In the history of Brazil, Africans and their descendants figure prominently. In many of the country’s regions, they represented a majority of the population, especially in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The features of Brazilian Portuguese are described and the possible links between the demographic makeup of the country and the presence of the features are explored.
Article
Morphological and Syntactical Variation and Change in Brazilian Portuguese
J. Clancy Clements
Article
Morphology of Determiners in the Romance Languages
Franck Floricic
The question of articles and definiteness has given rise to a great deal of work, whether from a theoretical, typological, historical, or other perspective. Given the breadth of the field, it would be unrealistic in a synthesis of this kind to go through all the work that has been done on this subject, some of which may be relatively old. We have therefore focused on a certain number of aspects which seemed relevant to us, taking into consideration dialectal data which are not often taken into account. Another difficulty of the undertaking is that the question of articles concerns various fields of investigation: syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. The focus of this contribution is therefore on the morphology of articles in Romance languages. After having sought to circumscribe the concept of determination, the origin and distribution of articles in a number of Romance varieties are described. Particular attention is paid to the phenomena of variation that manifest themselves at the phonomorphological level. The morpho-syntax of other kinds of determiners is discussed as well—demonstratives, quantifiers, and possessives. The question of the maintenance of case distinctions in the Romance determiners will also be addressed, as well as the discussed and intriguing question of lack of agreement within the noun phrase. Given their special status, it will be shown that personal and place names show particular constraints with respect to definite articles, due among other things to their historical genesis.
Article
Number Marking in Nouns and Adjectives in the Romance Languages
Franck Floricic
Even though Romance languages are taken to be well-known because of their clearly identified ancestor, they continuously offer a source of patterns and phenomena that are far from being properly taken into account in typological surveys. Corbett rightly pointed out that the question of number has erroneously been held to be simple and straightforward. Needless to say, if many Romance varieties suffer from endangerment or from sociological marginalization, other varieties like French are in some sense trapped in the ice of their norm and such a situation may lead in some cases to questionable analyses. Any French speaker will hold that the feminine of adjectives such as natif [naˈtif] ‘native’ is formed by substituting [f] for [v] and adding final -e at the orthographic level, hence the feminine singular form native [naˈtiv], as in, say, vert-e ‘green’. It is clear, however, that the opposition between natif and native relies on voice-alternation of the adjective final consonant. Various examples of this kind can be adduced to show how phonetic processes contribute to morphological oppositions.
Article
Usage-Based Approaches to Germanic Languages
Martin Hilpert
The theoretical outlook of usage-based linguistics is a position that views language as a dynamic, evolving system and that recognizes the importance of usage frequency and frequency effects in language, as well as the foundational role of domain-general sociocognitive processes. Methodologically, usage-based studies draw on corpus-linguistic methods, experimentation, and computational modeling, often in ways that combine different methods and triangulate the results. Given the availability of corpus resources and the availability of experimental participants, there is a rich literature of usage-based studies focusing on Germanic languages, which at the same time has greatly benefited from usage-based research into other language families. This research has uncovered frequency effects based on measurements of token frequency, type frequency, collocational strength, and dispersion. These frequency effects result from the repeated experience of linguistic units such as words, collocations, morphological patterns, and syntactic constructions, which impact language production, language processing, and language change. Usage-based linguistics further investigates how the properties of linguistic structures can be explained in terms of cognitive and social processes that are not in themselves linguistic. Domain-general sociocognitive processes such as categorization, joint attention, pattern recognition, and intention reading manifest themselves in language processing and production, as well as in the structure of linguistic units. In addition to research that addresses the form and meaning of such linguistic units at different levels of linguistic organization, domains of inquiry that are in the current focus of usage-based studies include linguistic variation, first and second-language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change.
Article
Morphology of Clitic Pronouns in the Romance Languages
Berthold Crysmann and Ana R. Luís
Bound weak pronominals, such as French les in Je les ai vu(e)s ‘I have seen them’ or Italian lo in Giovanni lo vuole ‘John wants it’, are generally known in the literature as clitic pronouns. There are a number of reasons why it has been claimed that these forms behave more like affixes than like independent word forms. Among other aspects, it has been shown that the behavior of Romance clitic pronouns inside the clitic cluster is morphophonologically and morphotactically identical to that of affixes. Likewise, the fact that clitic pronouns both trigger non-productive allomorphy on the verb and undergo allomorphic variation indicates that clitic pronouns attach to the verb in the morphology rather than in the syntax. In this article, we survey the main morphological properties that have been previously documented for Romance clitic pronouns. We show that the Romance languages exhibit a variety of morphological idiosyncrasies and that such variation poses serious challenges to general syntactic principles. Having demonstrated the affixal nature of clitic systems, we then turn to more controversial aspects of clitic pronouns, namely clitic climbing with auxiliaries and complex predicates. These contexts, which pose interesting challenges to both morphology and syntax, have been commonly used to weaken the inflectional approach to clitic pronouns. We survey existing lexicalist accounts of clitic systems and show how the interaction between clitics and syntax can be captured within an inflectional analysis of clitic pronouns.
Article
Verb Formation by Means of Suffixes in the Romance Languages
Elmar Schafroth
Suffixation is one of the most frequent and most productive word-formation processes in the Romance languages. One branch of it, the formation of verbs through suffixes, is particularly productive, especially regarding the formation of causative verbs with learned or borrowed verb stems (e.g., Fr. glorifier ‘to glorify’, Sp. alfabetizar ‘to alphabetize’, Pt. modernizar ‘to modernize’, Rom. a steriliza ‘to sterilize’). Other derivation techniques, however, such as evaluative verb suffixation (e.g., It. dormicchiare ‘to doze’), are not or are only slightly productive but semantically very complex. In this article, all common verb formations by means of suffixes in all major and some minor Romance languages are treated systematically. A fundamental division is made into non-evaluative and evaluative verbal suffixations. By considering Latin, the etymological foundations and the pre-Romance derivation suffixes are also briefly touched on. Finally, using dictionaries and digital corpora, the aspect of productivity of word formation patterns is considered. As far as evaluative derivation is concerned, it has been shown that the two parameters of quantity and quality across all Romance languages are neither stable nor predictable for any of the relevant suffixes but depend on the meaning of the underlying verb, the situational context, and the attitude of the speakers.
Article
Agreement in the Romance Languages
Michele Loporcaro
This article examines agreement in the Romance languages in light of current studies and with the toolkit of linguistic typology. I will first introduce the definition of agreement assumed in the article, demonstrating its superiority to the alternatives proposed in the literature, and then move on to consider empirical data from all branches of the Romance language family, illustrating how agreement works in all its components. This will require dealing with, in order, the controllers and targets of agreement, then the morphosyntactic features that are active in the agreement rules, then the conditions that may constrain those rules, and finally the syntactic domains in which agreement takes place. In the first half of this overview, the focus will be mainly on what is common to all Romance languages, while in the second half I will concentrate on the phenomena of agreement that are remarkable, in that they are rare and/or unexpected, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It will become clear from this survey that there is no dearth of such unusual phenomena, and that the Romance language family, especially through its lesser-known nonstandard local vernaculars (which will be treated here with equal dignity to the major literary languages), holds in store considerable richness that must be taken into serious consideration by any language typologist interested in agreement.
Article
Morphologization and the Boundary Between Morphology and Phonology in the Romance Languages
Paul O'Neill
This article analyses, from a Romance perspective, the concept of morphologization and seeks to answer the following question: At what point does a historically proven phonological cause-and-effect relationship, whereby phonological feature X causes and determines phonological feature Y, cease to hold and the dephonologized Y element stand as a marker of some morphological distinction? The question is relevant to cases in which the original phonological conditioning element is still present and where it has disappeared. I explain that the answer to this question depends entirely on one’s conception of morphology and phonology. I argue against theories that adhere to the principle of lexical minimization and have a static conception of morphology, which is restricted to the concatenation of idiosyncratic morphemes. These theories are forced by their theoretical underpinnings, which are often ideological and not supported by robust empirical evidence, to explain morphologized phenomena as being synchronically derived by phonology. This approach comes at a huge cost: the model of phonology is endowed with powerful tools to make the analysis fit the theory and which ultimately diminishes the empirical content and plausibility of the phonological hypotheses; such approaches also constitute serious problems for language acquisition and learning. I argue for more dynamic and abstractive models of morphology, which do not impose strict restrictions on lexical storage. I ultimately view morphologization as an instance of morphologically conditioned phonology and uphold that there is no strict boundary between the phonology and morphology but both systems overlap and interact.
I analyze data and phonological explanations of metaphony in nouns and verbs in Italo-Romance, plural formation in Spanish and Portuguese, the distribution of velar allomorphy in the Italian and Spanish verbs, and the distribution of verbal stress in Surmiran Romansh and Spanish. With reference to the latter, the contribution dedicates significant space exploring the extent to which the diphthong/monophthong alternation in Spanish, and different types of allomorphy in Surmiran Romansh, is a matter of phonologically conditioned allomorphy or morphologically conditioned phonology.
Article
Alignment and Word Order in the Romance Languages
Francesco Rovai
The term “alignment” refers to the formal realization of the argument structure of the clause, that is, the ways in which the core arguments of the predicate are encoded by means of three main morphosyntactic devices: nominal case marking (morphological case, adpositions), verb marking systems (verbal agreement, pronominal affixes, auxiliaries, voice distinctions, etc.), and word order. The relative importance of these mechanisms of argument coding may considerably vary from language to language. In the Romance family, a major role is played by finite verb agreement and, to a lesser extent, auxiliary selection, participial agreement, voice distinctions, and word order, depending on the language/variety. Most typically, both transitive and intransitive subjects share the same formal coding (they control finite verb agreement and precede the verb in the basic word order) and are distinguished from direct objects (which do not control finite verb agreement and follow the verb in the basic word order). This arrangement of the argument structure is traditionally known as “nominative/accusative” alignment and can be easily identified as the main alignment of the Romance languages. Note that, with very few exceptions, nominal case marking is instead “neutral,” since no overt morphological distinction is made between subject and object arguments after the loss of the Latin case system.
However, although the Romance languages can legitimately be associated with an accusative alignment, it must be borne in mind that, whatever the property selected, natural languages speak against an all-encompassing, holistic typology. A language “belongs” to an alignment type only insofar as it displays a significantly above-average frequency of clause structures with that kind of argument coding, but this does not exclude the existence of several grammatical domains that partake of different alignments. In the Romance family, minor patterns are attested that are not consistent with an accusative alignment. In part, they depend on robust crosslinguistic tendencies in the distribution of the different alignment types when they coexist in the same language. In part, they reflect phenomena of morphosyntactic realignment that can be traced back to the transition from Latin to Romance, when, alongside the dominant accusative alignment of the classical language, Late Latin developed an active alignment in some domains of the grammar—a development that has its roots in Classical and Early Latin. Today, the Romance languages preserve traces of this intermediate stage, but in large part, the signs of it have been replaced with novel accusative structures. In particular, at the level of the sentence, there emerges an accusative-aligned word order, with the preverbal position realizing the default “subject” position and the postverbal position instantiating the default “object” position.
Article
Gothic and Other East Germanic Varieties
Stefan Schaffner
Biblical Gothic is the earliest Germanic language preserved in a longer text. The main source is represented by the Bible translation of the Visigothic Arian Christian bishop Wulfila ( born ca. 311, deceased ca. 382–383). Another few short Gothic texts are extant. For the translation of the Bible (ca. 350–380), on the basis of a Greek text, Wulfila invented his own alphabet (called Wulfila’s alphabet), using the Greek alphabet as model, with the addition of Latin and runic characters. Several manuscripts (5th/6th century; the most famous is the Uppsala Codex argenteus) contain the greater part of the New Testament. In spite of its fragmentary documentation, Gothic represents without doubt an important basis for the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, because it offers—due to its early attestation—very archaic features in all areas of its grammar in comparison with the other old Germanic languages, the documentation of which began some centuries later. Gothic also shows recent innovations (especially the almost complete elimination of the effects of Verner’s Law within the strong verbs). The position of Gothic within the other Germanic subgroups, North and West Germanic, is still a matter of controversial discussion. Whereas older research stressed the correspondences between Gothic and North Germanic and, therefore, favored a closer relationship between them, postulating a subgroup Goto-Nordic, currently, a subgrouping into Northwest Germanic on the one hand and East Germanic (with Gothic as the most important representative) one the other hand is preferred, although this model also leaves open a couple of questions, giving impetus to further research. Other varieties of East Germanic are runic epigraphic texts (less than 10, most of them probably Gothic) from the 1st half of the 3rd century until the end of the 6th century. One of them (on the Charnay fibula, 2nd half of the 6th century) is probably of Burgundian origin. The documentation of other EGrm (East Germanic). languages is very poor and consists almost only of a few names. Two short syntagmata can probably be attributed to Vandalic. Crimean Gothic, the latest attested EGrm. language, is documented in a list of several dozen words and three lines of a cantilena. Most attested forms seem to represent a late EGrm. dialect.