Languages in Contrast - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2021

Old (Medieval and Classical) Spanish permitted finite enclisis and as such is classified as a strong-F language, as are many archaic varieties of Romance languages. Notable about Old Spanish is that, prior to the 1500s, interpolation arrangements were acceptable and rather common, as is still the case of Galician and some dialects of Portuguese. However, from the 1500s onward, interpolation in Old Spanish was no longer productive, much like modern Asturian. This is evidence that the “strong-weak” dichotomy of FP is insufficient to explain the situation of the languages. I argue that the strength of FP should be described as not only “weak” or “strong,” but instead on a gradient scale to distinguish languages that permit a range of possible clitic arrangements.

The main aim of the present paper is to compare the realization patterns of directive speech acts produced by the Speaker of the House of Representatives of New Zealand and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper focuses on head acts only, disregarding modification. Head acts are analyzed and compared in terms of their explicitness and implicitness, as defined in the framework proposed by Vine (2004a, 2004b). Overall results show that explicit head acts were dominant in both data sets. Furthermore, significant differences were noticed in terms of the findings for certain sub-forms of the explicit head acts, such as the imperative form, which is more frequent in parliamentary directives in Serbian, as are performative verbs. Modal verbs were typical of the parliamentary directives in English. The results are discussed in the context of the findings of previous relevant studies.

This paper provides the first contrastive analysis of a coherence relation (viz. addition) and its connectives across a sign language (French Belgian Sign Language) and a spoken language (French), both used in the same geographical area. The analysis examines the frequency and types of connectives that can express an additive relation, in order to contrast its “markedness” in the two languages, that is, whether addition is marked by dedicated connectives or by ambiguous, polyfunctional ones. Furthermore, we investigate the functions of the most frequent additive connective in each language (namely et and the sign SAME), starting from the observation that most connectives are highly polyfunctional. This analysis intends to show which functions are compatible with the meaning of addition in spoken and signed discourse. Despite a common core of shared discourse functions, the equivalence between et and SAME is only partial and relates to a difference in their semantics.

This study focuses on French and English abstract nouns denoting properties that can be ascribed to humans, such as beauty, carefulness and anger. Previous research showed that some but not all of these nouns are licensed in both locative existentials (e.g., There’s an intense anger in Isabella) and possessive existentials (e.g., Isabella has an intense anger). What remains unclear is how these and other patterns correlate among themselves depending on how easily they host such nouns. We here use speaker ratings of these nouns in different constructional environments. A principal component analysis suggests that the main dimension underlying native speakers’ ratings of these abstract nouns in six different patterns is temporal limitability. This gradable distinction, strongly correlated with the locative existential, holds for both the French and English data and outweighs any French-English contrastive differences in how acceptable human property nouns are considered to be in the patterns studied.

This article presents a contrastive analysis of the English copular subschema [become + past participle] and the equivalent copular subschema [devenir + past participle] in French, based on web data. It is shown that both patterns are almost equally productive at the subject complement level. Furthermore, a more in-depth analysis demonstrates that, in the segment of participles with a high adjectival potential, devenir accumulates more participle tokens than become. Conversely, the reverse holds true for participles with a high verbal potential, in which case become is characterized by more participle tokens than devenir. This high amount of combinations between become and eventive participles also suggests a higher degree of passivity for become. However, in the segment of participles with an intermediate verbal potential, devenir is slightly more type frequent than become, which hints at an emerging productivity in this area for devenir as well.

Cross-linguistically, there are different patterns for denominal verb formation and languages show preferences for certain patterns (cf. McIntyre, 2015). In this paper, I focus on denominal verb formation in English and Modern Greek. The analyzed data come from the TenTen corpora (Sketch Engine, Kilgariff et al., 2014). The first aim is to quantify the use of the patterns of denominal verb formations in both languages. The results of the analysis corroborate the findings of previous analyses, such as the strong preference for conversion for denominal verb formation in English and for suffixation in Modern Greek. However, the present paper aims to go a step further. The second aim is to discuss why English and Modern Greek show these preferences. I propose that the preferences can be explained if we correlate the parameters of inflectional marking, word order/configurationality, system of lexical category assignment and boundary permeability.