, su defensa ha sido una constante a lo largo del tiempo en las obras de autores como Bernabé de Busto (1533), Cristóbal de Villalón (1971 [1558]), Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (1995 [1587]), Gonzalo Correas (1954 [1625]) o, ya en el siglo XIX, Vicente Salvá (1988 [ 1 1830-8 1847]), entre tantos otros, y es precisamente en este ámbito en el que las divisiones de las partes de la oración suelen reducirse a nombre, verbo y, finalmente, partícula. Si bien en los tratados gramaticales suele aludirse a las partículas de manera imprecisa, lo cierto es que a lo largo de los siglos se ha hablado de ellas en el análisis gramatical, siendo diferentes las perspectivas metodológicas desde las que se han estudiado en español. Por lo general, la tradición gramatical ha contemplado que, bajo la etiqueta de partículas, se incluye todo un grupo de elementos diversos que, en buena medida, se relacionan con las denominadas partes invariables o indeclinables del discurso, esto es, los adverbios, las preposiciones, conjunciones e interjecciones. Y esta concepción es la que parecía primar en las palabras de Gregorio Garcés cuando, a finales del siglo XVIII, ya definía las partículas como

This paper examines six bilingual pragmatic markers: jare, biko, jor, shebi, shey, and fa which are borrowed from indigenous Nigerian languages into Nigerian English, with a view to examining their sources, meanings, frequencies, spelling stability, positions, collocational patterns, and discourse‐pragmatic functions in Nigerian English. The data for the study, drawn from the International Corpus of English‐Nigeria and the Nigerian component of the Global Web‐based English corpus, are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The findings show that jare, jor, shebi, and shey are borrowed from Yoruba, biko is from Igbo while fa is from Hausa. Jare, jor, and biko function as mitigation and emphasis markers, shebi and shey serve as agreement‐seeking markers while fa is an emphasis pragmatic marker. The study, thus, contributes to the growing research on bilingual pragmatic markers in second‐language contexts.

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (English or) in negative sentences by Turkish-and German-speaking children. Both children and adults were asked to judge Turkish/German sentences corresponding to the English sentence "This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper." Children acquiring both languages consistently assigned the same interpretation, which can be paraphrased as "This animal did not eat either the carrot or the pepper." German-speaking adults also consistently assigned this interpretation, whereas Turkish-speaking adults assigned a different interpretation, which can be paraphrased as "It is the carrot or the pepper that this animal did not eat." The finding that children initially assign the same interpretation across languages, despite difference in the interpretations assigned by adults, is credited to a "subset" principle of language learnability.

Riassunto. La parola macari e le sue numerose varianti (macar, magari, maguer ecc.) sono diffuse in tutti i Paesi che si affacciano sul Mediterraneo e sui Balcani, e mostrano un numero relativamente elevato di significati e funzioni. Nel presente lavoro, dopo una sintetica illustrazione dello stato dell'arte della ricerca, si dedicherà particolare attenzione al siciliano in prospettiva romanza comparata, concentrandosi in particolare sull'italo-romanzo. Verranno analizzati dati antichi e recenti del siciliano, in base ai generi testuali di appartenenza. Si cercherà di identificare una possibile traiettoria dello sviluppo semantico di macari che può essere rappresentata con la traiettoria ottativo > irrealis > possibilità > puramente additivo. Infine, risulterà chiaro che la Sicilia orientale, la parte della regione più influenzata dal greco, ha avuto un ruolo cruciale nella storia di macari. Parole chiave: marcatore scalare di focus; avverbio epistemico; irrealis; ottativo; spostamento semantico.

In sentences with internal negation, Free Choice Inferences (FCIs) are canceled (Chierchia, 2013). The present study investigated the possibility that FCIs are negated, not canceled, by external negation. In previous research, both Mandarin-speaking children and adults were found to license FCIs in affirmative sentences with a modal verb and the disjunction word huozhe 'or' (Zhou et al., 2013). The present study contrasted internal versus external negation in sentences that contained all the ingredients needed to license FCIs. Four experiments were conducted using the Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain and Thornton, 1998). Experiment 1 tested Mandarin-speaking children and adults using sentences with internal negation, a modal verb and disjunction. As expected, children did not license FCIs; rather, they assigned a 'neither' interpretation to disjunction. Also as expected, adults analyzed disjunction as taking scope over internal negation, yielding a 'not both' interpretation (Jing et al., 2005). Experiment 1 provided the benchmarks for sentences with external negation in Experiments 2-4. Experiment 2 confirmed that English-speaking adults distinguish between internal and external negation in sentences with disjunction. In Experiment 3, external negation was conveyed by the focus adverb zhiyou 'only'. External negation eliminated the between-group differences observed in Experiment 1. Both children and adults analyzed external negation as taking scope over disjunction. Experiment 4 tested the effect of external negation on the computation of FCIs. The test sentences only differed from Experiment 1 by using external negation, rather than internal negation. Again, children and adults interpreted the test sentences in the same way. Most importantly, in contrast to Experiment 1 (with internal negation), both groups analyzed external negation as negating, rather than canceling, FCIs. The findings support the distinction between internal and external negation.

This paper describes three clitics in purepecha, namely, =si , =k’u and =t’u . It is argued that they are all focus par-ticles, since they highlight a set of alternatives. however, each of these elements has a specific semantics: while =si is a contrastive focus marker, =k’u entails exclusion, and =t’u is an additive particle.

A key discourse function that mediates between communicative context and sentence prosody in a regular — and to a large extent grammaticalized — manner is focus. The acquisition of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking has typically been described as a protracted developmental process (esp. compared to production) (see Hornby 1971, Cruttenden 1985, Wells et al. 2004), despite children’s well-known early sensitivity to prosody. The picture, however, is far from uniform. A careful scrutiny of the literature reveals that children’s performance in comprehension experiments exhibits substantial variation depending on the task and method being used. Some recent studies suggest that if the experimental task is sufficiently simple, the ability to accurately identify focus based on its prosodic marking is in place already at an early age (Speer & Ito 2009, Höhle et al. 2009, Sekerina & Trueswell 2012, Szendrői et al. 2018). Another possible source of the variance in research outcomes m...

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.

This paper argues that there is a one-to-one mapping between the syntax of a causal clause and its semantic type. A causal central adverbial clause (CAC) is base-generated inside its licensing clause in a deep position and refers to a relation between eventualities. A causal peripheral adverbial clause (PAC) is base-generated inside its licensing clause in a high position and refers to a relation between propositions, and a causal non-integrated adverbial clause (NonIC) is a syntactic orphan and refers to a relation between speech acts. The German causal sentence forms considered in this paper occur in certain classes. A weil-verb-final-clause is by default a CAC; if it is supported by certain indicators, it can occur as a PAC or as a NonIC. A da-clause typically occurs as a PAC; if it is supported by certain indicators, it can occur as a NonIC. A weil-V2-clause necessarily occurs as a NonIC. The three domains in which according to Sweetser (1990) causal conjunctions may be interpre...

Adverbial clauses are often used to organize the information flow in discourse. A finite adverbial clause employs the finite form of a verb, and a central adverbial clause modifies the information given in the proposition with which it is associated and thus, structures the event (Haegeman, 2004). The central type of adverbial clauses includes conditional, temporal, causal, and purpose (Valmala, 2001). This research tries to shed light on the ordering distribution of central finite adverbial clauses in Qashqai Turkic language based on Diessel's (2001, 2005) typological approach to the order of adverbial clauses. Also, it has been tried to investigate the processing, discoursepragmatic, and semantic forces influencing the order of these clauses. Qashqai Turkic is an Altaic language mostly spoken in the southwestern part of Iran. According to Csató (2006), this lessknown language does not have a specific writing system, and even, there are no divisions of standard and spoken for it. A corpus of 810 Qashqai complex sentences was extracted from the interviews with 11 native speakers of this language aged between 45 to 85 including 6 female and 5 male participants. The results suggested that since the behavior of Qashqai Turkic is similar to the behavior of verb-ending languages and indicates a flexible constituent order, the adverbial clause in Qashqai has the ability to stand at both initial and final positions. The findings are in line with Diessel's (2001) typological classification stating that in languages with flexible word order, conditional clauses are usually preposed to the main clause but occasionally occur sentencefinally, and to a lesser degree, causal clauses are preposed to the main clause as well. In contrast, adverbial clauses of purpose mostly tend to occur in the final position, and temporal clauses show a mixed pattern: either the initial or final position. Figure 1. illustrates the proportions of four types of central adverbial clauses: conditional, temporal, causal, and purpose in Qashqai Turkic complex sentences based on their initial/final position. Furthermore, analysis of the results indicated that the flexible order of adverbial clauses in Qashqai is rooted in the interaction among the processing, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic forces.

German synthetic compounds containing selbst have traditionally been treated as reflexive in nature. However, this view cannot cope on the one hand with the basic value of selbst as focus particle and not as pronoun and on the other with the non-reflexive value of many compounds whose meaning range from purely intensification of the understood agent of the activity as in Selbstbau 'do-it-yourself -construction' to anti-causativity like Selbstentzündung 'self-ignition'. In this paper, we will consider a different option, namely to interpret the focus particle selbst as a flag for signaling contrastive coreference. This option can be concretely operationalized in constructional terms as a case of constructional idiom.

This paper investigates how pragmatics can be deployed to interpret non-standard usages in the context of the English language users. There are two important linguistics keys to interpreting meanings in English: pragmatics and grammatical competence. For effective communication, a decoder must be competent at the two levels. Many researchers in Nigeria have agreed that, Nigerian English has come to stay, therefore, we need to look beyond the grammatical rules and deploy a method of interpreting non-standard usages in the messages of these people. Decoding a message does not rely only on the linguistics or signs, there are extra linguistic properties that help the addressee to infer meanings from the message of the speakers which can be drawn from pragmatics. Pragmatics and grammar work hand in hand to provide meanings during an interaction.

The Czech polarity items i and ani are traditionally treated as English even. This paper deals with the acquisition of these polarity items in Czech children. These focus/scalar particles are specific for their sensitivity to probability. We aim to find out whether Czech children at primary school (junior school age) have already acquired i/ani and whether they are able to connect them correctly with alternatives on the scale of probability. The research was conducted with children from the second and the fourth grade at primary school. The paper represents an initial insight into this area since no similar research has been done in the Czech language so far.

The focus of our contribution is the German particle auch ‘also’ and its Italian counterpart anche. From a semantic point of view, auch and anche convey the same additive meaning in both languages: through them an element, called ‘domain of association’, is added to a list of further elements for which the auch/anche phrase applies. From a syntactical point of view, auch and anche can occupy different positions in the sentence by modifying the type and the scope of the domain of association. This results in four basic usage patterns which are similar in both languages and correspond to just as many functions of auch/anche: (i) additivity, (ii) sentence connection, (iii) focus domain, and (iv) modality. Despite these common functions, auch and anche interact with the syntax and the information structure of the sentence in German and in Italian differently. Furthermore, they are used in conversation contexts, which are distinctive in both languages. By starting from the current descri...

In this article we look at a case of secondary grammaticalization in English which entails the development of originally adverbial subordinators into complement-clause connectives. The study systematizes our earlier findings regarding the adverbial links but, if, though, lest, as if, as though, and like, which over time have come to realize a subsidiary function as equivalents (or near-equivalents) of the major declarative complementizers that and zero in certain specific contexts. We show that minor declarative complementizers are typically associated with the expression of subjectivity and irreality. As such, they are usually attested in complementation structures in which subjectivity is also at hand (e.g. they are complements to specific predicate-types occurring in non-assertive environments). The development discussed here illustrates grammaticalization both at the level of clause links and at the level of clause-combining.

The present study focuses on different topicalization strategies and on the linguistic realization of a variety of topics used in highly affective communicative contexts in Lebanese Arabic, i.e., contexts where speakers show highly emotional states. Through the analysis of topic occurrences found in this corpus, my study explores some discursive and pragmatic functions of topicalization and identifies and analyses "Participant Relevance Topics"-a specific type of free topics which appear with relative abundance in the data and fulfil important discursive and pragmatic functions.

Per riconoscere i tratti linguistici di interesse su un corpus composto da quasi tremila temi e per annotarli in modo coerente si è reso necessario lo sviluppo di diversi strumenti informatici. Tali software appartengono a due tipologie: da un lato, si sono sviluppati alcuni moduli per l'analisi del testo, che in modo automatico riconoscono dei tratti o estraggono delle informazioni parziali utili a riconoscere i tratti in modo manuale. Dall'altro, si è adattata al progetto una piattaforma online che permette di effettuare annotazione linguistica multilivello con diversi annotatori al lavoro in parallelo su porzioni diverse del corpus di temi. Per la prima tipologia di attività, si è esteso lo strumento per l'analisi del testo TINT (Palmero Aprosio e Moretti, 2019), un sistema sviluppato dalla Fondazione Bruno Kessler basato sulla architettura open-source StanfordCoreNLP (Manning et al., 2014). TINT includeva alcuni moduli di base per l'analisi dell'italiano contemporaneo che sono stati estesi con numerosi componenti ad hoc per il riconoscimento dei tratti di interesse. I dettagli dell'implementazione sono illustrati nella sezione seguente. Per quanto riguarda la piattaforma di annotazione, si è optato per un software online, in quanto consente di gestire centralmente diversi annotatori in parallelo, senza la necessità di installazioni di applicativi. La piattaforma adottata è CAT (Bartalesi Lenzi et al., 2012), descritta nel dettaglio in questo capitolo, che ha permesso di creare un account utente per ogni annotatore, di assegnare da un account di amministratore i temi da annotare a ogni utente e di svolgere un controllo qualità su alcuni temi presi a campione annotati in parallelo da più utenti. Alcune delle analisi di TINT sono state utilizzate come input per CAT, affinché gli annotatori potessero vedere alcuni tratti come pre-annotati e intervenire con delle correzioni oppure specificando degli attributi. La combinazione dei due tool, insieme alla versatilità dell'interfaccia online, hanno consentito di velocizzare notevolmente la annotazione dei tratti linguistici di interesse. Uno studio preliminare CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

The story of heritage languages is often told as a story of grammatical simplification. A substantial body of work has pointed to numerous areas of reduced structural elaboration across heritage language systems, often manifested as a decrease in paradigmatic complexity through the elimination of sub-distinctions in various grammatical categories. Evidence for simplification in the domain of syntagmatic relations, such as in the encoding of information structure relations through word order, is somewhat weaker for heritage languages. This chapter examines the dynamics of heritage language word order change through the lens of Russian. I draw on data from a series of contextualized acceptability judgment tests with homeland Russian speakers and English-dominant heritage Russian speakers at two levels of proficiency, probing the distribution of canonical (SVO) and non-canonical word order structures, including subjectverb inversion (OVS) and object fronting (SOV, OSV). While underrating OVS orders, heritage speakers converge with the controls in their judgments of OSV and SOV sentences, with a trend toward overgeneralization of SOV in high-proficiency speakers. In terms of contextual licensing, focus-driven movement appears more stable than displacement related to givenness. These results offer two important implications. Broadly, they indicate that heritage speakers do not show an across-the-board preference toward SVO syntax, nor do they display a generalized difficulty with information structure marking, suggesting that heritage language word order change should not be viewed narrowly through the lens of simplification, linearization, and pragmatic unmarking. Second, they demonstrate that the facilitation of a non-canonical pattern in a heritage language word order system may occur independently of dominant language transfer effects, bringing into focus other driving forces of language change, including input frequency and universal constituent placement preferences rooted in basic cognitive and communicative principles.

The paper examines the semantics and distribution of the polyfunctional Hill Mari focus particle =ok. We describe two interpretations of =ok possible on a wide range of hosts: the exhaustive use and the counteradditive use; besides, we consider several uses that are only possible with a lexically or semantically conditioned set of entities. We argue that =ok falls into a class of devices with not-at-issue exhaustive inferences, along with the English it-cleft and some other cross-linguistic counterparts. We discuss the implications that the Hill Mari data have for the typology of this class of constructions: Hill Mari =ok suggests that discourse givenness of the denotation of the focus constituent is an important dimension along which such elements vary across languages. Besides, in this paper we draw an areal comparison of the Hill Mari =ok with its counterparts in the Volga-Kama languages: Meadow Mari, Chuvash, Tatar, Bashkir, and Udmurt. Although the origin and the general set of readings are the same, the syntactic behavior of =ok's counterparts varies significantly.

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al., in: Clifton, Frazer, Rayner (eds) Perspective on sentence processing, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillside, 1994) predicts that children's initial scope assignment should correspond to the interpretation that makes sentences true in the narrowest range of circumstances, even when this is not the interpretation assigned by adults. This prediction was borne out in previous studies in Japanese, Mandarin and Turkish. As predicted by the SSP, the findings of the present study indicate that Italian-speaking children and adults assign the same interpretation to negative sentences with conjunction (conjunction takes scope over negation). By contrast, the...

We here revisit the let alone construction, which was first described in a 1980s paper that put Construction Grammar on the map. Our focus is on a seemingly aberrant use where the first conjunct does not entail the restored second conjunct, as in I don't have ten children, let alone one. We argue that this use should not be considered as a highly exceptional speech error or as evidence that some speakers wrongly assume that the first proposition is the entailed one. First, a systematic examination of let alone examples extracted from the BNC and COCA shows that it is not exceedingly rare, as does a growing collection of authentic examples we have collected over the years. Second, it constitutes a usage type in its own right, whereby the first proposition has most contextual relevance and the second conjunct is represented by the speaker as an apophasis-like afterthought. There are transitional cases between the two types (canonical and afterthought), where both conjuncts have considerable relevance. For contemporary speakers, the afterthought use may require extraction of a general pattern with bleached semantics and pragmatics, possibly refilled in with specific information.

A central issue in semantics and pragmatics is to understand how various different aspects of meaning contribute to the overall conveyed meaning of an utterance. Asserted content, implicatures, and presuppositions are commonly assumed to differ in terms of their source, their status, and their interaction with the context in the theoretical literature. This chapter starts with a brief introduction of this theoretical background, and then reviews the experimental literature on related phenomena in some detail, with a focus on presuppositions. In the course of this, the contributions to the present volume are situated in the context of previous work. The conclusion provides an outlook on future directions.

The article discusses the late Middle English replacement of the ordinal number other by the Romance loanword second. The major cause of the change was the ambiguity and polyfunctionality of the older native word. The study is based on the language material from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Middle English Compendium and the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. * For a detailed discussion of the Old English cardinal numer twegen/twa see van Mengden (2010:75-80).