Browsing by Author "Mevis, Alice"
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- Exploring the productivity and systematicity of recipient passives in Mozambican PortuguesePublication . Mevis, Alice; Silva, Augusto Soares daThis study aims to explore and provide a detailed description of the construction known as “Dative passives” or Recipient passives in the Mozambican variety of Portuguese, in the framework of Cognitive Grammar (LANGACKER, 1991, 2008) and Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995, 2006). Particular attention will be paid to the complex semantic categories of passive and ditransitive structures in order to identify which of their conceptual aspects lay behind the emergence of Recipient passives. By means of a corpus study based on the Corpus do Português (DAVIES, 2016), it will be shown that this construction is found with a wide range of verbs of transfer, thus showing increasing signs of productivity, and that the variation displayed by Mozambican Portuguese is not random but systematic, occurring in well-defined semantic contexts. Furthermore, adopting a constructional approach to the variation at hand provides a strong argument against considering Recipient passives as derived from Double Object constructions, a claim often made in the literature (GONÇALVES 1990, 1996, 2010). By doing so, this study also offers to delve deeper into the pluricentricity of Portuguese, a tendency that is furthermore bound to increase in the near future (SOARES DA SILVA, 2022).
- Prototype effects behind French loans in middle English: a cognitive account of lexical borrowingPublication . Mevis, AliceIt is a well-established fact that the Norman Conquest profoundly transformed the English society and had a significant impact on the course of evolution of its language. As a result of the peculiar situation of English, French and Latin trilingualism in medieval England, Middle English displayed a reorientation of its strategies for word creation, by increasingly relying on lexical borrowing. The presence of Romance-derived loanwords thus introduced some degree of onomasiological variation into the language, so that the coexistence of native and foreign lexical resources would eventually become a recurring feature of Middle English. Within this well-researched area, the prototype aim of this paper is to explore the contribution of Cognitive Semantics, and more specifically of prototype theory, to French lexical borrowing, and to investigate the many ways in which may help account for the integration of loanwords into the English lexicon – or conversely, for the retention of native vocabulary. First of all, the substitution of cultural models made for rather swift changes into the lexicon, as loanwords were introduced to better reflect the new cultural prototypes. Prototypicality can also work both within lexical categories at the prototypicality intensional level, as a differentiating factor between near-synonyms, and across categories at the extensional level, in the restructuration of category members around an onomasiologically salient concept. The objective of this paper is thus to show how prototypicality comes into play at various levels in processes of semantic change, and how prototype theory can therefore be deemed a relevant framework for the analysis of loanwords.
- Recipient passives in Mozambican Portuguese: a case of constructional alternation in the makingPublication . Mevis, AliceThe present paper investigates a constructional alternation currently under development in Mozambican Portuguese, arising from the constructionalization of a new passive construction (Recipient passives) alongside its standard counterpart (Theme passives). We argue that beyond the influence of the Bantu substrate that led to the emergence of the innovative variant, variation is conceptually and pragmatically motivated and involves restructuring in accordance with the structural constraints of Portuguese. We show how the alternation proves sensitive to a set of linguistic factors, the most prominent of which are related to information structure and differences in perspectivization, or construal. By adopting a sociocognitive view of language and a network view of grammar, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of restructuration and indigenization processes taking place in postcolonial varieties of pluricentric languages in the sequence of their nativization.