scholarly journals ADJECTIVE SEQUENCING IN GA

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 71-95
Author(s):  
Yvonne Akwele Amankwaa Ollennu
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
Syntactic Rule ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Nominal Phrase ◽  
Semantic Classes ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The use of multiple words to describe nouns is a common phenomenon in language and languages that have adjectives employ this word class.Ga, a Kwa language of the Niger Congo, branch is no exception, whereas languages without adjectives may use other lexical categories like nouns and verbs which play the adjectival role. Ga has adjectives and employs them as attributives for nouns. The paper examines the syntactic rule governing the occurence of several adjectives serving as attibtutes of a single head noun. In this paper the noun is considered as the head of the Ga Nominal Phrase. The order of these adjectives has not received scholarly attention in Ga and this is to fill that gap in the literature. I argued that the order of adjectives is not haphazardly arranged but follows a laid down syntactc prescription. For instance the data showed that Dimension adjectives normall occur in first position, whereas colour adjectives occur further from the head noun. It was also revealed that in the ordering of adjectives in which Value adjectives is included, the Age adjective occurs in last position and Value adjective occurs first or last when included in the ordering of adjectives for a noun. Consequently, it is opined that defying the arrangement in the ordering of the adjectives resulted in unacceptable forms.The adjectives are grouped according to  Dixon semantic classes. Data is gathered from native speakers of Ga. The findings contribute to the existing literature on adjective sequencing in Ghanaian languages.

Why is this happened? Passive morphology and unaccusativity

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Balcom
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Syntactic Rule ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Unaccusative Verbs

Zobl discussed inappropriate passive morphology (‘be’ and the past participle) in the English writing of L2 learners, linking its occurrence to the class of unaccusative verbs and proposing that learners subsume unaccusatives under the syntactic rule for passive formation. The research reported here supports and amplifies Zobl' proposal, based on a grammaticality judgement task and a controlled production task containing verbs from a variety of subclasses of unaccusatives. The tasks were administered to Chinese L1 learners of English and a control group of English native speakers. Results show that subjects both used and judged as grammatical inappropriate passive morphology with all verbs falling under the rubric of unaccusativity. The article concludes with linguistic representations which maintain Zobl’s insights but are consistent with current theories of argument structure.

Group genitive in Swedish – s-genitive as a phrase marker

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-252
Author(s):  
Alicja Piotrowska
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Prepositional Phrase ◽  
Nominal Phrase ◽  
Colloquial Language ◽  
The Status

Abstract In this paper I discuss the constructions with the group genitive and their use in today’s Swedish. The development of the s-genitive from a diachronic perspective, its degrammaticalization and the status of the s-genitive are discussed. The aim of the paper is to examine and analyse the use of the group genitive in the Swedish nominal phrases in three contexts, i. e. coordinated nominal phrases, nominal phrase with a prepositional phrase and nominal phrase with a relative clause. The group genitive’s domain is above all spoken, colloquial language. The analysed material consists of authentic examples of everyday use of language from the Swedish corpus Språkbanken and a questionnaire conducted among native speakers. The study shows that the group genitive is very productive with various types of nominal phrases in Swedish, even though it is still limited to colloquial and non-formal use of language.

Stoic syntax and semantics

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Urs Egli
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
Syntactic Rule ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Definite Clause Grammar ◽  
Explicit Statement ◽  
Structural Ambiguity

Summary The Stoic theory of loquia (lekta) contained a fairly explicit statement of formation rules. It is argued that one type of rule was called syntaxis (combination or phrase structure rule) by Chrysippus (e.g., “a subject in the nominative case and a complete predicate form a statement”). Two other types of rule were assignments of words to lexical categories (“Dion is a Noun Phrase”) and subsumption rules (“Every elementary statement is a statement”), often formulated in the form of subdivisions of concepts. A fourth type of rule seems to have been the class of transformations (enklisis, e.g., “A statement transformed by the preterite transformation is a statement”). Every syntactic rule was accompanied by a semantic interpretation according to a version of the compositionality principle familiar in modern times since Frege and elaborated by Montague and his followers. Though the concrete example of a syntax was a fairly elaborate version of some sort of Montague type or definite clause grammar, there was no effort to introduce a theory of grammar in the style of Chomsky. But the texts show awareness of the problem of the infinity of structure generated and of the concept of structural ambiguity. The Stoic system has been transformed into the formulation of the Word and Paradigm Grammar of the technical grammarians – “transformation” (enklisis) was the historical antecedent of paragôgê, declinatio, “inflection”, etc. Some formulations have survived into modern times, e.g., the notion of government, for which Stoic type formulations like “a deficient predicate can be combined with a subject in the accusative case to form a complete predicate” are a historical antecedent.

Information status and English relative constructions: A corpus-based study of Japanese learners in spoken language

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megumi Okugiri
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Information Preference ◽  
Information Status ◽  
Japanese Learners

AbstractThis study investigates Japanese learners’ production of English relative constructions, focusing on the information preference of noun phrases in spoken discourse. The constructions of Japanese learners and of native speakers of English were extracted from a spoken corpus according to learners’ English proficiency levels. The information status (New, Given, and Identifiable) of head noun phrases modified by relative clauses were also examined. The results found that, in an attempt to keep spoken communication coherent, native speakers and learners of all levels prefer general grammatical and pragmatic configurations in their production of English relative constructions. This preference is called the Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 1987). However, Japanese learners and native speakers did not share the same preference of language-specific information status. The results suggest that first language information preference plays a crucial role in second language acquisition, especially during the early stages of acquisition. They also suggest that discoursal properties affect the mechanisms and motivations of relative clause constructions in second language acquisition.

The production of gender agreement in native and L2 Spanish: The role of morphophonological form

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Foote
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Model Simulations ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
And Gender

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present study was to examine the role of morphophonological cues to gender in the production of gender agreement in native speakers and second language learners of Spanish in light of the Marking and Morphing account of agreement (Eberhard et al., 2005). Participants repeated and completed complex subject noun phrases with head nouns that varied in gender and gender-marking transparency. Analyses of accuracy rates along with Marking and Morphing model simulations of the results indicated that, contrary to previous findings, native speakers were not affected by gender-marking transparency. However, based on model simulations, second language (L2) learners were affected by the morphophonological form of the head noun.

Processing Chinese relative clauses in context by Italian L3 learners

2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832110026
Author(s):  
Shenai Hu ◽  
Carlo Toneatto ◽  
Silvia Pozzi ◽  
Maria Teresa Guasti
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Chinese Subject ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Structural Distance ◽  
Two Populations ◽  
Object Relative

The present study investigates third language (L3) learners’ processing of Chinese subject and object relative clauses in a supportive context. Using a self-paced reading task, we tested native Italian L3 learners of Mandarin Chinese and native Chinese speakers. The results showed that the L3 learners read significantly more slowly than the native speakers in all the target regions. Also, in the head noun region, they read object relative clauses significantly more slowly compared to subject relative clauses, indicating a preference for the latter. By contrast, for the native speakers, no significant differences were observed between subject and object relative clauses in any of the target regions. The L3 learners’ performance offers support for the Structural Distance Hypothesis over the Dependency Locality Theory, and the contrast between the two populations indicates that context is at play in the processing of relative clauses.

scholarly journals THE MODELLING OF THE DOMAINS OF THE EXPRESSION OF THE CONCEPT OF LANGUAGE IN THE BRITISH PUBLICISTIC DISCOURSE ON THE BASIS OF THE CHI-SQUARE CRITERION

2021 ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Myroslava Kovaliuk
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Semantic Classes ◽  
Education Science ◽  
Modern Technologies

The article is devoted to the modelling of domains which express the concept of LANGUAGE in the British publicistic discourse on the basis of the χ2 criterion. A domain is a cognitive model that contains a set of features that are revealed when the concept name is combined with accompanying words. To determine the domains of the expression of the concept under study, the adjoining words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) are analyzed in one syntactic frame together with the nominative lexeme „language". Accompanying nouns, verbs and adjectives to the concept name of LANGUAGE are grouped by common thematic features and divided into lexical-semantic classes (LSCs), representing the spheres of concept expression: nouns constitute forty LSCs, verbs account for thirty-five LSCs, adjectives amount to twenty-six LSCs. The statistic-linguistic method of the χ²-test was employed to determine the lexical-semantic classes (LSCs) of adjoining lexemes associated with the name of the concept that are predominantly used in publicistic discourse and thus establish the most relevant areas of expression of the concept in the articles of the British publicistic discourse. On the basis of the dominant LSCs in accordance with the χ2 criterion, domains of the expression of the concept of LANGUAGE were identified. Fourteen domains („linguistic features of language”, „purity of speech”, „origin and territorial functioning of language”, „the existence of language and attitude to it”, „people as native speakers”, „education / science”, „communication / emphatics in relation to language”, „political and military spheres”, „modern technologies”, „religion”, „social spheres (Economics, Law, Sports) ”, „art / mass media”, „time”, „body language”) were determined.The broadest domain is the domain of „linguistic features of language”, which contains eight lexical-semantic classes. Such domains as „body language”, „the origin and territorial functioning of the language”, „purity of speech”, „people as native speakers”, „social spheres (Economics, Law, Sports)”, „education / science”, „modern technologies” are quite numerous in the discourse under study, since they make up six LSCs. The least used are the domains of „art / mass media”, „time”, „religion” (only two LSCs).

scholarly journals Encoding definiteness on pronominal objects in Mordvinic

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (65) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariann Bernhardt
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Object Function ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Semantic Classes ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Perception Verbs ◽  
Good Material ◽  
Morphological Differences

This article examines the morphosyntax of pronouns in object function and reveals the syntactic and morphological differences between nominal and pronominal objects in Mordvinic. The variation in case marking and declension type of nominal objects is affected by definiteness. Indefinite objects are in the basic declension nominative, whereas definite ones are in the definite or possessive declension genitive. Furthermore, definite objects may be indexed on the verb. In this paper, I analyze the morphosyntax of pronouns, in order to reveal the regularities between semantics and morphological marking and to provide a better understanding of definiteness. For this purpose, the finite forms of perception verbs were collected from the MokshEr corpus, which contains written texts in the literary languages, and native speakers were consulted on the results. Perception verbs were chosen for this study because they agree with the object in person and number more frequently than other semantic classes of verbs, thus providing good material for examining the correlation of definiteness with verbal conjugation. The paper shows how definiteness is displayed within the morphosyntax of pronouns and uncovers how verbal conjugation correlates with different pronominal objects.

Processing Chinese relative clauses: An investigation of second-language learners from different learning contexts

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qin Yao ◽  
Claire Renaud
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Opposite Pattern ◽  
The Us ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Matrix Subject

AbstractThe goal of this study is to examine the processing of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) through a self-paced reading task and to determine whether the learning environment plays a role in the second-language (L2) acquisition of RCs. We investigated two types of RCs (subject vs. object RCs) along with two positions in which a RC can occur (modifying a matrix subject noun phrase [NP] vs. a matrix object NP). Eighteen native speakers of Chinese and twenty-one L2 learners at an intermediate proficiency level participated in the study. Ten learners were students learning Chinese in the US (i. e., in a foreign-language context), whereas the other eleven learners were students studying Chinese in China (i. e., in a study-abroad context). The comprehension of sentences containing a RC and reading times (RTs) on the RC and the head noun (the segment immediately following the RC) were analyzed. The results show distinct patterns for the learners and the native speakers. The accuracy data reveals that the L2 learners in China performed better than the L2 learners in the US. Additionally, the L2 learners in China exhibited a processing speed advantage to the L2 learners in the US. The RT data highlighted important asymmetries in the L2 learners in the US and the native speakers, while the results were flat for the L2 learners in China. Specifically, L2 learners in the US took longer to read object RCs than subject RCs while the opposite pattern was obtained for the L1 speakers. Moreover, matrix-object-modifying RCs revealed shorter RTs than matrix-subject-modifying RCs for L2 learners in the US, whereas the opposite pattern was found for the L1 speakers. These findings are discussed in light of the Linear Distance Theory and the Structural Distance Theory (e. g., O’Grady 1997. Syntactic development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Overall, these results seem to provide support to the assumption that changes in syntactic processing happen as a result of exposure to the language environment (Cuetos et al. 1996. Parsing in different languages. In Manuel Carreias, Jose E. Garcia-Albea & Nuria Sebastien-Galles (eds.), Language processing in Spanish, 145–187. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum; Frenck–Mestre 2002. An on-line look at sentence processing in the second language. In Roberto Heredia & Jeanette Altarriba (eds.), Bilingual sentence processing, 217–236. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.).

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