Generative Grammar Research Articles

A panoramic view of acceptability judgments in Polish generative linguistics

Abstract This article aims to provide a concise overview of the most relevant topics concerning the implementation of acceptability judgments in generative research. The first part focuses on theoretical issues, including the reasons underlying the prevalence of acceptability judgments, the skepticism towards the wide use of informal judgments, the arguments for and against the continued use of informal data points and the challenges related to experimental data collection and the gradient nature of judgments. The second part further explores the concept of gradient acceptability and its different sources. We suggest that violations of soft constraints correspond with partial acceptability, unlike violations of hard constraints, which cause strong unacceptability. Based on our investigation of selected partially acceptable syntactic phenomena in Polish, we show that their syntactic accounts can also benefit from the inclusion of non-syntactic factors, which can be more reliably identified via experimental methodology. More specifically, we propose that (i) the lack of subject orientation of pronominal possessives could be attributed to lexical ambiguity, (ii) coreference of possessive cataphora is facilitated by antecedent backgrounding and (iii) WCO is improved by focus marking of the possessive pronoun, (iv) while processing of the last two structures could be ameliorated with more informative fillers.

How Abstract Is Linguistic Generalization in Large Language Models? Experiments with Argument Structure

Abstract Language models are typically evaluated on their success at predicting the distribution of specific words in specific contexts. Yet linguistic knowledge also encodes relationships between contexts, allowing inferences between word distributions. We investigate the degree to which pre-trained transformer-based large language models (LLMs) represent such relationships, focusing on the domain of argument structure. We find that LLMs perform well in generalizing the distribution of a novel noun argument between related contexts that were seen during pre-training (e.g., the active object and passive subject of the verb spray), succeeding by making use of the semantically organized structure of the embedding space for word embeddings. However, LLMs fail at generalizations between related contexts that have not been observed during pre-training, but which instantiate more abstract, but well-attested structural generalizations (e.g., between the active object and passive subject of an arbitrary verb). Instead, in this case, LLMs show a bias to generalize based on linear order. This finding points to a limitation with current models and points to a reason for which their training is data-intensive.1

Pre-verb reactivation of arguments in sentence processing

Major models of sentence comprehension assume that a verb triggers retrieval of preceding thematic arguments from memory to establish argument-verb dependencies. If so, longer argument-verb distance should lead to higher processing load at the verb (a locality effect),since the representation of the argument should suffer from decay and/or interference.However, verb-final languages have often failed to show the expected argument-verb locality effect. A possible account of the lack of the effect is that arguments and adjuncts before the verb reactivate each other, counteracting memory degradation. In a pair of self-paced reading experiments in Japanese, a verb-final language, we found evidence of such pre-verb reactivation.Specifically, there was a locality effect and a similarity-based interference effect at the head of the adverbial that follows the subject, both of which suggest the retrieval of the subject at that point. The results are difficult to accommodate with other accounts of the lack of locality effect, such as a confounding effect of expectation and the inherent locality-insensitivity of verb-final languages. It is further argued that the constructivist analysis of verbal argument structure, which has been developed in generative syntax, provides an explanation for why such pre-verb reactivation takes place. 

Methods of Expressing Parcellation Phenomenon in Karakalpak Language

In this article, the characteristic features of the parcellation phenomenon in the Karakalpak language are analyzed on the example of the works of T. Kaipbergenov. The skill of the writer in revealing the characteristics of the hero through the parcellation phenomenon is shown. Also, information on the methods of expressing of this phenomenon in oral speech, literary text, its place is given. The difference of parcellation units from other linguistic phenomena is determined.The study of the phenomenon of parcellation in general linguistics, linguistic units equaled to this phenomenon, and their differences are shown.

The First Nature of Language

The first nature of language function is often considered to be communication. But with the rise of cognitive linguistics, whether the primary function of language is externalized communication or internalized thinking has been re-examined. This paper focused on what is the first function of language, and argued that the thinking function should remain the top priority. Based on theories of generative grammar from Noam Chomsky, it redefines the key concepts of language, thinking, and communication, discusses the superiority of language for thinking and the shortcomings of language for communication, and reveals the direction of language evolution by natural selection, and compile a series of evidence to justify the top status of thinking function by comparing the common peoples thinking ability and the auditory disableds thinking ability. Besides, another possible communicative pattern, direct brain-to-brain communication (DBBC) was also introduced to prove there might emerge a better way for communication. It is hoped that this will paint a possible picture of the development of language function science and provide an organic extension for the subsequent discovery of language function. At the end the paper finds out the first nature of thinking is plausible and tangible, conforming to the evolutionary tendency of human language. More researches are expected to provide more direct proofs approving the arguments.

Herslund on Danish suprasegmentals: an appraisal and a comparison

ABSTRACT Michael Herslund has, as is commonly known, contributed very significantly to Romance and general linguistics, both synchronically and diachronically. But he has also contributed important analyses of his mother tongue, Danish. I have had the privilege to discuss phonological and morphological problems with him, both concerning Romance (particularly French) and Scandinavian (particularly Danish) languages. Here I continue the discussion regarding Danish suprasegmentals, focusing on the entire complex around the Danish laryngeal syllable rhyme prosody called “stød”. In section 2, some basic prosodic features of Danish are discussed, emphasizing Herslund’s contributions and their relation to my own Non-Stød-Model. Section 3 presents challenges posed by Michael Herslund to the Non-Stød Model that have not yet been countered in a wholly satisfactory way. These challenges particularly concern circularity and productivity. This section is just one example of Michael Herslund’s importance for the study of his Danish mother tongue.

In the Labyrinths of Time and Language: on the 85th Anniversary of Prof. L.G. Zubkova

Lyudmila Georgievna Zubkova was a professor, Doctor of Philology, famous Russian linguist, author of more than 100 works on general and comparative historical linguistics, philosophy and theory of language, history of linguistics, methodology of linguistics, phonology, morphonology, morphology of the Russian language, linguistic semantics and semiotics. She supervised more than 20 candidates of philological sciences. L.G. Zubkova worked at Peoples’ Friendship University named after Patrice Lumumba (1960-2002), taught at Lomonosov Moscow State University and was a professor of the Department of Russian Language and General Linguistics at Moscow State Pedagogical University (2002-2021). The study gives a review of the most significant stages of professor L.G. Zubkova’s scientific activity and her scientific heritage.

DECODING OF NOUNS IN RELATION TO THE VERBAL MODALITY SOLLEN: THE SYNERGETICQUANTITATIVE APPROACH

The presented work is one of the stages of noun research within a certain verbal modality. The focus of the article lies in the study of the generating noun content in relation to the verbal modality sollen in German from the perspective of linguosynergetic scientific paradigm, which considers language as a complex dynamic system capable of self-organization and self-regulation. In this study methodologically important is the position that the synergetic law of making the least effort and conservation of speech energy is the driving factor of language development. In a synergetic sense, the author of the article draws parallels between the dictionary as a representative of the linguistic generalization of the structured amount of knowledge of the learned extraverbal reality and the mental lexicon, which is not an arbitrary accumulation of contributions, but constitutes a structured hierarchical system of such contributions. If lexical units in the synergetic sense and their meanings at the language level contain coded structured information, then in the same aspect the paper considers the implementation of the word in one of its meanings at the speech level as information decoding. The linguosynergetic format of the research proposed in this article assumes that language as a self-regulating system under the influence of external energy and information has developed a mechanism of different representations of nouns in syntactic constructions with different verbal modality in German-language fiction and press. The results obtained on the basis of the synergetic-quantitative approach are extrapolated to linguosynergetic models of self-organization of noun names according to the principle of minimization of efforts, which directs the human mental lexicon to optimal decoding of semantic volume of polysemic or monosemic nouns in relation to the verbal modality sollen in German-language fiction and press. Once again it was proved that since the closest distances in the lexical structure of a word at the linguistic level are the closest in comparison with the structures of knowledge of the human mental lexicon, the construction of noun content in modern German on the synergetic principle of conservation of speech energy and minimization of efforts is the most optimal way of directing the mental lexicon of a person to decoding the semantic scope of the closets meanings of the polysemic and unambiguous monosemic word models.

Syntactic Category of Determiners in Georgian and Mingrelian (Combining Descriptive rules of Georgian Traditional Grammar and Formal of Generative Grammar)

Syntactic Category of Determiners in Georgian and Mingrelian (Combining Descriptive rules of Georgian Traditional Grammar and Formal of Generative Grammar)

The Syntax of Wh-Interrogatives in Hijazi Arabic: A Non-Transformational Approach

Unbounded dependencies are structures where two elements that typically co-occur appear far from one another in spite of the syntactic dependency between them. Wh-interrogatives are one of the mostly investigated types of unbounded dependencies cross-linguistically. To contribute to the ongoing linguistic research in wh-interrogatives, the current paper attempts to explore them in one of the Arabic varieties: Hijazi Arabic (HA). The paper primarily focuses on how to account for the constructions of HA wh-interrogatives using one of the prominent non-transformational theories in generative syntax: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The analysis proposed herein also sheds light on the word order used in HA. The paper concludes that there are two constraints to which wh-interrogatives in HA are subject.

Statistical language model-based analysis of the English-Chinese corpus and political discourse

Abstract Politics and political discourse are closely related to people’s daily life, and this study aims to propose a new approach to political discourse analysis by combining English and Chinese corpora. By exploring the composition of formal language and the grammar generation process, this paper proposes an improved N-gram algorithm to address the shortcomings of the N-gram model in dealing with low-frequency words with low accuracy and uses the strategy of introducing alternative words to alleviate the problem of sparse data. Then, a critical metaphor analysis of political discourse in the English-Chinese corpus is conducted based on the improved statistical language model, and the convergence of political discourse is studied in terms of space and time. By analyzing the political discourse of American presidents, the spatial centrality factors of “we” and “our nation” were accurately extracted, and their correlations were 0.83, 0.73, 0.68, 0.51, 0.76, and 0.41 in order. The correlations of the unqualified facsimile noun phrases in the temporal convergence of political discourse reached 0.28, 0.25, 0.72, 0.68, and 0.54, respectively, and the accuracy of the improved N-gram model improved by about 28.1% compared with the traditional method, making using statistical linguistic models for political discourse analysis feasible and applicable.

The structural human and semiotic animal: between pride and humiliation

Abstract The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”

On Internal Merge

Abstract The rule MOVE, used in various forms in generative grammars to capture displacement or discontinuous constituency, has recently been talked of as an “internal” version of MERGE, the operation of simple node- or set-formation. Internal merge “reconstructs” the displaced element in its original argument-structural position at the level of logical form via a “copy”, to which it has been identical throughout the derivation. Reducing MOVE to MERGE seems to be on the side of simplifying the theory of grammar, potentially eliminating the need for constraints on movement in order to limit overgeneration. The paper addresses the question of how internal merge should be defined in formal terms. An account of discontinuity is proposed in which copies originate in the lexicon, as seems to be required by a strict interpretations of the Inclusiveness Condition of Chomsky (1995b), where they can be thought of as binders and variables in lexical logical form (lf). Merger is defined via a small number of type-dependent combinatory rules, which apply to strictly string-adjacent categories to monotonically project from the lexical array varieties of discontinuous dependencies that have been described in terms of various forms of movement, including “A”, “Ā”, “remnant”, “head”, “parallel”, “sideward”, “covert”, “roll-up”, and “late merge”, without any attendant “constraints on movement” other than those projected from lexical types. The analysis extends to a plethora of other discontinuous operations that have been proposed in addition to or instead of MOVE, including AGREE, LABEL, TRANSFER, and DELETE, all of which are replaced by synchronous monotonic lf and pf merger of contiguous categories. The result is to eliminate structure-dependence and action-at-a-distance of all kinds from syntactic rules.

Analisis Keefektifan Kalimat Bahasa Indonesia Dalam Karya Tulis Ilmiah

The purpose of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of Indonesian sentences in scientific writing. This research is a descriptive-qualitative study with primary data obtained directly from the data source in the form of scientific writing (thesis) by Politeknik Negeri Bali students and lecturer. Data was collected by observing method assisted by note-taking techniques. Furthermore, the data were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive method based on an inductive paradigm, namely from special to general paradigm. Research results are presented with formal and informal methods. This research is based on General Linguistics Theory with the basic concept of effective sentences. The results of the research show that students and lecturer who compose their scientific writing pay little attention to the effectiveness of sentences. This is proven by the number of ineffective sentences found in scientific writing. The ineffectiveness of the sentences is caused by inappropriateness, incongruity, inaccuracy, inefficiency, and illogicality. This is because the students and lecturer who write the scientific writing are not careful in choosing and using vocabulary.

GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY-MEDAN ADOLESCENT SLANG WORDS IN DAILY SPEECH

This paper aims at describing and examines the phonological processes of several adolescent slang words of Medan in daily conversation. In this paper, the researcher uses a qualitative descriptive method with a generative phonological approach. The data contained in this study are phonological data that the researcher obtained from slang words that several adolescents in Medan usually use in their daily conversations. In analyzing the data obtained, it was done by collecting data, analyzing the data, making phonological studies, and making the result and discussion. According to the findings in this research, generative phonology might be a valuable technique for examining and comprehending phonological processes used by Medan adolescents in ordinary discourse, which including Assimilation and Syllable Structure(tend to use /?/, /e/ and /o/ vowels, vowel-consonant sound release, the weakening, and mixing of vowels sound).

Place and place names: a unified model.

The goal of this paper is to offer a unified account of Place as a central theoretical notion across different disciplines. We show that while psychology, geography and other sciences have been converging to a unified view of this notion, linguistics still offers a fragmented perspective. Consequently, place names lack a full-fledged analysis that connects this category to the psychological concept of place. We propose to overcome this impasse by introducing a multi-modal Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) account of place as a conceptual construct and place concepts as specific instances of this construct. We show that current variants of DRT permit us to model place names and their senses, i.e., the meaning(s) that individuals associate with Sydney. We then model non-linguistic place concepts, i.e., the mental representation(s) that individuals can have of the city carrying this name. We present a model of the relation between linguistic meaning and conceptual content via the notion of anchoring relations applied to place. We pair this formal treatment with a morpho-syntactic account of place names building on current generative syntax treatments of proper names. Once we have a morpho-syntactic and semantic model of place names, we use a frame semantics treatment to account for lexical relations among place names. We test the overarching model on a set of recalcitrant problems afflicting current linguistic and multi-disciplinary treatments of place. These are the grammatical complexity and lexical content of place names, place concepts and their networks, and inter-subjective, communicative models of place in discourse. By solving these problems, our account integrates several frameworks (DRT, conceptual analysis, generative syntax, frame semantics) and connects several disciplines (linguistics, psychology, geographic information science, communication models) via a novel, multi-modal account of place. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical import of these results.

Generative linguistics: ‘Galilean style’

Generative linguistics is often claimed by Chomsky to have a 'Galilean style', which is intended to position linguistics as a science continuous with standard practise in the natural sciences. These claims, however, are more suggestive than explanatory. The paper will, first, explain just what a Galilean style is. It will then be argued that its application to two key notions in generative linguistics - the competence/performance distinction (with reference to centre-embedding) and the notion of computation - demands a departure from what we might expect of a Galilean style. In this sense, the epithet is misleading. It will also be shown, however, that the 'Galilean' label is appropriate once we factor in the difference between a science concerned with kinematics (the relations between objects in space and time) and one concerned with language.

Structural semiology, Peirce, and biolinguistics

Abstract Peirce’s sign model is introduced as incompatible with structural semiology in the majority of semiotics textbooks. In this paper, I would like to argue against this general polarization of the semiotic discipline. I focus on compatibilities between Lucien Tesnière’s syntactic theory (verbal valency) and Peirce’s logic of relatives. My main argument is that structural linguistics is not necessarily dyadic, and that Peirce’s sign doctrine is perfectly structural. To define the structural approach in Peirce, I analyze the notions of form (structure) and substance in Hjelmslev and Peirce. The aim of my argument is to contribute to attempts to introduce Peirce’s theory to the field of linguistics in the hope that such an integration will be beneficiary for general linguistics. To extend and support my argument, I provide some examples from biology where Peirce’s theory has been applied. I demonstrate an analogy between the biological structures of proteins and the structure of a sentence with Peirce’s own writings. I consequently introduce Peirce as the first structural semiologist and as the first biolinguist.

La ricezione della linguistica strutturale in Italia

The reception of structuralism by Italian linguists can be divided into three periods. In the first of them (roughly, from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s), structural linguistics, while by no means ignored, is essentially rejected (with some exceptions, such as G. Contini or L. Heilmann). The second period roughly coincides with the 1960s, when structural linguistics reaches the height of its success, thanks, primarily, to the work of scholars such as T. De Mauro, G. Lepschy and L. Rosiello. The success of structural linguistics in Italy began to decline from the 1970s onwards: various linguists turned to other conceptual frameworks, such as generative grammar. Some possible reasons for this decline are investigated here.

«…Я всю жизнь ждал радикального изменения в образе моей жизни»: переписка академика И.И. Мещанинова с В.В. Виноградовым 1942–1958 гг.

The article is dedicated to the 140th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Russian scientist, organizer of Soviet science, first academician-secretary of the Department of Literature and Language of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Hero of Socialist Labor I.I. Meshchaninov (1883–1967). It reflects little-known events in Russian linguistics of 1942–1958. The letters of the greatest linguists of the XX century — academician I.I. Meshchaninov and professor (later academician) V.V. Vinogradov are published for the first time. They set out the facts of the personal life of scientists and the activities of academic institutions during the evacuation and peacetime. The presented selection of epistolary materials tells about the work of V.V. Vinogradov in Tobolsk: an attempt to found there a Research institute for the study of languages, folklore, literature and history of the peoples of Siberia and I.I. Meshchaninov’s response to this idea, about a new book on lexis and phraseology, conveys the scientist’s anxiety about his wife’s Moscow apartment, etc. The prospects of V.V. Vinogradov’s relocation to other cities and his restoration in the staff of the Institute of Language and Thinking of the USSR Academy of Sciences are discussed. Judging by the events described, I.I. Meshchaninov took a lively part in the fate of a disgraced colleague and tried to help him overcome hardships. The letters of the 1950s describe events related to the preparation for the elections of academicians and corresponding members of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The epistolary also includes the names of many famous philologists whose destinies were somehow connected with the personality of I.I. Meshchaninov: S.P. Obnorsky, V.F. Shishmaryov, D.V. Bubrikh, A.V. Mirtov, etc. The published documents are of interest to historians of Soviet linguistics, linguoculturologists, sociolinguists. The letters reveal the rare circumstances of the work of research teams in a difficult time for the country, show linguists from an unusual side, report new biographical details, filling in the gaps in the historiography of the XX century. The article focuses the attention of modern researchers on the need to study archival data and introduce original materials into the theory and practice of general linguistics in order to recreate the annals of Russian science.