Expressive insubordination

In this chapter, the expressive speech act of so-called ‘that-exclamatives’ is compared in both Germanic and Romance languages. The chapter first points out important semantic differences between that-exclamatives in the two language groups by mainly focusing on the languages Catalan and German. In order to explain those differences, a detailed syntactic account is provided of the different systems of syntactic complementation in the expression of that-exclamatives in Germanic and Romance languages. The conclusion of the chapter is that only German that-exclamatives can be referred to as cases of so-called ‘insubordination’ (i.e., syntactic configurations that feature subordinated syntax, but are used as root clauses), whereas Catalan that-exclamatives instantiate a syntactic form that is distinct from both wh-exclamatives and subordinated syntactic configurations.

Analisis Gurindam Dua Belas Karya Raja Ali Haji Ditinjau dari Aspek Sintaksis

Gurindam Dua Belas is an old poem derived from an old manuscript by Raja Ali Haji, which is important to study based on the syntactic aspect. This current study examines the origins of phrases, clauses, and sentences in Gurindam Dua Belas written by Raja Ali Haji. This study analyses Gurindam Dua Belas written by Raja Ali Haji, in terms of syntactic aspects. The qualitative approach was used in this research with a descriptive analysis method. The data source is a written source, namely the text of Gurindam Dua Belas by Raja Ali Haji, which consists of 12 articles. The data collection technique used a documentation study. The research instrument was the researcher himself as the main instrument assisted by recording card of data. Data analysis was carried out through the reduction stage, the data presentation stage, and then drawing conclusions and verification stages. Based on a review of 3 aspects of syntactic studies, namely function, category, and role, the results show that in the functional aspect, the predicate function of Gurindam Dua Belas text is predominantly used in the structure of syntactic analysis compared to other functions. In the category aspect, the dominant array of Gurindam Dua Belas used is the nominal phrase category. The largest use of the syntactic role used in Gurindam Dua Belas by Raja Ali Haji is the role as a verb or action. Based on an analysis of the syntactic form, it is identified that each article has a different sentence structure. The dominant sentences in the 83 stanzas of Gurindam Dua Belas by Raja Ali Haji are compound.

Text-Forming Function of Addition in the Later Stories of V. G. Lidin

The subject of analysis is addition as a phenomenon of language and speech, as well as the specificity of the text-forming function of addition in artistic and speech creativity. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that until now in the theory of syntax there is no generally accepted view of the essence of addition and how it is produced in speech, and it is also not considered that the text-forming function of addition is unique in different speech spheres, in particular in artistic speech creativity. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that addition is presented as a special syntactic form, characterized by its semantics and formally constructive organization and determining the assumptions and limitations of its speech implementation. The dual manifestation of the text-forming function of attachment in artistic and speech creativity is shown. The research material is based on the late stories of V. G. Lidin, included in the collection “Melting Snows” (1980): this writer, whose metapoetics is characterized by close attention to syntax, used addition with extraordinary skill. When analyzing addition constructions in three stories, it was found that the addition is produced intentionally, counting on a textual perspective. It has been established that the text-forming function of addition is manifested in the organization of compositional-semantic communication on the one hand, and in the creation of an artistic detail on the other hand.

Semirings of Evidence

In traditional justification logic, evidence terms have the syntactic form of polynomials, but they are not equipped with the corresponding algebraic structure. We present a novel semantic approach to justification logic that models evidence by a semiring. Hence justification terms can be interpreted as polynomial functions on that semiring. This provides an adequate semantics for evidence terms and clarifies the role of variables in justification logic. Moreover, the algebraic structure makes it possible to compute with evidence. Depending on the chosen semiring this can be used to model trust, probabilities, cost, etc. Last but not least the semiring approach seems promising for obtaining a realization procedure for modal fixed point logics.

Learning programs by learning from failures

We describe an inductive logic programming (ILP) approach calledlearning from failures. In this approach, an ILP system (the learner) decomposes the learning problem into three separate stages:generate,test, andconstrain. In the generate stage, the learner generates a hypothesis (a logic program) that satisfies a set ofhypothesis constraints(constraints on the syntactic form of hypotheses). In the test stage, the learner tests the hypothesis against training examples. A hypothesisfailswhen it does not entail all the positive examples or entails a negative example. If a hypothesis fails, then, in the constrain stage, the learner learns constraints from the failed hypothesis to prune the hypothesis space, i.e. to constrain subsequent hypothesis generation. For instance, if a hypothesis is too general (entails a negative example), the constraints prune generalisations of the hypothesis. If a hypothesis is too specific (does not entail all the positive examples), the constraints prune specialisations of the hypothesis. This loop repeats until either (i) the learner finds a hypothesis that entails all the positive and none of the negative examples, or (ii) there are no more hypotheses to test. We introduce Popper, an ILP system that implements this approach by combining answer set programming and Prolog. Popper supports infinite problem domains, reasoning about lists and numbers, learning textually minimal programs, and learning recursive programs. Our experimental results on three domains (toy game problems, robot strategies, and list transformations) show that (i) constraints drastically improve learning performance, and (ii) Popper can outperform existing ILP systems, both in terms of predictive accuracies and learning times.

The Verb Valence And Expansion Of Sentence Structure

This article gives an idea of the extension of the sentence form and the degree of valency of the verb. At the same time, the derivation that requires the syntactic form of the sentence is based on the applicative model, the applicative method is illuminated by the introduction of new morphological elements into the composition of the previous derivative at each stage of derivation. In addition, the article provides information about the types of valence theory, as well as about actants and circonstants.

Headless Relative Clauses in Yucatec Maya

This chapter surveys headless relative clauses (i.e. ones with no overt head noun) in Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of southern Mexico. For Indo-European languages, discussion of such constructions has focused on “free relative clauses”—those with only a bare wh-word in place of a head—and to a lesser extent, “light-headed” relative clauses⎯those with a dedicated set of pronominal elements in place of a head noun. In contrast, Yucatec Maya is shown to allow for four different kinds of surface headless relative clause forms depending on the presence or absence of a wh-word and the presence or absence of a determiner, quantifier, or other D-element. With respect to free relative clauses, whereas many more well-studied Indo-European languages have morpho-syntactically distinct constructions for definite and indefinite free relative clauses (e.g. with an infinitive or subjunctive form in the latter case), Yucatec Maya is shown to have a single morpho-syntactic form whose (in)definiteness is determined by syntactic context.

From movement into action to manner of causation: changes in argument mapping in the into-causative

Over the last 300 years, the into-causative (he talked his father into giving him money) increased in frequency and lexical diversity. Changes of this kind are often taken as evidence of functional expansion. From a Construction Grammar (CxG) perspective, this paper argues that what appears to be a loss of restrictions on the verbal slot results from changes in argument mapping links. As the construction provides the argument roles by mapping semantics (causer, causee, result) onto syntax (subject, object, oblique), stronger mapping links increasingly facilitated the use of verbs that are semantically and syntactically atypical for the expression of causation. Data from the Corpus of Historical American English confirm three predictions of this hypothesis with respect to shifts in (i) the semantic classes of matrix verbs, (ii) their general argument structure preferences, and (iii) voice-marking. The results provide evidence for a subtle semantic change from movement into action to manner of causation. The increase in frequency and productivity are hence explained as the consequence of the syntactic form becoming a more reliable cue for causative meaning. We discuss implications for models of language change against the background of current issues in Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG) pertaining to constructionalization vs. constructional change.

GIVEN AND NEW INFORMATION IN BARACK OBAMA’S REMARKS: A SYNTACTIC FORM ANALYSIS

This study seeks to figure out how certain new and given information as information structure of syntactic forms are revealed in Barack Obama’s remarks in Jakarta. The study is focused on the beginning parts of Obama’s remarks, as in that he recalled his childhood memories of staying in Jakarta, Indonesia, for four years. In order to investigate the information structures, we collected the data from digital documents (scripts and videos) of the remark; then, we analyzed the syntactic forms of article “a” (indefinite) and “the” (definite) and also the rheme and theme of the script and the video of the remarks using close textual analysis. The results indicate that the uses of these articles construct certain messages whose tones are either distancing, getting close, or neutralizing the speaker against the audience. Furthermore, the information contained in Obama’s speech reflected the context-awareness of the speaker and also the audience. The speech could also open up further study on (political) critical discourse analysis, as it was delivered in the political contexts between Indonesia and the USA.