scholarly journals Verb movement and the lack of verb-doubling VP-topicalization in Germanic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Hein
Keyword(s):  
Head Movement ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Blocking Effect ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Vp Fronting ◽  
Verb Meaning ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Verb Doubling

AbstractIn the absence of a stranded auxiliary or modal, VP-topicalization in most Germanic languages gives rise to the presence of a dummy verb meaning ‘do’. Cross-linguistically, this is a rather uncommon strategy as comparable VP-fronting constructions in other languages, e.g. Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese, among many others, exhibit verb doubling. A comparison of several recent approaches to verb doubling in VP-fronting reveals that it is the consequence of VP-evacuating head movement of the verb to some higher functional head, which saves the (low copy of the) verb from undergoing copy deletion as part of the low VP copy in the VP-topicalization dependency. Given that almost all Germanic languages have such V-salvaging head movement, namely V-to-C movement, but do not show verb doubling, this paper suggests that V-raising is exceptionally impossible in VP-topicalization clauses and addresses the question of why it is blocked. After discussing and rejecting some conceivable explanations for the lack of verb doubling, I propose that the blocking effect arises from a bleeding interaction between V-to-C movement and VP-to-SpecCP movement. As both operations are triggered by the same head, i.e. C, the VP is always encountered first by a downward search algorithm. Movement of VP then freezes it and its lower copies for subextraction precluding subsequent V-raising. Crucially, this implies that there is no V-to-T raising in most Germanic languages. V2 languages with V-to-T raising, e.g. Yiddish, are correctly predicted to not exhibit the blocking effect.

Head Movement and Morphological Strength

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Wouter Zwart
Keyword(s):  
Head Movement ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Verbal Inflection ◽  
Verb Placement ◽  
Time Gap ◽  
The Rich ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Germanic Languages

In the Principles and Parameters framework of Generative Grammar, the various positions occupied by the verb have been identified as functional heads hosting inflectional material (affixes or features), which may or may not attract the verb. This gave rise to a hypothesis, the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH), according to which the verb has to move to the relevant functional head when the corresponding inflectional paradigm counts as “rich.” The RAH is motivated by synchronic and diachronic variation among closely related languages (mostly of the Germanic family) suggesting a correspondence between verb movement and rich agreement. Research into this correspondence was initially marred by the absence of a fundamental definition of “richness” and by the observation of counterexamples, both synchronically (dialects not conforming to the pattern) and diachronically (a significant time gap between the erosion of verbal inflection and the disappearance of verb movement). Also, the research was based on a limited group of related languages and dialects. This led to the conclusion that there was at best a weak correlation between verb movement and richness of morphology. Recently, the RAH has been revived in its strong form, proposing a fundamental definition of richness and testing the RAH against a typologically more diverse sample of the languages of the world. While this represents significant progress, several problems remain, with certain (current and past) varieties of North Germanic not conforming to the expected pattern, and the typological survey yielding mixed or unclear results. A further problem is that other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Frisian) vary as to the richness of their morphology, but show identical verb placement patterns. This state of affairs, especially in light of recent minimalist proposals relocating both inflectional morphology and verb movement outside syntax proper (to a component in the model of grammar interfacing between narrow syntax and phonetic realization), suggests that we need a more fundamental understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax before any relation between head movement and morphological strength can be reliably ascertained.

V(P)-fronting in Asante Twi and Limbum

2021 ◽  
pp. 96-130
Author(s):  
Johannes Hein
Keyword(s):  
Head Movement ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Verb Phrase ◽  
Reverse Pattern ◽  
Vp Fronting ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Verb Doubling

When a verb or verb phrase is fronted from a clause lacking any other verbs either a copy of the displaced verb occurs or a dummy verb ‘do’ is inserted. Most languages employ the same strategy for both verb and verb phrase fronting. Here, I present two African languages, Asante Twi and Limbum, where displacement of a single verb results in a verb copy while a full verb phrase triggers do-support when fronted. Both V and VP-fronting show the same syntactic properties within each language. A reverse pattern of verb doubling with VP-fronting but do-support with V-fronting is unattested. I propose an analysis of both strategies in terms of different orders of application between post-syntactic head movement and copy deletion. In interaction with the type of V-movement, remnant VP or head-to-spec movement, this derives all three attested patterns to the exclusion of the unattested one.

Verb Movement in Embedded Clauses in West Flemish

1998 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liliane Haegeman
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Head Movement ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Embedded Clauses ◽  
West Flemish ◽  
Feature Checking ◽  
Formal Features

This article analyzes aspects of the distribution of West Flemish verbs in terms of Kayne's (1994) antisymmetry approach. The distribution of the auxiliary in the Infinitivus pro Participio (IPP) construction provides evidence for three functional heads in the lower middle field: Neg, T, and F2. The word order in the IPP construction is derived by head movement of the auxiliary and XP-movement of the IPP complement. The IPP complement moves to [Spec, FP2] to check its formal features; the finite auxiliary moves either to F2 or to a higher functional head, T or Neg; the nonfinite auxiliary remains in F2. The analysis accounts for the finite/nonfinite asymmetry in the distribution of the negative affix en. The article includes concrete proposals for the implementation of feature checking.

OV versus VO in Old High German

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Petrova ◽  
Helmut Weiß
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Landing Site ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Functional Projection ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
The Right

This chapter surveys the word order variation in the right periphery of the clause in OHG. The investigation is based on a corpus including all dependent clauses introduced by the complementizer thaz ‘that’ in the minor OHG documents, a collection of up to forty smaller texts of various genres. The analysis shows that the majority of the data can be explained within a standard OV grammar, assuming additional extraposition of heavy XPs to the right. But apart from these cases, there is evidence supporting the assumption of leftward movement of the verb to an intermediate functional projection vP which is optional with basic OV but obligatory with basic VO. In addition, the chapter presents patterns which evidently involve verb movement to a higher functional head, above vP, and discusses the nature of the landing site of the verb in these cases.

Null Subjects in Old English

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly van Gelderen
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Null Arguments ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
English I

I review the proposal made by Sigurðsson (2011) that null arguments follow from third-factor principles, as in Chomsky 2005 . A number of issues remain unclear: for instance, the kind of topic that licenses null arguments in Modern Germanic, including Modern English. I argue that Old English is pro drop and add to the discussion Frascarelli (2007) started as to which topic licenses a null subject. I agree with Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) that the licensing topic in Modern Germanic and Old English is an aboutness-shift topic. I also argue that verb movement to C is necessary to license the empty argument in the modern Germanic languages (including Modern English), but not in Old English, since agreement is still responsible for licensing in that language, as in Italian.

scholarly journals Two-goal Local Search and Inference Rules for Minimum Dominating Set

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaowei Cai ◽  
Wenying Hou ◽  
Yiyuan Wang ◽  
Chuan Luo ◽  
Qingwei Lin
Keyword(s):  
Local Search ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Dominating Set ◽  
Inference Rules ◽  
Local Search Algorithm ◽  
Minimum Dominating Set ◽  
Massive Graphs ◽  
Construction Procedure ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Main Ideas

Minimum dominating set (MinDS) is a canonical NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with applications. For large and hard instances one must resort to heuristic approaches to obtain good solutions within reasonable time. This paper develops an efficient local search algorithm for MinDS, which has two main ideas. The first one is a novel local search framework, while the second is a construction procedure with inference rules. Our algorithm named FastDS is evaluated on 4 standard benchmarks and 3 massive graphs benchmarks. FastDS obtains the best performance for almost all benchmarks, and obtains better solutions than state-of-the-art algorithms on massive graphs.

scholarly journals THE ROLE OF IS IN THE ACQUISITION OF FINITENESS BY ADULT TURKISH LEARNERS OF DUTCH

2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ineke van de Craats
Keyword(s):  
Universal Grammar ◽  
First Language ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Minimalist Theory ◽  
By Products

This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like the man is go. Results from longitudinally collected production data of Turkish learners of Dutch are reported and present evidence for the claim that (a) verb movement and production of inflectional morphology develop separately in various developmental steps and (b) finite forms in nonfinite contexts (and vice versa) are by-products of this development. Moreover, all is-patterns in different Germanic languages can be explained by the application of minimalist theory of verb movement and recent views on morphology. Is-patterns that correspond neither to the first language nor to the L2—a poverty-of-the-stimulus problem—turn out to be possible in other languages of the world and are constrained by Universal Grammar.

scholarly journals A Variable Neighborhood Walksat-Based Algorithm for MAX-SAT Problems

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noureddine Bouhmala
Keyword(s):  
Local Search ◽  
Optimization Problems ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Search Algorithms ◽  
Boolean Formula ◽  
Local Search Algorithms ◽  
Neighborhood Structure ◽  
Np Complete ◽  
Max Sat ◽  
Almost All

The simplicity of the maximum satisfiability problem (MAX-SAT) combined with its applicability in many areas of artificial intelligence and computing science made it one of the fundamental optimization problems. This NP-complete problem refers to the task of finding a variable assignment that satisfies the maximum number of clauses (or the sum of weights of satisfied clauses) in a Boolean formula. The Walksat algorithm is considered to be the main skeleton underlying almost all local search algorithms for MAX-SAT. Most local search algorithms including Walksat rely on the 1-flip neighborhood structure. This paper introduces a variable neighborhood walksat-based algorithm. The neighborhood structure can be combined easily using any local search algorithm. Its effectiveness is compared with existing algorithms using 1-flip neighborhood structure and solvers such as CCLS and Optimax from the eighth MAX-SAT evaluation.

scholarly journals TellTail: Fast Scoring and Detection of Dense Subgraphs

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 4150-4157
Author(s):  
Bryan Hooi ◽  
Kijung Shin ◽  
Hemank Lamba ◽  
Christos Faloutsos
Keyword(s):  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Normal Variation ◽  
Dense Subgraph ◽  
Network Attacks ◽  
Dense Subgraphs ◽  
The Right ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Interesting Structure

Suppose you visit an e-commerce site, and see that 50 users each reviewed almost all of the same 500 products several times each: would you get suspicious? Similarly, given a Twitter follow graph, how can we design principled measures for identifying surprisingly dense subgraphs? Dense subgraphs often indicate interesting structure, such as network attacks in network traffic graphs. However, most existing dense subgraph measures either do not model normal variation, or model it using an Erdős-Renyi assumption - but this assumption has been discredited decades ago. What is the right assumption then? We propose a novel application of extreme value theory to the dense subgraph problem, which allows us to propose measures and algorithms which evaluate the surprisingness of a subgraph probabilistically, without requiring restrictive assumptions (e.g. Erdős-Renyi). We then improve the practicality of our approach by incorporating empirical observations about dense subgraph patterns in real graphs, and by proposing a fast pruning-based search algorithm. Our approach (a) provides theoretical guarantees of consistency, (b) scales quasi-linearly, and (c) outperforms baselines in synthetic and ground truth settings.

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