Complement Constructions Research Articles

Tense and control interpretations in gerund-participle and <i>to</i> infinitive complement constructions with verbs of risk

This study investigates temporal and control interpretations with verbs of risk followed by non-finite complements in English. It addresses two questions: Why does the gerund-participle show variation in the temporal relation between the event it denotes and that of the main verb whereas the to -infinitive manifests a constant temporal relation? Why does the gerund-participle construction allow variation in control while the to -infinitive shows constant subject control readings? The study is based on a corpus of 1345 attested uses. The explanation is framed in a natural-language semantics involving the meanings of the gerund-participle, the infinitive, the preposition to , and the meaning-relation between the matrix and its complement. Temporal and control interpretations are shown to arise as implications grounded in the semantic content of what is linguistically expressed. It is argued that the capacity of a natural-language semantic approach to account for the data obviates the need to have recourse to purely syntactic operations to account for control. Cette etude porte sur les interpretations temporelles et de controle avec des verbes exprimant la notion de risque suivis par des complements infinitifs ou gerondifs en anglais. Deux questions y sont abordees : Pourquoi le gerondif montre-il une variation dans la relation temporelle entre l’evenement qu’il denote et celui du verbe de la principale, tandis que l’infinitif manifeste une relation temporelle constante? Pourquoi la construction gerondive est-elle caracterisee par une variation de controle alors que l’infinitif produit des lectures constantes de controle par le sujet? Un corpus de 1345 exemples attestes est examine. L’explication est formulee en termes d’une semantique de langage naturel fondee sur les signifies linguistiques du gerondif, de l’infinitif, de la preposition to et le rapport semantique entre le verbe de la principale et son complement. Il est demontre que les interpretations temporelles et de controle sont des implications fondees sur le contenu semantique de ce qui est exprime linguistiquement. On soutient que la capacite d’une semantique de langage naturel de rendre compte des donnees elimine le besoin d’avoir recours a des operations purement syntaxiques pour expliquer le phenomene du controle.

Boron-dependent degradation of NIP5;1 mRNA for acclimation to excess boron conditions in Arabidopsis.

Boron (B) is an essential plant micronutrient that is toxic at higher levels. NIP5;1 is a boric acid channel required for B uptake and growth under B deficiency. Accumulation of the NIP5;1 transcript is upregulated under B deficiency in Arabidopsis thaliana roots. To elucidate the mechanism of regulation, the 5' untranslated region (UTR) of NIP5;1 was tested for its ability to confer B-dependent regulation using β-glucuronidase and green fluorescent protein as reporters. This analysis showed that the 5' UTR was involved in NIP5;1 transcript accumulation in response to B conditions. We also found that high-B conditions trigger NIP5;1 mRNA degradation and that the sequence from +182 to +200 bp in the 5' UTR is required for this mRNA destabilization. In the nip5;1-1 mutant background, a NIP5;1 complementation construct without the 5' UTR produced high levels of mRNA accumulation, increased B concentrations in tissues, and reduced growth under high-B conditions. These data suggest that the 5' UTR controls B-dependent NIP5;1 mRNA degradation and that NIP5;1 mRNA degradation is important for plant acclimation to high-B conditions.

Campylobacter capsule and lipooligosaccharide confer resistance to serum and cationic antimicrobials

The innate immune system plays a critical role in host defense against mucosal bacteria. Campylobacter jejuni is a major cause of human gastroenteritis that usually resolves spontaneously within several days, suggesting that innate mechanisms are important to control the infection. However, the specific means by which this occurs is not well understood. While diarrheal isolates of C. jejuni usually are susceptible to human serum, we found that a systemic strain of C. jejuni, isolated from the cerebrospinal fluid of an infant with meningitis, is relatively more resistant to human serum, the Bactericidal/Permeability-Increasing Protein (BPI), an endogenous cationic antimicrobial protein, and the cationic peptide antibiotic polymyxin B. To test the hypothesis that the surface properties of this strain contributed to its ability to withstand these innate host defenses, we constructed isogenic mutants in capsule (kpsM) and lipooligosaccharide (waaF) and complemented these mutants by insertion of the complementation construct in trans into hipO, a chromosomal locus. We found that capsule expression was essential for serum resistance, whereas lipooligosaccharide played no substantial role. In contrast, the lipooligosaccharide mutant showed increased sensitivity to polymyxin B, α-defensins, cathelicidins, and BPI. These findings suggest that the polysaccharides of C. jejuni strains contribute differently to resistance against host innate immunity; whereby capsule is more important for resisting human complement and lipooligosaccharide is more important for protection against killing mediated by cationic antimicrobial peptides and proteins.

A Minimalist Interpretation of In Seok Yang's Ideas

This paper discusses the main points of In?Seok Yang’s ground-breaking work, Korean Syntax(1972), which can be viewed as an monumental work in Korean syntax within the early Chomskyan framework, and evaluates its significance within the recent minimalist theory. As it turns out, Yang’s arguments about Multiple Case Constructions can be re?illuminated as a cartographic structures of Specs within IP, similar to the cartographic structures recently suggested by Rizzi(1997, 2004). Other important aspects of Yang’s theory concern sentential complementation constructions, in which he argued for clausal reduction and verbal compounding, and some of which provide significant dilemma in modern GB or minimalist frameworks. Some other Korean constructions involving so?called Equi?subject constructions offer other dilemmas, but some of them may in fact be shown to support little υ analysis within recent minimalist framework.

How to delete categorically — Two pushout complement constructions

In category theory, most set-theoretic constructions–union, intersection, etc.–have direct categorical counterparts. But up to now, there is no direct construction of a deletion operation like the set-theoretic complement. In rule-based transformation systems, deletion of parts of a given object is one of the main tasks. In the double pushout approach to algebraic graph transformation, the construction of pushout complements is used in order to locally delete structures from graphs. But in general categories, even if they have pushouts, pushout complements do not necessarily exist or are unique. In this paper, two different constructions for pushout complements are given and compared. Both constructions are based on certain universal constructions in the sense of category theory. More specifically, one uses initial pushouts while the other one uses quasi-coproduct complements. These constructions are applied to examples in the categories of graphs and simple graphs.

The lexicalisation of predicative complements in English

This paper focuses on three collocationally restricted constructions in English. These are take prisoner(s), fall victim(s) and play (the) truant. While predicative complement constructions in present-day English can generally occur with a full or reduced NP structure (cf. Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002: 253), the complements at hand occur (almost) exclusively in their reduced forms. Large-scale corpus analyses reveal that prisoner, victim and truant give up plural inflection (in the cases of take prisoners, fall victims) and drop the determiner preceding the complement (as in play the truant) long after the constructions have become idiomaticised. This paper proposes that the loss of morphosyntactic properties reflects the extent to which the constructions have become fully lexicalised.

Empirical view on raising to subject

This paper employs empirical methods to examine verbs such as seem, for which the traditional raising to subject analysis relates pairs of sentences which differ by taking an infinitival or sentential complement. A corpus-driven investigation of the verbs seem and appear demonstrates that information structure and evidentiality both play a determinate role in the choice between infinitival or sentential complementation. The second half of the paper builds upon the corpus results and examines the implications for the standard claims concerning these constructions. First, pairs of sentences related by the subject-to-subject raising analysis of verbs are often viewed as equivalent. New evidence from indefinite generic subjects shows that whether an indefinite generic subject occurs in the infinitival or sentential complement construction leads to truth-conditional differences. Further implications are explored for the claim that subjects of the infinitival variant may take narrow-scope: once various confounds are controlled for, the subject of the infinitival construction is shown to most naturally take wide-scope.

Fields and settings: French il and ça impersonals in copular complement constructions

Fields and settings: French il and ça impersonals in copular complement constructions

The development of sentential complement constructions in Greek

The development of sentential complements in Greek, a language with systematic use of two complementizers, is studied in a corpus of spontaneous conversations by one girl and her family in the age range of 1;8 to 4 years. Formal, semantic and pragmatic analyses of child and child-directed constructions indicate parallels and divergences from previous acquisition research. Early formal marking of complements suggests ambient language effects. Yet, emergence of semantically/pragmatically more prototypical ones is protracted, favoring usage-based and semantically motivated explanations. The data also contribute to the theoretical description of sentential complement constructions, by charting some of their varieties and also suggesting explanations for the relations holding among these varieties.

Psycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic evidence for L2 constructions

In Construction Grammar, highly frequent syntactic configurations are assumed to be stored as symbolic units in the mental lexicon alongside words. Considering the example of gerund and infinitival complement constructions in English (She tried rocking the baby vs. She tried to rock the baby), this study combines corpus-linguistic and experimental evidence to investigate the question whether these patterns are also stored as constructions by German foreign language learners of English. In a corpus analysis based on 3,343 instances of the two constructions from the British component of the International Corpus of English, a distinctive collexeme analysis was computed to identify the verbs that distinguish best between the two constructions; these verbs were used as experimental stimuli in a sentence completion experiment and a sentence acceptability rating experiment. Two kinds of short-distance priming effects were investigated in the completion data: we checked how often subjects produced an ing-/to-/’other’-construction after having rated an ing- or to-construction (rating-to-production priming), and how often they produced an ing-/to-/’other’-construction when they had produced and ing- or to-construction in the directly preceding completion (production-to-production priming). Furthermore, we considered the proportion of to-completions before a completion in the questionnaire as a measure of a within-subject accumulative priming effect. We found no rating-to-production priming effects in the expected direction, but a weak effect in the opposite direction; short-distance production-to-production priming effects from ing to ing and from ‘other’ and to to to, and, on the whole at least, a suggestive accumulative production-to-production priming effect for both constructions. In the rating task, we found that subjects rate sentences better when the sentential structure is compatible with the main verb’s collexemic distinctiveness.

The Structural Explicitation in Korean Translated Text —In Relation to the Restricted Distribution of a Complement Construction—

The Structural Explicitation in Korean Translated Text —In Relation to the Restricted Distribution of a Complement Construction—

Lexical frequency and exemplar-based learning effects in language acquisition: evidence from sentential complements

Usage-based approaches to language acquisition argue that children acquire the grammar of their target language using general-cognitive learning principles. The current paper reports on an experiment that tested a central assumption of the usage-based approach: argument structure patterns are connected to high frequency verbs that facilitate acquisition. Sixty children ( N = 60) aged 4- and 6-years participated in a sentence recall/lexical priming experiment that manipulated the frequency with which the target verbs occurred in the finite sentential complement construction in English. The results showed that the children performed better on sentences that contained high frequency verbs. Furthermore, the children’s performance suggested that their knowledge of finite sentential complements relies most heavily on one particular verb – think, supporting arguments made by Goldberg [Goldberg, A.E., 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford], who argued that skewed input facilitates language learning.

Complements of tableaux and straightening bideterminants

In this paper, we study the combinatorics related to complements of tableaux. Using the representation theory of general linear groups and a known construction of the dual Weyl modules, we obtain a new straightening algorithm for bideterminants and prove that it is compatible with the complement construction of tableaux. As an application, we get a purely combinatorial construction of the isomorphisms between generalized (classical) Schur algebras introduced first by Henke, Koenig and the author.

Functional Interactions between Mldp (LSDP5) and Abhd5 in the Control of Intracellular Lipid Accumulation

Cellular lipid metabolism is regulated in part by protein-protein interactions near the surface of intracellular lipid droplets. This work investigated functional interactions between Abhd5, a protein activator of the lipase Atgl, and Mldp, a lipid droplet scaffold protein that is highly expressed in oxidative tissues. Abhd5 was highly targeted to individual lipid droplets containing Mldp in microdissected cardiac muscle fibers. Mldp bound Abhd5 in transfected fibroblasts and directed it to lipid droplets in proportion to Mldp concentration. Analysis of protein-protein interactions in situ demonstrated that the interaction of Abhd5 and Mldp occurs mainly, if not exclusively, on the surface of lipid droplets. Oleic acid treatment rapidly increased the interaction between Abhd5 and Mldp, and this effect was suppressed by pharmacological inhibition of triglyceride synthesis. The functional role of the Abhd5-Mldp interaction was explored using a mutant of mouse Abhd5 (E262K) that has greatly reduced binding to Mldp. Mldp promoted the subcellular colocalization and interaction of Atgl with wild type, but not mutant, Abhd5. This differential interaction was reflected in cellular assays of Atgl activity. In the absence of Mldp, wild type and mutant Abhd5 were equally effective in reducing lipid droplet formation. In contrast, mutant Abhd5 was unable to prevent lipid droplet accumulation in cells expressing Mldp despite considerable targeting of Atgl to lipid droplets containing Mldp. These results indicate that the interaction between Abhd5 and Mldp is dynamic and essential for regulating the activity of Atgl at lipid droplets containing Mldp.

The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies

A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the kind postulated in traditional linguistic accounts of this construction. We describe three elicited imitation experiments with children aged from 4;6 to 6;9 and adult controls. Participants were asked to repeat prototypical questions (i.e., questions which match the hypothesised template), unprototypical questions (which depart from it in several respects) and declarative counterparts of both types of interrogative sentences. The children performed significantly better on the prototypical variants of both constructions, even when both variants contained exactly the same lexical material, while adults showed prototypicality e¤ects for LDD questions only. These results suggest that a general declarative complementation construction emerges quite late in development (after age 6), and that even adults rely on lexically specific templates for LDD questions.

Self-regulation of a new pathogenicity-related gene encoding leucine-rich protein LrpX in Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae

Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) is the causal agent of bacterial leaf blight, a serious disease of rice. Here, we isolated a pathogenicity-deficient mutant of Xoo strain T7174R [a rifampicin-resistant derivative of T7174 (MAFF311018)] produced by in vivo insertion mutagenesis using the EZ::TN™ transposon system. This mutant, 74M2, was significantly reduced in virulence on rice cultivar IR24. From sequence analyses, the region with the EZ::TN transposon insertion was found to be in ORF XOO1662, one of the leucine-rich proteins found in the genome database for MAFF311018, which we have named lrpX. In planta growth of 74M2 was also slower than that of the wild type. A complementation construct for 74M2 restored both virulence and in planta growth to wild-type levels. The promoter region of lrpX contained a consensus plant-inducible promoter (PIP)-box (i.e., TTCGC-N15-TTCGC) commonly found in HrpX (an AraC-type transcriptional regulator)-regulon in xanthomonads. The HrpXo (HrpX of Xoo)-dependent expression of lrpX was confirmed using the fusion construct with lrpX::GUS in hrp-inducing minimal medium (XOM2). The expression of lrpX was predicted to be self-regulated by its own translation product by directly binding to its own promoter.

Un comme qui marque une fonction qui se démarque. L'attribut de l'objet en comme et les verbes de nomination

This contribution examines, for the so-called nomination verbs, some of the hypotheses that have been formulated in order to explain the use of comme ( “as”) in object complement constructions. It will appear that comme is used in marked instances of the complement structure. The marking concerns the formal and lexical properties of the object complement, as well as the information structure of the sentence and the verb meaning. In presence of comme, the object complement conforms less often to the properties of a prototypical predicate and, even less so, to those of a resultative predicate. The secondary predication contained within the construction tends, moreover, to adopt some characteristics of what is considered to be a marked information structure. The use of comme, finally, correlates with non prototypical verb meanings in that the verb less often refers to the attribution of a professional duty that is intimately linked to the meaning of the verb.

The semantics of complementation in English: A cognitive semantic account of two English complement constructions

Studies on complementation in English and other languages have traditionally focused on syntactic issues, most notably on the constituent structures of different complement types. As a result, they have neglected the role of meaning in the choice of different complements. This paper investigates the semantics of complementation within the theoretical framework of cognitive grammar. In particular, I examine the extent to which two morphosyntactically different complement types in modern English, to infinitival and - ing complements, reflect differences in meaning and whether there is any semantic patterning in the sets of matrix predicates that select for each type. The analysis argues that the occurrence of one or the other complement type is not semantically arbitrary, but rather semantically motivated by the meanings of the matrix predicates and the meanings of the grammatical elements to and - ing found in each kind of complement. Consequently, in spite of its clear grammatical function, infinitival to is meaningful in all its uses, retaining aspects of its original path-like sense via well-established routes of semantic extension. In general, all to infinitival complements evoke the notion of conceptual distance of some kind between the matrix and subordinate clauses. In addition, in all its uses - ing is also meaningful in evoking some kind of conceptual overlap between the matrix and subordinate clauses.

Stranding, weak pronouns, and the fine structure of the Dutch Mittelfeld

The purpose of this paper is to develop a tool for determining the unmarked position of various PP types in the Dutch Mittelfeld. The paper argues that the distribution of stranded prepositions, which obey a Freezing constraint, can be used for this purpose, and that the same holds for prepositions with a weak pronominal complement. Among the results of this twin diagnostic are independent evidence for a case-movement analysis of scrambling, and support for a particular analysis of predicative complement constructions.

From Knowledge Representation to Writing Text: A Developmental Perspective

This study examined the representation of knowledge in text writing in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults in the Netherlands. The research analyzed the use of clause linking devices to compose larger text units. Special attention was given to the use of causal relational markers and the extent to which causal relations within the texts matched real-world causality or reflected the personal perspective of the writer. This study explored the extent to which individual differences in writing can be explained by such factors as gender, working memory, and the degree of reading and writing experience of the writer. The results showed greater textual coherence for adults than for school children. Adults tend to use more adverbial and complement constructions at the cost of coordinating devices. The causal markers produced by adults showed a broad range of personal stances, whereas those produced by children showed a high degree of detachment from real-world causality. The observed individual differences in the packaging of clauses by both the children and the adults were found to be primarily related to short-term memory constraints and to reading and writing experiences. A gender effect was found for the children's writing of expository text.