Linguistics

En este artículo se examinan las funciones pragmático-discursivas de los gerundios externos. Usando un corpus oral del español de Mérida, Venezuela, se sugiere que la posición en la que aparecen los gerundios está motivada por sus funciones pragmáticodiscursivas: las oraciones de gerundio antepuestas tienden a funcionar como marcos, mientras que las pospuestas funcionan como comentarios. Los resultados muestran que en los gerundios externos aparecen mayormente pospuestos como información nueva, mientras que los antepuestos introducen información conocida.

RESUMEN. El uso del gerundio no perifrástico en oraciones independientes, es decir, no subordinadas a un predicado principal, ha sido descrito muy poco en la gramática del español. Este artículo muestra que el uso que los hablantes hacen de esta construcción en narraciones cortas ofrece una interesante aproximación al estudio de las estrategias afectivas que usan los hablantes en el discurso. En consecuencia, se propone considerar los gerundios independientes como uno de los diversos mecanismos afectivos que los hablantes utilizan en la lengua hablada para acercar al interlocutor a la narración. Con el gerundio se dibuja una escena que revive los hechos ocurridos en el pasado. Palabras clave. gerundio; narraciones cortas; emotividad; lengua hablada ABSTRACT. The use of Spanish gerund in independent sentences has not been described as much as it would be necessary in the Spanish grammar. I suggest that the study of this form in short stories offers an interesting approach to the study of emotive communication. As a consequence, I propose to consider this form as an emotive device that speakers use in oral speech in order to involve the other speakers in the story. A scene is drawn with the gerund to relive past events.

This article deals with the structures formed by the gerund in independent sentences. This article specially discusses some syntactic aspects and the pragmatic functions found in the discourse. On the other hand, an independent classification of the gerund is proposed together with the context in which it is used. It implies the idea that this gerund can work as an independent sentence since the morphologic information that it does not have can be recovered from the linguistic and non linguistic context. Furthermore, a sociolinguistic analysis is carried out in order to show whether there is a normative influence in the speakers or not. The findings corroborates partially the hypothesis.

Grammatical approaches to language technology are often considered less optimal than statistical approaches in multilingual settings, where large-scale portability becomes an important issue. The present paper argues that there is a notable gain in reusing grammatical resources when porting technology to new languages. The pivot language is North Sámi, and the paper discusses portability with respect to the closely related Lule and South Sámi, and to the unrelated Faroese and Greenlandic languages.

The present paper presents ongoing work on a finite-state transducer, a Constraint Grammar disambiguator and dependency grammar for Faroese. In Faroese, the classical Germanic system of case, person and number inflection is upheld, but with somewhat more homonymy than in the closely related Icelandic.

This article presents a set of gender assignment rules for Old Norse, which generates gender for the nouns found in Fritzner's Ordbog over Det gamle norske Sprog (Fritzner, 1973). The rule set covers approximately 22 500 of the 26 900 nouns in this dictionary, or 81%. If final -r is taken as a sufficient criterion for masculine (i.e. if we do not ask why the -r is there), the percentage rises to 25 000 of 26 900, or 93%. The rules are semantic, morphological and phonological. The article argues that Old Norse has neuter as its default gender, and it thereby supports Steinmetz’ (1985, 1986, 2001) Great Gender Shift model. Contrary to Steinmetz, it is here argued that the Germanic Gender Shift cannot be seen as a result of the loss of nom.sg. -r alone, but must be seen as a result of the weak status of the default n(euter) gender, as opposed to the default masculine gender of Modern Norwegian. The weak status of neuter is suggested to be a result of neuter being both numerically small and outside the semantic core of the system (where masculine and feminine denoted living beings of opposite sex), and the unstable situation opening for the shift in default gender is due not only to the loss of -r, but to the marginal position of neuter and to the changes in the declension class system of Old Norse.

"This paper describes the development of two prototype systems for machine translation between North Sámi and Lule Sámi.
Experiments were conducted in rule-based machine translation (RBMT), using the Apertium platform, and statistical machine
translation (SMT) using the Mosesdecoder.
The experiments show that both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, and that they can both make use of pre-existing linguistic resources."