Search Results (4)

This paper investigates the syntax and diachrony of Italian causal clauses introduced by perché, siccome, and poiché. Although often treated as near-synonyms in Contemporary Italian, these subordinators differ systematically in their syntactic distribution, interpretive properties, and diachronic development. We show that perché introduces central adverbial clauses, merged within the vP/TP domain, whereas siccome and poiché introduce peripheral adverbial clauses, merged in the left periphery. This structural split correlates with a cluster of diagnostics: only perché-clauses can occur within the scope of matrix focus, negation, or epistemic operators, and only they can function as fragment answers. Conversely, siccome- and poiché-clauses consistently outscope matrix operators and encode non-at-issue content. A diachronic study reveals that the internal and external syntax of causal clauses introduced by each subordinator has remained stable from Old Italian to the present. However, siccome- and poiché-clauses display different semantics, as they derive from non-causal constructions (they originate from comparative and temporal clauses, respectively). We argue that the contrasting behaviors follow from the structural composition of the subordinators. Full article

Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures. Full article

Idioms are multi-word expressions whose meaning cannot always be deduced from the literal meaning of constituent words. A key feature of idioms that is central to this paper is their peculiar mixture of fixedness and variability, which poses challenges for their retrieval from large corpora using traditional search approaches. These challenges hinder insights into idiom usage, affecting users who are conducting linguistic research as well as those involved in language education. To facilitate access to idiom examples taken from real-world contexts, we introduce an information retrieval system designed specifically for idioms. Given a search query that represents an idiom, typically in its canonical form, the system expands it automatically to account for the most common types of idiom variation including inflection, open slots, adjectival or adverbial modification and passivisation. As a by-product of query expansion, other types of idiom variation captured include derivation, compounding, negation, distribution across multiple clauses as well as other unforeseen types of variation. The system was implemented on top of Elasticsearch, an open-source, distributed, scalable, real-time search engine. Flexible retrieval of idioms is supported by a combination of linguistic pre-processing of the search queries, their translation into a set of query clauses written in a query language called Query DSL, and analysis, an indexing process that involves tokenisation and normalisation. Our system outperformed the phrase search in terms of recall and outperformed the keyword search in terms of precision. Out of the three, our approach was found to provide the best balance between precision and recall. By providing a fast and easy way of finding idioms in large corpora, our approach can facilitate further developments in fields such as linguistics, language education and natural language processing. Full article

Negation hardly comes up as an issue in English–Arabic translation studies. The general assumption is that the translation of English negation into Arabic poses no serious problems to the translator. While this is generally true when it comes to rendering negation marked by generic negative particles/affixes (John is not happy and John is unhappy, respectively) and even lexical and rhetorical implicit negation (John denied having cheated on the test and Can a person like John make such a mistake?), the present paper aims to show that the appropriate textualization into Arabic of English adverbial and determiner negation (e.g., by the adverbials too and hardly, and the determiners little and few) can be a problematic area for Arabic translators. The textual data (270 examples) is extracted from several published translations (belonging to literary, popular science/journalistic, and economic discourse), in an attempt to show what strategies translators follow when encountering such negation and how successful they are. While the findings provide solid evidence for the serious mishaps (about 42% of the renderings involve one kind of problem or another) that Arabic translators experience in this area, the critical discussion unravels several textual strategies that can capture the subtleties inherent in adverbial/determiner negation. It is hoped that the investigation of this subtle, neglected area in English–Arabic translation studies offers significant insights for both student and professional translators. Full article