Reaffirming Māori negatives as verbs

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-167
Author(s):  
Sandra Chung
Keyword(s):  
Functional Head ◽  
Intransitive Verbs ◽  
Semantic Typology ◽  
Polynesian Languages

Generative syntacticians often assume that sentential negatives in all languages are the content of a functional head Neg. Although negatives in many languages are amenable to such an analysis, negatives in certain Polynesian languages are not. This chapter first reviews the evidence presented by Hohepa (1969) and others that sentential negatives in Māori are lexical heads, either intransitive verbs or adjectives, which are the main predicate of a clause that excludes the negated clause. It then explores the question of why Māori negatives should differ from the crosslinguistic norm. The answer that is proposed appeals to syntactic-semantic typology and Māori prosody, and engages with the larger issue of how lexical and functional heads are realized in Polynesian languages.

The acquisition of Hungarian recursive PPs

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-123
Author(s):  
Ágnes Langó-Tóth
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Functional Element ◽  
The Other ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Experiment Subject ◽  
The Given

Abstract In this study an experiment is presented on how Hungarian children interpret two word orders of recursive PPs (subject-PP-verb and PP-subject-verb order). According to the research of Roeper (2011) and Hollebrandse and Roeper (2014), children tend to give conjunctive interpretation to multiple embedded sentences at the beginning of language acquisition. This interpretation later turns into an adult-like, recursive interpretation. Our aim is to discover (i) whether Hungarian children start with conjunction as well, and whether (ii) the apparently more salient functional head lévő appearing in Hungarian recursive PPs can help them to acquire the correct, recursive interpretation early. We also want to find out whether (iii) the word orders in recursive PPs have an influence on the acquisition of children. In this paper two experiments are presented conducted with 6 and 8-year-olds and adults, in which the participants were asked to choose between two pictures. One of the pictures depicted recursive and the other one depicted conjunctive interpretation of the given sentence. In the first experiment subject-PP-verb order was tested, but in the second one sentences were tested with PP-subject-verb order. We will claim that lévő, which is (arguably) a more salient Hungarian functional element than -i, does not help children to acquire the embedded reading of recursive sentences, because both of them are overt functional heads. However, the two types of word orders affect the acquisition of recursive PPs. PP-subject-verb order is easier to compute because the order of the elements in the sentences and the order of the elements in the pictures matches.

OV versus VO in Old High German

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Petrova ◽  
Helmut Weiß
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Landing Site ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Functional Projection ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
The Right

This chapter surveys the word order variation in the right periphery of the clause in OHG. The investigation is based on a corpus including all dependent clauses introduced by the complementizer thaz ‘that’ in the minor OHG documents, a collection of up to forty smaller texts of various genres. The analysis shows that the majority of the data can be explained within a standard OV grammar, assuming additional extraposition of heavy XPs to the right. But apart from these cases, there is evidence supporting the assumption of leftward movement of the verb to an intermediate functional projection vP which is optional with basic OV but obligatory with basic VO. In addition, the chapter presents patterns which evidently involve verb movement to a higher functional head, above vP, and discusses the nature of the landing site of the verb in these cases.

Active Participles in Hittite

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-117
Author(s):  
Ekaterina A. Lyutikova ◽  
Andrei V. Sideltsev
Keyword(s):  
Intransitive Verbs

Abstract The paper reassesses the evidence for active transitive participles in Hittite and suggests that they are in reality formed from the unergative class of intransitive verbs.

scholarly journals Frequency Sensitivity of Neural Responses to English Verb Argument Structure Violations

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jona Sassenhagen ◽  
Ryan Blything ◽  
Elena V. M. Lieven ◽  
Ben Ambridge
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Learning ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
Verb Argument Structure ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
Intransitive Verbs

How are verb-argument structure preferences acquired? Children typically receive very little negative evidence, raising the question of how they come to understand the restrictions on grammatical constructions. Statistical learning theories propose stochastic patterns in the input contain sufficient clues. For example, if a verb is very common, but never observed in transitive constructions, this would indicate that transitive usage of that verb is illegal. Ambridge et al. (2008) have shown that in offline grammaticality judgements of intransitive verbs used in transitive constructions, low-frequency verbs elicit higher acceptability ratings than high-frequency verbs, as predicted if relative frequency is a cue during statistical learning. Here, we investigate if the same pattern also emerges in on-line processing of English sentences. EEG was recorded while healthy adults listened to sentences featuring transitive uses of semantically matched verb pairs of differing frequencies. We replicate the finding of higher acceptabilities of transitive uses of low- vs. high-frequency intransitive verbs. Event-Related Potentials indicate a similar result: early electrophysiological signals distinguish between misuse of high- vs low-frequency verbs. This indicates online processing shows a similar sensitivity to frequency as off-line judgements, consistent with a parser that reflects an original acquisition of grammatical constructions via statistical cues. However, the nature of the observed neural responses was not of the expected, or an easily interpretable, form, motivating further work into neural correlates of online processing of syntactic constructions.

scholarly journals The English gerund revisited

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Maekelberghe
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Distributional Preferences ◽  
Temporal Flexibility ◽  
Dynamic Perspective ◽  
Distributional Dimension ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Semantic Typology

AbstractThis paper re-examines the semantics of Present-day English gerunds by analyzing their collocational preferences. While traditional approaches suggest that a semantic opposition between ‘actions’ and ‘facts’ determines the meaning as well as the distributional preferences of nominal (the signing of the contract) and verbal (signing the contract) gerunds, these claims have not been supported by quantitative evidence. At the same time, more recent studies which quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the meaning of gerunds from a referential perspective lack a distributional dimension. This study presents a semantic typology of the nouns and verbs that are attracted to nominal and verbal gerunds in noun and verb complementation structures by means of a distinctive collexeme analysis which has been applied to contextual collexemes. The analysis shows that, while nominal and verbal gerunds occur in clearly distinctive contexts, this distinction does not appear to be based on an action-fact dichotomy, but is rather determined by the more abstract features of conceptual (in)dependence and temporal flexibility. Finally, it is shown how these abstract semantic profiles can be filled in more concretely by specific contextual slots, thus arriving at a more fine-grained and dynamic perspective on the semantics of English gerunds.

Some German sources on Polynesian languages

1986 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 227-228
Author(s):  
M. L. Berg
Keyword(s):  
Polynesian Languages

Relative clauses in Agul from a corpus-based perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-158
Author(s):  
Timur Maisak
Keyword(s):  
High Frequency ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
High Ratio ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Core ◽  
Text Corpora ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Intransitive Verbs ◽  
Syntactic Restrictions ◽  
Locative Case

AbstractThis paper gives an account of participial clauses in Agul (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian), based on a sample of 858 headed noun-modifying clauses taken from two text corpora, one spoken and one written. Noun-modifying clauses in Agul do not show syntactic restrictions on what can be relativized, and hence they instantiate the type known as GNMCCs, or general noun-modifying clause constructions. As the text counts show, intransitive verbs are more frequent than transitives and experiencer verbs in participial clauses, and among intransitive verbs, locative statives with the roots ‘be’ and ‘stay, remain’ account for half of all the uses. The asymmetry between the different relativization targets is also significant. Among the core arguments, the intransitive subject (S) is the most frequent target, patient (P) occupies second place, and agent (A) is comparatively rare. The preference of S and, in general, of S and P over A also holds true for most other Nakh-Daghestanian languages for which comparable counts are available. At the same time, Agul stands apart from the other languages by its high ratio of non-core relativization which accounts for 42% of all participial clauses. Addressee, arguments and adjuncts encoded with a locative case, as well as more general place and time relativizations show especially high frequency, outnumbering such arguments as experiencers, recipients, and predicative and adnominal possessors. Possible reasons for the high ratio of non-argument relativization are discussed in the paper.

scholarly journals Definiteness Systems and Dialect Classification

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Mike Turner
Keyword(s):  
Binary System ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Classification Schemes ◽  
Modeling Process ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Dialect Classification ◽  
Semantic Typology

In this article I explore how typological approaches can be used to construct novel classification schemes for Arabic dialects, taking the example of definiteness as a case study. Definiteness in Arabic has traditionally been envisioned as an essentially binary system, wherein definite substantives are marked with a reflex of the article al- and indefinite ones are not. Recent work has complicated this model, framing definiteness instead as a continuum along which speakers can locate referents using a broader range of morphological and syntactic strategies, including not only the article al-, but also reflexes of the demonstrative series and a diverse set of ‘indefinite-specific’ articles found throughout the spoken dialects. I argue that it is possible to describe these strategies with even more precision by modeling them within cross-linguistic frameworks for semantic typology, among them a model known as the ‘Reference Hierarchy,’ which I adopt here. This modeling process allows for classification of dialects not by the presence of shared forms, but rather by parallel typological configurations, even if the forms within them are disparate.

Transitivity and Intransitivity in English and Arabic: A Comparative Study

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Yasir Bdaiwi Jasim Al-Shujairi ◽  
Ahlam Muhammed ◽  
Yazan Shaker Okla Almahammed
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
Transitive Verbs ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
Intransitive Verbs

<p>English and Arabic are two major languages which have many differences and similarities in grammar. One of the issues which is of great importance in the two languages is transitivity and intransitivity.  Therefore, this study compares and contrasts transitivity and intransitivity in English and Arabic. This study reports the results of the analysis of transitivity and intransitivity in the two respective languages. The current study is a qualitative one; in nature, a descriptive study. The findings showed that English and Arabic are similar in having transitive and intransitive verbs, and in having verbs which can go transitive or intransitive according to context. By contrast Arabic is different from English in its ability to change intransitive verbs into transitive ones by applying inflections on the main verb. Additionally, Arabic is different from English in the fact that some Arabic transitive verbs can take up to three objects.</p>

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