Default is Different: Relations and Representations in Agreement Processing

Theories of agreement processing typically focus on the mechanisms by which comprehenders relate the morphological features of the agreement-controlling NP and those of the verb. However, agreement is fundamentally a syntactic relation. In this paper, I examine the processing of default agreement with clausal subjects ('[CP That the doctors studied hard] was reassuring') vs. the processing of agreement with near-synonymous NPs ('[NP The fact that the doctors studied hard] was reassuring'). In the NP subject case there is a syntactic agreement dependency between the head noun fact and the verb was, but not in the CP case. I show that the agreement processing pro?fie for CP subjects differs from those of NP subjects. This suggests that agreement confi?gurations with similar morphology and semantics may be processed using different strategies when embedded in different syntactic structures.

Formal Philosophy of Science: Statement and Set-theoretic Approaches

The so-called received view of scientific theory, initially proposed by logical positivists, represented scientific theory as a set of statements of some formal language, ordered by syntactic relation of deductive derivability. By late 1960s this strategy had met with severe criticism which called into question the effectiveness of formal methods in philosophy of science. The set-theoretic (semantic) approach in formal philosophy of science, which can be treated as natural development of received view, is based on the concept of model in Tarski’s sense and is capable of neutralizing the most part of these objections.

Syntactic Valence, Syntactic Relation

Syntax (ancient Greek σύν-ταξις “composition”, “coordination”, “order”) is a section of linguistics in which nominative and communicative linguistic units are studied: a sentence and a phrase. Literally translated syntax means not only composing, but also ordering, coordinating, combining words into a coherent text. The following article looks into the syntactic relations and valence in the English language.

Feature reanalysis and the Latin origin of Romance Negative Concord

This chapter investigates the sequence of changes leading from the Latin system of negation to the various Romance outcomes. While Classical Latin is a Double Negation language, the earliest Romance varieties show a Negative Concord grammar. In the proposed analysis, this seemingly paradoxical development is explained by situating the prerequisites for Negative Concord already at the Late Latin stage. In Late Latin, a featural and structural reanalysis of the negative marker entails the activation of a projection in the clause where sentential negation has to be identified. This, in turn, triggers the grammaticalization of new negatively marked indefinites licensed in the scope of negation. These indefinites establish a syntactic relation first with the Focus Phrase (as negation strengtheners) and subsequently with the Negation Phrase, yielding a Negative Concord system. This study highlights the importance of generative research on the nature and format of syntactic features for our understanding of diachrony.

Collocations in Academic Language in German and Danish

This study compares the collocational use of the different word forms of five roots of academic language in German and Danish, considered essential for the realization of obligatory moves in the academic abstract, namely *analy*, *untersuch*/*undersøg*, *method*/*metod*, *theor*/*teor* and *empiri*. The aim of the comparison is to uncover differences and similarities in the expert norm of the two languages in order to gain insights that may help to inform the teaching of German-speaking students who must learn written standard Danish as part of their studies in Denmark. The study places special emphasis on the topic of variation, since variation reflects interculturally different uses of language specifically and is a major theme in academic language in general. The frequency and distribution of the five roots as verb, noun and adjective are compared in the collocations: noun + verb, verb + noun, adjective + noun in a study of two corpora of 100 dissertation abstracts from each of the two languages (approx.145.000 tokens), using the Word Sketch function of the corpus tool Sketch Engine. The LogDice measure has been used to identify the collocations, and variation is operationalized as the type-token ratio, computed for each syntactic relation. The results show general differences between the two languages. The use of different collocations with word forms from the five word families is greater in academic language in German than in Danish, despite a very similar distribution of the collocations in the languages and despite higher frequencies in Danish. The collocational use of the words in Danish therefore seems to be less varied and more restricted than in academic language in German.

Postpositions in Munduruku (Tupi): Formal and Functional Features

The Munduruku people live in the states of Pará and Amazonas, including a handful of residents in Mato Grosso, in Brazil. My research about the language takes place within the Munduruku population of Pará. It is a language of the Tupi stock, that belongs to the Munduruku family. It is of head-marking type. The most common constituent order is s(o)v. The arguments do not receive morphologic marks, usually occurring in noun phrases. The verb receives person marks, which indicate/co-refer subject and direct object. Our objective here is to present the inventory of the postpositions, in order to discuss the properties they share; what their structural and functional features are; and their participation in the passive voice, causative, subordination, modality, source of information, and locative and possessive predication. We also approach the isomorphism among postpositions, nouns and verbs; the syntactic relation that establishes the postpositional phrase with the rest of the sentence: whether argument or adjunct. Finally we will also reflect upon its typology.

The Mechanisms of Proversion and Reversion in Producing the Compounds of the English Language

The subject-matter of this paper is the structural mechanism of the proverse and reverse word-compounding as a word-building process in modern English while having the model of word-combination as a starting basis for such transformations. The mechanism of proversion represents the process transforming a word-combination into a compound word while preserving the initial order of components coinciding with that of a word-combination (A + B → AB). When the reverse process of compounding takes place, the components of a resulting compound word change their places as to each other in comparison with a component-order in an initial word-combination (A + B → BA). The hypothesis of the investigation is that the compounding by proversion occurs if words of an initial word-combination are tied with the syntactic relation of agreement, while the reverse compounding usually tends to provide compounding on the basis of the syntactic relation of control. The proversive model is mostly the basis for creating nominative parts of speech, and the result of the reverse intergration of a word-combination into a compound word is manifested mainly by a verb or a verbal. The article describes the general and certain specific models of proverse and reverse compounding with the indication of their functional and stylistic peculiar features. The conclusion indicates the perspectives of working out the problem on the basis of other languages and on the comparative ground.

Relasi Sintaktis Antarkomponen pada Frasa Nomina Bahasa Rusia

AbstrakDalam sintaksis bahasa Rusia terdapat istilah sintaksiceskoe otnošenie ‘relasisintaktis’ yang menghubungkan komponen-komponen frasa secara leksikal dangramatikal. Ada beragam jenis relasi sintaktis dan relasi ini dapat dijumpai padafrasa dengan komponen inti nomina. Untuk itu, dalam artikel ini dibahas mengenaiberbagai macam relasi sintaktis pada frasa nomina bahasa Rusia. Metode yangdigunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode deskriptif dengan berbagai tekniklanjutan dalam penganalisisan data. Adapun sumber data berupa bahasa tulisdiambil dari korpus nasional bahasa Rusia. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwarelasi sintaktis yang ada pada frasa nomina bahasa Rusia adalah relasi atributif,objektif, subjektif, adverbial, dan kompletif, didasarkan pada koneksi sintaktisantarkomponen frasa berupa koneksi konkordansi, penguasaan, dan parataksis.Relasi-relasi sintaktis tersebut dapat dibedakan secara semantis melalui maknaleksikal dan gramatikal kata-kata pembangun frasa.Kata kunci: relasi sintaktis, frasa nomina, inti frasa, pewatas, koneksi sintaktisAbstractIn Russian syntax there is the term of sintaksiceskoe otnošenie ‘syntactic relation’which connects the phrase components lexically and grammatically. There are various typesof syntactic relations and these syntactic relations can be found on noun phrases. Therefore,this article discussed about various types of syntactic relations in Russian noun phrases. Themethod used in this research is descriptive method with various techniques in analyzing data.The source of the data is written language taken from the national corpus of Russian language.The results showed that the syntactic relations in Russian noun phrases are attributive,objective, subjective, adverbial, and completive relation, based on syntactic connections ofconcordance, government, and parataxis between the phrase components. These syntacticrelations can be distinguished semantically through the lexical and grammatical meaning ofthe phrase components.Keywords: syntactic relation, noun phrase, head, modifier, syntactic connection

Relasi Sintaktis Antarkomponen pada Frasa Nomina Bahasa Rusia

AbstrakDalam sintaksis bahasa Rusia terdapat istilah sintaksiceskoe otnošenie ‘relasisintaktis’ yang menghubungkan komponen-komponen frasa secara leksikal dangramatikal. Ada beragam jenis relasi sintaktis dan relasi ini dapat dijumpai padafrasa dengan komponen inti nomina. Untuk itu, dalam artikel ini dibahas mengenaiberbagai macam relasi sintaktis pada frasa nomina bahasa Rusia. Metode yangdigunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode deskriptif dengan berbagai tekniklanjutan dalam penganalisisan data. Adapun sumber data berupa bahasa tulisdiambil dari korpus nasional bahasa Rusia. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwarelasi sintaktis yang ada pada frasa nomina bahasa Rusia adalah relasi atributif,objektif, subjektif, adverbial, dan kompletif, didasarkan pada koneksi sintaktisantarkomponen frasa berupa koneksi konkordansi, penguasaan, dan parataksis.Relasi-relasi sintaktis tersebut dapat dibedakan secara semantis melalui maknaleksikal dan gramatikal kata-kata pembangun frasa.Kata kunci: relasi sintaktis, frasa nomina, inti frasa, pewatas, koneksi sintaktisAbstractIn Russian syntax there is the term of sintaksiceskoe otnošenie ‘syntactic relation’which connects the phrase components lexically and grammatically. There are various typesof syntactic relations and these syntactic relations can be found on noun phrases. Therefore,this article discussed about various types of syntactic relations in Russian noun phrases. Themethod used in this research is descriptive method with various techniques in analyzing data.The source of the data is written language taken from the national corpus of Russian language.The results showed that the syntactic relations in Russian noun phrases are attributive,objective, subjective, adverbial, and completive relation, based on syntactic connections ofconcordance, government, and parataxis between the phrase components. These syntacticrelations can be distinguished semantically through the lexical and grammatical meaning ofthe phrase components.Keywords: syntactic relation, noun phrase, head, modifier, syntactic connection