scholarly journals Function Words at the Interface: A Two-Tier Approach

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Tina Bögel
Keyword(s):  
Hand Function ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Mapping Algorithms ◽  
Word Structure ◽  
Prosodic Word ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
Focus Structure ◽  
Prosodic Structures ◽  
The One

The distinction between function words and content words poses a challenge to theories of the syntax–prosody interface. On the one hand, function words are “ignored” by the mapping algorithms; that is, function words are not mapped to prosodic words. On the other hand, there are numerous accounts of function words which form prosodic words and can even be analysed as heads of larger prosodic units. Furthermore, function words seem to be a driving factor for the formation of prosodic structures in that they can largely be held accountable for the non-isomorphism between syntactic and prosodic constituency. This paper discusses these challenges with a focus on a particular function word, and the first-person nominative pronoun in Swabian, a Southern German dialect. By means of two corpus studies, it is shown that the pronoun occurs in two forms, the prosodic word [i:] and the enclitic [ə]. Depending on clause position and focus structure, the forms occur in complementary distribution. Occurrences of n-insertion allow for the establishment of a recursive prosodic word structure at the level of the phonological module. The findings support a new proposal in the form of a two-tier mapping approach to the interface between syntax and prosody.

Prosodic differences among function words

Phonology ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Draga Zec
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Functional Elements ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Prosodic Word ◽  
The One ◽  
Single Set

Function words in standard Serbian fall into two classes: prosodically free functional elements on the one hand, and prosodically bound functional elements, or clitics, on the other. The two classes have overlapping syntactic distributions, yet exhibit clear prosodic differences. Free functional elements may become prosodic words if they are minimally disyllabic, or if focused, and in this they crucially differ from clitics, whose only prosodic option is to be included into the host prosodic word. It is argued that the prosodic properties of the two classes of function words cannot be captured by a single set of ranked constraints, and that one of the classes, the class of clitics, needs to be encoded lexically, by virtue of prosodic prespecification.

Templates as the interaction of recursive word structure and prosodic well-formedness

Phonology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ara Guekguezian
Keyword(s):  
Word Structure ◽  
Prosodic Word ◽  
Templatic Morphology ◽  
Special Apparatus ◽  
Whole Word

Templatic morphology involves the appearance of a fixed shape on a morpheme in a specific morphological context. This paper makes two claims: the morphological context of a template is syntactically cyclic, resulting in recursive prosodic word structure, and the shape of a template results from prosodic well-formedness conditions on the internal prosodic word. Templatic morphology in Chukchansi Yokuts illustrates these claims: affixes that trigger templates transfer the root to the phonology before other material is transferred, so that the root forms a prosodic word which is internal to the whole word. Roots with one underlying vowel are augmented to meet a disyllabic minimality requirement on prosodic words; the resulting disyllable forms a light–heavy iamb, to optimally satisfy Chukchansi parsing requirements. Templatic morphology falls out from the predictable interaction of the syntax–phonology interface and general phonological properties of a language, and needs no special apparatus or diacritics.

scholarly journals Phonological Words and Stuttering on Function Words

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 1019-1030 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Au-Yeung ◽  
Peter Howell ◽  
Lesley Pilgrim
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Content Word ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Phonological Word ◽  
The People

Stuttering on function words was examined in 51 people who stutter. The people who stutter were subdivided into young (2 to 6 years), middle (6 to 9 years), and older (9 to 12 years) child groups; teenagers (13 to 18 years); and adults (20 to 40 years). As reported by previous researchers, children up to about age 9 stuttered more on function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs), whereas older people tended to stutter more on content words (nouns, main verbs, adverbs, adjectives). Function words in early positions in utterances, again as reported elsewhere, were more likely to be stuttered than function words at later positions in an utterance. This was most apparent for the younger groups of speakers. For the remaining analyses, utterances were segmented into phonological words on the basis of Selkirk’s work (1984). Stuttering rate was higher when function words occurred in early phonological word positions than other phonological word positions whether the phonological word appeared in initial position in an utterance or not. Stuttering rate was highly dependent on whether the function word occurred before or after the single content word allowed in Selkirk’s (1984) phonological words. This applied, once again, whether the phonological word was utterance-initial or not. It is argued that stuttering of function words before their content word in phonological words in young speakers is used as a delaying tactic when the forthcoming content word is not prepared for articulation.

scholarly journals Unique function words characterize genomic proteins

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (26) ◽  
pp. 6703-6708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Scaiewicz ◽  
Michael Levitt
Keyword(s):  
Domain Architecture ◽  
Protein Sequences ◽  
Genomic Diversity ◽  
Unique Function ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Sequence Motif ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Conserved Domain ◽  
Sequence Profiles ◽  
Multiple Domain

Between 2009 and 2016 the number of protein sequences from known species increased 10-fold from 8 million to 85 million. About 80% of these sequences contain at least one region recognized by the conserved domain architecture retrieval tool (CDART) as a sequence motif. Motifs provide clues to biological function but CDART often matches the same region of a protein by two or more profiles. Such synonyms complicate estimates of functional complexity. We do full-linkage clustering of redundant profiles by finding maximum disjoint cliques: Each cluster is replaced by a single representative profile to give what we term a unique function word (UFW). From 2009 to 2016, the number of sequence profiles used by CDART increased by 80%; the number of UFWs increased more slowly by 30%, indicating that the number of UFWs may be saturating. The number of sequences matched by a single UFW (sequences with single domain architectures) increased as slowly as the number of different words, whereas the number of sequences matched by a combination of two or more UFWs in sequences with multiple domain architectures (MDAs) increased at the same rate as the total number of sequences. This combinatorial arrangement of a limited number of UFWs in MDAs accounts for the genomic diversity of protein sequences. Although eukaryotes and prokaryotes use very similar sets of “words” or UFWs (57% shared), the “sentences” (MDAs) are different (1.3% shared).

Function words and polarity

2021 ◽  
pp. 66-85
Author(s):  
Matteo Greco
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Closed Class ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The One ◽  
Syntactic Derivation

Function words are commonly considered to be a small and closed class of words in which each element is associated with a specific and fixed logical meaning. Unfortunately, this is not always true as witnessed by negation: on the one hand, negation does reverse the truth-value conditions of a proposition, and the other hand, it does not, realizing what is called Expletive Negation. This chapter aims to investigate whether a word that is established on the basis of its function can be ambiguous by discussing the role of the syntactic derivation in some instances of so-called Expletive Negation clauses, a case in which negation seems to lose its capacity to deny the proposition associated with its sentence. Both a theoretical and an experimental approach has been adopted.

scholarly journals Segmentation of vowel-initial words is facilitated by function words

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
YUN JUNG KIM ◽  
MEGHA SUNDARA
Keyword(s):  
Function Word ◽  
First Year ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Fluent Speech ◽  
First Year Of Life

AbstractWithin the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1–1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not 0;8 are able to segment vowel-initial words that immediately follow the function word the [ði], while ruling out a bottom-up, phonotactic account of these results. Thus, function words facilitate the segmentation of vowel-initial words that appear sentence-medially for infants aged 0;11.

Children's Responses to Telegraphic and Grammatically Complete Prompts to Imitate

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley L. Bredin-Oja ◽  
Marc E. Fey
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Semantic Relation ◽  
Language Delay ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Intervention Technique ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Alternating Treatment Design ◽  
Treatment Design

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to determine whether children in the early stage of combining words are more likely to respond to imitation prompts that are telegraphic than to prompts that are grammatically complete and whether they produce obligatory grammatical morphemes more reliably in response to grammatically complete imitation prompts than to telegraphic prompts.MethodFive children between 30 and 51 months of age with language delay participated in a single-case alternating treatment design with 14 sessions split between a grammatical and a telegraphic condition. Alternating orders of the 14 sessions were randomly assigned to each child. Children were given 15 prompts to imitate a semantic relation that was either grammatically complete or telegraphic.ResultsNo differences between conditions were found for the number of responses that contained a semantic relation. In contrast, 3 of the 5 children produced significantly more grammatical morphemes when presented with grammatically complete imitation prompts. Two children did not include a function word in either condition.ConclusionProviding a telegraphic prompt to imitate does not offer any advantage as an intervention technique. Children are just as likely to respond to a grammatically complete imitation prompt. Further, including function words encourages children who are developmentally ready to imitate them.

Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bates ◽  
Virginia Marchman ◽  
Donna Thal ◽  
Larry Fenson ◽  
Philip Dale ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Maternal Education ◽  
Linear Increase ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Small Samples ◽  
Initial Increase ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Closed Class

ABSTRACTResults are reported for stylistic and developmental aspects of vocabulary composition for 1, 803 children and families who participated in the tri-city norming of a new parental report instrument, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. We replicate previous studies with small samples showing extensive variation in use of common nouns between age o;8 and 1;4 (i.e. ‘referential style’), and in the proportion of vocabulary made up of closed-class words between 1;4 and 2;6 (i.e. ‘analytic’ vs. ‘holistic’ style). However, both style dimensions are confounded with developmental changes in the composition of the lexicon, including three ‘waves’ of reorganization: (1) an initial increase in percentage of common nouns from 0 to 100 words, followed by a proportional decrease; (2) a slow linear increase in verbs and other predicates, with the greatest gains taking place between 100 and 400 words; (3) no proportional development at all in the use of closed-class vocabulary between 0 and 400 words, followed by a sharp increase from 400 to 680 words. When developmental changes in noun use are controlled, referential-style measures do not show the association with developmental precocity reported in previous studies, although these scores are related to maternal education. By contrast, when developmental changes in grammatical function word use are controlled, high closed-class scores are associated with a slower rate of development. We suggest that younger children may have less perceptual acuity and/or shorter memory spans than older children with the same vocabulary size. As a result, the younger children may ignore unstressed function words until a later point in development while the older children tend to reproduce perceptual details that they do not yet understand. Longitudinal data show that early use of function words (under 400 words) is not related to grammatical levels after the 4OO-word point, confirming our ‘stylistic’ interpretation of early closed-class usage. We close with recommendations for the unconfounding of stylistic and developmental variance in research on individual differences in language development, and provide look-up tables that will permit other investigators to pull these aspects apart.

An analysis of medical synonyms

Terminology ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keita Tsuji ◽  
Kyo Kageura
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Dominant Term ◽  
Word Structure ◽  
Medical Dictionary ◽  
The One

This paper attempts to clarify the types of terms which are likely to be preferred among synonyms. We regard the term referred to by the other synonyms in a dictionary as the dominant term among synonyms. More than 2,000 pairs of Japanese synonymous terms for diseases are extracted from a standard medical dictionary, and their word-structures are analysed in relation with the preferred and non-preferred terms. It was found that the terms which include person names or virus names are likely to be dominant and that the terms which include place names or suffixes are not likely to be dominant. The relation between the concept which should be conveyed by the term and the one which is actually conveyed through the word-structure is discussed.

scholarly journals Language mixing in young bilinguals

1980 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy E. Redlinger ◽  
Tschang-Zin Park
Keyword(s):  
System Theory ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
Language Differentiation ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The One

ABSTRACTThe speech of four two-year-old children growing up bilingually in a German-speaking community was studied for periods varying between five and nine months. An analysis of their language mixing revealed an initially higher rate of mixing which diminished with a growth in language development as measured in MLU. The data suggest that the children were at various stages in a gradual process of language differentiation thus providing support for the one-system theory of bilingual acquisition. An examination of the distribution of lexical substitutions by part of speech revealed that nouns were most frequently substituted by all children; however, more function words were substituted than content words overall.

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