The present research study aims at providing an insight on the issue of metaphor and space concep... more The present research study aims at providing an insight on the issue of metaphor and space conceptualization through the comparative analysis of Irish and Italian prepositions, based on the theoretical foundations of cognitive linguistics, an insight into which was provided ...
Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group... more Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group Alessio S. Frenda, Trinity College Dublin Abstract From a broad typological point of view, gender can be characterized in terms of agreement, on a ...
Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constr... more Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constructions, their derivation from a Deeper Structure, and the lexical status of the causative verb employed. I will review a selection of such claims, pointing out that some of these claims may not in fact be as strongly backed by the available data as implied. I then move on to describe some basic properties of the Italian fare causative, presenting independent linguistic evidence of its use. Some interesting generalizations emerging from this analysis are presented here, with regard to intentional versus non-intentional readings and with how differently marked Causees conveys different meanings. These observations will also be analysed in the light of known typological universals relating to causative structures.
Cross-linguistic comparison of unrelated or distantly related languages is often hindered by the ... more Cross-linguistic comparison of unrelated or distantly related languages is often hindered by the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between the formal repertoires of the different languages. This article presents an example of such a situation, where the comparison of the Irish and Italian prepositional inventories is made impossible, on a formal basis, by the different sizes of the two sets of forms and the different semantic segmentation of the spatial-content continuum, i.e., the fact that one and the same form can express different concepts in a way that is cross-linguistically not always valid, and – conversely – that one and the same concept may be expressed by more than one linguistic form in a language and by just one in the other. A possible way of tackling this problem for the case at hand, based on a conceptual rather than formal comparison, is subsequently expounded. The aims of the comparison in point, that is, finding patterns of metaphorical sense extensions in the d...
s from adjectives -aint hen-aint old age -deb union-deb rightness -der/-ter poeth-der heat -did/-... more s from adjectives -aint hen-aint old age -deb union-deb rightness -der/-ter poeth-der heat -did/-tid glen-did cleanliness -dra/-tra cyfleus-tra convenience -had/-âd eglur-had clarification -i tlod-i poverty -id rhydd-id freedom -ineb ffol-ineb folly -ioni hael-ioni generosity -awd/-od un-awd solo -rwydd caredig-rwydd kindness -wch tywyll-wch darkness -yd segur-yd idleness Abstracts from nominal bases -ad enw-ad denomination -iad car-iad love -iant ffyn-iant prosperity (After Thorne, 1993: 123f.)s from nominal bases -ad enw-ad denomination -iad car-iad love -iant ffyn-iant prosperity (After Thorne, 1993: 123f.) For monosyllables there is a correlation between the vowel and grammatical gender (Watkins, 1993: 309): w /u/ and y /i/ (e.g. rhwd ‘rust’, hyd
Standard Irish is the outcome of language planning and as such it significantly diverges from the... more Standard Irish is the outcome of language planning and as such it significantly diverges from the three main spoken dialects of the language (or traditional Gaeltacht varieties) that provided the basis for its creation. It is also expected to differ, in its codified form, from the way it is actually employed within the small, usually urban communities of bilinguals who employ standard Irish and not some form of Gaeltacht Irish as a second language. The reason why such difference is expected is that the language planners codified as part of the standard many complex structures that had already been abandoned in the spoken dialects, basing their reconstruction on historicity rather than actual usage (especially as the actual usages were far from uniform). In this article, which presents part of the work involved in my currently ongoing research, some such complexities are presented which pertain to grammatical gender.
Argument Realisation in Complex Predicates and Complex Events: Verb-verb constructions at the syntax-semantic interface, 2017
In the Romance context, Sicilian rather unusually allows finite verbs to be governed by a preposi... more In the Romance context, Sicilian rather unusually allows finite verbs to be governed by a preposition within a subordinate phrasal constituent expressing purpose. In other Romance languages, the verb slotted in this context is normally an infinitive. Sicilian also has the corresponding infinitive construction, and the distribution of these two functionally equivalent structures in a corpus of Sicilian folk tales is analysed, revealing overall conciseness conditions restricting the occurrence of the finite-verb construction. The two structures are then analysed from a semantic and syntactic point of view, employing the formalism of Role and Reference Grammar, in order to understand what distinguishes them in terms of event structure and its expression via core complementation vs. adjunction.
Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constr... more Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constructions, their derivation from a Deeper Structure, and the lexical status of the causative verb employed. I will review a selection of such claims, pointing out that some of these claims may not in fact be as strongly backed by the available data as implied. I then move on to describe some basic properties of the Italian fare causative, presenting independent linguistic evidence of its use. Some interesting generalizations emerging from this analysis are presented here, with regard to intentional versus non-intentional readings and with how differently marked Causees conveys different meanings. These observations will also be analysed in the light of known typological universals relating to causative structures.
Corbett’s (1991: 226) Agreement Hierarchy predicts that when grammatical gender and semantic gend... more Corbett’s (1991: 226) Agreement Hierarchy predicts that when grammatical gender and semantic gender clash, personal pronouns are more likely to agree semantically, while attributive targets are more likely to agree syntactically; attributive targets include all the dependents in the controller’s noun phrase. The literature on Insular Celtic contains references to interesting developments which affect gender agreement; their import is confirmed by a quantitative analysis of spoken Irish and Welsh data. In contemporary Insular Celtic varieties (and in the final stages of now-extinct ones), masculine forms of anaphoric pronouns tend to be overgeneralized to all inanimate antecedents, including grammatically feminine ones: if interpreted as the result of a resemantization of the agreement system, this development is consistent with the Agreement Hierarchy. But the generalization of masculine agreement forms is also observed within the noun phrase (local agreement), where it affects noun–a...
Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group... more Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group Alessio S. Frenda, Trinity College Dublin Abstract From a broad typological point of view, gender can be characterized in terms of agreement, on a ...
The present research study aims at providing an insight on the issue of metaphor and space concep... more The present research study aims at providing an insight on the issue of metaphor and space conceptualization through the comparative analysis of Irish and Italian prepositions, based on the theoretical foundations of cognitive linguistics, an insight into which was provided ...
Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group... more Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group Alessio S. Frenda, Trinity College Dublin Abstract From a broad typological point of view, gender can be characterized in terms of agreement, on a ...
Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constr... more Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constructions, their derivation from a Deeper Structure, and the lexical status of the causative verb employed. I will review a selection of such claims, pointing out that some of these claims may not in fact be as strongly backed by the available data as implied. I then move on to describe some basic properties of the Italian fare causative, presenting independent linguistic evidence of its use. Some interesting generalizations emerging from this analysis are presented here, with regard to intentional versus non-intentional readings and with how differently marked Causees conveys different meanings. These observations will also be analysed in the light of known typological universals relating to causative structures.
Cross-linguistic comparison of unrelated or distantly related languages is often hindered by the ... more Cross-linguistic comparison of unrelated or distantly related languages is often hindered by the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between the formal repertoires of the different languages. This article presents an example of such a situation, where the comparison of the Irish and Italian prepositional inventories is made impossible, on a formal basis, by the different sizes of the two sets of forms and the different semantic segmentation of the spatial-content continuum, i.e., the fact that one and the same form can express different concepts in a way that is cross-linguistically not always valid, and – conversely – that one and the same concept may be expressed by more than one linguistic form in a language and by just one in the other. A possible way of tackling this problem for the case at hand, based on a conceptual rather than formal comparison, is subsequently expounded. The aims of the comparison in point, that is, finding patterns of metaphorical sense extensions in the d...
s from adjectives -aint hen-aint old age -deb union-deb rightness -der/-ter poeth-der heat -did/-... more s from adjectives -aint hen-aint old age -deb union-deb rightness -der/-ter poeth-der heat -did/-tid glen-did cleanliness -dra/-tra cyfleus-tra convenience -had/-âd eglur-had clarification -i tlod-i poverty -id rhydd-id freedom -ineb ffol-ineb folly -ioni hael-ioni generosity -awd/-od un-awd solo -rwydd caredig-rwydd kindness -wch tywyll-wch darkness -yd segur-yd idleness Abstracts from nominal bases -ad enw-ad denomination -iad car-iad love -iant ffyn-iant prosperity (After Thorne, 1993: 123f.)s from nominal bases -ad enw-ad denomination -iad car-iad love -iant ffyn-iant prosperity (After Thorne, 1993: 123f.) For monosyllables there is a correlation between the vowel and grammatical gender (Watkins, 1993: 309): w /u/ and y /i/ (e.g. rhwd ‘rust’, hyd
Standard Irish is the outcome of language planning and as such it significantly diverges from the... more Standard Irish is the outcome of language planning and as such it significantly diverges from the three main spoken dialects of the language (or traditional Gaeltacht varieties) that provided the basis for its creation. It is also expected to differ, in its codified form, from the way it is actually employed within the small, usually urban communities of bilinguals who employ standard Irish and not some form of Gaeltacht Irish as a second language. The reason why such difference is expected is that the language planners codified as part of the standard many complex structures that had already been abandoned in the spoken dialects, basing their reconstruction on historicity rather than actual usage (especially as the actual usages were far from uniform). In this article, which presents part of the work involved in my currently ongoing research, some such complexities are presented which pertain to grammatical gender.
Argument Realisation in Complex Predicates and Complex Events: Verb-verb constructions at the syntax-semantic interface, 2017
In the Romance context, Sicilian rather unusually allows finite verbs to be governed by a preposi... more In the Romance context, Sicilian rather unusually allows finite verbs to be governed by a preposition within a subordinate phrasal constituent expressing purpose. In other Romance languages, the verb slotted in this context is normally an infinitive. Sicilian also has the corresponding infinitive construction, and the distribution of these two functionally equivalent structures in a corpus of Sicilian folk tales is analysed, revealing overall conciseness conditions restricting the occurrence of the finite-verb construction. The two structures are then analysed from a semantic and syntactic point of view, employing the formalism of Role and Reference Grammar, in order to understand what distinguishes them in terms of event structure and its expression via core complementation vs. adjunction.
Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constr... more Much of the literature on Italian causatives is concerned with the syntactic status of the constructions, their derivation from a Deeper Structure, and the lexical status of the causative verb employed. I will review a selection of such claims, pointing out that some of these claims may not in fact be as strongly backed by the available data as implied. I then move on to describe some basic properties of the Italian fare causative, presenting independent linguistic evidence of its use. Some interesting generalizations emerging from this analysis are presented here, with regard to intentional versus non-intentional readings and with how differently marked Causees conveys different meanings. These observations will also be analysed in the light of known typological universals relating to causative structures.
Corbett’s (1991: 226) Agreement Hierarchy predicts that when grammatical gender and semantic gend... more Corbett’s (1991: 226) Agreement Hierarchy predicts that when grammatical gender and semantic gender clash, personal pronouns are more likely to agree semantically, while attributive targets are more likely to agree syntactically; attributive targets include all the dependents in the controller’s noun phrase. The literature on Insular Celtic contains references to interesting developments which affect gender agreement; their import is confirmed by a quantitative analysis of spoken Irish and Welsh data. In contemporary Insular Celtic varieties (and in the final stages of now-extinct ones), masculine forms of anaphoric pronouns tend to be overgeneralized to all inanimate antecedents, including grammatically feminine ones: if interpreted as the result of a resemantization of the agreement system, this development is consistent with the Agreement Hierarchy. But the generalization of masculine agreement forms is also observed within the noun phrase (local agreement), where it affects noun–a...
Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group... more Page 1. Notes on the evolution of grammatical gender in the languages of the Insular Celtic group Alessio S. Frenda, Trinity College Dublin Abstract From a broad typological point of view, gender can be characterized in terms of agreement, on a ...
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