scholarly journals Secondary predication and aspectual structure

2000 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 241-264
Author(s):  
Susan Deborah Rothstein
Keyword(s):  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Running Time ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Secondary Predicates ◽  
Secondary Predication ◽  
Matrix Verb

This paper presents an analysis of secondary predicates as aspectual modifiers and secondary predication as a summing operation which sums the denotation of the matrix verb and the secondary predicate. I argue that, as opposed to the summing peration involved in simple conjunction, there is a constraint on secondary predication; in the 0 case of depictives, the event introduced by the matrix verb must be PART-OF the event introduced by the secondary predicate, where e1 is PART-OF e2 if the running time of e1 is contained in the running time of e2 and if e1 and e2 share a grammatical argument. I argue resultative predication differs from depictive predication in that the PART-OF constraint holds in resultative constructions between the event which is the culmination of e1 and e2: formally, while depictive predication introduces the statement PART-OF(e1,e2), resultative predication introduces the statement PART-OF(cul(e1),e2). I show that this is all that is necessary to explain the well-known properties of resultative predication.  

scholarly journals structures of depictive and resultative constructions in Chinese

2001 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 191-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niina Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Locality Constraint ◽  
Specific Reading ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Resultative Construction ◽  
The Right ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Secondary Predicates ◽  
Occurrence Patterns ◽  
Secondary Predication

In this paper I firstly argue that secondary predicates are complement of v, and v is overtly realized by Merge or Move in secondary predication in Chinese. The former option derives the de-construction, whereas the latter option derives the V-V construction. Secondly, I argue that resultatives are hosted by complement vPs, whereas depictives are hosted by adjunct vPs. This complement-adjunct asymmetry accounts for a series of syntactic properties of secondary predication in Chinese: the position of a secondary predicate with respect to the verb of the primary predicate, the co-occurrence patterns of secondary predicates, the hierarchy of depictives, the control and ECM properties of resultative constructions, and the locality constraint on the integration of secondary predicates into the structure of primary predication. Thirdly, I argue that the surface position of de is derived by a PF operation which attaches de to the right of the leftmost verbal lexical head of the construction. Finally, I argue that in the V-V resultative construction, the assumed successive head-raising may account for the possible subject-oriented reading of the resultative predicate, and that the head raising out of the lower vP accounts for the possible non-specific reading of the subject of the resultative predicate.  

Markedness, operator movement and discourse effects in the acquisition of purpose clause constructions in a second language

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-33
Author(s):  
Malcolm A. Finney
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Additional Hypothesis ◽  
Late Emergence ◽  
Initial Learning ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
L1 Acquisition ◽  
Matrix Verb ◽  
Operator Movement

This article appraises the effects of gap position and discourse information in the acquisition of purpose clause constructions (PCs) by adult Francophones learning English as L2. L1 acquisition studies reveal children having little difficulty interpreting a PC with a subject gap only (SPC) while a PC with an object gap (OPC) has been problematic to interpret. This may be the result of the number of syntactic operations–including operator movement–involved in its derivation plus lexically specified restrictions on the matrix verb. There are grounds for hypothesizing a late emergence of OPCs in English for French speakers. They are not allowed in French and, in addition to lexical restrictions associated with the choice of matrix verb, are marked semantically and typologically; an OPC with a prepositional object gap is additionally syntactically marked. This may thus result in the late acquisition of OPCs relative to SPCs. An additional hypothesis addresses whether L2 learners are adept at using discourse clues to interpret syntactic structure. Results indicate initial difficulty interpreting only PCs with prepositional object gaps, providing support for the hypothesis that syntactically (structurally) marked constructions may create initial learning difficulty in L2 acquisition.

Action and agency in complex sentences from present-day Romanian

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (62) (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Alice BODOC
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Adverbial Clause ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon ◽  
Matrix Verb

Starting from Alanen’s remark that “actions (exercises of capacities) are found throughout the natural world; and so is agency” (2018, 2), the present paper aims at describing the influence of these two fundamental concepts – action and agency – on the structure of Romanian complex sentences. More precisely, I am interested in providing evidence of a linguistic phenomenon that has received far less attention in the literature, i.e. the semantic restrictions imposed by the matrix verb over the embedded adverbial clause. As concerns the methodology, both qualitative and quantitative analyses will be conducted on an extensive online Romanian corpus (CoRoLa), and will be based on the semantic typologies of the verb included in some of the reference Romanian grammars (GALR 2008, 326; GBLR 2010, 279). One of the most important results of the analysis was the phenomenon of agentivity

A different perspective on embedded Verb Second

2020 ◽  
pp. 297-322
Author(s):  
Rebecca Woods
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Embedded Clause ◽  
Matrix Verb

This chapter compares embedded verb movement phenomena in English with embedded Verb Second clauses in German and Swedish. Close examination of the syntactic—but more particularly the semantic and pragmatic—properties of these phenomena reveals striking similarities, and the claim is made that these phenomena exhibit independent illocutionary force in the sense that the perspective holder for the embedded proposition or question is disambiguated—a departure from the claim that embedded verb movement structures are asserted (cf. Julien 2015 and Chapter 11 of this volume). It is proposed, following recent innovations in speech act syntax (Wiltschko and Heim 2016; Woods 2016) that these structures are dependent, as the ‘embedded’ clause contains less structure than full a root clause, yet is still structurally larger than a typical embedded clause. However, they are not selected and are instead in an apposition relation with a (usually covert) nominal complement to the matrix verb.

Profiling verb complementation constructions across New Englishes

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra C. Deshors ◽  
Stefan Th. Gries
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Observational Data ◽  
Random Forests ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
American English ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Matrix Verb

In this paper, we explore verb complementation patterns with to and ing in native English (British and American English) as compared to three Asian Englishes (Hong Kong, Indian, and Singaporean English). Based on data from the International Corpus of English annotated for variables describing the matrix verb and the complement, we run two random forests analyses to determine where the Asian Englishes have developed complementation preferences different from the two native speaker varieties. We find not only a variety of differences between the Asian and the native Englishes, but also that the Asian Englishes are more similar (i.e. ‘better predicted by’) the American English data. Further, as the first study of its kind to extend the MuPDAR approach from the now frequent regression analyses to random forests analysis, this study adds a potentially useful analytical tool to the often messy and skewed observational data corpus linguists need to deal with.

The time course of long-distance anaphor processing in Korean

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chung-hye Han ◽  
Dennis Ryan Storoshenko ◽  
Betty Hei Man Leung ◽  
Kyeong-min Kim
Keyword(s):  
Time Course ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Null Pronouns ◽  
Anaphor Resolution ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Null Pronoun ◽  
Matrix Verb ◽  
Matrix Subject

While early studies on the Korean long distance anaphor caki describe it to be subject-oriented in that it can only take subject antecedents, similarly to long distance anaphors in many other languages, more recent studies observe that it can take non-subject antecedents as well, especially in the context of certain verbs. This paper presents a visual-world eye-tracking study that tested whether the antecedent potential of caki in an embedded subject position is a function of the matrix subject, the matrix verb, or both, and whether the subject and the verb effects constrain the interpretation of caki in the same way as null pronouns, a commonly used pronominal form in Korean. These questions were addressed through an investigation of how the subject effect and the verb effect were manifested in processing these pronouns. We found that when caki, but not null pronouns, was first processed, there were more fixations to the images representing the matrix subject than the images representing the matrix object regardless of the matrix verb. We further found that the proportions of fixations to the images in both caki and null trials changed after the processing of some sentential verbs. These findings demonstrate that while null pronoun interpretation is a function of the verb effect only, caki-interpretation is a function of both the subject and the verb effect, supporting a multiple-constraints approach to anaphor resolution.

The into-causative construction in English: a construction-based perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONG-BOK KIM ◽  
MARK A. DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Past Research ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Causative Construction ◽  
Matrix Verb

The so-called into-causative construction, involving the pattern ‘V NP into V-ing’, raises intriguing questions in terms of lexical creativity as well as variation. This article, based on nearly 20,000 tokens from more than 1.3 billion words of text, from both British and American English, carries out a comprehensive corpus-based investigation of the construction. The article supports past research on certain types of variation in the use of the construction in British and American English, but sheds new light on how these may relate to diachronic shifts as well as to synchronic variation. The article also sketches a construction-based analysis to account for the grammatical properties of the into-causative construction. In particular, it shows that the construction, as an extension of the caused-motion construction, shares grammatical properties with its family constructions including the resultative and way constructions, but is distinctive from these in several respects. By allowing close interactions between the matrix verb and the grammatical constructions, the constructional view can also account for innovative uses of the construction.

scholarly journals A formação de construções resultativas no português brasileiro

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Núbia Rech
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Small Clause ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Verb Phrase ◽  
Causative Alternation ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Motion Constructions ◽  
Secondary Predicates ◽  
Germanic Languages

This paper aims mainly at investigating if there is the formation of resultative constructions with simple adjective in Brazilian Portuguese, since researchers disagree on the existence of these constructions in Romance Languages. To start this discussion, first I make a distinction between resultative, depictive and circumstantial constructions. Then, I relate some of their main characteristics, testing how they appear in sentences written in Brazilian Portuguese. Afterwards, I propose an extension of Folli and Ramchand (2001)’s analysis on the Portuguese. These authors use a structure of verb phrase that consists of three different projections, each one consisting in a subpart of the event: Cause, Process and Result. My hypothesis about the Brazilian Portuguese is that the verbs of causative alternation – as they imply change of state – are the head of Result projection and have as their complement an adjective small clause (SC), whose predicate indicates the telic aspect of event, forming a resultative construction. Following this perspective of analysis, I study the possibility of formation of adjective resultatives with atelic and telic verbs that admit causative alternation. I also approach – although briefly – other types of constructions that express results, whose secondary predicates are, respectively, a complex adjective phrase, a PP or a DP. In this paper, only the constructions resulting from verbal actions are considered. Thus, goal of motion constructions – in which prepositions indicate the following of movement and its ending – and resultative constructions with causative verbs are not considered. The results show that there are not resultative constructions in the Brazilian Portuguese equivalent to those found in Germanic Languages, in which an atelic verb becomes a telic verb by adding a resultative secondary predicate to the sentence.

scholarly journals Secondary Nominal Predication in Non-elementary Simple Sentence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Андрей Пантелеев ◽  
Andrey Panteleev
Keyword(s):  
Russian Language ◽  
Simple Sentence ◽  
Procedural Semantics ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Language Representation ◽  
Abstract Nouns ◽  
Simple Sentences ◽  
Secondary Predicates ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Secondary Predication

This monograph is devoted to the study of the functioning of concrete and abstract nouns as bearers of secondary predication and proposition in the folded non-elementary simple sentences in the Russian language. At the level of non-elementary simple sentences, there are specific means of updating the procedural semantics of specific nouns, specific ways of language representation of functional-semantic categories of personality, temporality and taxis. A high degree of compression of the statements suggests a closer relationship to secondary predicates with context and background knowledge speaking

scholarly journals Semantic constraints on case assignment in secondary adjectival predicates in Russian

2001 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 99-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Hinterholzl
Keyword(s):  
Case Assignment ◽  
Semantic Constraints ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Secondary Predicates ◽  
Control Relation ◽  
Case Frames

Adjectival secondary predicates can enter into two Case frames in Russian, the agreeing form and the Instrumental. The paper argues that these Case frames go together with two syntactic positions in the clause which are correlated with two different interpretations, the true depictive and the temporally restricted reading, respectively. The availability of the two readings depends on the houndedness of the secondary predicate. Only bounded predicates can enter into both Case frames and only partially non-bounded predicates can appear in the Instrumental. The paper therefore argues that the pertinent two-way SL/IL-contrast is to he replaced by a three-way distinction in terms of boundedness. The paper outlines the syntax and semantics of the true depictive and the temporally restricted interpretation and discusses how adjectival secondary predicates whose salient properties involve a cotemporary interpretation with the matrix predicate and a control relation of an individual argument, differ from temporal adjuncts as well as from non-finite clauses.  

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