Linguistic Variation - Online First

This paper presents a survey of complementation strategies that are employed in Pazar and Ardesheni dialects of Laz, an endangered South Caucasian language that has been in contact with Turkish for decades. Our survey reveals strong signatures of contact in that nominalization patterns not present in cognate systems but present in Turkish seem to have been transferred into Laz. An intriguing asymmetry concerning the two dialects is that the Turkish noninalization pattern seems to have been directly copied into Pazar Laz whereas Ardesheni Laz seems to have developed a novel complementation pattern that mixes finite complementation with nominalization. Furthermore, in both dialects, complement clauses that denote propositions remain untouched by the dominant nominalization strategy in Turkish, raising questions on grammatical asymmetries in susceptibility to contact effects.

We present a cross-linguistic dataset of force-flavor combinations in modal elements, which currently contains information on modal semantics in 24 languages and is accessible at https://github.com/EdinburghMeaning​Sciences/modals_database. We discuss theoretical motivations for constructing the dataset, the data collection methodology, as well as the design and the format of the dataset. We also present four case studies using the data: (i) assessment of cross-linguistic generalizations on force/flavor variability; (ii) exploration of generalizations in the lexicalization of negative modality; (iii) investigation of the typology of the morphological encoding of modal strength; and (iv) examination of how future contributes to modality. These case studies illustrate that the dataset supports in-depth assessment of potential cross-linguistic generalizations as well as theory-informed investigations of cross-linguistic variations in modal semantics.

This paper investigates the emergence of differential object marking (DOM) in the Asia Minor Greek dialect of Pharasa (PhG) under contact with Turkish. We show that DOM in Turkish and PhG are both instances of structural accusative case and DOM can be formally modeled as context sensitive dependent case. We propose that two factors caused the emergence of DOM in PhG, namely (i) case neutralization in indefinite contexts, and (ii) an increase in the number of V-NP idioms borrowed from Turkish where the NP is in bare form. These perturbations led to a significant change in the overall data created by the community resulting in mixed input for the younger generations. Once the amount of bare NPs passed a certain threshold, a divergent grammar became inevitable. We test our proposal using an abductive generalization learning algorithm based on the Tolerance Principle and running a number of simulations. Our simulation results confirm our hypothesis.

In the last sixty years, starting with the method of introspection to judge the acceptability of linguistic data, research methods in linguistics have become more varied and more sophisticated. This also holds for studies on partitivity. In this paper various methods are presented that have recently been used in the literature to study variation in the linguistic expression and the use of partitive constructions and partitive elements in Romance, Germanic and some other languages, language varieties and dialects. It is argued that different types of research call for adapted methods. It is shown that the use of different methods may lead to different results, although this is not always the case. The overview presented in this paper reveals that in recent years much progress has been made in the study of variation in partitives.

This work examines the behavior of vibrant (presenting linguo-alveolar contact) tap/trill variation across generations of bilingual Afro-Caribbean speakers of Spanish and an English-Lexifier Creole, known here as Raizal Creole, in the Archipelago of San Andrés, Colombia. In these islands, a bilingual Spanish variety, known here as Raizal Spanish, coexists with a monolingual Spanish variety spoken by Colombian immigrants (Costeño Spanish). Data consists of over 3,300 tokens (867 trills and 2531 taps) compared across three generations of Raizal Spanish speakers with a sample of 528 segments (133 trills and 395 taps) produced in Costeño Spanish. Results show that although the frequency of use of vibrant taps and trills in younger generations increasingly resembles those presented in the monolingual variety, the behavior of rhotic variation is different in both Spanish varieties. In addition, non-vibrant or approximant variants are increasingly prevalent in the first and second generation informants with rates doubling those of the younger generation and monolingual Costeño Spanish. Results of the cross-variety comparison show that Raizal Spanish displays a generational continuity where a restructuring of the constraint ordering starts in the second generation and is completed with younger Raizales. On the contrary, Costeño Spanish behaves differently in terms of the systematic linguistic conditionings. The evidence suggests that rhotic variation has changed internally within both varieties.

This paper focuses on the variable use of partitive er in two types of constructions. First, er combined with cardinal numbers like drie ‘three’ and quantifiers like genoeg ‘enough’. Second, er combined with an elliptical noun referring to age and weight. Er should be present in the first case (Ik heb *(er) drie ‘I have three’) but absent in the second case (Hij is (*er) tachtig ‘He is eighty’), according to normative Dutch grammars.

The spontaneous spoken speech of 67 speakers born and raised in Heerlen, in the southeast of the Netherlands was analyzed, investigating the use of er also according to social distribution: language background, education/occupation and age.

The results show that er is used variably in the two types of constructions. It was found that younger speakers differ in some contexts from older speakers, suggesting that language change is going on, possibly under the influence of standard Dutch.

This paper aims to make a contribution to the study of the nature of syntactic categories by analysing a single element in a single language, namely the marker -lao in Yixing Chinese. Although this marker has previously been analysed as an adjectivaliser (Hu and Perry 2018), we show that it has a much broader range of uses. We suggest that the bulk of cases can be captured in a unified way by supposing that the marker in question displays a type of possessive semantics (which we label possession-as-attribute), which is defined by delineating a kind (in the sense of e.g. Carlson 1977; Chierchia 1998), with similar semantics being expressed by adjectival elements in languages such as English. It is observed, however, that this meaning can emerge in the absence of the marker -lao, and that -lao can, in a restricted set of cases, surface in the absence of this meaning, and we suggest that these facts are attributable to the diachronic development of the marker and can be captured synchronically by making use of late-insertion mechanisms for phonological and semantic features. We propose that the case of -lao provides a suggestive argument for a substance-free approach to syntactic features, whereby syntactic features are not inherently specified for interface interpretations. Other cross-linguistic implications of our analysis are noted, in particular for the representation of adjectives.

The starting point of the present article is the usage of mass nouns with indefinite articles, known from modern Bavarian and neighbouring dialects. Our analysis is dedicated to the use of the indefinite article varying with bare nouns in a historical perspective, based on a cookbook handwritten in 1556 in the East Swabian variety of Augsburg, containing about 900 instances of mass nouns with and without articles. Like in modern Bavarian, the readings OBJECT and QUALITY can be distinguished. A comparison with the de-nominals in Old Spanish recipes shows that the indefinite articles appear in equivalent positions with mass nouns mostly denoting non-specific regular objects as instantiations of the kind. The discussion of quantifiers and measuring expressions shows a special syntactic and semantic behaviour of ain wenig ‘a little’. The final discussion leads to the assumption that the indefinite article does not formally express a partitive relation, but, at most, produces partitive effects.