This article discusses degrammaticalization in North Saami. Globally, one of the best known examples of degrammaticalization is the development of the North Saami adposition and adverb haga ‘without’ from an earlier abessive case suffix. This article builds on earlier studies by examining haga in greater detail and by relating the development of haga to its cognates dagi and dagá in Lule Saami. The ...

This article discusses the morphology, syntax and semantics of the previously underdescribed denominal formations in -raejkiem and -raejkien in present-day written South Saami, and their etymological and functional counterpart -rájge in Lule Saami. As the topic has been mostly described in occasional dictionary entries but largely ignored in grammatical descriptions, the present article provides ...

The goal of this article is to analyse a case of variation in Spanish. In most varieties, constructions of the form Hace dos días que (“it has been two days since”) reject nominal expressions like todo el día (“all the day”), hence *Hace todo el día que (lit. “it has been all the day that”). However, a particular variety of Argentinean Spanish allows it. This article proposes that in the non-Argentinean ...

This article presents the main facts about how information structure is syntactically codified in Spanish, with particular attention to the syntax of topics and foci. These facts will be used to assess whether cartographic and minimalist approaches can, in their pure version, account precisely for this set of facts in a predictive way. We discuss the taxonomy of topics and foci, the evidence for ...

We report a longitudinal comprehension study of (long) passive constructions in two native-Spanish child groups differing by age of initial exposure to L2 English (young group: 3;0–4;0; older group: 6;0–7;0), where amount of input, L2 exposure environment, and socioeconomic status are controlled. Data from a forced-choice task show that both groups comprehend active sentences, not passives, initially ...

Spanish captures the difference between eventive and stative passives via an obligatory choice between two copula; verbal passives take the copula ser and adjectival passives take the copula estar. In this study, we compare and contrast US and Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish on their knowledge of this difference in relation to copula choice in Spanish. The backgrounds of the target groups ...

This paper integrates research on child simultaneous bilingual (2L1) acquisition more directly into the heritage language (HL) acquisition literature. The 2L1 literature mostly focuses on development in childhood, whereas heritage speakers (HSs) are often tested at an endstate in adulthood. However, insights from child 2L1 acquisition must be considered in HL acquisition theorizing precisely ...

Given that their L1, Norwegian, and their L2, English, are lexical stress languages, Norwegian speakers will equally tend to stress lexical words during the course of acquisition of L3 French, insuring the prosodic autonomy of each word. In the present paper, we show that this strategy slows down the acquisition of two external sandhi phenomena in French, i.e. liaison and final consonant linking. ...