A Grammar of Nahavaq (Malakula, Vanuatu)

<p>This thesis is a descriptive grammar of Nahavaq, an Oceanic language spoken by about 700 people in the Sinesip cultural area of Malakula, Vanuatu. Nahavaq was previously undescribed, and this grammar is based on data collected by the researcher over a total of nine months in the Sinesip area. The thesis includes a sociolinguistic overview of the Nahavaq-speaking community and descriptions of phonetics, phonology, mophology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. Noteworthy features of Nahavaq include: (i) two classes of bilabial consonants, which are distinguished by palatalisation and velarisation; (ii) two reduplicative verbal prefixes, which partially overlap in function; (iii) a base-20 numeral system with subbases of five and ten; (iv) nouns which include an accreted article; (v) serial verb constructions; and (vi) nine different surface forms for expressing possession relationships. The attached DVD contains a Nahavaq-English glossary, along with recordings and transcriptions of Nahavaq texts for reference purposes.</p>

A Grammar of Nahavaq (Malakula, Vanuatu)

<p>This thesis is a descriptive grammar of Nahavaq, an Oceanic language spoken by about 700 people in the Sinesip cultural area of Malakula, Vanuatu. Nahavaq was previously undescribed, and this grammar is based on data collected by the researcher over a total of nine months in the Sinesip area. The thesis includes a sociolinguistic overview of the Nahavaq-speaking community and descriptions of phonetics, phonology, mophology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. Noteworthy features of Nahavaq include: (i) two classes of bilabial consonants, which are distinguished by palatalisation and velarisation; (ii) two reduplicative verbal prefixes, which partially overlap in function; (iii) a base-20 numeral system with subbases of five and ten; (iv) nouns which include an accreted article; (v) serial verb constructions; and (vi) nine different surface forms for expressing possession relationships. The attached DVD contains a Nahavaq-English glossary, along with recordings and transcriptions of Nahavaq texts for reference purposes.</p>

English modal constructions ‘must HAVE DONE’ and intermediate modals in authentic context of use ‒ a case study

The aim of the present paper is to examine the degree to which the first year students of English philology at ATH in Bielsko-Biala are able to recognize the particular modal constructions occurring in authentic linguistic materials, after having been introduced to their forms and meanings theoretically. The paper focuses on contextualization by means of linguistic corpora of selected English modal constructions, such as the perfective use of central modals on the example of ‘must HAVE done’, and particular ‘intermediate’ modals (1. must have; 2. dare + bare infinitive; 3. WE/I shall; 4. BE about to; 5. BE to; 6. HAVE got to; 7. BE bound to; 8. BE willing to; 9. HAPPEN to), following a remote lecture on descriptive grammar of the English language via the MS Teams application during the coronavirus lockdown in January, 2021. The case study concerns the results obtained from an assignment administered to 64 first year students, presented in four tables. The assignment, attached in the form of an MS Word file to edit, required the students to select and cite from either of the two corpora of the English language – BNC or COCA – examples of authentic use of each of the modal constructions studied during one of the lectures. The paper consists of six sections, two on the main theses in cognitive linguistics, whose achievements pertain to usage-based acquisition of new linguistic material, three parts related to the research conducted, including the methodological part, an analysis of the results obtained, followed by a discussion and general conclusions. The last section signals how selected theses of cognitive linguistics apply to the results of the said research.

Quel corpus pour l’étude du dialecte niçois ?

A new project has just been launched to write a synchronic, descriptive grammar of Niçois, the Occitan dialect of Nice. In this article, I define the corpus of the research. To do so, I first review written production from the Middle Ages to the present. I then analyze the linguistic features of Niçois over time, in order to determine the precise starting point of the current language state. But because of reinforced normativism and the decreasing social use of Niçois among the educated population, written language after WWII became artificial and does not really correspond to recordings made in the field. The corpus will thus be composed of writings from the 1820’s to WWII and recordings from the last few decades.

Sustantivos e interrogativas encubiertas en español

Since Baker (1968) suggested the term concealed question —which, following Autor (forthcoming), we translate as “interrogativa encubierta”— to refer to a DP that complements a verb and can be paraphrased by an indirect question (Preguntó el precio/Preguntó cuál era el precio), one of the most debated issues in the literature on languages other than Spanish has been, beside the concept of concealed question itself, what nouns can appear in this type of constructions. However, this issue has practically gone unnoticed in the descriptive grammar of Spanish. This article aims to deal with the ensuing shortcomings of Spanish grammar as well as to review the proposals that fall outside the context of Hispanic linguistics. Most importantly, on the assumption that concealed questions are predicate complements that are remaining elements of an elliptical specificational copular sentence within an indirect question, it will be shown that the type of noun, though irrelevant for the licensing of this kind of structure, plays an important role in its interpretation.

ITALIAN GRAMMATICOGRAPHY BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY LINGUISTICS

The aim of this paper is to show the current situation in contemporary Italian grammaticography, i.e., to analyse grammatical models (traditional, generative and dependency model) grammar reference books for different purposes are based on. By means of diachronic and synchronic analysis of grammar reference books, we have examined and showed to what extent traditional theories and terminology are retained, i.e., to what extent generative grammar and valency theory are present. The introductory part of the paper shows the development of Italian grammaticography from the first generative research conducted in Italy to this day. The first Italian generative grammar books were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Costabile 1967, Saltarelli 1970, Gamberini 1971, Parisi, Antinucci 1973), i.e., shortly after Noam Chomsky’s first monographs on generative grammar theory were published. However, although it can be said that Italian grammaticography kept up to date with the research carried out worldwide in the field of linguistics, the first comprehensive descriptive grammar book (Comprehensive Consultative Italian Grammar Book) was not published until 1988, when the most comprehensive traditional Italian grammar book by Luca Serianni was published as well, which is the reason why that year is considered to be a turning point in Italian linguistics. Following this turn of events, which is frequently described as revolutionary, grammar book production has flourished while authors have begun to turn to new linguistic theories more and more, i.e., mostly to the fruits of generative grammar and other theories formulated within its framework, although not for want of work dedicated to traditional grammar. Therefore, for the last two and a half decades, Italian grammaticography has abounded in traditional grammar books mainly for the purposes of school use and “new” (Andreose 2017), i.e., „modern” (Vanelli 2010) grammar books primarily for the purposes of pursuing linguistic issues professionally, as well as studying languages at the university level. The central part of the paper is dedicated to analysing individually some of the most renowned grammar books published during the first decades of the 21st century (Salvi, Vanelli 2004, Andorno 2003, Sabatini et al. 2011, Ferrari, Zampese 2016) with the aim of showing their new features in relation to tradition (the reference point of traditional linguistics was the Serianni's grammar book) regarding terminology, the norm, topics and the organisation of the very grammar books. The main conclusion of this research is that contemporary grammar books actually show the greatest departure from tradition concerning the norm and the examples sentence analyses are based on, since normative grammar books, whose goal is to establish certain grammar rules, are completely rejected and replaced by detailed descriptive grammar books aiming at describing fully all registers of the Italian language and all its possible linguistic constructions, regardless of their grammatical accuracy. A somewhat minor, but still quite significant, departure from tradition can be seen in the organisation of grammar books and topics they deal with, since syntax has surely taken precedence in analysis, but also that some traditional topics have been rejected, while some new topics have been included in grammatical analyses (e.g. phonetics and textual linguistics). The characteristic which, nonetheless, has undergone minimal changes in that “transition” from the traditional to the modern way of linguistic analysis is terminology that can be concluded to have been brought up to date and expanded rather that completely changed.