Generative Grammar Research Articles

Syntax of DP Deletion and Pragmatics of DP Movement in Passive Voice

This study examines the syntax of DP deletion and pragmatics of DP movement in passive voice from applied linguistics methodology. The data collection was a purposive sampling method as the study specifically alternated the data from Q1 SCOPUS publications, Thai national publications (TCI 1), and Thai undergraduate students’ independent studies (IS) from a private university. There were 99 tokens. The data analyses were linguistics and inferential statistics. Linguistic analysis follows generative grammar, whereas the statistical analysis follows inferential statistical analysis SPSS29. The results of the study showed the similarities of DP by-phrase agent deletion between Q1 SCOPUS, TCI 1, and IS. However, the results in these publications were different pragmatically. The discussion was explained syntactically and pragmatically. The DP arguments in passive voice were omitted due to the reason of widely-known agents. Pragmatically, the movement of DP argument in Q1 SCOPUS and TCI 1 complies with the theory of pragmatic discourse of givenness, while this was not applied in IS. It is expected that the results in this study would be useful for English learners in how to apply passive voice to write research methodology appropriately.

Syntactic Analysis of Nominal Clauses Based on Chomsky’s Generative Grammar and Implications for Language Teaching

Nominal clause is a clause with nominal feature and syntactic analysis is the study of laws of sentence constructions. And Chomsky’s Generative Grammar is a very useful method to analyse a sentence in an explanatory way. This paper aims to focus on how to understand a nominal clause under Generative Grammar (GG) for the explanatory adequacy. In doing so, it will give a brief explanation to the generative mechanisms of simple sentence under GG, then move on to the similar mechanisms of complex sentence, here, it will focus on nominal clauses. On the syntactic analysis of nominal clauses, there are two steps: first recognizing its position in the whole sentence, then picking a proper connective for the nominal clause. Notice this paper will analyse a complex noun sentence for two sentences, one is the whole sentence, and another is the small clause, namely, the nominal clause within the whole sentence. Thus, it can conclude a way to analyse nominal clauses syntactically, and understand their inner constructions. Furthermore, it can explain why a nominal clause form like this and have a better understanding of complex sentences. More importantly, such method can play its role in linguistics and foreign language teaching, which would help language teachers build up a better understanding of the nature of language and the process of language learning.

A learning-based account of local phonological processes

Abstract Phonological processes tend to involve local dependencies, an observation that has been expressed explicitly or implicitly in many phonological theories, such as the use of minimal symbols in SPE and the inclusion of primarily strictly local constraints in Optimality Theory. I propose a learning-based account of local phonological processes, providing an explicit computational model. The model is grounded in experimental results that suggest children are initially insensitive to long-distance dependencies and that as their ability to track non-adjacent dependencies grows, learners still prefer local generalisations to non-local ones. The model encodes these results by constructing phonological processes starting around an alternating segment and expanding outward to incorporate more phonological context only when surface forms cannot be predicted with sufficient accuracy. The model successfully constructs local phonological generalisations and exhibits the same preference for local patterns that humans do, suggesting that locality can emerge as a computational consequence of a simple learning procedure.

The Argument of the Matrix Verb Seems in Spec T: The Raised DP or the Given DP

Generative linguists claim that the argument of the matrix verb as in Mary seemed to be innocent is the DP (determine phrase), which is the raised argument of the to-infinitive clause being raised to be landed in the Spec T. However, the current study argues that the DP argument as the subject of the matrix verb seems to be the given DP and this is supported by functional linguistics. The argument in this study is statistically supported by the empirical evidence of international applied linguistic research articles. The data collection was English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which were indexed in the Q1 SCOPUS database. A total number of approximately 250,000 words was derived from 25 applied linguistics research articles, which contained 47 tokens concerning the argument with the matrix verb seem. The data analysis was divided into the framework of syntactic analysis and the quantitative study of inferential statistical analysis. The framework of syntactic analysis follows functional linguistics called the pragmatic discourse of givenness. The statistical analysis in this study was Pearson Correlation in SPSS29. The results showed that there was a statistically significant relationship between the given DP of the matrix verb seem and applied linguistic research articles. The p-value was reported at 0.044. Thus, the hypothesis in this study was accepted. The discussion follows the principle of cohesion and fixed colligations. It is recommended that the hypothesis in this study be tested by other English materials, such as novels and business documents, to contribute to the field.

The Outsider in a Nation: Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism, and Generative Linguistics

The Outsider in a Nation: Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism, and Generative Linguistics

American linguistics in transition: From post-Bloomfieldian structuralism to generative grammar

American linguistics in transition: From post-Bloomfieldian structuralism to generative grammar

RESEARCH OF COMMUNICATIVE AND PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF THE VERBALIZERS OF THE CONCEPT "MOUTH" IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

Linguistic pragmatics is one of the most promising and new areas of modern linguistics, which is an integral part of the theory of language and is studied in the course of general linguistics. Lingvopragmatics refers to the study of how language is used in specific contexts and social settings. It combines the fields of pragmatics, which studies how meaning is constructed through language use, and linguistics, which studies the scientific structure and function of language. This field examines how pragmatic factors such as social context, speaker intentions, implication, presupposition, and the cooperative principle interact with linguistic elements to influence communication.

How to Demonstrate Metalinearness and Regularity by Tree-Restricted General Grammars

How to Demonstrate Metalinearness and Regularity by Tree-Restricted General Grammars

Syntactically branching out beyond the traditional classroom: A report on the discovery method

Abstract: This article reports on the successful implementation of the discovery method in an undergraduate Generative Syntax course. Rather than reading textbooks on syntactic analysis and doing exercises to apply what was read, students embark on a nine-stage learning cycle consisting of interactive, guided, and independent work. They engage with problem sets to build their own analyses of syntactic phenomena step by step. This method—meant to resemble the work of real-life scientists—allows students to hypothesize, experiment, and build knowledge from trial and error (Kolb 1984, Prince 2004). To measure the effectiveness of our pedagogy, we analyzed course evaluations submitted from 2012 to the present. Learner feedback shows that they find the assignments and activities helpful, that the course challenges them to think and learn, and that they consider the weekly write-ups demanding, yet highly beneficial for their learning.

АДАМДЫН ФИЗИОЛОГИЯЛЫК АБАЛЫН, ЭМОЦИЯСЫН ТУЮНДУРГАН ЭТИШТИК АНТОНИМДЕР (А.Жакыпбековдун чыгармаларынын негизинде)

In the realm of general linguistics, groups of words signifying various scenarios of object and phenomenon interactions, verbs, exhibit a greater morphological complexity compared to word families. They constitute a substantial portion of a language's vocabulary. Our aforementioned article yields the same conclusion. Specifically, when investigating antonyms within the artistic language of the esteemed writer A. Dzhakypbekov, verbal antonyms were found to be prevalent. The content of our scholarly work encompasses antonymous verbs that convey shifts in the emotional experiences of the characters in the work (including weeping, laughter, joy, sadness, positive and negative emotions, etc.), as well as diverse situations pertaining to their physiological state, movements, and actions involving the human body and its organs. Examples related to this word category were scrutinized in terms of morphological composition, antonym formation methods, and classification.

Staying terminologically rigid, conceptually open and socially cohesive

Abstract When he introduced the framework now known as Construction Grammar, Charles Fillmore said: “Grammatical Construction Theory differs from […] other frameworks […] in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated with interpretation instructions” (Fillmore 1989: 17). Construction Grammarians view the patterns, the associations and the interpretive instructionsas a matter of linguistic convention-a fact not generally appreciated within the wider cognitive-functional community that embraces Construction Grammar, In CxG, we do not use general principles to explain the existence of the form-function pairs we encounter in a language, but rather treat those as the product of lexical and constructional licensing (Zwicky 1994). But emergentists and stipulators share one core belief: grammatical structure is inherently symbolic. Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) makes this insight formally explicit by treating constructions as licensors of signs-signs that are phrases, lexemes or words-and allowing for semantic and usage constraints to be directly associated with constructions. But practitioners of Construction Grammar might reasonably reject the SBCG formalism as incompatible with major foundations of constructional thinking: the top-down nature of constructional meaning, the idiomaticity continuum and the narrow scope of linguistic generalizations. My task in this article is to address this concern, illustrating a variety of applications.

Generative Linguistics and the Computational Level

Generative Linguistics and the Computational Level

THEORETICAL A‐GRAMMATISM: THE CASE FOR AN ELIMINATIVIST MINIMALISM

AbstractThis paper explores patterns of cross‐linguistic, intra‐linguistic and individual variation in the acceptability of sentences with extraction from islands, a classic object of attention of generative grammar. It asks which “competence” concept better fits the presented data. We contrast two alternative views: one that ascribes a multilingual competence to individual speakers, in the “rich competence” tradition of acquisition theory, and another one based on a “competence‐free” kind of model, which is framed as an instantiation of the minimalist approach to the language faculty. We conclude that the latter eliminativist approach is better suited to account for variation in the acceptability of island sentences.

The Romance Inter-Views 3

The Romance Inter-Views are short, multiple Q&A pairs that address key issues, definitions and ideas regarding Romance linguistics or general linguistics from a Romance viewpoint. Prominent exponents of different approaches to the study of Romance linguistics are asked to answer some general questions. The answers are then assembled so that readers can get a comparative picture of what’s going on in the field. This is the third Inter-view. The first Inter-view, on Syntax, can be found here. The second Inter-view, on Cartography, can be found here.

Universal Grammar and Universal Grammar’s Influence and Related Theories Concerning Second Language Acquisition

Universal Grammar, represented by Chomsky, believes that the human brain is born with a Language Acquisition Device. Under the stimulation of the language environment, the language function of the human brain dedicated to language learning will be activated and begin to acquire a language. Universal grammar is the core idea of Chomsky's generative linguistics theory, which is composed of a limited number of syntactic principles representing the common features of human language. It is precisely because the human brain naturally generates this universal grammar that human beings can acquire their own mother tongue when language input is poor or even lacks "negative corpus" (that is, the indication of language errors or faults). Chomsky once proposed a simple language acquisition model, namely "language input —Language Acquisition Device —language acquisition", which means that language input generates grammar through Language Acquisition Device, thus acquiring language. It is worth noting that Chomsky's theory is not specifically designed for the study of Second Language Acquisition, and he himself has not given any guidance in this field, but it provides theoretical support for the theory of Second Language Acquisition (Yang Chunyuan, 2020). Hence, learning the whole semester’s course of Second Language Acquisition, having seen universal grammar as a important content in my textbook, this paper tries to integrate these related theories and make a conclusion and comment or paraphrasing（not all the bibliographies are quoted directly in this paper, paraphrased or arranged instead）based on various bibliographies.

The process of vowel harmony in Kurdish language in the framework of Autosegmental phonology

This study discusses the vowels harmony in Kurdish language. Vowel harmony like assimilation process is a very common process in most languages of the world. This process is studied by most phonological theories, such as generative phonology, autosegmental phonology as well as optimality theory. We examine this process from the perspective of autosegmental phonology in this paper. Therefore, we can say that the aim of this study is to investigate the process of vowel harmony in Kurdish language from the perspective of autosegmental phonology. The methodology of this study is to analyze the content of the articles and collect the data with appropriate samples. Autosegmental theory is one of the theories in the field of phonology and was first emerged by Goldsmith as an independent field of generative phonology. In 1976, along with the study of rhyme languages, he introduced autosegmental phonology and then it was published in tonal languages. This theory is actually a field or part of production phonology.

DECODING THE SEMANTIC VOLUME OF NOUNS WITH THE VERBAL MODALITY MÜSSEN: THE SYNERGISTIC DIMENSION OF LEAST EFFORT

The presented work is one of the stages of noun research within a certain verbal modality. The focus of the article lies in the study of the generating noun content in relation to the verbal modality müssen in German from the perspective of linguosynergetic scientific paradigm, which considers language as a complex dynamic system capable of self-organization and self-regulation. In this study methodologically important is the position that the synergetic law of making the least effort and conservation of speech energy is the driving factor of language development. In a synergetic sense, the author of the article draws parallels between the dictionary as a representative of the linguistic generalization of the structured amount of knowledge of the learned extraverbal reality and the mental lexicon, which is not an arbitrary accumulation of contributions, but constitutes a structured hierarchical system of such contributions. If lexical units in the synergetic sense and their meanings at the language level contain coded structured information, then in the same aspect the paper considers the implementation of the word in one of its meanings at the speech level as information decoding. The linguosynergetic format of the research proposed in this article assumes that language as a self-regulating system under the influence of external energy and information has developed a mechanism of different representations of nouns in syntactic constructions with different verbal modality in German-language fiction and press. The results obtained on the basis of the synergetic-quantitative approach are extrapolated to linguosynergetic models of self-organization of noun names according to the principle of minimization of efforts, which directs the human mental lexicon to optimal decoding of semantic volume of polysemic or monosemic nouns in relation to the verbal modality müssen in German-language fiction and press. It was proved that since the closest distances in the lexical structure of a word at the linguistic level are the closest in comparison with the structures of knowledge of the human mental lexicon, the construction of noun content in modern German on the synergetic principle of conservation of speech energy and minimization of efforts is the most optimal way of directing the mental lexicon of a person to decoding the semantic scope of the closets (main) meanings of the polysemic and unambiguous monosemic word models.

The communicative and pragmatic potential of German traditional and modified phraseological units

This article examines the traditional form and modifications of the German phraseology «in Saus und Braus leben» in the modern German press on economic topics from 2018 to 2024. The purposes of using phraseological units in the economic media discourse are diverse. Journalists, in an effort to attract the attention of the readers, use vivid and expressive phraseological units often modifying them. The purpose of the article is to determine the communicative and pragmatic potential of the traditional and modified unit, to identify ways of modifying it, and to present a lexical description of the phraseology. The work describes the functioning of this phraseology both in its traditional form and as modified within media discourse. In order to conduct the research, the following methods were used: an analytical and descriptive approach, linguistic stylistic analysis, and systematization of results, continuous sampling, complex linguistic description, statistical processing, and generalization of data. The material for this study consisted of newspaper articles published in German electronic media, such as «Manager magazin», «Die Tageszeitung», «Der Spiegel», «Focus», «Taz», «Berliner Zeitung». During the study, we found that traditional and modified forms prevail in the article body, often realizing the function of attracting attention, expressive and evaluative functions. It was revealed that the frequency of implementation of the modified phraseology is almost 1.5 times higher than its implementation in the traditional form. Both traditional phrases and their modified variants are used in their original meaning without changing the meaning of the sentence. Within the framework of the studied corpus of traditional and modified phraseological units, the following modifications were identified: change of the grammatical form, expansion of phraseology through additional components, replacement of the verb, reduction of the usual form of phraseology. In the course of the study, an expanded model of the dictionary entry was proposed, considering the specifics of the modern functioning of phraseology in the texts of economic discourse. This description will reflect both the traditional form and the structural and semantic modifications of phraseological units in the media discourse on economic topics.

Constituents, arrays, and trees: two (more) models of grammatical description

Abstract Generative syntax was built on the foundations of Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis, and IC methods and heuristics were an important tool in the early days of the generative enterprise. However, developments in the theory entailed a departure from some fundamental IC assumptions: we will argue that structural descriptions in contemporary generative grammar (transformational and non-transformational) define not constituents, but strictly ordered sequences closer to arrays. We therefore define and characterise IC approaches to syntax as opposed to what we will call Array-Based (AB) approaches. IC grammars define distributional generalisations, and proper containment and is-a relations between indexed distributionally defined categories. AB grammars, in contrast, define strictly ordered sequences of categories. In this paper we introduce and define the fundamental properties of IC grammar, and the changes in the generative theory that introduced arrays in phrase structure. We argue that it is crucial to distinguish between IC and AB grammars when evaluating the empirical adequacy of structural descriptions used in current syntactic theorising, as structures in AB and IC grammars represent different relations between expressions and may be better suited for different purposes.

The Role of (Re)Syllabification on Coarticulatory Nasalization: Aerodynamic Evidence from Spanish

Tautosyllabic segment sequences exhibit greater gestural overlap than heterosyllabic ones. In Spanish, it is presumed that word-final consonants followed by a word-initial vowel undergo resyllabification, and generative phonology assumes that canonical CV.CV# and derived CV.C#V onsets are structurally identical. However, recent studies have not found evidence of this structural similarity in the acoustics. The current goal is to investigate anticipatory and carryover vowel nasalization patterns in tautosyllabic, heterosyllabic, and resyllabified segment sequences in Spanish. Nine native speakers of Peninsular Spanish participated in a read-aloud task. Nasal airflow data were extracted using pressure transducers connected to a vented mask. Each participant produced forty target tokens with CV.CV# (control), CVN# (tautosyllabic), CV.NV# (heterosyllabic), and CV.N#V (resyllabification) structures. Forty timepoints were obtained from each vowel to observe airflow dynamics, resulting in a total of 25,200 datapoints analyzed. Regarding anticipatory vowel nasalization, the CVN# sequence shows an earlier onset of nasalization, while CV.NV# and CV.N#V sequences illustrate parallel patterns among them. Carryover vowel nasalization exhibited greater nasal spreading than anticipatory nasalization, and vowels in CV.NV# and CV.N#V structures showed symmetrical nasalization patterns. These results imply that syllable structure affects nasal gestural overlap and that aerodynamic characteristics of vowels are unaffected across word boundaries.