Conjunctive agreement in Lamaholot

2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
KUNIO NISHIYAMA

This paper presents a description and a theoretical analysis of agreement within coordination in Lamaholot (Austronesian), where the first conjunct agrees with the conjunction ‘and’. Conjunctive agreement is obligatory in the subject position but is optional in the object position. The analysis is couched in terms of markedness of case and proposes that the case of the subject (nominative) is unmarked compared to the case of the object (accusative), and that only unmarked case enables phi-features of the agreement control to be copied onto the agreement host. Apparent optionality is accounted for by manners of case spreading in coordination. Conjunctive agreement is also reported in the genetically unrelated but areally related language of Walman. Although conjunctive agreement originates in verbal agreement with the comitative function in both languages, it is shown that grammaticalization from the comitative to the conjunction is more advanced in Lamaholot, at least in terms of syntax and morphology.

Rhema ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 70-89
Author(s):  
Alexander В. Letuchiy

In the article, I describe cases of special behavior of Russian phrases with quantifiers like neskol’ko ‘some’, mnogo ‘many, much’ and small numerals like dva ‘two’. I show that they can occur in the subject position in contexts that usually do not contain a canonical DP/NP subject (constructions with the verb xvatat’ ‘be enough’, negation contexts with the verb byt’ ‘be’ and its habitual / iterative correlate byvat’), and for neskol’ko-like quantifiers, the direct object position with intransi- tive predicates like na-...-sja circumfixed verbs is also available. The reason of non- canonical subject behavior is the possibility to be subjects without controlling plural verbal agreement, while the non-canonical direct object behavior is possible because neskol’ko-like quantifiers lack the category of case.


1994 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 556-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary D. Garrard

An Unusual Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola has gained new prominence from its illustration in color in a recent publication. In her Women, Art, and Society (1990), Whitney Chadwick claims of the portrait in question, Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (fig. 1), that in presenting herself in the guise of a portrait being painted by her teacher, Anguissola produced “the first historical example of the woman artist consciously collapsing the subject-object position.” Chadwick's succinct observation opens up the possibility of understanding the painting in a new way, for she points to the peculiar conflation of subject and object that uniquely befell women artists in the Renaissance and complicates their art, especially their self-portraits. From this starting point, I will here explore the form of self-presentation offered by Anguissola in the Siena portrait and several other works in the context of what was a fundamental problem for the Renaissance female artist: the differentiation of herself as artist (the subject position) from her self as trope and theme for the male artist (the object position).


Author(s):  
Ana Clara Polakof

Even though the interpretation of Free Choice Items such as any has been on debate for more than 50 years (Vendler, 1974, Dayal, 1998, Horn, 2000, etc.), it is relatively more recent in Spanish (Menéndez-Benito, 2005, Giannakidou and Quer, 2013, among others). Some have analyzed it as a universal quantifier, neither taking its free choiceness into account nor contexts which seem to be problematic for the universal account (see, for instance, Etxepare and Uribe-Etxebarria, 2011). In this article, we defend that cualquier is a universal indeterminate pronoun which involves freedom of choice (as in the original proposal by Vendler, 1974). We will take into account data (taken from https://www.corpusdelespanol.org/web-dial) which has not been properly considered. We will analyze the interaction of negation and cualquier in Rioplantese Spanish in the subject position of negative generic statements, in the object position in negative episodic statements, and in a non argumental position. We will combine an alternative semantics approach to the analysis of the FCI cualquier, inspired in Menéndez-Benito (2010) and Aloni (2019), with a syntactic approach to negation inspired in Etxepare and Uribe-Etxebarria (2011).  


Author(s):  
Anna Giskes ◽  
Dave Kush

AbstractCataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions (Kazanina et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 56[3], 384–409, 2007). One characteristic of active search is that it is persistent: If a prediction is disconfirmed in an earlier position, the parser should iteratively search later positions until the predicted element is found. Previous research has assumed, but not established, that antecedent search is persistent. In four experiments in English and Norwegian, we test this hypothesis. Two sentence completion experiments show a strong off-line preference for coreference between a fronted cataphor and the first available argument position (the main subject). When the main subject cannot be the antecedent, participants posit the antecedent in the next closest position: object position. Two self-paced reading studies demonstrate that comprehenders actively expect the antecedent of a fronted cataphor to appear in the main clause subject position, and then successively in object position if the subject does not match the cataphor in gender. Our results therefore support the claim that antecedent search is active and persistent.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoxia Pan ◽  
Limin Liu

This paper aims to study the syntactic and semantic features of ‘marked VRC causative structures’, those special syntactic-semantic structures formed by verb-resultative constructions (VRCs) which violate both the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis and the Thematic Hierarchy. Their syntactic and semantic features are defined as follows: 1) VRC has a causative relation within itself; 2) the argument in the object position is the causee and the only argument of the resultative complement; 3) the causer in the subject position is any conceptual component from the cause event other than the agent of the predicate verb. This paper then attempts to propose an extended account to expound how they are formed syntactically and semantically. On this account, a marked VRC causative structure is re-causativization of a VRC when the VRC is self-causative; it enables other conceptual components of the cause event than the agent to become the causer when a VRC is not self-causative. There are some constraints on what becomes the causer of a marked VRC causative structure.


1992 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Labelle

The goal of this article is twofold. First, I explore the hypothesis that a number of regularities in the distribution of the two types of inchoative constructions with verbs of change of state in French, the superficially intransitive construction and the reflexive construction (illustrated in (1)–(3)), can be captured by an analysis whereby monovalent verbs of change of state may project the Patient argument to the subject or to the object position. When the Patient argument is projected to the subject position (as in (1a) and (3a)), the construction is unergative. When it is projected to the object position, the construction is unaccusative (as in (1b)–(3b)). Verbs of change of state in French diner as to whether they may enter an intransitive inchoative construction (1), a reflexive inchoative construction (2) or both (3).


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (spe) ◽  
pp. 47-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarida Maria Florêncio Dantas ◽  
Maria Cristina Lopes de Almeida Amazonas

This paper presents a reflection about being terminally ill and the various ways that the subject has at its disposal to deal with this event. The objective is to understand the experience of palliation for patients undergoing no therapeutic possibilities of cure. The methodology of this study has the instruments to semi-structured interview, the participant observation and the field diary, and the Descriptive Analysis of Foucault’s inspiration how the narratives of the subjects were perceived. The Results of paper there was the possibility of looking at the experience of illness through the eyes of a subject position assumed by the very sick. As conclusion we have than when choosing palliative care, the terminally ill opts for a way to feel more comfortable and resists the impositions of the medical model of prolonging life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 347-355
Author(s):  
Tom Baker ◽  
Ryan Jones ◽  
Michael Mann ◽  
Nick Lewis

Drawing on observations at the 2017 Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) – a global conference held in Christchurch, New Zealand – this paper examines the significance of localised event spaces in shaping economic subjects and, by extension, economic sectors. Conferences such as the SEWF are sites and moments that provide access to new knowledge, foster collective action and shape the subjectivities of economic actors. We describe how the SEWF cultivated sympathetic affective responses towards social enterprise and the subject position of the social entrepreneur, and demonstrate how the local specificities of Christchurch, as a place, were key to the cultivation of social-entrepreneurial subjectivity at the SEWF.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 633-656
Author(s):  
Adrian Briciu

Abstract It has become almost a cliché to say that we live in a post-truth world; that people of all trades speak with an indifference to truth. Speaking with an indifference to how things really are is famously regarded by Harry Frankfurt as the essence of bullshit. This paper aims to contribute to the philosophical and theoretical pragmatics discussion of bullshit. The aim of the paper is to offer a new theoretical analysis of what bullshit is, one that is more encompassing than Frankfurt’s original characterization. I part ways with Frankfurt in two points. Firstly, I propose that we should not analyze bullshit in intentional terms (i.e. as indifference). Secondly, I propose that we should not analyze it in relation to truth. Roughly put, I propose that bullshit is best characterized as speaking with carelessness toward the evidence for one’s conversational contribution. I bring forward, in the third section, a battery of examples that motivate this characterization. Furthermore, I argue that we can analyze speaking with carelessness toward the evidence in Gricean terms as a violation of the second Quality maxim. I argue that the Quality supermaxim, together with its subordinate maxims, demand that the speaker is truthful (contributes only what she believes to be true) and reliable (has adequate evidence for her contribution). The bullshitter’s main fault lies in being an unreliable interlocutor. I further argue that we should interpret what counts as adequate evidence, as stipulated by the second Quality Maxim, in contextualist terms: the subject matter and implicit epistemic standards determine how much evidence one needs in order to have adequate evidence. I contrast this proposed reading with a subjectivist interpretation of what counts as having adequate evidence and show that they give different predictions. Finally, working with a classic distinction, I argue that we should not understand bullshit as a form of deception but rather as a form of misleading speech.


Author(s):  
Frances Blanchette ◽  
Chris Collins

AbstractThis article presents a novel analysis ofNegative Auxiliary Inversion(NAI) constructions such asdidn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.


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