Frame determinism of artistic narrative

The article presents the results of a study undertaken to study the nature and degree of determinism of the plot semantics of artistic narrative by frame structures that serve as the basis of this narrative. The research focused on questions about the properties of frames that predetermine the deployment of narrative (determinant frames); questions about the nature of the connection between plot-forming frames (interframe transitions); questions about the nature, perspective and degree of imperativeness of the constraints imposed by the determinant frames on the deployment of the narrative. It is concluded that the frame as a meaningful unit of the meaning of the text has prospective semantics, from which it follows that any frame that forms the main storyline in the narrative prescribes each functional component of its composition, first of all, the first and second terms, predicates and basic sirconstrants, defined trajectories of further existence in the plot. The assumption is confirmed that the organization of artistic narrative is determined by both superframes-determinants and superstructures that form thematic sequences of macrostructures. The experience of constructing a graphical two-level model of the frame semantics of artistic narrative is presented, the comparison of this model with the representation of the frame in the FrameNet system is carried out. It was also concluded that the systematic and consistent description of the plot-content semantics of the narrative as a kind of literary text requires the same consistent and systematic description of the semantic-syntactic frames that form this semantics. In the systematic description of the frame semantics of narrative, special attention should be paid to predicates of nuclear propositions, since it is their semantic valences that determine the filling of the terminals of semantic-syntactic frames and their description gives explanatory power to the description of the semantic structure of frames. The authors see the prospect of the research in the systematic description of the frame semantics of the narrative with the involvement of the resources of the FrameBank project.

Perception verbs, copy raising, and evidentiality in Swedish and English

The Germanic languages have a number of different verbs of perception such as ‘see’, ‘hear’, and ‘look like’, and these verbs can appear in different syntactic frames. The literature on these verbs point to many similarities and also interesting and subtle differences between verbs and constructions. This chapter specifically focuses on English ‘look like’ and its Swedish counterpart ‘se ut som’. Specifically, copy-raising examples like ‘Mia looked like she was sleeping’ are compared to expletive examples such as ‘It looked like Mia was sleeping’. A comparison between new psycholinguistic study of Swedish and similar recent studies on Swedish and English lends support to the hypothesis that copy-raising and expletive examples are more similar to each other in English than they are in Swedish: in Swedish the embedded pronoun is less likely to be interpreted as co-referential with the matrix subject.

Consistency in Motion Event Encoding Across Languages

Syntactic templates serve as schemas, allowing speakers to describe complex events in a systematic fashion. Motion events have long served as a prime example of how different languages favor different syntactic frames, in turn biasing their speakers toward different event conceptualizations. However, there is also variability in how motion events are syntactically framed within languages. Here, we measure the consistency in event encoding in two languages, Spanish and Swedish. We test a dominant account in the literature, namely that variability within a language can be explained by specific properties of the events. This event-properties account predicts that descriptions of one and the same event should be consistent within a language, even in languages where there is overall variability in the use of syntactic frames. Spanish and Swedish speakers (N = 84) described 32 caused motion events. While the most frequent syntactic framing in each language was as expected based on typology (Spanish: verb-framed, Swedish: satellite-framed, cf. Talmy, 2000), Swedish descriptions were substantially more consistent than Spanish descriptions. Swedish speakers almost invariably encoded all events with a single syntactic frame and systematically conveyed manner of motion. Spanish descriptions, in contrast, varied much more regarding syntactic framing and expression of manner. Crucially, variability in Spanish descriptions was not mainly a function of differences between events, as predicted by the event-properties account. Rather, Spanish variability in syntactic framing was driven by speaker biases. A similar picture arose for whether Spanish descriptions expressed manner information or not: Even after accounting for the effect of syntactic choice, a large portion of the variance in Spanish manner encoding remained attributable to differences among speakers. The results show that consistency in motion event encoding starkly differs across languages: Some languages (like Swedish) bias their speakers toward a particular linguistic event schema much more than others (like Spanish). Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the typology of event framing, theories on the relationship between language and thought, and speech planning. In addition, the tools employed here to quantify variability can be applied to other domains of language.

A taxonomy of antonymy in Arabic: Egyptian and Saudi proverbs in comparison

This study has set out to identify, quantify, typify, and exemplify the discourse functions of canonical antonymy in Arabic paremiography by comparing two manually collected datasets from Egyptian and Saudi (Najdi) dialects. Building upon Jones’s (2002) most extensive and often-cited classification of the discourse functions of antonyms as they co-occur within syntactic frames in news discourse, the study has substantially revised this classification and developed a provisional and dynamic typology thereof. Two major textual functions are found to be quantitatively significant and qualitatively preponderant: ancillarity (wherein an A-pair of canonical antonyms project their antonymicity onto a more important B-pair) and coordination (wherein one antonym holds an inclusive or exhaustive relation to another antonym). Three new functions have been developed and added to the retrieved classification: subordination (wherein one antonym occurs in a subordinate clause while the other occurs in a main clause), case-marking (wherein two opposite cases are served by two antonyms), and replacement (wherein one antonym is substituted with another). Semicanonical and noncanonical guises of antonymy are left and recommended for future research.

On the Syntactic Status of Edo Ideophones

Ideophones are a particular lexical class of expressive words depicting perceptual events or states, and are said to be a universal or near-universal feature of language (Dingemanse, 2012:655; Kilian-Hatz, 2001:163). This paper presents an overview of Ẹdo ideophones to characterize them in terms of their occurrence in grammatical syntactic frames. It investigates what sets them apart within word classes in Ẹdo and how they differ from their non-ideophonic counterparts in sentential constructions. The Basic Linguistic Theory was adopted as the method for data analysis. This was done to show how ideophones manifest syntactically in the language. Ideophones appear in copular frames with some verbs in the language, especially the verb ‘to be’. This paper concludes that Ẹdo ideophones do not occur pre-nominally in the language.

Ditransitive structures: the to-Dative

"Starting with Chomsky (1965) the English Dative alternation has received a considerable amount of attention given the two accounts which have emerged: a non-derivational account (Kayne 1984, Pesetsky 1995, Harley 2002, Bruening 2010, 2018, Hallman 2015 i.a.) and a derivational account (Larson 1988, Larson and Harada 2006, Ormazabal and Romero 2010, MacDonald 2015 i.a.). Starting from this discussion, I show that the dative alternation has a morpho-syntactic dimension which can be illustrated at the level of idiomatic expressions. Because idioms are considered fixed structures, the paper aims at investigating whether to-dative idioms can occur in both ditransitive syntactic frames. The investigation will show that idioms are fully compositional structures in line with Larson (2017) and they can occur in alternating ditransitive frames, contrary to what has been previously discussed."

A corpus-based study on the functions of antonym co-occurrences in spoken Chinese

Previous corpus-based research has demonstrated that antonyms co-occur frequently and serve essential functions in discourse. However, these studies are mostly based on written corpus data. Therefore, the present study investigates how antonyms are used in spoken Chinese. Antonyms co-occurring within five turns were manually identified in the National Chengchi University (NCCU) Corpus of Spoken Taiwan Mandarin (27 transcripts, approximately 11 hours) and categorized by their functions. It is found that antonyms that are dialogic in nature prevail in spoken Chinese, and the results reconfirm that antonyms are often used to signal a nearby contrast or to express inclusiveness/exhaustiveness. Compared with written Chinese, spoken Chinese shows a stronger preference for three functional categories, i.e. Interrogative Antonymy, Corrective Antonymy, and Negated Antonymy, which clearly reflect the spontaneous, interactive nature of conversation. The comparison between spoken and written Chinese also shows that antonyms in spoken Chinese co-occur in particular lexico-syntactic frames less often, and that the morphosyllabic structure of antonyms, a crucial factor that influences the functional distribution of antonyms in written Chinese, occupies a minor role in spoken Chinese. This study reveals how the use of antonyms varies across spoken and written Chinese, complementing previous corpus-based studies of antonymy that have drawn conclusions mostly from formal written texts.

go constructions in Modern Standard Arabic

This paper investigates the constructional behaviour of three of the most frequent go verbs in Modern Standard Arabic: ḏahaba, maḍā, and rāḥa. These verbs are considered somewhat synonymous according to many classical and modern dictionaries of Arabic. Nevertheless, each verb has a distinctive profile manifested in its constructional behaviour, which explains why these verbs are not easily interchangeable in various contexts of use. In this paper, I will examine the prototypical uses of the three MSA go verbs based on corpus data (extracted from arabicorpus.byu.edu) by highlighting the lexico-syntactic frames they each associate with. This is achieved by annotating a large number of contextualized uses (per verb) for a variety of lexico-syntactic features. The data frame is subsequently probed with the help of Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis (von Eye 1990; Gries 2004) as a means of highlighting recurring and significant patterns of variable co-occurrences. The quantitative analysis is followed by a qualitative analysis that further explores the lexico-syntactic frames that pertain to different aspects of a deictic motion event. The results obtained from both the quantitative and qualitative analyses highlight the idiosyncratic constructional properties that characterize the use of each verb in various physical and figurative motion event construals.

Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds’ exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives in child-directed speech (CDS); and (ii) investigate how features of the input might scaffold adjective acquisition. In our novel corpus of UK English, adjectives occurred more frequently in prenominal than in postnominal (predicative) syntactic frames, though postnominal frames were more frequent for less-familiar adjectives. They occurred much more frequently with a descriptive than a contrastive function, especially for less-familiar adjectives. Our findings present a partial mismatch between the forms of adjectives found in real-world CDS and those forms that have been shown to be more useful for learning. We discuss implications for models of adjective acquisition and for clinical practice.