Finite Verb Forms Research Articles

Лирический герой и образная картина мира Екатерины Боярских по данным языка

The research analyzes the poetry of Ekaterina Boyarskikh, a contemporary poet from Irkutsk. The aim is to identify and describe the persona and the figurative picture of the world she creates. The method applied is linguistic data analysis. It is the poetic grammar, vocabulary, and the means of creating imagery that are the focus of the study. Consideration is given to lexical and grammatical features contributing to the creation of a persona and the world around it, such as the substantivization of adjectives and participles and the omission of syntactic subjects, finite verb forms, and primary nominatives. The syntactic specificity of Boyarskikh’s poetry manifests itself when compared to the conventional usage of the structures under investigation that were retrieved from the Russian National Corpus. The frequent use of the linguistic means involved is found to indicate a reflection on the cognized reality. This reflection proves to be an essential linguistic strategy for creating a fictional world. The analysis of comparative tropes unveils the striking parallels between the main images found in Boyarskikh’s poetry and the significant features of her figurative representation of the world. The research identifies nature as a common source of imagery, with natural objects regularly undergoing personification. The persona created by Boyarskikh is found to be strongly connected with the surrounding world being repeatedly cognized, as evidenced by the renunciation of conventional nominations and the search for new nominations of the objects of this world.

Синтаксические функции инфинитива в современном эрзянском языке

The aim of the study is to identify the syntactic functions of the infinitive using the material of one of the Mordovian languages, Erzya. The paper presents the polyfunctionality of this indefinite verb form conditioned by the synthesis of verbal and substantive semes. The study is novel in that it is the first in Mordovian linguistics to describe in detail the syntactic role of the infinitive. As a result, it has been revealed that in the sentence, the infinitive, just like the noun, can perform the functions of all the members of the sentence that are, except for the predicate, unmorphologized. A number of syntactic functions of the infinitive have been commented on. It has been indicated that taking into account the syntactic use, the infinitive is divided into the independent type (the subject of a two-member sentence or the main member of a one-member verbal sentence) and the dependent type (a component of a compound verbal predicate, attribute, object, adverbial modifiers of various categories). It has been determined that the infinitive subordinate to a finite verb form can be a subject infinitive (denotes an action whose subject coincides with the subject of the finite verb form), an object infinitive (indicates an action (state) as the object of activity of someone or something that is not the subject) or a subject-object infinitive (indicates the subject that is the producer of an action that should not be carried out). It has been noted that the infinitive can occupy important communicative positions in the text, bringing emotional coloring to its content.

Особенности выражения семантики будущности неличными формами английского глагола

The study aims to establish the fact of the transposition of the temporal meaning of futurality to non-finite verb forms in a certain lexico-grammatical (narrow) context. The paper presents a context-based analysis of a corpus of examples from English-language fiction in which an action expressed by a non-finite verb form possesses the meaning of the future tense. It is found that the transfer of the temporal meaning of futurality to a non-finite form occurs due to the modal connotations of verbs in a finite form combined with these non-finite verb forms. This is confirmed by transformational analysis, namely: the combination of a verb (with modal connotative semantics) with a non-finite verb form is easily transformed into a complex sentence with a future tense finite verb form (instead of a non-finite one). The scientific novelty of the study lies in establishing the fact of the transposition of the meaning of the future tense to a non-finite verb form in the construction ‘V (a verb with a modal meaning) + Ving (a non-finite verb form)’. Therefore, this construction can be considered as one of the ways of expressing the future tense in English. As a result of the study, a minimal lexico-grammatical context that promotes the transposition of the meaning of futurality from a finite verb form to a non-finite one has been established.

Соотношение семантики (типология семантики) производных основ, образованных аффиксами -hыт и -ааччы в якутском языке

Affixal word formation and term formation is one of the relevant areas being developed in Yakut linguistics. Starting with the fundamental work by Otto von Bohtlingk “On the Yakut language”, a study of the Yakut word-formation system was conducted in the grammatical works of V.V. Radlov, S.V. Yastremsky, N.N. Poppe, A.E. Kulakovsky, A.A. Ivanov-Kyund, P.A. Oyunsky, N.S. Grigoriev, L.N. Kharitonov, N.K. Antonova, E.I. Ubryatova, P.A. Sleptsova, E.I. Okoneshnikova, V.I. Bygova, I.B. Ivanova, etc. Affix –hyt in the Yakut language is a fairly used word-formation form, which denotes a person or figure for whom this subject (concept) represents the object of their occupation or profession, or constitutes their special inclination, skill, dexterity, predilection. The affix –aachchi in the Yakut language is also a living productive participial-nominal affix, which: firstly, denotes an actor or an actor; secondly, it functions as a participle and a finite verb form that has the meaning of a commonly performed action. The first affix forms nouns from nominal bases, and the second affix forms nouns from verbal bases. These derived bases, when formed from an unambiguous basis, express nouns denoting an actor or figure, which are close-valued and synonymous. For example, suruksut from suruk ‘letter’ – ‘able to write, scribe, clerk’; suruyaachchy from suruy ‘write’ – ‘able to write usually, writer’: tyylbaaschyt from tylbaas ‘translation’ – ‘translator’: tylbaastaachchy from tylbaastaa ‘translate, translate’ –‘translator. This article is devoted to the analysis of the nature of this phenomenon, i.e., the synonymy of names formed by affixes on –hyt and –aachchy from verbs and verbal names ascending to the same verb-nominal derivative root basis. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the main difference between words formed by the affix –hyt from names and the affix –aachchy from these nameless verbs is that names with the affix -hyt express the subject of action from the professional side (skillful possession of quality, activity, ability, inclination, etc.), i.e. the object of which is the given object, and the names with the affix -aachchy call (show) the names simply as subjects of this (given) action.

Едносъставни глаголни изречения, безлични глаголи, предикативи и форми на изразяване на субективност в българския език

One of the essential aspects of the concept of subjectivity proposed by Émile Ben-veniste (1966) is related to the idea that there are only two parts of speech in the lan-guage where the category of subjectivity is directly expressed in the category of gram-matical person – these are (personal and possessive) pronouns and verbs. In sentences comprising a subject and a predicate, the person of the nominally or pronominally ex-pressed subject must agree in person with the finite verb form (predicate). Taking this assumption as a point of departure, I consider the possibilities for realising the category of subjectivity in the cases where (pro)noun – verb person agreement is violated, as in the socalled subjectless sentences in Bulgarian.

Are There Aspectless Tensed Clauses in Turkish?

Turkish allows finite verb forms that carry tense marking but no overt aspect marking. Unlike those that contain both tense and aspect marking, aspectless forms also lack an auxiliary copula. This is a key difference that Kelepir takes as evidence that aspectless forms derive from clausal structures that lack an aspect projection. However, syntax-morphology mapping is not always isomorphic. Therefore, we also evaluate this proposal from a semantic point of view, raising both empirical and theoretical questions: (1) Is there any aspectual inference associated with morphologically aspectless verbs? (2) Are structures where tense directly combines with a VP compositionally interpretable? While Kelepir’s proposal seems to face challenges in both directions, we argue that the semantic considerations are, in fact, consistent with the clausal structure Kelepir argues for, with broader implications for clause structure and compositional interpretation.

Finite Verb Forms in Nubri With a Focus on Conjunct-Disjunct Distinction

This paper is a preliminary report on the finite verb forms in Nubri. Nubri reveals the verb agreement pattern known as 'conjunct-disjunct (C-D) like some Tibetan varieties, such as Kyirong Tibetan, Gyalsumdo among others. Nubri shows fairly consistent pattern of the verbs in the past tense marked with -hin, and –soŋ for conjunct and disjunct respectively. However, this is not consistent in the non-past tense.

Satakuntalaisuus puheessa -korpus ja siitä tehtyjä synkretismihavaintoja

Satakunta in Speech, a research project at the University of Turku, started in 2007. Since the beginning, the goal of the project was to study the current dialects around the province of Satakunta, one of the historical provinces and administrative units in Finland. Yet, dialectically the province is divided into two; the dialectal boundary between 1) the Southwestern Dialects and 2) the Dialects of Häme and the Transitional Dialects is traditionally considered one of the most distinctive in Finland. To further showcase the corpus compiled over the course of the project and challenges in annotation, we assess several types of syncretistic phenomena fairly widespread in contemporary Satakunta dialects and vernaculars: merging together of certain cases, finite and infinitive verb forms. Our aim is to make tentative and qualitative observations on the subject, which calls for a more thorough examination.

Адвербиализатор guža (гужа) в андийском языке

The present article examines the marker guža (гужа) in Andi, a language of the Avar-Andic branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian family. This marker often co-occurs with finite verb forms, so one may think of analysing it as a verbal suffix that derives converbs from finite verbs. However, as I show with examples taken from Andi texts, guža functions as a more general adverbializer that produces adverbials from both clauses and constituents of various types, namely noun phrases, postpositional phrases and adverbs. Thus, guža is not a verbal suffix as such, but rather a syntactic marker which is placed in the rightmost element of a constituent or a clause.

Internal Temporal Structure of the Biblical Hebrew Verb: A Case Study of Lexical Aspect in the Verb yd'

Traditional Biblical Hebrew (BH) grammars have often defined the temporal information of BH verbs only in terms of tense or grammatical aspect, which can be identified by the finite verbal forms. This paper argues that lexical aspect, which is also known as situation aspect or Aktionsart, is an essential semantic factor for determining the internal temporal structure of BH predicates. As a trial cut, this paper analyses lexical aspect in the verb yd' in the qatal, qotel, and wayyiqtol forms.

Topiks im Deutschen und Italienischen

The aim of this paper is i) to investigate the distribution of different topic types in the highest portion (found above valutative adverbs such as glücklicherweise and leider, Cinque 1999) of the German Mittelfeld, i. e. the clause portion found between the finite and non-finite verb forms (Satzklammer), and ii) to compare it with the distribution of topics within the Italian left periphery, i. e. the area found above the finite verb where operators, focalised and topicalised constructions are hosted (Rizzi 1997; Benincà 1988, 2001). Based on a corpus of written and oral German data collected through the DeReKO and the FOLK Databases, we show that in German i) in both written and oral examples a single topic belonging to all topic classes can appear in the highest portion of the Mittelfeld (as proposed by Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007), ii) and that multiple topics are restricted to written texts and appear with the fixed order “Aboutness Topic > Familiar Topic; Aboutness Topic > Contrast Topic”. We compare the distribution of topics above valutative adverbs in German with the distribution of topics in the Italian left periphery. We show that the two languages share the fact that multiple topics are possible, with the difference that i) three topics can appear in the Italian left periphery in the order Aboutness Topic > Contrast Topic > Familiar Topic whereas only sequences of two topics are attested in German; ii) the sentence-initial position functions as an “extra” position for topics in German but not in Italian due to the V2 nature of the former language; iii) the presence of multiple topics in the left periphery is restricted to oral or informal texts in Italian and it is a typical trait of colloquial/informal language, whereas the availability of multiple topics in the German Mittefeld is restricted to written/formal texts and can thus be seen as a written/formal trait.

Verbalization/Insubordination: A Diachronic Syntactic Isogloss in Northeast Asia

Abstract The present paper discusses one of diachronic syntactic isoglosses in Northeast Asia. This study addresses in particular the process of renewal of finite verbal forms through non-finite forms, which is very prominent in different families in Northeast Asia (Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Japanese and Korean). It will be shown that the processes of verbalization (finitization of participles and nominalizations) is a general areal feature in Northeast Asia, but recognition of this diachronic isogloss has been partially hampered by differences in research traditions. Apart from similarities (finitization of participles/nominalizations, displacement and modalization of the erstwhile finite forms), the languages also show certain differences, in part reflecting structural differences of constructions subject to reanalysis. Following up on our earlier work, in this paper we will be more specific on how the developments in the Korean verbal system fit into this general pattern.

“POLYPREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTION” IN THE KUMYK LANGUAGE

The article examines the functioning of the polypredicative construction in the Kumyk language. The notion of a "polypredicative sentence" was introduced by the Novosibirsk syntactic school. Turkic languages are not characterized by properly complex sentences with two formally independent finite parts connected by an analytical form. Case affixes and postpositions form not finite verb forms, but infinite verb forms. Such constructions in agglutinative languages are the most frequent.

Paradigm of passive constructions in the Ukrainian translation of the Bible by Filaret (Mykhailo Denysenko)

This paper investigates how passive constructions are used in Filaret’s translation of the Bible from Standard Russian (Russian Synod’s translation, 2002) into Ukrainian, not from biblical languages, e.g., Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. It specifically argues the nuclear position of the Ukrainian passive constructions paradigm formed by passive constructions with predicative participles in -nyi, -tyi, circumnuclear position of constructions with predicative forms in -no, -to, and peripheral position of constructions with passive verbs in -sia. Ranking of passive constructions with predicative participles over constructions with forms in -no, -to neutralizes syntactical peculiarities of Ukrainian, i.e., a focus on predicativity in finite verb forms and forms in -no, -to. The peripheral status of passive verbs in -sia shows a positive tendency for Filaret’s translation of the Holy Writ to distance from the Russian translation succeeded to passive constructions with predicative participles from Old Church Slavonic. The Ukrainian translation is often marked by active constructions (a mononuclear or two-member sentence) which are the authentical feature of the Ukrainian syntax. Simultaneous synonymous usage of active and passive constructions, particularly in the same environments, however, is largely triggered by a lack of distinction between syntactical peculiarities of Ukrainian and Russian, and, therefore, provides a syntactical variety. In the Ukrainian translation, usage of active constructions and different types of passive forms almost always intersects with the Russian Synod’s version. Keywords: Ukrainian translation of the Bible, paradigm of passive constructions, constructions with predicative forms in -no, -tо, constructions with predicative participles in -nyi, -tyj, sentences with passive verbs in -sia.

MONOFINITE COMPLEX CLAUSE IN THE KUMYK LANGUAGE

This article aims to analyze the monofinite complex clause in the Kumyk language in terms of structure. The originality of the research lies in the fact that the article proposes a different approach than in Russian studies on the analysis of the syntactic structure of a sentence. The relevance of the research is determined by the role of the sentence structure and methods of its study in linguistics in general. The main method used in the study is the method of syntactic modeling, which is used in terms of functions (members of a sentence), in terms of morphological forms of words and the semantic structure of a sentence. Turkic languages are not characterized by properly complex sentences with two formally independent finite parts connected by an analytical form. Case affixes and postpositions form not finite verb forms, but infinite verb forms. Such constructions in agglutinative languages are central and most frequent. The monofinite complex clause, or a sentence complicated by an infinite phrase (participial and adverbial phrase), or “polypredicative construction” according to the Novosibirsk syntactic school is investigated in this article. The author argues that when characterizing a complex clause, it is necessary to take into account such parameters as the finiteness / infiniteness of the dependent predicate, the nature of the means of communication and the referential identity / non-identity of the subjects of the main and dependent parts. The constructive center of a monofinite complex clause is the indicator of connection –analytical, that is, an auxiliary word, or synthetic, that is, a morpheme in the composition of a dependent predicate. Formally, this is a part of the infinite form of such a predicate, but functionally it serves to express the relationship between the predicative parts. Since the dependent predicate in the Kumyk language occupies the final position in the dependent predicative unit, the synthetic link indicator is located on the border between the main predicative unit and the dependent predicative unit.

Acquisition of Pitjantjatjara Clause Chains.

In Pitjantjatjara, a central Australian Indigenous language, speakers typically describe sequences of actions using clause chaining constructions. While similar constructions are common among the world’s languages, very little is known about how children acquire them. A notable exception are the converb constructions of Turkish, which have been relatively well-studied. The present paper examines the acquisition of Pitjantjatara clause chaining constructions and compares this with the acquisition of Turkish converb constructions. Data is drawn from a naturalistic corpus recorded between 2016 and 2019. The corpus contains over 4000 utterances from 23 children aged between 10 months and 10 years, five of whom are recorded at multiple ages. The corpus also includes approximately 1600 utterances from 21 adults, aged between 16 and 70. Results show that the acquisition of Pitjantjatjara clause chains consists of three stages. Stage 1 features juxtaposition of finite verb forms. In Stage 2, children make regular use of clause chain morphology, but primarily for modification purposes. In Stage 3, clause chains are the preferred strategy for sequential actions as well as modification purposes. The initial use of verb juxtaposition followed by increasing use of dedicated morphology is consistent with findings for Turkish converb acquisition, with speakers of both languages utilizing dedicated forms from around 2;6 onwards. A notable difference between the acquisition of Pitjantjatjara clause chains and Turkish converbs is in the order of acquisition of semantic functions. In Turkish, children acquire temporal functions, such as sequential actions, before modifying functions, such as manner specification. In Pitjantjatjara, the order is reversed, with children first using clause chaining constructions for modification and simultaneous aspects of events before utilizing them to combine sequential actions. This raises questions regarding the distribution and relative timing of event combination and modification strategies.

Verb Phrase in Tamil

The verb phrase is built up of a verb, which is the head of the construction. Verb occurs as predicate in the rightmost position of a clause. As a predicate it selects arguments (Ex. Subject, Direct object, Indirect object and Locative NPs) and assigns case to its arguments and adverbial adjuncts. Another syntactic property of verbs in Tamil is that they can govern subordinate verb forms. Verb occurring as finite verbs in clause final position can be complemented by non-finite verbs proceeding them. The latter with respect to the interpretation of tense or subject governs these non-finite forms, being subordinate to the finite verb form. If we follow the traditional idea of having a VP node for Tamil, then all the elements, except the subject NP, will have to be grouped under VP.

Reliance on Predicative Units as a Method of Analysing and Translating Amharic Written Texts

In analysing and translating Amharic texts, most foreign students have experienced major problems while trying to ‘redirect’ the rigidly leftbranching syntax of Amharic into the predominantly right-branching syntax of most European languages. The way out of this difficulty proposed by some teachers of Amharic consists in the so-called ‘translating from the end’ principle: the student begins to decipher the structure of an Amharic sentence from the finite verb form at its very end and gradually proceeds towards the beginning of the sentence, untangling—one by one—the syntactic structures involved. In the course of teaching Amharic, I have found this method largely inadequate for the purpose it is supposed to achieve. As an alternative to the ‘translating from the end’ method the author proposes another strategy which could be termed ‘reliance on predicative units’. In using this strategy, the student should, first of all, single out verb forms which are likely to perform the function of (final or dependent) predicates. The second step consists in delimiting groups, or units, headed by every such verb form. The third step is to provide a rough, working translation of every such unit without taking into consideration its relations to the other units in the sentence. The fourth, and final, step consists in joining the translations of the predicative units together; at this stage, detailed knowledge of Amharic morphosyntactic rules is very much required.

Finite verb forms in Beja (Cushitic): Labels vs functions, a historical perspective

Abstract The historical overview of the indicative finite verb forms of Beja (Cushitic) shows that several reasons may have induced the choice of labels by the linguists who worked on it since the second half of the 19th century. Linguists of Beja can be divided into two groups: descriptivists and comparatists. The former mostly adapted existing terminologies from various linguistic traditions, rarely explicitly, the latter mostly recycled them. Apart from this partition, several factors behind the choice of a label can be inferred, or are sometimes given by the authors. Beyond the lack of in-depth functional and semantic analysis of the verb forms until very recently, there is a clear-cut distinction between temporal and aspectual labels which correlates with the historical development of aspectual theories, and also with the linguistic traditions for Greek, Indo-European and Semitic. But labels are also linked to “national” traditions, in the sense of language areas (corresponding either to the native language of the authors, or to the language in which the grammars were written), namely German, English and French. Grammars written in German are the oldest ones, and their labels conform to the classical philological tradition of their time, even if at times in contradictory ways. In the most recent publication by German-speaking linguists, an aspectual stance is adopted by the authors, but they hesitate between temporal and aspectual labels, a mixture which is also found, to different extent in one French and one Swedish linguists. Descriptions of the three finite verb form by British scholars, and the Swedish typologist Östen Dahl, show competing motivations: the British terminology, the philological tradition, but also the first steps towards a more detailed analysis of the functions of the paradigms based on a theory of aspect. The French linguists on the other hand belong to the most recent layer of specialists of Beja and they were both trained in Semitic languages (for which aspectual analyses predominate) and for aspectual analysis. Nevertheless both of them took up existing labels for one of the forms (the iː-form) from British linguists, from Roper for Morin (“conditional”) and from Appleyard for Vanhove (“aorist”).

Old Norse as a problem of automatic PoS-tagging

This article dwells upon automatic PoS-tagging of Old Norse by computational means, including machine learning. It analyzes the available language material in diachrony from the standpoint of how language evolution might have affected the quality of automatic PoS-tagging. This article further describes the phonetic traits that have assumingly led to any classification errors. The research material is an Old Norwegian educational text titled Konungs skuggsjá, or “King’s Mirror”, vectorized by the moving average method and then used to train an Ada-Boosted random forest model. The resulting classification accuracy is about 97%. However, being non-contextual, this vectorization method enables no complete differentiation of morphologically similar parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. This becomes evident when digging into the identified high-weight classification features, each being a vectoral dimension corresponding to a specific alphabet character; another indicative factor comprises Morfessor-identified high-rank morphs, analyzing which reveals the morphogrammatic units that cause the most classification errors. Historical consideration of these morphs shows that their collision is due to them being inherited from Proto-Germanic (PG) while undergoing rhotacism, or conversion from PG /z/ to ON /r/. However, the same process effectively prevents the collision of rhotacized finite verbal forms with the genitive case that inherits the PG suffix -s. The key finding is that such morphological collision being unavoidable, character-based vectorization might not suffice when using a small training set or when trying to classify not only by parts of speech, but also by specific forms in the paradigm.