Linguistic Gender in Arabic, a Theoretical and Analytical Study

This study aims to discuss the phenomenon of masculinization and feminization in Arabic. It seeks to explore the syntactic features that distinguish masculinization and feminization; and their reflections on old Arabic dialects and Qur’anic modes of recitation. Moreover, the study examines the social dimension of the phenomenon of masculinization and feminization, and the effect of the linguistic gender on the Arabic sentence structure. Using the descriptive approach, the syntactic theory confirms that a significant distinction exists between the masculine and feminine references in many syntactic categories such as demonstratives, relative pronouns and verbal predicates. Grammarians’ perception of masculinization as a source, and feminization as a subdivision is firmly rooted in the Arabic culture; emanating from the belief that the masculine is the original creature. Grammarians, therefore, posit that the masculine does not need markers, unlike the feminine. Qur’anic modes of recitation differed in dealing with this phenomenon depending on the reference of the pronoun. Grammarians have employed the rule of meaning to make sentences agree with the masculinization and feminization rules.

The general noun-modifying clause construction beyond Eurasia

I aim to provide a typological investigation of the General Noun-modifying Clause Construction (NMCC) in languages other than those of Eurasia. I show that the five properties proposed by Matsumoto et al. as potentially correlating with the General NMCC are rather areal features which are falsified by the data of languages from Africa and Europe. The semantic interpretability condition and the syntactic licensing condition of the General Noun-modifying Clause Construction need reconsidering. Semantically, I argue that the interpretability of the General NMCC depends both on the semantics of the head noun and that of the modifying clause because they show close interaction with each other. Syntactically, I propose three general syntactic properties of the languages with the General NMCC, i.e. (1) no relative pronouns or relative pronouns in competition with a general clause marker, (2) complex subordinate locutions composed of the general clause marker(s) (and a head noun), and (3) unified verb forms in subordination.

Mis juhtus ja kes tegi? Põhjustamisahela eestikeelsed väljendusvahendid

Kokkuvõte. Artikkel käsitleb kausatiivsuse väljendusvahendeid suulises eesti keeles. 14 eesti keelt emakeelena kõnelejat kirjeldasid 43 videoklipis kujutatud põhjustamisahelat. Uurimuse esimene eesmärk oli saada ülevaade kasutatud väljendusvahenditest. Materjalis esinesid täielikult põhjuslikkust väljendavad vahendid (põhjustamis- ja tulemussündmust sisaldavad) ja põhjustamisahela osade sidujad. Põhjustamissituatsiooni osasündmuste seos võidi jätta eksplitsiitselt väljendamata, osi ühendati ka sõnaga ja või ning, sidesõnadega (nt sest) ja konnektiividega (nt mille peale). Põhjustamisahela väljendusvahenditena kasutati ka relatiivlauseid, des-konverbi, v-kesksõna, elatiivi, komitatiivi, kaassõnu, erinevaid konstruktsioone (nt analüütilisi kausatiivikonstruktsioone) ja derivatiivseid ning leksikaalseid kausatiive. Teine eesmärk oli vaadata väljendusvahendite jagunemist erinevate situatsioonitüüpide vahel. Kõigis kirjeldustes esines näiteid, milles põhjustamissituatsiooni osi eksplitsiitse väljendusvahendiga ei seotud, seoti sõnadega ja või ning või kasutati mõnda muud siduvat sõna. Kõikide situatsioonitüüpide kirjeldamiseks kasutati ka põhjuslikkust väljendavaid muutuskonstruktsioone, relatiivlauseid, derivatiivseid ja leksikaalseid kausatiive. Abstract. Kairit Tomson, Ilona Tragel: What happened and who did it? Means of expressing causality in Estonian. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the means of causal chain in Estonian and to describe how those means are distributed between causal situation types. The results of this research are based on the experiment with 14 Estonian speakers who described 43 video clips by answering the question “What happened?”. The video clips originate from the project “Causality across Languages”. Participants described causal situations by using 1) constructions (e.g rebib pooleks ‘tears apart’, ajab naerma ‘makes laugh’, palub visata ‘asks to throw’), 2) morphological causatives, 3) lexical causatives, 4) linking words between subevents (e.g ja ‘and’, nii et ‘so that’, sest ‘because’ and relative pronouns), 5) other morphosyntactic means (des-converb, case suffixes, postpositions). In addition, subevents were mentioned without adding any linking word in between.

Names, Light Nouns, and Countability

Making use of Kayne's (2005, 2010) theory of light nouns, this paper argues that light nouns are part of (simple) names and that a mass-count distinction among light nouns explains the behavior of certain types of names in German as mass rather than count. The paper elaborates the role of light nouns with new generalizations regarding their linguistic behavior in quantificational and pronominal NPs, their selection of relative pronouns in German, and a general difference in the support of plural anaphora between English and German.

On complementizers and relative pronouns in Germanic vs. Romance

Many Germanic languages have a finite-clause complementizer that resembles a demonstrative, e.g. English that, Dutch dat, German dass. No Romance language does. The traditional view of complementizers as simplex projecting heads that take IP or some comparable category as a complement has no way of accounting for this difference between Germanic and Romance. In this chapter, I will attempt to make progress toward an account, in part by reinterpreting finite-clause complementizers as relative pronouns.

ADJECTIVE CLAUSES AND ADVERBIAL CLAUSES IN “THE SECRET GARDEN” BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

This research aims to analyze the adjective and adverbial clauses in “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The method used in this research is a content analysis which is to describes the adjective clause and adverbial clause in the novel. Data are obtained, analyzed, and described based on the sentences in the novel. The relative pronoun's adjective shows the highest percentage of 130 or 86%, while relative adverbs show 22 or 14%. The adjective clause in relative pronouns shows the highest percentage caused by the complex sentences, mostly describing someone or things in most sentences in the novel. Meanwhile, adjective clause in time shows 154 or 63%, manner 46 or 19%, reason 35 or 14%, condition 6 or 2%, and concession 4 2%. Adverbial clause in time shows the highest percentage caused by most sentences tell about the time in almost every page.<p> </p>

Using Twitter Data for the Study of Language Change in Low-Resource Languages. A Panel Study of Relative Pronouns in Frisian

This paper investigates the usability of Twitter as a resource for the study of language change in progress in low-resource languages. It is a panel study of a vigorous change in progress, the loss of final t in four relative pronouns (dy't, dêr't, wêr't, wa't) in Frisian, a language spoken by ± 450,000 speakers in the north-west of the Netherlands. This paper deals with the issues encountered in retrieving and analyzing tweets in low-resource languages, in the analysis of low-frequency variables, and in gathering background information on Twitterers. In this panel study we were able to identify and track 159 individual Twitterers, whose Frisian (and Dutch) tweets posted in the era 2010–2019 were collected. Nevertheless, a solid analysis of the sociolinguistic factors in this language change in progress was hampered by unequal age distributions among the Twitterers, the fact that the youngest birth cohorts have given up Twitter almost completely after 2014 and that the variables have a low frequency and are unequally spread over Twitterers.

Cyclic changes in Hungarian relative clauses

Relative operators stem from demonstratives or from wh-operators and may subsequently be reanalyzed as complementizers. In Hungarian, unlike English, the reanalysis of wh-operators into relative operators preceded the reanalysis of the matrix demonstrative pronoun, and the demonstrative was reanalyzed into [Spec,CP] via cliticization onto the wh-based relative pronoun, rendering morphologically complex relative pronouns. This change was enabled by environments in which a morphologically unmarked (singular, nominative) matrix demonstrative was immediately followed by a relative operator. The demonstrative was subsequently renewed in the main clause. We argue that this had two important prerequisites. First, the original wh-based relative operator did not lose its lexical features and was not grammaticalized into a functional head. Second, the matrix demonstrative lost its original definiteness feature, [+def], and became unspecified for this feature. Ultimately, it is this feature change that brought about the emergence of a new morphosyntactic paradigm, in line with the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture.