In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the obse... more In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act.
In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the obse... more In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act.
Comparamos la labialización no asimiladora de nasales finales en español en tres corpus de españo... more Comparamos la labialización no asimiladora de nasales finales en español en tres corpus de español americano (mexicano, colombiano y paraguayo). Si bien es conocida la labialización no asimiladora en español yucateco, es en gran parte desconocida en otras regiones de habla hispana, por lo que a menudo se atribuye a la influencia maya. Ahora bien, se han señalado casualmente hábitos de pronunciación similares tanto en Paraguay como en Colombia. Comparando empíricamente la labialización en tres corpus constituidos sobre la misma base metodológica, concluimos que la evidencia a favor del contacto lingüístico es como mucho sumamente indirecta. Independientemente de esto, encontramos que la diferencia más marcada es que la tasa de labialización parece ser determinada por la duración de la pausa subsiguiente en los datos de la península yucateca, mas no en aquellos de Colombia y Paraguay. Argumentamos que es cierto que el contacto puede eventualmente haber desencadenado el desarrollo de este rasgo en el español yucateco, puesto que el español actual casi no conoce nasales labiales finales, pero el maya sí. Sin embargo, el perfil lingüístico (hablantes monolingües vs. bilingües) no tiene ningún efecto en nuestros datos yucatecos y paraguayos, y en el total de nuestros datos tampoco encontramos evidencia en favor de la hipótesis que el contacto lingüístico hubiera jugado un rol (importante) en el desarrollo de las labiales nasales en las tres variedades.
This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) i... more This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, at the level of the intonational realization of contrastive focus, and by means of the prosody of Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya. In Yucatec Maya, the maximally prominent constituent of an utterance is generally located at the leftmost part of the Intonational Phrase that contains the predicate (Verhoeven & Skopeteas 2015 reported similar results for Yucatec Maya and Uth 2016 for Yucatecan Spanish) unlike standard Mexican Spanish (as Carme De la Mota, Pedro Martín Butragueño and Pilar Prieto recorded in 2010). Here we present the results of an intonational comparison of contrastive focus utterances of Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya in order to test the hypothesis that this similarity is due to contact. Furthermore, we present additional evidence in favour of the presence of a left high tone in Yucatec Maya, based on a pilot study on the pronunciation of Spanish loanwords. Resumen En este artículo investigamos el contacto lingüístico entre el español yucateco y el maya yucateco (maya) en la península de Yucatán, México, a nivel de la realización entonativa del foco contrastivo y a través de la prosodia de los préstamos del español en esta lengua maya. En maya yucateco, el constituyente máximamente prominente de un enunciado generalmente se encuentra en la parte más a la izquierda de la Frase Entonacional (Verhoeven & Skopeteas 2015 reportaron esto para el maya yucateco y Uth 2016 además reporta resultados similares para el español yucateco), lo cual es diferente del español mexicano estándar descrito por Carme De la Mota, Pedro Martín Butragueño y Pilar Prieto en 2010. Presentamos aquí los resultados de una comparación de la entonación de enunciados con focos contrastivos tanto del maya bhs, 97 (2020)
Despite numerous theoretical approaches and empirical analyses, it is not entirely clear how diff... more Despite numerous theoretical approaches and empirical analyses, it is not entirely clear how different focus types and constructions are realized and interpreted in individual Romance languages. Due to the complexity of this linguistic area, an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach seems most appropriate for exploring the topic further. This introductory article gives an overview of the core problems related to focus realization in Romance, such as methodological in-congruences, differences regarding the conceptualization of focus categories, and nonobservance of diatopic variation. Moreover, it gives an outline of the present volume and situates the contributions with respect to the aforementioned issues.
This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) i... more This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, at the level of the intonational realization of contrastive focus, and by means of the prosody of Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya. In Yucatec Maya, the maximally prominent constituent of an utterance is generally located at the leftmost part of the Intonational Phrase that contains the predicate (Verhoeven & Skopeteas 2015), and Uth (2016) reports similar results for Yucatecan Spanish, unlike standard Mexican Spanish (De la Mota et al. 2010). Here we present the results of an intonational comparison of contrastive focus utterances of both Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya in order to test the hypothesis that this similarity is due to contact. Furthermore, we present additional evidence in favor of the presence of a left high tone in Yucatec Maya, based on a pilot study on the pronunciation of Spanish loanwords. (Offprint available upon request).
Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México , 2018
In this paper we address the issue of morphological plural marking in Spanish loanwords in Yucate... more In this paper we address the issue of morphological plural marking in Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya. Plural marking in this Mayan language has been a topic that has received a lot of attention in recent years. However, this does not extend to the loanwords that this language has adopted from Spanish, which in many cases also show the plural suffix of Spanish. In this paper we show, based on a corpus study, that plural marking in Spanish loanwords is regulated by criteria which are different from those that are observed in Yucatec nouns that are not loanwords. Furthermore, the comparison of marking between different age groups and different linguistic profiles reveals that the weight of the restrictions that originate in Yucatec Maya diminishes with (i) bilingualism and, (ii) the younger age of the speakers (see also Pfeiler 2009: 108). We conclude that plural marking of Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya is the result of the interaction of two typologically different systems which operate simultaneously in this part of the grammar of the host language. This results in a pattern which is different from the one observed separately in each language because it adopts different aspects of the two languages in contact.
El artículo otorga una visión conjunta de las variedades lingüísticas de México desde la perspect... more El artículo otorga una visión conjunta de las variedades lingüísticas de México desde la perspectiva de la variación diatópica. Después de resumir la controversia alrededor dela división dialectal del español mexicano, continúa con la zonificación de Henríquez Ureña (1921), quien divide la República mexicana en las siguientes regiones dialectales: centro, norte, costas, Chiapas y Yucatán. En segundo lugar, el artículo aborda la microestructura lingüística de las distintas áreas dialectales del país, así como los principales desarrollos históricos y condiciones sociodemográficas que conforman la base del panorama actual. Además de esto, se aportan para cada región datos sobre las lenguas indígenas más importantes, puesto que el contacto de lenguas es considerado como uno de los aspectos más importantes para la conformación de las variedades del español habladas en México.
This article deals with the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data ... more This article deals with the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation experiments with a total of 5 balanced bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM), 5 Spanish dominant bilingual speakers of YS and YM, and 5 monolingual speakers of YS suggest that in YS, contrastive focus is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the Intonation Phrase, followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety importantly differs from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive constituent is generally associated with a L+H* pitch accent (cf. De la Mota 2010). However, the systematic behavior described above only shows up in the data produced by the Spanish dominant and monolingual speakers, whereas the data produced by the balanced bilingual speakers is characterized by a much higher amount of idiosyncratic variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems in language contact settings is, among other things, a matter of gradual consolidation or strengthening of features.
French -age developed from Latin relational adjectives in -aticus which were by and by nominalize... more French -age developed from Latin relational adjectives in -aticus which were by and by nominalized, thereby incorporating the traditional head noun as a semantic constituent. In this article, it is argued that the Modern French -age derivation originated from the (re-)association of a semantically vacuous formative and an abstract semantic feature. This semantic feature gradually emerged through abstraction from the existing concrete derivatives and, once established, determines the range of possible interpretations of newly coined formations up to this day. The most important result of the analysis is that, apart from a structural reanalysis of the Latin substantivized relational -aticus adjectives, French -age did not undergo any meaning change at all, the stability of its meaning being due to the above-mentioned continuous interplay between the abstract semantic feature and the usage of the various concrete -age-nominalizations.
This article provides a semantic comparison of several of the most common event nominalization pr... more This article provides a semantic comparison of several of the most common event nominalization procedures of French and German. It is based on the hypothesis that each language disposes of a unique paradigm of event nominalization procedures, which differ slightly with regard to certain semantic-pragmatic features. The nominalization procedures which are taken into consideration for French are age, ation, ment, ée and the nominalized infinitive, while ung, the nominalized infinitive, and root conversions are discussed for German. The paradigmatic oppositions existing between the corresponding procedures are defined for each language using an inventory of six distinct semantic-pragmatic features. Four of these features relate to aspectual values, while the two remaining features deal with distinctions relating to the perspectivation of the events denoted by the base verbs (i.e. active or passive perspective, demotion of event participants).
In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study of certain syntactic particularities ... more In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study of certain syntactic particularities of contrastive focus marking in Yucatecan Spanish (YS). We argue that there are several pieces of evidence suggesting that these particularities are due to the variety's close contact with Yucatec Maya (YM). One of the several syntactic peculiarities of YS is that, just as in YM, a focused verb is displaced to a left peripheral position and a dummy verb do is inserted as the main verb of the clause, a pattern, which to the best of our knowledge is unattested in other varieties of Spanish (e.g. Sólo pasear haces, compared to Chéen xíi-ximbal ka meentik, Sobrino 2010, Gutiérrez-Bravo 2015). However, our data reveal that, just like in standard Spanish, preposed foci do not allow a subject DP to intervene between them and the verb (*Sólo PASEAR tú haces), nor can preposed foci co-occur with fronted Wh-operators (*Dónde PASEAR hace?, cf. e.g. Zubizarreta 1998 for preposed foci in Spanish), meaning that YS patterns exactly like all other Spanish varieties in this realm of syntactic realization. We conclude our discussion by delineating the mixed picture of YS focus fronting: While it is true that several constructions are clearly influenced by YM, YS adheres to the (close-to-) standard grammar of Spanish as regards particular syntactic core properties.
In this article, we discuss the methodology of elicitation experiments designed by in order to el... more In this article, we discuss the methodology of elicitation experiments designed by in order to elicitate non-contrastive narrow focus on subjects in Spanish. Taking into account recent semantic-pragmatic work concerning the interplay between focus, evidentiality and emphasis, it is suggested that the frequent preverbal position of narrowly focused subjects in experiments might result from the fact that the informants' answers to the elicitation questions contain wrong (i.e. non-intended) pragmatic inferences. If this conjecture turned out to be true, the discussion concerning the position of non-contrastively focused subjects in Spanish would have to be started all over again, since the existing data would stem from experiments blurring the distinction between narrow information focus and other prominence marking strategies. The most obvious pragmatic inferences that come into question as possible intervening marking strategies are related to epistemic modality and evidentiality. The vagueness of the communicative contexts of materials does not permit sound conclusions concerning the precise nature of these inferences, though. Therefore, new experimental materials have been elaborated in order to get more precise communicative settings. However, albeit revealing interesting gradual differences, the comparison of the elaborated materials with does not exhibit any categorical distinction as concerns the subject placement in contexts of narrow information focus in Spanish: in the modified experimental setting we also find narrowly focused subjects in preverbal position, although to a much lesser extent than in .
Dans la littérature traitant de la relation entre la morphologie savante et la morphologie vernac... more Dans la littérature traitant de la relation entre la morphologie savante et la morphologie vernaculaire en français, -(ai)son est souvent caractérisé comme l'équivalent vernaculaire de -(at)ion et la relation entre les deux procédés est décrite comme un remplacement suffixal, où -(at)ion 'refoule' -(ai)son de plus en plus au cours du développement du français moyen au français moderne (à part les citations indiquées ci-« Die Vitalität des volkssprachlichen -aison hat in den letzten Jahrhunderten stetig abgenommen. » (‚La vitalité de la forme vernaculaire -aison a constamment déclinée ces derniers siècles. ', Schmitt 1988 : 193) « -aison scheint durch das Suffix -ation in der Gegenwartssprache völlig verdrängt worden zu sein. » (‚-aison semble avoir été complètement refoulé par le suffixe -ation dans la langue actuelle.', Thiele 1981 : 34sq) « Le domaine de -aison s'est peu à peu restreint. Dans la langue moderne, il n'est presque plus productif, et c'est surtout la forme savante -ation qui le remplace. » (Nyrop 1908, tome III : 92sq)
This article approaches the debate between lexicalist and syntactic accounts of derivational morp... more This article approaches the debate between lexicalist and syntactic accounts of derivational morphology from a semantic viewpoint. It is argued that the debate between lexicalist and syntactic accounts of event nominalizations may not be solved without thoroughly investigating the different semantic components which potentially influence the characteristics of the derivatives, i.e. (i) the semantics of the nominalization procedure as such, (ii) the meaning of the derivational bases and (iii) the meaning of the nominalization suffixes. Concentrating on the latter component, the article presents a semantic analysis of the French nominalization suffixes –ment and –age in order to reveal the significance of the suffix meanings for the debate concerning the proper treatment of event nominalizations.
In this paper I will investigate process and result nominals in -age and -ment, which are derived... more In this paper I will investigate process and result nominals in -age and -ment, which are derived from verbs participating in the causative/anti-causative-alternation (henceforth labelled "alternating verbs"). First of all, it will be empirically shown that -mentnominals have both the anti-causative reading and the resultant state reading, whereas process nominals in -age focus on the causing process and result nominals in -age only appear in applicative constructions. assume that the causative eventive chain consists of a causing process and a change-of-state event that takes the resultant state as its situational argument. Following that, I will conclude from the empirical evidence that -ment nominalizes the change-of-state event, while -age nominalizes the causing process. Furthermore, I will model the relevant -age-and -mentnominals in terms of Lieber's (2004) conceptual structures and discuss the question whether we may assume that -ment and -age introduce different aspectual operators.
In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the obse... more In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act.
In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the obse... more In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act.
Comparamos la labialización no asimiladora de nasales finales en español en tres corpus de españo... more Comparamos la labialización no asimiladora de nasales finales en español en tres corpus de español americano (mexicano, colombiano y paraguayo). Si bien es conocida la labialización no asimiladora en español yucateco, es en gran parte desconocida en otras regiones de habla hispana, por lo que a menudo se atribuye a la influencia maya. Ahora bien, se han señalado casualmente hábitos de pronunciación similares tanto en Paraguay como en Colombia. Comparando empíricamente la labialización en tres corpus constituidos sobre la misma base metodológica, concluimos que la evidencia a favor del contacto lingüístico es como mucho sumamente indirecta. Independientemente de esto, encontramos que la diferencia más marcada es que la tasa de labialización parece ser determinada por la duración de la pausa subsiguiente en los datos de la península yucateca, mas no en aquellos de Colombia y Paraguay. Argumentamos que es cierto que el contacto puede eventualmente haber desencadenado el desarrollo de este rasgo en el español yucateco, puesto que el español actual casi no conoce nasales labiales finales, pero el maya sí. Sin embargo, el perfil lingüístico (hablantes monolingües vs. bilingües) no tiene ningún efecto en nuestros datos yucatecos y paraguayos, y en el total de nuestros datos tampoco encontramos evidencia en favor de la hipótesis que el contacto lingüístico hubiera jugado un rol (importante) en el desarrollo de las labiales nasales en las tres variedades.
This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) i... more This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, at the level of the intonational realization of contrastive focus, and by means of the prosody of Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya. In Yucatec Maya, the maximally prominent constituent of an utterance is generally located at the leftmost part of the Intonational Phrase that contains the predicate (Verhoeven & Skopeteas 2015 reported similar results for Yucatec Maya and Uth 2016 for Yucatecan Spanish) unlike standard Mexican Spanish (as Carme De la Mota, Pedro Martín Butragueño and Pilar Prieto recorded in 2010). Here we present the results of an intonational comparison of contrastive focus utterances of Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya in order to test the hypothesis that this similarity is due to contact. Furthermore, we present additional evidence in favour of the presence of a left high tone in Yucatec Maya, based on a pilot study on the pronunciation of Spanish loanwords. Resumen En este artículo investigamos el contacto lingüístico entre el español yucateco y el maya yucateco (maya) en la península de Yucatán, México, a nivel de la realización entonativa del foco contrastivo y a través de la prosodia de los préstamos del español en esta lengua maya. En maya yucateco, el constituyente máximamente prominente de un enunciado generalmente se encuentra en la parte más a la izquierda de la Frase Entonacional (Verhoeven & Skopeteas 2015 reportaron esto para el maya yucateco y Uth 2016 además reporta resultados similares para el español yucateco), lo cual es diferente del español mexicano estándar descrito por Carme De la Mota, Pedro Martín Butragueño y Pilar Prieto en 2010. Presentamos aquí los resultados de una comparación de la entonación de enunciados con focos contrastivos tanto del maya bhs, 97 (2020)
Despite numerous theoretical approaches and empirical analyses, it is not entirely clear how diff... more Despite numerous theoretical approaches and empirical analyses, it is not entirely clear how different focus types and constructions are realized and interpreted in individual Romance languages. Due to the complexity of this linguistic area, an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach seems most appropriate for exploring the topic further. This introductory article gives an overview of the core problems related to focus realization in Romance, such as methodological in-congruences, differences regarding the conceptualization of focus categories, and nonobservance of diatopic variation. Moreover, it gives an outline of the present volume and situates the contributions with respect to the aforementioned issues.
This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) i... more This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, at the level of the intonational realization of contrastive focus, and by means of the prosody of Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya. In Yucatec Maya, the maximally prominent constituent of an utterance is generally located at the leftmost part of the Intonational Phrase that contains the predicate (Verhoeven & Skopeteas 2015), and Uth (2016) reports similar results for Yucatecan Spanish, unlike standard Mexican Spanish (De la Mota et al. 2010). Here we present the results of an intonational comparison of contrastive focus utterances of both Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya in order to test the hypothesis that this similarity is due to contact. Furthermore, we present additional evidence in favor of the presence of a left high tone in Yucatec Maya, based on a pilot study on the pronunciation of Spanish loanwords. (Offprint available upon request).
Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México , 2018
In this paper we address the issue of morphological plural marking in Spanish loanwords in Yucate... more In this paper we address the issue of morphological plural marking in Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya. Plural marking in this Mayan language has been a topic that has received a lot of attention in recent years. However, this does not extend to the loanwords that this language has adopted from Spanish, which in many cases also show the plural suffix of Spanish. In this paper we show, based on a corpus study, that plural marking in Spanish loanwords is regulated by criteria which are different from those that are observed in Yucatec nouns that are not loanwords. Furthermore, the comparison of marking between different age groups and different linguistic profiles reveals that the weight of the restrictions that originate in Yucatec Maya diminishes with (i) bilingualism and, (ii) the younger age of the speakers (see also Pfeiler 2009: 108). We conclude that plural marking of Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya is the result of the interaction of two typologically different systems which operate simultaneously in this part of the grammar of the host language. This results in a pattern which is different from the one observed separately in each language because it adopts different aspects of the two languages in contact.
El artículo otorga una visión conjunta de las variedades lingüísticas de México desde la perspect... more El artículo otorga una visión conjunta de las variedades lingüísticas de México desde la perspectiva de la variación diatópica. Después de resumir la controversia alrededor dela división dialectal del español mexicano, continúa con la zonificación de Henríquez Ureña (1921), quien divide la República mexicana en las siguientes regiones dialectales: centro, norte, costas, Chiapas y Yucatán. En segundo lugar, el artículo aborda la microestructura lingüística de las distintas áreas dialectales del país, así como los principales desarrollos históricos y condiciones sociodemográficas que conforman la base del panorama actual. Además de esto, se aportan para cada región datos sobre las lenguas indígenas más importantes, puesto que el contacto de lenguas es considerado como uno de los aspectos más importantes para la conformación de las variedades del español habladas en México.
This article deals with the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data ... more This article deals with the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation experiments with a total of 5 balanced bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM), 5 Spanish dominant bilingual speakers of YS and YM, and 5 monolingual speakers of YS suggest that in YS, contrastive focus is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the Intonation Phrase, followed by a fall to the final stressed syllable of a contrasted word. In this respect, the established YS variety importantly differs from standard Mexican Spanish (MS), where the stressed syllable of a contrastive constituent is generally associated with a L+H* pitch accent (cf. De la Mota 2010). However, the systematic behavior described above only shows up in the data produced by the Spanish dominant and monolingual speakers, whereas the data produced by the balanced bilingual speakers is characterized by a much higher amount of idiosyncratic variation. This fact suggests that the development of intonational systems in language contact settings is, among other things, a matter of gradual consolidation or strengthening of features.
French -age developed from Latin relational adjectives in -aticus which were by and by nominalize... more French -age developed from Latin relational adjectives in -aticus which were by and by nominalized, thereby incorporating the traditional head noun as a semantic constituent. In this article, it is argued that the Modern French -age derivation originated from the (re-)association of a semantically vacuous formative and an abstract semantic feature. This semantic feature gradually emerged through abstraction from the existing concrete derivatives and, once established, determines the range of possible interpretations of newly coined formations up to this day. The most important result of the analysis is that, apart from a structural reanalysis of the Latin substantivized relational -aticus adjectives, French -age did not undergo any meaning change at all, the stability of its meaning being due to the above-mentioned continuous interplay between the abstract semantic feature and the usage of the various concrete -age-nominalizations.
This article provides a semantic comparison of several of the most common event nominalization pr... more This article provides a semantic comparison of several of the most common event nominalization procedures of French and German. It is based on the hypothesis that each language disposes of a unique paradigm of event nominalization procedures, which differ slightly with regard to certain semantic-pragmatic features. The nominalization procedures which are taken into consideration for French are age, ation, ment, ée and the nominalized infinitive, while ung, the nominalized infinitive, and root conversions are discussed for German. The paradigmatic oppositions existing between the corresponding procedures are defined for each language using an inventory of six distinct semantic-pragmatic features. Four of these features relate to aspectual values, while the two remaining features deal with distinctions relating to the perspectivation of the events denoted by the base verbs (i.e. active or passive perspective, demotion of event participants).
In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study of certain syntactic particularities ... more In this paper, we present the results of an empirical study of certain syntactic particularities of contrastive focus marking in Yucatecan Spanish (YS). We argue that there are several pieces of evidence suggesting that these particularities are due to the variety's close contact with Yucatec Maya (YM). One of the several syntactic peculiarities of YS is that, just as in YM, a focused verb is displaced to a left peripheral position and a dummy verb do is inserted as the main verb of the clause, a pattern, which to the best of our knowledge is unattested in other varieties of Spanish (e.g. Sólo pasear haces, compared to Chéen xíi-ximbal ka meentik, Sobrino 2010, Gutiérrez-Bravo 2015). However, our data reveal that, just like in standard Spanish, preposed foci do not allow a subject DP to intervene between them and the verb (*Sólo PASEAR tú haces), nor can preposed foci co-occur with fronted Wh-operators (*Dónde PASEAR hace?, cf. e.g. Zubizarreta 1998 for preposed foci in Spanish), meaning that YS patterns exactly like all other Spanish varieties in this realm of syntactic realization. We conclude our discussion by delineating the mixed picture of YS focus fronting: While it is true that several constructions are clearly influenced by YM, YS adheres to the (close-to-) standard grammar of Spanish as regards particular syntactic core properties.
In this article, we discuss the methodology of elicitation experiments designed by in order to el... more In this article, we discuss the methodology of elicitation experiments designed by in order to elicitate non-contrastive narrow focus on subjects in Spanish. Taking into account recent semantic-pragmatic work concerning the interplay between focus, evidentiality and emphasis, it is suggested that the frequent preverbal position of narrowly focused subjects in experiments might result from the fact that the informants' answers to the elicitation questions contain wrong (i.e. non-intended) pragmatic inferences. If this conjecture turned out to be true, the discussion concerning the position of non-contrastively focused subjects in Spanish would have to be started all over again, since the existing data would stem from experiments blurring the distinction between narrow information focus and other prominence marking strategies. The most obvious pragmatic inferences that come into question as possible intervening marking strategies are related to epistemic modality and evidentiality. The vagueness of the communicative contexts of materials does not permit sound conclusions concerning the precise nature of these inferences, though. Therefore, new experimental materials have been elaborated in order to get more precise communicative settings. However, albeit revealing interesting gradual differences, the comparison of the elaborated materials with does not exhibit any categorical distinction as concerns the subject placement in contexts of narrow information focus in Spanish: in the modified experimental setting we also find narrowly focused subjects in preverbal position, although to a much lesser extent than in .
Dans la littérature traitant de la relation entre la morphologie savante et la morphologie vernac... more Dans la littérature traitant de la relation entre la morphologie savante et la morphologie vernaculaire en français, -(ai)son est souvent caractérisé comme l'équivalent vernaculaire de -(at)ion et la relation entre les deux procédés est décrite comme un remplacement suffixal, où -(at)ion 'refoule' -(ai)son de plus en plus au cours du développement du français moyen au français moderne (à part les citations indiquées ci-« Die Vitalität des volkssprachlichen -aison hat in den letzten Jahrhunderten stetig abgenommen. » (‚La vitalité de la forme vernaculaire -aison a constamment déclinée ces derniers siècles. ', Schmitt 1988 : 193) « -aison scheint durch das Suffix -ation in der Gegenwartssprache völlig verdrängt worden zu sein. » (‚-aison semble avoir été complètement refoulé par le suffixe -ation dans la langue actuelle.', Thiele 1981 : 34sq) « Le domaine de -aison s'est peu à peu restreint. Dans la langue moderne, il n'est presque plus productif, et c'est surtout la forme savante -ation qui le remplace. » (Nyrop 1908, tome III : 92sq)
This article approaches the debate between lexicalist and syntactic accounts of derivational morp... more This article approaches the debate between lexicalist and syntactic accounts of derivational morphology from a semantic viewpoint. It is argued that the debate between lexicalist and syntactic accounts of event nominalizations may not be solved without thoroughly investigating the different semantic components which potentially influence the characteristics of the derivatives, i.e. (i) the semantics of the nominalization procedure as such, (ii) the meaning of the derivational bases and (iii) the meaning of the nominalization suffixes. Concentrating on the latter component, the article presents a semantic analysis of the French nominalization suffixes –ment and –age in order to reveal the significance of the suffix meanings for the debate concerning the proper treatment of event nominalizations.
In this paper I will investigate process and result nominals in -age and -ment, which are derived... more In this paper I will investigate process and result nominals in -age and -ment, which are derived from verbs participating in the causative/anti-causative-alternation (henceforth labelled "alternating verbs"). First of all, it will be empirically shown that -mentnominals have both the anti-causative reading and the resultant state reading, whereas process nominals in -age focus on the causing process and result nominals in -age only appear in applicative constructions. assume that the causative eventive chain consists of a causing process and a change-of-state event that takes the resultant state as its situational argument. Following that, I will conclude from the empirical evidence that -ment nominalizes the change-of-state event, while -age nominalizes the causing process. Furthermore, I will model the relevant -age-and -mentnominals in terms of Lieber's (2004) conceptual structures and discuss the question whether we may assume that -ment and -age introduce different aspectual operators.
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Papers by Melanie Uth
-age derivation originated from the (re-)association of a semantically vacuous formative and an abstract semantic feature. This semantic feature gradually emerged through abstraction from the existing concrete derivatives and, once
established, determines the range of possible interpretations of newly coined formations up to this day. The most important result of the analysis is that, apart from a structural reanalysis of the Latin substantivized relational -aticus adjectives, French -age did not undergo any meaning change at all, the stability of its meaning being due to the above-mentioned continuous
interplay between the abstract semantic feature and the usage of the various concrete -age-nominalizations.
Books by Melanie Uth
-age derivation originated from the (re-)association of a semantically vacuous formative and an abstract semantic feature. This semantic feature gradually emerged through abstraction from the existing concrete derivatives and, once
established, determines the range of possible interpretations of newly coined formations up to this day. The most important result of the analysis is that, apart from a structural reanalysis of the Latin substantivized relational -aticus adjectives, French -age did not undergo any meaning change at all, the stability of its meaning being due to the above-mentioned continuous
interplay between the abstract semantic feature and the usage of the various concrete -age-nominalizations.