scholarly journals Beyond Grammatical Weight: A Corpus Study of Information Structure Effect on Dative-Accusative Order in Korean

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 127-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
ChoiHyeWon
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Structure Effect ◽  
Corpus Study

scholarly journals Word order in Latin locative constructions: a corpus study in Caesar’s De bello gallico

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Structural Domains ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
First Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.

scholarly journals On the givenness of OV word order: a (re)examination of OV/VO variation in Old English

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
TARA STRUIK ◽  
ANS VAN KEMENADE
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Mixed Model ◽  
Linear Mixed Model ◽  
Multinomial Regression ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Given ◽  
New Hypothesis ◽  
Multinomial Regression Analysis

OV/VO variation in the history of English has been a long-debated issue. Where earlier approaches were concerned with the grammatical status of the variation (see van Kemenade 1987; Pintzuk 1999 and many others), the debate has shifted more recently to explaining the variation from a pragmatic perspective (see Bech 2001; Taylor & Pintzuk 2012a), focusing on the given-before-new hypothesis (Gundel 1988) and its consequences for OV/VO. While the work by Taylor & Pintzuk (2012a) focuses specifically on the newness of VO orders, the present study is particularly concerned with the givenness of OV word order. It is hypothesized that OV orders are the result of leftward movement from VO orders, triggered by givenness. A corpus study on a database of subclauses with two verbs and a direct object, collected from the YCOE (Taylor et al.2003) corpus, and subsequent multinomial regression analysis within a generalized linear mixed model shows that OV word order is reserved for given objects, while VO objects are much more mixed in terms of information structure. We argue that these results are more in line with an analysis which derives all occurring word orders from a VO base than an analysis which proposes the opposite.

scholarly journals Subject case alternation in negated existential, locative, and possessive clauses in Latvian

Kalbotyra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Andra Kalnača ◽  
Ilze Lokmane
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Semantic Type ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Adverbial Modifiers ◽  
Strict Rule ◽  
Negative Form

[full article and abstract in English] The goal of this article is to analyse the alternation between the genitive and nominative cases in Latvian. As the alternation between genitive and nominative cases is possible in all clauses in which the verb būt ‘to be’ is used as an independent verb, this article examines existential, locative, and also possessive clauses, while also demonstrating that distinguishing these clause types is problematic for Latvian utilising the criteria given in the linguistic literature. Clauses containing the negative form of būt ‘to be’, i.e. nebūt, form the foundation of those selected for this study, as only in these sentences the genitive/nominative alternation can be seen for the subject in Latvian. There are only fragmentary descriptions of existential clauses as a unique semantic type, primarily in connection with the function of the verb būt ‘to be’ and the problems associated with distinguishing its independent and auxiliary meanings. Word order in existential, locative, and possessive clauses has, until now, been examined in connection with typical clause expanders – adverbial modifiers and the dative of possession as well as the information structure of the clause. At the same time, case choice for objects in negative existential clauses has traditionally been one of the most studied themes regarding language standardisation. In order to determine which factors affect the choice of either the genitive or nominative case, a corpus study was done analysing 979 examples: 882 with a genitive subject and 97 with a nominative subject. It was found that a connection exists between the definiteness of the subject, word order, and case choice; however, this manifests only as a tendency rather than as a strict rule.

scholarly journals On word order variation and informationstructure in peninsular spanish and italian ‘why’-interrogatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. e021025
Author(s):  
Svenja Schmid ◽  
Klaus Von Heusinger ◽  
Georg A. Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
High Preference ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Peninsular Spanish ◽  
Structural Category ◽  
The Impact

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

The information structure of French il y a clefts and c’est clefts: A corpus-based analysis

Linguistics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Karssenberg ◽  
Karen Lahousse
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Il Y A

AbstractThis article investigates the distributional and information structural (IS) properties ofil y a‘there is’ clefts in comparison withc’est‘it is’ clefts in French.Il y aclefts, which are prototypically said to be “presentational” or express all-focus, are relatively under-researched with respect toc’estclefts. We present the results of an extensive corpus study ofil y aclefts in three different registers, revealing that these clefts most often express an all-focus articulation, but also quite often express a focus-background articulation, which has not been acknowledged often in the linguistic literature. Moreover, the corpora contain contrastiveil y aclefts (displaying properties of both all-focus and topic-comment sentences), which to our knowledge have not been noticed before. It follows from these data that althoughc’estandil y aclefts can both express all-focus and focus-background, they clearly differ with respect to the topic-comment articulation and have specialized for different functions. Finally, several syntactic and pragmatic factors are presented that may account for the (distributive) differences between the two cleft types, e.g., the impossibility of non-(pro)nominal clefted elements inil y aclefts, genre differences, and the implication of exhaustivity.

scholarly journals Object Shift in spoken Mainland Scandinavian: A corpus study of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristine Bentzen ◽  
Merete Anderssen ◽  
Christian Waldmann
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Cognitive Status ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Object Shift

Recent work on Object Shift (OS) suggests that this is not as uniform an operation as traditionally assumed. In this paper, we examine OS in the spontaneous speech of adults in large Danish, Norwegian and Swedish child language corpora in order to explore variation with respect to OS across these three languages. We evaluate our results against three recent strands of accounts of OS, namely a prosodic/phonological account, an account in terms of cognitive status, and an account in terms of information structure. Our investigation shows that there is both within-language and across-language variation in the application of OS, and that the three accounts can explain some of our data. However, all accounts are faced with challenges, especially when explaining exceptional cases.

Reexamination of the Bare Preterite Base in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Zakho

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Gutman
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Active Function ◽  
Base Form ◽  
Aramaic Dialects

AbstractIn Neo-Aramaic dialects the historic passive participle is used as the base form for the preterite tense. Nonetheless, the scholarly tradition saw it as a passive form, especially when it appears alone as a 'bare form'. A wide corpus study of Jewish Zakho Neo-Aramaic shows, however, that in some cases it is justified to see this form as bearing an active function. This is established through the examination of the information-structure associated with the form. A comparison to an older stratum of Neo-Aramaic, namely the Nerwa texts from the 17th century, provides a possible diachronic explanation of this change.

Thematic Asymmetries Do Matter! A Corpus Study of German Word Order

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Verhoeven
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Verb Classes ◽  
German Word ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Argument Realization ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Large Corpus

This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*

Causal inference or conventionalized meaning? A corpus study of the German connector nachdem ‘after’ in regional standard varieties

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-522
Author(s):  
Melitta Gillmann
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Conversational Implicature ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Temporal Succession ◽  
German Standard

AbstractDrawing on a corpus study using German and Austrian parliamentary protocols, this paper shows that the originally temporal connectornachdem‘after’ may carry causal meaning in southern German standard varieties. In these varieties,nachdemclauses may occur with individual level predicates, cases which, I will argue, provide unambiguously causal contexts since a temporal succession of events is excluded with individual level predicates. Whilenachdemdisplays polysemy comparable to Englishsincein southern German standard varieties, it is a temporal marker in central and northern German varieties and a causal link may arise only due to a conversational implicature. The observed polysemy coincides with a higher token frequency ofnachdemas well as a higher incidence of present tense use in thenachdemclause in the respective southern German varieties. Remarkably, causalnachdemclauses show a clear tendency to be fronted to the matrix clause despite the overall tendency of causal clauses to be post-posed, both cross-linguistically and in German, which may be explained in terms of information structure and discourse-organizing functions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document