scholarly journals Deverbal and deadjectival nominalization in Dan: Not as different as one might think. A reply to Baker & Gondo (2020)

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin Feodosievich Vydrin

The paper (Baker & Gondo 2020) studies several issues in Dan morphosyntax: the formal differences between verbs, nouns and adjectives; two types of possessive constructions (with alienable and inalienable head nouns) and their syntactic structures; the derivation of nouns from verbs and adjectives; low and high nominalization; and possessive constructions with deverbal and deadjectival nouns. As it turns out, Baker & Gondo’s analyses are incorrect in some major points: the key formal differences between verbs, adjectives and nouns have been left unnoticed due to disregard for Dan tonal morphology, and for the same reason, the tonal marking of the high nominalization has also been ignored. Baker & Gondo’s syntactic analysis of the possessive construction with alienable nouns as analogous to the Saxon genitive (king’s house) cannot be accepted; in fact, it can be compared with the genitive construction seen in English the house of the king. Possessive constructions with deverbal and deadjectival nouns are not as radically opposed as one may think after reading Baker & Gondo’s paper; in fact, a noun derived from an intransitive verb can sometimes appear as an alienable noun with respect to its theme, and, conversely, a deadjectival noun can appear as a relational noun with respect to the modified noun.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 359-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Seeker ◽  
Özlem Çetinoğlu

Space-delimited words in Turkish and Hebrew text can be further segmented into meaningful units, but syntactic and semantic context is necessary to predict segmentation. At the same time, predicting correct syntactic structures relies on correct segmentation. We present a graph-based lattice dependency parser that operates on morphological lattices to represent different segmentations and morphological analyses for a given input sentence. The lattice parser predicts a dependency tree over a path in the lattice and thus solves the joint task of segmentation, morphological analysis, and syntactic parsing. We conduct experiments on the Turkish and the Hebrew treebank and show that the joint model outperforms three state-of-the-art pipeline systems on both data sets. Our work corroborates findings from constituency lattice parsing for Hebrew and presents the first results for full lattice parsing on Turkish.



Author(s):  
Yulia A Filyasova

Abatract. The article presents the results of a lexico-syntactic analysis of valency and collocability of English words, related to one semantic group: effectiveness and efficiency . The aim of the research was to study the ability of these words to syntactically and lexically contact with other words, taking into consideration certain difference between their lexical meanings. The objectives included determining semantic variations and analysis of word classes in the left and right contexts. The material, 177,144 words, comprised 700 article titles and abstracts from seven international journals with geological and petroleumrelated specializations. Methods of study involved continuous sampling, classification, and analysis of lexical meanings of relevant words. It was found that the frequency of effectiveness was 40% higher than that of efficiency. Both of them had similarities in syntactic valency: they occurred in identical syntactic structures, however, with different rates of occurrence. The difference is the most obvious in such syntactic structures as N(E)+of+N - characteristic of effectiveness, and V+A+N(E) - specific to efficiency. A typical example of effectiveness was the effectiveness of the proposed method , while that of efficiency - improve production efficiency . Effectiveness collocated more often with method-related notions, whereas efficiency - with processes. The gained data correlate with the definitions: effectiveness has a wider semantic field (which explains a higher rate of its occurrence) and is oriented towards result, while efficiency implies process and has an additional technical meaning. The data can be used in the practice of teaching English as a second language for students with technical specializations and technical translation.



Author(s):  
Siva Reddy ◽  
Oscar Täckström ◽  
Michael Collins ◽  
Tom Kwiatkowski ◽  
Dipanjan Das ◽  
...  

The strongly typed syntax of grammar formalisms such as CCG, TAG, LFG and HPSG offers a synchronous framework for deriving syntactic structures and semantic logical forms. In contrast—partly due to the lack of a strong type system—dependency structures are easy to annotate and have become a widely used form of syntactic analysis for many languages. However, the lack of a type system makes a formal mechanism for deriving logical forms from dependency structures challenging. We address this by introducing a robust system based on the lambda calculus for deriving neo-Davidsonian logical forms from dependency trees. These logical forms are then used for semantic parsing of natural language to Freebase. Experiments on the Free917 and Web-Questions datasets show that our representation is superior to the original dependency trees and that it outperforms a CCG-based representation on this task. Compared to prior work, we obtain the strongest result to date on Free917 and competitive results on WebQuestions.



2018 ◽  
Vol III (II) ◽  
pp. 400-420
Author(s):  
Muhammad Seleem ◽  
Fatima Alam Khan ◽  
Aleena Zaman

This study investigates the syntactic structures of spoken discourse of teachers in academic discourse. The knowledge of syntactic structure of a language helps in understanding the spoken discourse. So, the study identifies the wh-Movement in the syntactic structures of teachers in English classroom sessions. The data was collected from two universities of Federal government, Pakistan. The one was Air University Islamabad and the second was National University of Modern Languages Islamabad. The data was collected through the recording tool where the English classroom sessions of the teachers were audio-recorded and transcribed. The analysis of data was quantitative and qualitative in nature. The frequency of wh-movement in the structures of recorded English spoken data was analysed quantitatively. In qualitative analyses, the transcribed data was analysed syntactically, keeping in view minimalist perspective, with the help of parsing rules and figures. The analyzed data shows that the teachers at undergraduate level use language where wh-movement is employed in syntactic structure of English used in classroom sessions. They move whexpression into other slots like internal merge and pied-pipe. However, the minimalist parametric unit, wh-movement, was found in the sentence structures of the teachers in the delivery of classroom sessions. So, the minimal pairs of sentence structure impacts different level of language.



2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Du Bois

AbstractThis paper argues for the need to recognize a new order of syntactic phenomena, and for a theory of syntax capable of addressing it. Dialogic syntax encompasses the linguistic, cognitive, and interactional processes involved when speakers selectively reproduce aspects of prior utterances, and when recipients recognize the resulting parallelisms and draw inferences from them. Its most visible reflex occurs when one speaker constructs an utterance based on the immediately co-present utterance of a dialogic partner. Words, structures, and other linguistic resources invoked by the first speaker are selectively reproduced by the second. The alignment of utterances yields a pairing of patterns at varying levels of abstraction, ranging from identity of words and affixes, to parallelism of syntactic structures, to equivalence of grammatical categories and abstract features of form, meaning, and function. This mapping generates dialogic resonance, defined as the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances. The key unit of analysis is the diagraph, recognized as a higher-order, supra-sentential syntactic structure that emerges from the structural coupling of two or more utterances. Dialogic syntax goes beyond traditional linear syntax to recognize as integral to the task of syntactic analysis a new kind of structural relation that arises between otherwise independent sentences.



Probus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Martínez Vera

Abstract This paper addresses recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer constructions) in Spanish, comparing Latin American Spanish (LAS) and European Spanish (ES). I make the novel observation that in spite of a superficial difference whereby a lower que after a left dislocate (LD) surfaces in ES but not in LAS, LAS does have recomplementation. In fact, LAS patterns with ES in that there are two constructions in each variety, i.e. a construction in which an intonational break following the LD is present and a construction in which the break is absent. I argue that the constructions with the break differ from the constructions without it with regard to reconstruction effects, no insertion and the position of high adverbs, which arise due to a locality violation in the former but not in the latter. I propose a syntactic analysis in terms of phases and argue that the locality violation is circumvented in the constructions with no break via verb movement, which is not possible in the constructions with the break. I further propose a mapping from the syntactic structures of recomplementation into prosody that correlates with the presence/absence of the intonational break in these constructions, hence providing prosodic evidence for phasal structure more generally.



Virittäjä ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jari Sivonen

Artikkeli käsittelee olemassa-adverbiaalin esiintymistä ja merkitystä suomen vanhoissa kansanmurteissa. Niin yleiskielessä kuin murteissa olemassa toimii adverbiaali-täydennyksenä sellaisessa kopulalauseessa, jossa ei ole paikan adverbiaalia (esim. radio oli olemassa). Tällaisten rakenteiden lisäksi olemassa esiintyy vanhoissa kansan-murteissa adverbiaalimääritteenä muissa lausetyypeissä. Digitaalisesta muoto-opin arkistosta, Lauseopin arkistosta sekä Suomen kielen näytteitä -kokoelmasta poimitun 275 esimerkin aineiston analyysi osoittaa, että olemassa esiintyy vanhoissa kansan-murteissa määritteenä kopula-, predikatiivi-, omistus-, kvanttori-, intransitiivi- ja transitiivi-lauseessa. Määritteenä toimivan olemassa-adverbiaalin merkitys ei kuitenkaan ole aina ilmeinen. Artikkelissa tarkastellaan olemassa-adverbiaalin määritekäytön semantiikkaa kognitiivisessa kehyksessä. Analyysi osoittaa, että adverbiaalin merkitys riippuu paljolti siitä lausekonstruktiosta, jossa sana esiintyy. Esimerkiksi kopulalauseen adverbiaalimääritteenä toimiva olemassa ilmaisee subjektin tarkoitteen eksistenssiä puhehetkeä laajemmin mutta myös asumista määräpaikassa. Omanlaisensa merkitys olemassa-määritteellä on transitiivi- ja intransitiivilauseissa, joissa se toimii kvantifioivana määritteenä tai episteemisenä kiellonvahvistajana. Vanhojen kansanmurteiden olemassa-sana puoltaa näkemystä, että lauserakennetta on hyvä tarkastella yksittäisiä lauseenjäseniä laajemmista konstruktioista käsin ja hakea syntaktisen kuvauksen pohjaksi aineistoa yleiskielen lisäksi murteista ja muusta puhekielestä.   It’s the devil, definitely not a bear: A semantic and syntactic analysis of the adverbial olemassa in old Finnish dialects This article addresses the usage and meaning of olemassa ‘in being / existence’ as an adverbial modifier in old Finnish folk dialects. In the standard language as well as in dialects, olemassa is used as a compulsory adverbial in copula clauses that lack a locative adverbial (e.g. radio oli olemassa ‘radio existed’). In addition to these, olemassa is used in old dialects as an optional modifier in other sentence types. The data – compiled from the materials of Digital Morphology Archives for Finnish Dialects, The Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive, and Samples of Spoken Finnish – consists of 275 examples and demonstrates that olemassa is used in old dialects in copula, predicative, possessive, quantifier, intransitive and transitive clauses. However, when used as an optional adverbial, the meaning of olemassa is not always obvious. The analysis illustrates that the meaning of olemassa depends greatly on the sentence type in which it is used. For example, in a copula sentence, the word olemassa, as an optional adverbial, expresses the existence of the subject’s referent in a broader sense than merely in the current speech-act situation, or living in some particular residence. The olemassa adverbial also has its own type of meanings in transitive and intransitive sentences where it can be understood as a quantitative modifier or epistemic reinforcer of negation. The olemassa adverbial modifier of old Finnish folk dialects supports the view that syntactic structures should be analysed as constructions larger than mere lexeme constituents. In addition, syntactic description would benefit from more data regarding dialects and other colloquial language.



1984 ◽  
Vol 29 (7) ◽  
pp. 551-551
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Stevenson
Keyword(s):  


1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Chechile ◽  
Jane Anderson


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