scholarly journals Does Free Word Order Hurt? Assessing the Practical Lexical Function Model for Croatian

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoran Medić ◽  
Jan Šnajder ◽  
Sebastian Padó
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Function Model ◽  
Lexical Function ◽  
Free Word

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

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.

Dependency Parsing in Bangla

2013 ◽  
pp. 155-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Utpal Garain ◽  
Sankar De
Keyword(s):  
Test Data ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Dependency Parsing ◽  
Order Problem ◽  
Simple Sentences ◽  
Free Word

A grammar-driven dependency parsing has been attempted for Bangla (Bengali). The free-word order nature of the language makes the development of an accurate parser very difficult. The Paninian grammatical model has been used to tackle the free-word order problem. The approach is to simplify complex and compound sentences and then to parse simple sentences by satisfying the Karaka demands of the Demand Groups (Verb Groups). Finally, parsed structures are rejoined with appropriate links and Karaka labels. The parser has been trained with a Treebank of 1000 annotated sentences and then evaluated with un-annotated test data of 150 sentences. The evaluation shows that the proposed approach achieves 90.32% and 79.81% accuracies for unlabeled and labeled attachments, respectively.

Objects in the German prefield

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-39
Author(s):  
Markus Bader
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Experimental Investigations ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun ◽  
New Findings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Speakers ◽  
Referential Form ◽  
Free Word

From the perspective of language production, this chapter discusses the question of whether to move the subject or the object to the clause-initial position in a German Verb Second clause. A review of experimental investigations of language production shows that speakers of German tend to order arguments in such a way that the most accessible argument comes first, with accessibility defined in terms like animacy (‘animate before inanimate’) and discourse status (e.g. ‘given before new’). Speakers of German thus obey the same ordering principles that have been found to be at work in English and other languages. Despite the relative free word order of German, speakers rarely produce sentences with object-before-subject word order in experimental investigations. Instead, they behave like speakers of English and mostly use passivization in order to bring the underlying object argument in front of the underlying subject argument when the object is more accessible than the subject. Corpus data, however, show that object-initial clauses are not so infrequent after all. The second part of the chapter, therefore, discusses new findings concerning the discourse conditions that favour the production of object-initial clauses. These findings indicate, among other things, that the clausal position of an object is affected not only by its referent’s discourse status but also by its referential form. Objects occur in clause-initial position most frequently when referring to a given referent in the form of a demonstrative pronoun or NP.

scholarly journals Decoding Middle Welsh clauses or “Avoid Ambiguity”

2014 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
Axel Harlos ◽  
Erich Poppe ◽  
Paul Widmer
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Morphological Features ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Lower Tier ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
Narrative Context ◽  
Free Word

Abstract Middle Welsh is a language with a restricted set of morphosyntactic distinctions for grammatical relations and with relatively free word order in positive main declarative causes. However, syntactic ambiguity rarely, if ever, arises in natural texts. The present article shows in a corpus-based study how syntactic ambiguity is prevented and how morphological features interact with two referential properties, namely animacy and accessibility, in order to successfully identify grammatical relations in Middle Welsh. Further lower-tier factors are the semantics of the verb and the wider narrative context. The article complements recent insights suggesting that subject-verb agreement is not only determined by wordorder patterns, but also by referential properties of subjects.

Is Polysynthesis a Valid Theoretical Notion?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Givón
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Clear Trend ◽  
Complex Verbs ◽  
Free Word

While Ute (Numic, Uto-Aztecan) currently has “free” word-order, most of its morphology conforms to a historical OV syntax, with postpositions pronouns, pre-nominal genitive modifiers, and predominantly suffixal verbal morphology,with most exceptions to the latter easily attributed to pre-verbal incorporation of object, instrument, adjective, or adverb stems. Ute also displays an extensive array of complex verbal stems, most commonly two-verb combinations. Of the two combined verbal stems, the second usually loses its original valence, exhibits semantic bleaching, and otherwise bears the traditional marks of grammaticalization. While the process of complex-verb creation is extensive, long-standing, and still ongoing, its diachrony is far from clear. This chapter describes Ute complex verbs, then reviews the potential candidates for the diachronic source-constructions that gave rise to these complex lexemes. While an unambiguous identification of “the” source-construction is not yet possible, the phenomenon as a whole represents a clear trend from syntax to lexis.

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