Absolute Participial Construction Theory: Controversial Issues

The study focuses on current problems associated with the evolution of absolute participial construction and its linguistic status in the French language. It has been established that, borrowed from classical Latin, the absolute construction with an ablative was accepted to the Old French language, presumably in the 13 th –14 th centuries thanks to translations from the Latin language. Widely used in literature, the construction caused disputes among grammarians and only at the beginning of the 20 th century it was recognized as normative. In the second part of the article, a review of the Russian and foreign scientific literature is made, the most controversial issues and the author's own position based on corpus data are formulated. The properties inherent in all types of absolute participial constructions are determined: binarity, semantic duality, expression of predominantly temporary, causal meaning or value of an accompanying action, mobility, syntactic optionality in relation to a matrix sentence, the possibility of functioning only as part of a complex sentence. It was revealed that this construction is an economical formal way of expressing a proposition based on a secondary predicative connection. The features of constructions with present participles, past participles and complex past participles are analyzed. The conclusion is made about the need for a differentiated approach to the analysis of these types of absolute structures. The prospect of further studies of linguistic structures is shown.

The typological and historical variation of punctuation systems

In the literature on punctuation we find a broad typological and historical distinction between prosodically and grammatically determined punctuation. The mainstream historical assumption is that the prosodic system changed into to a grammatical system in some languages. We will show that this view is confronted with serious empirical and conceptual problems. Our assumption is that the typological and historical variation at issue is motivated syntactically in all punctuation systems. The different punctuation systems are mainly distinguished by the comma, which is, therefore, the main topic of the present paper. The major use of the comma will be explained by four constraints, whose interaction may be congenially formulated in optimality-theoretic terms. The close relationship of the comma to prosody arises indirectly from the fact that syntactic structures are marked prosodically in many instances. The stylistic freedom of the comma, that is traditionally assumed for some languages and contexts of use, is a reflex of syntactic optionality.

French wh-in-situ Questions and Syntactic Optionality: Evidence from Three Data Types

The aim of this paper is to corroborate the assumption of syntactic optionality for French wh-questions. In terms of a broader basis of evidence three different data types are utilized: Firstly, a qualitative interview approach suggests that wh-in-situ does not show the syntactic restrictions postulated by Bošković (1998) and Cheng & Rooryck (2000), weakening the evidence in favor of the assumption of LF-movement. Secondly, a graded grammaticality judgment test reveals that even in terms of fine nuances an identical level of grammaticality exists between the wh-in-situ form and its counterpart with wh-movement. Given the fact that several crucial judgments in the literature on French wh-in-situ are doubtful, these approaches turn out to be particularly helpful for controlling undesirable interferences in the judgment process and for obtaining more reliable data. Thirdly, a reading time study shows that both variants have the same cognitive complexity in processing. These empirical studies come along with methodological work concerning the development and evaluation of the instruments. From a conceptual point of view the inherent contradiction to which optionality and economy lead within the minimalist framework will be addressed. I will largely follow the suggestion of Haider & Rosengren (2003), who assume optional movement to be exploited at the interface level of syntax. Concerning the latter, I point out that different registers partly correlate with different French wh-questions.

Negation in early German-English Interlanguage: more Valueless Features in the L2 initial state

In Eubank (1993/94), I argued that the apparent syntactic optionality one observes in, for example, the placement of medial adverbs vis-à-vis thematic verbs in French-English Interlanguage can be explained if one assumes that the relevant parametric values of French do not transfer into the English L2 initial state. What one finds instead is a nonvalue of sorts, which I dubbed <inert>. In this article, I extend this view of 'Valueless Features' by examining data from Wode (1981) on the L2 acquisition of English by speakers of German. In fact, what I show here is that, in spite of important differences between the French-English and the German-English data, Valueless Features extends in a fairly natural way. In addition, however, I also examine two views that differ from Valueless Features, namely, the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis of Schwartz and Sprouse (e.g., 1994) and the Minimal Trees of Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994). Here, a careful review of the acquisitional data - either the French-English data or the German-English data - suggests that these views may not be as straightforward as they may otherwise appear.