Three languages play an important role in the province of Fryslân: Frisian as the minority language spoken by a majority of the population, Dutch as the dominant language in society, and English as an increasingly important additional language. The position of Frisian as a language for teaching is marginal at all levels of education. Although it is an obligatory language for all primary schools...

This study provides evidence that the role of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) in substrate languages is reflected in prosodic systems of contact varieties of French. We have compared two contact varieties: Central African French, a variety of French spoken by L1 speakers of Sango a lexical tone language where the constraint is not respected, and Burundi French, which is spoken by L1 spea...

Due to the importance that verbs have in language an identification of their actants (obligatory complements) is important for understanding of the meaning of sentences. Usually, the solution of this problem in natural language processing is based on machine learning approaches, which are trained on large sets of tagged texts. We show that it is possible to work with other kind of sources, i.e....

This paper analyzes a language for actions and the deontic modalities over actions — i.e., the modalities permitted, forbidden and obligatory. The work is based on: (1) an action language that allows the representation of concurrent and repetitive events; (2) a deontic language that allows the representation of “free choice permissions”; (3) a proof procedure that admits a logic programming sty...

This paper discusses the issue of irrelevance aspect Polish verb. In specifi c contexts, grammatical category aspect, being obligatory in language, is fact redundant. The identifi cation such contexts (and hence review most important current observations and convictions this respect), attempt at ordering describing them enabled systematic material research based on a (Polish–German German–Polis...

Assimilation of place of articulation across a nasal and a following stop consonant is obligatory in Japanese, but not in Dutch. In four experiments the processing of assimilated forms by speakers of Japanese and Dutch was compared, using a task in which listeners blended pseudo-word pairs such as ranga-serupa. An assimilated blend of this pair would be rampa, an unassimilated blend rangpa. Jap...

A perception study with acoustically manipulated tokens sought to establish the relative weight of noise vs. formant transition cues in the perception of stop place of articulation by Polish listeners, and to replicate previous findings from a crowdsourced experiment. Results suggest that noise cues are primary for Poles in stop place identification. It is argued that this finding is compatible...

Romanian is a language which exhibits differential object marking (DOM) using the particle pe and (in most cases) a clitic pronoun (Niculescu 1965, Pan -Dindelegan 1997, von Heusinger & Onea 2008, Stark & Sora 2008). Direct object case marking is optional with human indefinite direct objects, as in (1), and almost obligatory with postverbal human definite direct objects, as reflected in the con...