Object case variation of the pronoun mis ‘what’ in spontaneous spoken Estonian and Estonian dialects

The Estonian language makes a systematic distinction between total and partial objects on the basis of semantic and syntactic features: total objects occur in nominative or genitive, partial objects in partitive. However, in the case of the interrogative-relative pronoun mis ‘what’, the partitive mida in the expected partial object position can be replaced with the nominative mis. The aim of this paper is to determine which variables significantly affect this object case variation, how the variation differs between contemporary speech and archaic dialects and what might have possibly motivated the development of this variation. This study is based on the data in the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech and the Corpus of Estonian Dialects. The results show that the variation is most affected by verb type, clause type, length of the following word and dialect. It is concluded that there might be multiple motivations behind this variation, mainly language contact (or a lack of it in certain areas), high usage frequency of the pronoun mis and the effect of the standardisation of language. Kokkuvõte. Hanna Pook: Pronoomeni mis käände varieerumine objekti positsioonis spontaanses eesti keeles ja eesti murretes. Eesti keeles eristatakse täis- ja osasihitist mitmete semantiliste ja süntaktilise tunnuste põhjal; täissihitis on nominatiivis või genitiivis, osasihitis partitiivis. Relatiiv-interrogatiivpronoomeni mis puhul võib aga oodatud osasihitise positsioonis asendada partitiivi mida nominatiiviga mis. Selle artikli eesmärk on välja selgitada, millised tunnused mõjutavad oluliselt pronoomeni mis objekti käände varieerumist, kuidas see varieerumine erineb vanemates kohamurretes ja tänapäevases spontaanses kõnes ning mis on selle varieerumise võimalikud põhjused ja mõjurid. Analüüs põhineb eesti keele spontaanse kõne foneetilisel korpusel ja eesti murrete korpusel. Tulemused näitavad, et mis ja mida varieerumist osaobjekti positsioonis mõjutavad kõige enam verbitüüp, lausetüüp, järgneva sõna silpide arv ja murre. On tõenäoline, et pronoomeni mis käände varieerumine on korraga olnud mõjutatud mitmest tegurist, peamiselt keelekontaktidest (või kontaktivähesusest teatud piirkondades), pronoomeni mis suurest kasutussagedusest ja keele standardiseerimisest.

Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Romanian

The geographical varieties of Romanian spoken in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and adjacent regions are largely mutually intelligible. More important are the differences between these varieties (known as “Dacoromanian”) and the South-Danubian varieties of Aromanian, Meglenoromanian, and Istroromanian, which have been separated from (Daco-)Romanian for a very long time, but qualify as dialects of Romanian from a historical and comparative Romance perspective. Standard Romanian is based on the southern dialect of Dacoromanian, in particular the variety of Muntenia, but also includes features taken from other dialects (e.g., the 3pl imperfect -au, the absence of “iotacism” in verb forms—văd instead of the etymological vă(d)z ‘see.1sg’ < Lat. *uidi̯o < uideō, with the regular sound change -di̯->-dz->-z-). A unified standard language was established around the middle of the 19th century. Some of the differences between the high and the colloquial register of standard Romanian are due to innovations characterizing southern varieties: the demonstrative system (high register acest(a), acel(a) versus colloquial ăsta, ăla), the future (high register voi [inflected] + infinitive versus colloquial o [uninflected] + subjunctive), the use of the infinitive (more restricted in the colloquial register than in the high register), and the presumptive mood (mostly colloquial, representing a modal epistemic specialization of a future form oi + infinitive, which is itself an innovation with respect to voi + infinitive). Some of the features by which substandard varieties differ from the standard language represent innovations: the replacement of the inflectional dative and genitive by prepositional constructions, the change of the relative pronoun care into a complementizer, and the loss of the number contrast in the 3rd person of verbs (the latter representing a recent development, mostly found in the southern varieties, but also in parts of Crişana and Transylvania). The loss of agreement with the possessee on the genitival article al is an innovation that first appeared in the northern dialect and subsequently gained ground across substandard varieties. Northern varieties, especially in peripheral areas (Crişana, Maramureş, northern Moldova), preserve a number of archaic features that disappeared from the standard language, for example, the productivity of verb-clitic word orders (with both auxiliary and pronominal clitics), the use of al-Genitive-N word orders, the conditional periphrases vream + infinitive and reaş + infinitive (the latter in Banat), and, as a widespread phenomenon, the 3sg=3pl homonymy in the perfect auxiliary (in the form o < au). Compared to the colloquial standard language, northern varieties preserve the infinitive better. An innovative feature characteristic of northern varieties is the use of periphrastic forms for the imperfect and pluperfect. As conservative features found in some nonstandard southern varieties, we may cite the use of the synthetic perfect (which in the standard language is restricted to the written register) and the stress on the oblique determiner/pronominal endings (ăstúia vs. ắstuia).

Clefts in Naija, a Nigerian pidgincreole

This paper is a corpus-based study of the various forms and uses of clefts in Naija, the largest West-African English lexifier pidgincreole, spoken in Nigeria and its diaspora as a second language by close to 100 million speakers. The data on which this paper is based is taken from the 500,000 word ANR-NaijaSynCor corpus, consisting of 300 samples of spontaneous speech, recorded in 2017 in 13 different locations in Nigeria, from 330 different speakers of both sexes, of various ages, education levels, and geographic origins. The quantitative data is taken from a sub-section of 9,621 sentences (almost 150,000 tokens) that constitute a syntactic treebank mirroring the social and geographic sampling of the full corpus. Clefts, pseudo-clefts and reverse pseudo- clefts are examined. Four types of clefts are described: wey-clefts, bare clefts, double clefts and zero-copula clefts. The properties of those clefting patterns are represented using a UD-type annotation scheme named SUD for Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies. The quantitative analysis of the data and comparison with former descriptions of the language underline the massive domination of bare clefts, and the emergence, among these various patterns, of a relative pronoun nãĩ “who/which” used only with cleft constructions, while the relativiser wey is being abandoned and specialises as relative clause operator.

The Difficulties Facing Of The Mechanic Otomotif (Mo) Student At Smk Yapim Kabanjahe Using Participle In Sentences

This study deals with the student’s difficulties in using participle in sentences. The purposes of the study were to find out whether or not the students found difficulties in using participle in sentence and to find out the type of difficulties they faced.The population of the study was the 2020/2021 of the Mechanic Otomotif (MO) students at SMK YAPIM Kabanjahe. In this sampling, all the population has equal chance to be selected for the sample. The total numbers of samples was 30 students. The instrument used to collect the data was multiple choice test. This research was conducted by applying the descriptive quantitative design. The reliability of the test is counted by using KR21 formula. The formula testing result showed that the reliability of the test was 0,89, it means that the test was very good. The finding showed that the students found some difficulties in using participle, they were : Present Participle (8,67 %), Past Participle (9,34 %) and Perfect Participle (9,33 %). Perfect Participle was regarded as the most difficult type for them, especially in using it after certain verbs and in replacing relative pronoun, and then followed Past Participle by especially in using in it replacing relative pronoun and after certain verb. And the last was Present Participle. The percentage of each difficulty was taken by dividing the wrong answer to the total correct answer of the test.

TRANSLATING THAT: AN IDEATIONAL CORRESPONDENCE ANALYSIS OF MACHINE TRANSLATION

This paper aims to contrast the translation of two machine translation systems, Google Translate and Bing Translator, in translating the lexeme in news articles. The approach used in scrutinizing the lexeme's translation correspondence in this study is systemic functional linguistics, especially in both experiential and logical structures. This study was carried out through descriptive comparative analysis. This study's data were 40 constituents that were taken from six BBC World news articles randomly selected. A thorough analysis demonstrates that the two machine translation systems can recognize the three functions of that, i.e., Head, post-modifier, and conjunction. The highest emerging function is post-modifier by 19 times (47.5%), followed by the conjunction function by 17 times (42.5%) on the first machine translation system and 18 times (45%) on the second one. The lowest emerging function is Head by four times (10%) on the first machine translation system and three times (7.5%) on the second one. Furthermore, due to the elliptical variation of that as a relative pronoun and the translation variation of that as a post-determiner, it concludes that the translation outputs of Google Translate are more accurate, semantically acceptable, creative, and contextual than those of Bing Translator.

Cyclic changes in Hungarian relative clauses

Relative operators stem from demonstratives or from wh-operators and may subsequently be reanalyzed as complementizers. In Hungarian, unlike English, the reanalysis of wh-operators into relative operators preceded the reanalysis of the matrix demonstrative pronoun, and the demonstrative was reanalyzed into [Spec,CP] via cliticization onto the wh-based relative pronoun, rendering morphologically complex relative pronouns. This change was enabled by environments in which a morphologically unmarked (singular, nominative) matrix demonstrative was immediately followed by a relative operator. The demonstrative was subsequently renewed in the main clause. We argue that this had two important prerequisites. First, the original wh-based relative operator did not lose its lexical features and was not grammaticalized into a functional head. Second, the matrix demonstrative lost its original definiteness feature, [+def], and became unspecified for this feature. Ultimately, it is this feature change that brought about the emergence of a new morphosyntactic paradigm, in line with the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture.

Headless Relative Clauses in Pesh

The aim of this study is to describe the two main kinds of headless relative clauses that are attested in Pesh, a Chibchan language spoken in Honduras: free relative clauses, which use a wh-word that functions as a relative pronoun at their left edge and a subordinator at their right edge, and headless relative clauses, which lack a wh- word but show a case marker or the topic marker at the right edge of the clause. The first type is less frequently attested in the natural corpus this study relies on, although the corpus does contain various instances of maximal, existential, and free-choice free relative clauses. Each of the constructions is distinguished by features of the wh-word and/or by certain restrictions regarding the tense of the verb in headless relative clauses or the type of verb in matrix clauses. The second type of headless relative clause, the ones that do not use a wh-expression, are much more frequent in the corpus and behave like headed relative clauses that lack a wh-expression. They are like noun phrases marked by a phrase-final case marker or the topic maker. The case or topic markers are used for light-headed relative clauses and for almost all types of maximal headless relative clause that have neither a light head nor a wh-expression, in contrast to maximal free relatives, in which only locative wh-words occur.