Clause Constructions Research Articles

Grammatical Alliance in Malay Language: A Study of Linguistic Typology

This article is entitled Aliansi Gramatikal Na Lingua Melayu: Study of Linguistic Typology. This study of the Malay language's grammatical alliance aims to understand (1) the basic construction of clauses, (2) the construction of complex sentences, (3) the pivotal system, and (4) ultimately the definition of the grammar alliance system. This study uses the theory of language typology as the main theory proposed by Comrie. (1988). These research data are clauses and sentences. Qualitative descriptive. This approach aims to understand the existence of the overlap of different external and internal symptoms of the subject being the subject of the study. Data from the coordinative construction and subordinative construction of the Malay language typologically leads to the finding that in syntax, the Malay languages treat S equally with A, and give different treatment to P (S`=`A`≠ P). The Malay language is a group of languages that works with the S/A pivot system. A system of grammatical alliances such as this suggests that Malay is syntaxically a language of nominative-akusative type. Observing the behavior of S on the intransitive clause with the behaviour of A and P on the transitive clauses of Malay language which indicates that S is equal to A and equally equal with P, then morphologically Malay language has a tendency as a nominative-akusative language.

Reducing the severity of incidents or emergency in Estonian emergency calls

Abstract The aim of the article is to analyze the calls to the Estonian Emergency Response Centre, focusing on instances where callers reduce the severity of incident or emergency in their first turn. The data comprise 39 calls from the Corpus of Emergency Calls of the University of Tartu. The analysis reveals that callers employ mitigating words and negative turn-initial utterances to reduce the severity. These words indicate the caller’s uncertainty about the information provided or suggest that the reported incident or emergency is minor. The utterances are syntactically and semantically (but not prosodically) completed clauses followed by a second part of the clause construction containing specific information about the caller’s issue. Functionally, these utterances serve as assessments falling into three groups based on the information they project. Some assessments project uncertain information, explicitly expressing uncertainty about the information or using the epistemic marker ma=i=tea ‘I don’t know’. The second group of assessments project information about an incident that the caller does not qualify as an emergency. The last group projects a potential incident or emergency using variants of the utterance ei juhtund midagi ‘nothing happened’. In addition, we offer explanations for why callers reduce the severity of the incident or emergency and demonstrate that reducing severity does not lower the probability of sending assistance. This indicates that call-takers do not rely on callers’ assessments when deciding whether the help is needed.

The general clause "interest of service" as one of the grounds for optional dismissal from service on the example of a police officer - selected theoretical and case law aspects

The principles of employing Police officers are regulated by the Act of April 6, 1990 on the Police, professional pragmatics of an autonomous nature. In the discussed pragmatics, the legislator divided the exhaustive catalog of reasons for dismissal from service into two reasons - obligatory and optional. The impetus for undertaking the research issues covered in this article was the construction of one of the reasons for optional dismissal from service. Namely, in accordance with Art. 41 section 2 point 5 of the Police Act, a police officer may be dismissed from service when an important interest of the service requires it. The construction of the service's interest is nothing more than the normative construction of a general clause, which by its nature is unspecified. Therefore, the closed catalog of grounds for dismissal from service remains open in this respect. The legislator deliberately and consciously uses this construction to make the generally closed catalog of reasons for dismissal from service more flexible. It should be stated, however, that although the Police authority is provided with a large area of freedom in the process of applying the law, the clause in question is not the basis for the authority to make arbitrary and instrumental assessments. The service interest clause, despite its undefined nature, refers to extra-legal criteria with a semantic context defined by the name of the criterion.

Anaphora and Depictives Do Not Rule Out Small Clause Approaches to Argument Structure: A Reply to Bruening 2018

Abstract Bruening (2018) uses the facts of anaphora and depictive modification to justify non-small-clause analyses of resultative constructions, caused-motion constructions, verb-particle constructions, and double object constructions: these constructions behave differently from canonical small clause constructions in terms of anaphora and depictive modification. In this reply, we argue against treating these tests as reliable diagnostics of small clauses. For one thing, we show that small clauses may have two different kinds of interpretations: they can be either semantically complete or incomplete. For another, Bruening’s (2018) arguments rely on some particular assumptions about anaphora and depictive modification which, we argue, are not without problems. If we adopt another set of reasonable assumptions, those facts of anaphora and depictive modification can be accounted for via the two kinds of interpretations for small clauses and thus do not argue in favor of non-small-clause analyses of the relevant constructions.

Examining Cross-linguistic Influence of Japanese Word Order: An Eye-Tracking Study on L2 English Learners’ Text Comprehension

Cross-linguistic influence is a systematic and unavoidable feature of language learning. This study aimed to investigate whether prepositive word order in Japanese noun clauses can serve as a cross-linguistic influence element in the acquisition of relative clauses (a form of a postpositive modifier) in English. To test this hypothesis, this study conducted an eye-tracking experiment with native Japanese speakers and showed the following results statistically. First, Japanese participants generally paid more attention to modifier clauses than the noun phrases they modified when reading English sentences with relative clauses. Second, when interpreting accusative relative clauses, longer fixations were observed both in the modifier clauses and in the antecedents, likely due to their complexity for Japanese L2 learners of English, as evidenced by the lowest accuracy rate. Finally, and most notably, the findings revealed that the participants who had not fully acquired the relative clause construction focused more on the left side of the relative pronoun than those who had. This tendency was most prominent when interpreting subjective relative clauses, a result that supports the hypothesis that prepositive L1 modifiers could be a CLI element in the acquisition of English postpositive modifiers.

Article: The Subtle Knife of Separability: Legal Fictions of Consent to Arbitration and the Problem of Conditions Precedent

The seminal House of Lords decision in Fiona Trust is best known for setting out the ‘one-stop shop’ presumption vis-à-vis the construction of arbitration clauses. Just as important, but often overshadowed, is the requirement it lays down that a challenge to the validity of the arbitration agreement nestled within a surrounding contract must be directed specifically to the arbitration agreement; a challenge that is merely ‘parasitic’ to a general challenge to the surrounding contact will not suffice to impeach the arbitration agreement. This article suggests that this dimension of Fiona Trust in fact requires the acceptance of a legal fiction in relation to the parties’ consent to the arbitration agreement (the ‘Legal Fiction of Untainted Consent’, or ‘LFUC’), which ought properly to be recognized. This article then considers the recent Court of Appeal decision in The Newcastle Express, which involved a challenge to the existence of the arbitration agreement premised upon a condition precedent to the existence of the surrounding contract remaining unfulfilled. This article argues that a modified version of the LFUC (the ‘Legal Fiction of Complete Consent’, or ‘LFCC’) can potentially apply to such ‘condition precedent’ cases, and concludes by conceptualizing and defending a potential LFCC doctrine. arbitration, agreement, separability, validity, fiction, consent

A collostructional approach to Japanese noun-modifying clause construction use and acquisition: a learner corpus study

Abstract Japanese features a general noun-modifying clause construction (NMCC) with a more versatile range of semantic and pragmatic interpretations than equivalent constructions in other languages. Motivated by the learning challenge NMCCs pose to Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners, this article examines speech data from the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS) to compare learner use of NMCCs against a large L1 Japanese corpus. Instances of the construction from both corpora were analyzed to identify high-frequency part-of-speech categories and subcategories in the modifying clause predicate and head noun slots. A simple collexeme analysis was then employed to identify strongly attracted and repelled lexical items among those identified in realizations of the construction. Taken together, findings from these analyses revealed an important connection between the semantic weight of head nouns in NMCCs and the idiomaticity of the construction, with learner productions demonstrating a tendency toward heavy head nouns. This study lays the groundwork for future research seeking to explore the NMCC at different levels of granularity and to improve its treatment in JFL pedagogical materials.

Adverbial Clause Construction in Dobbi

Adverbial Clause Construction in Dobbi

“Gap” matters: reflections on the notion of “gap” of relative clauses

Abstract This study aims to re-examine the essential notion of “gap” in the studies of relative clauses. Following Creissels’ (Creissels, Denis. 2006. Syntaxe générale: une introduction typologique. Paris: Hermès; Creissels, Denis. 2019. Remarks on the typology of noun-modifying clause constructions. Paper presented at the Conference of Complex Sentences, Central China Normal University, 26–29 July) discussion, we argue that there are at least three types of gaps in terms of their respective compositions, namely the gap corresponding to a zero-marked constituent, the gap corresponding to a case-marked constituent, and the gap corresponding to an adposition-marked constituent. This classification, which is not based on the grammatical relation of the relativized constituent in the relative clause but focuses on the composition of the gap, can better explain the existence of the so-called “enlarged gap”, a special type of gap that has been almost completely ignored so far. Moreover, this marking-based approach can shed new light on Keenan and Comrie’s (Keenan, Edward & Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8(1). 63–99) Accessibility Hierarchy. In particular, we argue that some interplay of the syntactic position and the morphological marking of a syntactic object determines whether the constituent can be relativized.

Ergative and Antipassive Construction in Minangkabaunese: Are There?

That Minangkabunese has active-passive dichotomy is not questioned anymore since it has been treated as an accusative language. Further typological analysis toward grammatical constructions of this language leads to a claim that it may be treated as an ergative language in which the ergative and antipassive constructions exist. That Minangkabaunese has ergative and antipassive construction is still questioned in some matters. Therefore, further grammatical-typological data, analysis, and discussion are needed. This paper, which is based on and developed from a part of results of research conducted in 2021-2022, particularly analyses whether Minangkabaunese has ergative and/or antipassive constructions. Two questions are raised, namely: (i) are there ergative and antipassive constructions in Minangkabaunese? and (ii) what is the linguistic implication of such claim toward grammatical typology of Minangkabaunese? This descriptive-qualitative study was practically operated as a linguistic field research and supported by a library study. Native speakers as represented by selected informants and written texts of Minangkabaunese were the sources of data. The data are in the form of clause constructions of Minangkabunese identified as the standard ones and were analyzed based on related theories of grammatical typology. The result of data analysis reveals that Minangkabaunese has ergative and antipassive constructions. Implicationally, this language may be typologically treated as an ergative language at the syntactic level beside as an accusative language.

A Corpus-based Study on Concessive Clauses Used in English Writing by Chinese Senior High School Students

This paper is designed to reveal the characteristics and figure out the errors in Chinese senior high students’ construction of concessive clause. The study uses data from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and a collection of concessive clauses from 499 English compositions written by senior two students in a key public high school in Beijing. The result shows that the construction of concessive clauses exhibits certain characteristics: (1) employing a wide range of linking words, “although” being the most frequently used concessive conjunction, which differs from the use of linking words in St2 from CLEC; (2) having a tendency to place the subordinate clause before the matrix and to construct the concessive clause as “Subject + Linking Verb + Predicate”. Fifty-seven errors are identified in 132 concessive clauses, including: (1) errors of linking words; (2) the wrong matrix-subordinate clause relationship; (3) errors such as choosing the wrong linking words, inconsistent tense between the matrix and subordinate clauses, errors within the clauses, and incorrect use of punctuation. These errors are mainly influenced by the negative transfer from Chinese.

The Semantics Relation of Japanese Aspect -teiru and Negation

Verb aspects in the form of -teiru in Japanese is a category that is still common to be discussed as the result of meaning classification that is prompted. This article tries to explore the aspect relations in -teiru form toward negation to see the change of meaning that is produced. This way, the writer recommends the aspects classification of -teiru when it is present with a negation constituent in clause construction. The object of this research is the verb form -teiru in Japanese, the data are taken from Konotoha corpus in collecting the data, the writer used several keywords including -teiru, -teinai, -teita, -teinakatta, -teimasu, -teimasen, -teimashita, and -teimasendeshita. The aspect analysis of -teiru in this research refers to a theory that is explained by Nitta (1995) who classified the Japanese -teiru meaning in four categories, including: ugoki no saichuu ‘continuity of action’, kekkajoutai no jizoku ‘continuity of result state’, kurikaeshiteki jizoku ‘repeated continuity’, and keiken-kiroku ‘experience-note/memory’. Based on the data analysis, it shows that the presence of negation in both past and non-past can generate -teiru form which is later classified into two, they are perfective and imperfective. Those that are categorized as perfective aspect are the presence of negation on aspect meaning of -teiru within category kekkajoutai no jizoku. While the imperfective aspect occurs during the presence of negation within categories ugoki no saichuu, kurikaeshiteki jizoku, and keiken-kiroku.

Good-enough processing, home language proficiency, cognitive skills, and task effects for Korean heritage speakers' sentence comprehension.

The present study investigates how heritage speakers conduct good-enough processing at the interface of home-language proficiency, cognitive skills (inhibitory control; working memory), and task types (acceptability judgement; self-paced reading). For this purpose, we employ two word-order patterns (verb-final vs. verb-initial) of two clausal constructions in Korean-suffixal passive and morphological causative-which contrast pertaining to the mapping between thematic roles and case-marking and the interpretive procedures driven by verbal morphology. We find that, while Korean heritage speakers demonstrate the same kind of acceptability-rating behaviour as monolingual Korean speakers do, their reading-time patterns are notably modulated by construction-specific properties, cognitive skills, and proficiency. This suggests a heritage speaker's ability and willingness to conduct both parsing routes, induced by linguistic cues in a non-dominant language, which are proportional to the computational complexity involving these cues. Implications of this study are expected to advance our understanding of a learner's mind for underrepresented languages and populations in the field.

Relativization of Noun Phrase in Ho language

This paper examines the syntax of nominal modification in the Ho language, with a specific exploration of relativization. Relative constructions across languages, and even within a particular language, manifest different strategies, such as participial relative clauses, internally headed relative clauses, and externally headed relative clauses. The analysis presented here focuses on participial and correlative clauses, aiming to derive a common logical form for equivalent sentences. Furthermore, the study aims to illustrate the diverse positions that can be modified by both participial and correlative clauses in accordance with the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. As posited by Keenan and Comrie (1977), this hierarchy hierarchically relativizes different noun phrase positions as a universal sequence: subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique object > object of genitive > object of comparison. Therefore, this paper seeks to assess the validity of this hierarchy in both participial and correlative clause constructions in the Ho language.

IDEOLOGY IN INDONESIAN POLITICAL PARTY ANTHEMS: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS AT THE LEXICOGRAMMATICAL LEVEL

Political parties are a forum for Indonesian people from various ideological backgrounds as channels for the aspirations of a pluralistic society. The party's ideology is embodied in the vision and mission that the party aspires to when domination is obtained after the General Election is held. In this research, the anthem lyrics of the top three political parties, based on the 2019 legislative elections, were taken as the data and studied through a stylistic approach at the lexicogrammatical level to figure out the ideology in the realization of the vision and mission of the political parties. The method of the analysis applied descriptive qualitative through transitivity analysis in order to reveal the lexical and grammatical construction in the lyric. The typical processes used in each anthem characterized the cognitive frame of how the political parties set their vision and orientation towards the nation goals. It was found that the use of stylistic devices came in low frequency, including epizeuxis, parallelism, imagery, metaphor, symbolism, asyndeton and anaphora. The construction of clauses in the anthem lyrics has a significant impact in expressing the goals of political parties ideologically, so that the results of this study are expected to be an alternative reference that provides a paradigm for the voting community during the election period

From possessive to relative clause marker: a grammaticalization pathway in the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages

AbstractTypological studies have repeatedly expressed doubt about the possibility of relative clause markers grammaticalizing from possessive markers. At the same time, cross-linguistic studies of attribution have provided substantial evidence for markers of adjectival attribution deriving from possessive markers. Given that simple adjectival attributive constructions are accepted to expand readily into relative clause constructions, there is an apparent discordance in the typological literature on the diachronic sources of their markers. Using data from the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages of south-eastern Wallacea, the present article argues that the link between possessive and relative clause markers, by way of an adjectival attributive marker, should also be uncontroversial.

Zur Syntax der polnischen Leichten Sprache

Summary Easy Language as a means for communicative accessibility is designed for use by people with communication impairments and low literacy skills in general, e. g. persons with intellectual disability, functional illiterates or individuals with dementia. Compared to standard written Polish, the complexity of this variety is reduced on all linguistic levels. The present article deals with the level of syntax and follows on from a previous study concerning the syntax of Easy-to-read Russian. It aims to contribute to the linguistically substantiated elaboration of Easy-to-read Polish by submitting suggestions for avoiding complex syntactic structures. Various subgroups of clause constructions and complex sentences are included. It turns out that the endeavour to make sentences as short, simple and comprehensible as possible is quite complex and certainly not easy. The presented suggestions await further discussion among linguists as well as systematic testing with target groups of Easy-to-read Polish. Since Easy Language has been implemented in Polish legislation, it is to be expected that this fact will result in an amplification of Easy-to-read text offers in the future. Therefore, there is a need for more intensive research in the field of Easy Language that can be seen as crucial in enabling people with disabilities and other persons with reading difficulties to fully enjoy the fundamental right to information and participation in social life.

Priming Center-Embedded Object and Extraposed Subject Relative Clauses in Persian Language Production: Searching for Persistence of Hierarchical Configuration.

Substantial evidence suggests that priming can co-occur at different syntactic and nonsyntactic levels. In this study, we further explore two loci of priming concerned with hierarchical configuration and thematic information using relative clause (RC) constructions. In a comprehension-to-production task, Persian speakers (42 adults and 42 children) described pictures after hearing extraposed subject or center-embedded object RCs containing the same or different verbs. We ask whether priming the object RC mitigates the computational cost of center-embedding and thus increases the subsequent production of this infrequent structure. We also measured persistence effects associated with the assignment of emphasis to thematic roles, examining whether a particular portrayal of an event is captured and reproduced (e.g., foregrounding the patient). Although this study could not establish any significant priming effects in the production of the center-embedded object RC, we observed that adults used this construction more in the same verbs condition. The overall results instead revealed strong evidence for thematic emphasis persistence, such that patient-emphasis object relatives further elicited functionally equivalent RC constructions. We discuss priming of hierarchical configuration as a candidate locus and explain the activation of functional information from the speaker's perspective.

Different shades of minimalism: The multilateral construction of labour clauses in the UK-Australia and UK-New Zealand FTAs

Different shades of minimalism: The multilateral construction of labour clauses in the UK-Australia and UK-New Zealand FTAs

Заголовки прозових творів для дітей: синтаксична організація та комунікативно-прагматичний потенціал

Introduction. In the contemporary scientific paradigm, the multivector study of representatives at the syntactic level has been implemented using various discursive and stylistic texts. However, the research of heading of prose for children is fragmentary. In this regard, it is perspective to describe the headings of fairy tales by V. Nestaiko, concurrently directing attention to the systematic analysis of their syntactic structure, morphological expression means, and lexical content. Equally relevant is the linguo-stylistic aspect, which, in combination, allows for the identification of the artist's style. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to determine the syntactic specificity and outline the typology of sentence structures explicating the headings of fairy tales by V. Nestaiko, clarify their functional potential, communicative-pragmatic features, stylistic and structural parameters. The syntactic units presented in the heading complexes are characterized in terms of evaluative aspects, emotional-expressive coloring, modality, realization of authorial intention, and with the purpose of highlighting the originality of the writer's thought and his/her skill in handling artistic language. Methods. The objectivity of the research was ensured by employing a descriptive method, allowing for the classification and characterization of factual material based on a set of defining features. The distributive analysis method facilitated the research of title sentences in terms of their combinatory and contextual features. The comprehensive analysis was used to describe syntactic units with an emphasis on their structure, semantic, morphological, and stylistic features, intention, communicative-pragmatic potential, and modality. Results. The studied headings are presented through several simple sentences, predominantly differing not only in structural parameters but also in emotional-expressive coloring, modality, intention, pragmatic features, and morphological expression. The author actively employs quotations – expressions of fairy tale characters that, in the context of other constructions, create stylistic contrast. The headings of the works are characterized by the presence of animal names and patronyms, as well as exclamations. Originality. The scientific novelty of the work is determined by: 1) a detailed description of simple single-clause and compound two-clause structures, complex compound sentences, and non- clausal constructions that model headings; 2) a systematic analysis of sentence elements and their formal representatives – lexical units that have accompanying positive or negative nuances, often serving expressive functions and revealing intentional-pragmatic potential; 3) a comprehensive study of the names of fairy tales in the aspect of modal interpretation, which became a prerequisite for their examination with a focus on the real-irreal paradigmatic feature, as well as means of expressing morphological, syntactic, and lexical-grammatical modalities. Conclusion. The heading complexes of V. Nestaiko's works are informative and structurally rich. They are expressed through syntactic units with varying structures, content, part-of-speech, emotional-evaluative, expressive, intentional, and pragmatic potential. In the headings of the writer's fairy tales, there are expressions that often have the nuances of oral spontaneous communication and implement interrogative, imperative, desiderative, affirmative/negative modal meanings, occasionally modal meanings of probability and necessity. All of this highlights the individual style of the writer.