Case mismatching in Icelandic clausal ellipsis

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-439
Author(s):  
JIM WOOD ◽  
MATTHEW BARROS ◽  
EINAR FREYR SIGURÐSSON

In this article, we take a detailed look at clausal ellipsis in Icelandic, a hitherto understudied phenomenon. We focus on case-matching and case-mismatching facts in fragment responses. We argue that although case matching is the norm, constrained instances of case mismatching strongly suggest that there must be silent structure in the ellipsis site, and some syntactic identity condition. We outline these patterns in detail, and provide an analysis that assumes a post-syntactic approach to case marking, and a hybrid identity condition along the lines of Chung (2013).

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-113
Author(s):  
Sanghoun Song ◽  
Duk-Ho Jung ◽  
Eunjeong Oh

Author(s):  
Timothy M. Stirtz

AbstractGaahmg has ergative traces in a predominately nominative-accusative system. Clauses with object focus demonstrate ergative case marking on postverbal noun and pronoun agents, and an ergative morpheme is also bound to verbs. Other evidence for ergativity is that the ergative morpheme is morphologically and syntactically distinct from the passive morpheme. Ergative morphemes and constructions in Gaahmg are similar to those of other Nilo-Saharan languages, including Luwo, Päri, and Shilluk. The Gaahmg antipassive also resembles that of other Nilo-Saharan languages. Yet, unlike other languages with ergativity and antipassives, Gaahmg readily combines the antipassive with ergative, passive, and causative morphemes in the same verb form. The Gaahmg antipassive occurs in nominative-accusative structures, as well as in object-focus clauses with ergative-absolutive structures. Further, the antipassive co-occurs with the passive, as if both the nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive structures are simultaneously present in the same clause, and the language is currently shifting from one structure to the other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gyu-Ho Shin ◽  
Sun Hee Park

Abstract Across languages, a passive construction is known to manifest a misalignment between the typical order of event composition (agent-before-theme) and the actual order of arguments in the constructions (theme-before-agent), dubbed non-isomorphic mapping. This study investigates comprehension of a suffixal passive construction in Korean by Mandarin-speaking learners of Korean, focusing on isomorphism and language-specific devices in the passive. We measured learners’ judgment of the acceptability of canonical and scrambled suffixal passives as well as their reaction times (relative to a canonical active transitive). Our analysis generated three major findings. First, learners uniformly preferred the canonical passive to the scrambled passive. Second, as proficiency increased, the judgment gap between the canonical active transitive and the canonical suffixal passive narrowed, but the gap between the canonical active transitive and the scrambled suffixal passive did not. Third, learners (and even native speakers) spent more time in judging the acceptability of the canonical suffixal passive than they did in the other two construction types. Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the mapping nature involving a passive voice, indicated by language-specific devices (i.e., case-marking and verbal morphology dedicated to Korean passives), in L2 acquisition.


Author(s):  
Patricia Lewis ◽  
Nick Rumens ◽  
Ruth Simpson

Mobilising postfeminism as an analytical device, this article re-examines how women business owners discursively engage with the identity of the mumpreneur. Drawing on interviews with women business owners, this article reconceptualises the compatibility between motherhood and entrepreneurship associated with the mumpreneur, in terms of a hybrid identity that interlinks feminine and masculine behaviours connected to home and work. Study data reveal the discursive practices present in interview accounts – choosing family and work, strategic mumpreneurship and enhancing the business without limits – which draw on postfeminist discourses to constitute hybrid entrepreneurial femininities associated with the mumpreneur category. The article contributes to the gender and entrepreneurship literature, in particular, the scholarship on mumpreneurship, by first, showing how engagement with the mumpreneur identity is implicated in the reproduction of masculine entrepreneurship; second, demonstrates how encounters with the mumpreneur contribute to the creation of a hierarchy of entrepreneurial identities which reinforces the masculine norm; and third considers how the mumpreneur as a hybrid identity mobilises entrepreneurship in children in gendered ways. While the emergence of the mumpreneur as a contemporary entrepreneurial identity has positively impacted how women’s entrepreneurship is viewed, the study demonstrates that it has not disrupted dominant discourses of masculine entrepreneurship or gendered power relations in the entrepreneurial field.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 200-222
Author(s):  
Hamada Hassanein ◽  
Mohammad Mahzari

Abstract This study has set out to identify, quantify, typify, and exemplify the discourse functions of canonical antonymy in Arabic paremiography by comparing two manually collected datasets from Egyptian and Saudi (Najdi) dialects. Building upon Jones’s (2002) most extensive and often-cited classification of the discourse functions of antonyms as they co-occur within syntactic frames in news discourse, the study has substantially revised this classification and developed a provisional and dynamic typology thereof. Two major textual functions are found to be quantitatively significant and qualitatively preponderant: ancillarity (wherein an A-pair of canonical antonyms project their antonymicity onto a more important B-pair) and coordination (wherein one antonym holds an inclusive or exhaustive relation to another antonym). Three new functions have been developed and added to the retrieved classification: subordination (wherein one antonym occurs in a subordinate clause while the other occurs in a main clause), case-marking (wherein two opposite cases are served by two antonyms), and replacement (wherein one antonym is substituted with another). Semicanonical and noncanonical guises of antonymy are left and recommended for future research.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-831 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gontzal Aldai

Although Basque’s case-marking pattern has conventionally been regarded as ergative, I argue in this article that it is not straightforward to determine whether this pattern is actually ergative or rather semantically-based. Several factors make this one a complex issue. Perhaps the most important factor among these, and one which has gone largely unnoticed in the literature, is the fact that there are clear dialectal differences regarding the behavior of lexically-simple unergative verbs. Another complication comes from establishing the specific contrast underlying the putative semantic split among Basque intransitives. With these questions in mind, I propose that the case-marking system of Western Basque should be considered semantically aligned instead of ergative. This system is based on a contrast patientive / non-patientive. Conversely, Eastern and Central Basque may be considered to have an ergative case-marking system, but one which differs in some respects from that of the most typical ergative languages and which is not too different from a semantic system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Edmund W. Cheng

Abstract This paper surveys the process of discursive contestation by intellectual agents in Hong Kong that fostered a counter-public sphere in China's offshore. In the post-war era, Chinese exiled intellectuals leveraged the colony's geopolitical ambiguity and created a displaced community of loyalists/dissenters that supported independent publishing venues and engaged in the cultural front. By the 1970s, homegrown and left-wing intellectuals had constructed a hybrid identity to articulate their physical proximity to, yet social distance from, the Chinese nation-state, as well as to appropriate their sense of belonging to the city-state, through confronting social injustice. In examining periodicals and interviewing public intellectuals, I propose that this counter-public sphere was defined first by its alternative voice, which contested various official discourses, second by its multifaceted inclusiveness, which accommodated diverse worldviews and subjectivities, and third by its critical platform, which nurtured social activism in undemocratic Chinese societies. I differentiate the permissive conditions that loosened constraints on intellectual agencies from the productive conditions that account for their penetration and diffusion. Habermas's idealized public sphere framework is revisited by bringing in ideational contestation, social configuration and cultural identity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Levshina

Abstract The use of differential case marking of A and P has been explained in terms of efficiency (economy) and markedness. The present study tests predictions based on these accounts, using conditional probabilities of a particular feature given the syntactic role (cue availability), and conditional probabilities of a particular syntactic role given the feature in question (cue reliability). Cue availability serves as a measure of markedness, whereas cue reliability is central for the efficiency account. Similar to reverse engineering, we determine which of the probabilistic measures could have been responsible for the recurrent cross-linguistic patterns described in the literature. The probabilities are estimated from spontaneous informal dialogues in English and Russian (Indo-European), Lao (Tai-Kadai), N||ng (Tuu) and Ruuli (Bantu). The analyses, which involve a series of mixed-effects Poisson models, clearly demonstrate that cue reliability matches the observed cross-linguistic patterns better than cue availability. Thus, the results support the efficiency account of differential marking.


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