Implicit Arguments in Ugandan English

In standard British/American English, some transitive verbs, which are ontologically specified for objects, may be used with the objects not overtly expressed (for example, leave), while other transitive verbs do not permit this syntactic behavior (for example, vacate). The former have been referred to as verbs that allow implicit arguments. This study shows that while verbs such as vacate do not ideally allow implicit arguments in standard British/American English, this is permitted in Ugandan English (a non-native variety), thereby highlighting structural asymmetries between British/American English and Ugandan English, owing mainly to substrate influence and analogization. The current study highlights those structural asymmetries and ultimately uncovers some characteristic features in the structural nativization process of English in Uganda, thereby contributing to the growing larger discourse meant to fill the gaps that had characterized World Englishes scholarship, where thorough delineations of Ugandan English have been virtually absent.

Person agreement with inherent case DPs in Chirag Dargwa

The article argues that the syntactic behavior of non-absolutive subjects of finite clauses in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Chirag Dargwa is a result of their interaction with two different functional heads in a clause: v and T. Discussing empirical data from Chirag, I present the puzzling behavior of person agreement, which shows selective sensitivity to arguments in the ergative, dative, and genitive cases. The primary evidence comes from the periphrastic causative, which displays some typologically unusual properties in case marking and agreement. I show that the ability to trigger person agreement is not an intrinsic property of ergative, dative, and genitive DPs in Chirag, but rather is endowed to the highest DP in T’s c-command domain over the course of the derivation. I propose that all non-absolutive subjects start out as DPs assigned inherent case and a theta-role by v, and that T further assigns structural nominative case to the DP in Spec,vP, thus making it accessible to φ-probes.

Syntactic Coherence in Word Embedding Spaces

Word embeddings have recently become a vital part of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. Word embeddings are a suite of techniques that represent words in a language as vectors in an n-dimensional real space that has been shown to encode a significant amount of syntactic and semantic information. When used in NLP systems, these representations have resulted in improved performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, it is not clear how syntactic properties interact with the more widely studied semantic properties of words. Or what the main factors in the modeling formulation are that encourages embedding spaces to pick up more of syntactic behavior as opposed to semantic behavior of words. We investigate several aspects of word embedding spaces and modeling assumptions that maximize syntactic coherence — the degree to which words with similar syntactic properties form distinct neighborhoods in the embedding space. We do so in order to understand which of the existing models maximize syntactic coherence making it a more reliable source for extracting syntactic category (POS) information. Our analysis shows that syntactic coherence of S-CODE is superior to the other more popular and more recent embedding techniques such as Word2vec, fastText, GloVe and LexVec, when measured under compatible parameter settings. Our investigation also gives deeper insights into the geometry of the embedding space with respect to syntactic coherence, and how this is influenced by context size, frequency of words, and dimensionality of the embedding space.

类型学视角下汉语的双系式结构

抽象 类型学发现，典型的双系式（applicative）结构将宾语（直接宾语或间接宾语）这个句法角色指派给一个本来不能作宾语的项，见于很多语言。本文证明汉语中以下结构都是类型学中所谓的“双系式”：在共时层面，有普通话中的“吃食堂”结构，自陆俭明、郭锐（1998）提出以来，有诸多学者从不同角度对其进行了研究；在历时层面，上古汉语中有名词（性结构）直接作补语和介词短语作补语交替的现象。汉语虽然是典型的孤立语，（几乎）没有判断双系式的形态依据，但这些结构在语义-句法层面表现出了双系式结构的基本特点，是完全可以归类为双系式结构的。这一结论也为类型学的动词配价（valency）研究打开了新思路，即在以往对于动词配价研究更侧重形态标准的基础上，也应参考句法行为特征（syntactic behavior），这对于研究汉语类的孤立语的动词配价操作尤其重要。

THE SHORT FORM OF THE ADJECTIVE IN PRESENT-DAY GERMAN IN THE LIGHT OF THE GRAMMAR THEORY OF THE WORD

The short form of the adjective in present-day German, which stems from the Indo-European protolanguage and for that matter is found both in the Germanic and Slavic languages, in the German language took its evolutionary path along the way of the rise and establishment of the morphological features and syntactic functions re-forging itself from one of the forms of expression of a qualificator word into a representative nominator of the morphological paradigm. It widened its syntactic functioning on account of the qualitative adverb that due to the reduction of final vowels, i.e. its grammatical markers, coincided by sounding and meaning with the short form of the qualificator words. In German, these processes brought about the appearance of a new part of speech known as Artwort with the categorical meaning of the qualificator attribution. It realizes its grammatical potentialities in the substance-predicate structure of the sentence revealing in this way a bipolar functionality. Proceeding from the lexicon-centric approach to the categorical meaning of the word including the "amorphous” word of the kind of GUT an attempt is being made to describe the specificity of this type of meaning. In the opinion of the authors the categorical meaning of the "amorphous” word”, which determines its morphological paradigm and syntactic behavior, is vested at the level of the mental lexicon of the speaker as awareness and linguistic experience of using this kind of word in communication. In this way the short form of the adjectives comes in possession of all the features of the elementary sign which non-discretely combines the lexical and categorical meaning. The text-centered approach to the identification of the grammatical concept of the elementary sign reduces the word to the root morpheme. The latter attains the categorical status in its usage which is detrimental to the hierarchical construal of language. The syntactically polar bi-functionality of the short form of the adjective as the elementary sign is foregrounded in the system of actual, real and potential predications and, specifically, in the structure of Paul’s "degraded predicates” as well as in the propositions of the sentence deep structure getting explicated by means of logical implicates that represent a bipolar syntactic functionality of qualificator words. The implicit propositions reveal homonymous ties of the short form of the adjective with the first constituents of compound words which in most cases show themselves as units of the phraseological level of language structure.

Syntactic verb-verb compounds in Japanese

This chapter discusses the syntactic behavior and some notable properties of syntactic V-V compounds in Japanese (Type 3 in the classification of Chapter 2), providing some fresh empirical data. In this chapter, syntactic V-V compounds are seen to be divided into raising and control types. Syntactic V-V compound verbs take distinct embedded structures, depending on whether V2 is classified as a raising or a control verb. V-V compounds allow some, but not all, V2s to undergo long-distance passivization. It is suggested that the difference in applicability of long-distance passivization between raising and control V-V compounds is determined according to whether V2 has an accusative-case feature to license an object, and also that control V-V compounds are not passivizable if they denote an uncontrollable event (even if V2 has an accusative-case feature). Furthermore, syntactic V-V compounds taking sugiru ‘exceed’ as V2 are shown to display a number of unique properties that are not shared with other syntactic compound verbs.

Some notes on outro in Portuguese

This paper studies the syntactic behavior of outro(s) in Brazilian and European Portuguese. Starting from the syntax of its Italian counterpart un altro/(degli) altri, we argue that outro(s)in prenominal position is neither an adjective nor a determiner, but an existential quantifier and that the presence of the indefinite article, um outro/uns outros, gives rise to a complex existential quantifier, like the corresponding Italian form. We also argue that outro(s) and um outro/uns outros do not specialize for different interpretations since they both substantially show the same ambiguity (one/some more or a/some different one(s)) and behave in the same way in relation to possible semantic interpretations typical of existential quantifiers

Morphosyntaxis of Modern Greek Spatial Adverbs in a Diachronic Perspective

Greek adverbs are often claimed to have almost completely lost the ability to govern the genitive case, which is replaced by prepositional phrases with the accusative. Nevertheless, the corpus study presented in the article demonstrates that some low-frequent spatial adverbs δεξιά/αριστερά ‘on the right/left’ and βόρεια/νότια/ανατολικά/δυτικά ‘in the north/south/east/west’ retain the ability to govern genitive along with prepositional phrases. Moreover, cardinal directions prefer this archaic model to all the other options. Cross-linguistically, lexical items traditionally classified as adverbs and/or adpositions often demonstrate mixed syntactic behavior, since adverbs that were relatively recentlyderived from nouns, can retain their initial nominal internal syntax. The diachronic development of the Greek adverbs ‘right/left’ and cardinal direction terms also have well traced nominal sources. In the present study I suggest that the mixed category analysis can be applied to some Modern Greek adverbs.

Aspectual particles and event types in TSM

The paper investigates the syntactic behavior and semantic constraints of four types of aspectual particles (1) 夭 iau2 / 夭故 iau2koh4 ‘still’, (2) 已經 i2king1 ‘already’, (3) 夭未 iau2be7 ‘not…yet’, and (4) 毋 m7 /無 bo5 /勿 mai3 /免 bien2 故 koh4 ‘not…any more’ in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). In line with Löbner (1989) it examines the interaction between aspectual particles and event types. The four types of aspectual particles can be better captured in terms of the notion of two consecutive event types: event 1 (Ev1) and event 2 (Ev2) coupled with the value of existence and non-existence of a situation symbolized by [+] and [−]. Type 1 and 3 share the common element 夭 iau2 and Type 1 and 4, the common element 故 koh4 . Whereas not…yet and still in English show no lexical relationship, such a relationship is tangible in TSM and German, as in 夭未 iau2be7 still not ‘not…yet’ and 夭 iau2 ‘still’, on the one hand, and noch nicht still not ‘not…yet’ and noch ‘still’, on the other. Parametric variation matters in dealing with language universal. Like still in English, 夭 iau2 or its compound kin 夭故 iau2koh4 ‘still’ develops the non-aspectual additive and even concessive sense.

Specificity of Cognate Nouns and Adjectives Functioning

Introduction. The aim of the article is to determine whether syntactic behavior of linguistic unit depends on its part-of-speech identity or only its semantics. The importance of the research is determined by the absence of systematic description of the specificity of cognate words functioning in linguistics.Methodology and sources. The research deals with the cognate nouns and adjectives functioning. According to the classification of semantic types of predicates developed by A. G. Eliseeva, O. N. Seliverstova we define the researched predicates as the ones denoting state. These predicates are studied in terms of case grammar, i. e. they are compared in the aspect of an argument structure realization. In determining the semantic cases of predicates, we mainly rely on the set of semantic cases proposed by V. V. Bogdanov.Results and discussion. It is shown that the analyzed nouns, as a rule, expressing given or known information require a lower number of cases in its explicit forms which still can be implicit. The researched adjectives that usually denote new information are accompanied by a higher number of cases in a surface structure. These predicates also differ in the forms of their arguments.Conclusion. The revealed features of cognate nouns and adjectives functioning show the significant influence of the form of linguistic unit on syntactic behavior and indicate that formation of syntactic structures is not only determined by semantics.