Junctures in Etulo Verb Serialization

Verb serialization involves the use of two or more verbs in the expression of series of related events. This feature has been established for West African languages and also for Etulo, an Idomoid language of the Benue Congo language family. This present study examines verb serialization in Etulo in order to ascertain the juncture types that can be confirmed for the language. The study adopts the Role and Reference Grammar theoretical approach in the analysis of the data. Data for the study were elicited from Etulo native speakers resident in Adi, Buruku Local Government Area of Benue State, Nigeria. Based on the analysis of the collected data, the study confirms both nuclear and core junctures for Etulo language. Furthermore, these junctures are distinguished on the basis of argument realization and sharing in the language.

Translating Fieldwork into Datasets: The Development of a Corpus for the Quantitative Investigation of Grammatical Phenomena in Eibela

This extended abstract details the process of constructing an annotated XML corpus suitable for quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic and phonetic phenomena in the Eibela language of Papua New Guinea. Preliminary results will also be included, which investigate the semantic, phonetic, and discourse correlates of argument realization. The goal of this paper is to illustrate how legacy materials can be enriched and investigated using computational methodologies including forced alignment of phonetic segments using bulk processing of data in Python and R, the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA), and morphosyntactic annotation developed as part of the Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts (Multi-CAST).

(No) competition between deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives in Spanish

This paper explores the distribution of deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives that are built on transitive verbs and occur in eventive interpretations. The study is empirically oriented and based on an acceptability judgment experiment in which argument realization and interpretational possibilities are manipulated as the independent variables. The results show that deverbal nouns prefer but are not limited to realizing the lower argument of the base, whereas nominalized infinitives are mostly restricted to realizing the higher argument. Furthermore, deverbal nouns turn out to be insensitive with regard to the distinction between episodic and generic event readings, while nominalized infinitives are shown to be specialized on generic interpretations. Deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives are, thus, mostly neither paradigmatically interchangeable nor complementarily distributed as nominalized infinitives reach the same degree of acceptability as deverbal nouns only under very narrow conditions. With regard to the ecological validity of the experimental approach, a comparison to corpus data indicates that high frequency clearly correlates with acceptability, but that the same does not hold for low frequency and unacceptability, that is forms that are not (sufficiently) attested in the corpus do not necessarily receive low ratings within the judgment task. The study, thus, also addresses a number of methodological issues in the study of event nominals.

Event structure and argument realization in English zero-derived nominals with particles

This paper is concerned with the morphosyntax of deverbal zero-derived nominals (e.g., to climb > a climb), which have received much less attention in the literature than suffix-based nominals (cf. the climb-ing, the examin-ation, the assign-ment). In the generative literature, in particular, after Grimshaw’s (1990) seminal work on suffix-based nominals and their possibility to inherit verbal event and argument structure, zero-derived nouns have been claimed to lack such properties: e.g., in syntax-based models of word formation, which take argument realization in deverbal nouns to indicate the inheritance of functional structure from the base verb, they have been analyzed as derived not from a verb but from an uncategorized root, as implemented in Borer (2013). Following Rappaport-Hovav and Levin’s (1998) theory of event structure and argument realization, I investigate zero-derived nouns built from verbs with preposed and postposed particles and show that they may realize argument structure on their event readings, which can only come about from the event structure of their base verbs.

Causer and causee as two higher-ranked thematic roles

On the basis of the argument realization of Mandarin resultative verb compounds, this paper argues that the Proto-Agent properties as well as the Proto-Patient properties proposed by Dowty (1991) are not equal in status. Specifically, the Proto-Agent property corresponding to the Causer and the Proto-Patient property corresponding to the Causee are two higher-ranked properties. In a non-prototype approach to thematic roles, this means that the Causer and the Causee are two higher-ranked thematic roles that are immediately relevant to the argument realization of monotransitive causative predicates. The paper shows that, compared with Dowty’s equal-weight approach, the alternative approach recognizing the Causer and the Causee as two higher-ranked properties or roles can give a simpler, more effective, and more straightforward account of the argument realization associated with monotransitive causative predicates, including lexical causatives, morphological causatives, and resultatives. This study has implications for research in the argument realization of causatives involving three (or more) arguments as well. Meanwhile, it has implications for any theory utilizing thematic hierarchy because (i) none of the thematic hierarchies proposed in the literature includes both the Causer and the Causee and (ii) a complete theory of thematic roles needs to take these two higher-ranked roles into consideration.

Morphology and Argument Alternations

Theories of argument realization typically associate verbs with an argument structure and provide algorithms for the mapping of argument structure to morphosyntactic realization. A major challenge to such theories comes from the fact that most verbs have more than one option for argument realization. Sometimes a particular range of realization options for a verb is systematic in that it is consistently available to a relatively well-defined class of verbs; it is then considered to be one of a set of recognized argument alternations. Often—but not always—these argument alternations are associated morphological marking. An examination of cross-linguistic patterns of morphology associated with the causative alternation and the dative alternation reveals that the alternation is not directly encoded in the morphology. For both alternations, understanding the morphological patterns requires an understanding of the interaction between the semantics of the verb and the construction the verb is integrated into. Strikingly, similar interactions between the verb and the construction are found in languages that do not mark the alternations morphologically, and the patterns of morphological marking in morphologically rich languages can shed light on the appropriate analysis of the alternations in languages that do not mark the alternations morphologically.

The acquisition of L3 variation among early bilinguals

The present study investigates whether prior experience with formal study of an L2 influences L3 Korean learners’ Type 1 variation (i.e., use of obligatory forms) and Type 2 variation (i.e., variation between alternative acceptable variants). The patterns of variation in Korean argument realization of early bilingual learners (English-Chinese/Malay/Indonesian/Tamil) of L3 Korean were assessed in light of the distribution of variants present in classroom input, learners’ prior L2 learning experience and home language background, argument animacy and number, and familiarity of verb structure type. Our findings demonstrate that prior experience with a typologically-similar L2 facilitates acquisition of grammatical patterns as well as acquisition of native-like patterns of variation between grammatical forms that are constrained by a range of internal linguistic factors. Any L2 experience, regardless of typological proximity, is found to facilitate acquisition of internal linguistic constraints, but not acquisition of grammatical patterns.