The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming effectively reveal mental suffering and changes in social behavior? To address this question, we applied natural language processing tools to study 239 dream reports by 67 individuals, made either before the Covid-19 outbreak or during the months of March and April, 2020, when lockdown was imposed in Brazil following the WHO’s declaration of the pandemic. Pandemic dreams showed a higher proportion of anger and sadness words, and higher average semantic similarities to the terms “contamination” and “cleanness”. These features seem to be associated with mental suffering linked to social isolation, as they explained 40% of the variance in the PANSS negative subscale related to socialization (p = 0.0088). These results corroborate the hypothesis that pandemic dreams reflect mental suffering, fear of contagion, and important changes in daily habits that directly impact socialization.
Merchant (2001) proposes that preposition stranding under sluicing is allowed only in those languages that also allow P-stranding in regular whquestions. Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) seem to falsify this generalization, as both are non-P-stranding languages that allow P-stranding under sluicing. Our claim is that, despite initial appearances, Spanish and BP do not constitute counterexamples to Merchant's generalization. We propose that there are two sources of sluicing in Romance: wh-movement plus IP-deletion (à la Merchant 2001), and clefting plus IP deletion (à la Merchant 1998), the latter being the underlying source for P-stranding sluicing. The apparent P-stranding effect follows from the fact that, as opposed to regular interrogatives, clefts in BP and Spanish do not involve P-stranding at all. We reinforce this conclusion by showing that, in those cases where a cleft base is independently banned, P-stranding under sluicing becomes impossible too.
This chapter argues that null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese are quite different from null subjects in other Romance languages. Referential null subjects are permitted in matrix clauses if the verb is marked as first person singular; they do not occur in other contexts. Null subjects occur in embedded clauses with an inflected verb; however, these are not referential null subjects but rather control structures resulting from movement of the subject DP/NP. The loss of verbal inflection is correlated with changes in the properties of Brazilian Portuguese null subjects: reduced inflection prompts loss of referential null subjects.
It has been suggested that the Romance first person singular indicative constitutes a natural class with the present subjunctive paradigm for the purposes of stem selection (Maiden 2005), thus forming a kind of 'diagonal syncretism', as the latter shares no morphosyntactic features with the former. The existence of such patterns has been taken to be an argument for autonomous morphology and the existence of unnatural 'morphomes', in the sense of Aronoff (1994). Our experimental investigations with native speakers of Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish reveal that this pattern is underlearned, and that speakers do not generalize it to novel forms, instead preferring the 2nd person singular indicative to the 1st person as the base for the derivation of the subjunctive paradigm (and the 2nd person indicative as opposed to the 2nd person subjunctive as the base for the derivation of the 1st person indicative as well). The results implicate a role for naturalness biases in morphological structure, and an awareness that the first person singular is an unreliable and idiosyncratic base for productive inflectional identity. We then study the underlearning of the L-morphome in terms of historical change in the salience of these patterns. We demonstrate, through means of diachronic corpus studies spanning five centuries, a change in the ratio of first conjugation verbs to second & third conjugation verbs, and a resulting decrease in the relative type frequency of where morphomic verbs reside. If indeed learners need increased evidence in order to incorporate and actively uptake unnatural patterns, this lexical support has dwindled over time. Even though many of the morphomic verbs have maintained a very high token frequency (allowing them to survive as memorized), their productivity has diminished over time, and hence they go unlearned as a generalizable pattern. When the distribution of irregular alternations is overshadowed in the lexicon, a morphologically unnatural pattern may cease to maintain its status as part of the grammar.
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