Search Results (6)

This article investigates how cognitive and grammatical mechanisms shape variable singular–plural agreement in Spanish perception–verb constructions, a domain where speakers alternate between agreement with the postverbal NP₂ and agreement with the infinitival complement. Building on usage-based and cognitive linguistics approaches, this study examines whether factors related to perceptual modality and conceptual salience underlie these alternations. A corpus analysis of pronominal infinitive constructions with ver and oír reveals divergent patterns across modalities, with visual perception favoring plural agreement and auditory perception favoring singular agreement. To evaluate whether these tendencies reflect deeper linguistic preferences, an acceptability-rating task systematically manipulated modality, agreement, and animacy. The results show no overall interaction between modality and agreement, but they identify a robust effect of animacy: sentences with human referents received higher ratings than those with inanimate referents. Moreover, animacy modulated the influence of modality and agreement in opposite directions, suggesting that speakers’ evaluations are sensitive to the ontological nature of the perceived stimulus. Together, the findings show that agreement variation reflects flexible conceptual construal and that corpus and experimental evidence offer complementary insights into the interface between morphosyntax, perception and salience in Spanish. Full article

This paper examines the appearance of published West Semitic spellings of the name of the deity commonly referred to as Asherah. In light of new evidence from the Bronze Age Amorite sources, as well as the complete publication of the inscriptions at Kuntillet ʿAjrud, a review of the analysis and discussion concerning the identification of the deity is undertaken. The purpose will be to ascertain the significance of the witness of epigraphic Hebrew texts at Kuntillet ʿAjrud and Khirbet el-Qom in light of earlier Bronze Age evidence, the biblical attestations, the conceptualization of deity, and the understanding of Iron Age epigraphic Hebrew spellings of the feminine singular suffix, as well as pronominal suffixes. The more complete availability of textual witnesses provides a foundation on which to argue the degree of continuity across more than a thousand years of the appearance of the deity in the West Semitic world. Full article

This paper explores the different ways in which speakers of Limburgian think and feel about sociopragmatic pronouns in their dialect, in which women can traditionally be referred to with both ziej ‘she’ and het ‘she’ (lit. ‘it’). Previous research revealed variation between speakers regarding the use of het, which appears to be associated with differences in interpretation and evaluation. This study investigates this further by analyzing how individual speakers evaluate non-feminine pronouns for women. Our data show that many speakers have a relatively high level of awareness, discussing four key themes: (i) how female reference in Limburgian differs from that of Dutch; (ii) the appropriateness of using the pronouns for certain referents and/or in certain social situations; (iii) the various connotations the pronouns may have; and (iv) how they navigate between-speaker differences regarding pronoun evaluation in daily life. Importantly, this high level of awareness is not present in all speakers. These results indicate that the use or non-use of the pronoun het for female referents may be conditioned by cognitive automaticity for some speakers, and by a conscious, emotionally charged consideration about its desirability for others. Our findings, therefore, suggest the importance of integrating cognition and sociality in linguistic theorizing. Full article

Research on copulas in Arabic dialects has hitherto largely focused on the pronominal copula, and has also mostly ignored Maghrebi dialects. Drawing on published literature as well as fieldwork-based corpora, this article identifies and analyzes a hitherto undescribed verbal copula in dialects of Tunisian and northwestern Libya deriving from the verb yabda (“to begin”). We show that copular yabda occurs mostly in predicational copular sentences, with time reference including the habitual present and generic future. It takes nominal, adjectival, and locational predicate types. We also argue for broader inclusion of syntactic isoglosses in Arabic dialectology, and show how copular yabda crosses the traditional isogloss lines established on the basis of phonology, morphology, or lexicon, and therefore contradicts established dialect classifications such as Bedouin/sedentary or Tunisian/Libyan. Full article

The Arabic dialectology literature repeatedly asserts the existence of a macro-level classificatory relationship binding the Arabic speech varieties of the combined Egypto-Sudanic area. This proposal, though oft-encountered, has not previously been formulated in reference to extensive linguistic criteria, but is instead framed primarily on the nonlinguistic premise of historical demographic and genealogical relationships joining the Arabic-speaking communities of the region. The present contribution provides a linguistically based evaluation of this proposed dialectal grouping, to assess whether the postulated dialectal unity is meaningfully borne out by available language data. Isoglosses from the domains of segmental phonology, phonological processes, pronominal morphology, verbal inflection, and syntax are analyzed across six dialects representing Arabic speech in the region. These are shown to offer minimal support for a unified Egypto-Sudanic dialect classification, but instead to indicate a significant north–south differentiation within the sample—a finding further qualified via application of the novel method of Historical Glottometry developed by François and Kalyan. The investigation concludes with reflection on the implications of these results on the understandings of the correspondence between linguistic and human genealogical relationships in the history of Arabic and in dialectological practice more broadly. Full article

Subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish has been widely studied across monolingual and bilingual varieties, showing a consistent effect of functional predictors. In recent papers, the role of the mechanical predictor priming, or perseveration, has been the source of debate. Additionally, little is known about the interaction of perseveration and significant functional predictors (e.g., grammatical person). In this paper, we expand on previous research by examining first-person singular (1sg) and third-person singular (3sg) data from sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish–English bilinguals from Florida to explore the possible difference in priming in deictic vs. referential subjects. The results from a mixed-effects variable rule analysis only offered clear evidence of priming in 1sg. We hypothesize that this result could be due to either surprisal (1sg overt pronominal subjects are rarer in the corpus that 3sg overt pronominal subjects) or to 3sg involving reference-tracking and perseveration only being evident in contexts where the subject form does not signal for pragmatic content. Full article