Clause Research Articles

Labeling Defective T*

AbstractThis paper proposes a new analysis of so‐called ‘defective T’ (a postulate originally discussed in Chomsky 2000, 2001) and seeks a label‐based theoretical explanation of phenomena associated with the distribution of subjects in infinitival clauses. I argue that we do not need to postulate ‘defective T’ as an element of the lexicon. Following Chomsky’s (2013, 2015) labeling approach, which investigates only finite clauses, I argue here that the subject of infinitive‐to is pair‐merged structure <T, C> and the associated predicate forms an {XP, YP} structure, which is unlabelable. To attain labeling, the subject position ([spec, TP]) in the infinitival clause moves out and the label of the resulting structure is the amalgam <T, C>, which has no visible Spec (violating EPP). As a consequence, we eliminate the Merge‐over‐Move principle.

On the Nominative with Infinitive: Notes in the Margins of the Domostroj

ABSTRACT The paper deals with Nom. object construction attested historically in East Slavic and Middle Russian texts, as well as in some modern dialects of the North and North West. Using the 16th-century Domostroj as the starting point for the discussion, the article focusses on the fact that Nom.+Inf. is associated with the legal genre. This presupposes its oral origin and sheds a new light on the possible evolution of this construction. It is argued that the transitive infinitive construction has a non-prototypical status in relation to the finite clause. The non-prototypicality comes from the modal semantics and the irrealis nature of the infinitive and the oblique Dat. subject. The nouns of the feminine *a-stem declension due to their evolution are especially predisposed to the Nom. form in infinitive construction. The opposition between the Nom. and the Acc. in this declension is weak. At the time when the Gen.-Acc. arose as a marker of morphological animacy, *a-stem nouns were pulled in the animacy opposition as well. The Nom. form became a variant of the Acc. for such nouns, by analogy to the Nom.-Acc. syncretism in other declensions and despite the fact that they had a separate Acc. form.

Non-linear interactions of factors influencing relative clause distribution and their implications on relative clause processing

Non-linear interactions of factors influencing relative clause distribution and their implications on relative clause processing

An experimental study on the nature of the relative clause constraint in Korean.

An experimental study on the nature of the relative clause constraint in Korean.

Egy dalszöveg a pedagógiai nyelvészet szolgálatában : Quimby: Magam adom

The paper offers an analysis of the lyrics of Magam adom ’I’m giving myself ’ produced by the Hungarian alternative rock band Quimby, arguing that the text can be fruitfully exploited by pedagogical linguistics. Drawing on but also taking issue with previous interpretations of the song by other linguists, the author highlights the following aspects of the tightly woven lyrics of Magam adom: (i) the demonstration of how Hungarian verbs can act as finite clauses by themselves, expressing highly complex meanings, (ii) the intricate network of phonological, semantic and morphological connections, which lends itself to analysis in Bybee’s morphological theory, and (iii) the interaction of various constructions derived from ad ’give’ that motivate a rich, emotionally ambiguous discursive meaning of the pattern megadom magam.

Process of Pan Balang Tamak Text: a Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

Pan Balang Tamak text is one of the Balinese narrative texts getting declination in the popularity in the community because of specific reasons. Many people do not know the ideology of the text. After all, the text is not comprehended totally because the text brings metaphor actions released by clauses. Verbs represent actions. Systemic Functional Linguistics serves verbs within clause as a process. The kinds of the process can be identified based on the activity done in the text. This research analyzed the usage of a process in Pan Balang Tamak text. The research aimed to find out the characteristics of the text. The data were taken from a Balinese narrative book Satua-Satua Bali (Supatra, 2014) the method used for the research was qualitative, library research. The technique used for the research was by splitting the clauses employed in all texts. The clauses were split into arguments such as participant, process, and circumstance. The processes became the research concern. The processes were collected based on the types. Participants and circumstances were not analyzed. The theory used to analyze the data was the theory concerned with transitivity proposed by Halliday.

A New Basis for Judicial Review in Iraq

Abstract Article 2 of the Iraqi Constitution of 2005, which states that Iraq is a modern Islamic constitutional democracy, contains a ‘repugnancy clause’, prohibiting enactment of any law contrary to Islam’s settled rulings, principles of democracy, and rights guaranteed in the Constitution. This clause allows the Constitutional Court to invalidate laws that violate the Constitution. Currently, the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court’s method for determining whether a particular law is repugnant to the Constitution and Islamic settled rulings as per Article 2 is inconsistent and arbitrary. Here the core question is: What is the best way to successfully implement the Iraqi Constitution’s Repugnancy Clause? We propose an approach focusing on maqāṣid, the classical Islamic concept meaning Sharīʿah’s intent, purpose, or objectives that will also fulfil the other purposes of Article 2 to ensure that the law is consistent with the principles of democracy and the principles of human rights.

The syntax and semantics of elliptical constructions: A direct interpretation perspective

Ellipsis refers to a phenomenon that involves the omission from a clause of one or more words that are nevertheless understood in the context of the remaining elements. The key question for its analysis is then how to license such correspondences between incomplete syntax and complete semantics. There have been two main strands: deletion-based and direct interpretation-based. The former derives elliptical structures from clausal sources such that there is no mismatch between the syntax and the semantics of ellipsis. Meanwhile, the latter countenances non-correspondences at syntax but derives sentential semantics from structured discourse information. This position paper discusses a direct interpretation perspective on ellipitcal constructions as represented by HPSG.

The Tense-Aspect System of Ad-nominal Clauses with Non-Simultaneity Taxis – A Korean-Japanese Contrastive Analysis –

The Tense-Aspect System of Ad-nominal Clauses with Non-Simultaneity Taxis – A Korean-Japanese Contrastive Analysis –

Subject ellipsis in early child English

English-speaking children are known to omit subjects. Parametric analyses of the phenomenon have the advantage to give a simple answer to why children omit subjects and how they reach an adult grammar: the problem is reduced to a matter of parameter misseting and resetting. However, early parametric analyses of missing subjects were challenged by empirical findings. In this paper, I present a parametric analysis of null subjects in finite clauses. In this analysis, three parameters interact to explain the pattern of subject omission in adult and child language.

Iconicity and properties of Korean -ceney ‘before’ and -hwuey/-nase ‘after’ temporal clauses: A corpus-based perspective.

Iconicity and properties of Korean -ceney ‘before’ and -hwuey/-nase ‘after’ temporal clauses: A corpus-based perspective.

Remarks on prepositional object clauses in Germanic

This paper analyses the variation we find in the realization of finite clausal complements in the position of prepositional objects in a set of Germanic languages. The Germanic languages differ with respect to whether prepositions can directly select a clause (North Germanic) or not and instead need a prepositional proform (Continental West Germanic). Within the Continental West Germanic languages, we find further differences with respect to the constituent structures. We propose that German strong vs. weak prepositional proforms (e.g. drauf vs. darauf) differ with respect to their syntax, while this is not the case for the Dutch forms (ervan vs. daarvan). What the Germanic languages under consideration share is that the prepositional element can be covert, except in English. English shows only limited evidence for the presence of P with finite clauses in the position of prepositional objects generally, but only with a selected set of verbs. This investigation is a first step towards a broader study of the nature of clauses in prepositional object positions and the implications for the syntax of clausal complementation.

بند موصولی عربی و فارسی

رده­شناسی2 شاخه­ای از زبان­شناسی است که شباهت­های ساختاری بین زبان­ها را بدون توجه به تاریخ آن­ها مورد بررسی قرار می­دهد. بررسی­های زبان شناسان ثابت کرده است که زبان­های مختلف دنیا مشترکاتی نیز دارند که به آن­ها، جهانی­های زبان گفته می­شود؛ بررسی ترتیب سازه­ها یکی از مهم­ترین مباحث رده­شناسی زبان است؛ زیرا زبان­ها در این مورد تنوع بیشتری نشان می­دهند و این تنوع دست­مایه­ای برای بررسی­ رده­شناختی زبان به شمار می­آید. یکی از این موارد تنوع، توالی هسته و بند موصولی است. رده­شناسان دو گونه توالی اسم و بند موصولی را در زبان­ها مشخص کرده­اند: هسته - بند موصولی و بند موصولی - هسته. از نظر آنها این دو توالی­ با آرایش سازه­های اصلی زبان­ها به ویژه (مفعول و فعل) همبستگی دارد. بنابر این طبق پیش­بینی­های آنها، توالی هسته - بند موصولی اکثرا در زبان­های فعل - مفعول و توالی بند موصولی - هسته در زبان­های مفعول - فعل هستند. در گفتار حاضر ساخت موصولی در زبان­های فارسی و عربی را در چهارچوب رده­شناسی بررسی می‌کنیم تا روشن شود که ویژگی­های ساخت موصولی در زبان­های فارسی و عربی چگونه است و چه شباهت­ها و تفاوت­هایی میان این دو ساخت در فارسی و عربی وجود دارد. به علاوه، این پژوهش در پی آن است تا مشخص کند که توالی هسته اسمی و بند موصولی در هر دو زبان چه نسبتی با پیش­بینی­های متخصصین رویکرد رده‌شناسی دارد. روش تحقیق توصیفی - تحلیلی است و جملات مورد بررسی از متون مختلف گونۀ رسمی هر دو زبان فارسی و عربی جمع­آوری شده است. بیش از ده هزار جمله مورد بررسی قرار گرفت. از نتایج پژوهش می‌توان به این موارد اشاره کرد که روشن شد زبان­های فارسی و عربی از الگوی غالب جهانی در ترتیب بند موصولی و هستۀ اسمی تبعیت می­کنند یعنی در هر دو زبان بند موصولی بعد از هستۀ خود قرار می­گیرد؛ اما در این زمینه زبان فارسی طبق پیش‌بینی‌های انجام‌شده برای زبان­های فعل پایان یا زبان­های OV عمل نمی­کند. در حالی که زبان عربی با پیش‌بینی‌های ارائه‌شده برای زبان­های VO سازگار است.همچنین یکی دیگر از نتایج این تحقیق این است که رخ دادن پدیدۀ خروج بند موصولی در زبان فارسی امکان­پذیر است ولی در زبان عربی رخ نمی­دهد.

Shell nouns as grammatical metaphor in knowledge construal: Variation across science and engineering discourse

This article proposes a novel treatment of cataphoric shell nouns (SNs) as instances of grammatical metaphor serving to reconstruct human experience into knowledge through the discipline-specific construal of different transitivity processes. Based on a two-million-word corpus of research articles in physics and aeronautic engineering, we investigated the sub-disciplinary variation in the use of SNs between science and engineering. While the two disciplines are found to demonstrate similar preferences for SN items evidenced by a large set of common SNs, the empirical study has uncovered significant differences. Firstly, physics favours finite clauses while aeronautic engineering favours non-finite clauses as preferred SN complementation types. Secondly, physics primarily chooses identifying relational processes to characterise fact-like propositions while aeronautic engineering tends to prefer attributive relational processes to express dynamic modality and mental processes of volition to highlight desirability of potential activities under specific conditions. Thirdly, physics resorts to verbal processes of assertion to argue for the discovery of discipline-internal theories while aeronautic engineering relies on material processes to construe laboratory-based activities. These findings reveal the fundamental differences between science and engineering as two discourse types and demonstrate SNs as significant manifestations of cognitive construals underpinning linguistic variations across the two registers.

A Comparative Study of Deep and Shallow Parsing Approaches to Automated Grammaticality Evaluation

The concept of automated grammar evaluation of natural language texts is one that has attracted significant interests in the natural language processing community. It is the examination of natural language text for grammatical accuracy using computer software. The current work is a comparative study of different deep and shallow parsing techniques that have been applied to lexical analysis and grammaticality evaluation of natural language texts. The comparative analysis was based on data gathered from numerous related works. Shallow parsing using induced grammars was first examined along with its two main sub-categories, the probabilistic statistical parsers and the connectionist approach using neural networks. Deep parsing using handcrafted grammar was subsequently examined along with several of it‟s subcategories including Transformational Grammars, Feature Based Grammars, Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Definite Clause Grammar (DCG), Property Grammar (PG), Categorial Grammar (CG), Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Based on facts gathered from literature on the different aforementioned formalisms, a comparative analysis of the deep and shallow parsing techniques was performed. The comparative analysis showed among other things that while the shallow parsing approach was usually domain dependent, influenced by sentence length and lexical frequency and employed machine learning to induce grammar rules, the deep parsing approach were not domain dependent, not influenced by sentence length nor lexical frequency, and they made use of well spelt out set of precise linguistic rules. The deep parsing techniques proved to be a more labour intensive approach while the induced grammar rules were usually faster and reliability increased with size, accuracy and coverage of training data. The shallow parsing approach has gained immense popularity owing to availability of large corpora for different languages, and has therefore become the most accepted and adopted approach in recent times.
 Keywords: Grammaticality, Natural language processing, Deep parsing, Shallow parsing, Handcrafted grammar, Precision grammar, Induced grammar, Automated scoring, Computational linguistics, Comparative study.

Syntactic predictors for text quality in Dutch upper-secondary school students\u2019 L1 argumentative writing

Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This is potentially problematic, since relevant syntactic indices may not be the same across languages. The current study is the first to explore which syntactic features predict text quality in Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative writing. In order to do so, the quality of 125 argumentative essays written by students was rated and the syntactic features of the texts were analyzed. A multilevel regression analysis was then used to investigate which features contribute to text quality. The resulting model (explaining 14.5% of the variance in text quality) shows that the relative number of finite clauses and the ratio between the number of relative clauses and the number of finite clauses positively predict text quality. Discrepancies between our findings and those of previous studies indicate that the relations between syntactic features and text quality may vary based on factors such as language and genre. Additional (cross-linguistic) research is needed to gain a more complete understanding of the relationships between syntactic constructions and text quality and the potential moderating role of language and genre.

Intellectual Security in Middle Stage Curriculum from Teacher's Point of View

The research tries to make sure that Islamic education books contain intellectual security concepts in the middle stage form teacher's view. The descriptive method was used in that research by making up a(30)clause- questionnaire formed of 25 concepts so that the most important concept of intellectual security can be measured. The study sample was formed of (73) Islamic education teacher's Emphasis was placed on the elements of (age - gender - experience).The results showed that concepts of intellectual security in Islamic education books are included in an average grade.

Proibição de discriminação da pessoa com deficiência: a incidência do princípio da igualdade nas relações privadas

A Constituição Federal tem uma cláusula geral de proibição da discriminação; contudo o tema suscita a incidência do princípio da igualdade no âmbito das relações privadas, o qual é objeto de questionamentos e resistências. No tocante às pessoas com deficiência, o combate à discriminação enfrenta também o desafio de superar a tensão entre igualdade e autonomia privada. O objetivo do presente estudo é analisar os fundamentos e delimitações da vedação da discriminação contra a pessoa com deficiência nas relações privadas. Por meio do método dedutivo e do procedimento de pesquisa documental bibliográfico, constatou-se que a proteção contra a discriminação no ordenamento jurídico brasileiro adota uma perspectiva direta, carecendo de aprofundamento a respeito da proteção contra discriminação indireta. O Estatuto da Pessoa com Deficiência traz diversas normas que proíbem a discriminação contra a pessoa com deficiência, com incidência expressa sobre as relações privadas, mas a questão ainda é objeto de controvérsias.

A study on the semantic functions and meta-language assessment of Korean connective endings -based on restrictions of the following clauses-

A study on the semantic functions and meta-language assessment of Korean connective endings -based on restrictions of the following clauses-

The Syntax and Semantics of Clause-Chaining in Toposa

Some languages make extensive use of clause-chaining. According to Payne (1997: 312), clause-chaining has been documented for languages in the highlands of New Guinea, Australia and the Americas. In Africa it is found in Ethiopia (Völlmin et al. 2007), in Kiswahili, a Bantu language (Hopper 1979: 213-215, Mungania 2018), in Anuak, a Western Nilotic language (Longacre 1990: 88-90 and 2007: 418) and in Toposa, a VSO language of South Sudan (Schröder 2011). Clause-chaining is characterized by a long combination of non-finite clauses that have operator dependency on a finite clause, and it usually signals foregrounded information in discourse (see also Dooley 2010: 3). Besides its discourse function, clause-chaining exhibits morpho-syntactic and semantic properties as demonstrated in this paper with examples from Toposa, an Eastern Nilotic language.