Clausal Syntax Research Articles

Morphosyntactic retention and innovation in Sheng, a youth language or stylect of Kenya

Abstract This paper examines the morphosyntax of the East African Swahili-based urban youth language or stylect Sheng. Research on urban youth languages has often focused on these varieties as sites of rapid change and linguistic creativity. However, we show that many of the structural features which appear to make Sheng stand out when compared to (Standard) Swahili are widespread across East African Bantu languages. We examine nominal and verbal domains, as well as clausal syntax, and highlight areas in which Sheng exhibits features in common with its contact languages, as well as features which appear to reflect instances of independent innovation. The study shows that Sheng is not a “simplified” version of Swahili which deviates from the grammar of Swahili in a range of ad hoc ways. Rather, the language exhibits features of retention and contact-induced borrowing, as well as systematic changes which are reflective of variation across the Bantu languages.

Subject nominalizations in Setswana

Agent nominalizations of an object-bearing transitive predicate require of-insertion in many languages, including English (e.g., driver *(of ) a truck). Note that the same transitive predicate is not associated with of-insertion in the clausal syntax (e.g., drive (*of ) a truck). This work provides empirical evidence from Setswana (Bantu) and suggests that of-insertion is not necessary in Setswana agent nominalizations and subject nominalizations, more broadly construed. As long as the syntactic licensing requirements are satisfied, they need not resort to of-insertion. Additionally, I add weight to the claim that an external argument can be represented inside subject nominalizations (Baker & Vinokurova 2009). Adopting the Phrasal Layering approach (Alexiadou & Schäfer 2010, among others), I argue that parallels can be drawn between the nominal domain and the clausal domain in Setswana.

Grammatical and Pragmatic Aspects of Slovenian Modality in Socially Unacceptable Facebook Comments

This paper investigates the grammatical and pragmatic uses of epistemic and deontic modal expressions in a corpus of Slovenian socially acceptable and unacceptable Facebook comments. We propose a set of modals that do not interpretatively vary in their modality type in order to enable robust corpus searches and reliable quantification of the results. We show that deontic, but not epistemic, modals are significantly more frequent in socially unacceptable comments, and specifically that they favour violent discourse. We complement the quantitative findings with a qualitative analysis of the discursive roles played by the modals. We explore how pragmatic communicative strategies such as hedging, boosting, and face-saving arise from the underlying syntactic and semantic properties of the modal expressions, such as the modal force and clausal syntax.

Full V2, no V2, residual V2

This paper presents a new phase-based theory of verb-second and indeed a new model of the left periphery. I argue that V-to-C movement of the verb to the phase head Fin0 has profound repercussions on clausal syntax which explains well-known differences between Modern Germanic V2 languages and Modern Romance non-V2 languages with respect to topicalisation. I also explore how the proposed analysis can account for the linear restriction on the prefield in V2 languages as well as the phenomenon of ‘residual verb second’ in otherwise non-V2 languages like Modern Romance.

Numeral Reduplication and Clausal Syntax: Grammaticalized Distributivity in Medieval Iberia

AbstractThis study examines a little-known case of grammaticalized distributivity in the Romance branch, as found in tenth to fifteenth century texts produced in the Iberian Peninsula. Analysis of a newly compiled, hand-annotated corpus demonstrates that, in Old Ibero-Romance, the reduplication of an adnominal cardinal numeral on the internal argument of the verb mandates a distributive reading at the sentential level. The distributive construction is characterized as ‘double-object’-like structure occurring only in expressions of dynamic and static possession. Whilst a cross-categorial operation originating in the DP edge triggers pluralization of the event itself, an applicative treatment of the clausal syntax not only captures the ‘double-object’-like structure of the construction, but the nature of the distributive relation itself.

O uso da análise de clusters na identificação de padrões de transitividade linguística

Este trabalho visa a apresentar a técnica de agrupamento hierárquica para análise de padrões semânticos e sintáticos da transitividade no nível oracional. Partindo de uma perspectiva empírica e baseando-se em dados reais da língua em uso, esse tipo de metodologia se mostrou útil na investigação dos padrões linguísticos a que os falantes são expostos, chegando a resultados semelhantes a categorias teoricamente conhecidas. Em um processo de amostragem simples sem reposição, foram selecionadas 690 unidades oracionais de um corpus de 23 entrevistas orais. Essas unidades oracionais foram analisadas em termos de nove parâmetros de transitividade e de sua respectiva sintaxe oracional. O objetivo foi identificar grupos de orações que compartilham semelhanças em termos de um conjunto de traços semânticos e morfossintáticos. Os grupos encontrados revelam um tipo de significado protoconceptual das orações, que inclui traços aspectuais e actanciais que se correlacionam. Os resultados evidenciam três cenários micro-narrativos básicos sobre os quais se desenrola o evento expresso na oração.

The clausal syntax of German Sign Language

The clausal syntax of German Sign Language

Scope-taking strategies and the order of clausal categories in German Sign Language

The scope order of clausal categories has been claimed to be universal. In this paper we adopt a universalist cartographic approach to clausal syntax. By discussing the categories of speech acts, evaluation, epistemic modality, scalarity, volition and deontic, as well as other kinds of modality, we illustrate a striking regularity in strategies of scope-taking in German Sign Language (DGS): the wider/higher the scope of a clausal operator, the more likely its expression will occur with a high body part by way of layering; namely, descending from the eyebrows to the lower face, tentatively to the shoulders, and finally switching to manual expressions. For intermediate operators a left-to-right concatenation strategy is employed, and low categories are expressed by way of a manual right-to-left concatenation strategy. Hence, we propose a highly regular natural mapping of the scope-order of clausal categories onto the body. This sort of mapping can also be observed in other sign languages and may turn out to be universal.

Defenestration: deconstructing the frame-in relation in Ungarinyin

The Australian Aboriginal language Ungarinyin (Worrorran) has one single complex-clause construction for expressing reported speech (‘say’), that can also signal reported thought (‘think’) and attribute intentions (‘want’). By demonstrating which formal and functional distinctions are essential to the interpretation of this Ungarinyin construction, the present paper aims to contribute to understanding the exact nature of the syntactic relation involved in reported speech constructions. Following the account of McGregor (1994, 1997, 2008), I analyse the clausal syntax of reported speech constructions as a dedicated syntactic relation, separate from more familiar clausal relations such as coordination and subordination. I call this relation the ‘frame-in’ construction.Subsequently, I compare the conventionalised reported speech construction in Ungarinyin to a variety of more loosely integrated non-conventionalised or semi-conventionalised strategies for expressing speech and thought attribution in the language. Collectively I refer to these strategies as examples of ‘defenestration’, constructions without the typical marking of the syntactic frame-in relation, while expressing the meaning associated with a regular frame-in construction. Instances of defenestration differ from syntactic frame-in in that they express the meaning of a frame-in construction through transparent compositional means.I argue that types of defenestration show remarkable regularities in Ungarinyin, and, tentatively, cross-linguistically, which has consequences for the analysis of indexicality and iconicity in syntax and presents a new context for analysing the syntax of reported speech constructions in relation to multimodal features, particularly for the category of free (in)direct speech and ‘zero quotatives’.

Representing discourse in clausal syntax

In Pharasiot Greek, an Asia Minor Greek dialect, a certain particle copied from Turkish, ki, is employed in a number of seemingly unrelated constructions. Close scrutiny, however, reveals that in each of these constructions, ki is employed as a device geared to influencing the interlocutor’s epistemic vigilance. Based on the Cartographic Approach which defends the syntactization of the interpretive domains, I propose that this unique semantics of ki should be represented in the clause structure. Following recent work which advocates the existence of a pragmatic field—Speech Act Phrase (SAP) in particular—above the CP-layer, where discourse and pragmatic roles are mapped onto syntax, I propose that ki is the overt exponent of SA0 and is further endowed with a [+ sentience] feature indexing the speaker as the sentient mind. The apparent differences between various construction types which involve ki—hence, in which SAP projects—then reduce to whether the [+ sentience] feature on SA0 is checked by an internally or externally merging category in Spec, SAP.

Low sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese and the Final-over-Final Constraint

Mandarin Chinese clausal syntax can be described as strictly head-initial, with the exception of certain “particles” which are linearized at the end of the clause. Previous work on these sentence-final particles (SFPs) has assumed that all SFPs are very high, in the CP periphery. In this paper I show that a subset of SFPs are in a lower, clause-medial position, based on the scopal interaction of these SFPs with negation, modals, quantificational subjects, and alternative question disjunction. I identify this position as coinciding with the edge of the lower phase, traditionally identified as vP. As SFPs are head-final heads with head-initial complements, they have been discussed as an important apparent exception to the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC), a proposed universal on structure-building and linearization. The existence of exceptions to FOFC in a clause-medial position in addition to the CP edge motivates the view that FOFC holds only within individual Spell-Out domains.

Symmetrical objects in Moro: Challenges and solutions

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic behavior of object arguments in Moro, a Kordofanian language spoken in central Sudan. In particular, we focus on multiple object constructions (ditransitives, applicatives, and causatives) and show that these objects exhibit symmetrical syntactic behavior; e.g., any object can passivize or be realized as an object marker, and all can do so simultaneously. Moreover, we demonstrate that each object can bear any of the non-agentive roles in a verb’s semantic role inventory and that the resulting ambiguities are an entailment of symmetrical object constructions of the type found in Moro. Previous treatments of symmetrical languages have assumed a syntactic asymmetry between multiple objects and have developed theoretical analyses that treat symmetrical behaviors as departures from an asymmetrical basic organization of clausal syntax. We take a different approach: we develop a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar account that allows a partial ordering of the argument structure (arg-st) list. The guiding idea is that languages differ with respect to the organization of theirarg-stlists and their consequences for grammatical function realization: there is no privileged encoding, but there is large variation within the parameters defined byarg-storganization. This accounts directly for the symmetrical behaviors of multiple objects. We also show how this approach can be extended to account for certain asymmetrical behaviors in Moro.

The Interdependence of Bodily Demonstrations and Clausal Syntax

Units in interaction are emergent real-time phenomena that can be accomplished by the coordinated deployment of language and the body. Focusing mostly on data from dance classes, this study looks at how incomplete syntax projects a continuation realized by the body and systematically accounts for clausal syntax that can incorporate an embodied demonstration. It is argued that the classic list of types of turn constructional units by Sacks et al. (1974) needs to be expanded with a syntactic-bodily one and that the syntax of embodied demonstrations has to be included in the grammatical description of language.

The syntax–morphology relation

We review and discuss some issues to do with the relation between morphology and syntax which have played a prominent part in generative linguistic research in the past three decades. Focusing on verbal inflection, we first discuss the relation between inflection and verb placement, with special attention given to verb-initial languages. We then discuss the relation between pro-drop and agreement, where we articulate a partly new understanding of Huang's (1989) generalization that pro-drop is characteristic of languages with rich agreement and languages with no agreement, but not languages that are in-between. We then present and discuss the Mirror Principle, one of the most significant findings in recent linguistic research. We pay special attention to the Mirror Principle as it applies in head-final languages, in the context of a model adopting Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom. The idea is to show how fairly complex aspects of clausal syntax, including word order and the possibility of phonetically silent arguments of a predicate, may be correlated with readily observable and, in themselves, rather simple properties of verbal inflection, and to show how, given a restrictive theory of Universal Grammar, this follows from the fact that inflections are syntactic categories, albeit realized as parts of words.

Edge-based clausal syntax: A study of (mostly) English object structure (review)

Edge-based clausal syntax: A study of (mostly) English object structure (review)

Clausal Continuations in Japanese

Recent studies illustrate cases of turn continuations that are not necessarily criterially dependent on clausal syntax (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono, 2007; Ford, Fox, & Thompson, 2002), advancing a more multidimensional construal of turn expansions, in general, which, as Auer (2007) put it, “is not a syntactic issue alone” (p. 651). This study further develops such a possibility and looks at a class of examples in Japanese conversation whereby a series of syntactically disjunct clausal units are both retrospectively oriented toward and pragmatically, semantically, and prosodically coherent with preceding material, often acting functionally as continuations. Some implications for the role of syntax in theory regarding turn-constructional unit continuations, specifically, and turn-taking, in general, are also discussed.

Pragmatic foundations of transitivity in Ao

This paper investigates the extent to which the phenomenon of transitivity contributes to syntactic organization in Ao, a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India, by considering its manifestations from a pragmatic perspective. Agentive case marking is found to be the only formal correlate of transitivity in this language. This serves an obligatory marking function on actor arguments of verbal clauses expressing the habitual activity of a referent, and agentive marking is also consistently used to distinguish the causer argument of causativized predicates. However, in all other types of clause structures its use is pragmatically determined. Transitivity thus appears to be a construction-based phenomenon that has grammaticalized for only some aspects of Ao clausal syntax.

Morphology in the ˋˋwrong'' place: The curious case of Coast Tsimshian connectives

This paper examines the apparently odd location of case-marking formatives found in the Pacific Northwest language, Coast Tsimshian. It first argues that the case-marking formatives are actually affixes on the preceding words, not prosodically-dependent words. Given this morphological analysis, a syntactic analysis is proposed that utilizes the 'informationally-rich' syntactic structure of HPSG. In particular, the analysis proposed uses EDGE features and chained identities between adjacent phrasal sisters to license the clause. This enables a simple analysis of the clausal syntax of Coast Tsimshian while still accounting for the wide array of facts surrounding the connectives.

The focus marker in Kîîtharaka: Syntax and semantics

This paper investigates a morpheme central to the clausal syntax of Kîîtharaka (SVO, Bantu, E54, Kenyan). The first sections of the paper offer a careful description of three functions of this morpheme, which marks information structure and cyclic movement. We show that the syntactic and semantic properties of the three functions fall into a neat hierarchy. Rather than treating the different uses of the morpheme as distinct, accidentally homophonous items, we suggest an account that needs to postulate only one morpheme, allowing it to realize different amounts of features in its different uses. Building on ongoing work in morphological theory by Starke (class lectures) and Caha (2007), we make the crucial assumption that the features in the lexical entry of a morpheme are hierarchically structured.

On the “Vulnerability” of Syntactic Domains in Swedish and German

This article investigates the L2 acquisition of clausal syntax in postpuberty learners of German and Swedish regarding V2, VP headedness, and verb particle constructions. The learner data are tested against L2 theories according to which lower structural projections (VP) are acquired before higher functional projections (IP, CP), VP syntax is unproblematic (invulnerable), but where grammatical operations related to the topmost level of syntactic structure (CP) are acquired late (e.g., Platzack's (2001)vulnerable C-domain). It is shown that such theories do not hold water: Native speakers of Swedish learning German and native speakers of German learning Swedish both master V2 from early on. At the same time, these learners exhibit a nontargetlike syntax at lower structural levels: residual VO in the case of the Swedish-L1 learners of German, and persistent nontarget transitive verb particle constructions in the German-L1 learners of Swedish. I argue that these findings are best explained by assuming full transfer of L1 syntax (e.g., Schwartz and Sprouse (1996)).