In Standard Arabic (SA), the (dual) quantifier KILAA/KILTAA displays an interesting paradigm of gender and number agreement that is conditioned by semantic interpretation: while collective KILAA/KILTAA agrees in natural duality number and grammatical gender with its predicate, distributive KILAA/KILTAA reflects agreement in grammatical singularity number and grammatical gender with the predicate in question. This paper shows that a simplified minimalist analysis which utilizes the formal tools of relativized probing based on the minimally-constrained cyclic Agree operation best captures the paradigm in question.
Constructions with si in Spanish are meaningful choices which pursue different communicative goals. These are studied as a prototype with contextual manifestations. Prototypical si-constructions are considered to be those that are structured under the protasis-apodosis schema, and that may or may not convey conditional and/or hypothetical meanings. The particle si functions as a space builder of assertiveness in both prototypical and non-prototypical constructions. All interpretations of si-constructions are dependent on the relationship established between the protasis and the apodosis and also on the meaning introduced by si and its combination with verbal tenses. The indicative present tense promotes the basic assertiveness meaning, interacting with si in most constructions. As a common feature, the present tense is almost categorical, which confirms the assertiveness cognitive domain that the conjunction si builds. Prototypical and non prototypical constructions create diverse pragmatic meanings and are unevenly distributed across different kinds of texts.
We disassociate two stages in visual complex pseudoword recognition, namely syntactic licensing and semantic composition (Neophytou et al. 2018), by comparing pseudowords violating category selection rules to those violating semantic rules of affix attachment in two closely related languages: Slovenian and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. Contrary to previous studies relying on argument structure violations in Greek and English (e.g., Manouilidou & Stockall 2014), we based our semantic violations on a more unambiguously semantic restriction of state stability by focusing on prefixes raz-, od-, and vz-/uz-that do not attach to stable state verbs ('to dwell'). In two acceptability judgment tasks and two lexical decision tasks, we show that semantic violations (raz-'dwell') are consistently more acceptable, rejected more slowly, and less accurately than category selection violations (raz-'mother'), across prefixes and languages. This adds evidence for the distinction between two post-decomposition stages from a new semantic dimension and supports the universality of this distinction in lexical processing.
This article explores synchronic and diachronic aspects of anticausativization in Italian, focusing on variability in its morpho-syntactic encoding and the parameters determining it, both verb-related-templatic (reflecting the event structure template of verbs) as well as root/lexical (concerning the type of root and change encoded)-and argument-related, involving thematic (e.g., agentivity) and inherent (e.g., animacy) properties of verbal arguments.
While Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is well-studied, dialectal Arabic texts, such as Moroccan dialect (Darija), pose unique challenges due to their informal structure and lack of a standardized grammar. In this paper, we provide an in-depth study of Darija detailing its morphological and syntactic features, and we introduce DiMorph (Dialectal Morphological Analyzer), a specialized morphological engine, which is designed to address these complexities automatically. In detail, we focus on DiMorph's multi-phase approach, involving both pre-and post-processing phases. Such approach effectively manages dialectal variability and achieves high accuracy in token recognition and analysis, particularly in social media contexts. Finally, we underscore the importance of developing tools that respect the linguistic diversity of Arabic dialects, laying a strong foundation for advanced computational research in Arabic dialectology.
