Published in STUF - Language Typology and Universals
This article discusses the development of the contrastive-partitive function of the possessive =eš in colloquial Persian. Examples of colloquial Persian show that the third person singular clitic pronoun =eš in some adnominal possessive constructions does not refer to any obvious referent present either in the syntactic structure (co-text) or in th...
Published in Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
Spanish locative adverbs may be followed by either a prepositional phrase (PP) (e.g. cerca de mí ‘close to/(of) me’) or, nonstandardly, a tonic possessive (TP) (e.g. cerca mío ‘lit. close mine’). Some also take feminine forms (e.g. cerca mía, detrás mía). Using R, I analyze 16,809 tweets representing 14 locatives from Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Mexi...
Published in Probus
The Italian pair *il luo libro vs. il suo libro (‘the his/her book’) that is typical of Romance lends itself to an account of the first in terms of constraints also seen in the syntax of compounding, and to an account of the second that links its s-, despite initial appearances, to what we think of as Romance reflexive s-. We might informally call ...
El presente trabajo abarca el estudio de la variación en las construcciones adverbiales locativas, que se manifiesta en la alternancia entre la variante ADVERBIO + preposición de + PRONOMBRE PERSONAL (por ejemplo, encima de mí), y la variante ADVERBIO + PRONOMBRE POSESIVO (por ejemplo, encima mío/a). El objetivo consiste en estudiar el posible efec...
Swedish students’ morpheme acquisition order in English, including the acquisition of -s morphemes, is a relatively unstudied topic. Given the morphological differences between the English and Swedish languages, students learning English in Sweden may encounter difficulties in the use of the third person singular present tense -s morpheme. Research...
Published in Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie
This diatopic study examines the characteristics of the locative adverb constructions that select possessive pronouns as complements in Peninsular Spanish oral corpora. Firstly, the range of locative adverbs that take part in this construction are scrutinised, as well as their frequency of use with respect to that of their counterparts, in which a ...
Published in Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This paper argues that you ‘have’ sluice is a variant of pseudosluicing, akin to shi ‘be’ sluice in Chinese. You sluice can be analyzed as a base-generated structure [pro you ‘have’ wh-phrase], consisting of a subject pro, a verb you ‘have’, and a wh-phrase, having nothing to do with movement and deletion. In this simple clause, the pro can either ...
This paper examines the use of Vedic svá- in the hymns of the Ṛgveda and the Atharvaveda. The aim is to show that one of its main values, together with possession, is intensification. The supporting arguments for this statement are: (a) its high frequency in discursively prominent positions of the stanza, (b) its presence in non-reflexive and non-p...
This dissertation focuses on the French word
This dissertation focuses on the French word propre roughly meaning `characteristic-of' and corresponding to English own found in `her own thesis'. This adjective makes extremely varied and complex contributions to the meaning and properties of sentences it occurs in. The present work addresses the question of how these contributions arise. Parsimo...
