The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and we compared the distribution of subjects and objects in the Italian and English of a bilingual child (1;10–4;6) with that of two groups of MLUw-matched monolinguals. All arguments were coded for syntactic function and for a number of discourse pragmatic features predicted to affect their realisation. Our main prediction was that unidirectional crosslinguistic influence might occur for the English–Italian bilingual child with respect to pronominal subject and object use after the instantiation of the C system. Specifically we predicted that in Italian the bilingual child might use overt pronominal subjects in contexts where monolinguals would use a null subject, and that he might use postverbal strong object pronouns in Italian instead of preverbal weak pronominal clitics. Conversely, we did not expect the overall proportion of overt objects, whether noun phrases or pronouns, to vary crosslinguistically as objects are always obligatorily overt in both languages regardless of discourse pragmatics. Our results confirmed these predictions, and corroborated the argument that crosslinguistic influence may occur in bilingual first language acquisition in specific contexts in which syntax and pragmatics interact.

No abstract

This chapter offers a diachronic investigation of the Occitan post-verbal negators pas and ges through the analysis of a selection of narrative texts covering the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Addressing an area that has received little attention in the literature, this chapter identifies the first occurrences of these negative markers and discusses in detail their characteristics, their development and, for ges, its decline. The data suggest that while the minimizer pas possibly started off as a marker of emphatic negation, becoming also a negator of discourse-old propositions, the generalizer ges followed the inverse path, starting as a negator of a presupposition and gradually moving to be an emphatic negator. In the case of pas, its presence in negative polar questions may hold the key to understanding the reasons behind its establishment as the generalized negative marker in modern Languedocian.

In recent years, within the cognitive linguistics approach there has been a trend of scholarly research committed to exploring the motivation for language change. The way in which people use language in communication, together with principles of human categorization, are the locus where language change and innovations are to be found. Interactional contexts in particular, seen as playing a crucial role in bringing about syntactic change (Traugott 2010b), have figured prominently in recent contributions on diachronic micro-changes, bringing to the fore the role played by dialogue as both the manifestation of the participants’ own voices and the realization of the constant negotiation that characterizes human communication. Against this background, this contribution focuses on a particular use of the Occitan post-verbal negator pas in negative rhetorical questions, which was very productive in fifteenth-century collections of religious theatrical texts. It is claimed that these dialogic contexts allowed a polyphonic use of pas, crucially restricted to this post-verbal negator, which is key to identifying the reasons behind the eventual establishment of pas as the generalized sentential negator in the modern language.

Through an investigation of morphologically defective pronominal object paradigms in a number of northern Italian dialects, this article offers a reflection on the relation between the development and the loss of linguistic items based on the reconstruction of the possible diachronic path that has led to the current situation. The paper sets out to achieve two objectives. First, it presents a detailed description of the peculiarities of the object clitic paradigm in the northern Italian dialects and places them within the wider Romance context. Secondly, it discusses and evaluates the way the processes of emergence and loss of linguistic items relate to one another, with specific reference to what appears to be a more general hierarchy operative in languages, the Referential Hierarchy (Silverstein 1976, Comrie 1981, and many others).