This article develops a comparative semantic analysis of representative focus-alternative quantifiers in English and Japanese: (i) only in English, (ii) dake, dake-wa, and shika in Japanese, and ...(iii) the cleft construction(s in the two languages). A sentence with only typically, and one with shika invariably, conveys the “negative contribution (NC)” (exclusivity implication) as an at-issue content and the “positive contribution (PC)” (prejacent-proposition) as a (non-presuppositional) not-at-issue content. A sentence with dake typically conveys both PC and NC as at-issue contents, while a sentence with dake-wa, as well as the cleft construction, conveys the PC as an at-issue content and the NC as a not-at-issue content. Dake-wa and the cleft semantically contrast in two respects: (i) with the former, the NC is presuppositional, while with the latter it is non-presuppositional, and (ii) only the latter conveys, as a presupposition, that at least one of the relevant alternative propositions holds true. With appropriate contextual cues, only may receive the dake-like, symmetrical interpretation. Dake may receive, in limited configurations, the dake-wa-like interpretation where only the PC is at-issue. These findings contribute to the general-linguistic taxonomy of focus-alternative quantifiers.
A major challenge for event structural theories that decompose verbs into event templates and roots relates to the syntactic distribution of roots and what types of event structures roots can be ...integrated into. Ontological Approaches propose roots fall into semantic classes, such as manner versus result, which determine root distribution (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998, 2010). Free Distribution Approaches, in contrast, hold that root distribution is not constrained by semantic content and roots are free to integrate into various types of event structures (Borer 2005; Acedo-Matellán and Mateu 2014). We focus on two different classes of verbs classified as result verbs in Rappaport Hovav and Levin’s (1998, 2010) sense and their ability to appear in resultative constructions. We build on Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012, 2020) proposal that the roots underlying these verbs fall into two classes: property concept roots, which denote relations between individuals and states, and change-of-state roots, which on our proposal, denote relations between individuals and events of change. We show that change-of-state roots, but not property concept roots, are able to appear in the modifier position of resultative constructions by providing naturally occurring examples of such resultatives. Combining the proposed lexical semantics of these two classes of roots with a reformulation of an Ontological Approach solely dependent on a root’s semantic type, we show that this analysis makes novel and accurate predictions about the possibility of the two classes of roots appearing in resultative constructions and the range of interpretations available when change-of-state roots are integrated into resultative event structure templates.
The inverse frequency effect Temperley, David
International journal of corpus linguistics,
6/2024, Letnik:
29, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract Rare syntactic constructions show an especially strong tendency to be repeated, but some rare constructions exhibit this tendency much more strongly than others. The reasons for this ...variation are not well understood. This exploratory study examines five rare noun-phrase (NP) expansions in English: < the A> ( the rich ), < a N prop N prop > ( a Bob Gates) , <N sing N prop N prop > ( architect Julia Morgan ), <D N pl N sing > ( the jobs data ), and <N sing A N sing > ( home electronic equipment ). Repetition tendencies are very strong in the first and second of these and somewhat strong in the third; in the fourth and fifth they are much weaker, only slightly higher than those of common NP expansions such as <D A N sing > ( the black dog ). To explain this variation, we suggest that constructions may be associated with different types of discourse: constructions with high repetition tendencies tend to occur in persuasive rather than informative discourse.
In this article we consider that transitivity is neither a verbal nor a clause feature, but a construction property. This implies that the transitive construction is a pairing of form and content. In ...order to grasp this content, it is necessary to adopt a formal descriptive apparatus, articulated, on the one hand, on the notions of conjunction/disjunction (which mark the relation of the subject to the object) and, on the other hand, on the notions of subject and object spaces. These notions are the subject of a detailed discussion which calls into question the notion of transitive prototypicality. Cet article propose de concevoir la transitivité comme une propriété non pas d'un verbe, non pas d'une proposition ou d'un énoncé, mais comme celle d'une construction. Cela implique que la construction transitive possède une signification (à l'image d'un lexème). Pour appréhender cette signification, il convient d'adopter un appareil formel descriptif, articulé, d'une part autour des notions de conjonction/disjonction (qui marquent le rapport du sujet à l'objet) et, d'autre part, autour des phénomènes d'espaces subjectaux et objectaux. Ces notions font l'objet d'une discussion détaillée qui remet en cause la notion de prototypicité transitive.
Motion is one of the fundamental concepts in the cognitive make-up of humans. The description and understanding of motion events have been explored by many linguists over the years and from different ...perspectives. Fictive motion constructions are dynamic constructions involving entities which, although static, are related to motion in various ways. This paper discusses the cognitive motivation of fictive motion constructions which involve a metonymic motion of an entity or an abstract concept in a space, and shows that fictive motion reflects the motion nature of human experience and human thinking.
This study investigates VP/vP preposing within the context of Multiple Nominative Constructions (MNCs). In Korean, a verbal constituent can be moved to the sentence-initial position. However, when an ...unbound trace is contained within the preposed constituent, it violates the Proper Binding Condition (PBC), rendering the sentence ungrammatical. The PBC effect has non-trivial implications for the structure of VP/vP. This paper investigates VP/vP preposing across diverse categories of MNCs in Korean to illuminate their structural characteristics. MNCs occur in various environments, broadly classified into Major Subject constructions and Nominative Object constructions (Kuno 1973). Previous literature classifies the two types of MNCs into several sub-types. An important question is concerned with the structure of the various MNCs. This paper explores whether previous analyses can adequately explain the (im)possibility of VP/vP preposing within each sub-type of MNCs. We show that the (im)possibility of VP/vP preposing in MNCs results from their unique structure, in combination with the PBC effect and many other syntactic principles.
Esse trabalho investiga a relação entre uso convencional de vírgulas em esquema duplo (ou vírgulas duplas) e estruturas adverbiais (advérbios e locuções adverbiais) em textos argumentativos ...produzidos por alunos do último ano do Ensino Fundamental II. Os textos foram selecionados do Banco de Dados de Escrita do Ensino Fundamental II e os dados correspondem à presença convencional de vírgulas, como em: “Mas o Brasil, na minha opinião, não faz por merecer ter a Amazônia”. A hipótese é que estruturas adverbiais, quando deslocadas sintaticamente e, portanto, delimitadas por vírgulas, sejam estratégias de modalização e argumentação mobilizadas na produção de textos argumentativos, privilegiadamente. Os resultados confirmam a hipótese e demonstram que os usos e os não usos de vírgula configuram-se como estratégias de organização e hierarquização dos enunciados escritos, estando a serviço da resposta ao gênero argumentativo solicitado.
In this paper we present a novel treebank developed to analyse marked constructions in Italian called MarkIT. The resource contains almost 1,300 sentences manually annotated with dependency relations ...following the Universal Dependencies paradigm. The sentences have been extracted from essays written by high-school students along several years, which accounts for the structure and the topic variability of the sentences. In this work, we detail the process to select the sentences, parse them automatically and then manually correct them. The resource covers seven types of marked constructions (839 sentences overall) plus some sentences, whose syntax can be wrongly classified as marked and which can serve as negative examples of markedness (453 sentences). We also present an evaluation of parsing performance, comparing a model trained on existing Italian treebanks with the model obtained by adding MarkIT to the training set.
Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit ...judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists' representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers' tendency to repeat their own and others' structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single shallow level of syntax connected to a semantic level containing information about quantification, thematic relations, and information structure, as well as to a phonological level. Many of the linguistic distinctions often used to support complex (or multilevel) syntactic structure are instead captured by semantics; however, the syntactic level includes some specification of “missing” elements that are not realized at the phonological level. We also show that structural priming provides evidence about the consistency of representations across languages and about language development. In sum, we propose that structural priming provides a new basis for understanding the nature of language.
This paper investigates a construction in Lakhota (Siouan, North America) to ascertain whether it has the properties of a cleft construction. The construction in question is marked by čha, a ...word-form that has numerous functions in the grammar. It is shown that the čha-construction in question has the properties of a cleft construction, even though the distribution of the focussed and presupposed material is the opposite of that in the usual cleft constructions. It is suggested that it is an inverted cleft construction.
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