Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 30, Issue 2, 2007

The present paper deals with the preposition au-delà de as a scalarity marker in three languages — French, English and Hebrew — representing each a distinct family: Roman, Germanic and Semitic, respectively. Our study is performed in the theoretical framework of the semantics of degree (cf. J. Hay, C. Kennedy, B. Levin 1999 ; C. Kennedy & L. McNally 1999 ; C. Piñón 2000 ; C. Kennedy 2001 ; C. Kennedy & B. Levin 2002 ; P. Caudal & D. Nicolas 2003, among others). Most of the current studies concentrate on the analysis of scalar and comparative modifiers. However, little has been said about the prepositional environment. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to find out what makes a prepositional phrase capable of measuring a property or an event on a degree scale.

Licensing of NPIs in Spanish varies depending on the semantics of the trigger. Nonveridical operators license n-words, and antiveridical operators license ni-minimizers. I argue that the NPIs that can occur in antiveridical contexts have a scalar presupposition, but those that are licensed in strictly nonveridical contexts are non-scalar. In this analysis, n-words are scalar (incorporating a silent ni ‘even’) in the scope of antiveridical operators. The distinction between scalar and non-scalar NPIs, I suggest, is the reason for the diversity of polarity sensitivity phenomena in Spanish, as well as in other languages.

A satisfactory description of the predicates from the theoretical point of view is necessary when elaborating electronic dictionaries meant for natural language processing. We focus on the methodology and descriptors we use within the framework of the classes of objects. At the same time, we put forward complementary descriptors so as to deal with predicative polysemy. Our analysis is illustrated by means of perception predicates.

Analysing the c’est-à-dire’s distribution as it occurs in the oral code, as well as its monolingual and dialectic uses, amounts to evaluate the scope of the phrase : a scope that can either be said to be narrow, if there are phrasal constituents, large if there are independent finite clauses. The distinction that was established to explain for the occurrences of c’est-à-dire in writing, i.e. that distinguishes between c’est-à-dire as linking phrasal constituents and c’est-à-dire que as introducing phrases, is not valid in the oral code : c’est-à-dire can also link phrases and c’est-à-dire que is not systematically the mark of a large scope, the conjunction que not always being dependent on the c’est-à-dire phrase.

In this paper I present a work in progress concerning the mimesis of Italian speech, which is possible to study not only into the two traditional forms of language — written and spoken — but also in broadcast language of tv series. In order to find examples of mimesis of spoken language which are as close as possible to the contemporary linguistic reality, I have excluded all specialised TV programmes which cater for specific contents and sectorial registers and I concentrate on television stories of TV fiction. Tv fiction can be divided up into various narrative formulae and, depending on the subject matter, in different macrocategories. I have focused my study on a particular kind of fiction based on realistic serial format: family fiction, which narrates the daily life of a family or group of families whose stories become entwined in a succession of petty or major events where the language must necessarily draw on colloquial Italian. The corpus analysed in this first phase of the research project was taken from two series: La famiglia Benvenuti (1968) and Un medico in famiglia (1998). I have selected a shortlist of phenomena which best match up to the characteristics of spontaneous speech, grouped in four areas of analysis: 1: Register and lexical–grammatical phenomena; 2: Linguistic commonplaces; 3: The polyvalent ‘che’; 4: Mechanisms of segmentation and focalisation.

The insertion of inflectional suffixes in the verbal paradigm is a widespread phenomenon, characteristic of Romance verbal morphology. Traditionally, there are two types of hypotheses that concern verbal amplifications: on the one hand there is a phonological explanation that relies on the criterion of the “generalization of stress”, on the other hand there is a semantic-functional hypothesis based on the theory of verbal aspect. This contribution proposes an analysis of the suffix -ëi- that appears in the verbal forms with stressed stem in the Badiot dialect, one of the idioms of the central Ladin group. The confrontation of the traditional hypotheses with a corpus of 2040 verbs of the first conjugation of the Badiot dialect, reveals that neither the phonological hypothesis nor the semantic-functional hypothesis can account for the insertion of the suffix. An alternative hypothesis is proposed, wich considers stress in a paradigmatic perspective wich that explains the presence of the suffix by the generalization of the metrical structure associated with the lexical stem of the infinitive.

In the study we describe in our thesis, we analyze « verb (+preposition) + noun » or « noun + verb » French combinations, known as support verb patterns (also known as light verb patterns in English). The grammar we describe is intended to comply not only with tree adjoining grammar formalism, but also with a more abstract language called metagrammar. In order to build an accurate and realistic syntactic lexicon, we use a corpus from the French daily Le Monde (developed at Paris 7 University), so as to represent only the most productive predicative nouns. The corpus allows us as well to check the regularities of support verb patterns in contemporary French. Applying our low-level grammar to a series of test sentences enables us to make sure that sentences whose descriptions used to be impossible or unsatisfactory may be adequately parsed.