Balkan-Romance is represented by Romanian and its historical dialects: Daco-Romanian (broadly known as Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian (see article “Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Romanian” in this encyclopedia). The external history of these varieties is often unclear, given the historical events that took place in the Lower Danubian region: the conquest of this territory by the Roman Empire for a short period and the successive Slavic invasions. Moreover, the earliest preserved writing in Romanian only dates from the 16th century. Between the Roman presence in the Balkans and the first attested text, there is a gap of more than 1,000 years, a period in which Romanian emerged, the dialectal separation took place, and the Slavic influence had effects especially on the lexis of Romanian.
In the 16th century, in the earliest old Romanian texts, the language already displayed the main features of modern Romanian: the vowels /ə/ and /ɨ/; the nominative-accusative versus genitive-dative case distinction; analytical case markers, such as the genitive marker al; the functional prepositions a and la; the proclitic genitive-dative marker lui; the suffixal definite article; polydefinite structures; possessive affixes; rich verbal inflection, with both analytic and synthetic forms and with three auxiliaries (‘have’, ‘be’, and ‘want’); the supine, not completely verbalized at the time; two types of infinitives, with the ‘short’ one on a path toward becoming verbal and the ‘long’ one specializing as a noun; null subjects; nonfinite verb forms with lexical subjects; the mechanism for differential object marking and clitic doubling with slightly more vacillating rules than in the present-day language; two types of passives; strict negative concord; the SVO and VSO word orders; adjectives placed mainly in the postnominal position; a rich system of pronominal clitics; prepositions requiring the accusative and the genitive; and a large inventory of subordinating conjunctions introducing complement clauses.
Most of these features are also attested in the trans-Danubian varieties (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian), which were also strongly influenced by the various languages they have entered in direct contact with: Greek, Albanian, Macedonian, Croatian, and so forth. These source languages have had a major influence in the vocabulary of the trans-Danubian varieties and certain consequences in the shape of their grammatical system. The differences between Daco-Romanian and the trans-Danubian varieties have also resulted from the preservation of archaic features in the latter or from innovations that took place only there.
41-60 of 605 Results
Article
Balkan-Romance
Adina Dragomirescu
Article
Bare Nominals
Bert Le Bruyn, Henriëtte de Swart, and Joost Zwarts
Bare nominals (also called “bare nouns”) are nominal structures without an overt article or other determiner. The distinction between a bare noun and a noun that is part of a larger nominal structure must be made in context: Milk is a bare nominal in I bought milk, but not in I bought the milk. Bare nouns have a limited distribution: In subject or object position, English allows bare mass nouns and bare plurals, but not bare singular count nouns (*I bought table). Bare singular count nouns only appear in special configurations, such as coordination (I bought table and chairs for £182).
From a semantic perspective, it is noteworthy that bare nouns achieve reference without the support of a determiner. A full noun phrase like the cookies refers to the maximal sum of cookies in the context, because of the definite article the. English bare plurals have two main interpretations: In generic sentences they refer to the kind (Cookies are sweet), in episodic sentences they refer to some exemplars of the kind (Cookies are in the cabinet). Bare nouns typically take narrow scope with respect to other scope-bearing operators like negation.
The typology of bare nouns reveals substantial variation, and bare nouns in languages other than English may have different distributions and meanings. But genericity and narrow scope are recurring features in the cross-linguistic study of bare nominals.
Article
Berber-Arabic Language Contact
Maarten Kossmann
Since the start of the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb in the 7th century ce, Berber and Arabic have been in continual contact. This has led to large-scale mutual influence. The sociolinguistic setting of this influence is not the same, though; Arabic influence on Berber is found in a situation of language maintenance with widespread bilingualism, while Berber influence on Arabic is no doubt to a large degree due to language shift by Berber speakers to Arabic.
Linguistic influence is found on all levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. In those cases where only innovative patterns are shared between the two language groups, it is often difficult to make out where the innovation started; thus the great similarities in syllable structure between Maghrebian Arabic and northern Berber are the result of innovations within both language families, and it is difficult to tell where it started. Morphological influence seems to be mediated exclusively by lexical borrowing. Especially in Berber, this has led to parallel systems in the morphology, where native words always have native morphology, while loans either have nativized morphology or retain Arabic-like patterns. In the lexicon, it is especially Berber that takes over scores of loanwords from Arabic, amounting in one case to over one-third of the basic lexicon as defined by 100-word lists.
Article
Bilingualism and Multilingualism from a Socio-Psychological Perspective
Tej K. Bhatia
Bilingualism/multilingualism is a natural phenomenon worldwide. Unwittingly, however, monolingualism has been used as a standard to characterize and define bilingualism/multilingualism in linguistic research. Such a conception led to a “fractional,” “irregular,” and “distorted” view of bilingualism, which is becoming rapidly outmoded in the light of multipronged, rapidly growing interdisciplinary research. This article presents a complex and holistic view of bilinguals and multilinguals on conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic/applied grounds. In that process, it attempts to explain why bilinguals are not a mere composite of two monolinguals. If bilinguals were a clone of two monolinguals, the study of bilingualism would not merit any substantive consideration in order to come to grips with bilingualism; all one would have to do is focus on the study of a monolingual person. Interestingly, even the two bilinguals are not clones of each other, let alone bilinguals as a set of two monolinguals. This paper examines the multiple worlds of bilinguals in terms of their social life and social interaction. The intricate problem of defining and describing bilinguals is addressed; their process and end result of becoming bilinguals is explored alongside their verbal interactions and language organization in the brain. The role of social and political bilingualism is also explored as it interacts with individual bilingualism and global bilingualism (e.g., the issue of language endangerment and language death).
Other central concepts such as individuals’ bilingual language attitudes, language choices, and consequences are addressed, which set bilinguals apart from monolinguals. Language acquisition is as much an innate, biological, as social phenomenon; these two complementary dimensions receive consideration in this article along with the educational issues of school performance by bilinguals. Is bilingualism a blessing or a curse? The linguistic and cognitive consequences of individual, societal, and political bilingualism are examined.
Article
Bilingual Language Processing
John W. Schwieter
Psycholinguistic approaches to examining bilingualism are relatively recent applications that have emerged in the 20th century. The fact that there are more than 7,000 current languages in the world, with the majority of the population actively using more than one language, offers the opportunity to examine language and cognitive processes in a way that is more reflective of human nature. While it was once believed that exposing infants and children to more than one language could lead to negative consequences for cognition and overall language competence, current evidence shows that this is not the case. Among the many topics studied in psycholinguistics and bilingualism is whether two language systems share an integrated network and overlap in the brain, and how the mind deals with cross-linguistic activation and competition from one language when processing in another. Innovative behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroscientific methods have significantly elucidated our understanding of these issues. The current state of the psychology and neuroscience of bilingualism finds itself at the crossroads of uncovering a holistic view of how multiple languages are processed and represented in the mind and brain. Current issues, such as exploring the cognitive and neurological consequences of bilingualism, are at the forefront of these discussions.
Article
Binding in Germanic
Eric Reuland and Martin Everaert
All languages have expressions, typically pronominals and anaphors, that may or must depend for their interpretation on another expression, their antecedent. When such a dependency is subject to structural conditions, it reflects binding. Although there is considerable variation in binding patterns cross-linguistically, in fact, variation is along a limited set of parameters. The Germanic languages exemplify some of the main factors involved.
In Germanic, third-person pronominals generally do not allow binding by a co-argument. However, in Frisian and Afrikaans, they do, being embedded in a richer structure than meets the eye. In Continental West Germanic and Scandinavian, anaphors come in two types: simplex anaphors (SE-anaphors)—deficient for number and gender—and complex anaphors (SELF-anaphors). These typically consist of a pronominal or SE-anaphor combined with an element like Dutch zelf ‘self’ or one of its cognates. In all the Germanic languages SELF-anaphors are bound in their local domain—approximately the domain of their nearest subject—except in a few identifiable positions, where they are interpreted logophorically. That is, they accept a non-local antecedent, provided this element holds the perspective of the sentence.
The distribution of SE-anaphors involves three different conditions. First, they can be bound by a co-argument only if the verb belongs to a restricted class, which allows syntactic detransitivization. Second, in general, SE-anaphors allow non-local binding. But the conditions differ among subgroups. In Dutch and German, they can only be bound non-locally when contained in a causative or perception verb complement or a small clause. In Mainland Scandinavian, non-local binding is, in principle, available to all infinitival clauses (subject to some dialectal variation). For instance, in some varieties of Norwegian, referentiality of intervening subjects restricts binding; in other varieties, the restricting factor is not “finiteness” but “being specified for tense.” Third, in Icelandic long-distance antecedents beyond the infinitival domain are licensed by a subjunctive, together with the requirement that the antecedent holds the perspective. Faroese largely patterns like Icelandic, although lacking a subjunctive. However, the class of verbs that allow this pattern coincides with the class of verbs in Icelandic that have a subjunctive complement.
Non-local binding of SE-anaphors is sensitive to the requirement that the antecedent be animate, but the languages show differences in the details.
Unlike the West Germanic languages, the Scandinavian languages all have a possessive reflexive in third person. In general, their distribution appears to be quite close to that of SE-anaphors, but this is subject to dialectal variation, with various differences in the details.
Article
Biolinguistics
Cedric Boeckx and Pedro Tiago Martins
All humans can acquire at least one natural language. Biolinguistics is the name given to the interdisciplinary enterprise that aims to unveil the biological bases of this unique capacity.
Article
Blending in Morphology
Natalia Beliaeva
Blending is a type of word formation in which two or more words are merged into one so that the blended constituents are either clipped, or partially overlap. An example of a typical blend is brunch, in which the beginning of the word breakfast is joined with the ending of the word lunch. In many cases such as motel (motor + hotel) or blizzaster (blizzard + disaster) the constituents of a blend overlap at segments that are phonologically or graphically identical. In some blends, both constituents retain their form as a result of overlap, for example, stoption (stop + option). These examples illustrate only a handful of the variety of forms blends may take; more exotic examples include formations like Thankshallowistmas (Thanksgiving + Halloween + Christmas). The visual and audial amalgamation in blends is reflected on the semantic level. It is common to form blends meaning a combination or a product of two objects or phenomena, such as an animal breed (e.g., zorse, a breed of zebra and horse), an interlanguage variety (e.g., franglais, which is a French blend of français and anglais meaning a mixture of French and English languages), or other type of mix (e.g., a shress is a type of clothes having features of both a shirt and a dress).
Blending as a word formation process can be regarded as a subtype of compounding because, like compounds, blends are formed of two (or sometimes more) content words and semantically either are hyponyms of one of their constituents, or exhibit some kind of paradigmatic relationships between the constituents. In contrast to compounds, however, the formation of blends is restricted by a number of phonological constraints given that the resulting formation is a single word. In particular, blends tend to be of the same length as the longest of their constituent words, and to preserve the main stress of one of their constituents. Certain regularities are also observed in terms of ordering of the words in a blend (e.g., shorter first, more frequent first), and in the position of the switch point, that is, where one blended word is cut off and switched to another (typically at the syllable boundary or at the onset/rime boundary). The regularities of blend formation can be related to the recognizability of the blended words.
Article
Blocking
Franz Rainer
Blocking can be defined as the non-occurrence of some linguistic form, whose existence could be expected on general grounds, due to the existence of a rival form. *Oxes, for example, is blocked by oxen, *stealer by thief. Although blocking is closely associated with morphology, in reality the competing “forms” can not only be morphemes or words, but can also be syntactic units. In German, for example, the compound Rotwein ‘red wine’ blocks the phrasal unit *roter Wein (in the relevant sense), just as the phrasal unit rote Rübe ‘beetroot; lit. red beet’ blocks the compound *Rotrübe. In these examples, one crucial factor determining blocking is synonymy; speakers apparently have a deep-rooted presumption against synonyms. Whether homonymy can also lead to a similar avoidance strategy, is still controversial. But even if homonymy blocking exists, it certainly is much less systematic than synonymy blocking.
In all the examples mentioned above, it is a word stored in the mental lexicon that blocks a rival formation. However, besides such cases of lexical blocking, one can observe blocking among productive patterns. Dutch has three suffixes for deriving agent nouns from verbal bases, -er, -der, and -aar. Of these three suffixes, the first one is the default choice, while -der and -aar are chosen in very specific phonological environments: as Geert Booij describes in The Morphology of Dutch (2002), “the suffix -aar occurs after stems ending in a coronal sonorant consonant preceded by schwa, and -der occurs after stems ending in /r/” (p. 122). Contrary to lexical blocking, the effect of this kind of pattern blocking does not depend on words stored in the mental lexicon and their token frequency but on abstract features (in the case at hand, phonological features).
Blocking was first recognized by the Indian grammarian Pāṇini in the 5th or 4th century bc, when he stated that of two competing rules, the more restricted one had precedence. In the 1960s, this insight was revived by generative grammarians under the name “Elsewhere Principle,” which is still used in several grammatical theories (Distributed Morphology and Paradigm Function Morphology, among others). Alternatively, other theories, which go back to the German linguist Hermann Paul, have tackled the phenomenon on the basis of the mental lexicon. The great advantage of this latter approach is that it can account, in a natural way, for the crucial role played by frequency. Frequency is also crucial in the most promising theory, so-called statistical pre-emption, of how blocking can be learned.
Article
Bracketing Paradoxes in Morphology
Heather Newell
Bracketing paradoxes—constructions whose morphosyntactic and morpho-phonological structures appear to be irreconcilably at odds (e.g., unhappier)—are unanimously taken to point to truths about the derivational system that we have not yet grasped. Consider that the prefix un- must be structurally separate in some way from happier both for its own reasons (its [n] surprisingly does not assimilate in Place to a following consonant (e.g., u[n]popular)), and for reasons external to the prefix (the suffix -er must be insensitive to the presence of un-, as the comparative cannot attach to bases of three syllables or longer (e.g., *intelligenter)). But, un- must simultaneously be present in the derivation before -er is merged, so that unhappier can have the proper semantic reading (‘more unhappy’, and not ‘not happier’). Bracketing paradoxes emerged as a problem for generative accounts of both morphosyntax and morphophonology only in the 1970s. With the rise of restrictions on and technology used to describe and represent the behavior of affixes (e.g., the Affix-Ordering Generalization, Lexical Phonology and Morphology, the Prosodic Hierarchy), morphosyntacticians and phonologists were confronted with this type of inconsistent derivation in many unrelated languages.
Article
Case
Andrej L. Malchukov
Morphological case is conventionally defined as a system of marking of a dependent nominal for the type of relationship they bear to their heads. While most linguists would agree with this definition, in practice it is often a matter of controversy whether a certain marker X counts as case in language L, or how many case values language L features. First, the distinction between morphological cases and case particles/adpositions is fuzzy in a cross-linguistic perspective. Second, the distinctions between cases can be obscured by patterns of case syncretism, leading to different analyses of the underlying system. On the functional side, it is important to distinguish between syntactic (structural), semantic, and “pragmatic” cases, yet these distinctions are not clear-cut either, as syntactic cases historically arise from the two latter sources. Moreover, case paradigms of individual languages usually show a conflation between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cases (see the phenomenon of “focal ergativity,” where ergative case is used when the A argument is in focus). The composition of case paradigms can be shown to follow a certain typological pattern, which is captured by case hierarchy, as proposed by Greenberg and Blake, among others. Case hierarchy constrains the way how case systems evolve (or are reduced) across languages and derives from relative markedness and, ultimately, from frequencies of individual cases. The (one-dimensional) case hierarchy is, however, incapable of capturing all recurrent polysemies of individual case markers; rather, such polysemies can be represented through a more complex two-dimensional hierarchy (semantic map), which can also be given a diachronic interpretation.
Article
Case Interactions in Syntax
Jessica Coon and Clint Parker
The phenomenon of case has been studied widely at both the descriptive and theoretical levels. Typological work on morphological case systems has provided a picture of the variability of case cross-linguistically. In particular, languages may differ with respect to whether or not arguments are marked with overt morphological case, the inventory of cases with which they may be marked, and the alignment of case marking (e.g., nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive). In the theoretical realm, not only has morphological case been argued to play a role in multiple syntactic phenomena, but current generative work also debates the role of abstract case (i.e., Case) in the grammar: abstract case features have been proposed to underlie morphological case, and to license nominals in the derivation.
The phenomenon of case has been argued to play a role in at least three areas of the syntax reviewed here: (a) agreement, (b) A-movement, and (c) A’-movement. Morphological case has been shown to determine a nominal argument’s eligibility to participate in verbal agreement, and recent work has argued that languages vary as to whether movement to subject position is case-sensitive. As for case-sensitive A’-movement, recent literature on ergative extraction restrictions debates whether this phenomenon should be seen as another instance of “case discrimination” or whether the pattern arises from other properties of ergative languages. Finally, other works discussed here have examined agreement and A’-extraction patterns in languages with no visible case morphology. The presence of patterns and typological gaps—both in languages with overt morphological case and in those without it—lends support to the relevance of abstract case in the syntax.
Article
Case Markers in Indo-Aryan
Miriam Butt
Indo-Aryan languages have the longest documented historical record, with the earliest attested texts going back to 1900 bce. Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic, Sanskrit) had an inflectional case-marking system where nominatives functioned as subjects. Objects could be realized via several different case markers (depending on semantic and structural factors), but not the nominative. This inflectional system was lost over the course of several centuries during Middle Indo-Aryan, resulting in just a nominative–oblique inflectional distinction. The New Indo-Aryan languages innovated case markers and developed new case-marking systems. Like in Old Indo-Aryan, case is systematically used to express semantic differences via differential object marking constructions. However, unlike in Old Indo-Aryan, many of the New Indo-Aryan languages are ergative and all allow for non-nominative subjects, most prominently for experiencer subjects. Objects, on the other hand, can now also be unmarked (nominative), usually participating in differential object marking. The case-marking patterns within New Indo-Aryan and across time have given rise to a number of debates and analyses. The most prominent of these include issues of case alignment and language change, the distribution of ergative vs. accusative vs. nominative case, and discussions of markedness and differential case marking.
Article
Case-Marking in the Romance Languages
Alexandru Nicolae
Case-marking is subject to several important developments in the passage from Latin to the Romance languages. With respect to synthetic marking, nouns and adjectives witness considerable simplification, leading (with some exceptions, i.e., the binary case systems) to the almost complete disappearance of inflectional case-marking, while pronouns continue to show consistent inflectional case-marking. In binary case systems, case distinctions are also marked in the inflection of determiners. Inflectional simplification is compensated for by the profusion of analytic and mixed case-marking strategies and by alternative strategies of encoding grammatical relations.
Article
Catalan
Francisco Ordóñez
Catalan is a “medium-sized” Romance language spoken by over 10 million speakers, spread over four nation states: Northeastern Spain, Andorra, Southern France, and the city of L’Alguer (Alghero) in Sardinia, Italy. Catalan is divided into two primary dialectal divisions, each with further subvarieties: Western Catalan (Western Catalonia, Eastern Aragon, and Valencian Community) and Eastern Catalan (center and east of Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Rosselló, and l’Alguer).
Catalan descends from Vulgar Latin. Catalan expanded during medieval times as one of the primary vernacular languages of the Kingdom of Aragon. It largely retained its role in government and society until the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, and since it has been minoritized. Catalan was finally standardized during the beginning of the 20th century, although later during the Franco dictatorship it was banned in public spaces. The situation changed with the new Spanish Constitution promulgated in 1978, when Catalan was declared co-official with Spanish in Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic Islands.
The Latin vowel system evolved in Catalan into a system of seven stressed vowels. As in most other Iberian Romance languages, there is a general process of spirantization or lenition of voiced stops. Catalan has a two-gender grammatical system and, as in other Western Romance languages, plurals end in -s; Catalan has a personal article and Balearic Catalan has a two-determiner system for common nouns. Finally, past perfective actions are indicated by a compound tense consisting of the auxiliary verb anar ‘to go’ in present tense plus the infinitive.
Catalan is a minoritized language everywhere it is spoken, except in the microstate of Andorra, and it is endangered in France and l’Alguer. The revival of Catalan in the post-dictatorship era is connected with a movement called linguistic normalization. The idea of normalization refers to the aim to return Catalan to a “normal” use at an official level and everyday level as any official language.
Article
Caucasian Languages
Marina Chumakina
Languages from at least five genetically unrelated families are spoken in the Caucasus, but there are only three endemic linguistic families belonging to the region: Kartvelian, West Caucasian, and Northeast Caucasian. These families are rather heterogeneous in terms of the number of languages and the distribution of the speakers across them. The Caucasus represents a situation where languages with millions of speakers have coexisted with one-village languages for hundreds of years, and where multilingualism has always been the norm. The richness of Caucasian languages on every linguistic stratum is dazzling: here we find some of the largest consonant inventories, inflectional systems where the mere number of word forms strains credibility (one of the Caucasian languages, Archi, is claimed to have over a million and a half word forms), and challenging syntactic structures. The typological interest of the Caucasian languages and the challenges they present to linguistic theory lie in different areas. Thus, for Kartvelian languages, the number of factors at play in the verbal system make the task of the production of a correct verbal form far from trivial. West Caucasian languages represent an instance of polysynthetic polypersonal verb inflection, which is unusual not only for Caucasus but for Eurasia in general. East Caucasian languages have large systems of non-finite forms which, unusually, retain the ability to realize agreement in gender and number while their non-finite nature is determined by the inability to head an independent clause and to express certain morpho-syntactic categories such as illocutionary force and evidentiality. Finally, all Caucasian languages are ergative to some extent.
Article
Causative/Inchoative in Morphology
Mercedes Tubino-Blanco
The Causative/Inchoative alternation involves pairs of verbs, one of which is causative and the other non-causative syntactically and semantically (e.g., John broke the window vs. The window broke). In its causative use, an alternating verb is used transitively and understood as externally caused. When used non-causatively, the verb is intransitive and interpreted as spontaneous. The alternation typically exhibits an affected argument (i.e., a Theme) in both intransitive and transitive uses, whereas the transitive use also involves a Causer that brings about the event. Although they are often volitional agents (e.g., John broke the window with a stone), external causers may also be non-volitional causers (e.g., The earthquake broke the windows) and instruments (e.g., The hammer broke the window).
Morphologically, languages exhibit different patterns reflecting the alternation, even intralinguistically. In languages like English, alternations are not morphologically coded, but they are in most languages. Languages like Hindi commonly mark causative (or transitive) alternations by means of different mechanisms, such as internal vowel changes or causative morphology. In many European languages, a subset of alternating verbs may exhibit an uncoded alternation, but most alternating verbs mark anticausativization with a reflexive-like clitic. In Yaqui (Uto-Aztecan), different patterns are associated with different verbal roots. The alternation may be uncoded, equipollent (i.e., both alternating forms are coded), and anticausative.
Theoretically, different approaches have explored the alternation. Both lexical and syntactic causativization and anticausativization accounts have been proposed to explain the alternation. A third approach postulates that both forms are derived from a common source.
Article
Central Italo-Romance (Including Standard Italian)
Elisa De Roberto
Central Italo-Romance includes Standard Italian and the Tuscan dialects, the dialects of the mediana and perimediana areas, as well as Corsican. This macro-area reaches as far north as the Carrara–Senigallia line and as far south as the line running from Circeo in Lazio to the mouth of the Aso river in Le Marche, cutting through Ceprano, Sora, Avezzano, L’Aquila and Accumoli. It is made up of two main subareas: the perimediana dialect area, covering Perugia, Ancona, northeastern Umbria, and Lazio north of Rome, where varieties show greater structural proximity to Tuscan, and the mediana area (central Le Marche, Umbria, central-eastern Lazio varieties, the Sabine or Aquilano-Cicolano-Reatino dialect group). Our description focuses on the shared and diverging features of these groups, with particular reference to phonology, morphology, and syntax.
Article
Central-Southern Italo-Romance
Alessandro De Angelis
Although respective Central (= CIDs) and Southern (= SIDs) Italo-Romance dialects display peculiar linguistic features, they also share a substantial number of common isoglosses such that they can be classified as two subdivisions of the same geolinguistic unit. Some of these are simply represented by the absence of Tuscan features, such as diphthongization in open syllable or anaphonesis. Other features are idiosyncratic and are discussed within the main body of this article, such as: (a) the different types of vowel systems; (b) the two main patterns of metaphony; (c) propagation; (d) phonosyntactic doubling that is not sensitive to stress. Regarding the morphological phenomena present in these varieties, the encliticization of possessives and the loss of both of the future indicative and the present subjunctive will be discussed. With regard to (morpho)syntax, these varieties are known for: (a) the rise of a mass neuter (neo-neuter) class of nouns; (b) an alternating gender value; (c) the extensive use of a dedicated marker to encode the accusative case in highly referential nouns; (d) dual complementizer systems; (e) split intransitivity in auxiliary systems; (f) extensive participial agreement (as well as similar agreement in manner adjectives); and, (g) pseudo-coordination, among other notable phenomena.
Article
Child Phonology
Yvan Rose
Child phonology refers to virtually every phonetic and phonological phenomenon observable in the speech productions of children, including babbles. This includes qualitative and quantitative aspects of babbled utterances as well as all behaviors such as the deletion or modification of the sounds and syllables contained in the adult (target) forms that the child is trying to reproduce in his or her spoken utterances. This research is also increasingly concerned with issues in speech perception, a field of investigation that has traditionally followed its own course; it is only recently that the two fields have started to converge. The recent history of research on child phonology, the theoretical approaches and debates surrounding it, as well as the research methods and resources that have been employed to address these issues empirically, parallel the evolution of phonology, phonetics, and psycholinguistics as general fields of investigation. Child phonology contributes important observations, often organized in terms of developmental time periods, which can extend from the child’s earliest babbles to the stage when he or she masters the sounds, sound combinations, and suprasegmental properties of the ambient (target) language. Central debates within the field of child phonology concern the nature and origins of phonological representations as well as the ways in which they are acquired by children. Since the mid-1900s, the most central approaches to these questions have tended to fall on each side of the general divide between generative vs. functionalist (usage-based) approaches to phonology. Traditionally, generative approaches have embraced a universal stance on phonological primitives and their organization within hierarchical phonological representations, assumed to be innately available as part of the human language faculty. In contrast to this, functionalist approaches have utilized flatter (non-hierarchical) representational models and rejected nativist claims about the origin of phonological constructs. Since the beginning of the 1990s, this divide has been blurred significantly, both through the elaboration of constraint-based frameworks that incorporate phonetic evidence, from both speech perception and production, as part of accounts of phonological patterning, and through the formulation of emergentist approaches to phonological representation. Within this context, while controversies remain concerning the nature of phonological representations, debates are fueled by new outlooks on factors that might affect their emergence, including the types of learning mechanisms involved, the nature of the evidence available to the learner (e.g., perceptual, articulatory, and distributional), as well as the extent to which the learner can abstract away from this evidence. In parallel, recent advances in computer-assisted research methods and data availability, especially within the context of the PhonBank project, offer researchers unprecedented support for large-scale investigations of child language corpora. This combination of theoretical and methodological advances provides new and fertile grounds for research on child phonology and related implications for phonological theory.
