The Conjunct Verb in Sheshatshit Montagnais

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Brittain
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Formal Properties

AbstractThis article accounts for the distribution and the formal properties of the conjunct verb in Sheshatshit Montagnais within the theoretical model of the Minimalist Program. A subset of the syntactic environments in which the conjunct verb occurs obligatorily is examined: subordinate clauses, non-pastwh-questions, and negated clauses.Wh-phrases and subordinate clauses are associated cross-linguistically with a CP projection. It is shown that the two principal negative morphemes in Sheshatshit Montagnais are also associated with a CP projection, thereby obtaining a common underlying structure for clauses requiring conjunct verbs. Central to this analysis is the claim that conjunct verbs move to the Comp position while independent verbs move to Infl. Associating conjunct and independent verbs with distinct functional categories not only predicts their distribution but also accounts for their most distinctive formal properties.

Object Shift, Phases, and Transitive Expletive Constructions in Germanic*

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 139-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Richards
Keyword(s):  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Strong Form ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Object Shift ◽  
The Core ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Universal Interface ◽  
Crosslinguistic Variation

This paper reconsiders the analysis of Transitive Expletive Constructions (TECs) across Germanic in light of recent developments in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 et seq.). I argue that prevailing views of expletives as merged directly into the Spec-TP position are untenable under the Probe-Goal Agree system of Minimalist Inquiries, and propose that T is anomalous amongst the core functional categories (C, T, v) in lacking the Merge-Expl property. This anomaly, I propose, is reducible to another anomaly setting T apart from C and v, namely T’s status as a nonphase head. It follows from the resolution of a basic indeterminacy in the composition of phases that Expl must merge in Spec-vP, the Object Shift position. This, in turn, throws new light on the patterns of complementary distribution that characterize the interaction between Expl, external arguments, and raised internal arguments exhibited by TECs. A strong form of Bures’s Generalization emerges — TECs are directly tied to the availability of full-DP Object Shift in a manner that is arguably both empirically and conceptually superior to existing analyses. Universal, interface-imposed, phase-based constraints on Object Shift and Merge-Expl are thus sufficient to account for the observed patterns of crosslinguistic variation in TEC distribution.

scholarly journals Obligatory Movement Operations for Verbal Roots in Najdi Arabic

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Al Qahtani Khulud ◽  
Al Zahrani Mohammad
Keyword(s):  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Najdi Arabic

This paper focuses on the obligatory movement operations that Najdi Arabic (NA) verb forms must undergo to satisfy the morphosyntactic requirements within the minimalist program (MP). Recall that the practice of the MP syntactic theory, including its further advancements, proposed by Chomsky (1995, 2000, 2001) springs from the fact that the grammar of a language starts basically from the lexicon from which suitable words are selected to form clauses. The selected words undergo some syntactic operations such as Merge, by which larger constituents are formed, and Move, by which the formed constituents move to higher positions in the hierarchy to fulfil some specific syntactic purposes. When the elements have undergone the operations of Merge and Move they are spelled out into phonetic forms (PF) and logical forms (LF). In light of this, we argue that NA verbs start out as roots in the head of VP before merging with the vocalic affixes in the head of Tax-AspP to satisfy the subjectverb agreement requirements and mark the aspect features. Perfective verb forms must then continue to move to T to merge with the past tense abstract features while imperfective forms stay in Tax-AspP. The thematic subject is generated in Spec,VP; it may stay there to derive the VSO order, or move higher to derive the SVO order. The findings show that obligatory movements indicate interactions between the functional categories of TP, Tax-AspP and VP: NA verbal roots obligatorily move to Tax-Asp to derive (im)perfective forms; perfectives obligatorily move to T.

scholarly journals The importance of executive leadership in creating a post-merged organisational culture conducive to effective performance management

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary W. Paul ◽  
David M. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Performance Management ◽  
Organisational Culture ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Executive Management ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
Effective Performance ◽  
Culture Creation

Orientation: Focus was placed on the important role of executive management in creating a post-merged organisational culture conducive to effective performance management.Research purpose: To develop a theoretical model from the insights gleaned from the literature study, interviews with senior human resource (HR) practitioners at participating institutions and the empirical study. Based on the empirical findings, this model was refined and resulted in the eight-step integrated post-merged organisational culture creation model.Motivation for the study: The negligible attention given to the design of mechanisms supportive of post-merged organisational culture creation emphasised the need for this study. The high percentage of merger failures attributable to ineffective post-merged organisational culture integration further contributed.Research design, approach and method: A quantitative study was conducted at three merged South African higher education institutions, namely Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Cape Peninsula University of Technology and Durban University of Technology. Respondents occupied the following functional categories: executive management, senior and line management, HR practitioners and non-HR or non-management.Main findings: Respondents perceived the role of executive management to be the most important step of the theoretical model which formed the basis for the empirical survey questionnaire. This step, which obtained the highest summated mean score in all three institutions and across all functional categories, was depicted as Step 5 of the model.Practical/managerial implications: The refined eight-step integrated post-merged organisational culture creation model will significantly enhance the creation of a post-merged organisational culture conducive to effective performance management.Contribution/value-add: This study addressed the void regarding a model to guide the creation of a post-merged organisational culture conducive to effective performance management in higher education institutions as well as merged corporate organisations.

scholarly journals Beyond Recursion: Critique of Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Роман Тарабань ◽  
Бандара Ахінта
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Minimalist Program ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
And Control

In 2002, Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch published an article in which they introduced a distinction between properties of language that are exclusively part of human communication (i.e., the FLN) and those properties that might be shared with other species (i.e., the FLB). The sole property proposed for the FLN was recursion. Hauser et al. provided evidence for their position based on issues of evolution. The question of the required properties of human language is central to developing theories of language processing and acquisition. In the present critique of Hauser et al. we consider two examples from non-English languages that argue against the suggestion that recursion is the sole property within the human language faculty. These are i) agreement of inflectional morphemes across sentence constructions, and ii) synthetic one-word constructions. References Adger, D. (2003). Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the Competition Model. In: The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing, (pp 3-76). B. MacWhinney and E. Bates (Eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Bickerton, D (2009). Recursion: core of complexity or artifact of analysis? In: Syntactic Complexity: Diachrony, Acquisition, Neuro-Cognition, Evolution, (pp. 531–543). T. Givón and M. Shibatani (Eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures (2nd edition published in 2002). Berlin: Mouton Chomsky, N. (1959). On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and Control, 2, 137–167. Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What it is, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569-1579. Luuk, E., & Luuk, H. (2011). The redundancy of recursion and infinity for natural language. Cognitive Processing 12, 1–11. Marantz, A. (1997). No escape from syntax: Don't try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 4(2), A. Dimitriadis, L. Siegel, et. al. (eds.), 201- 225. MacWhinney, B. & O’Grady, W. (Eds.) (2015). Handbook of Language Emergence. New York: Wiley. Nevins, A., Pesetsky, D., & Rodrigues, C. (2009). Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language, 85(2), 355–404. Ott, D. (2009). The evolution of I-language: Lexicalization as the key evolutionary novelty. Biolinguistics, 3, 255–269. Sauerland, U., & Trotzke, A. (2011). Biolinguistic perspectives on recursion: Introduction to the special issue. Biolinguistics, 5, 1–9. Trotzke, A., Bader, M. & Frazier, L. (2013). Third factors and the performance interface in language design. Biolinguistics, 7, 1–34.  

Code-switching between an OV and a VO language

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronika Jansen ◽  
Jasmin Müller ◽  
Natascha Müller
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Auxiliary Verb

The present article investigates intra-sentential code-switching in French/Italian/ Spanish-German bilingual children. The main question is what determines the syntax of code-switching in OV/VO structures and subordinate clauses. While in the domain of OV/VO, neither the language of the lexical verb nor that of the modal/auxiliary verb determines the structure of code-switched utterances, the complementizer seems to be decisive for the syntax of code-switching in subordinate clauses. The present approach focuses on the relevance of the functional head C in code-switching, claiming that the syntax of code-switched OV/VO structures is influenced by the language of a (covert) C-head, while it does not depend on the language of T or V. Our approach can explain the variability of OV/VO in code-switching data and supports the observations by Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994), Cantone (2007), Chan (2003; 2007), and Gonzalez-Vilbazo and Lopez (2012) that functional categories play an important role for the syntax of code-switching.

Structure of the Relational Thinking Styles Model

2012 ◽  
pp. 43-61
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Phenomenological Model ◽  
Thinking Styles ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Analog Model ◽  
Relational Thinking

This chapter lays out the initial RTS model designed by Dorothy Davis to describe her theory of thinking styles. Included here is a brief discussion of the Peircean-like phenomenological model that Davis used as the framework from which to develop the theoretical model of RTS and the DNV, an analog model of RTS. The main body of the chapter introduces the underlying structure of the RTS model (and, by association, the DNV), laying out the basic criteria for analysis and identification of inference patterns.

A Grammer without Functional Categories: A Syntactic Study of Early Swedish Child Language

1990 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christer Platzack
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Subordinate Clauses

In this paper I give empirical evidence for the hypothesis that there are no functional categories in early Swedish child language (up to approximately 3 years of age). claiming that utterances with at least a subject and a verb at this early stage of language development can be described within the limits of VP. Several properties of early Swedish are shown to follow from this hypothesis, including the lack of subordinate clauses in early Swedish and the fact that early Swedish is not a verb second language.

scholarly journals Learning the latent structure of collider events

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. M. Dillon ◽  
D. A. Faroughy ◽  
J. F. Kamenik ◽  
M. Szewc
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Probability Distributions ◽  
Variational Inference ◽  
Latent Structure ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Inference Algorithm ◽  
Machine Learning Technique ◽  
Learning Technique ◽  
Background Events

Abstract We describe a technique to learn the underlying structure of collider events directly from the data, without having a particular theoretical model in mind. It allows to infer aspects of the theoretical model that may have given rise to this structure, and can be used to cluster or classify the events for analysis purposes. The unsupervised machine-learning technique is based on the probabilistic (Bayesian) generative model of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We pair the model with an approximate inference algorithm called Variational Inference, which we then use to extract the latent probability distributions describing the learned underlying structure of collider events. We provide a detailed systematic study of the technique using two example scenarios to learn the latent structure of di-jet event samples made up of QCD background events and either $$ t\overline{t} $$ t t ¯ or hypothetical W′ → (ϕ → WW)W signal events.

scholarly journals Afrikaans directionality switch in ‘triple’ V-clusters with the auxiliary het

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Jacqueline van Kampen
Keyword(s):  
Underlying Structure ◽  
The West ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Category Assignment ◽  
General Perspective

Abstract The general perspective of the paper is that all (dis)harmonic branching orders within the West-Germanic V-clusters imply a different categorization by the acquisition procedure that should be independently motivated. More specific, the paper discusses the directionality switch with the temporal auxiliary het (‘have’) in Afrikaans. Afrikaans has a right-branching V-cluster 1-2-3. The directionality switches in subordinate clauses when V1 is the auxiliary het, which seemingly gives rise to the a-typical order 2-3-1 [[leer 2 swem 3] het 1]. V2 is in this case an IPP (Infinitivus-pro-participio) infinitive. I propose to derive the directionality switch as a matter of category assignment by an acquisition procedure that is unaware of underlying structure followed by movements. I argue that sentence-final het has been reanalyzed as a morphological suffix on the V3. This leads to a simplification of the apparent 2-3-1 V-cluster into a binary 1–2 V-cluster [leer 1 [swem het]2].

The Templatic Syllable Patterns of Reduplication and Stem-affixing Inflections in the Classical Arabic Based on Prosodic Morphology Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (11) ◽  
pp. 2196
Author(s):  
Elkhas Veysi ◽  
Farangis Abbaszadeh
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Morphological Operations ◽  
Single Node ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Morphological Processes ◽  
Verbal Processes ◽  
Nonconcatenative Morphology ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Classical Arabic

A morpheme, is a set of feature matrices dominated by a single node. Reduplication or gemination is one of the productive morphological processes which have been studied inclusively in different languages and in the frame of different linguistic theories like Generative Grammar, Optimality Theory and Minimalist Program. McCarthy's prosodic theory is justified by an analysis of the formal properties of the system of verbal processes like reduplication are the primary or sole morphological operations. This theory of nonconcatenative morphology recognizing the root as a discontinuous constituent. Under the prosodic model, a morphological category which characteristically reduplicates simply stipulates an output template composed of vowel and consonant. Consonantal roots and vocalic melodies in Arabic, although they contain bundles of the same distinctive features, can nevertheless be represented on separate autosegmental tiers. This ensures that the association conventions for melodies can operate independently on these two tiers. Association of autosegments from different tiers to the same segments will be subject to the natural restriction that no segment receives multiple associations for the same nontonal feature.

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