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Slightly fewer than half of the signs in vocabularies of sign languages use two hands. Of these, there are two basic types (Battison 1978), called balanced and unbalanced (van der Hulst 1993) among other labels. In balanced signs like MEET in Swedish Sign Language (SSL) (Figure 2), the two hands are configured and move symmetrically, and in unbalanced signs like ESCAPE (Figure 1c) above, the nondominant hand serves as a location/place of articulation, while the dominant hand articulates the movement. — Figure 2 Slightly fewer than half of the signs in vocabularies of sign languages use two hands. Of these, there are two basic types (Battison 1978), called balanced and unbalanced (van der Hulst 1993) among other labels. In balanced signs like MEET in Swedish Sign Language (SSL) (Figure 2), the two hands are configured and move symmetrically, and in unbalanced signs like ESCAPE (Figure 1c) above, the nondominant hand serves as a location/place of articulation, while the dominant hand articulates the movement.

Related Figures (63)

Table 1: Summary of the previous literature on verbal reciprocals.

Signs are comprised of three major phonological categories: handshape, location, and movement (Stokoe 1960). Like consonants and vowels of spoken languages, each of these major categories consists of a list of features (Liddell and Johnson 1989; Sandler 1989; Brentari 1998). These elements behave phonologically, in the sense that the constraints on their structure and the rules that manipulate them are related to their form and not to meaning. Turning first to contrastiveness, Figure 1 shows minimal pairs in Israeli Sign Language STAT \ 4hntét A. fn neler ce Landerern nlilanr\ hamdakawn ski owmntemawnt awd fn lanntkinn

The canonical phonological shape of a sign consists of a single hand configuration that moves from one location to another, to manifest a Location-Movement-Location (LML) monosyllable (Liddell 1984; Liddell and Johnson 1986; Sandler 1986, 1987, 1989). The fingers selected that specify a given hand configuration remain constant across a sign, but their position may change, e.g., from open to closed.

Figure 3: Lexicalized compound in ISL, (a) THINK + (b) STOP = (c) TAKEN-ABACK ("surprised")

Figure 4: ASL sign LOOK-AT (a) citation form and (b) durational form, reproduced with permission from Ursula Bellugi © Here we exemplify a particular type of morphological process that is analyzed as emplatic: temporal aspect morphology, that is, inflections for aspects such as iterative, durational, etc. There are many other types of morphology, as sketched in the previous paragraph, but we present temporal aspect here because it is templatic, as background for the phonological templates that we will propose for two-handed signs in section 3. Originally described for American Sign Language (ASL) by Klima and Bellugi (1979), and developed by Newkirk (1979, 1981), verbs are inflected for aspects such as habitual, durational, continuative, and iterative. They do so, not by added affixes, but by systematically altering he shape and/or rhythm of the sign’s production. The citation form of the sign LOOK-AT and its inflected Durational form are illustrated in Figure 4 (a,b).

Figure 5: Arabic examples of McCarthy's model, (a) kataba and (b) kattaba Since the form of these aspects involves gemination of locations or movements and/or changes in the shape of movement, typically from a straight path to an arc, they may be considered comparable to prosodic morphological templates of Semitic languages as proposed in McCarthy (1979, 1981). In that model, the root consonants are associated with templates that account for gemination by double association of the features of the root consonant to C timing slots. Vowel “melodies” vary roughly according to inflectional class, such as active or passive. If a given form requires gemination of the vowel, its features too are doubly associated to V slots. In McCarthy’s model, each ‘tier’ — the consonantal features tier, the vowel features tier, and the CV tier of prosodic form — has the status of a morpheme. Some examples from standard Arabic are shown in Figure 5 (a,b). We have seen that the canonical form of a sign in sign language is LML (roughly comparable to CVC). Under temporal aspect inflection, the basic features of handshape and location stay the same; movements, like vowels, can change their shapes, creating circles, for example, and the prosodic form is altered through gemination of one or more segments. Templates of the citation form of the ASL sign LOOK-AT and its Durational form are shown in Figure 6a and b.” The model schematized here and throughout this paper is from Sandler (1989), inspired by models of CV phonology (Clements and Keyser 1983), autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith 1976) and prosodic templatic morphology (McCarthy 1979, 1981). 7 Tey ie ny Ay ae ee , re, fe ST icy i ie 1... 4 ...*g4. gt. & 2. A tt

Figure 6: Templates of (a) Partial citation form of ASL LOOK-AT and (b) association to the Durational form (after Sandler 1990). The movement feature in the Durational template is [arc], and the whole sign is reduplicated.

Figure 7: Association of a verb to the Continuative template in ISL (Sandler 1993)

Figure 8: Underspecified templates for two-handed signs, (a) a two-handed balanced template in the SSL sign MEET and (b) a two-handed unbalanced template in the ISL sign END (templates after Sandler 1989, 1993). Broadly speaking, two-handed signs are either balanced or unbalanced.* Figure 8 (a,b) show representations of these two types of two-handed signs, with examples. Specifically, th representations show that the nondominant hand either acts as a copy of the dominant hand, i balanced signs, or as a place of articulation in unbalanced signs. The details of representation for such signs are different representations in other models of sign language phonology (e.g. Stokoe 1960; Blevins 1993; van der Hulst 1993; Brentari 1998), but in all of these, the element hat are represented are treated as meaningless. We show below that two-handedness is nc random, and briefly describe relationships between form and meaning in two-handed signs following Lepic et al. (2016). It is not only whether a sign is balanced or unbalanced that i motivated; other phonological details such as movement type and contact between the two hand are systematically related to meaning as well. which we illustrate with templates in Section 3.2.

Figure 9: The sign EMPTY in (a) ASL (b) ISL and (c) SSL (from Lepic et al. 2016) sign 1s often semantically motivated, either underlyingly or by inflection (see references above). A recent study by Lepic et al. (2016), on which this section focuses, is a cross-linguistic study on three unrelated sign languages — American Sign Language (ASL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), and Swedish Sign Language (SSL). The study provides comparative data to support the claim that two-handedness in uninflected signs is neither random nor meaningless phonological structure. The study compares 200 lexical items in the three sign languages and finds that the number of cases in which the same concepts were two handed in all three sign anguages is highly significant: 33%, where random distribution would be 13%. This study finds that, although the two-handed signs for the same concepts are not necessarily identical in form across the three languages, they draw upon a similar kind of iconic mapping, a similar ink between form and meaning. For example, the sign EMPTY is realized in ASL, ISL, and SSL with the non-dominant hand representing a surface or container, and the dominant hand acting upon it, to indicate bareness or lack of content (Figures 9 a-c). As is often the case, the signs are not phonologically identical in the three languages, but the fact that they are two- handed and unbalanced in all three languages is not random. Rather, these aspects of phonological form are motivated by meaning.

The feature [alternating movement] is represented in templates to encode a relationship in which one event/entity follows another repeatedly. For instance, in the ISL sign for NEGOTIATE (Figure 11) the hands represent two lines of communication, and the alternating movement shows that the conversation is going back and forth between the participants.

Figure 11: ISL NEGOTIATE, balanced alternating template 3.4. Motivated contact in balanced and unbalanced signs

Figure 12: SSL END, unbalanced, final-contact template

Figure 13: SSL SEMESTER, unbalanced initial-contact template

eee eg eee eee en eee ee ee none eee III IEE IEE IEE IEEE EIS The interaction of these two factors is at the basis of the development of multiple definiteness marking within the noun-phrase in Neo-Aramaic. The simpler case is Barwar, where the article is still a demonstrative DPp:.,, and the determiner D is null. If N raises to the null D, semantically marking the attributive AP as contrastive, it allows the attachment of the article ‘o- to the AP:

Table 1: Experimental design (HF vs LF targets) We selected 80 critical items to be used as target stimuli for this experiment and divided them in two subsets: 40 of them were high frequency words (mean frequency: 238,23) and 40 were low frequency words (mean frequency: 42,30). For each stimulus we created a morphological, an unrelated and an orthographic prime. Since we were interested in the effects of the manipulation of the stem frequency, the frequency of the morphological primes was kept constant in the two subsets (mean freq orthograp subset: or 136; unre length in length in sure that the HF subset: morphological: 10,90; orthographic: 8,03; unre subsets: in other words, in the HF subset the target was 2,71 as frequent as t the LF one the prime was 2,25 as frequent as the target. Frequency values were extracted from the CoLFIS database. The targets were either verbs or nouns, with respectively deverbal nouns and denominal adjectives as morphological primes. We created four experimental lists in which the targets were rotated across the four priming conditions by means of a Latin square design, so that participants saw each target only once in one of the possible four conditions. The experimental design is summarized in the tables below: uency in the HF subset: 87,75; LF subset: 95,33). The hic and the unrelated primes were matched as well (mean frequency in the HF hographic: 92,78; unrelated: 90,63; mean frequency in the LF subset: orthographic: ated: 96). Moreover, all of the three primes were matched for letter length (mean ated: 9,15; mean he LF subset: morphological: 11,13; orthographic: 8,03; unrelated: 9,43). We made he ratio between the frequencies of primes and targets was comparable in the two he prime, while in

Table 2. Reaction Times and SD (in milliseconds), error rates (in %) for lexical decisions to word targets in each frequency and priming condition, with net priming effects relative to the identity, orthographic and the unrelated prime conditions. * : p< .05

Table 1. Main means for spatial orientation encoding in Latin.

Table 2. Latin deictic demonstrative adverbs. Spatial deixis can be defined as the lexicalized information of the position of the speaker / scene, in which “scene” refers to the location where narrative attention is focused (cf. Lyons 1981: 170). In Classical Latin — as in most of the languages in which deictic anchoring is expressed — there is a distinction between ‘venitive’ and ‘andative’ deixis (i.e. ‘towards the speaker’ and ‘in the opposite direction to the speaker’). The most common way to express deixis is by the adverbs obviam ‘in the way (of)’, adversus ‘facing, opposite, against’, contra ‘in front of, on the other side, against’ (Cuzzolin 2010). Deixis can also be expressed by morphological means through adverbs derived from deictic demonstrative pronouns, cf. Table 2.

Figure 2. Source encoding in Latin.

Table 3. Prefixed verb with curro ‘to run’ (from the entries of the Oxford Latin Dictionary).

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the good word/20 13/03/chillax wikipedia and bridezilla_ are not pun s against adjoinages.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/07/19/sha rknado cronut and the summer of the neolexic p ortmanteau.html

In ASL, blends also incorporate phonological sub-constituents from one word into the overall prosodic frame provided by another.” Some examples are the sign glossed as TRIPPING’ 'to be on drugs', from TRAVEL*+INVENT’; HEARING-MINDED* 'to uncritically embrace the values of the hearing majority’, from THINK ’+HEARING® (see Padden and Humphries 1988; Wilcox 2000); and even one of the handful of variant signs for MORPHOLOGY, from WORD’+MEANING”’. In each of these examples, the resulting blend sign retains the overall movement pattern of one of its constituent signs, yielding blend signs that are segmentally and prosodically indistinguishable from simplex signs (see Sandler 1989, 1999 for discussions of canonical sign length and complexity). - ow % a 7. 1 aa Ps Wwe ~~ as . 1 1 T T 3 T is: ~~ Sis a ain iy ae As an illustration of this point, consider the (partial) forms of the signs glossed as INVENT, RAV RIPP templ b), t EL, and TRIPPING, shown NG (Figure 3c) is a one- e, and then moves up and he blend sign TRIPPING is RIPP NG therefore matches t incorporating the handshape of in Figure 3. Like the sign INVENT (Figure 3a), the blend handed sign in which the hand first makes contact with the forward, away from the head. Like the sign TRAVEL (Figure formed with the hand configured in what is known as a "bent- V" handshape, with the index and middle fingers extended and slightly bent. The blend sign he overall prosodic shape of the sign INVENT, however he sign TRAVEL.

Figure 3: The ASL signs (a) INVENT and (b) TRAVEL combine to form the blend (c) TRIPPING.

Figure 4: Phonological elements of the ASL signs (a) INVENT and (b) TRAVEL combine to form the blend (c) TRIPPING. These correspondences between INVENT, TRAVEL, and the blend TRIPPING can be formally represented as in Figure 4, where the appropriate values for the formational parameters of handshape, location, and movement are listed for each sign. Similar to the representation of the blend sharrows in Figure 2, this representation captures the fact that INVENT (Figure 4a) and TRIPPING (Figure 4c) are articulated with similar movement patterns, and that TRAVEL (Figure 4b) and TRIPPING are signed with the same handshape.

Figure 5: A family of related blends in English (left) and in ASL (right) HEARING-MINDED, involves changing the location of an existing sign so that it is instead articulated at the forehead. This has the effect of adding 'the mind as the site of cognition' to the original sign's meaning, as in COMMIT-TO-MEMORY, from WRITE-DOWN |, MENTAL-SCAR, from SCRATCH'’’, and WEAK-MINDED'®, from WEAK'*. These blend words in English and in ASL can be considered members of small lexical families because they have all changed an existing word in similar ways, whether affixing the element (a)/icious or changing their place of articulation to the forehead, to a create new word with a corresponding change in meaning, as is represented in Figure 5. It seems obvious, even though the meaning of (a)licious differs from the meaning of th English word delicious, that the use of (a)licious to form new words is the result of repeate lexical blends involving the word delicious. With the ASL pattern, however, it is not entirel clear which particular sign the forehead location has been extracted from. There are man conventional ASL signs that are signed at the forehead and relate to 'cognition' (Frishberg an Gough 1973/2000; Meir, Padden, Aronoff, and Sandler 2013), for example THINK, KNOW! and WONDER’®. Accordingly, and owing to the simultaneous, non-concatenative structure « many ASL signs (Emmorey and Corina 1990; Aronoff, Meir, and Sandler 2005), any of thes signs could be the potential source for the creation of a blend sign like COMMIT-TO-MEMORY. Though both languages contain n families of blends, the English and ASL examples seem t weer, a? Pe i: os i oe _ a ae ey a Gt a I,

Figure 6: The relationship between analogical and schematic bro words An illustrative example can be seen with the English word bromance. As an established put recently coined blend, bromance has served as the template for the creation of a number of other bro words, including brototype 'a prototypical bro', from prototype; brocabulary 'the language of bros', from vocabulary; brogrammers 'men who program together', from programmers; and even bromanteaux ‘blends containing bro', from portmanteaux. Though any one of these blends may have been formed on the basis of an analogical extension of the relationship between romance and bromance, the aspects of form and meaning shared among all of them can be described using a constructional template, as in Figure 6. In this representation, proportional analogy eventually gives way to a construction as a more abstract pairing of form and meaning.

i Se Oo — I In Construction Morphology (Booij 2010), constructions serve two grammatical functions. The first is that they are a description of how known words are formed, that is, of the relationship between meaning and form that can be observed in actually-occurring lexical items. Second, they serve as a template for producing or interpreting novel words. In English, then, a word like anniversary, or even a phrase like Military Industrial Complex, when re- used to create a set of blend derivatives, can serve as the source for the innovation of new affix-like elements with meanings like 'commemorative milestone’ and _'suspiciously corporate’, respectively. These constructions can then be deployed to create other new words (Figure 7). This analysis suggests that in at least some domains of English derivational morphology, we have a cumulative gradient shift from things that look more like canonical blends to things that look more like derivational affixes; the development of affix-like elements from blends follows a transition from more analogical formations to more schematic ones. Figure 7: The creation of new blends from schematic constructions

Figure 8: The creation of a new blend from schematic constructions in ASL initialized" signs, in contrast, requires a specific handshape, but its movement is schematic. These constructions are therefore complementary, each specifying a phonological value that is left schematic in the other; what happens when they combine to form a new sign? Its form is predictable, taking the movement and location that are observed in signs like GROUP, and combining them with the U-handshape from signs like UNIVERSE, as Figure 8 shows.

I a, nS In addition to these patterns, which involve recurring pairings of handshape or location values with specific meanings, we also find word-creation patterns that involve movement contrasts in ASL. One example involves two movement patterns that themselves participate in a "second-order" construction (see Booij and Masini 2015): In ASL, several pairs of signs differ only by the direction of their movement and the polarity of their meaning, and these patterns are systematically opposed. For example, in the sign IMPROVE” the non-dominant hand moves up the non-dominant arm, while in WORSEN*° the hand moves down the non- dominant arm. Similarly, THRILLED”” is signed with an upward movement, while DEPRESSED*® differs only in that it is signed with a downward movement. The relationship between these groups of positive and negative signs, in addition to the opposition between the negative and positive signs in general, can be schematized as in Figure 9. Here, 'positivity' is conventionally paired with an upward movement, and 'negativity' is similarly paired with a downward movement, and these patterns are also mutually contrastive in certain pairs of signs. Figure 9: A second-order schema in ASL

Figure 10: The conventional sign OPPRESS (left) has downward movement, and the related neologism PRIVILEGE (right) has upward movement sign UN-UNDERSTAND, articulated with a downward movement and used to describe something that was once understood now becoming incomprehensible. Another example. already anticipated in Figure 9, involves inverting the downward movement of the ASL sigr OPPRESS”” to form a possible sign for PRIVILEGE, as recently observed in an ASL video log posted online*'. The conventional sign OPPRESS is signed with the dominant hand pushing the non-dominant hand downward, while in the nonce sign PRIVILEGE, this configuration is reversed such that the dominant hand lifts the non-dominant hand upward (Figure 10).

Table 1: Participants in the study, according to groups

Figure 1: Percentage of forms of transfer verbs in the three ISL groups

Figure 2: Use of the Z axis vs. diagonal axis in single agreeing forms in the three age groups

Figure 3: A non-inflecting form of the transfer verb GIVE

Stage 4: Re-analysis of the verb’s initial location. The final stage of the emergence of verb agreement is obtained when the verb movement’s heretofore fixed and body-anchored initial point can be articulated at a place off the body; it is reanalyzed as the subject argument marker. When such a reanalysis occurs, the verb might be said to have left the body; it is no longer body-anchored. A verb form marked for agreement with two 3™ person referents moves from one location in space to another, often on the left-right spatial axis (see Figure 5). Both end-points, then, are analyzed as morphemes, and the verb becomes multi-morphemic.

Figure 5: A fully agreeing form of the verb GIVE, signed on the X axis Further developments: Once this mechanism of agreement (associating the verb’s initial and final points with the R-loci of the arguments) is established for a group of verbs with specific semantic characterization, namely, verbs of transfer, other verbs may also adopt this morphological mechanism, and become agreement verbs. These verbs may share some, but not all of the semantic attributes of verbs of transfer, e.g. they are transitive and involve two human participants, but the transfer sense is less obvious. For example, verbs of communication, such as PHONE or FAX, involve two human participants, as do verbs of transfer, and also the act of communication. In some languages (i.e. ASL and ISL) these signs were originally plain verbs, but have become agreement verbs over the years. Similarly, verbs of saying, such as TELL, ASK, ANSWER, TELL-A-STORY, and ASL SAY-NO-TO are also agreement verbs. Other verbs that became agreement verbs in ISL are VIDEOTAPE (someone), HATE/DETEST (someone) and STAY-AWAY-FROM/AVOID. As the formal mechanism becomes established in a language, the semantic basis for the category becomes more opaque, and the grammatical characteristics of the elements become more prominent.

Figure 6: Percentage of reference to spatial background, localization and indexing of referents in the three age groups

Figure 1: connections between S1, S7 and S9 for a regular verb A number of recent contributions on the inflectional morphology of Romance languages, anc in particular of Italian, showed that, when a lexeme displays allomorphy, stems can be formally connected in predictable ways (cf. Pirrelli and Battista 2000; Montermini and Boyé 2012). Lexemes are identified by a “stem space”, i.e. a collection of stems bearing specification about the paradigm area they fill. The links connecting each stem are the same for all lexemes in the language, and some stems are more closely linked than others (cf Montermini and Boyé 2012 on Italian for details). Under this view, regularity can be viewec as a gradient phenomenon: a lexeme is regular when all its stems are connected in <¢ predictable way; it is irregular when at least one of its stems is unconnected with the rest o1 the stem space, and thus must be stored independently. Figures 1 and 2 show a portion of the stem space for a regular (traditional 1‘ class) verb in Italian, ammirare (‘admire’). S1 corresponds to the simplest stem in the paradigm (used, among others, to form the present 2PI the imperfect indicative and subjunctive); S7 corresponds to the stem used to form the pas: participle, and S9 corresponds to the stem used to form the derivatives we referred to above As the representation we propose shows, we consider that for ammirare the three stems aré connected by predictable functions. This means that a speaker of Italian is able to recover any form in the paradigm (including derivatives) from any other.

Figure 2: connections between S1, S7 and S9 for a regular verb (ammirare)

As we see, for distruggere S7 and S9 are still connected by a predictable function (in this case an identity function), but in any case they are linked to S1. As the examples in (2) show, a S9 ending in [utt] can in fact correspond to S1 having different forms. Thus, we cannot consider that a predictable connection exists between the stems /distruddze] and |distrutt].

Figure 4: connections between S1, S7 and S9 for an irregular verb (produrre) In synchrony, the stem connections that can be identified for verbs have thus the function of facilitating the recovery of unknown forms by speakers; in diachrony, it can be shown that in some cases paradigms have been restructured following the same lines. Verbs in _struire (Figure 5), for instance costruire ‘build’, istruire ‘educate’, etc., display a S9 which is etymological (cf. Latin construo, P.P. constructum), and thus unconnected to the rest of the paradigm, whereas the S7 has been remodelled in order to be homogeneous with the rest of the paradigm, and is thus connected to the S1.

Figure 5: connections between S1, S7 and S9 for a partially regularized verb (costruire)

Figure 6: connections between S1, S7 and S9 for a partially regularized verb (scoprire)

Table 1: Hamming distance between albero and alberi

However, such a simple algorithm is not adequate for our needs. Let us take for instance the strings abcdefgh and bcdefgh: Table 3: Hamming distance between abcdefgh and bcdefgh

Figure 7: setup of the Levenshtein computation aS, > ee a, The Levenshtein method can analyse the transformation of a string into another by decomposing it into a sequence of basic operations. These basic operations are Insertion (a symbol occurs in the second string but is absent from the first string), Deletion (a symbol occurs in the first string but is absent from the second one), Substitution, (two symbols in the same position are different in the two strings), No-change (the same symbol occurs in the same position in the two strings).

Figure 11: Levenshtein algorithm computed for sedevo and siedo In this case, three possible paths give the result 3:

Figure 9: cell relative to different symbols Once all the cells in the matrix have been filled, the Levenshtein measure corresponds to the value in the bottom right cell (2 in the case in point, Figure 10):

Table 7: relations of the -ZIONE stem

De > eae, > aaa aaa, «a Siated, «> Date The position that periphrastic features in a language depend on its inflectional potential and that periphrases are in some sense an ‘expansion’ of its existing inflectional features is an attractive one, given the data from languages like Lithuanian, for example. Lithuanian has synthetic past, present, and future forms and also synthetic frequentative past tense forms. The distinctions made in the inflectional system appear to carry over to the system of periphrastic (or compound) tenses via the auxiliary, as the examples below in Table 2 show (the examples are drawn from Ambrazas 1997: 237):

The perfect tenses are formed with the help of a finite form of the auxiliary biti and the past active participle of the main verb (which distinguishes masculine and feminine gender). The auxiliary is respectively in the following tenses: present for the perfect, past for the past perfect, past frequentative for the past frequentative perfect and future for the future perfect. Lh) es ee ee ee, ee, ee ey ee. ee ee i ee ee, er perfect, past frequentative for the past frequentative perfect and future for the future perfect. The literature on periphrasis, however, suggests that periphrastic constructions can be non- compositional in terms of the morphosyntactic information expressed by the elements in the periphrase and the morphosyntactic information associated with the construction as a whole (see discussions in Ackerman and Stump 2004 or Brown et al. 2012, for example). There are indeed data to suggest that the association of the construction directly with the tense of its elements is not so straightforward. I turn to some such data next.

Table 6: Perfect, future and future perfect of ‘work’ in Lithuanian (examples are drawn from Ambrazas 1985: 237f) Table 5: Perfect, Future and Future Perfect of ‘work’ in Bulgarian The English system of auxiliary constructions can also be understood as a system of nested periphrases. The perfect progressive was mentioned already. It can be understood (and has been modelled in Bonami 2015) as the progressive periphrastic construction in which the auxiliary is ‘inflected’ in the perfect. Thus, the perfect progressive of work, has been working, can be understood as the progressive template for ‘work’, that is BE + working, in which the auxiliary BE appears in the perfect: has been.

study at all. Looking at the response latencies, our statistical analyses confirmed our hypothesis EnglishA-] concerning the control items only for the comparisons German-French as well as responded EnglishB. In other words, the reaction times of the German control items did not significantly differ from the reaction times of the French control items and the response atencies of the control items of the group EnglishA did not significantly differ from the response latencies of the control items of the group EnglishB.” Therefore, when examining he complex AN/NA constructions, we compared the German compounds only to the French phrases. Moreover, we contrasted the English AN constructions with initial stress only to the English AN constructions with non-initial stress. Our analyses revealed that subjects significantly more slowly to the French phrases than to the German compounds (Difference of means (henceforth: DM) = 65.0, t = 3.12, p = .046). We consider this effect to mirror a memorization advantage of compounds in comparison to phrases. Furthermore, the reaction times of the English AN constructions with non-initial stress were shorter than the response latencies of the English AN constructions with initial stress (DM = -65.2, t = -3.13, p = .045). The results reported so far are presented in Figure 1. At this point, however, remember that the effect in English does not reflect a memorization advantage but an advantage t hat originates in the default prosodic structure in | 1986: 51; Bauer, Lieber and Plag 2013: 448). Schil results suggest that responses are faster to the standard stress pattern than to a marked prosodic structure. Therefore, we have to app memorization advantage that we introduced above, between the AN constructions fact that non-initial stress represents the English AN constructions (cf. also Fudge 1984: 146; Zwicky er, Levelt and Fikkert’s (2004: 237-238) y the second definition of the term i.e. the comparison of the response times with initial stress and those with non-initial stress on the three individual test days. It turned out, however, that the latencies of the two groups did not significantly differ from each other on any of the individual days. In sum, we found a

Figure 2: Phrase-like constructions (semantically compositional items with non-initial stress) versus compound- like constructions (semantically non-compositional items with initial stress) on the three test days (F))

In this work we deal exclusively with types (5c) and (5d), i.e. with denominal reduplications forming adjectives and adverbs and expressing a spatial relation. In particular, we consider that in Sicilian three types of constructions are available in order to express a spatial relation between two entities: one of the entities is denoted by the input noun of the reduplicated construction, the other is denoted by a syntactically connected unit (in the unmarked case a NP). Table 1: Three types of NN total reduplications in Sicilian.

Figure 1: Types and subtypes of reduplicative spatial constructions in Sicilian. “As we observed above, the construction we have globally characterized as ([XX]q) corresponds, in fact, to three different constructions, each one with different specifications for some of their elements, which in turn are encompassed into the larger construction [Y R [XX],]. The general construction and its sub-constructions are given in Figure 1. Spatial relations between the trajector and the landmark are generically indicated as IN, although they can correspond to different spatial configurations and distributions, which depend on the semantic type of each of the nouns involved. 4.2 Semantic constraints on the trajector

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