Research has shown that givenness is one of several factors that influence the choice of word order with the Dative Alternation in languages such as English. This paper investigates to what extent Norwegian children between the ages of 4;2 and 6;0 are sensitive to this factor in production. In order to test this, an experiment was carried out in which the children were prompted to produce structures ...

One of the main topics on the study of the relationship between syntax and morphology is (deverbal) nominalizations. In this area, several generalizations that tie the morphological make-up with the syntactic structure have been made. Most relevantly, it has been argued that only overt nominalizations (those that include a nominalizer like -ation or -ment) are allowed to have internal arguments ...

On the background of a close reading of Ridley Scott’s war film Black Hawk Down (USA 2001; BHD), this paper investigates the formal properties through which a certain strain of war and action movies discursively constitutes the other – the enemy - as less than human. I develop the argument that the emergent relation between friend and foe in these films can be read through the concept of the border ...

This paper proposes an account of final devoicing in Friulian which relies on contrastive feature specification and feature geometry to explicate the connection between final devoicing and vowel lengthening. It is proposed that obstruents which are the outcome of final devoicing are phonologically distinct from true voiceless obstruents, being completely unspecified for laryngeal features. It is ...

This article is chiefly concerned with Wallace Stegner’s ideas of aridity as the key to the understanding of the history and culture of the American West. It first examines the arguments of some major books published in the 1980s that helped strengthen Stegner’s conviction that the West was heading towards environmental disaster due to the rapidly increasing depletion of its rivers and aquifers, a ...

This article discusses the absence of reflexive or self-caused readings in certain types of participles and de-verbal nominalizations, like the hanging of the suicidal patient and The suicidal patient was hanged yesterday. I argue that the "anti-reflexive" reading is not triggered by the presence of a subject PRO or pro, but rather by the absence of reflexive marking, i.e. overt marking that functions ...

This article discusses the possibility that Lexical Integrity effects can be explained by proposing that words are syntactic phases, thus eliminating these effects from the set of phenomena that argue in favour of the autonomy of morphology. The proposal is discussed from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, and it is shown, in the first place, that the phases proposed to give account ...

The research on the properties of nominalizations is one key empirical domain where crucial questions about the organization of grammar have tried to be answered: how are the morphology, the syntax and the semantics of a word intertwined? In this paper we address zero derived deverbal nouns in Spanish (the equivalent of attack) and we argue that, despite the presence of a desinence, this morpheme ...

In the present article we are offering a corpus-based analysis of nu-drop in Russian verbs, the process whereby certain verbs with the suffix -nu- omit this morpheme in past tense forms. We will explore phonological, morphological and syntactic/semantic factors and show that inflectional and derivational morphology are the most important for nu-drop. Our study of the inflectional and derivational ...