Semantic scope restrictions in complex verb constructions in Dutch

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Evie Coussé ◽  
Gerlof Bouma

Abstract This article addresses the question of how and why verbs combine in complex verb constructions in Dutch. We discuss introspective data reported in reference grammars and add evidence from corpus data to uncover the systematic ways in which Dutch verbs combine. Our analysis shows that verbs expressing meanings such as tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality are organized in a semantic scope hierarchy; that is, some verb meanings systematically have scope over others but not the other way round. We argue that this scope hierarchy reflects hierarchies of functional categories, elaborated in both functional and generative frameworks.

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 998-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel ángel Jiménez-Crespo ◽  
Maribel Tercedor

Localization is increasingly making its way into translation training programs at university level. However, there is still a scarce amount of empirical research addressing issues such as defining localization in relation to translation, what localization competence entails or how to best incorporate intercultural differences between digital genres, text types and conventions, among other aspects. In this paper, we propose a foundation for the study of localization competence based upon previous research on translation competence. This project was developed following an empirical corpus-based contrastive study of student translations (learner corpus), combined with data from a comparable corpus made up of an original Spanish corpus and a Spanish localized corpus. The objective of the study is to identify differences in production between digital texts localized by students and professionals on the one hand, and original texts on the other. This contrastive study allows us to gain insight into how localization competence interrelates with the superordinate concept of translation competence, thus shedding light on which aspects need to be addressed during localization training in university translation programs.


Virittäjä ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 121 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista Ojutkangas

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää, millaisissa konstruktioissa suomen seuralaisuutta ilmaisevat mukana ja mukaan esiintyvät. Seuralaisuussuhteelle on tyypillistä, että suhteen osallistujat tai vähintään kiintopiste ovat ihmisiä ja että osallistujien välillä on symmetriaero: seuralainen (engl. companion) osallistuu tilanteeseen epäsuorasti, seurattavan (engl. accompanee) välityksellä. Suomen grammeille ominaiseen tapaan mukana- ja mukaan-sanoja käytetään syntaktisesti monenlaisissa asemissa siten, että kiintopisteen (seurattavan) ilmaisun tyyppi vaihtelee. Tutkimuksessa selvitetäänkin, mikä on kiintopisteen ilmaisutavan rooli siinä, miten seuralaisuussuhteen osallistujien välinen epäsymmetria hahmottuu. Tutkimuksen syntaktisessa luokittelussa pidetään lähtökohtana postpositiokonstruktiota, jossa osallistujien välisen symmetriaeron voi katsoa perustuvan kiintopisteen viitepisteroolin kautta grammin semantiikkaan (tyyppi lapio oli kaivajan mukana). Symmetriaero sen sijaan voimistuu, kun kiintopiste edustuu omistusliitteen välityksellä subjektina (tyyppi hän otti lapion mukaansa) tai kun se ilmaistaan teemapaikalla paikallissijaisena adverbiaalina (tyyppi hänellä oli lapio mukana[an]). Symmetriaero sen sijaan heikkenee, jos (toissijainen) kiintopiste ilmaistaan adverbiaalina muualla kuin teemapaikalla (tyyppi hän oli mukana kaivamassa), ja vetäytyy taustatiedoksi, kun kiintopistettä ei ilmaista lainkaan (tyyppi hän on mukana). Tutkimus perustuu aineistoon, jossa ovat edustettuina 1800-luvun kirjakieli, Lauseopin arkiston murrehaastattelut ja nykykirjakieli. Aineisto osoittaa, että mukana- ja mukaan-grammeilla ilmaistuissa seuralaisuussuhteissa on tapahtunut muutos: 1800-luvun kirjakielen ja pääosin 1960-luvulla tallennetun murreaineiston esiintymissä yleisin kiintopiste on ihminen, kun taas nykykirjakielen aineistossa kiintopisteeksi hahmottuu tyypillisimmin toiminta. Kiintopisteen semanttinen tyyppi ja sen kielellinen ilmaisukeino ovat suorassa suhteessa toisiinsa. Ihmiskiintopiste ilmaistaan yleisimmin subjektin kanssa samaviitteisellä omistusliitteellä tai teemapaikkaisella paikallissijaisella elementillä ja toimintakiintopiste puolestaan ei-teemapaikkaisella paikallissijaisella elementillä. Eri ilmaisukeinot jakautuvat eri verbien ympärille rakentuvien konstruktioiden kesken. Tutkimuksen perusteella voi todeta, että esiintymäkonstruktiolla on merkittävä rooli siinä, millaista seuralaisuutta mukana- tai mukaan-grammilla kuvataan.   Finnish mukana and mukaan ‘with, along’ as comitative markers: Grammatical roles of expressions of the landmarks, constructions, and asymmetry between the participants of the accompaniment relation The topic of this article is the syntax of Finnish comitative markers mukana and mukaan ’with, along’. Comitative markers express accompaniment relations, which are typically conceived as being asymmetrical: the accompanee (landmark) is the pre-dominant participant, while the companion (trajector) is involved in the situation only via the accompanee (see Stolz et al. 2006: 26–27). However, markers such as mukana and mukaan are used in several syntactic constructions where the grammatical roles of expressions of the accompanees/landmarks vary. The main research question of the article is, how does the grammatical role of expression of the accompanee/landmark affect the asymmetry between the participants of the accompaniment relation. Five syntactic construction types were analysed from a corpus data. On the basis of this study, it is shown that syntactic variation has an effect on the conceived asymmetry between the accompanee and the companion, and that syntax makes an important contribution to the semantics of comitative constructions. In strongly asymmetric accompaniment relations, a human accompanee is expressed by a possessive suffix affixed to the comitative marker, or by a clause-initial adverbial. On the other hand, the question of asymmetry contracts to the background when the accompanee is expressed by a non-clause-initial adverbial and when the accompanee is implicit, without any overt marking. The research is based on a corpus data comprising 19th-century written Finnish, dialect interviews, and modern written Finnish. The data shows that accompaniment relations expressed by mukana and mukaan have changed: in the 19th-century and dialect data, the majority of the landmarks are humans, but in the modern data activities dominate as (secondary) landmarks.  


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-142
Author(s):  
Werner Abraham

Abstract The main designs of modern theories of syntax assume a process of syntagmatic organization. However, research on first language acquisition leaves no doubt that the structured combination of single lexical items cannot begin until a critical mass of lexical items has been acquired such that the lexicon is structured hierarchically on the basis of hierarchical feature bundling. Independent of a decision between the main views about the design of a proto language (the grammarless “Holophrastic view”, Arbib & Bickerton 2010: 1, Bickerton 2014) or the ‘Compositional View’ as taken by Rizzi (2010), Carstairs-McCarthy (2010), and others. What seems to be the minimal offset for language is the existence of grammatical categories like verb and noun, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, functional categories as needed for the expression of all kinds of agreement between the distinct categories to form recursively structured complexes. I follow the different stages of complexification asking whether there is paradigmatic next to syntagmatic organization and what its added value is for the evolution of grammar. The conclusion will be that paradigmatics is an indismissible part of the organization of early language in that it structures the lexicon so as to make primary and secondary syntactic merge possible and, consequently, is also a prerequisite for movement. The guiding idea of this position is Roman Jakobson’s insistence on the twofold organization of language and grammar. The two organizational designs, syntagmatics and paradigmatics, are manifest within each module: in the phonetic, the morphological, the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic form (consider Jakobson’s 1971a, b reiterated argument).


Author(s):  
Chan-Chia Hsu

AbstractPrevious corpus-based research has demonstrated that antonyms co-occur frequently and serve essential functions in discourse. However, these studies are mostly based on written corpus data. Therefore, the present study investigates how antonyms are used in spoken Chinese. Antonyms co-occurring within five turns were manually identified in the National Chengchi University (NCCU) Corpus of Spoken Taiwan Mandarin (27 transcripts, approximately 11 hours) and categorized by their functions. It is found that antonyms that are dialogic in nature prevail in spoken Chinese, and the results reconfirm that antonyms are often used to signal a nearby contrast or to express inclusiveness/exhaustiveness. Compared with written Chinese, spoken Chinese shows a stronger preference for three functional categories, i.e. Interrogative Antonymy, Corrective Antonymy, and Negated Antonymy, which clearly reflect the spontaneous, interactive nature of conversation. The comparison between spoken and written Chinese also shows that antonyms in spoken Chinese co-occur in particular lexico-syntactic frames less often, and that the morphosyllabic structure of antonyms, a crucial factor that influences the functional distribution of antonyms in written Chinese, occupies a minor role in spoken Chinese. This study reveals how the use of antonyms varies across spoken and written Chinese, complementing previous corpus-based studies of antonymy that have drawn conclusions mostly from formal written texts.


2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARKUS BADER ◽  
JANA HÄUSSLER

This paper presents three experiments that investigate the relationship between gradient and binary judgments of grammaticality. In the first two experiments, two different groups of participants judged sentences by the method of magnitude estimation and by the method of speeded grammaticality judgments in a single session. The two experiments involved identical sentence materials but they differed in the order in which the two procedures were applied. The results show a high correlation between the magnitude estimation data and the speeded grammaticality judgments data, both within a session and across the two sessions. The third experiment was a questionnaire study in which participants judged the same sentences as either grammatical or ungrammatical without time pressure. This experiment yielded results quite similar to those of the other two experiments. Thus gradient and binary judgments both provide valuable and reliable sources for linguistic theory when assessed in an experimentally controlled way. We present a model based on Signal Detection Theory which specifies how gradient grammaticality scores are mapped to binary grammaticality judgments. Finally, we compare our experimental results to existing corpus data in order to inquire into the relationship between grammaticality and frequency of usage.


2003 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW SPENCER

This article reviews two important recent contributions to the theory of morphology, which take significantly different approaches to the subject. Both are centrally concerned with questions of morphotactics. Rice argues that morpheme order in Athapaskan is largely the consequence of universal principles of semantic scope (coded as syntactic structure). Stump argues for a conception of inflection based on the paradigm. There is virtually no overlap between the two books, yet each raises questions that are of great significance for the other. In this review I briefly evaluate each book and then sketch the possibility of a synthesis.


2005 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Langer

Semi-compositional verb–noun constructions have been investigated under various labels in the different linguistic traditions. In this article we start from the quite well defined notion of support verb construction to present a battery of linguistic tests to distinguish truly semi-compositional constructions from semantically compositional verb–noun combinations on the one hand and from idiomatic constructions on the other. The tests are not genuinely designed by the author but collected from various linguistic investigations on such constructions. As the concept of support verb construction spans across a wide variety of languages, most tests can be applied to several languages. In the article, examples are given for French, English and German. It will be shown that most of the tests that cover the grammaticality of syntactic or semantic transformations of verb–noun constructions only present an approximation of underlying semantic properties and that to almost each alleged property exceptions can be found. However, taken as a whole, the test battery seems to be suitable to delineate support verb constructions from superficially similar linguistic expressions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-105
Author(s):  
Dwi Puspitosari

This study aims to identify nominative adjectives in Japanese that are difficult to categorize based on the occurred changes when these words are produced along with the other words. For non-native Japanese learners, this has become a challenging issue. The main reason is the adjective that was classified into two categories in accordance with their changes, i.e., i-adjectives and na-adjectives. These adjectives presented different forms of change that had a tendency of transforming into nouns when collaborating with other nouns. Not only did learners in elementary and secondary level face the difficulties, but also those in upper levels did. The data in this study focused on adjectives with a high frequency of use that were collected from "Gendai Nihongo Kakikotoba Kinko Koopasu". The data was analyzed based on the use of adjectives in sentences taken from the corpus data, which underwent different forms of changes. The results of this study indicated that there were many adjectives that underwent different forms of changes and could be classified into multiple word classes.   Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mngidentifikasi kata sifat-kata sifat yang bersifat nominatif dalam bahasa Jepang yang sulit dikategorikan berdasarkan perubahan saat berhadapan dengan kata lain. Bagi pembelajar bahasa Jepang non-native speaker, hal seperti ini merupakan permasalahan yang dirasa sulit. Alasannya adalah karena kata sifat yang menurut perubahannya diklasifikasikan menjadi dua yakni kata sifat -i dan kata sifat -na, mengalami perubahan yang tidak seragam dan cenderung menjadi nomina saat dihadapkan dengan nomina. Tidak hanya pada pembelajar tingkat dasar dan menengah, pembelajar tingkat atas pun mengalami kesulitan. Pada penelitian ini, data akan difokuskan pada kata sifat dengan frekuensi pemakaian yang tinggi dan dikumpukan dari “Gendai Nihongo Kakikotoba Kinko Koopasu”. Proses analisis data dilihat dari penggunaan kata sifat dalam kalimat diambil dari data corpus, yang mengalami perubahan tidak seragam. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan banyak kata sifat yang mengalami perubahan tidak seeragam dan dapat diklasifikasikan ke dalam kelas kata ganda.    


2021 ◽  
pp. 23-29
Author(s):  
Olha Zanevych ◽  
Myroslava Hnatyuk

In the article the material of monumental texts of the Ukrainian language of the 16th – the first half of the 17th century (business documents, artistic, polemical, chronicle, scientific and confessional literature) and the studied monuments of the Old Belarusian language are studied the diachronic aspect of the use of case forms (generic or accusative) in negative verb constructions; their functioning in modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages is analyzed. It has been revealed that in the monuments of the Ukrainian language of the specified period the accusative case in denial is inferior to the generic one. The use of certain syntactic models (parallel use of genitive and accusative forms in the pre- and postposition) was determined by the general style and place of writing the monuments. In studies of monuments of the Old Belarusian language in this position the genitive was fixed, and sometimes in negative constructions the accusative and the genitive were allowed at the same time. In the linguistics of the 20th – early 21st century philologists have repeatedly drawn attention to the peculiarities of the use of genitive and accusative cases in negative constructions both on the All-Slavic background and on the material of individual languages. Synchronously, it has been revealed that in the modern Ukrainian language the literary norm in negative constructions is the use of the genitive case instead of the accusative. However, there is no noticeable tendency to replace the accusative and the genitive in verbs with a negative participle not, as there are many cases of using the possessive case in literature and in everyday speech. On the other hand, there is no unanimity in the grammars of the modern Belarusian language on this issue: some scholars believe that both generic and possessive cases are possible in negative constructions, while others believe that only generic is possible. However, from a sample of analyzed works of Belarusian writers of the twentieth century, artistic and journalistic posts, as well as conversational style records, it can be argued that there are only a few cases of use of the accusative case, in particular in proverbs and sayings, and only the genitive is dominant in the negative constructions.


HortScience ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 861D-862
Author(s):  
Anik L. Dhanaraj* ◽  
Janet P. Slovin ◽  
Lisa J. Rowland

To gain a better understanding of changes in gene expression associated with cold stress in the woody perennial blueberry (Vaccinium spp.), a genomics approach based on the analysis of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) was undertaken. Two cDNA libraries were constructed using RNA from cold acclimated (mid winter conditions when the plants are cold stressed) and non-acclimated (before they received any chilling) floral buds of the blueberry cultivar Bluecrop. About 600 5'-end ESTs were generated from each of the libraries. Putative functions were assigned to 57% of the cDNAs that yielded high quality sequences based on homology to other genes/ESTs from Genbank, and these were classified into 14 functional categories. From a contig analysis, which clustered sequences derived from the same or very similar genes, 430 and 483 unique transcripts were identified from the cold acclimated and non-acclimated libraries, respectively. Of the total unique transcripts, only 4.3% were shared between the libraries, suggesting marked differences in the genes expressed under the two conditions. The most highly abundant cDNAs that were picked many more times from one library than from the other were identified as representing potentially differentially expressed transcripts. Northern analyses were performed to examine expression of eight selected transcripts and seven of these were confirmed to be preferentially expressed under either cold acclimating or non-acclimating conditions. Only one of the seven transcripts, encoding a dehydrin, had been found previously to be up-regulated during cold stress of blueberry. This study demonstrates that analysis of ESTs is an effective strategy to identify candidate cold-responsive transcripts in blueberry.


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