A groundbreaking, comprehensive formal theory of grammatical person that recasts its empirical foundations and re-envisions its theoretical core.
Impossible Persons, Daniel Harbour's comprehensive ...and groundbreaking formal theory of grammatical person, upends understanding of a universal and ubiquitous grammatical category. Breaking with much past work, Harbour establishes three core theses, one empirical, one theoretical, and one metatheoretical. Together, these redefine the data subsumed under the rubric of “person,” simplify the feature inventory that a theory of person must posit, and restructure the metatheory in which feature theory as a whole resides.
At its heart, Impossible Persons poses a simple question of the possible versus the actual: in how many ways could languages configure their person systems, in how many do they configure them, and what explains the size and shape of the shortfall? Harbour's empirical thesis—that the primary object of study for persons are partitions, not syncretisms—transforms a sea of data into a categorical problem of the attested and the absent. Positing, innovatively, that features denote actions, not predicates, he shows that two features alone generate all and only the attested systems. This apparently poor inventory yields rich explanatory dividends, covering the morphological composition of person, its interaction with number, its connection to space, and properties of its semantics and linearization. Moreover, the core properties of this approach are shared with Harbour's earlier work on number features. Jointly, these results establish an important metatheoretical corollary concerning the balance between richness of feature semantics and restrictiveness of feature inventories. This corollary holds deep implications for how linguists should approach feature theory in future.
Spanning the time from Old English to modern American English, this volume provides fresh perspectives on core issues and theories in the morphosyntactic history of English nominal, verbal and ...adverbial constructions. The contributions discuss the loss, rise and restructuring of morphonological marking, periphrastic verbal constructions, auxiliary variation and evolution, as well as changing word order options. Favouring corpus-linguistic, frequency-based and statistical approaches, the studies are firmly empirically grounded. The book is aimed at scholars interested in the history of the English language and in language variation and change.
Am Beispiel der Herausbildung der analytischen bzw. periphrastischen Verbalformen des Perfekts und Plusquamperfekts in der deutschen Sprache werden sprachtheoretisch relevante Probleme der ...Morphosyntax behandelt. Zentral sind dabei Fragen der Ontologie und sich daraus ergebenden Methodologie linguistischer Forschung. Konfrontiert werden universalgrammatisch definierbare typologische und textbasierte historische Ansätze, und es wird gezeigt, dass beide ihre eigene Erklärungsadäquatheit besitzen, auch wenn sie schwer vereinbar sind. Ferner werden konstruktionsgrammatische vs. kompositionelle Konzepte von Verbalperiphrasen als methodologische Alternativlösungen erörtert.
The mechanism of subcategorization has been used for decades to account for many sorts of idiosyncratic behaviors of lexical items. We home in on the use of subcategorization for regulating the ...behaviors of individual exponents (morphs, vocabulary items), in particular, for infixation and suppletive allomorphy. We compare two distinct approaches, (a) enriched subcategorization, which takes there to be one mechanism governing both infixation and suppletive allomorphy, with their differences coming from enrichments to the (single) condition on an exponent’s realization, and (b) split subcategorization, which teases apart a mechanism governing infixation (a condition on an exponent’s position) from one governing suppletive allomorphy (a condition on the choice/insertion of an exponent). On the basis of a number of empirical and theoretical considerations, we argue for the latter approach: subcategorization at the exponent level must be deconstructed into (at least) two distinct conditions/mechanisms.
Universal Dependencies de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine; Manning, Christopher D.; Nivre, Joakim ...
Computational linguistics - Association for Computational Linguistics,
07/2021, Volume:
47, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more than 100 languages. In this article, we outline ...the linguistic theory of the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of typologically oriented grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally used to explain how predicate–argument structures are encoded morphosyntactically in different languages while morphological features and part-of-speech classes give the properties of words. We argue that this theory is a good basis for crosslinguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Gentilics derived from composite proper nouns like Bin Yamīn "Benjamin" display complex morphosyntax in classical Biblical Hebrew. In postexilic Hebrew, this type of morphosyntax is not attested and ...the gentilics are formed differently. Construct-state gentilics thus confirm the regnant periodization of Ancient Hebrew.
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