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How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19econgrès international des linguistes, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken to be licensed only in a subset of intensional contexts. However, in our relative clauses, subjunctive is exceptionally licensed in extensional contexts. At the same time, the interpretation of these relative clauses still involves modality, a type of modality that targets the goals of the agent of the main event. We argue that the pattern displayed by these relative clauses follows straightforwardly if subjunctive is associated with a modal operator that, like modal indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in Journal of Semantics 35(1):1–41, 2017), can project its domain from a volitional event. Overall, our proposal supports the event-based analysis of mood (Kratzer in Evidential mood in attitude and speech reports. Talk delivered at the 1st Syncart Workshop, Siena, July 13, 2016; Portner and Rubinstein in Natural Language Semantics 28:343–393, 2020) and extends its application beyond attitudinal and modal complements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the phenomenon of inalienable possession between a dative argument and a body-part noun in Spanish. Specifically, it looks at contexts where the inalienable possession interpretation is obligatory, as in constructions containing monoeventive verbs of perception, and those where the inalienable reading becomes optional, namely with bi-eventive predicates denoting a change of state. I offer a possessor raising and applicative hybrid analysis, whereby the inalienable possessor originates inside the body-part DP and raises to the specifier of an applicative head to license dative case; the position ApplP occupies in the derivation determines the dative's interpretation as a mere possessor (low applicative), or as an affected possessor as well (middle applicative). Alternatively, cases where the dative is not understood as the inalienable possessor but simply as affected occur when this argument is an additional one originating in the specifier of the middle applicative head, and the possessor of the body-part noun is encoded internally via a clitic or strong possessive, or by means of a genitive PP inside the DP. Thus, I propose the existence of two types of affected applicative heads: (i) one whose specifier is available for the possessor inside the possessum DP to move into to be case licensed, and (ii) another introducing an additional argument in its specifier. Additionally, this analysis accounts for the complementary distribution between dative possessors and possessive determiners in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contact linguists have proposed that core borrowing can indicate language attrition – as the loan replaces its native-origin counterpart – while cultural borrowing expands the lexicon (Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical linguistics: An introduction, 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, Tadmor and Haspelmath (Tadmor, Uri & Martin Haspelmath. 2009. Loanwords in the world's languages: A comparative handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter) found that in core borrowing cases, coexistence of the foreign and the native forms is more common than replacement. In this paper, I explore coexistence and replacement scenarios of Spanish-origin core loan verbs and their native-origin counterparts in Paraguayan Guaraní. These loans have been previously described as instances of code-switching (Estigarribia, Bruno. 2017. Insertion and backflagging as mixing strategies underlying Guaraní-Spanish mixed words. In Bruno Estigarribia & Justin Pinta (eds.), Guaraní linguistics in the 21st century, 315–347. Leiden: Brill; Kallfell, Guido. 2016. ¿Cómo hablan los paraguayos con dos lenguas?: gramática del jopara. Asunción: CEADUC). Tokens of highly frequent native-origin verbs along with their broadly equivalent Spanish-origin loans were extracted from 40 interviews and were correlated with the senses of each verb. Results show that some Spanish verb loans replace its native-origin counterpart to convey only one of its senses, while the native-origin form remains the preferred form to convey the other senses. This specialized use also suggests that these semantically specialized Spanish verb loans are not code-switches but rather integrated lexical items in Guaraní. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitive causative change of state (TCoS) verbs elicit scalar readings, distinguishing them between: upper-bounded verbs (e.g., dry), denoting a culminating change of state, and lower-bounded verbs (e.g., wrinkle), denoting a change from a zero to a non-zero value (or from one value to another) regarding the property described by the semantic core of the verb. In their eventive reading, transitive experiencer object (TEO) verbs (e.g., calm down, delight) also denote causative eventualities able to yield scalar inferences. This study investigates whether TEO verbs are also associated with a minimum or maximum standard degree, proposing a similar subdivision of TEO verbs into lower-bounded items (delight) and upper-bounded items (calm down). In a forced-choice selection experiment we tested the impact of the standard degree (bound) of the semantic core of Spanish TEO verbs on the availability of lower-bounded or upper-bounded readings comparing them to TCoS verbs. Results revealed that the factor bound was significant to the extent that both lower-bounded TEO and TCoS predicates yielded the response compatible with a lower-bounded reading significantly more often than predicates that possess a maximum degree, supporting the distinction between lower and upper bounded items. Further, a significant effect of verb type was also observed, differentiating a change of state on the mental (TEO) versus the physical (TCoS) levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passive sentences have been traditionally analyzed in French by descriptive studies in the aim of elucidating the use of the auxiliary verbs être and se faire (Tesnière 1988; Le Goffic 1993; Riegel et coll. 1994; Le Bellec 2014). In Spanish, the formally equivalent auxiliary verbs are ser and hacerse but their use is not concurrent since hacerse is semantically restricted to express beneficial actions (e.g., Se hizo masajear la espalda, He had his back massaged). The goal of our paper is to compare –in spoken French and Spanish– the grammatical and lexical means used in the topicalization of non-volitional patients involved in unpleasant actions. Our results showed that French speakers produced 59.3% of passive sentences, whereas Spanish speakers showed a preference to conceptualize the Patient-victim as an accusative within active voice sentences (37.5%). Concerning the passive sentences produced by each group, French speakers showed an overt preference for the auxiliary se faire (78.9%), whereas in Spanish the Patient-victim's topicalization was most frequently marked by a Latin-derived prepositional object complement (58.8%). Our paper indicates that the topicalization of a Patient-victim is a distinctive typological feature between French and Spanish, and suggests the salience of passive-perspective conceptualizations in French for the semantic domain of unpleasant actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the possibility that Spanish intransitive verbs showing middle marking with no associated change of valency are a source of non-oppositional middle verbs. In order to do so, a study is conducted of the historical evolution of the middle-marked Spanish verb reír(se) 'to laugh' as well as other semantically related verbs (such as alegrar(se) 'to be happy, pleased', regocijarse 'to rejoice' and burlar(se), mofar(se), escarnecer(se) 'to mock, to ridicule, to make fun of'), where the presence of the middle marker is associated with a valency-reducing diathesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantics of zero-derivation/conversion has attracted renewed interest both as a subject of description and as a means towards refined descriptions of the process. This paper takes the latter stance and compares which semantic categories occur in zero-derivation/conversion and in overt affixation in two languages with a different morphological model: English and Spanish. For attestation and distribution of the semantic categories, the paper relies on a stratified sample of denominal verbs collected from two comparable corpora: the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. The sample consists in sets of ca. 50 denominal verb-forming resources, one per affixation process, namely affixation by -ate, -(i)fy, -ize/-ise, -en, en- in English, a-...-ar, en-...-ar, -ear, -ecer, -(i)ficar, -izar in Spanish, and zero-derivation/conversion in both languages. The results are contrasted within and across affixes/processes, within each language and across the two languages for the adequacy of a description as zero-derivation or as conversion. Statistical analysis shows that the process/affixes form a cline with overlaps and closer associations between specific affixes/processes and semantic categories, but no clear divide between zero-derivation/conversion and the rest of processes as far as the semantic categories are concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new approach to the alternate use of Spanish hacerse 'to make (reflexive)' and volverse 'to (re)turn (reflexive)' to express a change of state. Hacerse and volverse belong to the core of the family of change-of-state verbs in Spanish and constitute a prime example of alternating forms. The aim is to evaluate the importance of the notion of construal as an explanation to alternation. We do this by testing one of the major explanations regarding the difference between hacerse and volverse, namely that of Delbecque and van Gorp (Delbecque, Nicole & Lise van Gorp. 2012. Hacerse y volverse como nexos pseudo-copulativos. Bulletin hispanique 114(1). 277–306, Delbecque, Nicole & Lise van Gorp. 2015. The pseudo-copular use of the Spanish verbs hacerse and volverse: Two types of change. Cognitextes 13), who suggest that the distinction is one of construal. A sentence completion task involving priming and non-priming visual stimuli is used to investigate to what extent the distinct conceptual images associated with hacerse and volverse affect the choice of verb in given contexts. The results show little evidence of the importance of construal for the choice of verb. Instead, established V + ADJ combinations seem to have a greater impact on choosing either verb. This calls into question the applicability of construal as an explanation to alternation, especially from the perspective of choice between alternating forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Light verb constructions (LVCs) permeate the oral and written productions of native (and nonnative) speakers of typologically different languages (e.g., Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Sino-Tibetan languages, among others). From a cross-linguistic perspective, LVCs share basic combinatory and predicative features. However, semantic and morphosyntactic contrasts are visible even in closely related languages such as Spanish and Italian. Therefore, this paper aims to show some of the most significant asymmetries existing between Peninsular Spanish light verb constructions and their equivalent forms in Italian. The ultimate goal of this research is to highlight some of the systematic contrasts that affect specific semantic classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse Spanish verbal constructions that accept both the clitic se and the prefix auto- in order to determine whether these formations are or are not more agentive than the corresponding non-prefixed constructions (autocriticarse vs. criticarse). The proposal arises from the discussion about the different semantic values observed in formations with auto- and explores the distinctive features of such formations in contrast to those without auto-. We carried out a twofold analysis: first, we applied a set of tests of agentivity and control to a sample of 130 verbs with auto- extracted from the Modern Spanish Reference Corpus (CREA) and compared the sample with its non-prefixed pronominal pairs (i.e. verbs with clitic se). Second, we carried out a series of surveys using similar tests with Spanish speakers to guarantee the acceptability of the corpus interpretations. We argue that prefixed constructions show a higher degree of agentivity and control by external arguments, which results in the impossibility of bidirectionally replacing these constructions with those that only have the clitic se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a study that aimed to reflect on the implications of the use of cambio verbs in the acquisition process of Spanish as an L2 by Brazilian learners and to analyze the effects of a pedagogical intervention based on a self-instruction about these verbs in predicative constructions, contrasting their aspectual properties. The experiment was carried out with a group of participants who performed sentence acceptability judgment tasks with the target verbs (ponerse, quedarse, hacerse and volverse) in predicative constructions, interspersed by the self-instruction. Data analysis revealed that there was a slight increase of the accuracy and the reaction times decreased afterthe instruction. These results, although without a solid statistical significance, may indicate the potential of this pedagogical intervention to contribute with the learning of cambio verbs in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English vague language (VL), as in general noun phrases, general extenders and general verbs, is central to casual conversation. It can have discourse functions and create an informality and solidarity. The rationale for the study described here was a gap in the literature vis-à-vis language learner metapragmatic awareness of VL in their L1. It was hypothesised that attitudes towards VL vary from language to language. This paper describes a comparative questionnaire study of German, Spanish and Mandarin speakers' attitudes to VL in their languages. Subjects were invited to translate English VL to their languages and to think of other vague forms: German speakers volunteered 'Dingsbums' and 'und so'; Spanish speakers suggested 'cómo se llame' and 'o algo así; Mandarin speakers noted 'na ge dong xi'. Subjects were also asked to describe social variables, domains and functions associated with their VL: German speakers saw VL as creating closeness but many felt that it made addressors sound unreliable and mildly impolite; Spanish speakers mostly saw VL as a way of showing a relaxed, close, comfortable, friendly, but a few saw it as an sign of laziness and impoliteness; Mandarin speakers responded that VL was a marker of friendly informality and solidarity but they mostly associated it with indifference, laziness, impatience, irritation, anger, disappointment, contempt and dishonesty. The paper concludes with suggestions of ways to incorporate tasks on VL into English language teaching classrooms, and to raise language teachers' awareness of English L2 users' beliefs and intercultural differences in terms of VL. • Vague language forms, functions and variation. • Close with family and friends. • Indifference, impoliteness with strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, our aim is to present the results of our researchs about the anaphoric accusative object in the Spanish variety of Madrid and in the Brazilian Portuguese variety of São Paulo and to propose a theoretical analysis to these constructions based on minimalist developments (CHOMSKY, 1999, 2000, 2004). Interviews of the Spanish variety of Madrid (CESTERO MANCERA et al. 2014) and Brazilian Portuguese variety of São Paulo (LIMA-HERNANDES; VICENTE, 2012) were analysed. Regarding the theoretical approach, the biological (CHOMSKY, 1981, 1986) and social (LABOV, 2008; WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2009) perspectives on language were combined. We observed the effect of the antecedent referenciality, of the determinant indefinite features, of the bare nouns, of the structure and lexical aspect of verbs on possibility of elipsis in the Spanish variety of Madrid. Concerning the Brazilian Portuguese variety of São Paulo, the null objects were almost categorical and the lexical pronoun presented restrictions to less referencial antecedents. These results ressemble the tendencies of our previous research (SIMÕES, 2015) and the Spanish varieties of País Vasco (LANDA, 1993) and Quito (SUÑER; YÉPEZ, 1988). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of LINRED. Linguistica en la Red is the property of Universidad de Alcala. UAH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Talmy’s (e.g., 1985, 2000) seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy’s speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual Corpus, the present paper examines the variable position of the 1sg Spanish subject pronoun yo—pre- versus post-verbal—to consider the effect that code-switching may have on structural change. In an analysis of close to 700 tokens of yo, a rate of 16% post-positioning is found, which is within the range of post-position in non-contact varieties and thus contraindicative of the convergence hypothesis, in accordance with which the almost exclusive use of preverbal subject pronouns in English would predict lower rates of post-verbal yo in a converged contact variety. Moreover, by testing factors hypothesized to account for choice of post-posing yo using multivariate analysis, it is shown that bilinguals display similar constraints on yo post-positioning in New Mexican Spanish as monolingual speakers of Spanish, providing stronger support for an anti-convergence account. Results are discussed in terms of bilingual parallel activation, syntactic priming, and construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current experiment employs a variational pragmatics perspective to explore how the contextual variables of power, distance, and imposition jointly affect social groups' and individuals' choice of verb forms in requests in Madrid, Spain. Using a mixed-method approach to explore the requests of 111 Spanish speakers from Madrid, quantitative analyses determined the level of significance and hierarchical order of the predictor variables of power, distance, and imposition on verb form and also the distribution of verb forms by gender, with male and female participants exhibiting significant differences. Additionally, certain participants demonstrated decreased sensitivity to contextual factors, adopting more categorically indirect or direct request strategies. The examination of both gendered request patterns and the stances that single participants adopt through their verb-form selections contributes to our understanding of the social moves that are made by all speakers, not just those who fall within the gendered norms. The results highlight the different frames and social meanings attached to these forms at the micro- and macro-social levels, providing new insight into the complex relationship among linguistic variables, contextual factors, and social groups and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer “to seem/to appear” in different tenses, with and without experiencers, and with Tense Phrase (TP), verb phrase (vP) and Adjectival Phrase (AP) complements. The results show that advanced L2 learners can perform just like native Spanish speakers regarding grammatical knowledge in this domain, although the subtle differences between both languages are not explicitly taught. We argue that these results support Full Access approaches to Universal Grammar (UG) in L2 acquisition, by providing evidence that uninterpretable syntactic features can be learned in adult L2, even when such features are not directly instantiated in the same grammatical domain in the L1 grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast amount of research has been carried out inspired by the motion event typology established by Talmy (1985, 2000), that of, verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. However, hardly any research has been devoted to either deeply analyse motion verb lexicons or to explore manner-of-motion verb granularity between languages typologically different or similar (cf. Slobin, 2003, 2006). This paper concentrates on an important subdomain of motion, i.e., human locomotion, and examines the way Spanish and English lexicalise it in verbs. The first part of the paper focuses on the semantics of human locomotion verbs with special attention to the sort of fine-grained manner information that each language encodes. In the second part, an empirical study on how Spanish and English monolinguals categorise human locomotion verbs into three motor pattern categories (Walk -- Run -- Jump) is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modal verbs are well-known to license ellipsis of their complements under certain conditions. In the literature on Spanish, such sequences, which I refer to as Modal Ellipsis (ME), have been traditionally argued to involve a null pronoun. These analyses therefore treat ME simply as an instance of Null Complement Anaphora (NCA). In this article, I scrutinize the data adduced in the literature on Spanish and defend that (i) ME in this language is different from NCA, and (ii) ME must involve PF-deletion of a TP node. Even though these claims are not new, I provide novel data in an attempt to clarify some of the controversial facts and claims that exist in the Spanish literature. In doing so, I strengthen the recent view of ME as a PF-deletion phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish copula verb estar is currently taking part in two of the most well-known paths of semantic change across different dialectal varieties of Spanish: (a) as a main copula verb, in its encroachment on the domain of ser, and (b) as the auxiliary in the Present Progressive marker, as it encroaches in the domain of the Simple Present form (i.e., Sánchez-Alonso 2018; Fuchs 2020). Here we argue for the hypothesis that estar's participation in both paths of change is not coincidental. Focusing on the copular use, we present arguments for the proposal that estar's encroachment is connected to its lexico-conceptual structure, which, under specific communicative pressures, is afforded greater conversational informativity, thus systematically expanding its licensing contexts and, as a result, bolstering its use. Evidence consistent with this analysis emerges from use variation for estar across several dialects of Spanish, both in its copular and auxiliary uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to throw light on the behavior of the Spanish copulas ser and estar in locative sentences, beyond their classical distinction in terms of Individual-Level (IL) versus Stage-Level (SL) predicates. The behavior of the Spanish copulas in locative contexts constitutes an oddity that we aim to probe here: events (concierto 'concert'), despite their clear spatial and temporal anchorage, combine with ser (El concierto es en París 'The concert is in Paris'), which is the copula typically associated with IL or permanent predicates. To do so, we discuss the behavior of copulas as locative verbs in a broader empirical context, where not just events and individuals are considered, but also other types of nominals, such as qualities and states. We argue that ser emerges with events because time and place constituents combine directly with events, without the intermediation of extra predicational structure. When carrying a marked value, that extra predicational structure triggers the insertion of estar; when there is no predication structure (such as with events) and when the predication structure is unmarked (IL predicates), ser appears as the default copula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-linguistic research on event typology has revealed considerable variation in the linguistic conceptualization of placement events. Previous studies on second language acquisition have primarily dealt with the semantic re-categorization of placement verbs in a second language, but placement constructions have received less attention. The present study fills this gap by examining the constructions used by Spanish learners of L2 Danish (B1 and B2 levels) and by monolingual speakers of both languages. Data were elicited by means of the PUT task consisting of oral video descriptions and then classified into six main placement construction categories based on their frequency and structure. Results from the learner group suggest learning difficulties when reconstructing the expression of placement events in L2 Danish. In contrast to L1 Danish data, learners (i) kept using their L1 Spanish basic placement construction more often, (ii) avoided semantically more complex constructions, (iii) employed fewer spatial particles, (iv) showed difficulties in selecting the L2 appropriate spatial particles for specific placement scenes, and (v) used non-caused motion constructions. These findings suggest the creation of a linguistic conceptualization pattern on the part of the learners that is different from the respective L1 and L2 monolingual patterns, thus providing further empirical support for proposals arguing that bilinguals’ multicompetence is not equivalent to those of two monolinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Social Sciences Research / Sosyal Bilimler Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of ODU Journal of Social Sciences Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The debate over the relation between grammatically relevant (specifically, what we term event referential) and idiosyncratic aspects of verb meaning has produced a considerable literature. Some authors, such as Levin and Rappaport Hovav, have appealed to figurative uses of verbs as a source of data when the analysis of their literal uses has been controversial, a move that has sometimes been criticized. However, the question of whether figurative uses of verbs preserve the event referential properties of their literal counterparts and are therefore a valid source of data has not, to our knowledge, been systematically explored. We offer two detailed cross-linguistic case studies of Spanish and English verbs to provide an argument that figurative verb uses indeed are a reliable source of evidence for identifying event referential components of meaning: In each case study we find clear evidence for the preservation of these components across uses, indicating that these aspects of meaning both constrain and facilitate figurative uses of verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative study of the relationship between discourse positions and pragmatic functions of the Spanish discourse markers derived from motion verbs, namely anda , vamos , vaya and venga . These discourse markers are highly polyfunctional and concurrently have a high degree of positional freedom. The results show, first, that the position of a discourse marker and the discourse unit in which the marker is inserted restrict or activate its pragmatic functions. More particularly, discourse markers with an expressive, conative or discourse structuring function present a more increased pragmatic scope than those with a textual function operating at a more profound level of the discourse. Second, the degree of distributional freedom is related to the potential semantic-pragmatic autonomy of the discourse markers, rather than to the degree of functional diversity. In other words, discourse markers that do not necessarily depend on other discourse units (within the same turn) to convey their communicative intentions show a higher degree of positional freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spanish, several constituents have their unmarked position after the sentence's main verb (direct objects, locative adjuncts, depictives, etc.). The linearity of linguistic expressions implies that if two such postverbal constituents appear in a given sentence they must be ordered in a certain way. The present paper examines information focus and syntactic weight as possible factors in postverbal constituent order. Based on data from two experimental studies it will be shown that (i) these factors indeed play a role in postverbal constituent order in Spanish and that (ii) postverbal constituent order is characterized at the same time by optionality and preferences (e.g., although a direct object (dO) and a depictive (DEP) can be ordered as DEP-dO or dO-DEP, the order dO-DEP is clearly preferred over DEP-dO). To account for the optionality and preferences, the data will be modeled in a (simplified) Stochastic Optimality Theory grammar without assuming a basic constituent order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We examine the puzzling displacement in various Spanish dialects of a plural suffix from a verb where it is motivated semantically, syntactically, and morphologically onto a following clitic. We present previously unreported data and a new analysis of this material that succeeds where earlier efforts fail to provide a unified account of related phenomena. Our solution, which employs recent work on reduplication and metathesis, allows us to account for seemingly disparate phenomena as special cases of a single general framework and demonstrates that these operations are more versatile than previously thought. Directions for future research are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a snapshot of childhood morphology development in our investigation of two profiles of bilinguals (age 9–10) in an English-Spanish dual immersion academic setting: Spanish heritage language (SHL, n = 21) and second language (SL2, n = 41) children. Three tasks were given to the 62 bilinguals and 15 age-matched controls (Spanish first language, SL1): oral comprehension of 20 singular-plural present verbs, written sentence production of 10 similar verbs, and a meaning-focused writing task. SHL children were comparable to controls in production of number agreement, and showed no asymmetry between comprehension and production. SL2 learners showed lower accuracy than both SHL and SL1 children. A similar pattern was observed when person agreement and tense, aspect, mood and vowel errors were considered. The most common error among SHL and SL2 children was overregularization of stem vowels, a typical developmental error. The Feature Reassembly model of grammar can accommodate the range of possibilities represented by the data we present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple constraints, including semantic, lexical, and usage-based factors, have been shown to influence dative alternation across different languages. This work explores whether fine-grained statistics and semantic properties of the verb affect the acceptability of dative constructions in Spanish. First, a corpus analysis reveals that verbs of different semantic classes occur naturally in alternative dative constructions, a pattern quite different from English. The fact that dative alternation appears independent of semantic classes challenges traditional semantic-based approaches. Second, acceptability rating tasks reveal that dative constructions containing highly entrenched word combinations and frequent word order are judged more acceptable regardless of the verbs' semantics. The results are interpreted in favor of usage-based accounts: Acceptability of dative constructions may be language-specific and depend on patterns of use and conventionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the longstanding problems in linguistic analysis is to identify, describe, and analyze the lexical aspect classes allowed in natural language. Recent developments on this issue have raised two interrelated questions: how many event classes there are and how they are derived from a minimum of primitives. In this article, we identify a class of predicates denoting the maintenance of a situation through which 13 tests can be shown to display mixed properties between states and activities, challenging the existing taxonomies of aspectual classes. We furthermore argue that the existence of this class is expected by any theory that treats aspectual classes as epiphenomena of the combination of a restricted set of primitives, and propose an analysis where they contain a central coincidence preposition selected by an eventive layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir ('feel') which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver ('see') and mirar ('look'), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished - i.e., which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses ( sentirse) and the other uses ( sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the results of the first corpus analysis of Spanish verbs where the correlation between morphological irregularity and frequency was considered. In English, irregular verbs are more frequent than regular ones (Ullman, 1999 and Michel et al., 2011). We tested whether this frequency-irregularity relation observed in English would also hold in a more complex morphological system like Spanish. Results show that frequency and morphological irregularity do not correlate in Spanish. This pattern of results represents a challenge for the Dual-Mechanism model of morphology (Pinker and Prince 1988; Pinker and Ullman 2002), where all irregulars are argued to be stored whole in memory and are predicted to be more frequent than regulars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prescriptive grammars of Spanish claim that inflectional markers of the subjunctive are required for subordinate clause verbs provided that: (1) this clause is introduced by the complementizer que 'that' and (2) the matrix clause construction corresponds to one of several semantic notions, such as the expression of finality, personal commentary, volition, or uncertainty. Actual speech data, however, reveal that speakers variably use indicative and subjunctive moodforms in these contexts. In an attempt to account for variation in the use of mood, many theorists have claimed that use of the subjunctive is also determined by pragmatic factors related to a speaker's knowledge of and/or commitment to the speech proposition. Unfortunately, since these factors are difficult to measure quantitatively, claims of this nature tend to be highly speculative. Given the limitations of previous analyses, the current research will focus on the role of social factors (such as age, sex, language preference, and educational experience) in the conditioning of mood variation in the Spanish of Barelas, one of the original neighborhoods of Albuquerque. Due to the bilingual nature of the speech community, the grammatical distinction between indicative and subjunctive forms is slowly being lost, especially among English-dominant speakers who have never had any formal instruction in Spanish. The influence of English, which has all but lost morphological markers of mood in casual speech, may be serving to accelerate the loss of mood distinctions that is already taking place in monolingual varieties of Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach – combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data – in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) in L2 Spanish. Data elicited through one comprehension and three oral tasks with varying degrees of experimental control show that the emergence of temporal markings is determined mainly by the dynamic/non-dynamic contrast (whether a verb is a state or an event) as beginner and intermediate speakers use Preterit with event verbs but Imperfect mainly with state verbs. One crucial finding is that although advanced learners use typical Preterit–telic associations in the least controlled oral tasks, as predicted by the LAH, this pattern is often reversed in tasks designed to include non-prototypical (and infrequent) form–meaning contexts. The results of the comprehension task also show that the Preterit-event and Imperfect-state associations observed in the production data determine the interpretation that learners assign to the Preterit and the Imperfect as well. These results show that beginner and intermediate learners treat event verbs (achievements, accomplishments and activities) in Spanish as a single class that they associate with Preterit morphology. We argue that dynamicity contrasts, and not telicity, affect learners’ use of past tense forms during early stages of acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crosslinguistically, children begin producing the person and number features of personal pronouns in a similar order. This article explored whether the same is true of verbal agreement morphology and evaluated three potential explanatory hypotheses which could account for a universal sequence of the development of phi features: the existence of an innate feature geometry, statistical properties in the input, and the organization of verbal paradigms. I examined these hypotheses in light of data from 20 bilingual children aged 2;00–3;06 years acquiring Basque and Spanish as well as child-directed speech from four adult speakers of Basque and Spanish. The results did not fit the predictions of the feature-geometric analysis nor the frequency-driven approach. However, there is evidence of paradigm building from the children’s early errors in the production of finite verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines Spanish verb–noun compounds in terms of the role played by, and the relationship between, metonymy and metaphor in generating them. After exploring different referent types denoted by Spanish verb–noun compounds such as instrument, agent, place, plant, animal/insect, and causer event, sample examples are analyzed in each referent type for their conceptualization patterns. The analytical tools are based on the notion of domain-internal and domain-external conceptual mappings for metonymy and metaphor, respectively, as well as on the model proposed in the Combined Input Hypothesis for the analysis of metaphors involving multiple inputs. The analysis of the data shows that there are at least four metonymic and metaphoric patterns involved in Spanish verb–noun compounds and that these patterns are productive. The four patters are: (i) only metonymy is involved; (ii) target-in-source metonymy is derived from metaphor; (iii) metaphor is derived from target-in-source metonymy, and (iv) metonymy is derived from a metaphor which is derived from metonymy. This study proposes that these four types of metonymic and metaphoric patterns mediate the production of novel Spanish verb–noun compounds. The implication of this finding is that the more complex the cognitive operations involved in verb–noun compounds, the less predictable the meaning of the compound will be for the language users who first hear them; but once learnt, the meaning of the compound is stored as a whole unit in their mental lexicon. An analysis of a larger corpus of data in future studies will reveal a more comprehensive picture of the relational patterns involved in Spanish verb–noun compounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]