Subjects in Austronesian

2021 ◽  
pp. 160-180
Author(s):  
Charlotte Hemmings

In LFG, grammatical functions are primitives of the theory and treated as both fundamental and universal. However, there is a long standing debate in the wider literature as to whether grammatical functions should be considered universal or language specific/construction-specific notions. Western Austronesian languages have played a large role in this debate on account of their unusual verbal morphology and the split in typical subject properties between the actor semantic role and the argument privileged by the verbal morphology. In this chapter, Hemmings addresses the debate in relation to empirical data from the Kelabit language of Northern Sarawak. She argues that the Kelabit data provides a number of arguments for treating the privileged argument as subject, and the actor as an object in non-actor voice constructions. This has important implications for the treatment of subjects crosslinguistically, Western Austronesian verbal morphology and linking theories.

1998 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 87-100
Author(s):  
Marjolein van Dort-Slijper ◽  
Gert Rijlaarsdam ◽  
Maaike Ditzel

In order to provide authors of text books with empirical data on the acquisition in Dutch of written morphology in nouns, verbs and adjectives, several empirical studies were undertaken. In this article, the second study is reported on the performance of the morpheme -en in a special case of adjectives in Dutch: material adjectives such as 'gouden' (gold). The study tried to determine factors which affect the performance in reading and writing. Factors involved were two interference factors (plural in adjacent nouns; normal adjectives), cognitive task (comprehension versus writing) and two syntactic factors (grammatical function and position in the sentence of the constituent. Subjects (n=80, grades 6 and 7, from four schools) individually completed a comprehension and a production task in which factors were systematically varied. No effects of cognitive task were observed. Therefore only results for the production task were reported in detail. It turned out that material adjectives were more difficult than normal adjectives, and that within the category of material adjectives two subcategories should be distinguished, the easier one in which the morpheme is preceded by a stressed syllable as in 'gouden', and the more difficult one in which this is not the case, as in 'zilveren'. Of the two syntactic factors, only the grammatical function seems to affect the performance: adjectives in constituents with subject function were more difficult than adjectives with other grammatical functions; interactions between group and category of adjectives were found. Of the two interference factors, both factors seemed to affect performance.


Author(s):  
Theodore Levin ◽  
Maria Polinsky

This is an overview of the major morphological properties of Austronesian languages. We present and analyze data that may bear on the commonly discussed lexical-category neutrality of Austronesian and suggest that Austronesian languages do differentiate between core lexical categories. We address the difference between roots and stems showing that Austronesian roots are more abstract than roots traditionally discussed in morphology. Austronesian derivation and inflexion rely on suffixation and prefixation; some infixation is also attested. Austronesian languages make extensive use of reduplication. In the verbal system, main morphological exponents mark voice distinctions as well as causatives and applicatives. In the nominal domain, the main morphological exponents include case markers, classifiers, and possession markers. Overall, verbal morphology is richer in Austronesian languages than nominal morphology. We also present a short overview of empirically and theoretically challenging issues in Austronesian morphology: the status of infixes and circumfixes, the difference between affixes and clitics, and the morphosyntactic characterization of voice morphology.


Author(s):  
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine ◽  
Theodore Levin ◽  
Coppe van Urk

In an Austronesian-type voice system, one argument is designated the "pivot" in each clause, with verbal morphology indicating the choice of pivot and corresponding changes in case marking and extraction possibilities. It has been suggested that ergativity plays a crucial role in these systems. This paper argues that voice and case reflect separate but interacting systems, which can be dissociated from each other, based on the behavior of voice in Dinka (Nilotic; South Sudan) and Balinese (Austronesian; Indonesia). These languages exhibit familiar voice morphology, but are shown to not involve any ergativity. Instead, we propose that what unifies "voice" system behavior is a lack of structural licensing for subjects in Non-Subject Voices. Different voice systems solve this problem in different ways: Balinese licenses the subject under adjacency with the verb, whereas Dinka allows for a last resort genitive case like in many Austronesian languages of the Philippines and of Taiwan.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 939-974 ◽  
Author(s):  
MIGUEL BALLESTEROS ◽  
BERND BOHNET ◽  
SIMON MILLE ◽  
LEO WANNER

Abstract‘Deep-syntactic’ dependency structures that capture the argumentative, attributive and coordinative relations between full words of a sentence have a great potential for a number of NLP-applications. The abstraction degree of these structures is in between the output of a syntactic dependency parser (connected trees defined over all words of a sentence and language-specific grammatical functions) and the output of a semantic parser (forests of trees defined over individual lexemes or phrasal chunks and abstract semantic role labels which capture the frame structures of predicative elements and drop all attributive and coordinative dependencies). We propose a parser that provides deep-syntactic structures. The parser has been tested on Spanish, English and Chinese.


Author(s):  
Debi A. LaPlante ◽  
Heather M. Gray ◽  
Pat M. Williams ◽  
Sarah E. Nelson

Abstract. Aims: To discuss and review the latest research related to gambling expansion. Method: We completed a literature review and empirical comparison of peer reviewed findings related to gambling expansion and subsequent gambling-related changes among the population. Results: Although gambling expansion is associated with changes in gambling and gambling-related problems, empirical studies suggest that these effects are mixed and the available literature is limited. For example, the peer review literature suggests that most post-expansion gambling outcomes (i. e., 22 of 34 possible expansion outcomes; 64.7 %) indicate no observable change or a decrease in gambling outcomes, and a minority (i. e., 12 of 34 possible expansion outcomes; 35.3 %) indicate an increase in gambling outcomes. Conclusions: Empirical data related to gambling expansion suggests that its effects are more complex than frequently considered; however, evidence-based intervention might help prepare jurisdictions to deal with potential consequences. Jurisdictions can develop and evaluate responsible gambling programs to try to mitigate the impacts of expanded gambling.


Author(s):  
Virginie Crollen ◽  
Julie Castronovo ◽  
Xavier Seron

Over the last 30 years, numerical estimation has been largely studied. Recently, Castronovo and Seron (2007) proposed the bi-directional mapping hypothesis in order to account for the finding that dependent on the type of estimation task (perception vs. production of numerosities), reverse patterns of performance are found (i.e., under- and over-estimation, respectively). Here, we further investigated this hypothesis by submitting adult participants to three types of numerical estimation task: (1) a perception task, in which participants had to estimate the numerosity of a non-symbolic collection; (2) a production task, in which participants had to approximately produce the numerosity of a symbolic numerical input; and (3) a reproduction task, in which participants had to reproduce the numerosity of a non-symbolic numerical input. Our results gave further support to the finding that different patterns of performance are found according to the type of estimation task: (1) under-estimation in the perception task; (2) over-estimation in the production task; and (3) accurate estimation in the reproduction task. Moreover, correlation analyses revealed that the more a participant under-estimated in the perception task, the more he/she over-estimated in the production task. We discussed these empirical data by showing how they can be accounted by the bi-directional mapping hypothesis ( Castronovo & Seron, 2007 ).


1993 ◽  
Vol 38 (9) ◽  
pp. 991-992
Author(s):  
Seymour Fisher
Keyword(s):  

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Katz ◽  
Andrei Novac ◽  
Bita Ghafoori ◽  
Toni Pusateri
Keyword(s):  

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