The Optional Infinitive (OI) phenomenon in children’s speech has attracted a great deal of attention due to its occurrence in a variety of languages (including English, Dutch and German), and its apparent absence in other languages (such as Spanish and Italian). Wexler (1998) explains this pattern of results in terms of a Unique Checking Constraint that interacts with cross-linguistic differenc...

This issue of the Catalan Journal of Linguistics was conceived with the idea to promote comparative studies of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. The importance of comparison in linguistics dates back to neogrammarians in the xix century due to their interest of discovering the common roots of most of the languages spoken in Europe. In order to get to that objective, comparison of p...

Abstract This paper presents a comparative syntactic account of participial adjuncts in German and English. While the typological literature describes as much more restricted than their English counterparts both syntactically semantically, this empirical evidence that these differences have been exaggerated. Based on corpus 3000 adjuncts, it is argued clause-like internal structure languages. P...

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-dro...

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-dro...

This study investigates the interpretation of pronominal subjects in European Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. 30 native speakers each language completed two multiple-choice tasks (speeded untimed), which elicited their null overt subject pronouns intrasentential contexts with order matrix‑subordinate. The had a 2x2 design, crossing following variables: animacy matrix object (+ animate vs. - an...

The present study investigates how adult native speakers of two null subject Romance languages, European Portuguese (EP) and Italian, interpret overt pronominal subjects in intrasentential contexts. Participants were 30 EP Italian. Each language group was administered multiple-choice tasks (speeded untimed), which crossed the following variables: ‘animacy matrix object’ ([+ human] vs. [- human]...

This paper presents a straightforward method to integrate co-reference information into phrase-based machine translation to address the problems of i) elided subjects and ii) morphological underspecification of pronouns when translating from pro-drop languages. We evaluate the method for the language pair SpanishEnglish and find that translation quality improves with the addition of co-referenc...