Grammatical Point Of View Research Articles

The ellipsis of grammatical functions in coordinative structure of Japanese language

The discussion in this paper is focused on the ellipsis of grammatical functions in Japanese covering that of the function of grammatical of coordinative structure. The data analyzed in this paper were taken from Japanese corpus data. The concept of ellipsis was taken from Quirk et al., (1985), Makino & Tsutsui, (1994), and Verhaar (1981). The ellipsis from Quirk et al (1985) was applied the concept of recoverability from the grammatical point of view: (1) textual recoverability, (2) situational recoverability, and (3) structural recoverability. The qualitative and synchronic descriptive method was employed in this study. A qualitatively descriptive method was employed to explain and describe the coordinative sentence, whereas the synchronic approach was used to cover the current language phenomena. The findings show that in the coordinative structure, ellipsis of the function of grammatical subject, ellipsis the function of predicate and ellipsis of the function of object took place. Ellipsis of the function of grammatical in the coordinative structure can be anaphoric or cataphoric. It is called anaphoric because the ellipsis takes place rightward, the controlling constituents are located in the first clauses and the controlled constituents are located in the second clause. It is called cataphoric because the controlling constituents are located in the second clauses and the controlled constituents are located in the first clauses.

Finnish student language teachers reflecting on linguistic concepts related to sentence structures: Students recognising linguistic concepts in L1 and L2 textbooks

In this article, we report on a two-part qualitative case study on Finnish student language teachers' views of linguistic concepts related to teaching sentence structures and their ability to recognise linguistic concepts in mother tongue and foreign language textbooks. In addition, our aim is to gain experience of collaboration between mother tongue and foreign language students. The current Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (2014, translated 2016) emphasises language awareness, including linguistic and cross-linguistic awareness. Language education requires L1 and L2 teachers to co-operate, and it is important for teachers to gain experience of such co-operation already during their pedagogical studies The focus of our study is on student language teachers' ability to recognise linguistic concepts in mother tongue and foreign language textbooks. The informants are mother tongue (Finnish) and foreign language students (studying English, Swedish, German, and Russian). The study found that the students were able to find syntactic and morphological concepts in particular. Overall, they understood language and defined “linguistic concepts” from a grammatical point of view; and a functional approach to learning a language stood out. In the textbooks, the students found both similarities and differences in using linguistic concepts related to sentence structures. Overall, co-operation between L1 and L2 teachers was considered important.

الاسناد والجملة العربیة بین القدامی والمحدثین ( دراسة مقارنة )

الاسناد والجملة العربیة بین القدامی والمحدثین ( دراسة مقارنة )

Goal realization

Abstract Drawing upon recent insights into the role of Goal preference as reflector of cross-linguistic differences, this paper investigates the factors affecting the realization of Goals in motion event descriptions. In particular, it examines the interplay between the lexicalization pattern of a language, on the one hand, and grammatical viewpoint aspect, on the other – factors which have commonly been treated in isolation. In so doing, three typologically distinct languages were examined: English, German and Greek. The empirical basis of this paper includes: (a) a corpus study, in which we examined the distribution of Goals in a small set of verbs, and (b) an experimental verbalization study, from which we elicited descriptions of different motion event types. While the former does not give a clear picture concerning the cross-linguistic differences in Goal prominence, the latter indicates that lexicalization pattern assumes a more prominent role than grammatical viewpoint aspect in affecting Goal realization.

El- UKBERÎ (616/1219) VE ET-TİBYÂN ADLI ESERİNDE İSTİŞHÂD

Ebu'l-Beka al-'Ukberi (616/1219) is an important scholar who lived in the last period of the Abbasid clan. Despite losing his eyes during his infancy, he benefited from the opportunity of living in Baghdad, the center of caliphate, by absorbing all the scientific accumulation of this center. When he came to maturity, he became the authority of the period in nine branches of science with the expression of all sources. But the most obvious feature among these different areas was the fact that he was a linguist because the most commonly used qualification was sâhibu’l-i'râb. It is the work of the most famous of the works written in the most basic field of work, which was conducive to the reception of this qualification, et-Tibyan fi I'râbi'l-Qur'ân. He studied the entire Qur'an from a grammatical point of view. We have tried to examine this work of al-'Ukberi in terms of istishhâd method in this article.

Context-free grammars for permutations and increasing trees

We introduce the notion of a grammatical labeling to describe a recursive process of generating combinatorial objects based on a context-free grammar. By labeling the ascents and descents of Stirling permutations, we obtain a grammar for the second-order Eulerian polynomials. Using the grammar for 0-1-2 increasing trees given by Dumont, we obtain a grammatical derivation of the generating function of the André polynomials obtained by Foata and Schützenberger. We also find a grammar for the number T(n,k) of permutations on [n]={1,2,…,n} with k exterior peaks. We demonstrate that Gessel's formula for the generating function of T(n,k) can be deduced from this grammar. From a grammatical point of view, it is easily seen that the number of the permutations on [n] with k exterior peaks equals the number of increasing trees on {0,1,2,…,n} with 2k+1 vertices of even degree. We present a combinatorial proof of this fact, which is in the spirit of the recursive construction of the correspondence between even increasing trees and up-down permutations, due to Kuznetsov, Pak and Postnikov.

Face saving discursive strategies of negation: A Saudi-Japanese comparison

AbstractFrom a grammatical point of view, negation is considered a linguistic universal, whereby differences in expression across languages are not necessarily rendered syntactically. The focus of this paper is not, however, on syntactic but rather pragmatic aspects and cultural scripts associated with indirect negation, and limited to the cultures of Saudi Arabia and Japan. Based on linguistic and paralinguistic cues from audio-visual data and ethnographic data collection, a pragmatic comparison between the seemingly contrastive cultures of Japan and Saudi Arabia is carried out. Interestingly, pragmatic aspects of discourse such as “face saving” (shame, honour, and conflict avoidance) present similar strategies in the two languages involved, as related to the functions of refusal and denial.

On the interactional dimension of evidentials: The case of the Spanish evidential discourse markers

Spanish has a series of evidential discourse markers that combine the lexical semantics of visual perception with reference to inference or hearsay, for example, evidentemente ‘evidently’, por lo visto ‘visibly, seemingly’, al parecer ‘seemingly’ and se ve (que) ‘one sees that, apparently’. The main aim of this article is to examine the grammatical, semantic and interactional properties of these four evidential discourse markers in informal and formal spoken Spanish. From a semantic point of view, we study the evidential values expressed by these markers (i.e. direct evidence, reportative, inference) and discuss the correlations between them. From a functional point of view, we analyse the evidential markers on the basis of discourse-interactional criteria such as illocutionary force, position in the turn and kind of turn. From a grammatical point of view, we address the preferences in terms of person and Tense/Aspect/Modality (TAM) experienced by these evidential markers in discourse. The main result of our analysis is that, as far as the semantic and discourse properties are concerned, evidentemente differs from por lo visto, al parecer and se ve que. The former seems to refer primarily to shared thoughts, developing a reading that goes beyond any of the traditionally distinguished evidential values. The three other markers, by contrast, refer to indirect evidence, often combining the evidential values of reported knowledge and inference. In talk-in-interaction, the two types of markers behave differently: evidentemente does not enhance turn-taking, whereas the other markers leave room for the co-participant to give his or her view of the state of affairs.

Ett Litet Språks Spår I Översättarvärlden

Abstract This paper looks into the issue of Swedish-Polish translationese as a manifestation of the Swedish centre impact on languages in the world via translation. The term “translationese” is used to describe a specific language created in translated texts, among other things in Swedish-to-Polish translation. Such a language may be postulated to influence contemporary Polish in some domains due to abundant translations of Swedish literature in Poland in recent years. What features can be then ascribed to the Swedish-Polish translationese, not only from a lexical but from a grammatical point of view as well? The paper addresses this question thorough an analysis of a Swedish literary text and its 33 Polish non-professional translations, which are assumed to maximize the tension between Swedish and Polish in translation underlying the development of translationese. However, the intention is not to characterize such a language as a whole, but to test some hypotheses in its delimitation. The propounded hypothesis is that the occurrence of a postulated feature in the majority of the collected translations may be seen as an indicator of this feature’s existence in the Swedish- Polish translationese as such. The following features are identified: frequent use of short sentences, possessive pronouns in an NP, underspecified expressions and repetitions of lexical items, as well as desolation of fixed phrases. The presented research may be an impute to a broader corpus-based contrastive study.

The relationship between phonological and geographical distance. Umlaut on the diminutive in Dutch dialects

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the application of modern methodology to the study of geographic language variation. One instance of this, applied to the Dutch language area, is the topic of dialectometry. It seems fair to say that the measurements in most dialectometrical projects are fairly superficial from a grammatical point of view. In this article, we propose a view of dialect distance which is radically different both in its methodology and in its goals. We present a view in which the distances between grammars are computed rather than the differences between words or constructions, which we view as products of the grammars. In particular, we consider the phenomenon of umlaut in diminutive forms. Umlaut, a phenomenon in which back vowels become front in certain morphological contexts, is virtually absent in the western parts of the Dutch speaking area, but fully productive in many parts of the east. We show how this east-west transition can be elegantly described as a gradual change in grammars

In defense of common sense: Lorenzo Valla's humanist critique of scholastic philosophy

Preface Introduction PART ONE: The Attack on Aristotelian-Scholastic Metaphysics 1 The Analysis of Things: Substance, Quality, and the Tree of Porphyry 2 Thing and Word: A Critique of Transcendental Terms 3 From a Grammatical Point of View: The Reduction of the Categories PART TWO: Soul, Nature, Morality, and God 4 Soul and Nature: A Critique of Aristotelian Psychology and Natural 5 The Virtues and the Road to Heavenly Pleasure 6 Speaking about the Ineffable: The Trinity PART THREE: Toward a Humanist Dialectic 7 Dialectic I: Propositions, the Square of Contraries, Proof and Argument 8 Dialectic II: Forms of Argumentation Conclusion: Valla and Ordinary Language Philosophy List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography

Grammatical innovation in multiethnic urban Europe: New linguistic practices among adolescents

This paper discusses a phenomenon that has recently been observed in areas with a large migrant population in European cities: the rise of new linguistic practices among adolescents in multiethnic contexts. The main grammatical characteristics that have been described for them are (1) phonological/phonetic and lexical influences from migrant languages and (2) morpho-syntactic reductions and simplifications. In this paper, I show that from a grammatical point of view, morpho-syntactic reductions are only part of the story. Using ‘Kiezdeutsch’ as an example, the German instance of such a youth language (which may be the one with most speakers), I discuss several phenomena that provide evidence for linguistic productivity and show that they evolve from a specific interplay of grammatical and pragmatic features that is typical for contact languages: grammatical reductions go hand-in-hand with productive elaborations that display a systematicity that can lead to the emergence of new constructions, indicating the innovative grammatical power of these multiethnolects.

„Sich des Gebrauchs der Frauen enthalten“. Eine Anfrage an die grammatikalische Struktur einer Interzession für Verstorbene im Großen Euchologion aus dem Weißen Kloster

Abstract An intercession in one of the Coptic anaphoras in the Grand Euchologue du Monastère Blanc (published by Lanne) proves to be of great interest. According to the translation by the editor the intercession for the deceased mentions those “who refrain from the use of women”. This puzzling translation seems to be unjustified by the text. A thorough discussion of the grammatical structure of this intercession points towards a different interpretation because from a grammatical point of view we find an asyndetic enumeration of deceased persons and groups of persons for whom the priest is praying. Furthermore the nomen agentis is interpreted by Lanne as a verb. Thus, the evidence points clearly towards a separate group of persons, namely women serving as deacons, as attested by the Grand Euchologue as late as the tenth or the eleventh century.

A Grammatical Approach to the Alignment of Structure-Annotated Strings

In this paper, we are concerned with a structural ambiguity problem of tree adjoining grammars (TAGs), which is an essential problem when we try to model consensus structures of given set of ribonucleic acid (RNA) secondary structures by TAGs. RNA secondary structures can be represented as strings with structural information, and TAGs have a descriptive capability of this kind of strings, what we call structure-annotated strings. Thus, we can model RNA secondary structures by TAGs. It is sufficient to use existing alignment methods for just computing the optimal alignment between RNA secondary structures. However, when we also want to model the resulting alignment by grammars, if we adopt these existing methods, then we may fail in modeling the alignment result by grammars. Therefore, it is important to introduce a new alignment method whose alignment results can be appropriately modeled by grammars. In this paper, we will propose an alignment method based on TAG's derivations each corresponding to a given RNA secondary structure. For an RNA secondary structure, there exist a number of derivations of TAGs which correspond to the structure. From the grammatical point of view, the property of TAGs drives us to the question how we should choose a derivation from these candidates in order to obtain an optimal alignment. This is the structural ambiguity problem of TAGs, which will be mainly discussed in this paper. For dealing with this problem appropriately, we will propose an edit distance between two structure-annotated strings, and then present an algorithm which computes an optimal alignment based on the edit distance.

Goodman, Quine, and Chomsky: from a grammatical point of view

This paper explores specific issues concerning linguistic theory and the use of simplicity criteria in the early Transformational Generative Grammar literature. In particular, the influence of Nelson Goodman and Willard Van Orman Quine upon the work of Noam Chomsky during the 1950s is assessed. The main topics considered include the development of constructional system theory, the use of mechanical procedures for measuring the formal simplicity of extralogical bases in constructional systems, and the way in which Chomsky adapted these techniques in order to facilitate the analysis of natural language. In this context, the influence of constructive nominalism upon Chomsky's early work is also considered. Finally, the relationship between the notion of simplicity in 1950s-style generative grammar and more recent discussions of economy in the Minimalist Program is assessed.

Temporal reference in Mandarin Chinese

This paper discusses how Chinese, a so-called tenseless language, determines its temporal reference. For simplex sentences without time adverb or aspectual marker, I show that temporal reference is correlated with aktionsart or grammatical viewpoint. For sentences with an aspectual marker, I discuss the temporal semantics of le and guo in detail, showing how their tense/aspectual meanings contribute to temporal reference. I propose to analyze le as an event realization operator and guo as an anteriority operator. For subordinate clauses, I show that temporal reference of complement clauses of verbs is basically determined by verbal semantics of individual verbs, which may impose some temporal restriction on the temporal location of the embedded event. As for relative clauses and temporal adverbial clauses, many different factors such as lexical verbal semantics, referential properties of determiners, lifetime effect of noun phrases, semantic or pragmatics constraints on temporal connectives, inference rules and world knowledge, etc., all interact to help determine temporal reference. Many data discussed in this paper indicate that there is no evidence of (covert) tenses in Chinese. Therefore, challenging work remains for those who have claimed that Tense Phrase is projected in Chinese phrase structures.

The functions of formulaic language: an integrated model

1. Introduction1.1. The nature of formulaic language‘Formulaicity’ and ‘formulaic sequence’ will be used in this paper to describe, in aneutral way, a phenomenon that encompasses various types of wordstring whichappear to be stored and retrieved whole from memory. Our working definition ofthe formulaic sequence will be:a sequence, continuous or discontinous, of words or other meaning elements,which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved wholefrom memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation oranalysis by the language grammar.This includes, at the one extreme, tightly idiomatic and immutable strings, such asby and large, which are both semantically opaque and syntactically irregular, and, atthe other, transparent and flexible ones containing slots for open class items, like NPbe-TENSE sorry to keep-TENSE you waiting (Pawley and Syder, 1983, p. 210).Perkins (in press) defines formulaicity as follows: ‘‘manifested in strings of linguisticitems where the relation of each item to the rest is relatively fixed, and where thesubstitutability of one item by another of the same category is relatively con-strained’’. If we take formulaicity to encompass, as some do, also the enormous setof ‘simple’ lexical collocations, whose patterns are both remarkable and puzzlingfrom a formal grammatical point of view (e.g. Sinclair, 1991), then possibly as much

Trace Deletion, Θ-Roles, and Cognitive Strategies

This paper reports a rather striking distinction found in the performance of agrammatic patients: Their comprehension deficit distinguishes not only different syntactic constructions, but also verbs with different thematic structure. Thus, the coupling of a variety of sentence types with different verb types yields surprising performance patterns, demonstrating once again that the deficit these patients suffer from is highly selective from a grammatical viewpoint. This pattern of selectivity has important implications for linguistic theory, for it describes an error pattern that can be accounted for only by a theory that assumes a (normal) lexicon that encodes thematic labels and refers to a thematic hierarchy. In addition, the results argue for the necessity of a cognitive strategy (first NP = Agent) as part of the structural account of agrammatic comprehension (the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis). It is shown that, contrary to some recent claims, an account lacking such a strategy cannot derive agrammatic performance patterns properly. New data are presented, from an experiment that used an anagram task to test agrammatic comprehension of active and passive sentences containing verbs of three different thematic types. Verbs varied in that their external argument was Agent, Instrument, or Experiencer. The finding was that on all active sentences, performance was above chance, whereas on the passives, performance split: on verbs with Agent or Instrument external arguments, performance was at chance, corroborating previous findings. On Experiencer verbs, though, performance was below chance. These data argue decisively for the TDH as originally presented, namely, for an account that assumes trace deletion, coupled with a strategy. The implications of these results to the theory of brain/language relations are discussed, in the context of the theory of lexical representation.

Grammatical borrowing and language change: The Dutchification of Frisian

Abstract A scientific discipline is defined by a set of research objectives, and a set of methodological principles, the latter in part derived from a metatheoretical worldview. From this perspective the study of minority languages as a coherent domain of research hardly exists. It seems to be more accurate to say that minority languages are approached from (a combination of) traditional disciplines such as sociology, psychology and linguistics. What these approaches share, is, may be, no more than their research objects. This makes it unavoidable, in my opinion, to discuss the theme of ‘comparative research and development of theories’ from the perspective of one or more of the disciplines just mentioned. My starting point will be linguistics, and more specifically, generative grammar. From a grammatical point of view, minority languages have, as natural languages, no special properties. Nevertheless these languages are of particular interest for the grammarian; more specifically, for the grammarian who is interested in the dynamics of natural language. The speakers of minority languages find themselves in a situation which puts all kinds of pressure on the use of its minority mother tongue. Changes occur within a reasonably short period of time. Minority languages are therefore well qualified for studying factors that are involved in language change. In this paper I would like to address the very old problem of grammatical borrowing. I will discuss this problem within the context of minority language studies. Is it possible that the grammatical system of a minority language changes by borrowing grammatical elements and/or grammatical principles from the dominant language? It seems to be natural to take the Dutchification of Frisian as an example. Three cases of grammatical borrowing of Frisian from Dutch that have been proposed in the literature will be critically discussed: 1. the borrowing of verbal endings that is supposed to be responsible for transition of verbs from the je class to the e class;2. the transition of the diminutive suffix ke to tsje; 3. changes in the word order of the Frisian verbal complex. I will conclude that the grammatical system of Frisian does not Dutchify. Furthermore this examination gives rise to some general conclusions concerning the ways in which minority languages can and cannot be influenced by dominant languages.

“Legere Est Agere”

Summary This contribution gives a detailed analysis of the first Quaestio of the collection of grammatical quaestiones preserved in the MS Oxford, CCC 250, ff.30vb-33vb (§ § 1–3); an attempt is made to assign the Quaestio its proper place in the development of 12th-century linguistic thought (§ § 4–6). The subject matter of the Quaestio is the various interpretations of the infinitive used in a proposition as a noun (in vi nominis) as exemplified by “legere est agere”, a topic closely related to the discussions on the status of the dictum propositionis. The anonymous author deals with it from a logical point of view, and his main concern appears to be the truth of the proposition. The influence of contemporary views as the ‘contextual approach’ is shown by his proposal to judge the interpretation of the infinitive according to the syntactic structures of the propositions. His conditional interpretation of the proposition “legere est agere” in the sense of “si quis legit, agit” in the case of an ‘impersonal interpretation’ of the infinitives and the copula is judged worthy of our attention (§ 3). § 4 is devoted to discussions of this topic (and related questions) in 12th-century texts on logic. Special attention is paid to Abailard’s ‘impersonal interpretation’ of the infinitive in his theory on the ‘dictum propositionis’, and to the Ars Meliduna and the Dialectica Monacensis for the use of the term ‘attributum’. The minor textbooks of logic are considered to be the direct source of the example “legere est agere”. We find a comprehensive treatment of the question at issue in the Summa on the Priscianus minor by the Parisian Master Robertus (fi. ca.1160), but now from a grammatical point of view (§ 5). His main concern is the congruity of the construction. He admits both interpretations: in vi verbi and in vi nominis, but does not make any further sub-distinction of the use in vi nominis. Twice Robertus refers to an opinion adhered to by the author of our Quaestio, but rejected by Robertus himself. — An edition of the Quaestio is appended.