Possibility and Probability in Siin Seereer Language

The present work deals with possibility and probability in Siin Seereer, a language belonging to the West Atlantic branch of the Niger- Congo family. Possibility and probability are two notions which are so close in meaning and that lots of people make confusion in their uses mainly in the verbs and phrases used to express them. The enunciator, focusing on his/her observation of facts, shows the possibility or the probability that the grammatical subject has to realize the predicate. In other words, he/she accounts the possibility or the probability of the realization or the non- realization of the predicative relationship. Thus, we have pointed out that most of the verbs, operators and phrases used to express these concepts are most of the time placed at the beginning of the sentence. Furthermore, there are some verbs which are used to express possibility and that can also be used to express probability if they are combined with other verbs or phrases.

Describing Subjective Infinitive Constructions in Lexicographic Sources (on the Example of the Udmurt)

The work is devoted to the actual problem of modern Udmurt lexicography – the issues of lexicography of combinations of a subject with an infinitive. The research material was composed of dictionaries of the Udmurt language. The work is based on a descriptive method. The purpose of the work is to study the transmission in Udmurt dictionaries of verb combinations expressing emotional and mental states and physiological phenomena in the form of infinitive combinations «subject + infinitive» and to suggest acceptable ways of their design. Udmurt lexicography has come a long way since its inception and achieved certain success. However, due to the lack of continuous work in this area, many problems remain unresolved. One of these problems is the registration in dictionaries of combinations associated with the expression of emotional and mental states and physiological phenomena. In living speech, such constructions often consist of a grammatical subject (yyr ‘head’, kӧt ‘belly’, lul ‘soul; breath’, vir ‘blood’, etc.) and a conjugated form of the verb, for example: yyr kur lue ‘me angry’, kӧt kurekte ‘I’m sad’, vir pote ‘blood flows, oozes’. In the Soviet period, the tradition of presenting verbs in dictionary entries in the form of an infinitive (affix -ny) was established in the Udmurt lexicography. Along with the publication of new dictionaries, the number of structures of the «subject + infinitive» type gradually began to increase, although the subject cannot enter into a syntactic connection with the infinitive, and such structures are not found in living speech. The paper describes possible ways to solve the problem under study, while for different groups of structures, slightly different solution models are proposed.

Justice in the Eye of the Beholder: How Comparison Framing Affects the Perception of Global Inequality Through Social Emotions and Justice Sensitivity

Global inequality is one of today’s major challenges. How people mentally represent inequality is often determined by its comparative framing. In the present work, we seek to analyze whether putting the focus of a comparison on the disadvantaged or advantaged group affects legitimacy perceptions of and action intentions against global inequality. Results of two preliminary studies indicated that global inequality is perceived as less legitimate and action intentions are increased when the disadvantaged group is the grammatical subject of the comparison, but only when the size of the economic inequality is perceived to be large (vs. small). In addition, social emotions mediated the relationship between comparative framing and legitimacy perceptions. Building on these preliminary studies, we present a planned large-scale study in which we aim to replicate these effects and to additionally test whether the strength of individuals’ emotional responses to comparative framing is moderated by their justice sensitivity. We will discuss findings with regard to the role of how framing elicits certain mental representations of justice.

“Un projet de justice et de progrès social”: President Macron’s 2020 new year message to the nation. A linguistic viewpoint

President Macron’s New Year message on 31 December 2019 was given against a background of social unrest due to his proposed Pension reforms. He defended his policy reiterating the phrase “un projet de justice et de progress social”, but passing responsibility for resolving the crisis to his Prime Minister. The general analytical framework is that of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Macron uses first person singular (je) and plural (nous) subject pronouns to more or less the same extent but the singular form is used mainly with mental processes and the plural with material processes. There are in addition a large number of first person pronoun references other than those that function as grammatical subject: Macron manipulates the ambiguity of the plural pronoun to associate the general public with regard to responsibility for the government’s actions. Material processes are encoded more frequently as non-finite or as nominalizations where specification of the agents is not required, than as finite verbs. Obligation is attributed to the plural nous rather than the singular je. Thus Macron defends his policies while avoiding accepting personal responsibility for them.

Basque impersonals in comparison

The Basque impersonal is a detransitivized construction that resembles middles, passives and impersonals. In this construction, the thematic object is the grammatical subject, which bears absolutive case and triggers absolutive agreement, and the auxiliary selected is izan ‘be’. At the same time, there is an implicit agent that is syntactically active even though it is not realized as an ergative argument with corresponding ergative agreement. In this article, we compare the Basque impersonal with the middle, the passive of languages like English, and subject-suppressing impersonals (as in Polish), and we show that it is more similar to the passive and subject-suppressing impersonals, given that (i) in the Basque impersonal, the event is instantiated, (ii) it can be used with more predicate classes, and (iii) it allows dative-marked second objects, among other properties. Similarly, like in English-type passives and subject-suppressing impersonals, the implicit agent of the Basque impersonal is syntactically active, as it can license agent-oriented modifiers and control adjunct purpose clauses. Nevertheless, there are other properties in which these constructions differ; for instance, the implicit agent must be interpreted as human, unlike in passives, and the grammatical subject cannot be other than 3rd person, something attested neither in passives nor in subject-suppressing impersonals. In light of this distribution, we consider the Basque impersonal to be located somewhere in between middles, passives and subject-suppressing impersonals as far as its syntactic properties are concerned.

The Influence of Focus Marking on Pronoun Resolution in Dialogue Context

Using visual world eye-tracking, we examined whether adults (N = 58) and children (N = 37; 3;1–6;3) use linguistic focussing devices to help resolve ambiguous pronouns. Participants listened to English dialogues about potential referents of an ambiguous pronoun he. Four conditions provided prosodic focus marking to the grammatical subject or to the object, which were either additionally it-clefted or not. A reference condition focussed neither the subject nor object. Adult online data revealed that linguistic focussing via prosodic marking enhanced subject preference, and overrode it in the case of object focus, regardless of the presence of clefts. Children’s processing was also influenced by prosodic marking; however, their performance across conditions showed some differences from adults, as well as a complex interaction with both their memory and language skills. Offline interpretations showed no effects of focus in either group, suggesting that while multiple cues are processed, subjecthood and first mention dominate the final interpretation in cases of conflict.

Cross-Linguistic Trade-Offs and Causal Relationships Between Cues to Grammatical Subject and Object, and the Problem of Efficiency-Related Explanations

Cross-linguistic studies focus on inverse correlations (trade-offs) between linguistic variables that reflect different cues to linguistic meanings. For example, if a language has no case marking, it is likely to rely on word order as a cue for identification of grammatical roles. Such inverse correlations are interpreted as manifestations of language users’ tendency to use language efficiently. The present study argues that this interpretation is problematic. Linguistic variables, such as the presence of case, or flexibility of word order, are aggregate properties, which do not represent the use of linguistic cues in context directly. Still, such variables can be useful for circumscribing the potential role of communicative efficiency in language evolution, if we move from cross-linguistic trade-offs to multivariate causal networks. This idea is illustrated by a case study of linguistic variables related to four types of Subject and Object cues: case marking, rigid word order of Subject and Object, tight semantics and verb-medial order. The variables are obtained from online language corpora in thirty languages, annotated with the Universal Dependencies. The causal model suggests that the relationships between the variables can be explained predominantly by sociolinguistic factors, leaving little space for a potential impact of efficient linguistic behavior.

Modal verbs of strong obligation in Scottish Standard English

This article investigates differences between Scottish Standard English (SSE) and Southern British Standard English (SBSE) in the semantic domain of strong obligation. Focusing on the modal verbs must, have to, need to and (have) got to, we use new corpus material from nineteen written and spoken genres in the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SCO) and corresponding texts from ICE-GB. Data are analysed using a mixed-effect multinomial regression model to predict the choice of verb. Language-internal factors include mode of production (written/spoken), grammatical subject (first/second/third person) and source of obligation (objective/subjective). Our results show that, as previous research suggests, SSE is much more likely to employ need to for the expression of strong obligation, and less likely to employ must and (have) got to. This general pattern remains essentially unaffected by language-internal factors. To account for our findings, we draw on the sociologically motivated process of democratisation and the language-internal process of grammaticalisation.

The Development of long in Early Modern English: Impersonal Verbs of Desire in Focus

The class of English verbs of Desire in Present-Day English comprises verbs such as long or thirst, several of which are attested in earlier English in impersonal constructions characterised by the lack of a grammatical subject. In English, the impersonal construction decreased in frequency between 1400 and 1500, and effectively went out of use during the sixteenth century. Previous research has suggested that there is a need for a corpus-based study of not just Middle English, but also Early Modern English, in order to explore the different path(s) of development followed by individual impersonal verbs. The present article, therefore, investigates the development of the impersonal verb long (< OE langian) with the following objectives: a) to determine when long ceases to occur in impersonal constructions; b) to provide a diachronic overview of the personal syntactic patterns that came to replace impersonal constructions in Early Modern English; and c) to identify, within the framework of Construction Grammar, factors that may account for the development of long as a prepositional verb.