Syntactic Features

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Svenonius
Keyword(s):  
Formal Theory ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Feature Structures ◽  
Central Case ◽  
Syntactic Constraints ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Three Components

Syntactic features are formal properties of syntactic objects which determine how they behave with respect to syntactic constraints and operations (such as selection, licensing, agreement, and movement). Syntactic features can be contrasted with properties which are purely phonological, morphological, or semantic, but many features are relevant both to syntax and morphology, or to syntax and semantics, or to all three components. The formal theory of syntactic features builds on the theory of phonological features, and normally takes morphosyntactic features (those expressed in morphology) to be the central case, with other, possibly more abstract features being modeled on the morphosyntactic ones. Many aspects of the formal nature of syntactic features are currently unresolved. Some traditions (such as HPSG) make use of rich feature structures as an analytic tool, while others (such as Minimalism) pursue simplicity in feature structures in the interest of descriptive restrictiveness. Nevertheless, features are essential to all explicit analyses.

scholarly journals The conventionalisation of contextual effects in middle structures

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casilda Garcia de la Maza
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Contextual Effects ◽  
Verb Phrase ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Adverbial Modification ◽  
Syntactic Constraints ◽  
Formal Properties

<p>The presence of adverbial modification, affectedness, or the aspectual characteristics of the verb phrase have usually been invoked as principles governing the possibility for a verb to appear in the middle mode, as defended by Roberts (1987), Fagan (1992), Doron and Rappaport-Hovav (1991) and Levin (1993), inter al. This paper presents the results of a data collection project aimed at unravelling the issue of the conditions on middle formation. The data show how existing accounts are deficient in a number of ways and leave a wide range of data unaccounted for. Instead, the data reveal that pragmatic relevance has a major role to play in the matter and provide empirical support to defend the essentially “pragmatic value” (Green 2004) of the construction. Some of the formal properties of middles which had been formerly put down to syntactic constraints are then reanalysed in the light of this characterisation, including the apparent requirement for adverbial modification, which can now be approached from a fresh perspective.</p>

The morphology and syntax of Ulster Scots

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
The Other ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
James I ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
The 1960S

Ulster differs from the other three historical provinces of Ireland in the presence of Ulster Scots, an off-shoot of Lowland Scots brought principally from the Western and Central Lowlands of Scotland in the 17th century through a plantation established by King James I and through periodic migrations, especially in times of economic duress in Scotland. Since that time Ulster Scots has been spoken in rural parts of Counties Antrim, Donegal, Down, and Londonderry/Derry, where it was mapped by Robert Gregg in the 1960s mainly on the basis of phonological features. The present article, based on eight years of fieldwork with native speakers in Antrim, analyzes a range of pronominal, verbal, and syntactic features, seeking to identify general patterns as well as variation within Ulster Scots. When possible, comparisons are made to Lowland Scots and Irish English in order to situate structural features of Ulster Scots within the larger linguistic landscape of the British Isles.

Systematic repetition of the first person singular pronoun wo in Mandarin conversation

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jee Won Lee
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
First Person ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Interactive Strategies ◽  
Single Speaker ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Mandarin Conversation

While repetition was once thought to be “just a marker of a ‘disfluent’ or ‘sloppy’ speaker,” it has been increasingly recognized as a “human social activity, clearly part of our everyday conduct or behavior” (Schegloff 1987). The present study, using video recorded natural conversation data, aims to describe ways in which native speakers of Mandarin Chinese employ repetition of the first person pronoun wo for interactional moves. Repetition of wo is analyzed in conjunction with other interactive strategies, such as syntactic features, phonological features, pragmatic features, gesture, self-grooming, and gaze, as a way to organize and negotiate stances toward the proposition expressed and the co-participants and at the same time to enable intersubjectivity. By showing that within the speech of a single speaker pronominal repetition acts as a stance marker, this paper provides a new perspective on Chinese pronominal use and enriches our understanding of the functions of “disfluent” language in general.

scholarly journals Introduction to double issue 41.1–2 on Features

Nordlyd ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Svenonius ◽  
Martin Krämer
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Statistical Computation ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Government Phonology ◽  
Linear Hierarchies ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Selection Of

<p>This special double issue (41.1 and 41.2) contains 11 articles on the formal properties of linguistic feature systems, all of which were presented at a conference in Tromsø in the fall of 2013.</p><p>The issue was jointly edited by Martin Krämer, Sandra Ronai, and Peter Svenonius.</p><p>A version of the original call for papers posted in 2013 follows.</p><p>All formal models of linguistics assume sets of features in terms of which generalizations can be stated. But the nature of the features themselves is often not explicitly addressed. In this special double issue of <em>Nordlyd</em> we focus on the nature of features across phonology and syntax and related domains of linguistics. </p><p>One group of questions concerns the ‘grounding’ of features in substance or content. For example, phonological features may be grounded in phonetics, and syntactic features may be grounded in semantics. Innatist traditions have sometimes posited innate universal inventories of grounded features. The ‘substance-free’ movement in phonology argues instead that the formal properties of features can and should be radically dissociated from their grounding in content. Sign language phonology would seem to support this position, as the featural system of sign language phonology operates with a completely different set of articulators from those used in spoken languages. Minimalist syntax also frequently promotes the dissociation of formal properties of features from their content (as in the proposal that tense is simply one of a variety of ways in which Infl may be ‘grounded,’ favored in Indo-European languages but with various other languages opting for other content for Infl). Such proposals raise many questions concerning how feature systems are constrained to be uniform across languages and to what extent they are free to vary. The radically opposing view in phonology denies the existence of categorical features altogether and attempts to model phonological patterns as statistical computation of phonetic data.</p><p>The formal structure of features raises another set of questions. Complex patterns of feature locality gave rise to feature geometries in phonology, and these have been developed further to account for dependencies among features, not only in phonology but also in syntax. Cartographic work typically assumes linear hierarchies. To what extent are the various geometries and hierarchies motivated, and how might they be grounded in a broader explanatory theory?</p><p>Interacting with these questions about the “geometric” relations among features is the algebraic structure of the features. For example, it is often assumed that privativity, in which opposition is marked by presence versus absence, is conceptually simplest and therefore the zero hypothesis. While in phonology the pendulum currently swings towards privativity, recently arguments have come from morphosyntax that features have binary values. While apparent ternary patterns in phonology have been taken as arguments in favor of binarity, such patterns have more recently been accounted for by reference to class nodes. Theories such as HPSG or Government Phonology assume much more complex relations among features (with HPSG even allowing feature-value matrices in which the values are feature-value matrices, extending to a kind of feature recursion, and GP positing government and licensing relations between features and positions).</p><p>In this volume, a selection of researchers address these and other questions about the nature of features in linguistic theory.</p>

Syntactic relations and syntactic constraints

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-260
Author(s):  
Mary Dalrymple ◽  
John J. Lowe ◽  
Louise Mycock
Keyword(s):  
Formal Theory ◽  
Regular Expressions ◽  
Precedence Relations ◽  
Path Constraints ◽  
Syntactic Constraints ◽  
Syntactic Relations

This chapter continues the discussion of the formal architecture of LFG and of ways to describe and constrain constituent structures and functional structures. The chapter introduces additional relations and constraints on structures, and discusses concepts fundamental to our formal theory, including regular expressions (Section 6.1); sets (Section 6.3); off-path constraints (Section 6.6); templates (Section 6.7); relations between f-structures such as f-command, subsumption, and restriction (Section 6.9); c-structure/f-structure constraints including empty nod rules (Section 6.10); and precedence relations (Section 6.11). For most readers, this chapter best serves as a reference to be consulted for definition and discussion of concepts and relations that are used in the analyses presented in the remainder of the book.

Mereology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Cotnoir ◽  
Achille C. Varzi
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Formal Theory ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
Algebraic Models ◽  
Formal Systems ◽  
Central Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formal Properties

Mereology is the formal theory of parthood relations. Mereological theories—have become a chapter of central interest in metaphysics, but also with applications in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science. This book provides a critical survey and an up-to-date assessment of the main results in this area, with an eye to both their philosophical underpinnings and their formal properties. In doing so, it also aims to investigate the varieties of formal systems currently available. After a brief history of the development of mereology, introductions to different axiomatizations of so-called classical mereology, alongside set-theoretic and algebraic models, are presented in a clear and accessible manner. The book addresses formal and philosophical issues surrounding the notions of parthood, identity, decomposition, atomism, composition, and more. As a result, the book, provides resources to aide the development of new, non-classical theories of parthood (such as non-well-founded mereologies, non-transitive mereologies, non-extensional mereologies, and more). Consideration is devoted to impact that the logical background has on mereological results (including higher-order, temporal, modal, non-classical logics). A detailed index, appendices, and a comprehensive bibliography makes this book an indispensable resource to researchers in every field where part-whole theorizing plays a fundamental role.

scholarly journals The Tale of Two Lexicons: Decomposing Complexity across a Distributed Lexicon

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Terje Lohndal ◽  
Michael T. Putnam
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Hierarchical Organization ◽  
Distributed Model ◽  
Distributed Architecture ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
First Pass ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Three Components

Abstract The notion of complexity is evasive and often left to intuition, yet it is often invoked when studying heritage language grammars. In this article, we propose a first pass at decomposing the notion of complexity into smaller components in a formal grammatical model. In particular, we argue that a distributed model of the lexicon (i.e., one that assumes that principles that generate both words and phrases are one and the same) allows us to identify three components: syntactic features, the hierarchical organization of features, and the mapping between syntactic features and their exponents. Based on grammatical gender in different language pairs, in particular the heritage language American Norwegian (AmNo), we illustrate how this distributed model can account for developments in heritage language grammars whereby the grammatical gender system is considered to have become less complex. More generally, the article demonstrates that a distributed architecture is better suited empirically and theoretically as a heuristic to understand complexity effects in heritage grammars and beyond.

scholarly journals Stylistic Analysis of Maya Angelou’s “Woman Work”

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Arina Isti'anah ◽  
Caecilia Riris Krismarini ◽  
Elisabet Ayu Pramesthi Lebdo Putri
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Maya Angelou ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Hard Data ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Phonological Features

This paper presented the stylistic analysis of a poem by Maya Angelou, “Woman Work”. This stylistic analysis focused on analyzing two language levels, phonology and syntax, covering the study of sound repetition, transitivity, and pronoun. The phonological features employed in the poem were assonance and consonance. On the other hand, the syntactic features were in the form of material processes that described the works of a woman. The employment of pronoun referred to the poet and nature. This analysis found that Angelou positioned nature as an essential part of a woman's life as it helped her to provide a living to her family. Further, nature was placed as an Actor that helped her face her world as a woman. This paper concludes that stylistics is applicable to analyse literary works in an objective way as it provides the hard data. Keywords: stylistics, poem, woman, Angelou 

Variable morphotactics in Information-based Morphology

2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
BERTHOLD CRYSMANN ◽  
OLIVIER BONAMI
Keyword(s):  
Formal Theory ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
The Core ◽  
Rule Type ◽  
Feature Structures ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Nominal Declension ◽  
Extended Discussion ◽  
Order Variability

We address variable morphotactics, the phenomenon of order variability of morphs, in the context of inflectional morphology. Based on an extended discussion of cross-linguistic variation, including conjugation in Nepali, Fula, Swahili, Chintang and Italian, and nominal declension in Ostyak and Mari, we propose a canonical typology that identifies different deviations from strict ordering. Following a discussion of previous approaches to the problem, we propose Information-based Morphology, an inferential-realisational and model-theoretic approach to morphology couched in a logic of typed feature structures. Within this formal theory, we develop detailed analyses of the core cases in the typology and show how different types and degrees of deviation from the canon can be pin-pointed in the relative complexity of the rule type hierarchies that model the data. Furthermore, we show that complex deviations, as attested in Mari, can be understood as combinations of more basic deviations.

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