Grammatical Domains Research Articles

Evaluating the language abilities of Large Language Models vs. humans: Three caveats

We identify and analyze three caveats that may arise when analyzing the linguistic abilities of Large Language Models. The problem of unlicensed generalizations refers to the danger of interpreting performance in one task as predictive of the models’ overall capabilities, based on the assumption that because a specific task performance is indicative of certain underlying capabilities in humans, the same association holds for models. The human-like paradox refers to the problem of lacking human comparisons, while at the same time attributing human-like abilities to the models. Last, the problem of double standards refers to the use of tasks and methodologies that either cannot be applied to humans or they are evaluated differently in models vs. humans. While we recognize the impressive linguistic abilities of LLMs, we conclude that specific claims about the models’ human-likeness in the grammatical domain are premature.

Being a heritage speaker matters: the role of markedness in subject-verb person agreement in Italian.

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., io *suona la chitarra "I plays-3rd-person the guitar") yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., il giornalista *esco spesso "the journalist go-1st-person out often"). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs.

Wh-complement Clauses and (non-)Local Selection

This paper revisits c- and s-selection in the context of wh-clausal complements. The standard treatment of predicate-complement selection can be traced back to generative approaches of 70’s and says that the selection of a complement by a predicate is evaluated both in syntax and semantics. As regards syntax, the grammatical category of the complement must belong to the subcategorization frame of the predicate, and vis-à-vis semantics, the semantic type of the complement must fall in the set of types selected by the predicate. The present paper examines several licit instances of wh-clausal selection that should have been ungrammatical under the standard treatment, but they are not. The analysis offered here says that c-selection reduces to argument selection and is computed derivationally (at the point of External Merge), while s-selection reduces to an interpretation function that spans a larger grammatical domain and is evaluated representationally (at the syntax-semantics interface).

Investigating Strategies for Mitigating and Avoiding Expert Blind Spot Development in Teaching English Attributive Adjectives

Teaching is a prominent paraphernalia that brings numerous insights for developing learners’ competence in educational concerns. However, teaching English to non-native learners poses challenges as innovative strategies are scant. Sometimes teachers overlook the difficulties experienced by novices when they approach a new English grammatical domain. Psychological expert blind spot sporadically and intuitively develops due to teachers’ ignorance. The paper investigated strategies for mitigating and avoiding expert blind spot in teaching English attributive adjectival phrases at Khwevha High School in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Quantitative and qualitative research approaches were adopted to corroborate the findings. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 35 selected Grade 10 respondents using a simple random sampling technique. Qualitatively, semi-structured interviews were conducted on two purposely sampled schoolteachers from Dzindi Circuit, based on the researcher’s preference for obtaining an in-depth understating of the topic. Initially, learners were incompetent in using adjectives but after employing ‘points of entry’, offering ‘explanations’, presenting ‘structures’ and checking ‘comprehension’ strategies, learners improved considerably. The paper underscores using the identified strategies to mitigate and avoid the advancement of the expert blind spot in teaching English attributive adjectives.

Syntactic variation and Pan-Hispanic awareness in teachers of Spanish as a second language

Abstract The increasing view of Spanish as a pluricentric language has raised awareness of its linguistic diversity also in the grammatical domain. The concept of Pan-Hispanism—the recognition that varieties different from Castilian Spanish can be acceptable as Standard Spanish—has been publicly implemented by the prescriptivist institutions. The goal of this article is to analyze the influence of Pan-Hispanism and awareness of syntactic variation in teachers of Spanish as a second language. To do so, we surveyed 264 native and non-native teachers of Spanish across the world through an online questionnaire where they had to (a) implicitly judge sequences which reflected grammatical phenomena of different diatopic varieties of Spanish, and (b) explicitly indicate which variety they used in their classes. The results show that, despite the advances and institutional efforts towards pluricentrism, awareness of Pan-Hispanism in grammar is still very low among teachers of Spanish, since most tend to reject grammatical uses that are alien to their own variety. The prevalence of the prestige of Castilian Spanish is linked to a still dominant Eurocentrism in the teaching of Spanish as a second language, thus showing the need for adopting a more tolerant and inclusive view of Spanish linguistic diversity.

Where to go at the end: Polylexicalization and polygrammaticalization of Kaz ‘edge’ in Korean

Nominal lexemes undergo in history extensive development in the lexical as well as grammatical domains. Their semantic change involves diverse threads of conceptualization which shows significant aspects of language development. Despite the series of intriguing changes in form and meaning that the Late Middle Korean lexeme kaz ‘edge’ has undergone, encompassing polylexicalization and polygrammaticalization that merit an in-depth analysis, it has not yet received earnest attention to date. Thus, this paper aims to fill the research gap by analyzing the lexeme’s development from Late Middle Korean to Modern Korean from the grammaticalization perspective, drawing upon data from a historical corpus and dictionaries. An extensive diachronic data analysis based on concordance and lexical searches shows that new meanings or functions are so diverse that some of them even form an antonymic relation. Such a wide-ranging semantic and functional diversity is attributable in part to the role of the participating forms in word formation processes such as derivation and compounding but, more importantly, to differential conceptualizations of the source meaning ‘edge’ e.g., entity-internal and entity-external conceptualizations; mapping the ‘edge’ onto different continua, e.g., degree, path, likelihood; and involvement of subjectification, e.g., evaluative-epistemic judgment such as counter-expectation. The innovated meanings resulting from such cognitive operations form a conceptual network. The developmental processes of the lexeme kaz ‘edge’, in general, can be explained with reference to grammaticalization mechanisms, such as desemanticization, extension, decategorialization, and erosion, and some mechanisms are also operative in lexicalization as well. However, erosion, or the reduction of phonetic volume, is not prominent in these changes, suggesting that the principles should be interpreted as tendencies rather than deterministic diagnostics. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationship between lexicalization and grammaticalization.

Negation and Negative Concord in Georgian Sign Language

Negation is a topic that has received considerable attention ever since the early days of sign language linguistics; also, it is one of the grammatical domains that has given the impetus for sign language typology. In this paper, we offer a typological and theoretical contribution to the study of sign language negation. As for the typological side, we add Georgian Sign Language (GESL) to the pool of languages investigated. Our description reveals that GESL displays a number of typologically unusual features: a considerable number of negative particles, including emphatic, prohibitive, and tense-specific particles; specialized negative modals; and a wide range of possibilities for Negative Concord (NC) involving two manual negative signs, including a unique tense-specific instance of NC. Most of the patterns we report—available negative particles, their clausal position, and NC possibilities—are clearly different from those attested in spoken Georgian. As for the theoretical contribution, we investigate how the highly complex GESL negation system compares to existing taxonomies of NC and Double Negation systems, and we conclude that GESL aligns with certain languages that have been classified as atypical NC languages.

Universal attractors in language evolution provide evidence for the kinds of efficiency pressures involved

Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different efficiency effects—such as articulatory, processing and planning ease, mental accessibility, and informativity, online and offline efficiency effects—conspire to yield the coding of linguistic signs. While we do not yet exactly understand the interactional mechanism of these different effects, we argue that universal attractors are an important component of any dynamic theory of efficiency that would be aimed at predicting efficiency effects across languages. Attractors are defined as universal states around which language evolution revolves. Methodologically, we approach efficiency from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of a world-wide sample of 383 languages from 53 families, balancing all six macro-areas (Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Oceania). We explore the grammatical domain of verbal person–number subject indexes. We claim that there is an attractor state in this domain to which languages tend to develop and tend not to leave if they happen to comply with the attractor in their earlier stages of evolution. The attractor is characterized by different lengths for each person and number combination, structured along Zipf’s predictions. Moreover, the attractor strongly prefers non-compositional, cumulative coding of person and number. On the basis of these and other properties of the attractor, we conclude that there are two domains in which efficiency pressures are most powerful: strive towards less processing and articulatory effort. The latter, however, is overridden by constant information flow. Strive towards lower lexicon complexity and memory costs are weaker efficiency pressures for this grammatical category due to its order of frequency.

The grammaticalization of plurality in the languages of Amdo

Among the categories grammaticalised in the noun phrase, the domain of number shows several formal and functional similarities in genetically distinct languages of Amdo. In most languages of the area, it is grammaticalised in a complex way, with several morphemes expressing distinct plural categories. This paper describes the attested categories and their functional characteristics in order to retrace cases of linguistic copying and show the respective contribution of each language group to this domain. Hence, the paper shows that the grammatical domain of plurality in Amdo, both from a functional and a formal point of view, presents characteristics of linguistic convergence based on multiple model-languages.

The TAME domain in Baltic and its neighbours. An introduction

This article outlines the aims, methodological approaches and research topics of the thematic volume Studies in the TAME Domain in Baltic and Its Neighbours. It also briefly characterises the individual contributions to the volume, highlightingtheir main ideas and pointing out their relevance to ongoing discussions as well as the impulses they can give to further (also cross-linguistic) research. The grammatical domains explored in the volume are tense, aspect, mood andevidentiality/mirativity.

How to promote the pragmatic awareness and avoid the fossilization phenomenon through a role play activity in English as a foreign language classes

Many people, even after spending a lifetime studying a foreign language are prone to get stuck in a certain grammatical domain no matter the efforts made and the amount of the target language input offered in the classroom. Unfortunately, the great majority who pursuits their dreams to be the closest possible to a native like speaker, the lack of ability to analyze and synthesize linguistic elements makes them persist in the same errors, establishing a phenomenon known as Fossilization in their learning process. In fact, Fossilization can occur in all learning process levels: phonological, grammatical, lexical and pragmatic and the errors made seem to be similar from individual to individual. In an attempt to avoid this Fossilization process concerning the pragmatically ability to communicate, this article aims to present a suggestion of a role-play activity involving strategies to enhance pragmatic awareness related to politeness theory.

Convergence by Shared Ancestry in Romance

Abstract In many cases of apparent contact-induced change the contribution of genealogical correlation in the language sample and its interaction with processes such as matter and pattern replication are difficult to specify. In order to get a better sense of the relevance of shared ancestry, we quantify the change in similarity since the late Middle Ages in a sample of Romance and Germanic languages with data from a selected grammatical domain (expression of reflexivity). We compare their dynamics to patterns of change of similarity in two contact zones in Europe, namely the British Isles (Dedio et al., 2019) and the Balkans. Concerning the genealogical signal, the results indicate a maintenance and gain of similarity in Romance as opposed to a loss of similarity in Germanic. This hints at the importance of the inherited states, the time since the split from the common ancestor, and subsequent developments. We presume that these factors are likely to be at the origin of the maintenance and increase in similarity observed for the sampled Romance varieties. While this result cannot be generalized beyond the specific case study presented here, the basic approach will contribute to a better understanding of how contact, genealogy and culture interact in shaping the dynamics of linguistic similarity.

Complexity and Simplification in Language Shift

This paper examines the question of linguistic complexity in two shift ecologies in northeastern Russia. It is frequently claimed that language shift results in linguistic simplification across a range of domains in the grammars of shifting speakers (Campbell and Muntzel 1989;Dorian 1989;O’Shannessy 2011). We challenge the breadth of this claim, showing that while there are undoubtedly patterns that can be described as a simplification of some grammatical domain, the overall grammars of these speakers cannot be said to be “simple,” as simplification in one part of the grammar often corresponds to complexification in other parts (“complexity trade-offs”). Furthermore, patterns that are deemed loss or simplification are often presented in such a way because they are being compared to earlier varieties of the shifting languages; however, such patterns are entirely typologically expected, are consistent with other languages of the world, and can be seen as more or less complex depending on one’s locus of measurement. In this paper, we present incipient changes taking place in Chukchi (Chukotko-Kamchatkan, ISO ckt) and Even (Tungusic, ISO eve) stemming from the modern language shift context. We evaluate these changes against different notions of complexity to demonstrate that a more nuanced approach to morphosyntactic change in language obsolescence is warranted. While morphological simplification is expected in these scenarios, other changes in these speakers’ systems (occurring as potential adaptations in light of simplification) provide a more enlightening avenue for research on shifting varieties.

Grammaticalization of discourse markers: views from Jordanian Arabic

The inclusion of discourse markers (DMs), which are commonly depicted as syntactically non-integrated elements, within the domain of grammaticalization has been a controversial topic in the last two decades. The emergence of DMs for some researchers are cases of grammaticalization, whereas they are viewed by some other researchers as elements that escape from the grammatical domain to the pragmatic and communicative domain. This paper argues with the grammaticalization of DMs. It provides evidence to this view from Jordanian Arabic. The cases under investigation in this paper are the DMs ma, hu and mahu. This paper offers synchronic evidence supporting their grammaticalization. This evidence is based on two main conclusions: (1) these DMs share common grammatical items most of the grammaticalization sub-processes that lead to their emergence, and (2) they are not dis-integrated elements from the sentence grammar. They rather belong to the peripheral domain of grammar.

Introduction

Introduction Douglas R. Parks This special issue of Anthropological Linguistics contains ten articles on personal names in Native languages of North America. All but one of these articles are revised versions of papers originally presented at the special session "American Indian Personal Names: A Neglected Lexical Genre" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in Portland, Oregon, on 7 January 2012.1 There is no modern, comprehensive linguistic description of American Indian naming systems. Published sources of names are primarily lists compiled by anthropologists, linguists, and historians. Even though personal names are an integral part of the languages and cultures of Native peoples, linguists usually do not document names for the languages they study: they do not utilize names as data for their grammars, and they generally do not include names in their dictionaries. The purpose of the special session was to bring together a group of Americanist linguists who have an interest in personal names in the languages they study; contributions were selected to represent the diversity of naming systems found in Native North American language families and to enable the participants to identify major issues in the study of names. The resulting articles describe the salient linguistic and semantic features of the names in these languages, illustrating how names are important semantic and grammatical domains in Native American languages, forming systems within the larger linguistic context, and why their study is essential for language documentation—for morphological and syntactic analysis, and for the compilation of richer dictionaries. They also illustrate how for most North American groups, rich archival corpora of names are available that have rarely been utilized by linguists and exemplify the methods and challenges of studying them. Even though personal names are a relatively neglected subject in North American linguistics and anthropology, significant work has been done over the years; some of the more noteworthy contributions may be mentioned here. The earliest linguist to give notable attention to personal names on the Plains was James Owen Dorsey, who beginning in 1871 devoted more than twenty years to documenting the Dhegiha and other Siouan languages. He recorded hundreds of personal names for each, but he published only one article, "Indian Personal Names" (1890). Although he planned to write a monograph on Siouan personal names, he died before completing it. Today his manuscripts are archived primarily in the National Anthropological Archives. [End Page 1] Other early linguists working on the Plains included C. C. Uhlenbeck; he published "Geslachts- en Persoonsnamen der Peigans" (1912), in which he cites the names of Piegan bands and a representative number of individuals' personal names, and discusses the historical incidents upon which the names were based. Edward Sapir (1924) compiled a list of ninety-four Sarsi names that he published in phonetic transcription, together with literal and free English translations, and then grouped into seven semantic categories: geographical references, tribal names, war names, names referring to horses and riding, names based on incidents or objects, and names referring to personal characteristics. Later in the century, James A. Goss (1973) reported on his attempt to develop a model for the naming practices of the Southern Ute Indians of Colorado that would enable him to predict, on the basis of a set of binary features, the sex, age, kin affiliations, and shamanistic powers from a name itself. Throughout the early twentieth century a small number of linguists and anthropologists who engaged in fieldwork with particular groups recorded lists of names, some of which were published, while others remain unpublished. For example, in the Southwest, the Franciscan Fathers at St. Michael's Mission on the Navajo Reservation documented various aspects of the language. In 1910, they published An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language, an innovative linguistic work in which the entries have English head words arranged according to a vast array of cultural topics and activities as well as natural phenomena. Among them is a long entry entitled "Personal Names" that identifies seven categories of names: for boys, for girls, and for women; for men; for distinguished chiefs, treaty signers, and American residents; and tribal names. N. H. Winchell published in The Aborigines of...

Crossing borders to enhance our understanding of variation in heritage languages

The ‘Norwegian in America’ project, led by Janne Bondi Johannessen, has provided continued inspiration and access to document and study American Norwegian. This has contributed to a growing body of research on morpho¬syntax and, to a lesser extent, phonetics-phonology. Using compositional definiteness as an illustration, we show the benefits of incorporating these two perspectives to analyse variation in heritage languages. We strive for a holistic approach to two examples in order to demonstrate how variation in each grammatical domain interacts. In one case, this leads to an enriched understanding of the data, whereas the other case highlights an explicit need for future research. We believe that further work that includes both morphosyntax and phonetics-phonology is fruitful for our understanding of how multiple language domains interact in a heritage language setting.

Gradability across grammatical domains

Abstract This paper argues that ordered abstract scales are applicable to analyses of a range of grammatical domains. We argue this based on data from a number of unrelated languages, primarily Logoori (Bantu, JE 41; Kenya). The Logoori verb kudoka can be translated into English as ‘to arrive’/‘to reach,’ ‘to be enough,’ and ‘must,’ depending on its linguistic context. We propose that these meanings arise from a single semantic denotation that is sensitive to a shared gradable component in the semantics of linguistic expressions referring to spatial paths, gradable predicates, measures of plural count nouns/mass nouns, and modals. The central theoretical issue addressed in this paper is the application of ordered, abstract scales in a model of grammar. This data and proposal is an important contribution to the literature arguing for a gradable model of modality (Lassiter 2014, 2017b, among others).

Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form–frequency correspondences and predictability

This paper claims that a wide variety of grammatical coding asymmetries can be explained as adaptations to the language users’ needs, in terms of frequency of use, predictability and coding efficiency. I claim that all grammatical oppositions involving a minimal meaning difference and a significant frequency difference are reflected in a universal coding asymmetry, i.e. a cross-linguistic pattern in which the less frequent member of the opposition gets special coding, unless the coding is uniformly explicit or uniformly zero. I give 25 examples of pairs of construction types, from a substantial range of grammatical domains. For some of them, the existing evidence from the world’s languages and from corpus counts is already strong, while for others, I know of no counterevidence and I make readily testable claims. I also discuss how the functional-adaptive forces operate in language change, and I discuss a number of possible alternative explanations.

Typology of coding patterns and frequency effects of antipassives

AbstractFrequency asymmetries within a minimal grammatical domain create offline associations that languages tend to exploit for a more efficient encoding. We explore cross-linguistic coding patterns of antipassives. We first argue that antipassive markers tend to have properties of derivational markers. Secondly, we show that antipassives are considerably rarer than the basic transitive constructions. The lower frequency correlates with the length of coding: antipassives tend to be coded with longer forms than basic transitive verbs. Thirdly, we explore frequency associations of different lexical input types and find that it is the rare input types that tend to select the antipassive, if the marking is differential, while the frequent ones correlate with the unmarked verb (A-lability). We, furthermore, show that the rarer argument types and argument scenarios correlate stronger with antipassives than the more frequent argument types and scenarios.

The voice domain in Baltic and its neighbours

This article outlines the aims, methodological approaches and research topics of the thematic volume Studies in the Voice Domain in Baltic and Its Neighbours. It also briefly characterises the individual contributions to the volume, highlighting their main ideas and pointing out their relevance to ongoing discussions as well as the impulses they can give to further (also cross-linguistic) research. The grammatical domains explored in the volume are the passive, the middle voice and the causative.