This paper deals with cases of apparent enclisis on past participles in North-Western Italian varieties. It is claimed that these cases do not involve clitic pronouns, but weak pronouns in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). Both syntactic and morphophonological evidence is discussed. Some varieties display both proclitics and postverbal weak pronouns and use them in different syntacti...

In this paper, we address the task of languageindependent, knowledge-lean and unsupervised compound splitting, which is an essential component for many natural language processing tasks such as machine translation. Previous methods on statistical compound splitting either include language-specific knowledge (e.g., linking elements) or rely on parallel data, which results in limited applicabilit...

My objective in this paper i s to provide a contrastive analysis of partitives in English and Italian. The differences between these two languages appear to be representat ive of the di fferences prevail ing throughout the Romance and Germanic families and thus i t is hoped that the analysis to be offered wil l be of more general appl icabil i ty . I will couch my proposal within an approach to...

This article discusses a number of complex appositive constructions, and compares them to regular nonrestrictive relative clauses and appositions in some Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. Special attention is paid to the existence of so-called additional head NPs, and additional pronouns and determiners in appositive constructions. It is argued that almost all of the constructions under d...

After a short general discussion of ’parallel’ words, we compare the placement of main stress in such words, in Swedish (Stockholm), Danish (Copenhagen) and Norwegian (Ålesund). To be sure, this property coincides in the vast majority (> 95%) of the cases. However, concentrating on the exceptions (about 300 per language pair in our data), we find that although all three languages exhibit late s...

Research on the mutual intelligibility of closely related Germanic languages has shown that several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors determine intelligibility scores to a high degree. In this paper, we aim to pinpoint the precise role of the determinant phonetic distance. As for example Gooskens (2007) shows, aggregate Levenshtein distances turn out to be good predictors of the intelligi...

The two West-Germanic languages Dutch and Afrikaans are so closely related that they can be expected to be mutually intelligible to a large extent. The present investigation focuses on written language. Comprehension was established by means of cloze tests on the basis of two newspaper articles. Results suggest that it is easier for Dutch subjects to understand written Afrikaans than it is for ...

In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. However, is this strategy universally available, even in languages with different phonological systems? In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment is also found in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where in principle the use of pitch for lexical identi...