Clause Types Research Articles

Impersonal Constructions Between Personae and ‘Personlessness’. Strategies of Language Manipulation in Aeschines and Demosthenes

Abstract This paper investigates the distribution of different types of impersonal constructions in Attic oratory and focuses on the data taken from two political speeches, i. e., Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon (speech 3) and Demosthenes’ On the Crown (speech 18). The topic of impersonal constructions in Ancient Greek has not yet received much attention from scholars, with the exception of some studies devoted to singular aspects, e. g., the semantics and morphosyntax of impersonal verbs and the comparison with other Indo-European languages. No attention has been paid to the analysis of textual distribution of impersonal constructions and to the effects that impersonal constructions produce in communicative terms. This paper aims at filling the gap, by analysing different types of clauses under the umbrella of impersonal constructions. Some of them are usually recognised as impersonal constructions, while others are not. Constructions are of three types: the first includes constructions with impersonal verbs, e. g., δεῖ, δοκεῖ, etc., which are to be compared with the corresponding personal constructions. The second group contains some non-personal uses of grammatical persons, namely the non-referential uses of the first person plural and the clauses with indefinite subject τις. Finally, the third type includes constructions with non-human subjects, which display no-agreement in number between the verb and its external argument. The purpose of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims at contributing to the debate on ancient Greek impersonal constructions; on the other hand, it investigates the role played by impersonal linguistic strategies in building the contents of forensic speeches and conveying the messages that orators wanted to communicate to the audience.

Semantic Negation on Verbal Clauses with Verbs of Imminence in Saudi Arabic Varieties

Negation in languages is a phenomenon, which receives researchers' attention for a long period. Negation occurs on different type of clauses by which it shows to have morphological and syntactic changes over the structure of words, phrases and sentences. Verbs of imminenceare used sometimes to denote negation in verbal clauses in Arabic. ka:d is one of those verbs which carries the negation of the clause without using any negative particles. Saudi dialects use the verb baʁa to perform the same function. This paper discusses baʁa in verbal clauses illustrating its syntactic and semantic impact on the structure of the clauses. It requires the imperfective form of the verb to follow. Negating a clause, with the only negative particles ma: and/or la:, does not carry the negative sense because it is delivered through the use of baʁa. Thus, the negation of verbs of imminence does not require the presence of any negative particles. Otherwise, the positive meaning is delivered.

Contact-Induced Language Change: the Case of Mixtec Adverbial Clauses

Abstract It is now clear that languages not-genetically related can come to share syntactic structures that were not necessarily borrowed directly in their modern forms. Although it can be challenging to spot these structures, striking similarities in certain patterns and in fine details of usage may shed light on this process. Not only may spotting the patterns be a difficult task, but also establishing the source of diffusion of a trait (i.e., who passed it to whom). These points are illustrated here with constructions termed ‘adverbial clauses’. Examples are drawn from Mixtec languages. The analysis focuses on six types of adverbial clauses. In particular, it is explained how several Mixtec adverbial clause-linking strategies may have spread to Huasteca Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) and vice versa.

On Bulgarian Dali-Questions and the Relation to the Subjunctive Mood

The subjunctive mood has been widely discussed from the perspective its selection in complements of volitional, directive and emotive-factive predicates (Picallo 1984, Raposo 1985, Ambar 1988, a.o.). Subjunctive questions and other type of subjunctive main clauses, on the other hand, have not been subject to much systematic research. Some works (Ambar 2016, Giannakidou 2016) suggest that, in main clauses, the selection of the subjunctive mood codifies the expression of the speaker’s evaluations. In line with this view, we discuss the syntactic expression of the Bulgarian dali-questions which do not consist in true requests for information but rather display a flavour of wondering encoded in the occurrence of dali and its morphological make up combining the subjunctive particle da and the interrogative particle li. Considering the properties of the Balkan subjunctive particles, we discuss the syntactic expression of Bulgarian dali-questions building on previous analyses of Bulgarian yes-no questions (Dimitrova 2020).

Possessive and Caritive in Nivkh

Abstract This paper focuses on the various encoding strategies and other relevant issues pertaining to affirmative and negative predicative possession in the two Amuric languages, Amur Nivkh and Sakhalin Nivkh (Nighvng). One of the goals is to demonstrate that possessive negation serves as a major strategy for expressing caritive semantics (= non-involvement). Constructions rendering possessive and caritive meanings represent one of the basic and rather frequent types of clauses in Nivkh, and they are also interconnected both semantically and grammatically with other clause types. Some of the constructions present in Nivkh have analogues in the neighboring languages, while others are specific to Nivkh. The present paper, based on the author’s field materials, represents the first specific study of this topic.

Interlocked life cycles of counterfactual mood forms from Archaic to Classical Greek

Abstract Based on a corpus study of 2074 occurrences in Archaic (424) and Classical (1650) Greek, I offer a unified explanation for the temporal reference extensions of counterfactual mood forms in declarative, interrogative, wish and de-activated illocutions (i.e. subordinate clauses). I propose a diachronic trajectory (life cycle) for counterfactual mood forms from past to present and future reference. Extensions are constrained diachronically by grammatical aspect (e.g. imperfect facilitating extensions to present reference more than the aorist or pluperfect), and actionality of the state of affairs in clausal context (atelic states of affairs enabling temporal extensions), as well as synchronically by illocutionary usage, collocations with temporal adverbs and common ground knowledge (i.e. temporal location known or not). This trajectory explains the replacements of the inherited counterfactual optative by the counterfactual indicative, because their life cycles are interlocked: in Archaic Greek the counterfactual optative had already extended from its original past to present and future reference and is losing its counterfactuality, whereas the counterfactual indicative referred only to the past and sometimes the present. In Classical Greek, temporal extensions of the counterfactual indicative are continued across different aspects, clause types and illocutions at different rates of change and the counterfactual optative is filtered out of the system.

TIME SUBORDINATORS AND TIME RELATIONS IN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN

Language in general is a complex apparatus of the human beings through which we express our innerfeelings, thoughts and ideas. This study was initiated due to the importance of language in general. However, toknow a language does not only mean to know its vocabulary, but how to link the words, the word order in a clauseas well as the order of clauses in a sentence, their role and their relations to each other. The relationship of theclauses in a sentence is especially important concerning complex sentences, in which the clauses are not of the samelevel but show a dependency. So, precisely the adverbial clauses of time are the ones that are highly complicated andcreate confusion. For this reason, most of the people try to avoid them, and use simple clauses instead, nevertheless,this somehow loses the meaning and originality of the idea. This means that although complex, adverbial clauses oftime are crucial in explaining our ideas and thoughts. Based on the great number of the adverbial clauses of time, onthe meanings that they convey as well as on the manner how the meaning is expressed, this study will concentrate ona contrastive analysis of the adverbial clauses of time in English and Albanian. It will focus on the time relations thattime subordinators of time express in both languages. The methodology that is used in this paper is mainlydescriptive and comparative. The paper is based on the analysis of Jack London’s novel White Fang which wastranslated into Albanian under the title Dhëmbi i Bardhë by Bujar Doko. A comparison of the adverbial clauses oftime in both languages is done in order to find their differences and commonalities. Afterwards, a detaileddescription of the data extracted from the comparison is carried out, which will play a major role in proving thehypothesis and coming to a conclusion. The general hypothesis of this study is that most of the adverbial clauses oftime as well as their subordinators will be equivalent in both English and Albanian. The results of the analysis showthat adverbial clauses of time do have a similar structure as well as correspondence in English and Albanian: theoverall structure of both English and Albanian adverbial clauses of time is the same; the subordinators in bothlanguages correspond to their counterparts in expressing time relations, being a fixed time, duration, simultaneity,anteriority or posteriority; both types of clauses are movable, which means that they can take the initial, medial andfinal position in a sentence; and the use of commas is the same as well. There is also a similarity in the word orderof the time clauses. Another similar feature of the adverbial clauses of time in both English and Albanian is that theyare expressed by finite and non-finite clauses.

The Historical Present qātēl in Biblical Aramaic


 
 
 This article offers a typologically-driven and corpus-based analysis of the historical present (HP) “active participle” qātēl in Biblical Aramaic. The authors argue that qātēl instantiates the HP category quite neatly and provide three main arguments. First, qātēl complies with the definition of a progredient/propulsive HP that emerges from crosslinguistic literature: while, in its prototypical use, qātēl expresses some type(s) of present, it may also be employed in narrative to introduce past perfective events. Second, when used as an HP, qātēl exhibits functions that are consistent with tendencies attested across languages: stylistically, the HP qātēl is often associated with expressivity, mirativity, and dramatism, while discourse-pragmatically, it is predominantly related to the progression (rarely, the climax) and atomization of the plot. Third, most other properties exhibited by the HP qātēl also harmonize with the behavior of HPs observed in linguistic typology; these concern types of clauses in which the HP qātēl appears, and subjects and verbs used. Overall, the HP qātēl can be viewed as a highlighting narrative device—subjective although linguistically constrained.
 
 

Implementing Gender Provisions: A Study of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro in the Philippines

Abstract While scholars on gender provisions have focused on why and how this type of peace agreement clause gets incorporated, few studies have sought to improve our understanding of the implementation process. Addressing this gap empirically, this study utilizes unique interview material to analyze the initial stages of realizing the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro in the Philippines. The article bridges and expands on key theoretical insights based on three explanations suggested by previous research: 1) state capacity on promoting gender equality; 2) the mobilization of women’s organizations; and 3) gender awareness of international actors. We find that the strategic actions of women’s organizations combined with state capacity accelerated the implementation. However, their influence was dependent on whether or not the government prioritized the gender provisions, and whether international actors provided financial support to the agreement infrastructure.

The formal heterogeneity of allocutivity

Despite recent growth in formal work on allocutive marking, little work to date has considered the nature of cross-linguistic differences in the syntax of allocutive varieties, and what relationships, if any, exist among them. This paper summarizes recent formal results describing four kinds of variation across allocutive languages: (i) variable root-sensitivity; (ii) variation in allocutive morpheme placement; (iii) differences in allocutive morpheme type; and (iv) variation in interactions with clause typing and complementizers. We propose that the sole formal property unifying allocutive varieties is exponence of addressee features licensed by a silent Addressee DP. We further propose that variation in the properties of allocutive morphemes considered here reflect four principal loci of variation: (i) the position in which the silent Addressee DP may participate in allocutivity; (ii) the variable presence of a projection introducing an allocutive pronoun; (iii) the variable non-silence of a bound allocutive pronoun and/or the head introducing the Addressee DP; and (iv) agreement with other C-field heads. The analysis suggests that allocutivity involves greater formal heterogeneity than has been described previously in the literature. Principal aspects of cross-linguistic variation nevertheless can be modeled in terms of a limited set of formal options elsewhere motivated.

Too True to Be Good? The Non-Uniformity of Extraction from Adjunct Clauses in English

Adjunct clauses are traditionally assumed to be strong islands for extraction across languages. However, the universal island status of adjunct clauses has been challenged by studies showing that extraction is possible from finite adjunct clauses in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. The possibility of extraction in these languages appears to be affected by various factors, including the type of adjunct clause, the type of extraction dependency, and the presence of contextual facilitation. These findings call for a re-evaluation of the islandhood of adjunct clauses in English. We conducted an acceptability judgment study on relativization from three types of finite adjunct clauses in English (if-, when-, and because-clauses) in the presence of supporting context. We found that the three clause types showed rather non-uniform acceptability patterns: extraction from when- and because-clauses both yielded significantly lower ratings than extraction from if-clauses, which patterned with non-island that-clauses. Our results suggest that at least for relativization, if- and when-adjuncts are not invariably strong islands in English, and that extra-grammatical factors may be key in understanding island structures traditionally assumed to be purely syntactic in nature.

The nominative-to-accusative shift in Japanese: diachronic and synchronic considerations

Abstract Some Japanese predicates allow their object to be marked either with the accusative particle o, the canonical marker of an object, or with the nominative particle ga, the canonical marker of a subject. This work reports and discusses the results of corpus-based surveys on the patterns and recent trends in nominative-marking on objects. It will be demonstrated: (i) that there has been an increase in the proportion of accusative-marking over nominative-marking in recent times, (ii) that accusative-marking is more likely to be chosen in certain types of subordinate clauses than in matrix clauses, and (iii) that at least with some types of predicates, accusative-marking on the object is more likely when its referent is animate rather than inanimate. It will be argued that the effects of clause type and animacy have to do with the functional motivation to mitigate processing load and the risk of misinterpretation incurred by nominative-marking on objects.

Familiarwhen-relatives and peculiarwhen-relatives in English

Typical headed relatives in English include a relative pronoun which takes the head as its antecedent. However, some modifyingwhen-clauses in this language are peculiar relatives in that their heads are not the antecedent ofwhenand they do not even have temporal referents. In view of the peculiarity of this type of relative clause, a novel account of the syntactic generation and interpretation of temporalwhen-clauses is pro- posed. Under this account four lexical entries ofwhen, which have different semantic and syntactic properties, are recognized. The semantics of variouswhens are analyzed based on existing work, while the syntactic properties of differentwhens in non-interrogative sentences are characterized in the form of lexical information, which is implemented in the framework of Dynamic Syntax. The work in this article enriches the description of the diversity of relatives and suggests that the analysis of relatives can be unified semantically but not syntactically.

Embedded NP error in German object relative clause comprehension: A case for a universal developmental pathway.

We report the results of an eye-tracking study investigating German children's comprehension of subject relative clauses (SRC) and object relative clauses (ORC) with morphologically unambiguous head and embedded noun phrases (NPs). The experimental paradigm was adopted from Adani and Fritzsche. Children's eye movements were tracked on the visual display while they were listening to an SRC or an ORC. Subsequently, they had to choose the most appropriate visual character on the screen to go with a particular relative clause type in a character selection paradigm. All the head NP and the embedded NPs were of masculine gender. Thus, the relative clause syntax was disambiguated by the ending on the relative pronoun and, subsequently, on the determiner in the embedded NP. We computed fixation probabilities towards the syntactic competitor and the embedded NP character in addition to the proportions of looks towards the target character on the screen. Thematic reversal error remained the dominant error type on children's response accuracy data. The subject advantage was also confirmed on the eye-tracking data, though it was overridden in the post-relative clause time window. However, there was a significant increase in fixation probabilities towards the embedded NP character in the ORC, but not in the SRC condition. While children were less efficient to use the morphological information on the relative pronoun to generate an expectation of a non-canonical ORC structure, they obviously used embedded NP morphology later in the sentence to update their ongoing structural analysis.

A quantitative model of verb–object order in Middle English with special reference to the prose–poetry distinction

This article reports a regression model for the change from OV to VO in Middle English. It focuses on genre (prose versus poetry) as a predictor by including data from a recently published corpus, the Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry (PCMEP; Zimmermann 2015). Other independent variables considered are time, object type, clause type and weight. The results specify the time course of the development in Middle English with great precision and replicate several effects from the previous literature including the importance of the genre variable, poetry being considerably more conservative than prose. It is recommended that poetry texts should be considered in studies on early Middle English syntax more generally to arrive at comprehensive assessments of linguistic changes at the time.

The Influence of Case and Word Order in Child and Adult Processing of Relative Clauses in Greek

Previous cross-linguistic studies have shown that object relative clauses (ORCs) are typically harder to parse than subject relative clauses (SRCs). The cause of difficulty, however, is still under debate, both in the adult and in the developmental literature. The present study investigates the on-line processing of SRCs and ORCs in Greek-speaking 11- to 12-year-old children and adults, and provides evidence on relative clause processing in Greek—a free word order language. We conducted a self-paced listening task in which we manipulated the type of relative clause (SRC vs. ORC), the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled), and the type of relativizer (relative pronoun vs. complementizer). The results showed that SRCs were overall processed faster than ORCs, providing evidence that children follow similar processing strategies to adults. In addition, accusative case marking facilitated the processing of non-canonical structures in adults but less so in children. Children showed heavy reliance on word order, as they processed nominative and accusative pre-verbal NPs in exactly the same way, while they were strongly garden-pathed in ORCs with post-verbal nominative NPs. We argue that these results are compatible with the Competition Model.

Grammatical tone mapping in Ekegusii

AbstractA major issue in Bantu morphophonology is how to get the right tones in the right ‘cells’ in the verb paradigm. In many Bantu languages, grammatical tones are assigned to different positions in the verb stem depending on inflectional features of tense, aspect, mood (TAM), polarity and clause type: The same TAM may assign different tones (and different segmental allomorphs) in the affirmative vs. negative and in main vs. relative clauses. Although such ‘melodic tones’ (Odden & Bickmore 2014) are typically restricted to the verb stem (root + suffixes), often also the domain of vowel harmony and other segmental phonology, both the presence and mapping of grammatical tones within the stem cannot be determined without reference to the prefixal inflectional marking of subject, negation, TAM and object which precede the stem. In this article, we discuss three cases in Ekegusii, a Bantu language of Kenya, that require the stem-assigned grammatical tones to look ‘outward’ to morphological and phonological properties of such prefixes: (1) differential mapping according to whether the pre-stem tone-bearing unit is toneless, a derived H(igh) (from H-tone spreading), or underlyingly /H/ (Bickmore 1997, 1999); (2) presence of an object prefix in imperative and subjunctive forms and (3) initial/final tone agreement between the subject prefix and the final vowel of the verb (cf. Rolle & Bickmore (2022). We will show that Ekegusii provides extensive evidence that both the presence of grammatical Hs and their specific mapping, while targeting the stem (root + suffixes), must be ‘globally’ calculated on the basis of the entire morphosyntactic structure of the verb (including features exponed by prefixes).

Dimensions of honorific meaning in Korean speech style particles

In this paper we analyze a set of sentence final particles in Korean that express information on clause type and on the relation between speaker and addressee. Our focus is the latter type of information, known as speech style; we argue that it involves two distinct dimensions, hierarchy and formality. Hierarchy expresses the respective position of speaker and addressee relative to a scale based on a certain social relation (for example, boss-subordinate). We argue that formality is a way of classifying the social relation that forms the basis, or source, for the hierarchical relation. We extend the participant structure analysis of hierarchy from Portner, Pak, and Zanuttini (2019) to capture formality in a way that explains not only how the two dimensions are distinct, but also how they are related.

A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ADJECTIVE CLAUSE ON SPIDERMAN HOME COMING

This research focuses on the contrastive analysis of adjective clauses found in the Spiderman Homecoming movie. The research design used is a qualitative design. The researcher conducted this research descriptively, which explained the research by making a table and a few sentences to explain it. The data is taken from the Spiderman Homecoming movie. Researchers search and find data from various websites to obtain data by reading and searching for materials in journals, e-books, and related articles. The researcher discusses everything related to the adjective clause, which is the main purpose of this research. The sentences or scripts are taken and analyzed through an adjective clause. The results of the researcher's analysis found 2 types of adjective clauses, namely, adjective clause defining and adjective clause modifying. In the Spiderman: Homecoming film script, there are 25 adjective clause defining sentences and 14 adjective modifying sentences.

Syntactic Optionality in Heritage Language Use: Clause Type Preferences of German Heritage Speakers in a Majority English Context

Abstract This study focuses on the syntactic and pragmatic resources heritage speakers (HS s) use to structure their discourse according to register. Drawing on a corpus of narratives produced by German HS s living in the United States, as well as by monolingually-raised speakers (MS s) of English and German, we investigated HS s’ syntactic resources by analyzing how they approached clause type optionality across registers. Concerning overall clause type frequencies, HS s performed similarly to MS s in their majority English, but showed differences in their heritage German compared to German MS s. This can be attributed to the majority language dominance and different complexity of clause types in the heritage language. However, regarding the pattern of clause types across registers, HS s’ productions are similar to those of German MS s, and across HS s’ two languages. This suggests an underlying register awareness that HS s can draw upon in their heritage language.