This article describes the manifestations of the morphosyntactic category of grammatical gender in the Romance languages, including regional varieties and dialects, as well as Romance minority languages spoken under total language contact (which underwent significant reshaping under contact pressure). It will briefly sketch the diachronic development of this category from Latin to the Romance varieties highlighting the diversity that has come into being in Romance as a product of language change and dialect differentiation in this area of grammar. Among this diversity, some phenomena of gender marking and/or assignment have sometimes arisen that are rare among Indo-European languages (and, in some cases, even beyond): these rara & rarissima are paid special attention in the present account of Romance gender.
11-20 of 607 Results
Article
Grammatical Gender in the Romance Languages
Michele Loporcaro
Article
Language of Social Media and Online Communication in Germanic
Steven Coats
This article provides an overview of language practices that have emerged as a result of technological developments related to telecommunications and the internet, primarily in text-based modalities, and discusses research into social media and online communication in Germanic languages. It begins by providing a brief history of the communication technologies and platforms that underlie computer-based communication (CMC), then considers language features common to text-based CMC modalities that have developed since the 1970s such as email messages, mailing lists and message boards, chatrooms, SMS (Short Message Service), instant message (IM), and social media platforms such as Twitter/𝕏 or Facebook. For text communication in these modalities, features such as abbreviation, nonstandard orthography, use of emoticons and emoji, and performative marking of verbs are common in the Germanic languages, and new discursive practices have emerged for use of the hashtag (#) and the “at” sign (@). The article then reviews some of the findings of research into CMC for English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, and the Scandinavian languages, noting the diversity of theoretical approaches and analytical frameworks employed. Selected focus issues are discussed, including ethnographic and interactive studies of Germanic CMC and approaches to the study of multimodal online language on video-streaming and -sharing websites such as YouTube. The article concludes by noting some desiderata for research into Germanic language social media and online communication.
Article
Mandarin Chinese Noun Phrases: Structures and Representations
Fengcun An and Haihua Pan
Noun phrases are fundamental elements found in different languages. Mandarin Chinese (MC) noun phrases lack extensive morphological forms, such as plural makers, but can effectively convey definiteness and plurality. This complicates the exploration of the structural features and the representation of key aspects within MC noun phrases in the syntactic structure. Previous studies have concentrated on illustrating the structural forms of MC noun phrases through syntactic distribution and interpretation in concrete contexts The key components of MC noun phrases typically consist of classifiers (such as ben (本)), the affix -men (们), and de (的). The classifiers’ uniqueness is associated with the countability of the noun head, allowing only countable nouns to be collocated with them. The affix -men is commonly seen as a plural marker or a collective marker, with its syntactic role remaining ambiguous. The functions of de in nominals range from marking modifiers to elements that allude to referentiality. These three elements correspond to the main aspects of the syntactic structure in MC noun phrases: countability, plurality, and referentiality. This raises a further issue about the representation of these elements in the syntactic structure. The syntactic status of items within MC noun phrases is closely connected to the representation of the syntactic structure when viewed broadly. Hence, the analysis of the structure and representation of MC noun phrases still requires further discussion to elucidate the features of internal parts inside MC noun phrases and the projection of syntactic structure.
Article
Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in Italian
Michela Cennamo and Francesco Maria Ciconte
Italian is an Italo-Romance language based upon a form of Tuscan, old Florentine. For centuries, Italian was a literary language mastered only by well-educated elites. In contrast, almost the entire population spoke a local variety of Italo-Romance. The Italo-Romance varieties are not dialects—that is, variations—of Italian, but they are languages in their own right, which, like Tuscan, developed independently from Latin. The long-term and intensive coexistence of Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties has produced a great deal of variation, which still characterizes the linguistic repertoire of Italy. The diglossic relationship between Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties is thus the key to capturing such variation. The interrelation between a superstrate national language—that is, Standard Italian—and the deep-rooted local varieties has yielded interlanguage phenomena, which eventually led to substratum interference, that is, the occurrence of local features in Italian. This variation has not affected Standard Italian, but, rather, it has produced geo-varieties of Italian, altogether termed “Regional Italians.” The use of certain regional features has become the norm—a norm which is socially accepted and in fact constitutes the standard within the respective regional areas. Besides phonetic and prosodic variation and substantial lexical importation into Italian from the Italo-Romance varieties, a set of shared interference features has transcended isoglossic boundaries at the morphosyntactic level as well. At the same time, the traditional diamesic dichotomy between the spoken and written domain has loosened, allowing a variety of interrelated styles and registers. In this respect, contemporary Italian can be said to be undergoing a process of restandardization. The newly emerging standard variety, “Neo-Standard Italian,” encompasses originally regional morphosyntactic features which have become pan-Italian and are commonly used in almost all functional domains of communication.
After discussing some typical instances of morphosyntactic variation in the macro-areas of Regional Italians, this article analyzes some shared Romance phenomena with regard to the specific features of Italian and its regional variation, namely existential constructions, forms of address, futurity, mood, and negation, pointing to emerging new phenomena, coexisting with stable patterns of variation, some of which are already attested in earlier stages of the language and of the early vernaculars.
Article
Northern Gallo-Romance: langue d’oïl (Including French)
John Charles Smith
The linguistic area of Gallo-Romance includes contemporary France, together with some contiguous areas. The (often moribund) local varieties spoken in the northern half of this area, together with standard French (which developed from a koinéized version of the speech of Paris at, or just after, the end of the Middle Ages) present interesting typological differences from many other Romance varieties. Their segmental phonology is characterized by a much larger number of vowels than is typical of Romance in general. Many of these vowels are the result of processes of nasalization and of diphthongization followed by remonophthongization that have not taken place, or not taken place to the same extent, elsewhere. Unlike many Romance varieties, Northern Gallo-Romance varieties are not pro-drop languages, so that sentences almost always require an overt subject, which may be a clitic pronoun. Finally, a striking syntactic feature of French is dislocation, where elements are moved to positions outside the nuclear or core sentence, giving rise to the view that French is, or is becoming, a discourse-configurational language.
Article
Phonetics of Fricatives
Allard Jongman
Fricatives are very common, occurring in over 90% of the world’s documented languages and at all places of articulation codified in the International Phonetic Alphabet charts. Fricatives constitute a class of consonant sounds characterized by a turbulent airflow produced by a severe but not complete constriction of the vocal tract. This constriction divides the vocal tract into two parts, a front cavity that ranges from the constriction to the lips and a back cavity that ranges from the constriction to the larynx. For anterior fricatives, the friction generated at the constriction excites the front cavity and the resonances associated with the front cavity dominate the sound spectrum. The length of the front cavity is a major determinant of the spectrum. As the location of the constriction moves toward the back of the vocal tract, the front cavity becomes longer, and the resonances occur at lower frequencies. For more posterior fricatives produced at and beyond the velum, back cavity resonances become more prominent.
Acoustic and perceptual studies focusing on the frication noise show that properties of the spectrum, amplitude, and duration of the noise all serve to distinguish the sibilant from the non-sibilant fricatives across a wide variety of languages. In addition, spectral properties distinguish /s/ from /ʃ/, with /s/ having a concentration of energy in higher frequencies than /ʃ/. None of the noise properties seem adequate to distinguish /f/ from /θ/. Acoustic and perceptual studies of fricative-to-vowel formant transitions suggest that transitions may provide unique information for those contrasts that are difficult to distinguish on the basis of the frication itself.
Fricatives, especially /s/ and /ʃ/, have also been shown to carry information about social-group membership, including speakers’ sexual orientation and social class.
Measures such as spectral moments can be sensitive to differences in sampling rate and type and exact location of the analysis window. Methods to obtain reliable measurements are discussed, including ensemble averaging and multitaper analysis. In addition, alternatives to spectral moments such as the Discrete Cosine Transformation coefficients are introduced.
Article
Phonetics of Tone (African Languages)
Scott Myers
Most of the languages of Africa are tone languages, and the distribution of tones in these languages is often integrated into the morphology and syntax. Descriptions of tone in African languages have been influential in the development of linguistic approaches to tone and in particular autosegmental representations. But almost all of those descriptions are based on phonetic transcriptions, which are subjective and imprecise. Experimental phonetic investigations, based on objective measurements and quantitative analysis, have given new insight into old issues in this area.
Phonetic research on tone is concerned with how tones relate to fundamental frequency (f0), what factors affect that relation, how tones are produced, and how listeners recognize tone categories. Such research on African tone languages has provided significant information about how tone categories can differ in f0 contour. It has yielded evidence about downdrift and downstep, two notions derived from the study of these languages. It has shown how intonation can work in a language in which tone is used to distinguish words. It has shed light on how tones can be realized in the face of interruptions of modal voicing. The small but growing body of experimental work on tone in African tone languages is significant because these languages make up a good proportion of the tone languages in the world, and because tone patterns in these languages have shaped how linguists look at tone.
Article
Sardinian
Michele Loporcaro and Ignazio Putzu
Sardinian is documented in continuous texts from the 11th century onward, at a historical period when the Republic of Pisa, at that time a maritime power, exerted its influence (linguistic and otherwise) on the island. In earlier centuries, Sardinian gradually became differentiated from Latin under Byzantine rule, which resulted in Greek influence. Later, Catalan, Spanish, and finally Italian were the main sources of contact pressure on Sardinian qua official languages, endowed with prestige, in subsequent periods, whereas Sardinian dialects were progressively relegated to spoken and informal usage. At present, language shift toward Italian is rampant, and Sardinian, in both its main varieties (Logudorese and Campidanese), now counts as seriously endangered.
The phonology of Sardinian is markedly different from that of the rest of the Romance languages, its main peculiarity lying in the stressed vowel system, in which the outcomes of Latin /iː/ and /e/ and /oː/ and /u/, respectively, remained distinct. Another peculiarity of Sardinian phonology is the preservation of Latin word-final -/s/ and -/t/ in the verbal and nominal inflection, which contributes to shape the inflectional morphology of Sardinian. Finally, the definite article /su/ ‘the.m.sg’, an outcome of Latin ipsum rather than illum, is also characteristic for Sardinian. By contrast, the syntax of Sardinian does not exhibit on the whole similarly marked peculiarities compared to the rest of the Romance languages. The properties just mentioned demarcate Sardinian stricto sensu, consisting of Logudorese and Campidanese, from the Tuscanized varieties spoken at the northern fringe of the island, Sassarese and Gallurese.
Their origin is debated, and many scholars now believe that they are varieties imported from Corsica, a scenario that seems implausible to the present writers. Instead, we provide evidence in support of the traditional view that Sassarese and Gallurese arose by modification of originally Sardinian dialects due to Pisan-Genoese influence in the late Middle Ages, which resulted in their being reshaped. Finally, the island also hosts two Romance language enclaves: Catalan in Alghero (in the northwest) and Genoese in Carloforte and Calasetta (in the southwest).
Article
The Semantics and Syntax of the Nominal Construction in Chinese Xiang
Man Lu, Yi Zhen, Ma Yu, and Li Shihui
In classifier languages, a classifier is often used with a numeral; for instance, to count numbers of items. However, there are also cases in which a classifier is used without a numeral, such as [CLF+N]. The interpretation of a [CLF+N] construction varies. Generally, it is interpreted as definite in subject position, and indefinite in object position. This observation has widely been reported in many dialects spoken in southern China, like Yue and Wu.
The definite reading created in [CLF+N] constructions is derived from movement of the noun to Clo, where an iota operator is inserted, and where it is proposed that the nominal phrase in Chinese has a [ClP[NP]] structure. The definite reading of the [CLF+N] construction noun movement happens in Cantonese Yue, while in Mandarin Chinese this is not possible, since the movement of the noun to the head is blocked for reasons that are not clear.
Another approach to deal with the case is to propose a [DP[ClP[NP]]] structure, in which there is a DP projection with a null D, and the classifier is a quasi-definite article with the meaning of “identifiability” or “familiarity.” The definite reading is related to information structure and to context-dependency. This observation is also made in Lianjiang, where a [CLF+N] construction can be interpreted as definite in object position of a control verb or, when it functions as a defective or beneficial theme, the definiteness in such constructions is affected by both syntax and context.
The [CLF+N] construction is also observed in Xiang. However, the interpretation and distribution of such constructions is different from those observed in Yue and Wu. Specifically, in Xiang, the [CLF+N] construction can: (a) appear in subject and object position, (b) follow a pronoun/proper name [pronoun/proper name+[CLF+N]], (c) precede a proper noun [CLF+proper noun], and (d) appear in a topic position. In subject position, it can be interpreted as either definite or generic; in object position, it can be interpreted as definite and nonspecific. In a topic position, it can be interpreted as either definite or generic. When it follows a pronoun or proper name, the interpretation is ambiguous between a definite reading and a nonspecific reading. Factors like syntactic position, verb properties, aspect, and telicity all affect the interpretation of the [CLF+N] construction.
The data in Xiang can be accounted for with the structure [DP[ClP[N]]] proposed in the literature. That is, there is a null D in the nominal structure in Xiang. In the process of derivation, the classifier moves up to the null D to check the definite feature in D. The noun moves to the head classifier position after the classifier has moved up; otherwise, it stays in situ if a numeral blocks the movement.
Article
History of the Catalan Lexicon
Josep Martines
Catalan is a western Romance language closely related to the Gallo-Romance languages, especially to Occitan. Therefore, most words of the Catalan basic lexicon have a great affinity to Occitan. Throughout its history, Catalan inherited from Latin many words of non-Indo-European (Iberian and Old Basque) and Indo-European (Proto-Celtic and Celtic) origin. It had contacts and received borrowings from several languages, mostly Germanic (Gothic and Frankish), Arabic, Aragonese, Occitan, Italian, French, and more recently English. Eventually, the use of Catalan gained strength in formal contexts (literary, scientific, administrative texts, among others) during the Middle Ages, which in turn encouraged the development of varied lexical resources (popular vocabulary and learned words), norms of correct usage, and elaborate register variation.
The progressive expansion of the Crown of Aragon toward the south and east of the Iberian Peninsula (13th century)—and its later integration into the Spanish monarchy at the end of the Middle Ages —prompted its contact with Spanish and a process of Hispanization of the Catalan lexicon. At the end of the Middle Ages, a change of its sociopolitical status provoked the beginning of a process of loss of social prestige and the interference of the Spanish lexicon. The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century witnessed a process of recuperation of the usage in all spheres of society, the elaboration of a linguistic norm, the depuration of interference, and the activation of the resources of lexical and terminological production.
