An Ergative Historiography

1977 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Seely
Keyword(s):  
American Indian ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Transitive Verb ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Causative Construction ◽  
Polynesian Languages ◽  
Insight Into

Summary The most widely accepted definition of ‘ergative’ is in terms of a grammatical case, namely, the subject of a transitive verb, wherein that case is opposed to a second case, the ‘absolutive’ (‘nominative’), which includes both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive. Languages which have been referred to as ‘ergative’ or as containing ‘ergative constructions’ include Basque, Eskimo, most languages from the Caucasus and from Australia, some Polynesian languages, Burushaski, the Paleosiberian languages, Sumerian, Hittite, some Papuan languages, Tibetan, most members of the Indic branch of Indo-European, and many American Indian languages. Insight into speculation on the nature of the ergative leads to a study of the terminology applied before the coinage of the term ‘ergative’ in 1912 (by Adolf Dirr). The term itself has been given varied definitions. Fillmore pictured the ergative as a causative construction; John Anderson suggested ‘ergative’ as a semantic marker; John Lyons describes an ‘ideal ergative’ which is agentive in nature. The bizarre conjecture surrounding the study of ergative languages has included a long debate as to the active or passive nature of the ergative construction and, secondly, the fantasy that an ergative language was a ‘primitive’ one whose speakers had a ‘Weltanschauung’ opposed to that possessed by speakers of a nominative-accusative language. Rather than either active or passive it has also been postulated that the verb is bidirectional and that verb and nouns in some ergative constructions are in a kind of apposition with each other; in addition, these often occur in sets of relationships which are determined by the semantic nature of the nouns and verb. The term ‘semantic ergative’ is suggested here to describe the presence of the ergative marker due to semantic features as +movement, +voluntary, or + emphasis. Although found most commonly as subject of a transitive verb, this semantic ergative may nevertheless also be found as subject of an intransitive.

Object attraction effects during subject-verb agreement in Persian

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 742-752 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aazam Feiz ◽  
Wind Cowles
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Production ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Attraction Effects ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Attraction Errors

Subject-verb agreement provides insight into how grammatical and semantic features interact during sentence production, and prior studies have found attraction errors when an intervening local noun is grammatically part of the subject. Two major types of theories have emerged from these studies: control based and competition-based. The current study used an subject-object-verb language with optional subject-verb agreement, Persian, to test the competition-based hypothesis that intervening object nouns may also cause attraction effects, even though objects are not part of the syntactic relationship between the subject and verb. Our results, which did not require speakers to make grammatical errors, show that objects can be attractors for agreement, but this effect appears to be dependent on the type of plural marker on the object. These results support competition-based theories of agreement production, in which agreement may be influenced by attractors that are outside the scope of the subject-verb relationship.

scholarly journals The Transitivity Index: Using Transitivity as a continuous measure to account for clitic case alternation in Spanish causative constructions

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. e0246834
Author(s):  
Gustavo Guajardo
Keyword(s):  
Continuous Measure ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Transitive Verb ◽  
Case Alternation ◽  
Causative Constructions ◽  
Dative Case ◽  
Direct Causation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of

In Spanish causative constructions with dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ the subject of the embedded infinitive verb can appear in the accusative or the dative case. This case alternation has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of direct vs. indirect causation. Under this account, the accusative clitic with a transitive verb denotes direct causation while the dative clitic with an intransitive verb expresses indirect causation. The problem with this account is that we lack an independent definition of (in)direct causation in this context and so this approach suffers from circularity: the case of the clitic is used to determine causation type and causation type implies use of one or the other grammatical case. Therefore, a more objective way to account for clitic case alternation is needed. In this paper, I offer one possible solution in this direction by investigating clitic case alternation against Hopper and Thompson’s Transitivity parameters and a small number of other linguistic variables. The novelty of this approach is that I operationalise Transitivity as a weighted continuous measure (which I call the Transitivity Index) and use it to predict the case of the clitic. The results indicate that the transitivity of the infinitive verb, the animacy of the object and the agentivity of the subject are strong predictors of clitic case. Moreover, the Transitivity Index clearly shows that higher levels of Transitivity are associated with the dative clitic contrary to other contexts in which accusative is said to be more transitive. The findings in this paper allow us to arrive at a finer-grained characterization of the contexts in which each clitic case is more likely to occur and provide further evidence of the pervasiveness of Transitivity in natural language.

scholarly journals CAT AND DOG CONCEPTS AS COMPONENTS OF THE ENGLISH WORLDVIEW

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Novikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
World View ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Cognitive Semantic ◽  
General Scientific ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
English Culture

The subject of the study is the linguistic objectification of the concepts of CAT and DOG in lexicographic sources, due to the national culture and mentality of English speakers (The British). The paper aims at identifying the objectification features of CAT and DOG concepts in the British linguoculture. The significance of CAT and DOG concepts is motivated by the degree of verbal explication and their value in English culture. In our work, the reconstruction of English world view fragments, marked by CAT and DOG concepts, was carried out on the material of lexical units. The purpose and problem is due to the use of the following methods: general scientific (abstraction, generalization, formalization, induction, deduction), empirical-theoretical (analysis, synthesis) and special (lexical-semantic analysis – to clarify the semantic potential of the concept name; dictionary definition method – to clarify the semantics of possible verbalizers of the concept, determine its name and description of the conceptual component; elements of etymological analysis – to explain the content of the concept verbalizer. Verbal nominations, representing CAT and DOG concepts, are interpreted as fixators of knowledge about objects, explicitly expressed in language. CAT and DOG concepts have a concrete-subject character, they correlate with the objective reality – a discrete, objectively available material object of reality. As a result of the definitive analysis and based on the definition of the nominative token cat and dog, we distinguished 12 generalized meanings that form the denotation CAT concept and 14 generalized meanings that produce the denotation of DOG concept. The conceptual basis of CAT and DOG concepts is expanded with the help of additional semantic features, taking into account the cognitive-semantic analysis of synonymous equivalents of the nouns cat and dog.

Typologization of security regulation

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Denis Tikhomirov
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Procedural Understanding ◽  
Limited Ability ◽  
Methodological Basis ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Legal Understanding

The purpose of the article is to typologize terminological definitions of security, to find out the general, to identify the originality of their interpretations depending on the subject of legal regulation. The methodological basis of the study is the methods that made it possible to obtain valid conclusions, in particular, the method of comparison, through which it became possible to correlate different interpretations of the term "security"; method of hermeneutics, which allowed to elaborate texts of normative legal acts of Ukraine, method of typologization, which made it possible to create typologization groups of variants of understanding of the term "security". Scientific novelty. The article analyzes the understanding of the term "security" in various regulatory acts in force in Ukraine. Typological groups were understood to understand the term "security". Conclusions. The analysis of the legal material makes it possible to confirm that the issues of security are within the scope of both legislative regulation and various specialized by-laws. However, today there is no single conception on how to interpret security terminology. This is due both to the wide range of social relations that are the subject of legal regulation and to the relativity of the notion of security itself and the lack of coherence of views on its definition in legal acts and in the scientific literature. The multiplicity of definitions is explained by combinations of material and procedural understanding, static - dynamic, and conditioned by the peculiarities of a particular branch of legal regulation, limited ability to use methods of one or another branch, the inter-branch nature of some variations of security, etc. Separation, common and different in the definition of "security" can be used to further standardize, in fact, the regulatory legal understanding of security to more effectively implement the legal regulation of the security direction.

Antonio Negri

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Diran
Keyword(s):  
Critical Distance ◽  
Middle Voice ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Antonio Negri

Agamben describes his posture as a reader as one of seeking a text’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit, or capacity for elaboration.1 In examining Agamben’s practices of reading, we can attend to the opposite phenomenon: the counter-elaboration that a text, in having being read by the philosopher, performs upon Agamben’s own thought. This reciprocal elaboration might constitute a paradigm for Agamben’s use of reading, according to his own idiosyncratic definition of use as an event in the middle voice, in which (according to a definition of Benveniste) the subject ‘effects an action only in affecting itself (il effectue en s’affectant)’ (UB 28). With this definition in mind, we could say that Agamben effects a text (he writes) only to the extent that he is also affected by another text (he reads). This is why Agamben’s position as a reader proves particularly important to any assessment of his work, quite aside from the problem of influence or intellectual genealogy. For this same reason, however, assessing Agamben’s relation to Antonio Negri – a figure with whom, by most measures, he is at odds – poses an unexpected challenge: how can Agamben’s thought be a use of Negri? Answering this question means not only assessing the critical distance between the two thinkers, but also taking this distance as a measure, in the Spinozan sense, of mutual affection.

The Autobiographical Subject and the Death Penalty

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
E. S. Burt
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
First Person ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Why does writing of the death penalty demand the first-person treatment that it also excludes? The article investigates the role played by the autobiographical subject in Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I, where the confessing ‘I’ doubly supplements the philosophical investigation into what Derrida sees as a trend toward the worldwide abolition of the death penalty: first, to bring out the harmonies or discrepancies between the individual subject's beliefs, anxieties, desires and interests with respect to the death penalty and the state's exercise of its sovereignty in applying it; and second, to provide a new definition of the subject as haunted, as one that has been, but is no longer, subject to the death penalty, in the light of the worldwide abolition currently underway.

Importance of the Intersection of Library and Information Sciences with Systems Theory

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Lee
Keyword(s):  
System Theory ◽  
General System ◽  
General System Theory ◽  
Von Bertalanffy ◽  
Meta Level ◽  
Professional Field ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Critical Insight ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Information Sciences

This paper is the attempt to show how system theory could provide critical insight into the transdisciplinary field of library and information sciences (LIS). It begins with a discussion on the categorization of library and information sciences as an academic and professional field (or rather, the lack of evidence on the subject) and what is exactly meant by system theory, drawing upon the general system theory established by Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The main conversation of this paper focuses on the inadequacies of current meta-level discussions of LIS and the benefits of general system theory (particularly when considering the exponential rapidity in which information travels) with LIS.

CONCEPT AND CONTENT OF A RECONCILIATION AGREEMENT IN THE CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS OF UKRAINE

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariia Sirotkina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Procedure ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Main Attention ◽  
Criminal Offense ◽  
Procedural Law ◽  
Legal Nature ◽  
Criminal Procedure Law ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of

The article is turned out to a scientific search for the concept of "a reconciliation agreement between the victim and the suspect or accused" through the study of the essence of reconciliation and role in criminal proceedings thereof. The author notes that criminal procedural law (until 2012) had been proclaimed another approach to reconciliation between victim and suspect, not involved a dispute procedure as a conflict, the result of which can be reached by compromise and understanding through reconciliation. It is stated that one of the ways to resolve the legal conflict in committing a criminal offense was the opportunity to reach a compromise between the victim and the suspect (the accused) by concluding a reconciliation agreement between them, provided by the Code of Сriminal Procedure of Ukraine (2012). The main attention is placed on the shortcoming of the domestic criminal procedure law which is the lack of the concept of "a reconciliation agreement between the victim and the suspect or the accused", which can be eliminated only through examining the essence or legal nature of reconciliation in criminal proceedings. Taking into consideration the current legislation and modern views on the institution of reconciliation in criminal proceedings, the author's definition of the concept of "a reconciliation agreement" is proposed. Thus, “The conciliation agreement is an agreement in criminal proceedings concluded between the victim and the suspect or the accused person on their own initiative in relation to crimes of minor or medium gravity and in criminal proceedings in the form of private prosecution, the subject of which is the compensation of harm caused by wrongdoing or committing other actions not related to compensation for the damage that the suspect or the accused is obliged to commit in favor of the victim, in exchange for an agreed punishment and sentencing thereof or sentencing thereof and relief from serving a sentence with probation, as well as the statutory consequences of conclusion and approval of the agreement".

Need of Human Rights as a Better Way of Life

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Tushar Kadian
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Labour Unions ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Made In

Actually, basic needs postulates securing of the elementary conditions of existence to every human being. Despite of the practical and theoretical importance of the subject the greatest irony is non- availability of any universal preliminary definition of the concept of basic needs. Moreover, this becomes the reason for unpredictability of various political programmes aiming at providing basic needs to the people. The shift is necessary for development of this or any other conception. No labour reforms could be made in history till labours were treated as objects. Its only after they were started being treating as subjects, labour unions were allowed to represent themselves in strategy formulations that labour reforms could become a reality. The present research paper highlights the basic needs of Human Rights in life.

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