Clause Constructions Research Articles

Relative Clauses in Thai English

This study explores characteristics and usage of relative clauses in Thai English in comparison with those in American English. Data are taken from articles published in English newspapers in Thailand and America. Relative clauses are identified and classified into types based on the features: finiteness, restrictiveness and simple/complex. The Z-test is used to evaluate the proportions of types of relative clauses between the two varieties. The findings show that relative clauses in Thai English do not have any forms distinctive from those in American English, but quantitative analysis shows that the types of relative clauses are used in distinctive proportions in the two varieties. Thai English has a significantly higher proportion of non-finite and restrictive relative clauses than American English does. It also shows a higher use of shared head-noun and three-layer complex relative clauses. This characteristic of relative clauses in Thai English reflects the process of nativization, where a variety of English is adjusted to its ecology. Since Thailand is a collectivist culture with a high-context type of communication, the types of relative clauses that correspond well with this condition are used at a higher frequency than in the native variety. This suggests a subtle kind of nativization, where distinctions from the native variety do not emerge in terms of overt forms of relative clause constructions but rather in terms of the proportions of certain types of relative clauses.

Information Structure in Somali. Evidence from the syntax-phonology interface

The correspondence between grammatical categories and prosodic events is widely acknowledged in the literature and a number of recent works have investigated the syntax–prosody interface and its relation to information structure. In this area of research, this paper provides an analysis of broad and narrow Focus constructions in Somali, based on a corpus of semi-spontaneous conversations between three native speakers of Somali.Evidence is thus provided for a partition of the utterance into two major domains, one including the so-called Verbal Complex and the other the left periphery of the sentence – two interpretive domains that basically correspond to the vP- and CP-phase, consistent with Minimalist claims (Chomsky 2008). From a cartographic viewpoint, prosodic investigation supports the existence of a hierarchical organization of discourse-grammar categories in the C-domain. However, some internal refinement is required. In particular, functional heads concerning Focus and (different types of) Topic are shown to be fully part of the C-domain, while Fin(iteness)P – the functional projection connected with tense and agreement specifications (cf. Rizzi 1997) – belongs to the clausal domain. A reconsideration of what counts as the Complement of C (used as a cover term of the CP-phase) is therefore needed. Finally, intonation strongly supports a cleft-like analysis of narrow Focus constructions in languages like Somali. In particular, evidence is given for a predicative merge of the focused DP in a Small Clause construction and for the topicalized status of the (presupposed) relative DP. Attention is also paid to the intonation of yes-no questions, showing the necessity of different functional projections to activate interrogative force, according to scopal requirements.

A Study on the Idiomatic Expression in Construction of Conjunctive Adnominal Clause

A Study on the Idiomatic Expression in Construction of Conjunctive Adnominal Clause

A Study on the Development of the Infants' Ability to Construct Adnominl Clauses

This study aims to investigte the development of the ability of the infants in the period from 23-months-old to 43-months-old to construct the relative clause and the noun complement through the materials made of their free speech. In this period their ability to use such construction develop steadily, and the most frequent head noun is 'keos(것)'. In case of the relative clause, the restrictive clauses go ahead of the non-restrictive clauses in the frequency and the time of their uses. And the subjecthood of the head noun is learned earlier than the objecthood or adverbhood. The adjective predicate is also earlier-learned compared to the verb predicate in the relative clause construction. The predicate ‘keos(-i-)' is most frequently used among the complement nouns. The acquisition time of ‘(-eul) keos(-i-)' is different from that of ‘(-eun/neun) keos(-i-)'. ‘(-eul) keos(-i-)' that express the intent of the 1st person subject is learned earlier than the one that express the guess of the speaker.

The information structure of Danish grammar constructions

This paper addresses the issue of how information structure can be accounted for in a formal grammar of Danish. Three information structure features – topic, focus and background – are discussed, and it is shown how they are instantiated in a number of different grammatical constructions from a corpus of spoken Danish. Prosodic, syntactic and information structure constraints characterising the various constructions are represented as typed feature structures following Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and the constructions themselves are ordered in a type hierarchy. The proposed approach modifies and extends earlier HPSG-based accounts by integrating information structure as a dimension of phrasal and clausal grammar constructions.

Processing Subject‐Object Ambiguities in the L2: A Self‐Paced Reading Study With German L2 Learners of Dutch

The results of two self‐paced reading experiments are reported, which investigated the online processing of subject‐object ambiguities in Dutch relative clause constructions like Dat is de vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien by German advanced second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Native speakers of both Dutch and German have been shown to have a preference for a subject versus an object reading of such temporarily ambiguous sentences, and so we provided an ideal opportunity for the transfer of first language (L1) processing preferences to take place. We also investigated whether the participants' working memory span would affect their processing of the experimental items. The results suggest that processing decisions may be affected by working memory when task demands are high, and in this case the high working memory span learners patterned like the native speakers of lower working memory. However, when reading for comprehension alone and when only structural information was available to guide parsing decisions, working memory span had no effect on the L2 learners' online processing, and this differed from the native speakers' online processing even though the L1 and the L2 are highly comparable.

Autobiographical Memory and Past Time Reference

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between the acquisition of language and the development of autobiographical memory. The investigation was based on the analysis of longitudinal caregiver-child interaction data from 10 children learning English during the period from approximately 2 to 4 years of age. Three forms of past reference were analyzed: (1) regular and irregular simple past tense, (2) past progressive, and (3) subordinate clause constructions with when and past time reference (i.e., past when-sentences). Simple past was acquired relatively early at 2;4 (cf. Brown, 1973), past when-sentences relatively late at 3;6 (cf. Limber, 1973), and past-progressive in the interim at 2;10. The discourse segments surrounding the sentences that contained these forms were analyzed for the following three elements: (1) reference time context established, (2) a supporting event expressed in the segment, and (3) reference made to a self-relevant, real-life event. The likelihood that a discourse segment would include these three elements increased as past reference advanced from simple past to past progressive and then to past when-sentences. As the morpho-syntax of past reference became more complex, a higher proportion of past time references provided evidence for autobiographical memory.

Agora: Thoughts on Fiona Trust: Separability and Construing Arbitration Clauses: the House of Lords' decision in Premium Nafta and the Fiona Trust

In October 2007, the House of Lords removed the last major obstacle to the creation of a separability doctrine in England, the suggestion that an arbitration clause is not wide enough to include issues of the main contract’s validity and enforceability. In so doing, it eliminated an entire source of arguments about the interpretation of arbitration agreements in a way which seems likely to find acceptance on a broader international scale. As with most judgments on separability, there are other forces at work. The House of Lords is applying a change in the way English law interprets contracts generally to the construction of the arbitration clause. The emphasis is now on the context of the transaction and the search for what a reasonable person in the position of the contracting parties would have intended, rather than the words used. Lord Hoffman, who delivered the leading judgment, has also become something of a separability purist, going further than the French Cour de cassation and Swiss Tribunal fédéral in asserting that the question of whether the main contract was ever concluded is irrelevant. He is clearly bent on bringing to an end 398 years of English case law discussion on the nature of arbitration clauses, a debate similarly reflected in other countries.

A Note on the Grammar Book:An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course

Linguistic Research 25(2), 125-137. Although Celce-Murcia and Larson-Freeman (1999) (CL hereafter) is an excellent comprehensive textbook for the students in an ESL / EFL teacher’s course, it has some drawbacks. This review examines what they are and explores better ways to present the relevant issues. First, CL do not clearly distinguish grammatical functions from grammatical categories. The lack of this distinction causes confusion and inconsistency when PS rules are considered. Second, CL’s treatment of the determiners such as possessives, partitives, and phrasal quantifiers is too simplified and may lead to a wrong grammaticality prediction. Third, a discussion seems needed regarding the connectivity in the relative clause constructions, which helps to choose an appropriate relativizer. Fourth, a caution needs to be addressed on verbs’ subcategorization frames, many of which are not semantically predictable. Problems in the coordination constructions are also illustrated. (Dongseo University)

Constructions comparatives en comme

French comparative constructions introduced by the word comme show a large variety of realizations. However, a thorough observation of their semantics, and of their syntactic properties, leads to conclude that they all fall under a unique analysis : they are adverbial free relative clauses. Indeed, comme phrases show the behavior of manner adverbs (§ 2), the embedded clause is an extraction context (§ 3) and comme has the properties of an adverbial wh- word. Moreover, thanks to the matching effects that constrain the free relative clause construction, we can explain how the comparative semantics proceed – roughly, the fact that two manners are compared (§ 1 and § 5.2).

The Foundations of Arbitrability in International Commercial Arbitration

Arbitrability is concerned with whether a particular type of dispute is amenable to settlement by arbitration, or if instead jurisdiction lies exclusively with the domestic courts or state organs. These determinations are usually made by reference to domestic statute law.1 The parties to a dispute, when considering whether its subject matter is arbitrable, must ensure the said dispute is arbitrable not only in accordance with the law of the lex arbitri, but that it also conforms to the laws and public policy of the governing law of the contract and of those states where enforcement of the award will be sought. It should be said that some confusion exists with regard to the precise terminology associated with the concept of arbitrability. In Europe the term refers, as explained above, to the permission granted by state laws for a dispute to be settled by arbitration, rather than compulsory judicial settlement. In the United States, it has taken on an additional overtone. There, the term has been consistently employed to determine whether an arbitral tribunal has sufficient jurisdiction to hear a dispute as a matter of construction of the arbitral clause,2 as well as whether the arbitrators may validly

Constructions comparatives en comme

French comparative constructions introduced by the word comme show a large variety of realizations. However, a thorough observation of their semantics, and of their syntactic properties, leads to conclude that they all fall under a unique analysis : they are adverbial free relative clauses. Indeed, comme phrases show the behavior of manner adverbs (§ 2), the embedded clause is an extraction context (§ 3) and comme has the properties of an adverbial wh- word. Moreover, thanks to the matching effects that constrain the free relative clause construction, we can explain how the comparative semantics proceed – roughly, the fact that two manners are compared (§ 1 and § 5.2).

Formal linking in Internally Headed Relatives

This paper aims to clarify and resolve issues surrounding the so-called formal linking problem in interpreting the Internally Headed Relative Clause construction in Korean and Japanese, a problem that has been identified in recent E-type pronominal treatments of the construction (e.g., Hoshi, K. (1995). Structural and interpretive aspects of head-internal and head-external relative clauses. PhD dissertation, University of Rochester; Shimoyama, J. (2001). Wh-constructions in Japanese. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst). In the literature, this problem refers to the difficulty of capturing the delimited semantic variability of the E-type pronoun present in the embedding clause of the construction. I show that the E-type pronoun at issue is subject to a different licensing condition from a typical E-type pronoun and therefore presents a different linking problem. More specifically, it requires that the embedded clause describe a state of its antecedent and its descriptive content be supplied by a salient property represented in the logical form of the embedded clause. I propose an event-based semantic analysis that derives the effects of this novel generalization by establishing a binding relation between the event structure of the embedded clause and the denotation of the E-type pronoun.

The role of animacy in the real time comprehension of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from auditory event-related brain potentials

Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which modulated the assignment of actor and undergoer roles to the arguments), both arguments were either animate or inanimate. This allowed us to examine the interplay of animacy with thematic interpretation. In Experiment 1, we observed no effect of animacy at NP1, but N400 effects for inanimate actor arguments in second position. This result mirrors previous findings in German, thus suggesting that an initial undergoer universally leads to the prediction of an ideal (animate) actor. We also observed an N400 effect for passive sentences with an inanimate initial (undergoer) argument. We attribute this effect to a language-specific property of the passive construction in Chinese, namely that the first argument is negatively affected by the event described (i.e. bears an experiencer role). Experiment 2 showed that both of these effects can also be observed in sentence constructions of another type, in which the critical information sources become available in a different order. These findings provide the first demonstration that the N400 is not only sensitive to general (universal) aspects of thematic processing (i.e. “who is acting on whom”) but also to the interaction between thematic interpretation and language-specific pragmatic principles.

Small clauses reconsidered: Not so small and not all alike

This paper re-examines a syntactic typology of small clause constructions, based on new crosslinguistic evidence from languages that allow two different kinds of copula elements: verbal copulas and pronominal copulas. Such languages include Arabic ( Eid, 1983), Hebrew ( Doron, 1983; Rapoport, 1987), Russian ( Pereltsvaig, 2001), Polish ( Rothstein, 1986), Scottish Gaelic ( Adger and Ramchand, 2003), among others. The two types of copular constructions in these languages have been argued to correlate with a difference in interpretation along the predicational/equative dimension, and with a structural difference involving the size of the small clause. This paper re-examines both semantic and syntactic differences between the two types, focusing on new data from Polish. It focuses on selection, case, extraction possibilities, and interpretation, and argues that the differences between the two types of small clauses lie not in the size of the small clause, but in the featural make-up of the functional projection heading it.

The Syntactic Derivations of Split Antecedent Relative Clause Constructions

In this paper, I propose a syntactic derivation for Split Antecedent Relative Clause Constructions such as Mary met a man and John met a woman who knew each other well. I claim that the two antecedents of such a construction are originally two conjuncts of a coordinate nominal. Then each has undergone a sideward movement, landed in a new working site, and been selected by a verb. After that, a coordinate clausal complex is constructed. In the old working site, a complex nominal is also constructed, in which the relative clause takes the remnant coordinate nominal as its antecedent. Finally, the complex nominal adjoins to the coordinate clausal complex. This analysis shows how the freedom in the selection of the landing site gained from sideward movement makes the syntactic derivations of this special type of relative clause construction possible, while at the same time avoiding the problems of the alternative three-dimensional analysis.

A grammar of Kham (review)

Reviewed by: A grammar of Kham by David E. Watters Edward Garrett A grammar of Kham. By David E. Watters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 477. ISBN 0521812453. $150 (Hb). Kham, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodic branch spoken by forty to fifty thousand people in the upper valleys of mid-western Nepal, now has its first comprehensive grammar. A revision of Watters’s 1998 University of Oregon Ph.D. dissertation, this book has been in the making since 1969, when W inaugurated his lifelong commitment to the language. After a brief introduction to the people and their language, W then describes a tonal language characterized by pronominalizing morphology, elaborate causativization and detransitivization morphology, person-based split-ergativity, clause-chaining, evidentiality, and extensive use of nominalization. The book ends with over twenty pages of texts followed by a basic 400-plus word vocabulary highlighted by W’s tentative Himalayish reconstructions. Phonologists will be particularly interested in the chapter on tone, which describes a contrastive fourtone system arising from the intersection of tonal melody and modal/lax voice register. The existence of complex rules of tonal assimilation and dissimilation forced the creation of a practical reading orthography that marks voice register but not tonal melody. Most of the Kham examples in the book follow this orthography, which may be a good thing, since W’s phonetic transcriptions simultaneously mark both the underlying tone and the surface tone of a morpheme. The chapter on adverbs and adverbials includes a lengthy section on expressive adverbs, modifiers that typically occur in reduplicative couplets immediately preceding a verb. In most such reduplications, base vowels are copied as a or ya. There are two notable exceptions to this rule: if a or ya occurs anywhere in the base, other base vowels remain unchanged in the copy; and, onomatopoeic bases tend to remain unaffected by reduplication. In addition to fully discussing the phonology of reduplication in Kham, W also treats the widespread use of reduplication in light verb constructions to derive conative interpretations. Kham’s evidential system, modest compared to that of some Tibeto-Burman languages, will still interest researchers. It includes a mirative construction, which as in Tibetan languages, exploits an auxiliary use of the existential copular verb ‘to be’ to mark unanticipated new information, and a reportative particle used for information the speaker attributes to another source and for which s/he disclaims responsibility. As in other Tibeto-Burman languages, nominalization plays an important role in Kham syntax. It is used to mark relative clauses, clausal arguments in complement clauses, and even independent verbs in main clause constructions. W’s book is unique in devoting an entire chapter to the specific discourse conditions under which the third usage is possible. He makes the novel claim that nominalizations are used as independent clauses to mark narrative discontinuity in the form of backgrounded, unpredictable, or surprising material. These are just a few of the highlights of the book, which is an extraordinary achievement reflecting W’s profound knowledge of Kham. Tibeto-Burmanists and typologists will profit from this book for years to come, but others should take note, too: this is how to write a grammar. [End Page 477] Edward Garrett Eastern Michigan University Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America

Construction of restrictive relative clause and nonrestrictive or appositive relative clause on anaphor

Construction of restrictive relative clause and nonrestrictive or appositive relative clause on anaphor

Interaction of Multiple Factors in Relative Clause Construal and Acquisition

A valuable perspective can be gained by examining whether claims about certain linguistic phenomena that were made largely based on observations from particular languages still hold for similar constructions in typologically different languages. This thematic issue contributes to SLA research in this respect by rethinking the putative universal influence of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977) on the acquisition of relative clause (RC) constructions in a second language (L2). The NPAH has been strongly supported by numerous studies in English and other European languages such as French, Italian, and Swedish; the articles in this special issue examine L2 RC acquisition in East Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

The construal of objectivity in atemporal complement clauses in English

In Cognitive Grammar, the syntax of a complement clause construction reflects the particular construal imposed on its conceptual content. Differences in syntax reflect differences in construal. One such construal concerns perspective, which can be subjective or objective. A personal construction portrays the speaker's involvement in the complement event; thus it is construed as subjective. Subjectivity is the act of judging an event which is influenced by personal opinions. An impersonal construction portrays the speaker's distance from the complement event; thus it is construed as objective. Objectivity is the act of judging an event without being influenced by personal opinions. This paper explores the impact of objectivity on the syntactic realization of atemporal complement clauses. Impersonal constructions take various forms which represent different construals. One construal pertains to scope. A non-extra- posed construction signals a minimal range of content in describing a complement event. An extraposed construction signals a maximal range of content in describing a complement event. Another construal relates to profile. A non-raised construction profiles a whole complement event. A raised construction profiles the most salient entity in a complement event.