A study of the Morphological Patterns of Collocation in Assamese: A Thematic Overview

This study aims at a thorough examination of the parameters behind the emergence of a given proverb in a given language and at a given time. Proverbs, like lexical items or certain syntactic constructions, are born, develop and eventually disappear. Our reflection will start from the observation that the formulation the origin of proverbs is indeed extremely vague. A proverb is in fact the result of the action of several parameters: a) the sapiential lesson: every proverb rests fundamentally on an implicative pivot of the type ‘if you have P, you have Q’, either to apply it (Like father, like son), or to reject it (A swallow doesn’t make a summer). This sapiential lesson is linked to the culture and beliefs of the community concerned and may not exist in another culture; b) the metaphor used to represent P and Q: it is to be expected, for example, that a culture where the swallow has no relevant place will appeal to another metaphor to represent the sapiential lesson contained in A swallow does not make summer; c) the form of proverbs: studies of sententious forms show that proverbs are generally based on a small number of patterns - around a dozen - which strictly limit variations. These patterns are characteristic of a specific language or group of languages and make it possible to identify proverbs in a given language; d) finally, a significant number of proverbs show rhythmic and / or metrical structures in small numbers. The interesting point is that a sapiential form, even if it doesn’t have such a structure at first, always ends up acquiring one, as we will show with specific examples.

2 - GRAMMAR AND FUNCTION: toward a discourse definition of syntax

In order to resolve metonymy and other violations of selectional restrictions between lexical items, a language understander must be able to infer relationships that do not have explicit lexical analogs in the sentance. Although such inferencing has typically been relegated to the world knowledge portion of a natural language processing system, there is also evidence, from both theoretical analysis in compositional semantics and distributional analysis of corpus data, that some cases of metonymy may best be processed with respect to more specific lexical and syntactic constructions. In this paper, we argue how the richer vocabulary for lexical semantics proposed in Pustejovsky's “Generative Lexicon” theory allows one to explore the role of lexical information in such cases, and therefore sheds more light on the distinction between lexical inferences, which follow from defaults associated with lexical items and rules of composition, and pragmatic inferences, which depend on reasoning with respect to the context of the utterance.

SummaryHerein, an ultra‐high performance liquid chromatography coupled to a diode array detector (UHPLC‐DAD) based quantification method has been developed for the simultaneous determination of 21 bioactive phenolic compounds present abundantly in food products. The developed method was validated in terms of parameters such as linearity, detection and quantification limits, intra‐day and inter‐day precision and recovery showing ideal results. Further, the developed method was applied for the quantitative analysis of phenolics in commercially procured dietary samples such as spices, green tea, black tea and dark chocolate. The major phenolics quantified in dry weight of different samples were epigallocatechin gallate (425.5 mg/10 g), epicatechin gallate (111.9 mg/10 g) in green tea; gallocatechin (286.8 mg/10 g) in dark chocolate; and naringin (93.9 mg/10 g) in star anise etc. Overall, the UHPLC‐DAD‐based method was found to be reliable, simple and specific for the estimation of phenolics in different targeted food samples.

The theoretical outlook of usage-based linguistics is a position that views language as a dynamic, evolving system and that recognizes the importance of usage frequency and frequency effects in language, as well as the foundational role of domain-general sociocognitive processes. Methodologically, usage-based studies draw on corpus-linguistic methods, experimentation, and computational modeling, often in ways that combine different methods and triangulate the results. Given the availability of corpus resources and the availability of experimental participants, there is a rich literature of usage-based studies focusing on Germanic languages, which at the same time has greatly benefited from usage-based research into other language families. This research has uncovered frequency effects based on measurements of token frequency, type frequency, collocational strength, and dispersion. These frequency effects result from the repeated experience of linguistic units such as words, collocations, morphological patterns, and syntactic constructions, which impact language production, language processing, and language change. Usage-based linguistics further investigates how the properties of linguistic structures can be explained in terms of cognitive and social processes that are not in themselves linguistic. Domain-general sociocognitive processes such as categorization, joint attention, pattern recognition, and intention reading manifest themselves in language processing and production, as well as in the structure of linguistic units. In addition to research that addresses the form and meaning of such linguistic units at different levels of linguistic organization, domains of inquiry that are in the current focus of usage-based studies include linguistic variation, first and second-language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change.

Learners of English as a second language at intermediate and advanced stages have often mastered the majority of the major syntactic constructions in English. Yet, many grammatical errors persist in their writing. A high percentage of these errors, though labeled grammatical, do not in fact represent problems with pure syntax but rather mistakes in using given lexical items in constructions they do not belong in. By utilizing concepts from modern transformational-generative theories, the authors trace such errors to incorrect or incomplete lexical subcategorization. The nature of these errors is discussed from both a theoretical and pragmatic perspective, and the major classes of subcategorization errors for English verbs are identified. The article argues that ESL teachers, particularly writing teachers of students beyond the beginner’s level, need to be aware of the source of these errors so that they can distinguish them from other types of grammatical errors and more effectively help their students to overcome them.

This paper is concerned with the status of bound forms in compounds and other lexical items, but it ultimately aims at setting up a hierarchy of lexical items of various degrees of “freedom”, making use of clear-cut criteria applicable in at least one (fairly large) group of languages. In spite of the difficulties of the various (phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic) definitions of ‘word’, Bloomfield’s characterization of minimum free forms is applied to designate items at the top of the hierarchy, which are called ‘autonomous words’. Bound forms that allow autonomous words to occur between them and the lexical item they are bound to are ‘dependent words’. The novelty of this paper lies in dividing the rest of the lexical items “below”, i.e., ‘nonwords’, into three groups: semiwords, affixoids, and affixes, based on a new application of a familiar operation, coordination reduction, which is shown to work both backward and forward for some items, but only backward reduction is possible for ot...

Adopting the assumptions of usage-based construction grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006), the paper aims to explore the grammatical construction so ADJ as to V with respect to the lexical items occurring in two different slots of the construction. A central idea of the theoretical framework is that syntactic constructions may be as meaningful as lexical items, and, hence, they have the power to attract semantically compatible lexemes. This metaphorical power of attraction, in fact, is indicative of the level of construction entrenchment in the speakers’ minds. The method applied is covarying collexeme analysis (a subtype of collostructional analysis developed by Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, Stefanowitsch 2013), a quantitative and corpus-based approach designed to identify pairs of words that occur together in the same construction more or less frequently than expected. The obtained list of most strongly attracted ADJ–V combinations reveals that a great majority of adjectives denote a negative quality, which is perceived as the cause of the activity in the V slot. The consequence, on the other hand, is reserved for verbs of cognition, emotion, speech, and rarely for true dynamic verbs. A limited number of positive polarity adjectives appears to be used productively, only when the pattern is conventionalized through recurrent communicative situations. Finally, adjectives denoting size or quality, bordering the meaning of too- and enough-patterns, were observed in 12% of the analyzed collexeme pairs.

The article looks at the peculiarities of grammatical and lexical items, stylistic devices, syntactic construction used in the political discourse for the verbal expression of suggestion. The work is based on the political speeches of American Presidents. The actual material dates from the post-war period to nowadays. The investigation results in the conclusion that suggestion on the morphological level is primarily marked by nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, among syntactic constructions simple sentences, syntactic parallelism, rhetorical questions, parcellation, inversion and anaphora are dominated.

This article examines the relation between grammaticalisation and word formation, focusing on derivations and phrasal compounds. It suggests that grammaticalization and word formation must be considered distinct processes because grammaticalisation is a process by which linguistic elements change into constituents of grammar while word formation allows for the production of new lexical items. The analysis reveals that the formation of phrasal compounds can be accompanied by a grammaticalisation process which may affect the whole construction or only part of it and that some syntactic constructions can be lexicalized.

The most productive way to encode ablative, privative, and reversative meanings in current Catalan and Spanish is by means of des- prefixation. This paper investigates how these related values are obtained both from a structural and from a conceptual perspective. To analyze the structural behaviour of these predicates, a new neo-constructionist model is adopted: Nanosyntax, according to which lexical items are syntactic constructs. As for the conceptual content associated to these verbs, it is accounted for by means of a non-canonical approach to the Generative Lexicon Theory developed by Pustejovsky (1995 ff.).The core proposal is that des- prefixed verbs with an ablative, a privative, or a reversative meaning share the same syntactic structure, and that the different interpretation of each semantic class emerges as a consequence of the interactions generated, at a conceptual level, between the Qualia Structure of the verbal root and that of the internal argument of the verb.

This volume is a collection of current work at the interface of linguistics and conversation analysis. The focus is on linguistic items in their action contexts: syntactic structures and lexical items in data from natural conversations in six European languages: Danish, English, Finnish, German, Italian and Swedish. Some of the studies deal with similar practices in two different languages, which enables cross-linguistic comparisons. The notion of 'construction' is brought together with an interactional perspective; the fact that constructions cannot always be clearly analysed as either syntactic or lexico-semantic has its reflection in this volume. So far, there have been fewer attempts at interactionally oriented work on lexical and semantic phenomena than on syntactic constructions. In this volume, several papers show the interactional relevance of word selection and lexical semantic issues. In the future, studies on syntax and lexico-semantics in interaction will enrich realistic grammars of our languages, and cross-linguistic description of comparable practices of organizing talk in interaction will be invaluable for the study of both inter-European and international communication.

This volume contains sixteen chapters addressing the process of syntactic change at different granularities. The language-particular component of a grammar is now usually assumed to be nothing more than the specification of the grammatical properties of a set of lexical items. Accordingly, grammar change must reduce to lexical change. And yet these micro-changes can cumulatively alter the typological character of a language (a macro-change). A central puzzle in diachronic syntax is how to relate macro-changes to micro-changes. Several chapters in this volume describe specific micro-changes: changes in the syntactic properties of a particular lexical item or class of lexical items. Other chapters explore links between micro-change and macro-change, using devices such as grammar competition at the individual and population level, recurring diachronic pathways, and links between acquisition biases and diachronic processes. This book is therefore a great companion to the recent literature on micro- versus macro-approaches to parameters in synchronic syntax. One of its important contributions is the demonstration that we can learn a great deal about synchronic linguistics through the way languages change: the case studies included provide diachronic insight into many syntactic constructions that have been the target of extensive recent synchronic research, including tense, aspect, relative clauses, stylistic fronting, verb second, demonstratives, and negation. Languages discussed include several archaic and contemporary Romance and Germanic varieties, as well as Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, among many others.

Reviewed by: La Biblia Escorial I.I.6 by Enrique-Arias, Andrés Steven N. Dworkin Enrique-Arias, Andrés, ed. La Biblia Escorial I.I.6. Transcripción y estudios. Logroño: CiLengua Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla, 2010. 98 pp +1 CDROM. ISBN 978-84-937654-6-0. A rich tradition of vernacular renderings (romanceamientos) of the Bible flourished in medieval Spain. At least a dozen different manuscripts have preserved Romance versions of the Bible, the largest number in any medieval European vernacular. All but two of these translations are based on the Hebrew Bible and thus exclude the New Testament. In some of the versions derived from the Hebrew text, the Deuterocanonical books follow the text of the Vulgate. These texts were prepared by Jews for the use of both their co-religionists, and for Christian patrons who commissioned and sponsored some of these translations. Although some may reflect earlier originals, the majority of these versions date from the fifteenth century, a time when the Church was not strictly enforcing its prohibition on private ownership of vernacular Bibles. The negative attitude of the Church in the Iberian Peninsula toward vernacular Bibles may explain in part the paucity of Romance Bibles based on the Latin Vulgate. The surviving manuscripts may be but the remnants of a much richer tradition of Romance Bibles in medieval Spain. In addition, vernacular Bible texts constitute lengthy sections of such works as the early thirteenth-century Fazienda de ultra Mar and the Alfonsine General estoria (the latter based on the Vulgate). Romance biblical fragments also turn up in several fifteenth-century texts. Three recent studies by Gemma Avenoza provide an informative description and analysis of the manuscripts that have preserved medieval Spanish Bibles. The Biblical text contained in Escorial Manuscript I.I.6 (also known as I-J-6 and E6; hereafter E6) is one of the two medieval Spanish vernacular Bibles translated directly from the Vulgate (the other being Escorial MS I.I.8 or E8) and is the oldest Castilian vernacular Bible. This copy was executed ca. 1250 and, consequently, is the longest extant pre-Alfonsine Castilian prose text. It is a treasure trove of early Castilian linguistic forms. Its 358 double-columned [End Page 291] folios contain the Old Testament starting from Proverbs, and the entire New Testament. Escorial Manuscript I.I.8 (E8) contains most of the Old Testament material missing from E6, a situation which has led some experts to suspect that both go back to a common Vulgate-based original. The Gospel of St. Matthew as transcribed in E6 was edited by Thomas Montgomery, who subsequently joined forces with Spurgeon Baldwin to publish a well-received edition of the remainder of the New Testament. Over the years various scholars have edited individual Old Testament books from E6, often in journals of difficult access or as unpublished dissertations. Enrique-Arias identifies these editions at page 16 of his Introduction to the book under review, which offers its readers the first edition of the entire Biblical text preserved in E6. Andrés Enrique-Arias is one of the leading specialists in the study of medieval vernacular Spanish Bibles. He is the creator of the website Biblia medieval (www.bibliamedieval.es), which offers, among other features, a transcription of all extant medieval Spanish Bible manuscripts as well as those portions of Biblical books reproduced in other texts, accompanied by the text of the Vulgate and the Hebrew Bible (the latter both in Hebrew script and in transliteration). Enrique-Arias has designed a parallel corpus, which allows the researcher to compare at one glance how a given Biblical passage is rendered in all the relevant Romance versions. Such a tool is invaluable to the textual critic and to the historical linguist who wishes to compare the choice of, say, orthographical and morphological variants, syntactic constructions, or lexical items. Enrique-Arias himself has authored a number of studies of Spanish morphosyntax based on the data found in the Biblia medieval corpus (e.g., Biblias romanceadas, Lingua eorum). In addition to a Prologue by Claudio García Turza and a brief Introduction by the editor, four studies accompany the transcription...

Systems that generate natural language output as part of their interaction with a user have become a major area of research and development. Typically, natural language generation is divided into several phases, namely text planning (determining output content and structure), sentence planning (determining abstract target language resources to express content, such as lexical items and syntactic constructions), and realization (producing the nal text string) (Reiter, 1994). While text and sentence planning may sometimes be combined, a realizer is almost always included as a distinct module. It is in the realizer that knowledge about the target language resides (syntax, morphology, idiosyncratic properties of lexical items). Realization is fairly well understood both from a linguistic and from a computational point of view, and therefore most projects that use text generation do not include the realizer in the scope of their research. Instead, such projects use an o -the-shelf realizer, among which PENMAN (Bateman, 1996) and SURGE/FUF (Elhadad and Robin, 1996) are probably the most popular. In this technical note and demo we present a new o -theshelf realizer, RealPro. RealPro is derived from previous systems (Iordanskaja et al., 1988; Iordanskaja et al., 1992; Rambow and Korelsky, 1992), but represents a new design and a completely new implementation. RealPro has the following characteristics, which we believe are unique in this combination: RealPro is implemented in C++. It is therefore both fast and portable cross-platform. RealPro can be run as a standalone server, and has C++ and Java APIs. The input to RealPro is based on syntactic dependency (roughly, predicate-argument and predicate-modi er structure). Syntactic and lexical knowledge about the target language is expressed in ASCII les which are interpreted at run-time. It can easily be updated. We reserve a more detailed comparison with PENMAN and FUF, as well as with AlethGen/GL (Coch, 1996) (which is perhaps the system most similar to RealPro, since they are based on the same linguistic theory and are both implemented with speed in mind), for a more extensive paper. This technical note presents RealPro, concentrating on its structure, its coverage, its interfaces, and its performance.