Astarloaren sintaxia eta hitz ordena naturala

[EN] This paper examines the syntactic ideas of Pablo Pedro Astarloa (1752-1806) as he explained in his Discursos filosóficos sobre la lengua primitiva (1805), and tries to put them in the context of the debate between rationalists and sensualists, who argued whether there is a «natural order» of words. Astarloa developed a system for accounting the word order in the primitive language of mankind (and hence in the Basque language) founded in three types of «nobleness», and in the principle that the noblest element precedes the less noble one. The first type (nobleza de origen) orders words according to their meaning. The second type (nobleza de ministerio) orders words according to the part of speech they belong to, or the semantic function they have. Finally, the third type (nobleza de mérito or de movilidad) considers the will for communication and, as a result, word order reflects the information structure. Moreover Astarloa ’s three types of nobleness are arranged in a hierarchy of superiority: movilidad > ministerio > origen. So Astarloa ’s syntax appears near to sensualists ’ conceptions on word order because it did not appeal for a fixed natural order of words; instead he proposed a variable word order based mainly on the communicative process.

Language distance and non-native syntactic processing: Evidence from event-related potentials

[EN] In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that differences in native versus non-native language processing strongly correlate with language distance: native/non-native processing differences obtain if a syntactic parameter of the non-native grammar diverges from the native grammar. Otherwise, non-native processing will approximate native processing as levels of proficiency increase. We focus on three syntactic parameters: (i) the head parameter, (ii) argument alignment (ergative/accusative), and (iii) verb agreement. The first two diverge in Basque and Spanish, but the third is the same in both languages. Our results reveal that native and non-native processing differs for the diverging syntactic parameters, but not for the convergent one. These findings indicate that language distance has a significant impact in non-native language processing.

Sentence comprehension before and after 1970: Topics, debates and techniques

[EN] Language Down the Garden Path traces the lines of research that grew out of Bever's classic paper. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition (the role of prediction, grammar, working memory, prosody, abstractness, syntax and semantics mapping); the current status of universals and narrow syntax; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book will appeal to all those interested in understanding the questions that shaped, and are still shaping, this field and the ways in which linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are seeking to answer them.

I edo adikzio baten anatomia

[EN] This paper is devoted to i, the Basque dative case marker. In part I, the paper aims at presenting a general approach the locus of syntactic variation within Universal Grammar (sections 1.1 to 1.3). After an excursus on the use of minorized languages in science (1.4), a discussion on parameters is provided. In (1.5), the notion of macroparameter from the 80’s is critically discussed mainly but not along the lines of Newmeyer (2005). The last section (1.6)supports to focus on microparameters, along the lines of Kayne (2000, 2005), as the right way to properly understand and explain variation. Part II provides an analysis of the main properties of Basque datives (sections 2.1 and 2.2). Sections 2.3 and 2.4 are devoted to the nature of Basque inflectional morpheme (k)i, interpreted asan applicative morpheme which ‘applies’ dative object arguments to the structure. Finally, microcomparative analyses on Basque Differential Object Marking and Dative Displacement are presented in sections (2.6) and (2.7) respectively.

A Brief Grammar of Euskara, the Basque Language

This is a short grammar of the Basque language, or Euskara as it is called by its speakers. What follows is a partial description of the syntax of Euskara. The text has been arranged in the following fashion: there is an index where you can find the distribution of topics. Within each of the topics, an effort has been made to arrange information from general to specific, so that as you read into a given section, you will get into more details about the topic being under discussion. This grammar hopes to be useful to a wide variety of users. Therefore, it will probably not satisfy anyone completely: Those who want a quick 'feel' for the language will be disappointed by the slow and messy details the text dives into. Those who want a detailed, professional description will be disappointed by the lack of depth in the discussion. The text hopes to sit somewhere in the middle, and if it tells too much to those who want to know a little, and too little to those who want to know a lot, then it will have done its job.

Automatically exposing OpenLifeData via SADI semantic Web Services

Background: Two distinct trends are emerging with respect to how data is shared, collected, and analyzed within the bioinformatics community. First, Linked Data, exposed as SPARQL endpoints, promises to make data easier to collect and integrate by moving towards the harmonization of data syntax, descriptive vocabularies, and identifiers, as well as providing a standardized mechanism for data access. Second, Web Services, often linked together into workflows, normalize data access and create transparent, reproducible scientific methodologies that can, in principle, be re-used and customized to suit new scientific questions. Constructing queries that traverse semantically-rich Linked Data requires substantial expertise, yet traditional RESTful or SOAP Web Services cannot adequately describe the content of a SPARQL endpoint. We propose that content-driven Semantic Web Services can enable facile discovery of Linked Data, independent of their location. Results: We use a well-curated Linked Dataset - OpenLifeData - and utilize its descriptive metadata to automatically configure a series of more than 22,000 Semantic Web Services that expose all of its content via the SADI set of design principles. The OpenLifeData SADI services are discoverable via queries to the SHARE registry and easy to integrate into new or existing bioinformatics workflows and analytical pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of this system through comparison of Web Service-mediated data access with traditional SPARQL, and note that this approach not only simplifies data retrieval, but simultaneously provides protection against resource-intensive queries. Conclusions: We show, through a variety of different clients and examples of varying complexity, that data from the myriad OpenLifeData can be recovered without any need for prior-knowledge of the content or structure of the SPARQL endpoints. We also demonstrate that, via clients such as SHARE, the complexity of federated SPARQL queries is dramatically reduced.

Breaking verbs. From event structure to syntactic categories in Basque

445 p.

La sintaxis del pasivo en irlandés antiguo

[ES] Con la intención de dilucidar el modo en el que el patrón sintáctico del pasivo del irlandés antiguo se ha establecido en un momento del proto-celta insular, se pasa revista en este trabajo al orden obligatorio VSO (§4), a las condiciones de aparición y la forma de los pronombres personales (§§5-7), a la oración relativa (§§8-9) y a la construcción "ceft", (§§10-11) del irlandés antiguo en tanto que factores determinantes en la constitución (§§12-14) de dicho pasivo.

"Erran nahi baita" birformulatzaile esplikatiboa gaurko euskaran

[EN] This article presents a detailed study of the present-day use of the Basque discourse marker "erran/esan nahi baita" (‘that is to say’). This is an explanatory reformulator by means of which the speaker presents a reformulation of something said in the previous utterance (either a clause that forms part of the current sentence, or the preceding sentence) in order to express it more clearly or explain it. In the article I will examine the marker’s values; literary tradition; form and origin; present-day variants; equivalent expressions; position; punctuation; syntax; frequency, medium (written or spoken), register and text type; equivalents in other languages; and discourse value.

Extraposition in English and Spanish: A comparative study

451 p.

Euskarazko egitura sintaktiko konplexuen analisirako eta testuen sinplifikazio automatikorako proposamena

301 p.(eus); 217 (eng)