The syntactic and semantic autonomy of the participial adjective

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Grammatical Categories and Relations: Universality vs. Language‐Specificity and Construction‐Specificity

This study represents a research on the grammar of the contemporary Romanian language. It proposes a discussion regarding the identification of the flective-relateme as an expression of the grammatical category of the case (seen as a relational category) of Romanian common nouns with definite and indefinite articles when they occupy a structural position of the part of sentence and syntactic function type, in the absence of prepositions or prepositional phrases. In the Romanian language, the noun, as a Ts, can be subordinated to a Tr only through two subtypes of relateme, which are in a relation of logical disjunction: preposition-relateme vs flective-relateme. A common noun, whether nondetermined or determined (definite or indefinite), may materialize either a monomorphematic flective, in which case the flective-relateme can be of the desinence type or of the definite determinative article type, or a bimorphematic flective. In the latter situation, accepting the phenomenon of syncretism and redundancy in the Romanian language, it becomes clear that common grammatical categories, number and case, are materialized alike in both flectional subunits, making it difficult to delimit the expression unit of the flective-relateme: the desinence or the determinative article. Once we accept the principle of the monosubordination of syntactic functions and the much higher case functionality of the flective of the determinative article type compared to desinence, we may conclude that the determinative article becomes a flective-relateme.

It is known that the functional word “and” is formed from the ancient Turkic particle “birlan” and is differentiated by grammatical function and meaning as a conjunction and ending. However, it is known that modern variants of the particle “birlan”, common to the Turkic peoples, have not received unambiguous recognition in the grammar of the Turkic languages. There are specific reasons for this. The article attempts to compile a systematic description of the functional words that arose from the particle “birlan”. For this purpose, the etymological works of domestic and Soviet Turkologists and specific facts in the Kazakh national literary language were analyzed. The form and function of the instrumental case in the Kazakh language were compared with the variants in other Turkic languages, and it was noted that the grammatical index of the prepositional case also exists in other Turkic languages. It is proven that in some Turkic languages, modern versions of the particle “birlan”, which changed, were formed as affixes. The similarities and differences between the conjunction and the ending “and” formed from the same genesis were shown, as well as their grammatical meanings in our modern language were systematized. It was determined in which cases in the modern language the functional word “and” becomes a conjunction, and in which cases it becomes an ending. Grammatical functions are differentiated in a more detailed way.

Papuan Malay is an Austronesian language spoken in the two provinces constituting Papua. Papuan Malay has four varieties. The Serui Malay variety is the main point of the discussion. I will show that the voice system of this variety displays two main levels of linguistic aspect: (1) Semantic argument level and (2) syntactical function. Both exhibit various patterns in active, passive and causative sentences. Among these are constructions of the type “X:S;Y: DO”, i.e. the first semantic (macro) role X (Actor) is mapped onto grammatical relation of the Subject, while the second semantic (macro) role Y (undergoer) is mapped onto the grammatical relation of Direct Object. Particularly, an active sentence in this variety displays Semantic argument level (roles), and Syntactical function (S, O) in transitive sentences. There are three ways to construct passivity: (1) promotion of the object to the subject position, i.e. the object of the active sentence is promoted to be the subject of the passive sentence; (2) passive sentences; either the default agentless use of passive; or the optional, less common construction of mentioning the agent in an oblique phrase headed by dari “from”, which may also occur in transitive sentences. (3), causative transitive ; i.e. the causer takes the Subject position, and if the embedded verb is intransitive, transitive, or bitransitive, the causee appears as Direct Object, Indirect Object Object or Oblique Object.

Morphological case languages do not necessarily depend on word order to determine their grammatical relations. However, structural case languages depend largely on word order to determine the various grammatical relations. For most configurational languages, the agent/experiencer usually precedes the patient/theme in a simple clause (in the active voice). In the passive voice, the patient/theme occupies the subject position while the agent becomes an object of a preposition (oblique) or omitted as evident in English. Akan, a Kwa language of the Niger-Congo family, being a nominative-accusative language, allows the agent/experiencer to precede the patient/theme in the active construction. In the passive- like construction, however, unlike a language like English, an impersonal pronounoccupies the subject position while the patient or theme remains at the object position. This implies that agents/experiencers do not occur at the oblique position in Akan; neither dopatients/ themes occur at the subject position. Certain verbs (symmetrical verbs), however, may allow the experiencer and the theme arguments to switch positions in the active construction without affecting the meaning of the sentence in the language. This paper seeks to highlight these marked grammatical relations in Akan within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG).

A structural priming study examined whether the mapping between grammatical functions (e.g. subject) and thematic roles (e.g. agent) persists across utterances. Specifically, we tested whether native Cantonese speakers are more likely to produce a standard subject–verb–object (SVO) active or a standard passive sentence after repeating an active sentence in object–subject–verb (OSV) order where the direct object (i.e. patient) is grammatically marked as a topic. Such Topic-OSV and standard active sentences share the same agent–subject and patient–direct object mapping, but they differ in all other important aspects including constituent structure, information structure, and linear thematic role order. In contrast, Topic-OSV and passive sentences only share information structure and thematic role order. The results demonstrated that Topic-OSV prime sentences primed SVO actives rather than passives, suggesting that grammatical function–thematic role mapping is a major source of structural priming. We thus argue that our sentence representations encode grammatical functions.

The present study investigated scrambling effects on the processing of Japanese sentences and priority information used among thematic roles, case particles and grammatical functions. Reaction times for correct sentence decisions were significantly prolonged for scrambled active sentences with transitive verbs in the first experiment and with ditransitive verbs in the second experiment. Errors were made with scrambled sentences more than canonical sentences in both experiments, which suggested that scrambling effects were apparent in active sentences. Passive sentences in the third experiment indicated that canonical order defined based on case particles, not thematic roles, was more quickly and accurately identified than scrambled order. Potential sentences in the fourth experiment and causative sentences in the fifth experiment indicated that the processing of scrambled sentences based on grammatical functions, but not on case particles, required longer reaction times and resulted in higher error rates than canonical sentences. Consequently, scrambling effects in the present study indicated that neither thematic roles nor case particles can provide fully-satisfactory information for canonical phrase order, and that only grammatical functions offer satisfactory information in all types of sentences.

This study describes the similarities and differences between Japanese and Indonesian passive sentences through a pairing technique. Passive sentences in both languages are classified into several types based on their syntactic functions and categories and the semantic roles in 21 types of Japanese passive (JP) sentences and 22 types of Indonesian passive (IP) sentences. The findings show that all types of Japanese direct passive (CJ) sentences can be paired directly with the Indonesian di-V construction. Some of the Japanese indirect passive (KJ) sentences can be integrated into the constructions di-V, ter-V, ke-|-an, and construction ditinggal-V-intr, while others could not be paired with Indonesian passive sentences at all but could be expressed by active sentences with Indonesian words that convey opposing meanings. In contrast, the process of pairing Indonesian passive sentences with their Japanese counterparts indicates that type A9, personal passive, and some ter-V constructions could not be paired with Japanese passive sentences but could be expressed through active sentences by putting the object in front. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n1s1p317

REVIEWS205 have wished, however, for a more even-handed assessment of the facts, along the lines of Dixon's recent survey, distinguishing processes which are universally subject-oriented for semantic reasons from those which are languagespecifically accusative (Dixon, 101-18). Chung has also provided an interesting new hypothesis about the evolution of these systems, with some evidence which cannot be easily dismissed. She handles an impressive amount of data from several languages with great facility. (I noted only a very few inconsequential errors in the examples and glosses.) Furthermore, in search of support for her hypotheses, she has uncovered a wealth of hitherto unnoticed or unappreciated facts about these languages. REFERENCES Biggs, Bruce. 1974. Some problems of Polynesian grammar. Journal of the Polynesian Society 83.401-26. Chung, Sandra. 1976. Case marking and grammatical relations in Polynesian. Harvard dissertation. Churchward, Spencer. 1928. On the origin of the Polynesian passive. Journal of the Polynesian Society 37.300-305. Clark, Ross. 1973. Transitivity and case in Eastern Oceanic languages. Oceanic Linguistics 12.559-605. -----. 1980. Eastern Polynesian borrowings in Pukapukan. Journal of the Polynesian Society 89:2. Dixon, R. M. VV. 1979. Ergativity. Lg. 55.59-138. Hohepa, Patrick VV. 1969. The accusative-to-ergative drift in Polynesian languages. Journal of the Polynesian Society 78.297-329. Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. Phonological representations. Three dimensions of linguistic theory, ed. by Osamu Fujimura, 1-136. Tokyo: TEC. Williams, H. W. 1928. Some observations on Polynesian verbs. Journal of the Polynesian Society 37.306-17. [Received 2 April 1980.] Reconstruction of Proto-Tsouic phonology. By Shigeru Tsuchida. (Studies of languages and cultures of Asia and Africa, Monograph series, 5.) Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1976. xxx, 329 pp. Reviewed by R. A. Blust, University ofLeiden The Tsouic languages (Tsou, Saaroa, Kanakanabu) are spoken by an estimated 4,000 persons in the mountains of south-central Formosa (Taiwan). Like other aboriginal languages of Formosa, they belong to the great Austronesian language family, which dominates the island world of the tropics from Madagascar to Easter Island. Thanks principally to Tung 1964, Tsou (roughly 3,400 speakers) is reasonably well-known. Much less has been published on the Southern Tsouic languages; but Tsuchida, drawing on his own carefully transcribed fieldnotes, makes an important descriptive contribution in this work. During the brief occupation of Formosa by the Dutch East Indies Company (1624-61), relatively extensive materials were published for Favorlang (Happart 1650) and for Siraya (Gravius 1661) as a by-product of missionary activity. 206LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) Following the expulsion of the Dutch, interest in the languages of the native population waned, and it was not until the 19th century (Klaproth 1822) that the Austronesian affinity of any Formosan language was recognized in print. Further descriptive studies did not appear until the 1870's, and it was more than half a century later before short comparative vocabularies finally were made available for most of the 21 or 22 languages of the island, together with a provisional internal subgrouping (Ogawa & Asai 1935). Since the early 1960's, interest has dramatically revived in this long-neglected area, as witnessed in part by the book under review. T's study, which began as a doctoral dissertation at Yale University, contains six chapters: 1, 'The position of the Formosan languages in the Austronesian language family'; 2, Outline of grammar of Tsouic languages'; 3, 'Proto-Austronesian phonemes'; 4, 'Reconstruction of Proto-Tsouic phonology and Proto-Tsouic reflexes of Proto-Austronesian phonemes'; 5, 'Tsou reflexes of Proto-Tsouic phonemes'; and 6, 'Proto-Southern-Tsouic reflexes of Proto-Tsouic phonemes, and Kanakanabu and Saaroa reflexes of Proto-Southern-Tsouic phonemes'. There are two appendices: 'Reflexes of Proto-Austronesian phonemes in the Formosan languages' and 'Index of reconstructions'. A loose page of 'Corrigenda and addenda' is appended, but it unfortunately includes only a portion of the typographical errors which the reader will encounter.1 Chap. 1 is a discussion of genetic relationships intended to place the Tsouic languages in a wider comparative context. Apart from its general usefulness as background information, there is a practical reason for this chapter. T sensibly recognizes that the reconstruction of a...

Chapter 5 - Limits to Case — A Critical Survey of the Notion

This article presents an outline of basic aspects of the grammar of Indo-Pakistani Sign Language (IPSL), the sign language used in deaf communities in parts of the Indian subcontinent, cast in a typological framework. Following a typological profile that is intended to capture the essential character of IPSL grammatical organization by typological standards, the article proceeds to describe important domains of IPSL grammar. This includes word classes and their syntactic functions, the marking of basic syntactic relations, the pronominal paradigm, possessive constructions, and categories of number marking. Basic sentence types (negatives, interrogatives, subordinate clauses) are also covered, as well as some principles of discourse organization. IPSL is quite different in many respects from the better-documented Western sign languages and is therefore very interesting from the point of view of typological variation across sign languages.

When analysing a sentence, you are revealing your understanding of this sentence by certain criteria. Before analysing a sentence, you need to understand it in a basic, pre-analytical, concealed way: Analysis is not possible without understanding. The process of analysing a sentence will concretize and finalize this understanding. You will need a theoretical background, the theoretical “tools” when uncovering your syntactical understanding of a sentence by means of syntactical analysis: Analysis is not possible without these theoretical tools. The tools used in the theoretical framework of surface grammar (Oberflachengrammatik) as they were first elaborated by Eisenberg in his 1986 grammar book include syntactic constituents such as verb, noun, noun group and the like (syntactic forms), and syntactic relations, such as predicate, subject, object and the like (syntactic functions). While this sounds like a rather traditional view of grammar, the thorough analyses presented here show that there is more to surface grammar than one might expect. The prime goal of this publication is to present the results of different sentence analyses in form of syntactical trees with information about the forms and functions of the syntactic constituents used. You will find more than 100 syntactical trees, forming a “syntactical forest”. It gives students (and other readers) who are analysing sentences in the framework of surface grammar an opportunity to test their knowledge and understanding of certain syntactical phenomena against the background of authentic use of speech. Besides, the “Surface Grammar in action” is proof of the soundness of the analytical methods and tools used by appropriately analysing linguistic phenomena found in the wilderness of journalistic text production. And yet, sometimes there is more than one solution, more than just one way to explain the structures found. Most authors decide which road to take by themselves. We include the crossways by adding our dialogues about arguable cases, so that readers may see several options of how to explain the more difficult (and more interesting) aspects of grammar. The present publication appears in the year of Peter Eisenberg’s 80th birthday and is dedicated to him with the deepest respect for his life work and especially for the foundation of a syntactic framework with which so many generations of university students are working and which has helped so many understand the intriguing features of the grammar of the German language.

This pioneering study is based on an analysis of over 200 languages, including African, Amerindian, Australian, Austronesian, Indo-European and Eurasian (Altaic, Caucasian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Uralic), Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan. Adpositions are an almost universal part of speech. English has prepositions; some languages, such as Japanese, have postpositions; others have both; and yet others, kinds that are not quite either. As grammatical tools they mark the relationship between two parts of a sentence: characteristically one element governs a noun or noun-like word or phrase while the other functions as a predicate. From the syntactic point of view, the complement of an adposition depends on a head: in this last sentence, for example, a head is the complement of on while on a head depends on depends, and on is the marker of this dependency. Adpositions lie at the core of the grammar of most languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in everyday speech and writing. The author examines their morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic and cognitive properties. He does so for the subsets both of adpositions that express the relations of agent, patient, and beneficiary, and of those which mark space, time, accompaniment, or instrument. Adpositions often govern case and are sometimes gradually grammaticalized into case. The author considers the whole set of function markers, including case, which appear as adpositions and, in doing so, throws light on processes of morphological and syntactic change in different languages and language families.

This paper aims at the criteria applied in grammars in order to classify the words and to discuss the pertinence of such criteria. In the word classification, it is necessary to apply criteria that contemplate the threefold aspects meaning, syntactic function and morphosyntactic behavior. In order to achie ve such aim, the classificatory criteria used by Perini (1996), Camara (1982), Neves (2006) and Mosânio & Lima (2003) were analyzed. In a bibliographic and exploratory research, the ten grammatical word classes were extracted out of four traditional grammars of the Portuguese language. As a result, a graph displays an heterogeneous application of the criteria and the predominance of the semantic criteria over the others.

This research wants to show the syntaxical function of the infinitive and the other unchangeable form of the northern dialect in the folkloric creation. This issue has been discussed scientifically from different foreign and Albanian researchers such as:Lambertz, A. Xhuvani, I. Sheperi, K.cipoetc, in different grammar books during the years. It should be said that these constructions, at times they are called clauses, sometimes called the sentence. They usually go directly, but sometimes with connecting words or linkers. Sometimes they are functionally equivalent to verbal sentences with verb in subjunctivereplaceable them, so functionally synonymous with different dependent sentences. M. Celek concludes that today's Albanian literary language has not existed as many of the European languages, as is the northern dialect of Albanian. Gerund of the northern dialect which is a realistic concept of the true meaning of the word, fully comparable in all directions with the gerund of other languages, carries over 12 key syntax functions. Keywords: unchangeable forms, syntactical functions, subordinate clauses.