In the last three decades the linguistic innovation has brought two main theoretical tools that are fully functional: the construction grammar and the frame semantics. The present work makes a ...proposal to unite both frameworks in order to exploit their respective contribution in a pedagogical perspective in foreign language classes. The aim is (i) to operationalize the theoretical junction, and (ii) to propose to exploit it by using mind maps, which elaboration is based on the observation of the speech praxis.
Nous montrons dans cet article comment exploiter un corpus annoté en dépendances syntaxiques : nous chercherons à extraire des cooccurrents synthétisant la combinatoire lexico-syntaxiques des mots et ...aussi à travailler à un niveau plus général sur des expressions, voire des constructions, plus complexes et plus abstraites que les simples pivots lexicaux. Pour mettre en œuvre les requêtes sous-jacentes, et permettre à des utilisateurs non experts de les manipuler, nous proposons de guider l’exploration par l’analogie et de construire des requêtes sur la base d’exemples avec l’outil Lexicoscope .
This study investigates how Mandarin speakers segment causal‐chain motion events in a verbalization task. The results demonstrate that Mandarin shows attentional bias for the causal source and goal ...in causal‐chain segmentation, which may be universal across languages. Furthermore, there is a correlation between directness of causation and the complexity of linguistic representations, with direct conceptualization leading to a preference for simpler constructions (e.g. causative verb construction, resultative verb construction), and indirect causation for more complex representations (e.g. causative periphrases and multi‐macro‐event constructions). The most salient factor for directness of causation in causal‐chain segmentation is spatio‐temporal contiguity. The macro‐event property (MEP) is used to test the tightness of Mandarin causative constructions from a typological perspective. It is concluded that Mandarin demonstrates greater similarity with Ewe and Lao, but differs from Japanese and Yukatek regarding grammatical integration and event integration in causal‐chain segmentation.
This article builds on observations from several research areas which hitherto have been pursued relatively independently of one another, to argue that discontinuous nominal expressions are one of ...the attested strategies for marking a subtype of sentence focus constructions known as thetic constructions. This analysis can be applied to the type of discontinuity termed extraposition from subject NP/DP in languages with otherwise strongly configurational nominal expressions such as English. For these constructions, however, it cannot be ruled out that weight/length is an alternative or additional motivation. Evidence from several Australian languages, where discontinuous subjects usually just involve a semantic head and a modifier, can be used to show that this strategy is attested even where weight is not a plausible factor. Like other construction types that are associated with theticity crosslinguistically, discontinuous nominal expressions are saliently distinct from topic-comment (“categorical”) constructions and thus obey the principle of detopicalization identified by Lambrecht, Knud. 2000. When subjects behave like objects: An analysis of the merging of S and O in sentence-focus constructions across languages.
24(3). 611–682. The findings support the hypothesis that the principle of iconicity of distance, which ensures contiguity of the subconstituents of a phrase under most circumstances, will only be overridden if another principle motivates this violation. Such competing principles include highlighting a contrastive modifier and the distribution of weight, both discussed in previous literature. Here it will be argued that detopicalization can be added to this list since discontinuity prevents the assignment of topic status to the subject expression. Moreover, a construction where a discontinuous subject frames the entire clause is itself iconically motivated by the principle of informational integration which results in the unitary, non-bipartite nature of the construction generally associated with theticity.
This article discusses a relatively new construction, called „expressive subordinate-clause construction“ (ENK), which is highly frequent in social media and consists of a DP anchor and an ...attributive clause like „The moment when you realize it’s a Monday tomorrow“. Besides sketching some of the particular syntactic properties of this expression, this paper examines the relation of the ENK to the conversational practice of narration (in the everyday sense). The ENK expresses some specific emotion, as triggered by the situation expressed by the subordinate clause, and thereby is tied to the experiences of the speaker to which the hearer is supposed to relate. The ENK hence instantiates the property of experiencialty (one of the crucial aspects of narrations) in a rather direct way. This will be connected to the observation that the ENK is expressive: it expresses its content in a non-truth-conditional way. As this gives an immediate impression of the speaker’s emotions, a close connection between expressivity and experiencialty can be drawn. Together with other features of narration, like genericity or tellability, the ENK thereby collects many of the important characteristics of narration in a very short form, which is why call it a minimal narration.
This article explores a phenomenon of English in which out‐ combines with a predicate to form a complex predicate (e.g., outsing, outdo, outrun, outsmart, …), here called “out‐pred.” A thorough ...investigation uncovers several new generalizations, which can be summarized as follows. (i) Out‐pred formation is productive and syntactic, building upon the structure for the pred. (ii) Out‐ is the core of the out‐pred clause's extended verbal projection. These findings are derived via an analysis in which out‐ merges with the pred before any argument(s) can merge. This analysis is then further supported by exploring domains in which out‐pred is unavailable; though these are seemingly unrelated, they share deep derivational properties that are incompatible with the derivation of out‐pred. The findings of this article have implications for the syntactic representation of argument structure more generally, supporting analyses where all arguments of a verb are syntactically severed from it.
This paper investigates agreement—in particular person agreement—in two configurations in Icelandic where there are two potential controllers of agreement and where at least in some cases agreement ...is with the lower of the two (a “low nominative”). One case is the
Dative-Nominative
construction, where there is a dative subject and a lower nominative argument. The other is the
Specificational Copular Clause (SCC)
construction, where there are two nominative arguments. A much-discussed aspect of agreement in the former case is that agreement in number with the low nominative is generally possible, but agreement in person is at best highly restricted, leading in some cases to ineffability. This person effect has been claimed to be ameliorated by syncretism in the agreement paradigm, but there is limited data available substantiating this effect, which is however crucial to deciding between two recent types of account. This paper reports on a pair of experimental rating studies on the
Dat-Nom
and SCC configurations in Icelandic. We show that, taken together, the two sets of data provide evidence against the Person Licensing Condition and in favour of an account of the
Dat-Nom
construction in terms of morphological conflict arising from double agreement, although we show that the ameliorating effect of morphological syncretism, while real, is limited. Further, we show that there is no evidence of double agreement in the copular clauses investigated. We argue that full agreement with the low nominative here arises if the first nominal can move out of the domain of agreement entirely. The possibility of agreement with the initial nominal we suggest indicates that nominatives, unlike datives, cause the search of the agreement probe to terminate.
The ability to overcome interference from the first-language (L1) is a source of variability in second language (L2) achievement, which has to date been explored mainly in same-script bilinguals. ...Such interference management, and bilingual language control more generally, have recently been linked to domain general executive functions (EF). In the current study, we examined L2 proficiency and executive functions as possible predictors of susceptibility to L1 interference during L2 processing, in bilinguals whose languages do not share an orthographic system. Seventy Arabic-Hebrew bilingual university students performed two tasks indexing cross-language interference (from L1 to L2). Lexical interference was assessed using a cross-modal semantic similarity judgment task in Hebrew, with false-cognates as critical items. Syntactic interference was assessed using a self-paced reading paradigm and grammaticality judgments on Hebrew sentences whose syntactic structures differed from those of Arabic. EFs were examined using spatial and numerical Stroop tasks, to index inhibitory control, and a task switching paradigm, to index shifting abilities. We found significant L1 interference across the lexical and syntactic domains, even in proficient different-script bilinguals. However, these interference effects were not correlated, and neither type of interference was related to domain general EF abilities. Finally, offline susceptibility to syntactic interference, but not lexical interference, was reduced with greater L2 proficiency. These results suggest at least partially independent mechanisms for managing interference in the two language domains, and raise questions regarding the degree to which domain general control abilities are recruited for managing L1 interference.
I argue that a range of morphological phenomena sensitive to features of multiple arguments in Georgian (South Caucasian)—including Anti-Superiority effects (Béjar 2003), and omnivorous number ...effects (Nevins 2011) – receive a unified account if spellout targets contiguous spans of maximally simple heads, in a fixed hierarchy. I introduce new data from a related language, Laz, and show that a close comparison of the two languages reveals that (i) number agreement is expressed omnivorously only if the prefix is not sensitive to number, and that (ii) this number expression covaries with Tense only if the subject is third person. I argue that both Anti-Superiority and the facts about number expression should be interpreted as fusional morphology being limited to third person contexts, and that a principled explanation for such an asymmetry can be provided, if first and second person structurally contain third person, and the matching of exponents with syntactic structure is governed by Overspecification (Starke 2009), such that a lexicalized span is a candidate of spellout for its sub-spans.
Manner/Result Complementarity (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010) has been argued to have consequences for argument realization: only manner verbs permit object deletion and non-selected objects. In ...contrast, result verbs always co-appear with their object, because they are required to express the undergoer of the change that they entail. We discuss new data involving result verbs in constructions where the undergoer of the change encoded by the result verb is not realized as the object of the predicate. We argue these data display result verbs whose root is integrated into the argument structure of the predicate in such a way that it is interpreted as specifying a co-event of the main event denoted by the predicate, whereby the result entailed by the root is not necessarily intended to hold of the direct object. This follows if verb roots do not come with a syntactically relevant specification for manner or result from the lexicon, but acquire it on the basis of their association with the syntactic structure.
