Matching Items (7)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Clitics
- All Subjects: Spanish
- Creators: Gelderen, Elly van
Description
The purpose of this study is to explore the syntax and pragmatics of subject doubling in spoken French. Many prescriptivists have considered it a redundant and ungrammatical form, but over the years, it has gained more interest from syntacticians. It is widely acknowledged that dislocations involve topics, but the position of these structures is very disputed. Some linguists believe in base generation while others state there is movement. The status of subject clitics also comes into play and their role as arguments or agreement markers is crucial to understanding the issues at stake with a topic analysis. It is often argued that the clitics are undergoing a linguistic cycle whereby they lose their function of argument, and need to be reinforced by disjunct pronouns. In this study, I examined which analyses support my data and I attempted to determine what structures tend to be most dislocated by looking at the environment of the discourse in a corpus of spoken French.
ContributorsBlanquart, Eleonore (Author) / Ossipov, Helene (Thesis advisor) / Bahtchevanova, Mariana (Thesis advisor) / Gelderen, Elly van (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Past research has isolated an extension of the copular verb estar into the domain previously sanctioned for its counterpart, ser. This extension has been found in areas of contact between American English and Spanish speaking Mexican immigrants. A similar situation of contact is in occurrence in Arizona, and this study endeavored to evaluate if this same extension was present, and to what degree. This study also explores the framework of linguistic hegemony in order to relate language attitudes in Arizona to language change in Arizona. The findings revealed minimal extension. This may be due to language maintenance in response to hegemony.
ContributorsBonnell, Jamie (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Major, Roy (Committee member) / Ryan, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Adult second-language learners of Spanish struggle with the acquisition of preterite and imperfect selection due to the overtly morphological representation of grammatical aspect. Prior studies have documented the effect of a default encoding without influence of the lexical aspect in the emergence of aspectual morphology, and have proposed the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH).
This study investigates the emergence of aspectual morphology by testing the DPTH and the effect of adverbials at interpreting grammatical aspect in this process of acquisition. Twenty-eight English-speaking learners of Spanish (beginning, intermediate and advanced) and twenty native-Spanish speakers are tested with two written comprehension tasks that assess the interpretation of habitual/imperfect and episodic/preterite readings of eventive verbs. The truth-value judgment task incorporates forty short stories with two summary sentences, from which participants must choose one as true. The grammaticality judgment task presents sixty-four sentences with temporal adverbials of position and duration, thirty-two are grammatical and thirty-two are ungrammatical. Participants must accept or reject them using a 5-point likert scale.
The findings indicate that the DPTH is partially supported by the statistical data showing a default marker, imperfect for beginning learners, and preterite for intermediate learners. This provides support to the argument of unsteady aspectual checking of [-bounded] in the spec of AspP and not necessarily by only checking [+past] in the TP for intermediate learners. The influence of the lexical aspect value of the verb is partially evident with advanced learners. Temporal adverbials play an important role at interpreting grammatical aspect with intermediate and advanced learners. Results show that beginning learners are not influenced by the presence of adverbials due to their inexperience with the Spanish aspectual morphology.
The findings also allow the confirmation of prior results about factors that influence the interpretation of preterite and imperfect. First, the instruction of aspectual morphology co-indexed with specific temporal adverbials, and second, that learners rely on lexical cues at the sentential level, while native speakers rely on discursive ones.
This study investigates the emergence of aspectual morphology by testing the DPTH and the effect of adverbials at interpreting grammatical aspect in this process of acquisition. Twenty-eight English-speaking learners of Spanish (beginning, intermediate and advanced) and twenty native-Spanish speakers are tested with two written comprehension tasks that assess the interpretation of habitual/imperfect and episodic/preterite readings of eventive verbs. The truth-value judgment task incorporates forty short stories with two summary sentences, from which participants must choose one as true. The grammaticality judgment task presents sixty-four sentences with temporal adverbials of position and duration, thirty-two are grammatical and thirty-two are ungrammatical. Participants must accept or reject them using a 5-point likert scale.
The findings indicate that the DPTH is partially supported by the statistical data showing a default marker, imperfect for beginning learners, and preterite for intermediate learners. This provides support to the argument of unsteady aspectual checking of [-bounded] in the spec of AspP and not necessarily by only checking [+past] in the TP for intermediate learners. The influence of the lexical aspect value of the verb is partially evident with advanced learners. Temporal adverbials play an important role at interpreting grammatical aspect with intermediate and advanced learners. Results show that beginning learners are not influenced by the presence of adverbials due to their inexperience with the Spanish aspectual morphology.
The findings also allow the confirmation of prior results about factors that influence the interpretation of preterite and imperfect. First, the instruction of aspectual morphology co-indexed with specific temporal adverbials, and second, that learners rely on lexical cues at the sentential level, while native speakers rely on discursive ones.
ContributorsFistrovic, Tatiana Katy (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Renaud, Claire (Committee member) / Muñoz-Liceras, Juana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation provides an account of evidentiality of a number of selected verbs of perception in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The verbs are divided into three categories: activity, experiential, and source-based, following Viberg (1983). The data shows that the activity P.Vs in MSA are rarely used evidentially whereas the experiential and the source-based ones are commonly used to indicate evidential meaning. It also shows that while the source-based verb is mostly used with an inferred evidential meaning, the evidentiality encoded by the experiential perception verbs is determined by the complementation pattern and the person of the subject (first or third person subject). With the non-finite complement, these verbs indicate a direct evidentiality when having a first person subject, and a reported evidentiality when having a third person subject. With the finite CP complement, they indicate an indirect evidentiality. This corpus-based study also examines the grammaticalization of these verbs when used evidentially. I argue that only the verb ra’aa of the selected experiential verbs is fully grammaticalized, but only when it is in the past tense and followed by a verbal non-finite complement. In this usage, it becomes a light verb. The source-based verb badaa/yabduu when indicating an evidentiality, it is grammaticalized into copulative verb when followed by an adjectival predicate, and modal verb when followed by a finite complement.
ContributorsHarthi, Jaber (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Gebhardt, Lewis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
ABSTRACT
This study explores some grammatical aspects of Rural Palestinian Arabic (RPA), spoken in the vicinity of the city of Tulkarm in the Northwest part of the West Bank, and compares the variety to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Urban Palestinian Arabic (UPA). The study introduces an overview of the Arabic language and its colloquial dialects and the status of diglossia in the Arab world. Subject-verb agreement in MSA and RPA is also discussed.
The focus of this study is on the pronominal system and negation in both MSA and RPA. It investigates the correlations between dependent subject pronouns and independent pronouns and their phonological and syntactic relationships. I argue that dependent subject pronouns are reduced forms of the independent subject pronoun. The study explains how dependent subject pronouns are formed by deleting the initial syllable, except for the first person singular and the third person masculine plural, which use suppletive forms instead. Dependent object pronouns are also derived from their independent counterparts by the deletion of the second syllable, with the exception of third person plural pronouns, which take the same form as clitics attached to their hosts.
I argue that dependent subject pronouns are agreement affixes used to mark verb argument features, whereas pronominal object and possessive pronouns are clitics attached to their hosts, which can be verbs, nouns, prepositions, and quantifiers. This study investigates other uses of subject pronouns, such as the use of third person pronouns as copulas in both MSA and RPA. Additionally, third person pronouns are used as question pronouns for yes
o questions in RPA.
The dissertation also explores the morphosyntactic properties of sentential negation in RPA in comparison to sentential negation in MSA. The study shows that the negative markers ma: and -iš are used to negate perfective and imperfective verbs, while muš precedes non-verbal predicates, such as adjectives, prepositional phrases (PPs), and participles. The main predicate in the negative phrase does not need the noun phrase (NP) to raise to T if there is no need to merge with the negative element.
Keywords: Standard Arabic, Rural Palestinian Arabic, Urban Palestinian Arabic, independent pronouns, dependent pronouns, pronominal clitics, copula pronouns, negation
This study explores some grammatical aspects of Rural Palestinian Arabic (RPA), spoken in the vicinity of the city of Tulkarm in the Northwest part of the West Bank, and compares the variety to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Urban Palestinian Arabic (UPA). The study introduces an overview of the Arabic language and its colloquial dialects and the status of diglossia in the Arab world. Subject-verb agreement in MSA and RPA is also discussed.
The focus of this study is on the pronominal system and negation in both MSA and RPA. It investigates the correlations between dependent subject pronouns and independent pronouns and their phonological and syntactic relationships. I argue that dependent subject pronouns are reduced forms of the independent subject pronoun. The study explains how dependent subject pronouns are formed by deleting the initial syllable, except for the first person singular and the third person masculine plural, which use suppletive forms instead. Dependent object pronouns are also derived from their independent counterparts by the deletion of the second syllable, with the exception of third person plural pronouns, which take the same form as clitics attached to their hosts.
I argue that dependent subject pronouns are agreement affixes used to mark verb argument features, whereas pronominal object and possessive pronouns are clitics attached to their hosts, which can be verbs, nouns, prepositions, and quantifiers. This study investigates other uses of subject pronouns, such as the use of third person pronouns as copulas in both MSA and RPA. Additionally, third person pronouns are used as question pronouns for yes
o questions in RPA.
The dissertation also explores the morphosyntactic properties of sentential negation in RPA in comparison to sentential negation in MSA. The study shows that the negative markers ma: and -iš are used to negate perfective and imperfective verbs, while muš precedes non-verbal predicates, such as adjectives, prepositional phrases (PPs), and participles. The main predicate in the negative phrase does not need the noun phrase (NP) to raise to T if there is no need to merge with the negative element.
Keywords: Standard Arabic, Rural Palestinian Arabic, Urban Palestinian Arabic, independent pronouns, dependent pronouns, pronominal clitics, copula pronouns, negation
ContributorsMousa, Neimeh (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Ali, Souad (Committee member) / James, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This thesis investigates the pronominal system in Standard Arabic. It seeks to unravel the correlation between independent and dependent personal pronouns. Although both pronoun groups are treated as distinct parts of the lexicon, I argue that dependent pronouns are reduced forms derived from the strong counterparts. This study examines how these forms (reduced and non-reduced) relate to one another phonologically and syntactically. Various analytical tools are utilized including vowel harmony, syllable structure as well as some principles of Distributed Morphology and Chomsky's 1995 Minimalist Program. With regard to the phonological relations, I argue that dependent subject pronouns are generated from their parallel strong forms by omitting the initial syllable. Dependent object pronouns are formed by omitting the first two syllables. The first person singular and third person plural masculine subject pronouns are suppletive forms completing the paradigm. They are not derived by reduction from their full counterparts. After investigating the distributional properties of both sets of pronouns, I propose a bipartite subcategorization of reduced pronominals into two subclasses: clitics and affixes. Clitics surface in positions in which strong pronouns cannot occur. As for affixes, they are used to mark verb-argument agreement. In light of these positions, I argue that dependent subject pronouns are always affixes while dependent object pronouns are always clitics. Clitics function as syntactically independent units which combine with hosts at the phonological phase as a result of their prosodic deficiency while affixes associate with hosts when features are valued during a sentence derivation.
ContributorsAlbuhayri, Salem (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Major, Roy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Over the centuries, definite articles in Romance languages have expanded their use to include generic, collective, and abstract nouns, essentially becoming noun markers. This usage is not confined to just a few languages, either, but is found in most, if not all, Romance languages, major and minor. This thesis examines the question of how this came to be, whether through diffusion from one language to all others, or through independent parallel development. I first trace the history of definite articles in three major Romance languages, French, Spanish, and Italian, starting with the emergence of the definite article in Late Latin as it derived from Classic Latin demonstratives. It includes an analysis of the use of definite articles in six works of literature, one in each language from the late thirteenth century, and one in each language from around the year 1500. The results show definite articles were used more frequently than expected in the earlier Spanish work, perhaps hinting at diffusion from Spain. Nevertheless, placing these results in historical context, I argue that this use arose through independent parallel development through the process that gave birth to definite articles in the first place - grammaticalization.
ContributorsPerry, Mabry (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019