Clause order and syntactic integration patterns in Dutch conditionals

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Alex Reuneker

Abstract Conditional clauses in Dutch can occur in sentence-initial and sentence-final position. For sentence-initial conditionals, a number of syntactic integration patterns are available. This corpus study investigates to what extent clause order and syntactic integration are associated with text mode (spoken, written) and register (formal, informal). Sentence-initial position of the conditional clause is shown to be most frequent in both modes and registers, although sentence-final position is more frequent than one would expect based on the literature, especially in written texts. The distribution of syntactic integration patterns shows a clear difference between modes, as full integration of the conditional clause into the main clause is most frequent in written texts, whereas the use of the resumptive element dan (‘then’) is most frequent in spoken texts.

Phonology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Vietti ◽  
Birgit Alber ◽  
Barbara Vogt

In the Southern Bavarian variety of Tyrolean, laryngeal contrasts undergo a typologically interesting process of neutralisation in word-initial position. We undertake an acoustic analysis of Tyrolean stops in word-initial, word-medial intersonorant and word-final contexts, as well as in obstruent clusters, investigating the role of the acoustic parameters VOT, prevoicing, closure duration and F0 and H1–H2* on following vowels in implementing contrast, if any. Results show that stops contrast word-medially via [voice] (supported by the acoustic cues of closure duration and F0), and are neutralised completely in word-final position and in obstruent clusters. Word-initially, neutralisation is subject to inter- and intraspeaker variability, and is sensitive to place of articulation. Aspiration plays no role in implementing laryngeal contrasts in Tyrolean.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilián Guerrero ◽  
◽  
Rebeca Gerardo-Tavira ◽  

Previous typological studies have shown that temporal clauses, unlike other adverbial clauses, can occur before or after the main clause, and this order variation has been observed across languages and within the same language. In the case of Spanish, some studies have found that temporal clauses tend to occur at the beginning of the clause. In this paper, we extend the assumptions of typological studies into the analysis of temporal clauses introduced by cuando ‘when’. Based in used data, we found that the initial position is preferred in oral data, while both positions are equally common in writing data. We examine some semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic motivations that, together, may explain this order variation: the semantic nature of cuando, sequential iconicity, length, and syntactic complexity, as well as pragmatic order.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laia Mayol

This paper presents a corpus study of right dislocation (RD) in Catalan and discusses crosslinguistic differences of information packaging between English and Catalan. The Catalan corpus consists of 93 RDs which have been coded according to three parameters: (1) the point where the entity in the right-dislocated constituent had appeared in the discourse, (2) consequences of eliminating the right-dislocated constituent and (3) consequences of restoring the canonical order. I argue that RD in Catalan is a means to structure information in a coherent way by displacing old information from the main clause. Three main types of RDs can be found: (1) RDs which activate an entity which was no longer accessible in the discourse and make it highly salient, while still marking its discourse-old status; (2) RDs which make explicit an implicit, never textually mentioned, referent and places it in a discourse-old information position. (3) RDs referring to entities mentioned in the previous sentence. Such RDs convey an additional meaning, some ‘emotional content’, having to do with the expression of opposition or emphasis. In order to analyse crosslinguistic differences, an English text and its Catalan translation have been used. The Catalan translation contained 42 instances of RD, while the English text contained none, which shows that the two languages use different strategies to encode information packaging. The Catalan translation uses RDs mostly in cases in which the English original repeats the same phrase in two consecutive utterances and in utterances which convey contrast or opposition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-98
Author(s):  
Widya Juli Astria

The purpose of this research was to analyze the third semester students’ problem in learning English basic sounds pronunciation. The research design was case study. The data were collected by recording the students’ pronunciation. The subject of the research were the third Semester Students of English Department at Universitas Ekasakti). The result of the research was found that Each aspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ have two allophones, [ph] and [p], [th] and [t], [kh] and [k]. Then, all instances of [ph] occured immediately before a stressed vowel. It can be said that the following rule: /p/ becomes [ph] when it occured before a stressed vowel or initial position of English words. Moreover, aspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ sounds were really pronounced in two different ways. First, when these sounds came at the beginning of the word they are always followed by a puff of breath. Second, if aspirated /p/, /t/, and /k/ occur at the end of final position of English words, it is not necessary to pronounce them by following a puff of breath. In following there is a chart of aspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ sounds at initial position of English words


Author(s):  
Shanti Ulfsbjorninn

Abstract It is standardly assumed that French does not have word-stress, rather it has phrase-level prominence. I will advance a number of arguments, many of which have appeared already in the literature, that cumulatively suggest that French roots are characterized by phonological prominence, even if this is non-contrastive. By prominence, I mean a syntagmatically distributed strength that has all the phonological characteristics of stress in other Romance languages. I will remain agnostic about the nature of that stress, eschewing the lively debate about whether French has feet, and if so what type, and at what level. The structure of the argument is as follows. French demonstrably has phonological word-final strength but one wonders what the source of this strength is. Positionally, the initial position is strong and, independently of cases where it is reinforced by other factors, the final position is weak. I will argue, based on parallels with other Romance languages, that French word-final strength derives from root-final phonological stress. The broader significance of this conclusion is that syntagmatic properties are enough to motivate underlying forms, even in the absence of paradigmatic contrasts (minimal pairs).


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-298
Author(s):  
Sergei Klimenko

Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based study of a number of different types of previously undescribed constructions formed with the Tagalog noun kasama ‘companion’. Apart from independent and attributive uses, kasama frequently occurs as the predicate of an adjunct clause that can introduce a comitative participant, a semantically depictive secondary predicate, an event-oriented adjunct, or a predicative complement. The study analyses the frequency of kasama in all of these types of constructions and looks into their specific properties. This includes: the semantic distinction between additive and inclusory constructions with kasama; animacy agreement between arguments of kasama in additive constructions; variation in case marking of arguments of kasama; the preponderance of the absence of linkers – commonly known to introduce adverbial clauses in Tagalog – which are used to attach the kasama clause to the main clause; attested controllers of the kasama clause; positions available for the kasama clause in the sentence. Variation in case marking and compatibility with linkers suggests a classification of Tagalog adjunct clauses similar to that of Tagalog adverbials and prepositions. There is also some evidence to believe that kasama is being grammaticalized as a preposition. Comitative and semantically depictive constructions with kasama, which account for a quarter of the corpus sample, have never been studied before, despite the fact that Tagalog is included in several typological studies on comitative and depictive constructions.


1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Platt ◽  
Gavin Andrews ◽  
Pauline M. Howie

The articulation errors of 32 spastic and 18 athetoid males, aged 17–55 years, were analyzed using a confusion matrix paradigm. The subjects had a diagnosis of congenital cerebral palsy, and adequate intelligence, hearing, and ability to perform the speech task. Phonetic transcriptions were made of single-word utterances which contained 49 selected phonemes: 22 word-initial consonants, 18 word-final consonants and nine vowels. Errors of substitution, omission and distortion were categorized on confusion matrices such that patterns could be observed. It was found that within-manner errors (place or voicing errors or both) exceeded between-manner errors by a substantial amount, more so on final consonants. The predominant within-manner errors occurred on fricative phonemes for both initial and final positions. Affricate within-manner errors, all of devoicing, were also frequent in final position. The predominant between-manner initial position errors involved liquid-to-glide and affricate-to-stop changes, and for final position, affricate-to-fricative. Phoneme omission occurred three times more frequently on final than on initial consonants. The error data of individual subjects were found to correspond with the identified overall group patterns. Those with markedly reduced speech intelligibility demonstrated the same patterns of error as the overall group. The implications for treatment are discussed.


1972 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seline Stein Hirsch ◽  
John M. Panagos

3 groups of naive adults were tested on their pronunciations of a foreign sound after one received no phonetic pretraining, another practiced the sound in the initial position, and the third learned it in the final. A significant positive transference effect indicated that practicing an unknown sound in the initial position facilitates its pronunciation in the final position.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuoyan Song ◽  
Hongyin Tao

Causal clauses introduced by yīnwèi in Chinese can have either an initial position or a final position with regard to the main clause. While traditional grammars have treated the initial sequence as the default form, numerous discourse-based studies have shown just the opposite. However, few have attempted to explain why both sequence orders exist and why they have skewed distribution patterns across discourse registers. In this paper we use a telephone conversation corpus and a written Chinese corpus as data and provide a comprehensive analysis of the usage patterns. Our main findings are that final and initial causal clause sequences are ostensibly two different linguistic constructions, functioning as an interactional device and an information-sharing device, respectively. Quantitative distributional disparities are seen as a function of the discourse utilities of the linguistic devices in question and the communicative demands of different registers. From a cross-linguistic perspective, our findings raise questions about the ways in which universal and language-specific properties of clause sequencing can be better understood.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0251559
Author(s):  
Domicele Jonauskaite ◽  
Adam Sutton ◽  
Nello Cristianini ◽  
Christine Mohr

In Western societies, the stereotype prevails that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. A third possible gendered colour is red. While liked by women, it represents power, stereotypically a masculine characteristic. Empirical studies confirmed such gendered connotations when testing colour-emotion associations or colour preferences in males and females. Furthermore, empirical studies demonstrated that pink is a positive colour, blue is mainly a positive colour, and red is both a positive and a negative colour. Here, we assessed if the same valence and gender connotations appear in widely available written texts (Wikipedia and newswire articles). Using a word embedding method (GloVe), we extracted gender and valence biases for blue, pink, and red, as well as for the remaining basic colour terms from a large English-language corpus containing six billion words. We found and confirmed that pink was biased towards femininity and positivity, and blue was biased towards positivity. We found no strong gender bias for blue, and no strong gender or valence biases for red. For the remaining colour terms, we only found that green, white, and brown were positively biased. Our finding on pink shows that writers of widely available English texts use this colour term to convey femininity. This gendered communication reinforces the notion that results from research studies find their analogue in real word phenomena. Other findings were either consistent or inconsistent with results from research studies. We argue that widely available written texts have biases on their own, because they have been filtered according to context, time, and what is appropriate to be reported.


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