Reference Grammar Research Articles

Focus Structure in Persian Interrogative Sentences: An RRG Analysis

The studies regarding information structure and its distribution in sentences are traced back to works of Prague School linguists such as Mathesius in 1920s. Recently, the issue of information structure has been dealt with by functionalists. In Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), information structure constitutes one of the main components of syntax. In this theory, information structure is mainly based on the Lambrechtiyan information structure which regards the formal structure of sentences as highly related to the discourse-pragmatic functions. Information structure investigates the way information is structured in clauses and sentences. This paper aims at dealing with information structure in interrogative sentences according to RRG. At first a brief introduction to works on information structure and RRG is presented. Then the theory is applied briefly to Persian language declaratives and dominantly to interrogatives.

A Reference Grammar of French

Those who enjoy dipping into grammar books will find many hours of enjoyment here. Though a reference grammar at heart, its short, focused chapters are presented with few subheadings, so that the reader is drawn in to the chapter topic as a whole, even once an answer has been located. This, along with the lively style and wealth of intriguing facts, is a great strength of the book. A few quirks in the structure and index do not detract from its overall qualities. The content is presented in sixty-eight chapters, grouped into eleven parts. The motivation for the division into (untitled) parts is not particularly clear, as the parts are neither uniform in size, nor are the chapters always grouped by obvious grammatical connections (for example, the subjunctive mood forms a twenty-page chapter and part by itself, while the imperative mood forms one of thirty-three chapters in a 225-page part devoted to verbs). The content as a whole is very well located within its wider context, however. In their broad-sweep introductory essay on the history of French, the authors give a clear sense of the diversity of Francophonie today, as well as the deep-rooted tensions between prescription and description. Examples throughout the book are drawn principally from France, Quebec, Belgium, and Switzerland, and also illustrate a range of registers (discussed in early chapters), with classification as R1 (very informal), R2 (standard), or R3 (formal, literary) to aid the learner. Further, a very attractive feature is that the authors consistently seek to place French in the context of neighbouring Romance languages, with discussion of systematic grammatical differences between French, Italian, and Spanish. Several of the illustrative texts that introduce most chapters also take the geography or culture of other countries as their subject matter. This contextualization will be very useful for students learning more than one of these languages, and, like the book as a whole, offers food for thought for others. All treatment of pronunciation is achieved without recourse to the International Phonetic Alphabet, which makes it very accessible, but means that advanced students may wish to use the book in conjunction with a good dictionary indicating pronunciation. The grammar ends with a helpful glossary, with entry headings that are bilingual like the chapter headings, a brief, partially annotated bibliography of grammars and usage guides, and two indexes — a general index and a ‘subjunctive index’. With the main index, the user has to be prepared to try different entries (for example, to locate treatment of the definite article under ‘le/la/les’ rather than ‘definite article’ or ‘articles’), or to cross-reference to the contents page. One might argue that the subjunctive index is hardly necessary, as all of the entries refer to a single twenty-page chapter on the subjunctive mood; nevertheless, this is an ingenious idea, and should be a frequent port of call by anglophone students who often fear the subjunctive's unknowns. All in all, this is the sort of grammar book with which one can form a lasting relationship throughout a degree programme.

Corpora and coursebooks: destined to be strangers forever?

Corpus linguistics has had a powerful influence on ELT teaching materials, such as dictionaries, and, more recently, reference grammars. However, its influence on ELT coursebooks has been less profound. In this paper, I review the case for the use of corpora in coursebook production, I discuss the use of corpora from a publishing perspective, and I present the results of a questionnaire study of current coursebook authors on their opinions on, and experiences of, the use of corpora. The results of the survey suggest that while some coursebook authors already do make use of corpora in their writing, many do not; this is due, primarily, to perceptions of a lack of available corpora and lack of time in writing schedules.

Register as a predictor of linguistic variation

AbstractOver the last two decades, corpus analysis has been used as the basis for several important reference grammars and dictionaries of English. While these reference works have made major contributions to our understanding of English lexis and grammar, most of them share a major limitation: the failure to consider register differences. Instead, most reference works describe lexico-grammatical patterns as if they applied generally to English.The main goal of the present paper is to challenge this practice and the underlying assumption that the patterns of lexical-grammatical use in English can be described in general/global terms. Specifically, I argue that descriptions of the average patterns of use in a general corpus do not accurately describe any register. Rather, the patterns of use in speech are dramatically different from the patterns in writing (especially academic writing), and so minimally an adequate description must recognize the two major poles in this continuum (i.e., conversation versus informational written prose).The paper begins by comparing two general corpus approaches to the study of language use: variationist and text-linguistic. Although both approaches can be used to investigate the use of words, grammatical features, and registers, the two approaches differ in their bases: the first gives primacy to each linguistic token, while the second gives primacy to each text. This difference has important consequences for the overall research design, the kinds of variables that can be measured, the statistical techniques that can be applied, and the particular research questions that can be asked. As a result, the importance of register has been more apparent in text-linguistic studies than in studies of linguistic variation.The bulk of the paper, then, argues for the importance of register at all linguistic levels: lexical, grammatical, and lexico-grammatical. Analyses comparing conversation and academic writing are discussed for each level, showing how a general ‘average’ description includes some characteristics that are not applicable to one or the other register, while also omitting other important patterns of use found in particular registers.

Syntactic functions in Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar: an evaluative comparison

The aim of this paper is to compare the treatment of syntactic functions, and more particularly those traditionally labelled as Subject and Object, in Functional Discourse Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar. Relevant aspects of the overall structure of the two theories are briefly described. The concept of alignment between levels of the grammar in Functional Discourse Grammar is introduced and the role of syntactic functions in the morphosyntactic type of alignment is explained. The arguments put forward in Role and Reference Grammar against the adoption of Subject and Object and in favour of a single language-specific and construction-specific privileged syntactic argument are then discussed. The arguments against Subject are found to be persuasive, those against the need for any secondary syntactic function (in place of the traditional Object) rather less so. It is therefore proposed that Functional Discourse Grammar should abandon the notions of Subject and Object as valid categories in those languages which can be demonstrated to need syntactic functions, and should make it explicit that grammatical relations are specific to particular languages and even to constructions within those languages, while making appropriate generalisations wherever possible. The role played by syntactic functions in the two theories is then discussed in rather more detail, and it is concluded that while the Role and Reference Grammar system makes stronger predictions about the relationships between syntax and semantics, the Functional Discourse Grammar concept of alignment has greater overall scope and generality.

Information Structure in Persian: A Comparison of Systemic Functional Grammar & Role and Reference Grammar

The aim of this paper is to compare the approaches to Persian information structure in two functional theories: Systemic Functional Grammar & Role and Reference Grammar. By selecting 400 data from scientific and educational texts, stories and newspapers we have analyzed the relationship between information structure in one hand, and phonology, semantics, morphology and syntax in another hand based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar & VanValin’s Role and Reference Grammar. Also, advantages and disadvantages of the mentioned approaches in relation to information structure are investigated. After discussing what is meant by information distribution in each theory, we examine the classification of focus in each approach. Finally the obtained results of Persian data show that the relationship between information structure in one hand and phonology, semantics, morphology and syntax in another hand is not regular and rule-governed. Moreover, studies represent despite the different analytical methods and the shortcomings of each theory, the obtained outcomes in the framework of these two approaches have some in common because of similarity in functional nature of the both.

A reference grammar of French

A reference grammar of French

Why should men break all the rules?

This paper presents the results of a detailed investigation of grammatical inflexion for number in spoken Modern Standard Chinese and explores whether the use of the plural marker men conforms to the guidelines laid down in standard grammar reference works. For the purposes of studying morphological features in context a new source of spoken language samples is identified: published transcripts of television broadcasts. This study focusses on spoken Modern Standard Chinese in mainland China, as exemplified in a popular Chinese chat show over the period 2003 to 2006. The analysis of the data shows significant discrepancies between the traditional grammatical analysis of the plural marker men and its actual use in real-life situations, with the so-called plural suffix employed to perform many more functions than have traditionally been ascribed to it. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the contexts in which the plural suffix is used suggests that to maintain that inflexion for number is optional in Chinese, as many grammar textbooks do, may be somewhat misleading.

A structural–functional account of NP-internal mood

Illocutionary force and modality are grammatical phenomena that are traditionally considered to operate at a ‘high level’, scoping over entire clauses and represented in the upper regions of the syntactic tree or of the semantic representation. This is supported by the observation that (most) subordinate clauses do not have their own illocutionary force, but depend on the main clause in this respect. Still, English exhibits a number of constructions where an NP appears to come with its own illocution, independent of the illocutionary force of the clause of which the NP is a part. In other languages as well, NPs are known to occur with illocutionary and modality operators. In this article, several of these constructions will be brought together, and it is then considered how they can be accounted for in two closely related structural–functional syntactic theories, namely Role and Reference Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar. It is shown that both approaches can accommodate these odd constructions, provided a number of minor adjustments are made to the technical apparatus.

A reference grammar of Puyuma, an Austronesian language of Taiwan (review)

A reference grammar of Puyuma, an Austronesian language of Taiwan (review)

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Optimality Theory and Morphology

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Optimality Theory and Morphology

Alguns apontamentos sobre o texto de apresentação da Gramática Contemporânea da Língua Portuguesa

This article intends to establish a dialogue between the readings done on the second semester of 2009 for the course The teaching of language in Brazil (A constituicao do ensino de lingua no Brasil), and the analysis of the introduction of the Gramatica Contemporânea da Lingua Portuguesa (1994), by Jose de Nicola and Ulisses Infante. The aim of this analysis is to see if the authors´ proposal matches the way the grammatical contents are approach, discussed and problematized. A broader goal is to understand what conceptions of language, grammar, language teaching, student and teacher are conveyed in this reference grammar

Alguns apontamentos sobre o texto de apresentação da Gramática Contemporânea da Língua Portuguesa - Doi: 10.5212/Uniletras.v.32i2.0001

This article intends to establish a dialogue between the readings done on the second semester of 2009 for the course The teaching of language in Brazil (A constituicao do ensino de lingua no Brasil), and the analysis of the introduction of the Gramatica Contemporânea da Lingua Portuguesa (1994), by Jose de Nicola and Ulisses Infante. The aim of this analysis is to see if the authors´ proposal matches the way the grammatical contents are approach, discussed and problematized. A broader goal is to understand what conceptions of language, grammar, language teaching, student and teacher are conveyed in this reference grammar.

Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology (review)

Reviewed by: Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology Jeffrey Heath The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology. Jae Jung Song, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xxi + 704. $150.00 (cloth). There are eleven other linguistic volumes in the Oxford Handbook series. This one contains thirty chapters, from ten to forty-five pages each. It is especially useful for readers who are not themselves engaged in mainstream typology but who wish to follow or catch up on it. For this journal, instead of a technical review aimed at typologists, or complete coverage of the chapters, a selective appreciation with a linguistic anthropological flavor is appropriate. If by mainstream typology we mean the inheritors of Joseph Greenberg’s first-order worldwide codings of grammatical data points (e.g., constituent order, morphological agreement), and second-order correlations among them, the main recent news has been the intrusion of geography and history. This “epiphany” (as the editor calls it on p. 3) began around 1990 with work by, e.g., Matthew Dryer and Johanna Nichols. It had once seemed that worldwide typology would flourish as conclusions drawn from Greenberg’s thirty languages were refined by the addition of hundreds of new languages; Chomsky’s absolute universals would be supplemented or replaced by powerful probabilistic correlations. As it happens, worldwide typology has run into snags. Careful studies have found systematic macroregional biases, making even the ideal of a global typology with bias-purified results deeply problematic. This issue is covered in Dik Bakker’s chapter on “Language Sampling” (pp. 100–127), but it crops up in several others. And geography leads to history. If each macroregion has its own trait distributions and correlation patterns, this can only be explained by an unexpectedly profound conservatism of grammatical patterns, going back far beyond the brick wall of ten thousand years that has plagued comparative historical linguistics. Edward Sapir lives. And a number of seemingly robust correlations from the Greenberg era have imploded. For example, the correlation between noun-adjective and verb-object order has not held up (Song on “Word Order Typology,” pp. 253–79). In this instance, the problem can be solved by refining the theoretical analysis (an object is phrasal, while an adjective is not). But typology faces weekly crises as new reference grammars from the Amazon and New Guinea stream out, often revealing categories and constructions that resist labeling and coding (Patience Epps on “Documentary Linguistics,” pp. 634–49). Greenberg-style typology is bureaucratic; it needs cross-linguistically codable traits based on reliable etic grids, fed into large databases that output powerful correlations. But what if the codings are forced, or if the correlations are unimpressive (sixty to forty instead of eighty-five to fifteen)? One consequence of the bureaucratization of the subfield is a striking lack of interest in extreme languages. Pidgins, creoles, and sign languages are not listed in seventeen pages of language and subject indexes at the back, and I noticed only one or two passing references in the text. Perhaps there are good (bureaucratic) reasons for these omissions. The recent controversies about Pirahã played out in the pages of Language and The New Yorker are too recent to have been covered in a volume several years in the making. However, the neglect of configurationality is hard to excuse—it gets one brief footnote. Yet this is the most crucial dividing point among human languages, since the absence of multiword phrasing has consequences for the entire grammar and lexicon (think of quantification and negation, for example). It deserves to be prominently featured in a [End Page 287] subfield whose major aim is to document the range of human language structures. A chapter on configurationality would have made a nice complement to Walter Bisang’s chapter on “Word Classes” (pp. 280–302), which describes languages that lack a well-defined noun-verb distinction, essentially subordinating lexicon to syntax and discourse. But there are not enough fully nonconfigurational languages to make interesting statistics, and it is hard to code their features. John Haiman (“Competing Motivations,” pp. 148–65) does deal directly with another kind of extreme language, namely, Cambodian, which he provocatively calls an “everything-drop” language. The extensive ellipsis affecting all stem...

A Reference Grammar of Spanish by BATCHELOR, R. E., & MIGUEL ÁNGEL SAN JOSÉ

The article reviews the book A Reference Grammar of Spanish, by R.E. Batchelor and Miguel Angel San Jose.

A Reference Grammar of Egyptian Arabic by ABDEL–MASSIH, ERNEST T., ZAKI N. ABDEL–MALEK, EL–SAID M. BADAWI, & ERNEST N. MCCARUS.

The Modern Language JournalVolume 95, Issue 1 p. 154-156 MLJ Reviews A Reference Grammar of Egyptian Arabic by ABDEL–MASSIH, ERNEST T., ZAKI N. ABDEL–MALEK, EL–SAID M. BADAWI, & ERNEST N. MCCARUS. MOHAMMED SAWAIE, MOHAMMED SAWAIE University of VirginiaSearch for more papers by this author MOHAMMED SAWAIE, MOHAMMED SAWAIE University of VirginiaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 March 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01160.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume95, Issue1Spring 2011Pages 154-156 RelatedInformation

Relative clauses in Hausa: A grammaticalization perspective

This paper claims that relative clauses in Hausa originate from adverbial scene setting clauses. The scene setting clauses (SSCs) are causal, reason, or circumstantial clauses that evoke known, presupposed information and serve as background to their main clauses. When positioned after a sentence topic, they can shift formally and functionally from clause level to NP level modification and give rise to relative clauses in appropriate contexts. Taking advantage of Role and Reference Grammar's proposed functional and structural similarities between NP and clause modifiers, this paper also gives a representation for various relative constructions in Hausa.

Subjects: Grammatical Relations, Grammatical Functions and Functional Categories

AbstractThis paper presents an overview of how the notion of ‘subject’ has been defined in linguistic theory. Although the term developed out of Artistotelian logic, its use has been narrowed to refer to the grammatical relation (or function). Over the past 50 years, the definition of subject and its universality have been the source of much debate. Broadly Chomskian approaches claim that grammatical relations such as subject are not primitives of the grammar and can be derived from phrase structure. As such, testing for the subject involves constituency tests (more recent versions of Chomskian syntax, however, abstract away from constituency). Other approaches (Relational Grammar, Lexical‐Function Grammar) posit grammatical relations as primitives of the grammar that are not necessarily related to constituency. And at the other extreme, certain linguists argue that subjects are not found in all languages and therefore the notion is not one of interest (e.g. Role and Reference Grammar). This paper reviews the various analyses of subjects and considers in some detail how the notion of subject has evolved within the Chomskian framework.

Kasusrektion durch das Lexem voll. Kasusvariation, aber kein Genitivschwund

Abstract This paper reports on the results of a corpus study on case variation after the lexeme voll (‘full’). It deals with constructions like (er ist voll revolutionären Bewusstseins ‘he is full of revolutionarygen awarenessgen’ vs. er ist voll revolutionärem Bewusstsein ‘he is full of revolutionarydat awarenessdat’). Many reference grammars of German claim that voll (‘full’) governs the genitive as well as the dative and that in current language use the dative increasingly replaces the genitive. Based on an electronic corpus of the German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, the issues of the extent of the case variation after voll (‘full’) and the government properties of this lexeme are addressed. The data analysis reveals that case variation only occurs when the governed NP is in singular. Here, the rate of dative (62%) is higher than that of genitive (38%). In the plural condition, however, the data analysis shows no case variation. Here, voll (‘full’) exclusively governs the genitive. Hence, the findings do not support the claim of a general genitive loss after voll (‘full’). It is argued that the discrepancy between the singular and the plural conditions can be considered as a syntactically motivated case variation. The findings are mainly discussed in the context of Gallmann's (1996) approach of the syntactically determinate case ending omission.

Criteria of adequacy in functional linguistics

In this article, I shall put forward a set of criteria of adequacy (based on, but going considerably beyond, those proposed by Dik) which, in my view, a functional account of language should make serious attempts to fulfil. I shall argue that the overarching aim of functional linguistics should be a comprehensive theory of language, and that there are dangers in building models of grammar as ends in themselves, if these are not accompanied by equally well-developed models of the relationships between the grammar and other components of the more comprehensive model. I then briefly assess a selection of five functionalist approaches in relation to the proposed criteria of adequacy. The approaches, chosen to cover as wide a range as possible, are Functional Discourse Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and finally two usage-based cognitive-functional approaches, Emergent Grammar/the interactional study of grammar at work, and Word Grammar. In conclusion, I propose that continued work towards a higher overall level of adequacy in functional linguistics would be greatly facilitated by (i) more widespread use of corpus-based data analysis, (ii) increased attention to the interfaces between different linguistic approaches, and (iii) familiarity with the work of other groups of scholars with an interest in language, in particular psycholinguists, psychologists, sociolinguists, sociologists, neurolinguists and neurologists.