scholarly journals Introduction

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Laura J. Downing ◽  
Annie Rialland ◽  
Cédric Patin ◽  
Kristina Riedel
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Direct Reference ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Cooperative Project ◽  
Phonological Phrase ◽  
Indirect Reference

The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Bantu Relative Clause workshop held in Paris on 8-9 January 2010, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. [...] This range of expertise is essential to realizing the goals of our project. Because Bantu languages have a rich phrasal phonology, they have played a central role in the development of theories of the phonology-syntax interface ever since the seminal work from the 1970s on Chimwiini (Kisseberth & Abasheikh 1974) and Haya (Byarushengo et al. 1976). Indeed, half the papers in Inkelas & Zec’s (1990) collection of papers on the phonology-syntax interface deal with Bantu languages. They have naturally played an important role in current debates comparing indirect and direct reference theories of the phonology-syntax interface. Indirect reference theories (e.g., Nespor & Vogel 1986; Selkirk 1986, 1995, 2000, 2009; Kanerva 1990; Truckenbrodt 1995, 1999, 2005, 2007) propose that phonology is not directly conditioned by syntactic information. Rather, the interface is mediated by phrasal prosodic constituents like Phonological Phrase and Intonation Phrase, which need not match any syntactic constituent. In contrast, direct reference theories (e.g., Kaisse 1985; Odden 1995, 1996; Pak 2008; Seidl 2001) argue that phrasal prosodic constituents are superfluous, as phonology can – indeed, must – refer directly to syntactic structure.  

scholarly journals Questions in Bantu languages: prosodies and positions

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Laura J. Downing
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Student ◽  
Project Leader ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Formal Syntax ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Cooperative Project

The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Workshop on Bantu Wh-questions, held at the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, Université Lyon 2, on 25-26 March 2011, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. The Berlin team, at the ZAS, is: Laura Downing (project leader) and Kristina Riedel (post-doc). The Paris team, at the Laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie (LPP; UMR 7018), is: Annie Rialland (project leader), Cédric Patin (Maître de Conférences, STL, Université Lille 3), Jean-Marc Beltzung (post-doc), Martial Embanga Aborobongui (doctoral student), Fatima Hamlaoui (post-doc). The Lyon team, at the Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) is: Gérard Philippson (project leader) and Sophie Manus (Maître de Conférences, Université Lyon 2). These three research teams bring together the range of theoretical expertise necessary to investigate the phonology-syntax interface: intonation (Patin, Rialland), tonal phonology (Aborobongui, Downing, Manus, Patin, Philippson, Rialland), phonology-syntax interface (Downing, Patin) and formal syntax (Riedel, Hamlaoui). They also bring together a range of Bantu language expertise: Western Bantu (Aboronbongui, Rialland), Eastern Bantu (Manus, Patin, Philippson, Riedel), and Southern Bantu (Downing).  

scholarly journals Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Laura J. Downing
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Subject

In spite of this long history, most work to date on the phonology-syntax interface in Bantu languages suffers from limitations, due to the range of expertise required: intonation, phonology, syntax. Quite generally, intonational studies on African languages are extremely rare. Most of the existing data has not been the subject of careful phonetic analysis, whether of the prosody of neutral sentences or of questions or other focus structures. There are important gaps in our knowledge of Bantu syntax which in turn limit our understanding of the phonology-syntax interface. Recent developments in syntactic theory have provided a new way of thinking about the type of syntactic information that phonology can refer to and have raised new questions: Do only syntactic constituent edges condition prosodic phrasing? Do larger domains such as syntactic phases, or even other factors, like argument and adjunct distinctions, play a role? Further, earlier studies looked at a limited range of syntactic constructions. Little research exists on the phonology of focus or of sentences with non-canonical word order in Bantu languages. Both the prosody and the syntax of complex sentences, questions and dislocations are understudied for Bantu languages. Our project aims to remedy these gaps in our knowledge by bringing together a research team with all the necessary expertise. Further, by undertaking the intonational, phonological and syntactic analysis of several languages we can investigate whether there is any correlation among differences in morphosyntactic and prosodic properties that might also explain differences in phrasing and intonation. It will also allow us to investigate whether there are cross-linguistically common prosodic patterns for particular morpho-syntactic structure.  

Spanning versus Constituent Lexicalization

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Tarald Taraldsen
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Input Tree ◽  
Bantu Languages

This chapter seeks to evaluate the relative merits of two competing views of how lexical insertion should work in a nanosyntactic framework. One view holds that a sequence of heads meeting certain conditions, a “span,” can be replaced by a single morpheme even when those heads do not form a constituent in the input tree. The other view allows lexical insertion only to target constituents. The article focuses on certain properties of portmanteau prefixes identified by investigating the nominal class prefixes in Bantu languages. Accounting for portmanteau prefixes looks like a serious challenge to the theory restricting lexical insertion to constituents. They can be accommodated by positing only a richer syntactic structure than is usual. However, various empirical arguments show that the richer syntactic structure is in fact needed in an analysis of the nominal class prefixes in Bantu and that this conclusion extends to class prefixes in other languages.

Again on relative clause and subordination in Latin

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gualtiero Calboli
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Central Point ◽  
Relative Pronoun ◽  
Case Theory ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

AbstractI started from the relative clause which occurs in Hittite, and in particular with the enclitic position of the relative pronoun. This is connected with the OV position and this position seems to have been prevailing in Hittite and PIE. The syntactic structure usually employed in Hittite between different clauses is the parataxis. Nevertheless, also the hypotaxis begins to be employed and the best occasion to use it was the diptych as suggested by Haudry, though he didn't consider the most natural and usual diptych: the law, where the crime and the sanction build a natural diptych already in old Hittite. Then I used Justus' and Boley's discussion on the structure of Hittite sentence and found a similarity with Latin, namely the use of an animate subject as central point of a sentence. With verbs of action in ancient languages the subject was normally an animate being, whereas also inanimate subject is employed in modern languages. This seems to be the major difference between ancient and modern structure of a sentence, or, better to say, in Hittite and PIE the subject was an animate being and this persisted a long time, and remained as a tendency in Latin, while in following languages and in classical grammar the subject became a simple nominal “entity” to be predicated and precised with verb and other linguistic instruments. A glance has been cast also to pronouns and particles (sometimes linked together) as instruments of linking nominal variants of coordinate or subordinate clauses and to the development of demonstrative/deictic pronouns. Also in ancient case theory a prevailing position was assured to the nominative case, the case of the subject.

How ‘person’ got into focus: Grammaticalization of clefts in Lingala and Kikongo areas

Linguistics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenneke van der Wal ◽  
Jacky Maniacky
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject

AbstractIn several Bantu languages in the regions where Kikongo and Lingala are spoken, we encounter sentences where the word ‘person’ can appear after the subject of a canonical SVO sentence, resulting in a focused interpretation of the subject. Synchronically, we analyze this as a monoclausal focus construction with moto ‘person’ as a focus marker. Diachronically, we argue, the construction derives from a biclausal cleft, where moto functioned as the head noun of the relative clause. This is a crosslinguistically rare but plausible development. The different languages studied in this paper show variation in the properties indicative of the status of the ‘moto construction’, which reflects the different stages of grammaticalization. Finally, we show how contact-induced grammaticalization is a likely factor in the development of moto as a focus marker.

scholarly journals A Self-Supervised Representation Learning of Sentence Structure for Authorship Attribution

2022 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Fereshteh Jafariakinabad ◽  
Kien A. Hua
Keyword(s):  
Structural Information ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Authorship Attribution ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Vector Representation ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Neural Models ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Classification Tasks

The syntactic structure of sentences in a document substantially informs about its authorial writing style. Sentence representation learning has been widely explored in recent years and it has been shown that it improves the generalization of different downstream tasks across many domains. Even though utilizing probing methods in several studies suggests that these learned contextual representations implicitly encode some amount of syntax, explicit syntactic information further improves the performance of deep neural models in the domain of authorship attribution. These observations have motivated us to investigate the explicit representation learning of syntactic structure of sentences. In this article, we propose a self-supervised framework for learning structural representations of sentences. The self-supervised network contains two components; a lexical sub-network and a syntactic sub-network which take the sequence of words and their corresponding structural labels as the input, respectively. Due to the n -to-1 mapping of words to their structural labels, each word will be embedded into a vector representation which mainly carries structural information. We evaluate the learned structural representations of sentences using different probing tasks, and subsequently utilize them in the authorship attribution task. Our experimental results indicate that the structural embeddings significantly improve the classification tasks when concatenated with the existing pre-trained word embeddings.

TIM EWERS (b. 1958)Moondrunk (2000)

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-68
Author(s):  
Jane Manning
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Direct Reference ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Second Viennese School ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
Pierrot Lunaire

This chapter discusses English composer Tim Ewers’s Moondrunk (2000). This short piece is a confident and clearly imagined setting of an English translation of the first poem of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 masterpiece for voice and ensemble, Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21. Though brief, it should prove a useful and characterful item for a recital programme, especially one containing lengthier pieces, perhaps based around other works from the Second Viennese School or, alternatively, a collection of songs about the moon. The tessitura is wide-ranging, but within the reach of most voices, although a female voice was originally envisaged, in direct reference to Schoenberg’s seminal work. The musical idiom is pleasingly logical in its chromaticism, with frequent use of tritones. As always, when singing unaccompanied, the vocalist will need to be scrupulous about tuning intervals, avoiding microtonal slippage. Despite moments of freedom and rubato, rhythmic discipline is an important factor, and a sense of pulse needs to be preserved. Within this modest time span, the singer has to create and sustain a welter of shifting nocturnal moods, both threatening and intoxicating.

Lexical government and tone group formation in Xiamen Chinese

Phonology ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo-wang Lin
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Group Formation ◽  
Phonological Representation ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Tone Sandhi ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Syntactic Information

The study of the relation between syntactic structure and phonological representation has attracted the attention of many phonologists in the past few years. One important contribution to this field of study is Chen's (1987) work on Xiamen Chinese tone sandhi domains. He suggests that the syntax–phonology relation appeals to syntactic information such as category types and the edges of syntactic bracketings. This insight has been further elaborated in the general theory of the syntax—phonology relation of Selkirk (1986). In this theory, the relation between syntactic structure and prosodic structure above the foot and below the intonational phrase is defined in terms of the edges of syntactic constituents of designated types. More precisely, this theory incorporates two hypotheses. One is that there are designated category types in syntactic structure with respect to which one end (Right or Left) of the designated category is relevant in the formulation of a prosodic constituent C, which extends from one instance of the appropriate end (R/L) of the designated category to the next. This hypothesis has been called the End Parameter.

scholarly journals The Syntax and Prosody of Weak Pronouns in Chamorro

2003 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Chung
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Mutual Interaction ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Austronesian Language ◽  
Independent Components ◽  
Prosodic Phrase ◽  
Phonological Phrase

In the modular linguistic theory assumed by many generative linguists, phonology and syntax are interconnected but fundamentally independent components of grammar. The effects of syntax on phonology are mediated by prosodic structure, a representation of prosodic constituents calculated from syntactic structure but not isomorphic to it. Within this overall architecture, I investigate the placement of weak pronouns in the Austronesian language Chamorro. Certain Chamorro pronominals can be realized as prosodically deficient weak pronouns that typically occur right after the predicate. I showthat these pronouns are second-position clitics whose placement is determined not syntactically, but prosodically: they occur after the leftmost phonological phrase of their intonational phrase. My analysis of these clitics assumes that lexical insertion is late and can affect and be affected by prosodic phrase formation-assumptions consistent with the view that the mutual interaction of phonology and syntax is confined to the postsyntactic operations that translate syntactic structure into prosodic structure.

scholarly journals On the Correction to Precession from Proper Motions Referred to Galaxies

1971 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 163-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Vasilevskis ◽  
A. R. Klemola
Keyword(s):  
Proper Motion ◽  
Direct Relationship ◽  
Fundamental System ◽  
Direct Reference ◽  
Meridian Circle ◽  
Proper Motions ◽  
Obvious Advantage ◽  
Naval Observatory ◽  
Cooperative Project ◽  
The U.S

One of the principal aims of the Lick proper motion program, as conceived and initiated by Wright (1950), was to derive the correction to precession. Ideally, proper motions of stars from a fundamental catalogue should be measured with respect to galaxies. Unfortunately, these stars are too bright for a direct reference to faint galaxies, even with an objective grating and two systems of exposures (2 h and 1 min) on every plate, as employed at Lick. For this reason a cooperative project with the U.S. Naval Observatory was initiated in 1953 (Scott, 1954; Vasilevskis, 1954), with an intention to establish a direct relationship between meridian circle and Lick observations. When Heckmann (1954) proposed the formation of the AGK3, it was agreed to discontinue the cooperation mentioned, so as to make the resources of the U.S. Naval Observatory available for observing the AGK3 reference stars, and then to use the AGK3 as an intermediary for relating the Lick proper motions to a fundamental system. An obvious advantage of this change was offered by the abundance of AGK stars for measurement on Lick plates; a disadvantage is the absence of the AGK3 data south of declination –2.°5.

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