Centre de Recherche sur la Langue et les Textes Basques

This study analyzes gender assignment in Spanish–Basque mixed nominal constructions with nouns in Basque (a language that lacks gender) and determiners in Spanish (a language that marks gender) by using a multi-task approach: (i) naturalistic data, (ii) an elicitation task, and (iii) an auditory judgment task. Naturalistic data suggest cross-language effects under which a morphological marker of Basque (-a determiner) is interpreted as a morphophonological expression of gender marking in Spanish. A preference for feminine determiners was observed in the judgment task, which differs from the masculine default trend observed in Spanish–English bilinguals (Jake, Myers-Scotton & Gross, 2002). Our results point to feminine gender as default in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs, indicating that the resources that bilinguals use for gender assignment can be different from those of monolinguals. We argue that this is an outcome of interacting processes which take place at the interfaces (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax) of both languages, resulting in cross-language effects.

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The analysis focuses on those varieties of Basque that admit the participial dependent to occur either before or after the modal verb. It is shown that in these varieties, the syntactic position of the participial dependent correlates with differences in its internal structure: whereas participial dependents can correspond to TPs when they are located to the right of the modal verb in Basque (a typically SOV language), they cannot correspond to anything more complex than a small v structure when they surface to the left of the modal verb. Our analysis of the internal structure of participial dependents also extends to issues concerning the basic word order of Basque. It is claimed that the analysis presented here requires the auxiliary to be generated to the left of the verb phrase, as the antisymmetry hypothesis would posit.

This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call "interface judgment," which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the syntax-semantics and prosody-semantics interface. We first discuss the results from the ERP literature connected to NPI licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al. (2016). The results of this study show evidence that there are two distinct NPI licensing mechanisms, i.e., licensing and rescuing, in line with Giannakidou (1998, 2006). Then we discuss an acceptability judgment task on Greek NPIs which supports the negativity as a scale hypothesis (Zwarts, 1995, 1996; Giannakidou, 1998). For the semantics-prosody interface judgment, we discuss two types of findings on two different phenomena and languages: (i) the study by Giannakidou and Yoon (2016) on scalar and non-scalar NPIs in Greek and Korean, which serves as the foundation for Chatzikonstantinou's (2016) study of production data showing distinct prosodic properties in emphatic (scalar) and non-emphatic (non-scalar) Greek NPIs; (ii) a (production and perception) study by Etxeberria and Irurtzun (2015) on the prosodic disambiguation of the scalar/non-scalar readings of sentences containing the focus particle "ere" in Basque. The main conclusion of the paper is that experimental methods of the kind discussed in the paper are useful in establishing physical, quantitative correlates of interface judgment.

This article analyses Locating Adverbials (LAs) such as un peu plus tard , ce matin , deux kilomètres plus loin (‘a little later’, ‘this morning’, ‘two kilometers further’) when they are dislocated to the left of the sentence (IP Adjuncts cases). Although not discourse connectives, in such a position, they seem to play an important part in structuring discourse. It is this contribution of LAs to discourse that we tackle, providing a descriptive analysis and a formal account grounded on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In particular, we deal with the frame introducer role of the LAs and with spatio-temporal interpretations of these markers occurring in trajectory descriptions.

The main goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of the internal structure of Basque quantification in particular and natural language quantification in general within the framework of Generalized Quantifier Theory. The proposal put forward in it demonstrates that the standard analysis of Generalized Quantifiers is correct and that it can account for quantification in natural languages, pace alternative analyses that argue for a revision. Assuming that quantification in natural languages must always be contextually restricted and that quantificational domain restriction is always encoded syntactically, this dissertation proposes a novel compositional structure for Basque quantifiers where the quantifier internal definite determiner is taken to act as the overt quantificational domain restrictor. This proposal leads to a particular analysis of the Basque article: this element will be the definite determiner everywhere, but very flexible in its ability to “type shift”, which accounts for the various interpretations that the Basque definite determiner can get.

Basque people have received considerable attention from anthropologists, geneticists, and linguists during the last century due to the singularity of their language and to other cultural and biological characteristics. Despite the multidisciplinary efforts performed to address the questions of the origin, uniqueness, and heterogeneity of Basques, the genetic studies performed up to now have suffered from a weak study design where populations are not analyzed in an adequate geographic and population context. To address the former questions and to overcome these design limitations, we have analyzed the uniparentally inherited markers (Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA) of ~900 individuals from 18 populations, including those where Basque is currently spoken and populations from adjacent regions where Basque might have been spoken in historical times. Our results indicate that Basque-speaking populations fall within the genetic Western European gene pool, that they are similar to geographically surrounding non-Basque populations, and also that their genetic uniqueness is based on a lower amount of external influences compared with other Iberians and French populations. Our data suggest that the genetic heterogeneity and structure observed in the Basque region result from pre-Roman tribal structure related to geography and might be linked to the increased complexity of emerging societies during the Bronze Age. The rough overlap of the pre-Roman tribe location and the current dialect limits support the notion that the environmental diversity in the region has played a recurrent role in cultural differentiation and ethnogenesis at different time periods.

After offering a brief survey of the features of causative sentences in Basque, mainly onthe basis of Dixon's (2000) criteria, the paper deals with Basque lexical causatives, whichcan be used as either causative or unaccusative verbs. The proposed analysis assumes that lexical decomposition is carried out directly according to syntactic principles (Hale & Keyser 1993, Baker 1997, McGinnis 2000), and that different types of causative sentence(morphological vs lexical causatives) correspond to different types ofphrase (VoiceP vs VP) selected by the Cause head (Pylkkannen 2001, 2002; Meggerdoomian 2002). The paper shows that in Basque lexical causatives the Cause head selects one of the predicates BECOME or GO only. Other intransitive verbs are excluded from lexical causativization, even those which are superficially similar verbs of change because they are absolutive monadic verbs (reflexive verbs like orraztu 'comb', verbs of happening like gertatu 'happen', or verbs of activity like jostatu 'play'). Three types of lexical causative are distinguished and analyzed following lexical decomposition: verbs of change of (physical) state, verbs of change of place and psychological causatives. Since Basque, unlike Finnish or Japanese, shows a strict correlation between causation and the existence of an external argument, it is assumed that in Basque as in English, the Cause and Voice heads conflate in lexical causatives (Pylkännen 2002).

Abstract We sought to describe the strategies used by 2L1 and L2 Basque-French bilingual children and monolingual Basque children to express subject-agent function in a free elicitation context in Basque. Based on a three-year longitudinal study, the analysis focused on transitive constructions requiring a subject-agent noun marked for ergative case. The results showed that the children mastered production of the ergative case marker at different ages, and used different psycholinguistic strategies to refer to the subject-agent. The majority of the bilingual children favoured topological strategy (i.e., marking of the subject-agent in the first position through subject-verb-object word order). However, the children with L1 Basque seemed to engage more in morphological strategy, through the use of the nominal ergative suffix. These data allowed us to discuss variations in the performance of bilingual children in light of the cue cost and cue validity concepts elaborated by the Competition Model applied to language production.

In the expression of spatial relationships, it is cross-linguistically common that human or animate nouns have particularities that distinguish them from other nouns. After presenting cross-linguistic data illustrating some tendencies observed in the behavior of human or animate nouns in spatial orienter function, this paper examines the contribution of Basque data to this question.

Final obstruent devoicing is common in the world's languages and constitutes a clear case of parallel phonological evolution. Final obstruent voicing, in contrast, is claimed to be rare or nonexistent. Two distinct theoretical approaches crystalize around obstruent voicing patterns. Traditional markedness accounts view these sound patterns as consequences of universal markedness constraints prohibiting voicing, or favoring voicelessness, in final position, and predict that final obstruent voicing does not exist. In contrast, phonetic-historical accounts explain skewed patterns of voicing in terms of common phonetically based devoicing tendencies, allowing for rare cases of final obstruent voicing under special conditions. In this article, phonetic and phonological evidence is offered for final obstruent voicing in Lakota, an indigenous Siouan language of the Great Plains of North America. In Lakota, oral stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ are regularly pronounced as [b], [l], and [ɡ] in word- and syllable-final position when phrase-final devoicing and preobstruent devoicing do not occur.

Minority language" as a notion emerged in scientific and legal discourse in the last decades of the twentieth century. Its definition has never been clear and looking at how it is used in discourse, it becomes obvious that its meaning is context-dependent. This Multilingua issue is dedicated to the investigation of what it means to designate a language as a minority language in the twenty-first century in Europe.

La notion de langue régionale s'est répandue depuis un demi-siècle notamment en Europe bien qu'on la trouve également en Inde où elle s'applique à des langues territorialisées co-officielles. En Europe, c'est surtout en France qu'elle a pris la place de notion référente. On la retrouve aussi à travers la notion de "langue régionale ou minoritaire" dans la Charte du Conseil de l'Europe s'appliquant à des langues désignées ainsi.Cette notion a fini par intégrer plusieurs acceptions. Partant de là, cet article s'emploie à faire le point sur les traits définitoires communs et différentes propriétés qui se déclinent selon les pays, depuis des acceptions minimales jusqu'à d'autres qui ajoutent aux traits géographique ("régional") et démolinguistique de départ des propriétés qui caractérisent cette langue par rapport à d'autres également minoritaires soit par le type d'historicité et de lien au territoire, soit par le statut juridique.

Bien que les tudes toponymiques concernant la Galice aient toujours t beaucoup moins nombreuses que celles ayant pour objet le Pays Basque ou la Catalogne, il existe nanmoins certains articles et ouvrages linguistiques de grande qualit. Ces derniers mentionnent plusieurs noms de lieux galiciens, particulirement ceux d'origine latino-romane ainsi que ceux issus du germanique, les principaux travaux tant surtout ceux de Joseph M. Piel. Les travaux de Joan Coromines, dont l'oeuvre est pourtant considrable, n'ont abord que quelques rares points de toponymie galicienne 1 .

This study analyzes gender assignment in Spanish–Basque mixed nominal constructions with nouns in Basque (a language that lacks gender) and determiners in Spanish (a language that marks gender) by using a multi-task approach: (i) naturalistic data, (ii) an elicitation task, and (iii) an auditory judgment task. Naturalistic data suggest cross-language effects under which a morphological marker of Basque (-a determiner) is interpreted as a morphophonological expression of gender marking in Spanish. A preference for feminine determiners was observed in the judgment task, which differs from the masculine default trend observed in Spanish–English bilinguals (Jake, Myers-Scotton & Gross, 2002). Our results point to feminine gender as default in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs, indicating that the resources that bilinguals use for gender assignment can be different from those of monolinguals. We argue that this is an outcome of interacting processes which take place at the interfaces (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax) of both languages, resulting in cross-language effects.

0. Sarrera Lan honek euskararen menpeko infinitiboak ditu aztergai. Zehazkiago, haiekin sortzen den komunztadura fenomeno bat, hemen urru-neko komunztadura deituko dudana. Mintzagai izango dudan fenomenoa (1)-(3)-koa da. (l)-(3)-ko perpausetan, perpaus nagusiko laguntzaileak komun-ztadura egin dezake berez perpaus berekoa ez den argumentu batekin, men-peko infinitiboaren objektuarekin alegia : (1) a. [Nobela beltzak irakurtzea] gustatzen zaiob. [Nobela beltzak irakurtzea] gustatzen zaizkio (2...

In recent research (Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco, 2014a,b) have advanced the hypothesis that our species-specific language-ready brain should be understood as the outcome of developmental changes that occurred in our species after the split from Neanderthals-Denisovans, which resulted in a more globular braincase configuration in comparison to our closest relatives, who had elongated endocasts. According to these authors, the development of a globular brain is an essential ingredient for the language faculty and in particular, it is the centrality occupied by the thalamus in a globular brain that allows its modulatory or regulatory role, essential for syntactico-semantic computations. Their hypothesis is that the syntactico-semantic capacities arise in humans as a consequence of a process of globularization, which significantly takes place postnatally (cf. Neubauer et al., 2010). In this paper, I show that Boeckx and Benítez-Burraco's hypothesis makes an interesting developmental prediction regarding the path of language acquisition: it teases apart the onset of phonological acquisition and the onset of syntactic acquisition (the latter starting significantly later, after globularization). I argue that this hypothesis provides a developmental rationale for the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis of language acquisition (cf. i.a. Gleitman and Wanner, 1982; Mehler et al., 1988, et seq.; Gervain and Werker, 2013), which claim that prosodic cues are employed for syntactic parsing. The literature converges in the observation that a large amount of such prosodic cues (in particular, rhythmic cues) are already acquired before the completion of the globularization phase, which paves the way for the premises of the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis, allowing babies to have a rich knowledge of the prosody of their target language before they can start parsing the primary linguistic data syntactically.

Celtic and Semitic languages show the following clustering of typological properties: (i) the Complementarity Principle in the verbal agreement system; (ii) licensing of a genitive dependent by a construct state; (iii) a verbal construction whose object bears genitive. The aim of this paper is to show how (i-iii) are derived in one of these languages taken as a case study. I will show that in the Breton language (Continental Celtic), the three properties mentioned above follow straightforwardly from one parameter: the interpretability of the [D] feature on v as represented in (1a), where v is a functional projection similar to D in a DP structure in (1b).1) a. [vP Subject v [D- φ 3.SG ] [ VP ] ] b. [DP ..... D [ NP ]

Language Variation – European Perspectives V is based on papers presented at the Seventh International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 7), which was held in Trondheim, Norway from 26 to 28 June 2013. The 17 papers included in the book explore phonetic and phonological variation (Bitenc and Kenda-Jež; Hildenbrandt and Moosmüller; Jansen; Schaufuß; Schleef, Flynn and Ramsammy; Stuart-Smith, Rathcke, Sonderegger and Macdonald), morphology (Padilla-Moyano), syntax (Christensen and Juel Jensen; Jónsson, Brynjólfsdóttir and Sverrisdóttir), morphosyntax (Auger and Wycoff; Cerruti and Regis), language ideology, linguistic practices and language attitudes (Strand; Hall-Lew, Fairs and Lew; Dunmore and Smith-Christmas), code-switching (Amadou; Bucher) and language documentation (Kühl). The book is essential reading for scholars working on variation and change in European languages. The articles in the present volume investigate Romani, Turkish, Greek, Slovene, Picard, Swiss-German, Basque, Danish, Italian, English, Gaelic, Icelandic Sign Language, Faroe Danish and Norwegian.