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Existential sentences in Spanish are sensitive to the definiteness or quantification restriction or effect, which prevents personal pronouns, proper nouns, and definite constituents from occupying the pivot position. Contact varieties between Spanish, a robust language as regards the effect, and Catalan, which has a weaker version, remain largely unexplored. This paper fills this void. A large corpus was gathered to quantitatively study the variation between definite and indefinite pivots. Examples involving definite, specific pivots and even proper names, hitherto unnoticed, are brought to the fore. The pivot of the existential in Spanish is argued to bear Partitive case, as shown by (i) pronominal existential pivots in other Romance languages, (ii) the phi-feature defectiveness of the clitic out of the pivot position, (iii) and partitive pronouns with unaccusatives in Spanish. The hypothesis is put forth that varieties of Spanish in contact with Catalan no longer relate Partitive case to the non-definiteness of the pivot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios de Linguistica del Espanol is the property of University Library of Bern 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.)

Our paper seeks to bridge the gap between a linguistic and a technological description of Artificial Intelligence, as we see chatbots and other representations pushing to the forefront of academic ways of working. We set out to venture a philologist's perspective on AI, critically reflecting upon the extent and nature of a lexicographical software's 'intelligence.' We shall discuss and demonstrate AI's potentials and limitations by adhering to the specific case of the recently released English Dialect Dictionary Online 4.0 (Markus and team 2023). While we propose that EDD Online is 'intelligent' in the sense that its retrieval software will anticipate and be capable of answering many of the questions that dialectologists would raise, we claim that the reason for such 'intelligence' is inherently rooted within the competence of humans in terms of predicting such questions and of eliciting the answers by means of complex query rules. We shall in fact argue that – as opposed to retrieval software types like the hotly debated ChatGPT chatbot, which are merely black box phenomena – EDD Online 4.0 's user interface represents a rare feature of AI: transparency and proactive user-friendliness. (185 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to review the history of dialectology at Vilnius University since the establishment of the Department of the Lithuanian Language in 1940. To achieve this, we have set the following objectives: 1) to present the teaching of dialectology, 2) to review the dialect material collection, and 3) to examine existing research. Descriptive, analytical, and evaluative methods are applied in the study. The beginning of dialectological research is associated with the name of Antanas Salys. The works of Aleksas Girdenis and Zigmas Zinkevičius are also discussed in the paper, as well as the teaching of the dialectology subject, methods of collecting dialectological material and directions of dialectological research. The paper distinguishes the paradigms of traditional, structural, and new dialectology dialectology, and examines their methodological similarities and differences. The most important conclusions and summaries of the paper are fundamentally related to dialectological paradigms: in more than eighty years since the first dialectology subject taught at Vilnius University, the understanding of dialectology has changed. The stage of traditional dialectology at the University was extremely important, as it produced the most fundamental works that are still used today. The structural dialectology paradigm and Prof. Girdenis Dialectology School that trained a large group of productively working Lithuanian dialectologists has flourished over the years. Currently, the new paradigm of dialectology is making its way, offering new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of dialects.

Dialect classification is a long-standing issue in Chinese dialectology. Although various theories of Chinese dialect regions have been proposed, most have been limited by similar methodological issues, especially due to their reliance on the subjective analysis of dialect maps both individually and in the aggregate, as well as their focus on phonology over syntax and vocabulary. Consequently, we know relatively little about the geolinguistic underpinnings of Chinese dialect variation. Following a review of previous research in this area, this article presents a theory of Chinese dialect regions based on the first large-scale quantitative analysis of the data from the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects, which was collected between 2000 and 2008, providing the most up-to-date picture of the full Chinese dialect landscape. We identify and map a hierarchy of 10 major Chinese dialect regions, challenging traditional accounts. In addition, we propose a new theory of Chinese dialect formation to account for our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boletín de Filología is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades 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.)