Functional Categories

Resumen Construcciones como El Gobierno presto ayuda {mas/mejor/antes/primero} a los bancos que a los ciudadanos han sido habitualmente analizadas en la gramatica del espanol como pseudocomparativas con un valor exclusivo, correctivo o metalinguistico. Es objetivo de este trabajo demostrar la existencia en estas estructuras, en unos casos, de autenticos grupos sintacticos comparativos y, en otros, de locuciones adverbiales semilexicalizadas los cuales carecen de estatus sintactico y actuan como operadores de foco en la estructura informativa de la oracion. Estos operadores se asocian siempre a un foco contrastivo. Palabras clave : Estructuras pseudocomparativas; comparativas metalinguisticas; estructura informativa de la oracion; operadores de foco; foco contrastivo. Abstract Spanish sentences like El Gobierno presto ayuda {mas/mejor/antes/primero} a los bancos que a los ciudadanos are often analysed as pseudo-comparative structures with an exclusive, corrective or metalinguistic va...

and, especially, the late Ken Hale. Material here is a revised version of chapter 5 of Bruening 2001. 1 This sentence was translated in the text, misleadingly, as 'She knew that it was her brother.' I have replaced it with a more syntactically accurate translation. See below for explanation of the morphology. Examples are given in the practical orthography in use in the Passamaquoddy community. Letters have their IPA values except that o = schwa, q = [kw], c = palatal affricate, hC = (pre-)aspirated C, ' = abstract morpheme (or segment) inducing aspiration in following consonant. Consonants are voiced intervocalically and initially.

2003, IULC): This book is an extensive revision of my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the University of Essex in 1999. While the arguments presented herein are identical to those of the dissertation-namely, arguments which lend themselves to more traditional theories concerning the nature of language development-many of the findings could be recast to contribute to the series of debates now being waged regarding the 'Dual Mechanism Model' (see Clahsen 1999, Pinker 1999 for a review). For instance, attested disparities development/chronological onsets between the morphological processing of (rote-learned) irregular versus (rule based) regular verbs (evidenced in so-called 'u-shaped learning') may likewise spill-over and reflect the protracted development of more formal computational processes related to the emergence of functional categories (particularly the development of IP). Generally speaking, I believe the findings presented in this book add considerable support to the idea that children may indeed begin their very early stages of syntactic development much in the same way as they begin their phonological development-that is, initially, by primitive and robust means of establishing some type of first order associations linking 'form' to 'meaning', whether it be regarding, for example (i) the treatment of syllabi whole chunks that the child processes in early word production/recognition (postponing a phonetic based segmental process to a second stage of development), or, as this study shows, (ii) the treatment of non-syntactic processing where formulaic chunks and or lexical redundancy rules are the order of the day (and likewise postponing a 'pure' rule-based syntactic process to a second stage of development).

Resumen Este trabajo investiga el uso de las preposiciones de, sobre, acerca de y en torno a para expresar el tema o asunto de una conversacion, de donde procede la denominacion de preposiciones de ‘tema/asunto’. El objetivo es averiguar que diferencias hay en el uso de estas preposiciones, partiendo del llamado Principio-de-no-sinonimia (Goldberg 1995, p. 67). Basandome en la idea de que el contexto de uso puede revelar diferencias entre estas expresiones sinonimas dentro del ambito de tema/ asunto, he anotado 100 casos de cada preposicion extraidos del Corpus de espanol de Davies 2002, segun 22 factores gramaticales. Estos datos han sido analizados cuantitativamente mediante analisis de regresion logistica (multinomial y binomial por pares) y sometidos a un agrupamiento jerarquico. Los resultados indican que especialmente de se distingue de las demas, mientras que sobre, acerca de y en torno a presentan usos tan semejantes que resulta dificil diferenciarlas nitidamente. Palabras c...

Merge is inextricably linked to Dynamic Antisymmetry (DA)insofar that any exclusive ‘merge-only’ stage would only support a strictly symmetric/unordered SET{α,β} (where higher functional features would not project and where word order would remain variable). Antisymmetry (non-mirror structures), leading to the formulation of hierarchical fixed word order, as expressed in Moro’s work on DA. Labelling, along with fixed word order can only come about via displacement properties having to do with
recursive MOVE, projecting a subsequent structure-dependent PAIR<α, β> whilst
dispensing with the former structure-independent SET{α,β}. This shift from SET to
PAIR can only arise via MOVE. (SET{α, β} → PAIR <α, <α, β>>)

As an update to my 2001 paper on ‘The Development of English Word Order: A Minimalist Approach’—where I cite Kayne’s 1994 LCA as principally behind the early child’s setting of word order (and where I speak of ‘single v double’ argument strings as playing an essential role)—I’d like to suggest a more current analysis widely in support of Andrea Moro's ‘Dynamic Antisymmetry’(DA) model which, inter alia, suggests that in order for a given phrase to be labelled and therefore ordered, (thus providing for a H(ead) of P(hrase)), hierarchical movement must ensue, thus breaking with flat-symmetric sisterhood relations e.g., an unordered SET{α, β}. My 2001 analysis on early child variable word order as expressed in this paper, I feel, can be easily extended to capture Moro's premise that any putative single argument string (SAS) stage, as found in my early stage-1, would not entail the hierarchical capacity to support the correct setting of word order, as is attested in these data.
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Ref. Paper. Goodluck H, Kazanina N. (2020) 'Fragments Along the Way: Minimalism as an Account of Some Stages in First Language Acquisition'. PMID: 32457672. More recent research has shown that in early stages word order can be variable: strings that must be interpreted as Subject—Verb, Verb—Subject, Object—Verb and Verb—Object are attested in languages with SVO order (Tsimpli, 1992 [quoted in Galasso, 2001], Galasso, 2001). Thus, it may be the case that at a very early stage the child combines two words without attention to headedness. Nonetheless, the evidence favors the rapid development of a system in which asymmetric Merge is found in child language----
See paper 'Note on 'Problems of Projection' (Chomsky's 2013 Lingua paper): https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007267

This paper discusses the issues concerning functional categories in Japanese as they pertain to Universal Grammar. A minimalist guideline called the Visibility Guideline for Functional Categories is proposed, according to which functional categories are required to be ''detectable'' (directly or indirectly) in the primary linguistic data. Various candidates for functional categories in Japanese are examined in light of the Visibility Guideline, and it is concluded that none of them is qualified as an active functional category inducing formal and mechanical computations. An alternative view of the relevant phenomena in terms of ''PF reanalysis'' is put forth, and the analysis is extended to the case marking mechanism in Japanese. An overall picture of Japanese grammar is also suggested as the result of the discussion on functional categories: In many areas of Japanese grammar, PF and semantic mechanisms are at work in place of mechanical computations in narrow syntax.

There is a tension between Chomsky's recent Minimalist theory and the cartographic program initiated by Cinque. Cinque's cartography argues for a large number of finegrained categories organized in one or more universal Rich Functional Hierarchies (RFH). The subtlety of the evidence and the richness of the inventory virtually force an innatist approach. In contrast, Chomsky argues for a minimal role for UG (MUG), shifting the burden to extralinguistic cognition, learning, and what he calls third factor principles such as principles of efficient computation. In this paper we reconcile the austere MUG vision of Chomsky with the impressive empirical evidence that Cinque and others have presented for RFH. We argue (building on previous work) that some Cartographic work overstates the universality of the orders observed, and furthermore conflates several different sources of ordering. Ordering sources include scope, polarity, and semantic category. Once these factors are properly understood, there remains an irreduceable universal functional hierarchy, for example that which orders epistemic modality and tense over root modality and aspect, and that which orders the latter over argument structure and Aktionsart (as discussed in much previous work). This residual core functional hierarchy (CFH) is unexplained so far by work which follows MUG. Rather than simply stipulating the CFH as part of UG, we reconcile CFH with MUG by detailing what nonlinguistic cognition must look like in order for MUG to derive the CFH. We furthermore show how an individual language develops a languagespecific RFH which is consistent with the universal CFH, illustrating with a detailed account of the English auxiliary system.

This paper proposes that sentential particles belong to the class of semi-lexical categories. Sentential particles are fixed forms derived from nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. They modify the sentence and contribute a pragmatic or discursive meaning. The hypothesis defended here is that sentential particles are semi-lexical because they are lexical words occupying a functional position related to the pragmatic layer of the sentence. This hypothesis explains that sentential particles share some properties with functional heads without losing all the properties of the lexical ones.

Background and Aim : An interesting area of research in deaf studies concerns the idea that various language components and particularly different functional categories such as tense, mood, and agreement are not impaired to the same extent. The present study aimed to explore the performance of Persian speaking deaf individuals on tests dealing with five functional categories, namely complementizer/Wh-words, tense, aspect, mood, and agreement. Methods : This research was a cross-sectional study with two groups, first of which included 11 (4 boys and 7 girls) profoundly deaf students with hearing loss above 90 dB for both ears, aged between 14 and 22; and second group of 15 students with normal hearing with mean (SD) age of 14 (2) years. In addition to interviews, we also conducted sentence-completion and grammaticality judgment tasks to explore their performance in each category. Results : The deaf group performed significantly worse than hearing group in all the tests. Our results a...

«Matrix syntax» es un modelo formal de relaciones sintácticas en el lenguaje. La estructura matemática resultante se asemeja a algunos aspectos de la mecánica cuántica. «Matrix syntax» nos permite describir una serie de fenómenos del lenguaje que de otro modo serían muy difíciles de explicar, como las cadenas lingüísticas, y podría decirse que es una teoría del lenguaje más económica que la mayoría de las teorías propuestas en el contexto del programa minimalista en lingüística. En particular, las oraciones se modelan de manera natural como vectores en un espacio de Hilbert con una estructura de producto tensorial, construida a partir de matrices de 2x2.

Background: The distribution of pronouns varies cross-linguistically. This distribution has led to conflicting results in studies that investigated pronoun resolution in agrammatic indviduals. In the investigation of pronominal resolution, the linguistic phenomenon of "resumption" is understudied in agrammatism. The construction of pronominal resolution in Akan presents the opportunity to thoroughly examine resumption. Aims: To start, the present study examines the production of (pronominal) resumption in Akan focus constructions (who-questions and focused declaratives). Second, we explore the effect of grammatical tone on the processing of pronominal (resumption) since Akan is a tonal language. Methods & Procedures: First, we tested the ability to distinguish linguistic and non-linguistic tone in Akan agrammatic speakers. Then, we administered an elicitation task to five Akan agrammatic individuals, controlling for the structural variations in the realization of resumption: focused who-questions and declaratives with (i) only a resumptive pronoun, (ii) only a clause determiner, (iii) a resumptive pronoun and a clause determiner co-occurring, and (iv) neither a resumptive pronoun nor a clause determiner. Outcomes & Results: Tone discrimination .both for pitch and for lexical tone was unimpaired. The production task demonstrated that the production of resumptive pronouns and clause determiners was intact. However, the production of declarative sentences in derived word order was impaired; wh-object questions were relatively well-preserved. Conclusions: We argue that the problems with sentence production are highly selective: linguistic tones and resumption are intact but word order is impaired in non-canonical declarative sentences.

This paper addresses the following questions: is (external) merge, the binary operation that combines two elements into a constituent in every variant of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1993, 1995 and related works), an unconstrained operation? If so, what avoid generating ill-formed structures? I will argue here for a simple functional / lexical constraint on Merge, assuming a possible principled binary opposition for the items which enter the syntactic derivation. I will basically follow Kayne (2009), who assumes that the class of nouns (or L-roots) is the only open (lexical) class in grammar, updating the intuitions of Hale and Keyser (1993). This proposal leads to interesting structural and typological consequences.

El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar por qué el español y otras lenguas admiten complementos de tiempo construidos como sintagmas nominales sin preposición. Propondremos que el motivo es que la estructura tempoaspectual de la cláusula se define en la espina dorsal del árbol sintáctico, lo cual hace innecesario emplear un elemento relacional para construir ese significado: el sintagma es un argumento de dichas proyecciones temporales. La distribución de los sintagmas nominales admitidos en estos contextos se sigue de las condiciones generales de legitimación de los argumentos.

Bat diversity and activity have been documented to change with elevation and to be correlated with temperature variation, especially in temperate regions. Acoustic elevational studies of insectivorous bat fauna in tropical mountains are scarce. Here, we investigated diversity, general and species-specific activity patterns of aerial insectivorous bats along an elevational gradient in Costa Rica and tested the hypothesis that on tropical wet mountains species richness of insectivorous bats follows a decreasing pattern with elevation. We expected a peak of species diversity and activity at lower elevations and higher temperatures and nomajor differences betweenmonths. With simultaneous acoustic monitoring on five elevations, we recorded 11 984 bat passes during approximately 550 recording hours and identified 15 species, two genera and one sonotype at the family level. We found the highest diversity and activity of bats at mid-elevations, besides elevational, temporal and species-spec...

This paper concerns the exploitation and the creative use of the world wide web as text corpus in the educational process and, specifically, in grammar teaching. The most important aims of this study are the following two: (a) the investigation of the fruitfulness of the web as texts corpus in grammar teaching considered both as a resource for authentic data used for the grammar codification process as well as a tool for evaluation of the language coursebook content by the students; (b) the comparison of the web as corpus with the conventional corpora as far as their usefulness in language teaching. The criteria of the comparison are the size and the representativeness of the texts corpora (web and conventional) as much as the reproducibility of the results of the research through these tools. At last, a grammar teaching activity is presented, where web as corpus is exploited.

Background and Aim : An interesting area of research in deaf studies concerns the idea that various language components and particularly different functional categories such as tense, mood, and agreement are not impaired to the same extent. The present study aimed to explore the performance of Persian speaking deaf individuals on tests dealing with five functional categories, namely complementizer/Wh-words, tense, aspect, mood, and agreement. Methods : This research was a cross-sectional study with two groups, first of which included 11 (4 boys and 7 girls) profoundly deaf students with hearing loss above 90 dB for both ears, aged between 14 and 22; and second group of 15 students with normal hearing with mean (SD) age of 14 (2) years. In addition to interviews, we also conducted sentence-completion and grammaticality judgment tasks to explore their performance in each category. Results : The deaf group performed significantly worse than hearing group in all the tests. Our results a...

Estudiamos las semejanzas y las diferencias de dos categorías que expresan número en español: la categoría gramatical de número y la categoría léxica de numeral cardinal. Aplicamos un modelo comparativo basado en Bosque 1989. El sistema de número gramatical y el sistema de número léxico comparten la función aditiva mínima que los genera. Difieren en (a) la naturaleza de las unidades que construyen sus sistemas: unidad natural en los nombres; card(n) unidad axiomática en los números y (b) las propiedades del dominio: Semirretícula de uniones (conjunto parcialmente ordenado); secuencia de números naturales ⟨1,2,...,n⟩ ∈ ℕ (conjunto totalmente ordenado). Proponemos un modelo que generaliza los Axiomas de Peano para las funciones que construyen el sistema.

Pollock (1989) initiated a paradigm of research within the Principles and Parameters framework where Agreement (Agr) as a functional projection has played an increasingly significant role. The legitimacy of this programme has been called into question by Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program. Chomsky rejects Agr on conceptual grounds, so that in his system only those functional projections with clear semantic content such as Tense and Negation are retained. Agree is analysed in terms of feature movement and a concept of matching that is left unclear. In Chomsky (1998, 2000) Agree is further defined as a relation that holds between a goal and a probe within a minimal domain that leads to feature deletion under matching. This paper focuses on the nature of agreement specified for [gender, number] features and gives empirical support to Chomsky's rejection of Agr(O). Exploiting Cinque's (1999) adverb hierarchy, the paper shows that the presence of a functional projection devoted to object agreement cannot be empirically justified. It is proposed that the agreement relation established between a past participle and its direct object, and in general all instances of agreement specified for [gender] features, exploits the relation of c-command, suggesting that the latter is indeed active within the narrow syntax, contra Chomsky (2000). Finally, we suggest that not all instances of agreement are to be subsumed under the same mechanism: it seems plausible to claim that agreement specified for [gender] and agreement specified for [person] are instantiated through different configurational structures.

Este trabajo aborda la utilidad, la validez y el uso de varias nociones gramaticales, casi todas sintácticas. Nuestro objetivo es evaluar si algunos conceptos frecuentes en las asignaturas de lengua de secundaria y bachillerato deberían ser reemplazados por otros, o bien debería modificarse en alguna medida el contenido que actualmente se les otorga. Defendemos tales posibilidades, que justificamos con el argumento principal de que el análisis gramatical debe relacionar las formas con los significados y ha de favorecer la reflexión sobre el conocimiento inconsciente que cada hablante tiene de su propia lengua, además de sobre el uso que los hablantes hacen de las expresiones lingüísticas. Por motivos expositivos, consideraremos cuatro tipos de nociones gramaticales: aquellas que se aplican y son útiles; aquellas que también son útiles, pero que apenas se aplican; aquellas que se suelen aplicar, pese a ser poco útiles; y, finalmente, aquellas que podrían resultar útiles y que raramen...

El objetivo de este trabajo es contribuir a precisar, en primera instancia, qué se entiende
por adjetivo desde una perspectiva interlingüística y, en segundo término, qué se entiende
por adjetivo dentro del sistema lingüístico concreto (el español) en que nos centramos.
La lingüística actual considera que la separación del léxico de una lengua en distintas
«clases de palabras» debe establecerse a partir de los diferentes grupos que puedan aislarse
mediante criterios morfosintácticos. La adscripción de estos grupos resultantes a las clases
universales (nombre, verbo, adjetivo…) se lleva a cabo a partir de sus propiedades semánticas:
en el caso del adjetivo, estas propiedades son (1) indicar que una entidad tiene una
determinada propiedad y (2) contribuir a especificar el referente de un sintagma nominal.
A partir de nuestro análisis del español mostramos que en esta lengua hay,
efectivamente, una clase de palabras que se puede aislar morfosintácticamente e
identificar semánticamente con la etiqueta (aparentemente) universal de adjetivo.
Sin embargo, no todo aquello que tradicionalmente llamamos adjetivo en español acepta el
mismo proceso morfosintáctico de «aislamiento», por lo que cabe plantearse, como hacía
Siegel 1980 con el inglés, si el español cuenta verdaderamente con una única clase que integra
las tres categorías principales en que suele subdividirse la clase adjetival: adjetivos calificativos,
adjetivos relacionales y adjetivos adverbiales. Desde el punto de vista semántico los calificativos llevan
a cabo las dos funciones prototípicas de la clase; mientras, los relacionales y los adverbiales,
solo desempeñan una de ellas. En lo sintáctico esto se deja notar en la «movilidad» que,
respecto al nombre, presentan los calificativos y en el «estatismo» de relacionales y adverbiales.

This work proposes a structural account of Korean determiner phrase (DP) under the assumption of Minimalist Program. The analysis is first motivated by the question of What’s in the DP? In order to offer an answer to this question, possible DP-internal elements are determined first; they are the head noun and pre/post-nominal modifiers. Examinations of these elements and the interactions among them reveal their positions in the hierarchy of DP structure. Four optional functional categories are found in between the two obligatory projections, NP and DP. Special attention is paid to, first, floating quantifier a popular topic among Korean and Japanese syntacticians, and second, the post-nominal quantifier ta. The data analysis reveals that the numeral phrase projects immediately above the noun phrase, and the classifier phrase takes the numeral phrase as its complement, which many researchers agree. Then, two subsequent quantifier phrases merge in, the higher one of which represents t...

Persian lexical categories have been recognized and presented in all grammar books of this language. Although Persian possesses the common and crosslinguistically known parts of speech such as adverb, adjectives, prepositions, nouns and verbs which can be distinguished from each other according to their morphosyntactic behaviors and distributional criteria, it also has a considerable number of mismatching lexical words which do not easily fall under any of the common known lexical categories. In the following sections, Persian mismatching words will be focused on in order to scrutinize their nature from the view point of their lexical category or parts of speech. In addition, we try to examine some of the important and controversial views on parts of speech in light of Persian lexical categories, especially mismatching words in this language. Different views on lexical categories will be referred under two general titles: lexical and feature-based approaches or syntactic and construction-based approaches. According to the former, words are lexically specified which means that it is a part of linguistic knowledge of speakers that words are classified as nouns, verbs, etc. However, in the latter approach, lexical categories are specified according to their relationship with other linguistic forms and lexical words are not specified as noun, verb, etc. as part of their lexical specification. We will show that different classes of Persian lexical items can be better accounted for in a theory, contra feature-based approaches, in which constructions, but not words, are assumed as primitive and atomic; lexical categories are determined and specified in constructions headed by functional heads. After this introductory section, we focus on Persian word classes and illustrate how various word classes are distinguished from each other based on morphosyntactic and syntactic distributional criteria in section 2. In section 3, we argue and explain that mismatching lexical words in the language are independent words with their own forms and

This article discusses some of the problems generated by the proliferation of functional categories. Empirical evidence is presented favoring approaches according to which functional categories are only projected if necessary either to create hosts for lexical ...

La presente aportación propone una presentación del desarrollo y los objetivos de la Biolingüística y una reflexión sobre su estatus como disciplina científica. Mostramos, en general, que la consideración del lenguaje como una propiedad biológica de nuestra especie, y no solo como un logro cultural de la misma, ha tenido un efecto notable en el desarrollo de la teoría lingüística, y en su conexión con otros ámbitos de la ciencia cognitiva, notablemente con la psicolingüística. Se concluye que, aunque aún queda mucho por comprender sobre cómo el cerebro procesa y almacena el lenguaje, sobre cómo surgió evolutivamente esta facultad en nuestra especie y sobre cómo se desarrolla en cada persona, gracias a la integración de la lingüística teórica y la neurociencia cognitiva, cada vez somos más capaces de convertir esos misterios en problemas abordables empíricamente.

El presente trabajo examina la variación diatópica de la perífrasis andar + Ger, comparando su uso en el español mexicano con el uso peninsular. Para ello, se analiza la frecuencia relativa de la misma en varios corpus y se estudian sus rasgos semánticos y sintácticos más destacados. El análisis cuantitativo, por una parte, pone de manifiesto la mayor frecuencia de andar + Ger en el español de México en comparación con el español peninsular. Por otra parte, revela que la perífrasis ocurre, sobre todo, en modalidades de lengua informales. En el plano semántico, el presente estudio confirma que, en perífrasis de gerundio, el verbo andar ha ido perdiendo su significado léxico de movimiento físico y ha llegado a transmitir valores pragmáticos, particularmente de determinación y empeño. Asimismo, a diferencia del español de España, en el español de México la perífrasis está sometida a relativamente pocas restricciones selectivas respecto del gerundio, evolución que se fecha en épocas relativamente recientes. En el nivel sintáctico, el proceso de gramaticalización se manifiesta en 1 El título se inspira en la siguiente cita: "…, pues los ascos no son una enfermedad en sí, sino el resultado de que algo anda ocurriendo en nuestro organismo" (https://www.imer. mx/tropicalisima/nauseas/).

In this paper I argue for a split between NP and DP by showing that it accounts for crucial distinctions in the behavior of nominalizations. The NP-DP split is challenged not only by competing frameworks or theories that argue, for instance, that NPs and not DPs are selected. Another challenge comes from derivational theories that reject the existence of possibly covert lexical categorizers such as N and posit instead overt functional categorizers like Classifier and especially D for nominalizations. In this latter trend, it is the NP (not the DP) whose existence is questioned. This paper argues in favor of the lexical categorizer N and for D as a necessary but exceptional nominalizer.

Adverbs and Functional Heads: a Cross-Linguistic perspective (Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press)—one of the founding works of “Syntactic Cartography”—combines some of the developments in Syntactic Theory from the 1980s and 1990s with insightful contributions from Linguistic Typology. This paper has two interrelated goals. First, it aims to review the fundamental theses of Cinque’s monography of 1999—which are far from controversial among scholars working in Cartography—; at the same time it provides conceptual support to them. Secondly, it aims to explore some methodological tools of Syntactic Cartography presented and discussed by Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, namely the so-called precedence-and-transitivity tests—after a brief discussion on methodology used to recognise the functional ca...

SUMMARY The use of functional groups, such as trophic categories, is more useful for ecological interpretation of differences in community structure than the simple comparison of lists of names. Using these trophic categories demonstrates that bat assemblages from Andean cloud forests show greater taxonomic and functional simplicity than those from lowland rainforests. This altitudinal decrease has been interpreted as a consequence of the reduction of available resources. However, this is not manifested proportionally in all functional groups or trophic guilds or even in all taxa within the same guild. The insectivore guild seems to be directly responsible for the decrease, showing a high correlation with total bat species richness, while on the contrary, the rest of the functional categories decrease in other ways. Diet has a large influence on the metabolic rate of these mammals and therefore on their thermoregulatory capacities. Bats whose diet is based on protein (insects) in ge...

Background and Aim : An interesting area of research in deaf studies concerns the idea that various language components and particularly different functional categories such as tense, mood, and agreement are not impaired to the same extent. The present study aimed to explore the performance of Persian speaking deaf individuals on tests dealing with five functional categories, namely complementizer/Wh-words, tense, aspect, mood, and agreement. Methods : This research was a cross-sectional study with two groups, first of which included 11 (4 boys and 7 girls) profoundly deaf students with hearing loss above 90 dB for both ears, aged between 14 and 22; and second group of 15 students with normal hearing with mean (SD) age of 14 (2) years. In addition to interviews, we also conducted sentence-completion and grammaticality judgment tasks to explore their performance in each category. Results : The deaf group performed significantly worse than hearing group in all the tests. Our results a...

Persian lexical categories have been recognized and presented in all grammar books of this language. Although Persian possesses the common and crosslinguistically known parts of speech such as adverb, adjectives, prepositions, nouns and verbs which can be distinguished from each other according to their morphosyntactic behaviors and distributional criteria, it also has a considerable number of mismatching lexical words which do not easily fall under any of the common known lexical categories. In the following sections, Persian mismatching words will be focused on in order to scrutinize their nature from the view point of their lexical category or parts of speech. In addition, we try to examine some of the important and controversial views on parts of speech in light of Persian lexical categories, especially mismatching words in this language. Different views on lexical categories will be referred under two general titles: lexical and feature-based approaches or syntactic and construction-based approaches. According to the former, words are lexically specified which means that it is a part of linguistic knowledge of speakers that words are classified as nouns, verbs, etc. However, in the latter approach, lexical categories are specified according to their relationship with other linguistic forms and lexical words are not specified as noun, verb, etc. as part of their lexical specification. We will show that different classes of Persian lexical items can be better accounted for in a theory, contra feature-based approaches, in which constructions, but not words, are assumed as primitive and atomic; lexical categories are determined and specified in constructions headed by functional heads. After this introductory section, we focus on Persian word classes and illustrate how various word classes are distinguished from each other based on morphosyntactic and syntactic distributional criteria in section 2. In section 3, we argue and explain that mismatching lexical words in the language are independent words with their own forms and

SUMMARY The use of functional groups, such as trophic categories, is more useful for ecological interpretation of differences in community structure than the simple comparison of lists of names. Using these trophic categories demonstrates that bat assemblages from Andean cloud forests show greater taxonomic and functional simplicity than those from lowland rainforests. This altitudinal decrease has been interpreted as a

Throughout recorded history, sexually mature males have issued humorous insults in public. These 'verbal duels' are thought to discharge aggressive dispositions, and to provide a way to compete for status and mating opportunities without risking physical altercations. But, is there evidence that such verbal duels, and sexual selection in general, played any role in the evolution of specific principles of language, syntax in particular? In this paper, concrete linguistic data and analysis will be presented which indeed point to that conclusion. The prospect will be examined that an intermediate form of 'proto-syntax', involving 'proto-Merge', evolved in a context of ritual insult. This form, referred to as exocentric compound, can be seen as a 'living fossil' of this stage of proto-syntax-providing evidence not only of ancient structure (syntax/semantics), but also arguably of sexual selection.

Minimizers are a wide kind of expressions that refer to prototypes of minimal values and they
point out the lowest step on a pragmatic scale. Partitive ones, such as una gota «a drop» or una
pizca «a pinch», can be considered a type of quantifiers; but, since their grammatical status is
controversial, the aim of this paper is to analyze their pragmatic and grammatical behavior
by using data from CREA to determine their categorization. The application of grammatical
criteria permits to demonstrate that these minimizers are lexical items. Although their syntactic
behavior is different, they can take part as a head in pseudopartitive constructions (adopting
a predicate inversion structure) and they can perform syntactic functions within a sentence
(arguments or adjuncts). Because of their minimal scalar value, explicatures that project the
speaker’s attitude towards the information are generated in negative polarity contexts and, this
way, the relevance of the utterance gets increased. These explicatures are obtained by means
of different inferential procedures (general or specific), depending on the internal structure
and the syntactic behavior of the minimizer expression, whose lexical status is not modified.

El presente trabajo examina la variación diatópica de la perífrasis andar + Ger, comparando su uso en el español mexicano con el uso peninsular. Para ello, se analiza la frecuencia relativa de la misma en varios corpus y se estudian sus rasgos semánticos y sintácticos más destacados. El análisis cuantitativo, por una parte, pone de manifiesto la mayor frecuencia de andar + Ger en el español de México en comparación con el español peninsular. Por otra parte, revela que la perífrasis ocurre, sobre todo, en modalidades de lengua informales. En el plano semántico, el presente estudio confirma que, en perífrasis de gerundio, el verbo andar ha ido perdiendo su significado léxico de movimiento físico y ha llegado a transmitir valores pragmáticos, particularmente de determinación y empeño. Asimismo, a diferencia del español de España, en el español de México la perífrasis está sometida a relativamente pocas restricciones selectivas respecto del gerundio, evolución que se fecha en épocas relativamente recientes. En el nivel sintáctico, el proceso de gramaticalización se manifiesta en 1 El título se inspira en la siguiente cita: "…, pues los ascos no son una enfermedad en sí, sino el resultado de que algo anda ocurriendo en nuestro organismo" (https://www.imer. mx/tropicalisima/nauseas/). 2 Para correspondencia, dirigirse a: Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen (D.Nieuwenhuijsen@uu.nl), Universidad de Utrecht. Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, Holanda.

A previously unrecorded behavior of Diclidurus isabellus (Chiroptera: Emballonuridae) is reported, consisting of sudden dives into the water; some aspects related with this behavior are discussed, taking into account the analysis of stomach contents of six specimens and the pattern of use of aerial strata observed for the species of the genus Diclidurus. Some morphometric and distributional data on Diclidurus isabellus are presented, extending its distributional range in Venezuela to the SouthWestern Llanos and the NorthEastern sector of the Guayana.

Variability is one of the characteristics in the acquisition of functional heads in language acquisition. One
of the theories that attempts to give answers is the Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis. This theory examines
functional heads in the Phonology/Syntax Interface. In this paper we will present briefly the theories that
try to explain the variability in the acquisition of functional heads, the Phonology/Syntax Interface, the
main characteristics of the theory and data from existing surveys in that framework. In addition we will
present data from Greek that confirms Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis in the acquisition of determiners,
negation and clitics.

Background and Aim: An interesting area of research in deaf studies concerns the idea that various language components and particularly different functional categories such as tense , mood, and agreement are not impaired to the same extent. The present study aimed to explore the performance of Persian speaking deaf individuals on tests dealing with five functional categories, namely complementizer/Wh-words, tense, aspect, mood, and agreement. Methods: This research was a cross-sectional study with two groups, first of which included 11 (4 boys and 7 girls) profoundly deaf students with hearing loss above 90 dB for both ears, aged between 14 and 22; and second group of 15 students with normal hearing with mean (SD) age of 14 (2) years. In addition to interviews , we also conducted sentence-completion and grammaticality judgment tasks to explore their performance in each category. Results: The deaf group performed significantly worse than hearing group in all the tests. Our results also demonstrated a significant numerical gap between all five categories in the deaf group, beginning from the lowest least impaired category, which is in agreement, and ending up to the most impaired category, that is, comple-mentizer.

Background and Aims: Considering the fact that different components of linguistic knowledge are not equally vulnerable, this study investigated the knowledge of argument structure of verbs in a group of deaf Persian speakers, as people who have been deprived of linguistic data during the early years of their childhood that is the critical period of language acquisition. Methods: In this study, the knowledge of verb arguments was examined through two tasks, one written (for 10 verbs) and one pictorial (for 10 verbs), in the two groups of deaf and normal hearing individuals, each of which consisting of 12 participants (6 girls and 6 boys). Results: The analysis of verb argument structure showed that the number of errors in pictorial tests and recognized verb arguments was not significantly different between the groups. However, the main challenge of the deaf participants was attributed to mapping the arguments of the verb onto syntactic level. Conclusion: The results showed that linguistic levels are not equally dependent on the successful experience of the critical period. The syntax level was highly affected by the critical period, while concepts like verb arguments had the least