Animacy Features Research Articles

Full agreement with coordinate subjects in Polish: Gender resolution rules revisited

The aim of the paper is to propose a set of revised gender resolution rules for Polish, based on an interplay between gender and animacy features of conjuncts, which makes a coordinate subject eligible for a given variant of gender agreement with the predicate. Specifically, it is argued that both gender and animacy features of conjuncts can make a coordinate subject eligible for virile or non-virile agreement, or both. The resolution is achieved by the application of a set of four rules capitalising on certain semantic features of conjuncts and the interaction between them within a coordinate subject. The application of the rules restricts agreement possibilities to either virile or non-virile agreement, or makes both possibilities available for a given coordinate subject. In consequence, the proposed revised gender resolution rules have a capacity to capture data that are problematic under the traditional resolution rules for Polish.

Animacy and differential subject marking in the Ikema dialect of Miyako

Ikema is a dialect of the Miyako language of Ryukyu, Japan and is endangered. It is remotely related to Japanese, but unlike Japanese it shows a differential-subject marking based on the animacy feature of the subject noun. The pronoun and personal names are invariably marked by ga, while inanimate nouns are marked by nu. All human common nouns are also marked by nu, but a subset of this category can be marked by ga. In this paper, I propose to employ the socio-pragmatic notion of addressability, or the noun’s potential to be used as an address term, to classify human nouns into two subtypes for case marking, “Dad, can you help me?”.

The morphological expression of plurality and pluractionality in Mandarin

This paper reports the fact that the morpheme that expresses the plurality of individuals and the one that expresses the plurality of events or actions are the same derivational reduplicant in Mandarin Chinese. It is seen in AABB nouns and AABB verbs. Thus, an instance of cross-categorial quantification is attested morphologically. With respect to word formation, the fact can be explained if the reduplicant is combined with a base first and then a functional element is merged with the combination, and the categorial features are projected from the functional element alone (categorization). Thus, not only roots, but also derivational affixes, can have no categorial features. As a consequence, the existence of acategorial plural markers indicates that number features can be integrated not only after categorization, realized as inflectional affixes or functional elements, but also before categorization, realized as derivational affixes. The same is true of gender and animacy features, cross-linguistically.

Exploring interactions between semantic and syntactic processes: The role of animacy in syntactic priming

The current study addressed the relation between syntactic and semantic processes during language production in 5- and 6-year-old children. A priming paradigm was used to examine children’s production of passives in describing transitive scenes (target pictures) following exposure to the experimenter’s sentences (primes). The key question was whether the tendency to repeat the syntactic form of the prime was affected by the animacy features in the prime and the target picture. In Experiment 1, children heard either passive or active primes with varied animacy configurations (e.g., animate patient/inanimate agent vs. inanimate patient/animate agent). The animacy features of the prime matched those of the target. Similar to prior studies, results showed a greater use of passives following passive, as opposed to active, primes. Critically, the difference between the two priming conditions varied as a function of animacy; it was larger when the prime and the target included an animate patient/inanimate agent than with the reversed animacy. In Experiment 2, the animacy configuration of the prime either matched or did not match that of the target. Results showed a greater likelihood of producing a passive when the target picture contained an animate patient versus an inanimate patient, and this effect was stronger when the prime had the same animacy features. The findings indicating that syntactic priming is moderated by animacy are discussed in the broader context of understanding the role of semantics in guiding the choice of syntactic structure.

El sistema pronominal en el español de bilingües tepehuano del sureste-español

The Spanish pronominal system has been extensively studied, either from the perspective of grammar rules or from sociolinguistic studies focused on change and language variation; protruding those performed in contact zones where the Spanish shares territory with languages that are not part of the Indo-European family. These studies have shown a tendency to simplify the unstressed pronoun of the third person in relation to gender and number as well as the elision direct object pronoun with defined reference and the double marking of the pronoun and its referent. This study focuses on simplifying the unstressed third person pronoun in Spanish of and bilinguals southeast tepehuan and spanish taking into account both the frequency of use like the semantic features of animacy, specificity, and position of the noun phrase that functions as a reference.

Word order affects the time course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal

The scope of planning during sentence formulation is known to be flexible, as it can be influenced by speakers' communicative goals and language production pressures (among other factors). Two eye-tracked picture description experiments tested whether the time course of formulation is also modulated by grammatical structure and thus whether differences in linear word order across languages affect the breadth and order of conceptual and linguistic encoding operations. Native speakers of Tzeltal [a primarily verb–object–subject (VOS) language] and Dutch [a subject–verb–object (SVO) language] described pictures of transitive events. Analyses compared speakers' choice of sentence structure across events with more accessible and less accessible characters as well as the time course of formulation for sentences with different word orders. Character accessibility influenced subject selection in both languages in subject-initial and subject-final sentences, ruling against a radically incremental formulation process. In Tzeltal, subject-initial word orders were preferred over verb-initial orders when event characters had matching animacy features, suggesting a possible role for similarity-based interference in influencing word order choice. Time course analyses revealed a strong effect of sentence structure on formulation: In subject-initial sentences, in both Tzeltal and Dutch, event characters were largely fixated sequentially, while in verb-initial sentences in Tzeltal, relational information received priority over encoding of either character during the earliest stages of formulation. The results show a tight parallelism between grammatical structure and the order of encoding operations carried out during sentence formulation.

RESTRIÇÕES DA TEORIA DA LIGAÇÃO E O PROCESSAMENTO DA CORREFERÊNCIA PRONOMINAL EM DOIS ESTÁGIOS

Este trabalho investigou a atuação do princípio B da Teoria da Ligação no parsing de frases contendo o pronome ‘ele” com antecedente indisponível convergente ou divergente quanto aos traços de gênero, número e animacidade. Um experimento de leitura automonitorada revelou uma atuação imediata do princípio B e uma influência tardia dos antecedentes indisponíveis, vendo-se uma ação conjunta dos traços citados.

Categorization of Causation: Directness or Animacy?

The categorization of English causative constructions turns commonly around the notion of directness, with little consensus among linguists on the exact definition of this concept. The use of directness as a clustering parameter results in a twofold categorization of English periphrastic causative constructions, namely direct and indirect causatives. This paper reveals the inaccuracy of this distinction and advocates the relevance of frequency and correlational information in the categorizing process. The clustering of English periphrastic causative constructions with regard to the animacy feature offers a better understanding of causal relations and results in a fourfold categorization of causative constructions into physical, volitional, affective and inductive causatives.

Plurality Agreement in Some Eastern Mayan Languages

A preliminary analysis of texts shows that third-person plural agreement marking in K’ichee’ is obligatory for animate nouns and optional but strongly dispreferred for inanimate nouns. In Mam, however, plural agreement marking is strongly preferred but still optional for animate nouns and, while it is not preferred for inanimate nouns, it is used with much greater frequency than in K’ichee’. It is likely that in K’ichee’ an innovative syntactic rule for agreement marking has been introduced that requires it for animates and not for inanimates, thus converting a pragmatic strategy, still used in Mam, to a syntactic strategy that pays attention to animacy features.

Vernacular Knowledge of Bromeliaceae Species Among the Wichí People of the Gran Chaco, Argentina

To illustrate and analyze how Bromeliaceae species are used, perceived and conceived by the Wichí people of the Semiarid Chaco, phytonomy, morphology, organoleptic characteristics and other features of the plants are described from a Wichí perspective, placing emphasis on an analysis of linguistic expressions. Fieldwork was carried out in five settlements located in the northeast region of the province of Salta, Argentina. The information was gathered through open-ended and semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation. Our results reveal a correlation between the importance of each species and the type of phytonym used to name it. The majority of names for plant parts are also used to refer to animal or human body parts; this polysemy is explained by functional, morphological and positional similarities, and mythical associations. Some organoleptic characteristics and the existence of a spirit “owner” of Bromeliaceae species suggest that they have features of animacy. For the Wichís, the Bromeliaceae are closely related and may comprise a distinct ethnocategory.

The clitics mechanism in French and Italian

The article concentrates on the question of the composition, the internal or- dering and the placement of clitic-clusters (C-clusters) in French and Ital- ian, though clitic data from other languages are drawn in occasionally. The system proposed is top-down transformational, in the terms of Semantic Syntax (Seuren 1996). Clitics are taken to originate in underlying structure as canoni- cal argument terms or adverbial constituents of clauses. During the process of transformation from to surface form, nonfocus, nonsubject, pronom- inal argument terms are assigned values for the features of animacy ((±an)), dative status ((±dat)) and reflexivity ((±refl)). On the basis of these, the rule featurecm� , inducing clitic movement, is assigned or withheld. Plus- values increase, and minus-values reduce, the semantic weight of the clitics in question. Pronouns without the featurecmare not cliticised and stay in their canonical term position in their full phonological form. Pronouns with the featurecmare attached to the nearest verb form giving rise to clitic clusters, which accounts for the composition of well-formed C-clusters. The attachment of clitics to a cluster occurs in a fixed order, which accounts for the ordering of clitics in well-formed clusters. Branching directionality, together with a theory of complementation, accounts for the placement of C- clusters. Clitics often take on a reduced phonological form. It is argued that, in French and Italian, which are languages with a right-branching syntax and a left-branching flectional morphology, postverbal clitics, or enclitics, are part of left-branching structures and hence fit naturally into the morphology. They are best categorised as affixes. Occasionally, as in Italian glielo, dative clitics (e.g., gli) turn preceding lighter clitics (e.g., lo) into affixes, resulting in the left- branching structure glielo ,w here-lo is an affix. In a brief Intermezzo, instances are shown of the irregular but revealing lui-le-lui phenomenon in French, and its much less frequent analog in Italian. On these assumptions, supported by

Syntactic priming in comprehension: The role of argument order and animacy.

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison?") are due to anticipation of structural properties following the verb (send) in the target sentence or to anticipation of animacy properties of the first postverbal noun. Shortly following the target verb onset, listeners looked at the recipient more (relative to the theme) following DO than PO primes, indicating that the structure of the prime affected listeners' eye gazes on the target scene. Crucially, this priming effect was the same irrespective of whether the postverbal nouns in the prime sentences did ("The monarch will send the painting to the president") or did not ("The monarch will send the envoy to the president") differ in animacy, suggesting that PO/DO priming in comprehension occurs because structural properties, rather than animacy features, are being primed when people process the ditransitive target verb.

The Interpretability Hypothesis: evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition

The second language acquisition (SLA) literature reports numerous studies of proficient second language (L2) speakers who diverge significantly from native speakers despite the evidence offered by the L2 input. Recent SLA theories have attempted to account for native speaker/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) divergence by arguing for the dissociation between syntactic knowledge and morpho(pho)nology. In particular, Lardiere (1998), Prévost and White (2000), and Goad and White (2004) claim that highly proficient learners have knowledge of the abstract syntactic properties of the language but occasionally fail to associate them with the correct morphological or phonological forms. On the other hand, theories that support partial availability of Universal Grammar (UG) (Tsimpli and Roussou 1991; Hawkins and Chan, 1997) argue for a problem in the syntax: while UG principles and operations are available in SLA, the formal features of the target language that are not instantiated in the L1 or have a different setting, cause learnability problems. This article discusses acquisitional data in the light of the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli and Mastropavlou, 2007), which is a reformulation of the SLA theory suggested by Tsimpli and Roussou (1991) in minimalist terms. It is argued that a minimalist approach to SLA can be implemented to specify the status of the features that are least accessible to re-setting in the SLA process, given (1) constraints on their learnability and (2), their setting in the L1 grammar. The phenomenon discussed concerns the use of the resumptive strategy in wh- subject and object extraction by intermediate and advanced Greek learners of English. It is proposed that the acceptability rate of pronouns in the extraction site is conditioned by the Logical Form (LF) interpretability of the features involved in the derivation. Hence, the interpretable features of animacy and discourse-linking are hypothesized to be involved in the analysis of English pronouns by Greek L2 learners, while the first language (L1) specification of resumptive pronouns as clusters of uninterpretable Case and Agreement features resists resetting.

The Object Agreement Constraint

This paper deals with the so-called Person Case Constraint (Bonet, E. 1991), a universal constraint blocking accusative clitics and object agreement morphemes other than third person when a dative is inserted in the same clitic/agreement cluster. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the scope of the PCC is considerably broader than assumed in previous work, and that neither its formulation in terms of person (1st/2nd vs. 3rd)-case (accusative vs. dative) restrictions nor its morphological nature are part of the right descriptive generalization. We present evidence (i) that the PCC is triggered by the presence of an animacy feature in the object’s agreement set; (ii) that it is not case dependent, also showing up in languages that lack dative case; and (iii) that it is not morphologically bound. Second, we argue that the PCC, even if it is modified accordingly, still puts together two different properties of the agreement system that should be set apart: (i) a cross-linguistic sensitivity of object agreement to animacy and (ii) a similarly widespread restriction on multiple object agreement observed crosslinguistically. These properties lead us to propose a new generalization, the Object Agreement Constraint (OAC): if the verbal complex encodes object agreement, no other argument can be licensed through verbal agreement.

Influence of animacy and grammatical role on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns in German L1-acquisition

In anaphora resolution theory, it has been assumed that anaphora resolution is based on a reversed mapping of antecedent salience and anaphora complexity: minimal complex anaphora refer to maximal salient antecedents. In order to ex-amine whether and by which developmental steps German children gain command of this mapping maxim we conducted an experiment on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns including the three pronoun types zero, personal, and demonstrative pronoun. With respect to antecedent salience, the experiment varied syntactic role (subject/object) and in/animacy. Six age groups of children (age range from 2;0 to 6;0) and an adult control group has been tested. The hypothesis arising from the mapping maxim is that zero pronoun correlates with more salient antecedents than personal and demonstrative pronoun, the latter correlating with the least salient antecedents. The results are: In production, children first establish the opposition of zero pronoun with animate antecedents vs. demonstrative pronoun with inanimate antecedents. In a next step, syntactic role comes into play and a more complex system opposing the three presented pronoun types is established. In comprehension, however, the effect of pronoun type re-mains weak and antecedent features remain a strong factor in reference choice. However, also adults employ pronoun type and antecedent features. The oldest children and the adults show variation in personal pronoun resolution according to the animacy pattern of the potential antecedents. In case of identical animacy features, the subject is the preferred candidate; in case of distinct animacy features, there is a tendency to choose the object antecedent.

A aquisição de clíticos acusativos e o objeto nulo no PB

Based on Lopes and Cyrino (2005) and Creus e Menuzzi (2005), thepurpose of this work is to investigate how Brazilian Portuguese (BP)children are filling the anaphoric direct object position once occupiedby 3rd person accusative clitics. Since these clitics disappeared fromBP’s pronominal system, we aim to determine the linguistic evidencesavailable to children in order for them to choose between a lexicalpronoun or a null object in this position. Results from our analysis ofthe language acquisition data confirmed Lopes & Cyrino’s hypothesisthat the semantic features of animacy and specificity in the antecedentare responsible for the alternation between lexical pronoun and nullobject, as well as bring into question some of Creus & Menuzzi’spredictions, which ascribe to the semantic genre of the antecedent (andnot to animacy and specificity) the main role in the choice of positions.

Mediating between Concepts and Grammar (review)

Reviewed by: Mediating between concepts and grammar ed. by Holden Härtl and Heike Tappe Petra Burkhardt Mediating between concepts and grammar. Ed. by Holden Härtl and Heike Tappe. (Trends in linguistics 152.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. vii, 465. ISBN 3110179024. $127 (Hb). This volume is a collection of articles from a workshop at the 2001 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) annual meeting focusing on syntax-semantics interface issues. The editors, Holden Härtl and Heike Tappe, selected a broad variety of contributors, who agree that the path from conceptualization to linguistic structure involves distinct subsystems of the language system, but who differ with respect to the specific conditions of this interaction. Part 1 focuses on language production and presents papers on the connection between preverbal messages and linguistic structures. Femke van der Meulen reports an eye-tracking experiment indicating that before verbal descriptions are uttered, the relevant information is retrieved during a ‘preview process’, which facilitates speech production. The eye-tracking and keyboard data from Philip Cummins, Boris Gutbrod, and Rüdiger Weingarten also suggest that (conceptual) preview and production processes are distinguishable. Kathy van Nice and Rainer Dietrich explain the tendency to produce animate NPs first with the high accessibility of animacy features and their facilitating effect during language retrieval. Gerard Kempen and Karin Harbusch present a probabilistic formalism to account for scrambling phenomena depending on an element’s grammatical function and shape. Effects of argument order and scope relations are discussed by Andreas Späth. Markus Guhe presents a detailed model for how conceptual information is organized incrementally before it enters the formalizer. Heike Wiese illustrates how semantics functions as an interface system that prepares conceptual information for syntactic representation and is hence capable of operating on linguistic and nonlinguistic features of meaning. Part 2 deals with temporal and spatial aspects of event conceptualization. Utilizing priming studies, Elke van der Meer, Reinhard Beyer, Herbert Hagendorf, Dirk Strauch, and Matthias Kolbe show that the processing of routine-event concepts is influenced by the distance and directionality of the contributing individual events. Investigating event segmentation across languages, Ralf Nüse presents evidence that language-specific differences arise at the interface, while general event cognition remains unaffected. Three papers discuss coercion phenomena. Maria M. Piñango provides data from processing and aphasia studies suggesting that combinatorial processes required for the interpretation of aspectual and complement coercion operate at the interface and are semantic in nature. Contrary to this view, Johannes Dölling argues for the interpretation of coercion on the basis of contextual enrichment, as do Markus Egg and Kristina Striegnitz within an NLG (natural language generation) approach. Part 3 concentrates on lexical encoding. In her discussion of German -ung-nominalizations and the range of possible thematic interpretations for post-nominal genitives, Veronika Ehrich argues for a grammatical foundation of the underlying linking principles. Andrea Schalley proposes that event encoding is guided by two principles—(conceptual) compactness and (lexical) transparency—partly depending on the number of available single stems in a language. Ladina Tschander argues that the conceptualization of path-relations controls the selection between particle verbs and verbs with directional prepositional phrases, and that particles are encoded independently in the lexicon. Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner analyze scientific abstracts to illustrate how event conceptualization and argument structure interact to achieve register-specific goals. In general, this volume highlights today’s diversity of syntax-semantics approaches, including numerous disciplines and frameworks, different experimental approaches, and various languages. It further contains research by advocates of lexical encoding, conceptual influences, and hybrids, among whom the readers can position themselves. Petra Burkhardt Yale University Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

On the syntactic nature of the me-lui and the person-case constraint

This paper is part of a more extensive project whose main topic is the role of Case-theory in the general design of the language faculty. The ultimate goal of this work would be to show that Case does not play the central role current linguistic theories attribute to it, and to derive its effects from other general conditions of the system. In this paper, we will focus on several phenomena that show, contrary to standard assumptions, that Case and Agreement-checking are independent processes. We will argue that Case-features are not the relevant trigger for overt agreement-inducing movement; in particular, in the cases we will analyze, we will show that verbal agreement is sensitive to some animacy feature of the attracted object. Case-marking will then be analyzed as a property of the morphological component, with no bearing on the issue of syntactic movement.

Influence of Selected Semantic Variables on Word Associations of Aphasics

A word association test consisting of 10 animate noun and 10 inanimate noun stimuli was administered to 30 French-speaking and 30 English-speaking college students, 14 hospitalized non-aphasics, 7 fluent aphasics, and 7 dysfluent aphasics. The purpose of the study was to compare the response types and to investigate the effects of the semantic feature of animacy on response type and response latency. It was found that dysfluent aphasics gave significantly more paradigmatic responses than the hospitalized non-aphasics, and that the aphasics responded much more slowly than the hospitalized non-aphasics. There was no difference between English and French students on the number of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses given; however, the English students responded significantly faster than the French students. Both the college students and the fluent aphasics responded significantly faster to inanimate nouns than to animate nouns. There was no response type-semantic feature interaction found for any of the groups. These findings provided evidence that aphasics do not respond similarly to normals, and that the animacy feature has an influential effect on linguistic performance.