Clitic placement in the Romanian verbal complex

Author(s):  
Paola Monachesi
Author(s):  
Diego Pescarini

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages. It aims to explore the empirical facets of cliticization and elaborate on the theoretical ramifications of the topic. On the empirical side, the book deals with data ranging from Latin to modern languages and less well-known dialects from all areas of Romance. Medieval vernaculars take centre stage both in the reconstruction of the evolution from Latin to Romance and in the modelling of clitic placement in the modern languages. Syntactic, phonological, and morphological aspects are examined, but the main focus is on syntactic placement, which is the hallmark of Romance clitics. On the theoretical side, the books engage with the previous literature, in particular with Generative literature. In recent decades, our understanding of Romance clitics has grown in symbiosis with the Generative theory, and the importance of most empirical findings cannot be fully appreciated without being acquainted with the terms of the ongoing debate. The book challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency. Instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which caused freezing of certain pronominal forms first and—through reanalysis—their successive incorporation into verbal hosts. This approach entails revising analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations (the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law), and addressing orthogonal phenomena such as V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting.


2020 ◽  
pp. 136700692094813
Author(s):  
Michelle J White

Aim of the study: The aim of this longitudinal study was twofold: first, to determine whether the relationship between working memory measures and language performance in young English language learners (ELL) remains constant over the year. The second aim was to determine if performance on working memory tasks predicts future performance on language measures. Methodology: The participants were 27 ELLs between the ages of 5 and 6 years who were in their first year of formal schooling and attended the same mid-low socioeconomic status school in South Africa. The participants were tested three times throughout the year on tasks of working memory and an English assessment battery. Data analysis and results: Mixed effects models and multiple linear regression were used to address the aims of the study. The first aim of the study showed that there are significant correlations between all working memory measures and all language measures in varying strengths across the year. The second research aim further elaborated on this by showing that both phonological working memory and non-verbal complex working memory are implicated in the acquisition of syntax, semantics and pragmatics at different points throughout the year. Implications and originality: Language acquisition in ELLs is not a stand-alone process and working memory measures may be able to predict future language outcomes. This could indicate that working memory measures may be used as an indicator for who may need language intervention, at a time when the ELL only has limited English proficiency and limited English exposure. This research is the first of its kind to originate from Africa, with a sample from low socioeconomic, culturally and linguistically diverse circumstances who are exposed to English consistently for the first time and are tested with working memory tasks with less strong language components.


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