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.
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, Letnik:
47, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
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.
Abstract
We investigated linguistic knowledge of subjunctive mood in heritage speakers of Spanish who live in a
long-standing English-Spanish bilingual community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Three ...experiments examine the constraints on
subjunctive selection. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 employed pupillometry to investigate heritage speakers’ online sensitivity to
the presence of the subjunctive with non-variable governors (Lexical conditioning) and with negated governors (Structural
conditioning). Experiment 3 employed an elicited production task to examine production of subjunctive in the same contexts. The
findings of the heritage group were compared to those of a group of Spanish-dominant Mexican bilinguals. Results showed that in
comprehension and production, heritage speakers were as sensitive as the Spanish-dominant bilinguals to the lexical and structural
factors that condition mood selection. In comprehension, the two groups experienced an increased pupillary dilation in conditions
where the indicative was used but the subjunctive was expected. In addition, high-frequency governors and irregular subordinate
verbs boosted participants’ sensitivity to the presence of the subjunctive. In production, there were no significant differences
between heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant bilinguals when producing the subjunctive with non-variable and negated
governors.
This volume features fourteen papers by leading specialists on various aspects of historical morpho-syntax in the Ibero-Romance languages. In these papers, fine-grained analyses are developed to ...capture the richness of undiscussed or -often- previously unknown data. Comparative across the (Ibero-)Romance languages and diverse in terms of the approaches considered, ranging from cognitive-functionalist to generativist to variationist, they combine in this volume to showcase the merits of different, yet complementary, perspectives in understanding linguistic variation and language change. The gamut of phenomena scrutinised varies from morpho-phonological puzzles and word-formation to syntax and interface-related phenomena to, as a coda, methodological suggestions for future research in old Ibero-Romance; thus making it ideal reading for scholars and postgraduate students alike.
Particle verbs (combinations of two words but lexical units) are a notorious problem in linguistics. Is a particle verb like look up one word or two? It has its own entry in dictionaries, as if it is ...one word, but look and up can be split up in a sentence: we can say He looked the information up and He looked up the information. But why can't we say He looked up it? In English look and up can only be separated by a direct object, but in Dutch the two parts can be separated over a much longer distance. How did such hybrid verbs arise and how do they function? How can we make sense of them in modern theories of language structure? This book sets out to answer these and other questions, explaining how these verbs fit into the grammatical systems of English and Dutch.
Ambiguity in Linguistics tuny, Jordi; Payrató, Lluís
Studia linguistica,
04/2024, Letnik:
78, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Ambiguity is conventionally defined in Linguistics as a property of a word or an utterance that has two meanings or two interpretations, and is usually classified as lexical, morphological, syntactic ...(or structural), and pragmatic.Giving an adequate definition of linguistic ambiguity is not trivial, nor is there unanimity in accepting it. Most researchers tend to agree that ambiguity should be distinguished from related concepts such as vagueness, context sensitivity, reference transfer, and underdetermination or generality of meaning. The distinction between these concepts is also related to the divergences or connections between the perspectives of analysis of ambiguity, and the aim of each work.In this introduction, we define the limits of ambiguity with respect to related concepts and summarize the studies contained within this special issue. These studies do not cover all possible approaches to linguistic ambiguity, but provide a broad overview that can be useful in different fields. We trust that they will contribute to deepening into a phenomenon that is not yet well described and that seems to be consubstantial with the use of language.
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