scholarly journals A Cross-linguistic Study of Person Agreement in Imposter Constructions

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Kaori Furuya
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Object Relation ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Imposter Phenomenon ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Person Agreement

This paper provides an analysis of person agreement in the imposter phenomenon studied by Collins & Postal (2012). In the constructions, full DPs are used to refer to speech-act participants like personal pronouns. Nonetheless, person agreement caused by imposters morphsyntactically varies in a subject-verb relation and subject-object relation cross-linguistically. Moreover, members of the classes of imposters are also not identical among languages. These patterns differ from those of personal pronouns. The paper argues that dual properties of the person feature (semantic and morphological) do not always coincide, leading to agreement alternations in PF. Furthermore, the D head does not always involve the person feature value, which induces dialectal and cross-linguistic variation. The analysis shows that regardless of the cross-linguistic variations, the syntactic operation for agreement is uniform in imposter constructions.

Multiple facets of constructional Arabic gender and ‘functional universalism’ in the DP

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdelkader Fassi Fehri
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Nominal Property ◽  
Classifier Languages ◽  
Or Groups

Rather than being confined to an intrinsic nominal property (of the low n), and expressing sex or animacy, gender is shown to be polysemous, contributing ‘unorthodox’ meanings such as quantity, perspective, evaluation, performativity, and interacting with various layers and categories in the nominal domain. It is then constructional, and distributed over the various syntactic projections, including RootP, nP, DivP, GroupP, and SAP (Speech Act Phrase). Appealing to data from Arabic varieties shows that gender plays the same role played by classifiers in South Asian classifier languages. Two alternating (and equivalent) modes of unitization are used in forming individual units or groups: (a) morphological gender builds singulatives or pluratives, and (b) pseudo-partitives contribute semi-lexical classifier structures. Close interactions between gender, classifier, and number (in addition to other interactions) make it difficult to account for linguistic variation through traditional typologies, and open the room for a more appropriate ‘functional universalism’.

A cross-linguistic study on the linguistic expressions of Cantonese and English requests

Pragmatics ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Lee
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Direct Sequence ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Native English Speaking

This study investigates the cross-linguistic devices of requests written by native English-speaking (NSE) and native Cantonese-speaking (NCS) respondents in an academic context on the basis of 197 discourse completion tests. Both groups asked in a direct sequence accompanied by a different proportion of syntactic and lexical devices to reduce directness. NES used a higher frequency and a wider range of syntactic downgraders than NCS. NCS, however, used a higher frequency of lexical downgraders and a greater number of combinations of lexical devices than NES. The cross-linguistic comparison of the linguistic features of Cantonese and Engish requests demonstrates how the distinctive linguistic properties of each language and social factors combine to constitute a request. Further investigation could be made between idealized and authentic English and Cantonese requests for a range of age groups and contexts, or to compare the linguistic forms of requests made by NCS in English with the linguistic forms of requests made by NES in Cantonese.

THE CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. VOL. 5: EXPANDING THE CONTEXTS.Dan Isaac Slobin (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997. Pp. xiii + 339. $89.95 cloth.

2000 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-114
Author(s):  
Susan A. Gelman
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
Main Topic ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
The Core ◽  
Acquisition Task ◽  
The Cross

This is the fifth volume in a renowned series edited by Dan Slobin, focusing on cross-linguistic studies of children acquiring their first language. The series is seminal for its focus on languages other than English and for addressing the astonishing diversity and complexity of the language acquisition task. Slobin notes that, in contrast to Chomskyan models that consider core grammar to be the main topic of interest, the series was conceived with the notion of showing “how much fruit there is beyond the core” (p. 14). The goal of Volume 5 is to explore themes that were relatively backgrounded in the others. Specifically, these themes include: typological analysis, semantic systems, phonology and prosody, individual differences, and diachronic processes.

The development of person agreement and the cliticization of personal pronouns in Batsbi

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-296
Author(s):  
Yasuhiro Kojima
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Finite Form ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Noun Class ◽  
Person Agreement

Abstract Most Nakh-Daghestanian languages have gender (or noun class) agreement in the verb, but do not have person agreement. This is the case with Chechen and Ingush, which are genetically the closest to Batsbi. Batsbi, by contrast, has developed person agreement with the subject in the verb along with gender agreement. This is assumed to be due to the strong influence of Georgian, which has long been the second language of Batsbi speakers. In Georgian, the verb shows person agreement with the subject as well as with the direct or indirect object. Present-day Batsbi, presumably inspired by the polypersonal agreement of Georgian, further develops the cliticization of non-subject personal pronouns. To put it simply, it seems as though Batsbi attempts to express what a Georgian verb may encode in a single, finite form by means of a verb and a personal pronoun that is cliticized to it.

Let's talk about you and me

2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 465-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEDDE ZEIJLSTRA
Keyword(s):  
Blocking Effect ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
First Person ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Maximize Presupposition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cross

A recent development in Dutch concerns the deictic interpretation of the second-person singular pronoun je, which may refer to the speaker only. In such examples the subject refers to the speaker – not the hearer – but at the same time, these examples come along with an implicature stating that the hearer would have done the same thing if s/he were in the speaker's situation. Why is it the case that a second-person singular pronoun may refer to the speaker only? And why is it that when speaker-referring je is used, it always comes along with an implicature of the kind described above? In this article I argue that this behavior of Dutch je is a consequence of its semantically unmarked status with respect to the first-person singular pronoun ik. Along the lines of Sauerland (2008), I propose that Dutch je only carries one feature, [PARTICIPANT], whereas ik carries two features: [SPEAKER] and [PARTICIPANT]. Consequently, je may in principle refer to all participants in the conversation, enabling je to refer to the speaker as well. The fact that je does not normally refer to the speaker but to the hearer only then follows as some kind of blocking effect resulting from application of the principle of Maximize Presupposition. The paper concludes by spelling out the predictions that this analysis makes for the cross-linguistic variation with respect to the readings that participant and other pronouns may yield.

scholarly journals The Cross-linguistic Study of Sentence Production

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 866-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Florian Jaeger ◽  
Elisabeth J. Norcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Production ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
The Cross

(Non-)intervention in A-movement

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Hartman
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Intervention Effects ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Parallel Movement ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Subject Raising

This article explores ‘defective intervention’ effects in a range of A-movement constructions in English. Moving beyond an old observation that English lacks intervention in standard subject-to-subject raising constructions, I present new data showing that English does in fact display intervention in a variety of other NP-raising contexts. I explore the consequences of this expanded data set, and propose an account of intervention that aims to capture both the cross-linguistic variation between English and other languages, and the cross-constructional variation within English. Keywords: intervention; raising; tough-movement; raising-to-object; passivization; PP-reanalysis; parallel movement; reconstruction; A-movement

Subject pronoun doubling in Agul

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timur A. Maisak
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Clitic Doubling ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
Doubling Construction ◽  
Person Agreement

The paper describes the doubling of free personal pronouns in Agul, an East Caucasian language spoken in Daghestan, Russia. The doubling construction consists of a subject pronoun in the canonical preverbal position, paired with an identical instance of the same pronoun immediately following the verb. The first pronoun is usually adjacent to the “verb–pronoun” combination, though it can optionally be separated by another constituent. In the oral corpus consulted for the analysis, the construction is found most often with the primary verb of speech in clauses introducing a quote (e.g. ‘I said I, …’). I argue that the doubling pattern originated as the conflation of a preverbal subject with a very frequent “verb–subject” word order used with highly topical referents. The function of the doubling construction is therefore postulated to draw additional attention to the referent. A brief comparison of Agul doubling and related phenomena in other languages (e.g. person agreement and clitic doubling) is also offered.

scholarly journals The meanings of positive polarity minimizers in Japanese: a unified approach

2015 ◽  
pp. 599
Author(s):  
Osamu Sawada
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Lexical Item ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Expressive Meaning ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation ◽  
Internal Variation

In Japanese there are multiple lexical items for positive polarity minimizers (hereinafter, minimizer PPIs), each of which can differ in meaning/use. For example, while sukoshi ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can only express a quantitative (amount) meaning, chotto ‘lit. a bit/a little’ can express either a quantitative meaning or an ‘expressive’ meaning (i.e. attenuation in degree of the force of a speech act). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the semantics and pragmatics of the Japanese minimizer PPIs chotto and sukoshi and to consider (i) the parallelism/non-parallelism between truth conditional scalar meanings and non-truth conditional scalar meanings, and (ii) what mechanism can explain the cross-linguistic and language internal variation between minimizer PPIs. As for the semantics/pragmatics of minimizers, I will argue that although the meanings of the amount and expressive minimizers are logically and dimensionally different (non-parallelism), they can systematically be captured by positing a single lexical item (parallelism). As for the language internal and cross-linguistic variations, it will be shown that there is a point of variation with respect to whether a particular degree morpheme allows a dimensional shift (i.e. an extension from a semantic scale to a pragmatic scale). Based on the above proposals, this paper will also investigate the pragmatic motivation behind the use of minimizers in an evaluative context.

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