a corpus-based analysis of tonal, syllabic and segmental aspects

Due to its history of language contact with French, modern Vietnamese contains numerous loanwords of French origin, many of which refer to a variety of culturally transmitted items (such as clothing, food, technology, tradeable objects more generally). The present study deals with the phonological aspects of such loans, considering tone, syllable structure and segmental structure. The analysis is based on a corpus of roughly 500 Vietnamese nouns of French origin that, according to native speakers’ judgments, are still in use. As for tonal structure, generalizations about tone assignment made in previous research are modified. The systematic analysis of repair strategies applying to French consonant clusters in onsets and codas shows that Vietnamese generally prefers deletion over epenthesis, unlike many other languages, with two additional repair processes being attested in specific contexts, as well

Language contact between Italian and English: a case study on nouns ending in the suffix -ing

The article deals with how English deverbal nouns with the suffix -ing have been imported into Italian. The focus is on the semantic characteristics of these borrowed nouns in Italian and, in particular, on the question of whether they have been borrowed not as simple sign-concept pairings but with argument and event structure. In previous research, it has been claimed that argument and event structure need to be licensed by some overt functional element. Hence, borrowed deverbal nouns should have argument structure and event structure only if they have an overt affix, in other words, only if the forms are not borrowed holistically as unsegmented words but retain internal morphological structure, implying that morphological borrowing of the affix has occurred. When a foreign affix combines with native bases of the recipient language, this is often considered an important criterion for morphological borrowing, which is clearly not the case for the suffix -ing in Italian. Here, it will be shown that contrary to expectation, numerous occurrences with argument and event structure may be found in a large Italian web corpus for a sample of English deverbal nouns ending in -ing, borrowed into (certain registers) of Italian

Semantic and distributional patterns of Spanish negation with nouns and adjectives: A Lexical-Realizational Functional Grammar approach

This study examines the semantic and distributional characteristics of the Spanish negation no when it occurs before nouns and adjectives, specifically, whether these instances diverge from sentential negation, but also from negation via prefixes such as des- ‘dis-’ or in- ‘in-, un-’. Using data from the Spanish Web 2011 corpus, it is shown that the use of no before adjectives aligns with other forms of constituent negation, often resulting in a contradictory interpretation, that is similar to that of sentential negation. However, the interpretation of no preceding nouns exhibits a broader range of interpretations, depending on whether the noun refers to an eventuality, quality, or entity. In such instances, no shows parallels to negative prefixes, frequently indicating privation rather than contradiction. Consequently, no can be analyzed as a building block of phrases, expressing syntactic negation, behaving similarly to other adverbs, as well as a building block of words, expressing lexical negation, resembling Spanish prefix-like elements like cuasi ‘almost’ or ex ‘ex-’. The analysis is couched within the framework of Lexical-Realizational Functional Grammar (LRFG), integrating aspects of Lexical Functional Grammar and Distributed Morphology. This approach does not treat morphology and syntax as separate modules, thus allowing us to account for the variable distribution and interpretation of no by means of a single representation in vocabulary structure, drawing on constituent structure representations which are needed on independent grounds for adverbs and for prefix-like elements

Variable and invariable liaison in a corpus of spoken French

Using texts selected from the C-Oral-Rom corpus, this study considers how linguistic and sociolinguistic variables affect liaison. In the majority of cases, liaison appears on monosyllabic function words. Individual lexemes differ greatly in rate of liaison. With regard to sociolinguistic variation, female speakers realize liaison consonants more often than male speakers, younger speakers realize it more often than older speakers, and liaison rates for speakers without university degree are higher than for speakers with university degree. Results are discussed in the light of models of prosodic structure and with respect to their implications for models of socio- linguistic variation

Paradigmatic structures in Romance verbs

This project investigates the relationship between assignment of word stress and patterns of stem distribution, sometimes termed morphomes, in Romance verb paradigms, using the method of artificial language learning