On the interplay between tense marking, aspect and temporal continuity in Udora Komi

The Udora dialect of Zyrian Komi lacks the morphological opposition between the present and future tenses that is found in other Komi dialects and the written standard. The morphemes corresponding to these tenses are, however, found in this dialect, with individual verbs showing a strong tendency to choose one of the two. This study shows that the two morphemes are not in free variation but rather carry various grammatical meanings, and that the variants are strongly connected to the lexical aspect of individual verbs. Due to the rigidity of the system, the authors refer to the variants here as conjugation types. The -as- conjugation type, which corresponds to the Standard Komi future marker, occurs with all transitive verbs and a majority of intransitive verbs. However, the study also identifies a group of intransitive verbs occurring with the conjugation type -e̮-. The verbs in the latter group can be analysed as temporally continuous. Additionally, there are other subgroupings that can be postulated, including verbs that describe involuntary actions. The system interacts in a predictable manner with Komi derivational morphology. The study also corroborates the previously proposed historical connection between this characteristic of verbal morphology in the Udora dialect and Old Komi. The authors suggest that the verbal morphology seen in these Komi varieties must predate the contemporary tense system. The study provides a new direction for analysing the development of the tense system in the Permic languages, as it is shown that the factors underlying the variation extend beyond transitivity. As a previously undescribed phenomenon, the study describes the use of the Udora conjugation types in narrative tense structuring and demonstrate parallels with Standard Komi.

The Development of Discourse and Morphological Features in L2 Narratives: A Study with Classroom Spanish-Speaking Learners of French

Previous research has examined the organization of second-language French narratives through discourse or morphological analyses. At the discourse level, the analyses have investigated the foreground/background relationship. Conversely, at the morphological level, the analyses have examined the role played by verbal morphology and verbal predicates. Different methodological caveats have limited the interpretation of findings in both types of analyses. In order to provide new data, this cross-sectional study examined the evolution of discourse and morphological resources in the written narratives of Mexican Spanish-speaking learners of French whose language learning experience is limited to the classroom. The learners in the cross-sectional sample (n = 11) were selected from a population of 88 participants who completed lexical, past-tense and general proficiency tests. They also generated two written narratives during silent-film retelling tasks. The cross-sectional sample selection was based on the learners’ test scores and the results of parametric statistical analyses. The narratives were analyzed for the identification of foreground/background clauses, verbal morphology and verbal predicates. The results reveal that, as learners’ past-tense knowledge increases, the organization of narratives consolidates through a developmental path that involves the interrelated growth of discourse and morphological features.

Subjects in Austronesian

In LFG, grammatical functions are primitives of the theory and treated as both fundamental and universal. However, there is a long standing debate in the wider literature as to whether grammatical functions should be considered universal or language specific/construction-specific notions. Western Austronesian languages have played a large role in this debate on account of their unusual verbal morphology and the split in typical subject properties between the actor semantic role and the argument privileged by the verbal morphology. In this chapter, Hemmings addresses the debate in relation to empirical data from the Kelabit language of Northern Sarawak. She argues that the Kelabit data provides a number of arguments for treating the privileged argument as subject, and the actor as an object in non-actor voice constructions. This has important implications for the treatment of subjects crosslinguistically, Western Austronesian verbal morphology and linking theories.

Sensory Chunking and the Like: Testing a Pedagogical Treatment Applied to the Strengthening of the Third-Person Singular-s

Research into foreign language acquisition reports that learners of English as a foreign language are inconsistent with the suppliance of verbal morphology and tend to omit morphemes such as the third-person singular -s even at advanced instructional stages. Researchers rely on Generative linguistics and models such as the Minimalist Programme (Chomsky, 2000, 2015/1995) and the Feature Assembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2005, 2007, 2009) to account for such variability. The present study attempted to increase the accuracy rates of the -s. The author designed a treatment (©2018, 2019, Verónica Mendoza Fernández) that centered around sensory chunking (teaching with chunked sentences). Sixty-four learners of English as a foreign language from three different rural schools of primary education in Northern Spain participated in a classroom experiment that followed a pretest-postest procedure. Participants from school 1 constituted the control group and participants from schools 2 and 3, the experimental groups. The results of a grammaticality judgement task indicated a statistically significant increase in the accuracy rates of the -s for one of the experimental groups and a trend towards significance for the other experimental group. The treatment could promote the learning of linguistic items contained within blocks of language, as well as the learning of such blocks, and thus foster language automatisation.

Portuguese-Lexified Creoles

The Portuguese colonial enterprise has had myriad and long-lasting consequences, not the least of which involves language. The many Portuguese-lexified creole languages in Africa and Asia are the product of Portugal’s colonial past. The creoles to be discussed that developed in Africa belong to two subgroups: the Upper Guinea Creoles (Cape Verdean, Guiné Bissau Creole, Casamance Creole) and the Gulf of Guinea Creoles (Santome, Angolar, Principense, Fa d’Ambô). Among the Asian Portuguese creoles, three subgroups are distinguishable, based on shared linguistic traits: the northern Indian group (Diu, Daman, Korlai), which retains some verbal morphology from Portuguese and distinguishes the subject/object case and informal-formal forms in the pronominal systems; Sri Lanka Creole, which retains less Portuguese verbal morphology but distinguishes the subject/object case and informal-formal forms in the pronominal system; and the East Asian group (Papiá Kristang, Makista), which retains very little, if any, Portuguese verbal morphology and has no informal-formal or subject/object case distinctions in the pronominal systems. Despite these differences, all creoles share a common lexicon, to a large extent, and, to varying degrees, aspects of Portuguese culture.

morphology of argument marking in Zaghawa-Wagi

This paper presents an analysis of the system of argument marking on the verb in Zaghawa. Zaghawa, also called Beria in the literature, is a Saharan language of the Nilo-Saharan language phylum spoken in the border region of Sudan and Chad. Like other Saharan languages, it has complex verbal morphology including person indexing. The primary aim of the study is descriptive in that it presents linguistic data of the underdescribed Wagi dialect which is mainly spoken in Sudan. First, the paradigm of bound verbal affixes and their morphology is described. Secondly, one of the functions of the final morpheme of the verb which has not yet been described in detail in previous studies on Zaghawa is analysed. This final morpheme interacts with the person indexes to mark plural participants, and it is exploited to mark a morphological category not yet recognized in the other dialects of Zaghawa: the exclusive/inclusive distinction in the 1st person plural. Therefore, the study provides new data on the Zaghawa verb system and contributes a further detail to our knowledge of the Nilo-Saharan language family.

Italo-Romance: Venetan

Venetan belongs to the group of northern Italian dialects, which are characterized by the presence of some phonological and morphological features that are common to French dialects and are attributed to the Celtic substratum. However, numerous traces of the Venetic substratum distinguish the Venetan dialects from the other (Gallo-Italic) dialects. In the linguistic history of the Venetan dialects, Venice played a central role due to the political power achieved by the Venetian Republic and its commercial expansion into many Adriatic and Mediterranean countries. There, the Venetian dialect laid the foundations for the development of a “colonial Venetian,” which has been used for several centuries. In the 21st century, Venetan is still vital in three regions of northeastern Italy (Veneto, Trentino Alto-Adige, Friuli Venezia Giulia), in Istria, and in Dalmatia. Small Venetan-speaking communities are also found elsewhere in Europe as well as Canada, Australia, and North and South America. These were the destination countries for the numerous emigrants who left Veneto between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Alongside several structural features that are common to the other northern Italian dialects, Venetan presents some distinctive properties. In phonology, apocope and syncope are restricted and consonant lenition in inter-vowel position is extensive. In verbal morphology, Venetan is characterized by the agglutination of the auxiliary ‘have’ with the clitic ghe, the alternation of the traditional Venetian form [ze] with the form [ɛ] for the auxiliary ‘be’ at present indicative 3rd persons, and the variety of past participle suffixes. In nominal derivation, some suffixes, such as the augmentatives -ón/-óne and -àso and the present participle suffix -ànte (which is used for the formation of nomina agentis) are very productive. In syntax, 2sg and 3sg/pl subject clitics are obligatory; dative and object clitics are used for doubling respectively datives and pronominal objects in the 1st and 2nd person; specific rules govern the structure of direct, indirect, and noncanonical interrogatives. The Venetan lexicon, which developed in several domains, particularly in marine (on the lagoon) and agricultural (on the mainland) contexts, mirrors the history of the region, revealing several traces of different strata (Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Slavic, Jewish, and French).

Phonological evidence for morpho-syntactic structure in Athapaskan

Athapaskan verbal morphology appears to violate the Mirror Principle in multiple ways and, thus, the ordering of affixes in these languages has resisted a straightforward analysis. We adopt a new morphological tool of Iterative Root Prefixation, which allows for a more direct mapping from syntax to morphology in languages of this profile. Apparent violations of affix ordering that remain, namely the puzzling placement of the transitive and causative morphemes, are argued to be explained by overriding phonological constraints.