Internal motivations and formal approaches

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-116
Author(s):  
Anne Breitbarth ◽  
Christopher Lucas ◽  
David Willis
Keyword(s):  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Diachronic Development

This chapter focuses on the language-internal motivations for the processes observed in chapter 2, in particular, the change from negative polarity adverb to negator. The chapter discusses what motivates the actuation of a new postverbal marker or negative quantifier, what obstacles need to be overcome in order to complete this process, and what processes lie behind the loss or exaptation of the original negation markers after such a development. It is argued that both functional and formal factors play a role in explaining the diachronic development of markers of negation in Jespersen’s cycle. In particular, a negation phrase (NegP)-free account making use of economy principles (Minimize Structure and Feature Economy) is proposed to capture the typological and diachronic variation of negative markers.

scholarly journals The Development of Polysemous ‘One’-phrase in Mandarin Chinese

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
I-Hsuan Chen
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
The One ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
Three Components

Mandarin ‘one’-phrase, [<em>yi </em>‘one’+classifier+noun], has multiple interpretations, such as counting /measuring phrases, negative polarity items (NPIs), and expressions meaning ‘whole’. Each function of the ‘one’-phrase is treated as a construction that has different relationships among its three components. ‘One’ serves as a reference point on a scale, so the numeral sequence can mean maximality or minimality depending on contexts. The scalar implications are built into the whole construction instead of one lexeme through grammaticalization. This study aims to provide a unified account for the synchronic polysemous ‘one’-phrase by looking into its diachronic development.

Is There a Negative Polarity Item ‮דבר‬‎ in DSS Hebrew?

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-350
Author(s):  
Adina Moshavi
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Polarity Item ◽  
Negative Polarity Item ◽  
Diachronic Development

Abstract A negative polarity item (NPI) is a word or expression that occurs grammatically in negative clauses and a variety of other types of clauses such as interrogatives and conditionals, but not in ordinary affirmative sentences. Examples from classical Biblical Hebrew include the pronoun ‮מאומה‬‎ “anything” and the semantically-bleached noun ‮דבר‬‎ “a thing,” which has been produced from the ordinary noun ‮דבר‬‎ “word, matter, action” by the process of grammaticalization. This paper examines the noun ‮דבר‬‎ in the non-biblical DSS with the purpose of determining whether it is used as there as an NPI, as in Biblical Hebrew, or as an ordinary semantically-bleached noun, as in Rabbinic Hebrew. The results show that the diachronic development of ‮דבר‬‎ in the DSS appears to be at an earlier stage than classical Biblical Hebrew, despite the later dating of the scrolls. This finding is explained as a special kind of pseudo-classicism.

Human Event-Related Potentials to Higher-Order Acoustic Spatial Changes

2002 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Ruusuvirta ◽  
Heikki Hämäläinen
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Mismatch Negativity ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Free Field ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Spatial Changes ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
Human Event

Abstract Human event-related potentials (ERPs) to a tone continuously alternating between its two spatial loci of origin (middle-standards, left-standards), to repetitions of left-standards (oddball-deviants), and to the tones originally representing these repetitions presented alone (alone-deviants) were recorded in free-field conditions. During the recordings (Fz, Cz, Pz, M1, and M2 referenced to nose), the subjects watched a silent movie. Oddball-deviants elicited a spatially diffuse two-peaked deflection of positive polarity. It differed from a deflection elicited by left-standards and commenced earlier than a prominent deflection of negative polarity (N1) elicited by alone-deviants. The results are discussed in the context of the mismatch negativity (MMN) and previous findings of dissociation between spatial and non-spatial information in auditory working memory.

Reconstruction of the Ancient Numeral System in Basque Language

Philology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2018) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
FERNANDO GOMEZ-ACEDO ◽  
ENEKO GOMEZ-ACEDO
Keyword(s):  
Cardinal Number ◽  
Counting System ◽  
Cardinal Numbers ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract In this work a new insight into the reconstruction of the original forms of the first Basque cardinal numbers is presented and the identified original meaning of the names given to the numbers is shown. The method used is the internal reconstruction, using for the etymologies words that existed and still exist in Basque and other words reconstructed from the proto-Basque. As a result of this work it has been discovered that initially the numbers received their name according to a specific and logic procedure. According to this ancient method of designation, each cardinal number received its name based on the hand sign used to represent it, thus describing the position adopted by the fingers of the hand to represent each number. Finally, the different stages of numerical formation are shown, which demonstrate a long and diachronic development of the whole counting system.

RepPer: Perception of Psychiatric Disorders on Twitter in French (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Delanys ◽  
Farah Benamara ◽  
Véronique Moriceau ◽  
François Olivier ◽  
Josiane Mothe
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Psychotic Disorders ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Annotation Scheme ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Initial Dataset

BACKGROUND With the advent of digital technology and specifically user generated contents in social media, new ways emerged for studying possible stigma of people in relation with mental health. Several pieces of work studied the discourse conveyed about psychiatric pathologies on Twitter considering mostly tweets in English and a limited number of psychiatric disorders terms. This paper proposes the first study to analyze the use of a wide range of psychiatric terms in tweets in French. OBJECTIVE Our aim is to study how generic, nosographic and therapeutic psychiatric terms are used on Twitter in French. More specifically, our study has three complementary goals: (1) to analyze the types of psychiatric word use namely medical, misuse, irrelevant, (2) to analyze the polarity conveyed in the tweets that use these terms (positive/negative/neural), and (3) to compare the frequency of these terms to those observed in related work (mainly in English ). METHODS Our study has been conducted on a corpus of tweets in French posted between 01/01/2016 to 12/31/2018 and collected using dedicated keywords. The corpus has been manually annotated by clinical psychiatrists following a multilayer annotation scheme that includes the type of word use and the opinion orientation of the tweet. Two analysis have been performed. First a qualitative analysis to measure the reliability of the produced manual annotation, then a quantitative analysis considering mainly term frequency in each layer and exploring the interactions between them. RESULTS One of the first result is a resource as an annotated dataset . The initial dataset is composed of 22,579 tweets in French containing at least one of the selected psychiatric terms. From this set, experts in psychiatry randomly annotated 3,040 tweets that corresponds to the resource resulting from our work. The second result is the analysis of the annotations; it shows that terms are misused in 45.3% of the tweets and that their associated polarity is negative in 86.2% of the cases. When considering the three types of term use, 59.5% of the tweets are associated to a negative polarity. Misused terms related to psychotic disorders (55.5%) are more frequent to those related to mood disorders (26.5%). CONCLUSIONS Some psychiatric terms are misused in the corpora we studied; which is consistent with the results reported in related work in other languages. Thanks to the great diversity of studied terms, this work highlighted a disparity in the representations and ways of using psychiatric terms. Moreover, our study is important to help psychiatrists to be aware of the term use in new communication media such as social networks which are widely used. This study has the huge advantage to be reproducible thanks to the framework and guidelines we produced; so that the study could be renewed in order to analyze the evolution of term usage. While the newly build dataset is a valuable resource for other analytical studies, it could also serve to train machine learning algorithms to automatically identify stigma in social media.

Formal and Functional Types of Indefinite Pronoun

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Haspelmath
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Ontological Category ◽  
Functional Types ◽  
Formal Element ◽  
Free Relative ◽  
Existential Sentences ◽  
Universal Quantifiers ◽  
Indefinite Pronoun ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns

This chapter examines formal and functional types of indefinite pronoun. It first presents some examples of different indefinite pronoun series in a variety of languages, focusing on a formal element shared by all members of an indefinite pronoun series, such as some and any in English. This element is called indefiniteness marker, an affix or a particle which stands next to the pronoun stem. The chapter proceeds by discussing two main types of derivational bases from which indefinite pronouns are derived in the world's languages: interrogative pronouns and generic ontological category nouns like person, thing or place. It also looks at the main functional types of indefinite pronoun, namely: negative indefinite pronouns and negative polarity (or scale reversal). Finally, it analyses some alternatives to indefinite pronouns, including generic nouns, existential sentences, non-specific free relative clauses, and universal quantifiers.

Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Chatzopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Inertial Forces ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Polarity Item ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Diachronic Development

This study is an investigation of the expression of negation in the history of Greek, through quantitative data from representative texts from three major stages of vernacular Greek (Attic Greek, Koine, Late Medieval Greek), and qualitative data from Homeric Greek until Standard Modern. The contrast between two complementary negators, NEG1 and NEG2, is explained in terms of sensitivity of NEG2 μη‎ to nonveridicality: NEG2 is a polarity item in all stages of the Greek language, an item licensed by nonveridicality. The asymmetry in the diachronic development of the Greek negator system (the replacement of NEG1 and the preservation of NEG2) is explained with reference to the particulars of the uses of NEG2, specifically the inertial forces drawn by the nonnegative uses of NEG2, which being nonnegative did not experience the renewal pressures predicted by the Jespersen’s Cycle. These are its complementizer uses: (i) as a question particle, and (ii) in introducing verbs of fear complements. A viewpoint for Jespersen’s Cycle is proposed that abstracts away from the morphosyntactic and phonological particulars of the phenomenon and explicitly places its regularities in the semantics, accommodating not only for Greek, but for numerous other languages that deviate in different ways from the traditional description of Jespersen’s Cycle. The developments observed in the history of the Greek negator system agree with current generative theories of syntactic change, regarding the notions of up-the-tree movement.

Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (6) ◽  
pp. 1543-1579
Author(s):  
Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
The Early 21St Century

AbstractThis article discusses the diachronic development of the Spanish multifunctional formula en plan (with its variant en plan de, literally ‘in plan (of)’ but usually equivalent to English like). The article has two main aims: firstly, to describe the changes that the formula has undergone since its earliest occurrences as a marker in the nineteenth century up to the early 21st century. The diachronic study evinces a process of grammaticalization in three steps: from noun to clause adverbial and then to discourse marker. Secondly, to conduct a contrastive analysis between en plan (de) and the English markers like and kind of/kinda so as to shed new light on the potential existence of a universal pathway of grammaticalization in the emergence of discourse markers.

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