This book is a research monograph that explores the implications of the strongest minimalist thesis from an antisymmetric perspective. Three empirical domains are investigated: nominal root compounds ...in German and English, nominal gerunds in English and their German counterparts, and small clauses in Russian and English. A point of symmetry that has the potential of stalling the derivation emerges in the derivation of all of these constructions. Building on certain assumptions on how Merge works, this book shows that the points of symmetry can all be resolved in the same way; despite the fact that the three empirical domains under investigation are standardly derived from distinct structural configurations, such as head-head merger in the case of root compounds, head-phrase merger as it arises from standard complementation/predication structures for nominal gerunds, and phrase-phrase merger in small clauses. This book is of interest to all researchers working on syntax and its interfaces.
The study of Russian is of great importance to syntactic theory, due in particular to its unusual case system and its complex word order patterns. This book provides an essential guide to Russian ...syntax and examines the major syntactic structures of the language. It begins with an overview of verbal and nominal constituents, followed by major clause types, including null-copular and impersonal sentences, WH-questions and their distribution, and relative and subordinate clauses. The syntax behind the rich Russian morphological case system is then described in detail, with focus on both the fairly standard instances of Nominative, Accusative and Dative case as well as the important language-specific uses of the Genitive and Instrumental cases. The book goes on to analyze the syntax of 'free' word order for which Russian is famous. It will be of interest to researchers and students of syntactic theory, of Slavic linguistics and of language typology.
An argument that the word order of a given language is largely predictable from independently observable facts about its phonology and morphology.
Languages differ in the types of overt movement they ...display. For example, some languages (including English) require subjects to move to a preverbal position, while others (including Italian) allow subjects to remain postverbal. In its current form, Minimalism offers no real answer to the question of why these different types of movements are distributed among languages as they are. In Contiguity Theory, Norvin Richards argues that there are universal conditions on morphology and phonology, particularly in how the prosodic structures of language can be built, and that these universal structures interact with language-specific properties of phonology and morphology. He argues that the grammar begins the construction of phonological structure earlier in the derivation than previously thought, and that the distribution of overt movement operations is largely determined by the grammar's efforts to construct this structure. Rather than appealing to diacritic features, the explanations will generally be rooted in observable phenomena.
Richards posits a different kind of relation between syntax and morphology than is usually found in Minimalism. According to his Contiguity Theory, if we know, for example, what inflectional morphology is attached to the verb in a given language, and what the rules are for where stress is placed in the verb, then we will know where the verb goes in the sentence. Ultimately, the goal is to construct a theory in which a complete description of the phonology and morphology of a given language is also a description of its syntax.
The functional SYNTAX score (FSS) has been shown to improve the discrimination for major adverse cardiac events compared with the anatomic SYNTAX score (SS) while reducing interobserver variability. ...However, evidence supporting the noninvasive FSS in patients with multivessel coronary artery disease (CAD) is scarce.
The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of and validate the noninvasive FSS derived from coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) with fractional flow reserve (FFRCT) in patients with 3-vessel CAD.
The CTA-SS was calculated in patients with 3-vessel CAD included in the SYNTAX II (SYNergy between percutaneous coronary intervention with TAXus and cardiac surgery II) study. The noninvasive FSS was determined by including only ischemia-producing lesions (FFRCT ≤0.80). SS derived from different imaging modalities were compared using the Bland-Altman and Passing-Bablok method, and the agreement on the SS tertiles was investigated with Cohen’s Kappa. The risk reclassification was compared between the noninvasive and invasive physiological assessment, and the diagnostic accuracy of FFRCT was assessed by the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve using instantaneous wave-free ratio as a reference.
The CTA-SS was feasible in 86% of patients (66 of 77), whereas the noninvasive FSS was feasible in 80% (53 of 66). The anatomic SS was overestimated by CTA compared with conventional angiography (27.6 ± 6.4 vs. 25.3 ± 6.9; p < 0.0001) whereas the calculation of the FSS yielded similar results between the noninvasive and invasive imaging modalities (21.6 ± 7.8 vs. 21.2 ± 8.8; p = 0.589). The noninvasive FSS reclassified 30% of patients from the high- and intermediate-SS tertiles to the low-risk tertile, whereas invasive FSS reclassified 23% of patients from the high- and intermediate-SS tertiles to the low-risk tertile. The agreement on the classic SS tertiles based on Kappa statistics was slight for the anatomic SS (Kappa = 0.19) and fair for the FSS (Kappa = 0.32). The diagnostic accuracy of FFRCT to detect functional significant stenosis based on an instantaneous wave-free ratio ≤0.89 revealed an area under the receiver-operating characteristics curve of 0.85 (95% CI: 0.79 to 0.90) with a sensitivity of 95% (95% CI: 89% to 98%), specificity of 61% (95% CI: 48% to 73%), positive predictive value of 81% (95% CI: 76% to 86%), and negative predictive value of 87% (95% CI: 74% to 94%).
Calculation of the noninvasive FSS is feasible and yielded similar results to those obtained with invasive pressure-wire assessment. The agreement on the SYNTAX score tertile classification improved with the inclusion of the functional component from slight to fair agreement. FFRCT has good accuracy in detecting functionally significant lesions in patients with 3-vessel CAD. (A Trial to Evaluate a New Strategy in the Functional Assessment of 3-Vessel Disease Using SYNTAX II Score in Patients Treated With PCI; NCT02015832)
Display omitted
Latin nonfinite structures with nonovert subjects exhibit puzzling properties with regard to the case- and ϕ-features of their subjects and their relationship to overt NPs in matrix clauses. While ...the transmission of case- and ϕ-feature related properties is obligatory when there is a nominative or accusative controller NP, it is only ϕ-feature transmission that remains obligatory when there is a dative controller, case transmission being apparently optional. To avoid an assumption of syntactic optionality, accounts of the phenomenon which rely on syntactic mechanisms propose that the apparent optionality reflects a syntactic difference between two types of nonfinite structures. It is instead proposed that mechanisms of linking of objects via Agree and ϕ-feature and case transmission should be assigned to different components of the grammar, syntax and morphology. The hypothesis allows a unified treatment of the syntactic phenomenon of control in Latin.
This article aims to propose a treatment of the internal morphological organization of words, based on the idea that morphology is part of syntactic computation. We disagree with Distributed ...Morphology model, whereby morphology is identified with a post-syntactic component conveying an information ‘separated from the original locus of that information in the phrase marker’ (Embick and Noyer 2001: 557) by rules manipulating syntactic nodes. We also consider inadequate the costly and complex syntactic structures that cartographic approach maps into inflectional strings. We pursue a different conceptualization assuming that morphology is governed by the same rules and principles of syntax. Sub-word elements, including inflections, thematic exponents and clitics, are fully interpretable and enter (pair-)merge operations (in the sense of Chomsky 2020a,b, 2021) according to their content, giving rise to complex words.
The aim of the present paper is to investigate the control/raising behaviour of Romanian aspectual verbs. Following Mourounas & Williamson’s (2019) proposal for English aspectuals, I show that in ...Romanian these verbs enter the causative alternation, a property which distinguishes them from both raising and control verbs and which can explain their hybrid behaviour. The aspectual verbs which merge with an infinitive and a subjunctive complement evince raising-like behaviour in their anticausative variant and control-like behaviour in their causative variant. Their anticausative variant is not marked and the verb does not project any Voice Phrase. In their causative variant, they project a thematic Voice Phrase which hosts an external argument, assigned an Agent-Initiator theta-role. Some of the verbs in the termina ‘finish’ class have a marked anticausative variant which projects an expletive Voice Phrase (Schäfer 2008) which hosts the voice marker se, whose presence signals the existence of a volitional, external argument in the structure. When these verbs occur with a supine complement they can only have an unmarked form, indicative of causative status, and they behave exclusively like verbs of control.
Complex numerals are numerals composed of two or more numeral roots, e.g., three hundred five. Complex numerals fall into two classes called additive (e.g., twenty-three = 20 + 3) and multiplicative ...(e.g., three hundred = 3 × 100). There are two possible approaches to capturing their structure. Analysis A (e.g., He 2015) says that complex numerals form a constituent that quantifies over entities denoted by the noun. Analysis B (e.g., Ionin and Matushansky 2018) says that each numeral independently combines with the expression denoting counted entities. This article investigates the morphology of complex numerals in a sample of 17 diverse languages to determine which of these analyses (if any) is more accurate. Our goal is to lay out the patterns and discuss how well they fit with these theories. Our preliminary conclusion is that both structures should be allowed based on the data in our sample, though structures adhering to Analysis A (the complex numeral is a constituent) seem to be more common than the other type.
This book examines the diverse prosody of compound nouns in Kansai Japanese, with a special focus on a class of compounds with particularly variable prosody, whose unique prosody is potentially ...endangered due to their structure and influence from Tokyo Japanese. These compounds serve as important evidence for recursion in prosodic structure in theories of the syntax-prosody interface, as they simultaneously resemble not only other compound words but also non-compound phrases, making them valuable test cases for compound prosodic structure. This book discusses potential reasons for these compounds' prosodic variabilty and what may condition their unique prosody, based on results from novel fieldwork. A unified account of compound prosody in Kansai and three other Japanese dialects is also presented.
A syntax-lexicon trade-off in language production Rezaii, Neguine; Mahowald, Kyle; Ryskin, Rachel ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
06/2022, Letnik:
119, Številka:
25
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Spoken language production involves selecting and assembling words and syntactic structures to convey one's message. Here we probe this process by analyzing natural language productions of ...individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and healthy individuals. Based on prior neuropsychological observations, we hypothesize that patients who have difficulty producing complex syntax might choose semantically richer words to make their meaning clear, whereas patients with lexicosemantic deficits may choose more complex syntax. To evaluate this hypothesis, we first introduce a frequency-based method for characterizing the syntactic complexity of naturally produced utterances. We then show that lexical and syntactic complexity, as measured by their frequencies, are negatively correlated in a large (
= 79) PPA population. We then show that this syntax-lexicon trade-off is also present in the utterances of healthy speakers (
= 99) taking part in a picture description task, suggesting that it may be a general property of the process by which humans turn thoughts into speech.