Linguistics in the Netherlands - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2015

The two primary goals of this article are to present data concerning the mood-based alignment split that can be observed in Panará pronominal clitics and to put forward a tentative formal analysis that can capture the motivations of such phenomena in the grammar. This paper aims to explore an approach to mood from a simple syntactic perspective, in which different sets of features active in the narrow syntax suffice to derive the case marking phenomena that are correlated with mood in Panará.

This study investigates whether grammar and pragmatics are separate linguistic components or not, and whether children with SLI and children with HFA have overlapping or distinct linguistic profiles. We examine two DP-related phenomena: the mass-count distinction (grammatical) and the choice for a definite/indefinite article (pragmatic). We tested 27 children with HFA aged 6–14, age and gender matched to 27 children with SLI, and 27 TD controls on a Quantity Judgment Task (mass-count) and an Elicited Production Task (article choice). Our results show that pragmatics can be impaired independently from grammar (in HFA) and vice versa (in SLI), providing evidence for a modular view of grammar and pragmatics, and against an overlap in the profiles of SLI and HFA.

Traditionally a two-way distinction is made in French between learned and non-learned suffixes, based on etymology. However, this distinction does not account for all suffixes. Furthermore, suffixes are traditionally considered as categorial heads, but some suffixes derive words of multiple categories. This paper proposes an alternative analysis of French suffixes, distinguishing three instead of two types, using a theory by Creemers et al. (2015) proposed for Dutch. In their analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology, Creemers et al. distinguish three instead of two types of suffixes, proposing an alternative to Lowenstamm (2010). Starting from their proposal, we show that it is possible to distinguish three types of suffixes in French as well, accounting for the categorial flexibility of some suffixes, without resorting to the vague distinction between learned and non-learned.

This paper provides a novel syntactic analysis of the Dutch prefix be-. This prefix can derive new verbs by attaching to verbs (be-vindV-en ‘to be located’), nouns (be-dijkN-en ‘to dam up’) or adjectives (be-grootA-en ‘to economize’). It can also form new adpositions by combining with adjectives (be-needA-en, ‘below’) or prepositions (be-ove(r)P-(e)n ‘above’). We propose an analysis of be- based on Aboh’s (2010) account for complex locative expressions in typologically different languages, including Gungbe, Zina Kotoko, English and Dutch. We extend this analysis to Dutch verbal complexes, and argue that be- expresses a functional category (F°) that embeds a predicate phrase containing the element it attaches to, in both adpositions and verbs. Our analysis goes against Hoekstra, Lansu and Westerduin’s (1987) small clause account of be- in verbal complexes in which be- is the head of a predicate phrase (Pr°).

In British English (BrE), a subset of pronominal objects of prepositions in have/with possessives may be optionally realised as prepositional object gaps (POGs). In this short paper, we introduce three core properties of this previously unreported phenomenon, and then outline a preliminary syntactic analysis to straightforwardly capture them. These properties are: POGs are only observed in BrE, POGs are only observed in have/with possessives, and POGs are only observed in structurally simplex complements of possessive have and with. We show that these properties are straightforwardly captured by an analysis that treats POGs as arising from A-movement of the possessor. We claim that the locus of variation between dialects that permit POGs and dialects that do not is the feature specification of a single syntactic head, which either induces or precludes A-movement. This proposal accords with current Minimalist approaches to microparametric variation, in which all variation stems from the lexicon.

Indefinite articles are generally used to introduce new or unfamiliar entities to the discourse. However, in noun phrases such as een opgeluchte Obama ‘a relieved Obama’, the proper noun denotes a familiar individual who does not even have to be new in the discourse. Yet, an indefinite article is used in this construction. We have conducted a corpus study in written Dutch and a production experiment in order to find out the characteristics of this construction as well as its definite counterpart. We will show that the denotation of the adjective plays a crucial role in the semantic composition of the construction, and that preferences for either a definite or an indefinite article correlate with differences in the duration of the state denoted by the adjective. We will use semantic type-theory to account for these findings.

The difference between weak crossovers and weakest crossovers is usually derived from a distinction between quantifiers and non-quantifiers (Lasnik & Stowell 1991). In this paper I will derive crossover restrictions from a new example set, long movement constructions with Dutch A-bar pronouns. Besides question wh-pronouns and relative pronouns, the set of Dutch A-bar pronouns includes topic d-pronouns not available in English. I will argue that A-bar pronouns constitute a uniform set of quantifiers, be it quantifiers with a discourse antecedent. To explain the present analysis, I take Safir (2004) and Ruys (2004) as a starting point. A major difference between these approaches and my own is that my analysis will make a distinction between strong crossovers as binding failures versus weak and weakest crossovers as a matter of discourse dependency, whereas it is more usual to see a related explanation for strong and weak crossovers versus weakest crossovers.

Morphological case is a cross-linguistically widespread strategy to mark the role of participants of an event. Using a computer simulation, this paper will show how case can emerge in languages that have no rules of grammar as a result of cultural evolution. For this, only very general cognitive and communicative principles are necessary.

The last decades have witnessed a shift from anecdotal remarks concerning the “marriage” of music and lyrics in songs towards a more scientific approach to the matter. Textsetting has thus become the object of more formal analyses accounting for the regularities observed in individual singing traditions with regard to the mapping of linguistic material on musical structures. This paper illustrates the nature of the problem and reflects the status of the research on textsetting in living traditions. It is addressed to a wide audience of linguists interested in the relationship between language and music and points to the challenges that await the further development of this field of studies under the umbrella of linguistics.

In this paper we studied the interpretation of sentences with the Dutch universal quantifiers alle (all) and elke (each) in collective, distributive and cumulative situations. In the first experiment, 25 adults and 30 children from 5 and 6 years old performed a truth-value judgement task. Adults and children show similar interpretations for collective and distributive, but perform different for cumulative. As a follow-up we performed a preference task. Participants gave their preferences for the three situations for both quantifiers. Children, regardless of the quantifier, prefer the distributive situation. Adults have a strong preference for distributive for elke, showing a wider range of interpretation for alle. These data clearly indicate that Dutch children do not yet have acquired the full range of restrictions for the quantifiers alle and elke.

This paper documents a number of restrictions on negation marking in Avar, a Northeast Caucasian language, and presents a tentative analysis of the observed morphosyntactic facts as having a semantic basis. The two different negation markers are analysed, based on the proposal in (Ramchand & Svenonius 2014), as taking complements of a different semantic type.

Prior research shows that morphological richness facilitates acquisition and that paradigm size is more important than uniqueness of form-function pairings (uniformity). The present paper takes a novel approach to uniformity, not restricted to inflectional morphology, and aims to establish whether morphological richness is more important than uniformity when competing forms from different linguistic levels are taken into account. To this end, the paper compares the acquisition of adjectival degree markers in Dutch and Russian. Dutch has scarce adjectival (degree) morphology, but more one-to-one form-function mappings, whereas the Russian system involves rich morphology, but little uniformity. A longitudinal study of spontaneous child speech and a cross-sectional elicitation experiment provide converging evidence that Russian children have more difficulty acquiring degree markers: their acquisition rate is lower and error rate higher. It is concluded that uniformity is more important than morphological richness, when cross-categorical cue competition (beyond inflectional morphology) is taken into account.