Grammatical Relations Research Articles

Grundlagen einer 'integralen' Grammatik

Within the framework of an integral grammar, syntax, morphology and lexicology represent three types of consideration of the same reality, which is the linguistic construction of meaning. The distinction between these three linguistic disciplines may be useful in some cases, but in other cases it may hinder the explanation of linguistic phenomena. Integral linguistics is capable of unifying the disciplines - integrating them. It can, however, use modular methods where appropriate. It could therefore be seen as a kind of construction grammar with the option of modularising its descriptions and explanations. This is not to say that this approach advocates methodical indifference; on the contrary, it presupposes a particularly rigorous deduction of its concepts and descriptive methods. The foundations for such a grammar have already been laid in Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, which – with striking foresight – anticipates the ideas of nowadays' construction grammars and provides them with a hitherto unprecedented theoretical foundation. This is the starting point for the present article, which places Saussure's reflections within the framework of a theory of language centred on the speech event. It defines the functional levels of the sentence on the ground of the dimensions of utterance meaning, deduces the notions of syntactic function and syntactic constituency from the synthetic and analytical mechanisms of the syntagmatic dimension of language, and those of form and category from the abstraction principles of the paradigmatic dimension of language. Finally, it will be shown how the basic ideas of constructional grammars, in particular that of the syntax lexicon continuum, can be convincingly and exhaustively explained by the universal principles of grammar postulated by Saussure: the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structuration of language.

Type-migrating C-to-Rust translation using a large language model

Rust, a modern system programming language, introduces new types that prevent memory bugs and data races. This makes translating legacy system programs from C to Rust a promising approach to enhance their reliability. Since manual code translation is time-consuming, it is desirable to automate the translation. To yield satisfactory results, the translator should have the ability to perform type migration, i.e., removing C types and introducing Rust types in the code. In this work, we aim to automatically port an entire C program to Rust by translating each C function to a Rust function with a signature containing proper Rust types through type migration. This goal is challenging because (1) type migration cannot be achieved through syntactic mappings between type names, and (2) after type migration, function bodies should be correctly restructured based on the precise understanding of the functions’ behavior. To address these difficulties, we leverage large language models (LLMs), which possess knowledge of program semantics and programming idioms. However, naïvely instructing LLMs to translate each function produces unsatisfactory Rust code, containing unmigrated or improperly migrated types and a huge number of type errors. To resolve these issues, we propose three techniques: (1) generating candidate signatures, (2) providing translated callees’ signatures to LLMs, and (3) iteratively fixing type errors using compiler feedback. Our evaluation shows that the proposed approach yields a 63.5% increase in migrated types and a 71.5% decrease in type errors compared to the baseline (the naïve LLM-based translation) with modest performance overhead.

THE SYNTACTIC TYPOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTIONS WITH THE ADNOMINAL INSTRUMENTAL CASE WITH THE PREPOSITION WITH (“С”)

The complexity of the syntactic functioning of the adnominal instrumental case with the preposition with (“с”) is determined by the fact that in a sentence the adnominal instrumental case is always a syncretic member, combining the signs of a modi er and an object and, much less often, a modi er, object and adverbial. This article makes an attempt to classify the combination with the adnominal instrumental case with the preposition with (“с”) in phrases that are in a weak position associated with the partial neutralisation of oppositions, whose main component is represented by a non-verbal noun. Particular attention is paid to combinations in which the dependent component is represented by a proper name.

Grammatical Relations of German and Indonesian language in Criminal Texts Der Spiegel and Kompas

This study aims to analyze the types of grammatical relations that appear in Germany in the German criminal text Der Spiegel and Indonesian in the Indonesian criminal text Kompas. The data in this study are 127 clauses in German and 90 clauses in Indonesia. The data sources in this study are 3 German crime texts in the German (online) magazine Der Spiegel and 3 Indonesia newspapers Kompas in the May 2024 issue. The research design used is Qualitative Descriptive. Data collection was carried out using critical reading and note-taking techniques. Meanwhile, the approach used in this study is the Typology approach of Comrie (1981) and Farrel (2005). The results of this study show that there are: (1) 4 types of grammatical relations, namely Nominative with 13 findings (10%), Nominative-Acoussative with 48 findings (38%), Active language with 44 findings (35%) and Passive language with 22 findings (17%) appear as types of grammatical relations that occur in German in the online criminal text Der Spiegel; (2) 4 types of grammatical relations found in Indonesian criminal texts in Kompas, that is Nominative with 7 findings (8%), Nominative-Accusative with 38 findings (42%), Active language with 32 findings (36%) and Passive language with 13 findings (14%); (3) the Nominative-Accusative grammatical relationship type with 48 findings (38%) is the dominant one found in the German criminal text in the May 2024 edition of Der Spiegel online; and (4) the Nominative-Accusative grammatical relationship type with 38 findings (42%) is the most dominant in the Indonesian crime text in the May 2024 issue of the Kompas newspaper.

TYPES AND FEATURES OF PRONOUNS IN THE KOREAN LANGUAGE

This article aims to highlight the pronouns of the Korean language and their distinctive features. In Korean, pronouns are used to indicate clarity and to indicate a person. The uniqueness of this language is that the use of pronouns varies depending on the social status and the level of respect in the sentence. The article also provides information about the grammatical functions of Korean pronouns, their place in a sentence and changes in content. This article serves as a useful resource for Korean language learners on how to use pronouns correctly and effectively.

Linguistic Chameleon: Syntactic Functions of “Kuan” (Cebuano language filler) in Social Media Conversations

The study explored the syntactic functions of “kuan” in social media conversations and in the logs, reels, and shorts of various Cebuano content creators. Taking into account related studies on fillers, the researchers discovered that there is still no known study of its syntactic functions. Hence, the researchers will analyze the syntactic functions of filler words, specifically the Cebuano filler “kuan” used by content creators. Understanding the syntactic functions of these words contributes to the body of language research by offering some insights into people’s communication patterns on social media. This contributes to our understanding of the versatility of “kuan” within the context of social media use. The researchers will be using content analysis to examine how Cebuano content creators used ”kuan” in their logs, shorts or reels and analyze their syntactic functions. The researchers have concluded that "kuan" has various syntactic functions: subject, verb, object, subject complement and object complement.

Non-conforming dialect and its (social) meanings: younger and older speakers’ reactions to hyperdialectisms in Brabantish

Abstract This paper discusses the social meaning of variation in adnominal gender marking in the Dutch dialect of North Brabant. Previous studies reveal that the masculine gender suffix gains social meaning at the expense of grammatical function. However, it remains unclear what kinds of meanings the suffix can have, and how it becomes part of a Brabantish speech style. Therefore, we present statements from ten focus group interviews featuring 50 younger and older speakers. In these sessions, participants were asked to reflect on hyperdialectal usages of the gender suffix. We argue that the indexicalization of the suffix does not yield one fixed social meaning but rather a range of potential meanings, i.e. indexical field, that can be called upon by individual speakers depending on the context. However, the ranges of potential meanings clearly differ between both age groups, unraveling the different norms associated with the suffix.

Het didactiseren van bewuste taalvaardigheid

Various contextualized and cross-linguistic approaches of grammar teaching have yielded significant transfer effects on both metalinguistic knowledge and proficiency in reading, writing, listening, and speaking in the first and second languages. Nevertheless, a similar approach is absent in language teaching in the Netherlands, perpetuating the discrepancy between the intended, implemented, and attained objectives. This study endeavors to remedy this discrepancy by examining the effective characteristics of teaching materials promoting language awareness. To this end, a contextualized, cross-linguistic lesson series on the concept of ‘syntactical function’ was designed, targeting upper secondary students (aged 15-16) drawing from four design principles and an analysis of the Dutch, the English and the German language. Subsequently, the lesson series underwent expert consultation, focus group interviews and various impact measurements, yielding a significant positive influence on students’ motivation and language awareness in all three languages. This underlines the potential value of teaching materials promoting language awareness.

Appositive Combinations in the Russian Language: Concept Scope and Syntactic Characteristics

The concept of syntactic connection is fundamental for presenting the syntactic structure of any language. Linguists have described in detail the dichotomy of coordination and subordination, both from the point of view of the semantic relationships between the components of syntactic units and of the use of linguistic means to connect these components. Nevertheless, some syntactic structures have not yet received a comprehensive grammatical description. The article is devoted to the analysis of constructions with nouns being in appositive relations, as their combinations are interpreted inconsistently in modern scientific and educational literature. It has been established that the units in appositive constructions are connected on the basis of logical subordination, which appears in two variants: if the equal case ending agreement for both nouns is required in the entire paradigm, the linkage is characterized as agreement (without distributing it into complete and incomplete), if the case ending in entire paradigm is absent, it is viewed as a case (nominal) adjunction. The dependent component in parallel-case combinations of common nouns is considered to be the one that represents another name or an additional, including evaluative, attribute to the same referent that is named by the word being defined. In appositive combinations of a proper name and a common noun, the dependent component is noted to be the one expressed by a proper name of any type. The syntactic function of the dependent components in appositive phrases is suggested to be characterized without employing the concept of apposition, thus treating them as coordinated or uncoordinated attributes.

The birth of the Chinese character ‘奈’: Reflections on semantic differentiation

In this study, ‘奈’, is the earliest character in Ancient Chinese to derive its meaning from a single character. It was derived and developed from the sounds and characters corresponding to ‘奈’, ‘柰’ and ‘祟’. Thus, the formation and elimination of sounds in Ancient Chinese can be viewed through the one-sided development of Chinese characters from the time of the oracle bone script period to the present, but it can be seen that sound components are not all components of lexical variation, and thatW the process of character differentiation is ultimately influenced by the similarity of characters, their meaning and their development. The article describes a study to examine the development of lexical meaning and the relationship between its semantic elements: first, the original meaning of the characters and the extended meaning; second, the development of sound and dialect from the Ancient Chinese period to the Middle Chinese period; and third, the grammatical implementation and function that can be checked through it, and the semantic analysis elements found in the Chinese characters, excavated texts and traditional texts.

ПУНКТУАЦИОННАЯ СИСТЕМА ЯЗЫКА И ЕЕ СОСТАВЛЯЮЩИЕ: АНГЛИЙСКАЯ И КЫРГЫЗСКАЯ ПУНКТУАЦИЯ В ПОСТРОЕНИИ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ДИСКУРСА

This article describes the role of the punctuation system of language and its components, the formation of punctuation as the development of written communication, English and Kyrgyz punctuation in developing the literary discourse, as well as examples of literary and artistic discourse. Ten basic and generally accepted punctuation marks are considered using the example of literary discourses in the English and Kyrgyz languages. Discourse is defined as a coherent text that has ontological and epistemological properties. Here, an analysis of literary and artistic discourse is carried out; in general, the influence of English and Kyrgyz punctuation on the formation of literary artistic discourse is studied. For linguistic comparison, artistic discourses of a similar extra-linguistic event with a similar social and everyday theme in both compared languages are involved. In general, the ontological and epistemological functions of punctuation marks are applicable. The syntactic, semantic and intonation functions act as the main function and in the updated additional function. As a result, the dual functioning contributes to the establishment of discursive artistic meaning and its theme.

Lexical Density of Reading Materials in An English Textbook: A Content Analysis

In reading, students are required to learn to comprehend the content of the text. Lexical density is one of the factors that influences students’ reading comprehension. Lexical density is a condition of words’ proportion in a text, which shows the ratio of content words (CW) and grammatical function words (GFW). This research used the “Passport to the World” English textbook for the 8th grade of junior high school to be analyzed. This study aims to find out the genres of reading materials offered by the curriculum 2013 found in the textbook and to examine the lexical density of the reading materials in the textbook. A qualitative approach was applied, while content analysis was used as the research design. Data were collected with document analysis. The findings showed that there are 3 genres of reading materials, among 5 genres offered by the curriculum 2013, included in the textbook such as descriptive, recount, and functional texts in the form of announcements. From those, it was found that two texts were categorized as low lexical density, 11 texts were categorized as medium lexical density, and four texts were labeled as high lexical density. In addition, the composition of this text did not reach the ideal ratio of 1:2:1 for index difficulty. However, this textbook can still be suggested to be used in the class with some usage modifications in the classroom.

COVERT SIMULTANEOUS POST-EDITING IN ONLINE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENTS’ SIGHT TRANSLATION

This first attempt aims to determine the extent of students’ covert use of machine translation (MT) in the online assessment of their sight translation, the strategies of such use, and its signs. The study is based on the analysis of target texts (TT) of specialised online sight translation from Ukrainian into English by 13 BA and 10 MA students. The procedure involved the comparison of the students' TTs with their MT counterparts. Signs of covert MT were found in 46% of the BA and 30% of the MA students’ translations. The main method of this covert MT use is "simultaneous post-editing", i.e., the immediate oral post-editing of the MT text generated by the students on their screens and hidden from the assessor, while they deliver their supposedly original TTs. Simultaneous post-editing strategies range from replacing individual lexemes with their synonyms, adding and deleting elements, changing the syntactic functions of words or phrases, rearranging sentence fragments, transforming their structure, to applying several of these strategies simultaneously. Other methods of concealment include alternating MT systems in translating the same source text, as well as artificially slowing down the process of reading the TT from the screen, accompanied by pauses in the relevant text fragments to perform certain mental operations. In order to increase objectivity, the author recommends a delayed assessment of students' online interpreting recordings. The research perspective is to study the didactic potential of simultaneous post-editing as a procedure for developing general interpreting skills.

Comprehensive Analysis of Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes for English Language Acquisition

Morphology plays a crucial role in students' language acquisition. This study delves into the distinctions between inflectional and derivational morphemes, aiming to enhance comprehension of these concepts. By investigating word creation processes and observed alterations, the study illustrates the profound impact of prefixes and suffixes on words, shedding light on their significance in language learning. Students frequently require clarification when distinguishing between inflectional and derivational morphemes during learning. To enhance comprehension of this subject, this present study initially investigated the definitions and subcategories of these two terms outlined in various literary sources. Next, it provided a concise overview of the critical distinctions between inflectional and derivational morphemes. These analyses aim to determine the word created by derivational morphemes, the word formed by inflectional morphemes, the process by which the specified word is formed, and the types of observed alterations. The author implements the descriptive qualitative approach. It will discover that each morpheme possesses its function and influences the base word's meaning, word class, or grammatical function. This study illustrates the impact of prefixes and suffixes on words.

Argument structure affects relative clause extraposition: corpus evidence from Persian

The extraposition of a relative clause creates a discontinuous dependency between the relative clause and its host noun phrase, as in A man just entered the bank who claimed to have a gun. Since discontinuous dependencies are known to increase processing effort, a key question is why speakers produce them in the first place. Some factors known to affect extraposition – for example, the length of the relative clause and the main verb phrase – have received processing-based explanations, but others haven’t. We focus on two factors described by previous research: verb type and the grammatical function of the noun phrase hosting the relative clause. Specifically, extraposition from grammatical subjects is more common with unaccusative and passive verbs in English; further, extraposition is more common from grammatical objects than subjects in Dutch and German. We replicate these findings using corpus data from Persian. Further, we propose that verb type and grammatical function can be linked to a single underlying notion: argument structure. We demonstrate that argument structure modulates the likelihood of extraposition in Persian. We suggest that this occurs because speakers choose to extrapose relative clauses in order to keep the main clause verb close to its internal arguments. This explanation extends previous findings in psycholinguistics on the role of argument structure in speech planning during language production.

The Evolutional Development of Nouns in Middle Chinese Grammar

Middle Chinese witnessed the existence of a large number of new grammatical constituents, some of which had already been developed in the mid and late Old Chinese language before thriving in middle ancient times. Among these, the syntactic functions of nouns in Middle Chinese were in the process of evolutional development. The paper aims to investigate the nature of noun evolution by analyzing the exemplified data. It is found that nouns in Middle Chinese grammar mainly serve as subjects, objects, and attributes, though their direct link with predicates became less frequent due to the extensive usage of the copula of shì是 (be). The development of nouns mainly consisted of prefixes and suffixes, such as the prefix ā阿, which emerged with its crucial evolutional features.

Prosody in narratives: An exploratory study with children with sex chromosomes trisomies

Although language delays are common in children with sex chromosome trisomies [SCT], no studies have analysed their prosodic abilities. Considering the importance of prosody in communication, this exploratory study aims to analyse the prosodic features of the narratives of 4-year-old children with SCT.Participants included 22 children with SCT and 22 typically developing [TD] children. The Narrative Competence Task was administered to elicit the child's narrative. Each utterance was prosodically analysed considering pitch and timing variables.Considering pitch, the only difference was the number of movements since the utterances of children with SCT were characterised by a lower speech modulation. However, considering the timing variables, children with SCT produced a faster speech rate and a shorter final syllable duration than TD children.Since both speech modulation and duration measures have important syntactic and pragmatic functions, further investigations should deeply analyse the prosodic skills of children with SCT in interaction with syntax and pragmatics.

Grupul nominal în scrierile lui Dosoftei. Atributul substantival

The article follows a presentation of the noun phrase in Dosoftei’s writings, focusing on attributes expressed by nouns. After a theoretical description of the syntactic function of the attribute and of attributes expressed by nouns in particular, we will take into account the formal types of attributes expressed by nouns found in Dosoftei’s writings, with their construction peculiarities as adjuncts of head nouns: the prepositional attribute expressed by a noun, the attribute expressed by a noun in the genitive case, the attribute expressed by a noun in the nominative case, the apposition expressed by a noun and the attribute expressed by a noun in the dative case. The variety of these types of attributes expressed by nouns will reflect the complex possibilities of structuring the noun phrase in Dosoftei’s writings, thereby illustrating the diversity of Old Romanian constructions in the corpus to be analyzed.

Didactic Aspects of Figurative Syntagms in the Teaching Process

In the discursive process, figurative phrases with high expressive intensity are frequently used, representing one of the various sources of expression for each speaker in different communicative contexts. However, due to their nature, their teaching at school presents some difficulties. Although they are understandable to a particular linguistic community, they can be incomprehensible or difficult to interpret for anyone learning a foreign language, since their first meaning is in many cases not the meaning of the words that compose them and can be very different from the meaning they acquire in an idiomatic context. Idiomatic expressions rarely have corresponding translations in different languages, and their meaning is often rendered by completely different passages that have nothing in common with their direct meaning. In this article, we have tried to point out some of the methodological aspects to be considered when analyzing texts for didactic purposes and in foreign language teaching when it comes to figurative expressions. Since figurative phrases express a part of a nation’s culture, it is important for students to recognize the syntactic structures as words come together in the discursive process to express and convey thoughts and become part of various meaningful and formal grammatical relationships. They should be learned and acquired by keeping in mind the characteristics of their different types, their density, and their pragmatic use in the respective linguistic community. In this study, we will also try to show that the study of figurative syntagma can shed more light on theories of foreign language acquisition. Previous studies on figurative syntagma in Albanian have mainly been conducted within the narrow confines of linguistics, especially traditional linguistics. We assume that their investigation in the context of language didactics, as we approach it here, is only a first step that needs to be completed and deepened in further and more comprehensive studies. Received: 28 April 2024 / Accepted: 30 June 2024 / Published: 02 July 2024

Comparing theory-based models of grammatical complexity in student writing

Abstract The present study tests the empirical adequacy of competing models of grammatical complexity in university student writing, based on analysis of disciplinary texts from L1-English and L2-English students. The results show that grammatical complexity in student writing must be treated as a multi-dimensional linguistic construct, distinguishing among both structural types and syntactic functions. We compare the results here to previous research (Biber et al., 2024a, b), showing a similar patterning of complexity features in student writing and the broader domain of general writing. Two of these groupings – dependent phrases functioning as noun modifiers, and finite dependent clauses functioning as clause-level constituents – are especially interesting. These two groupings represent the strongest co-occurrence patterns in general writing, but only the dependent clause grouping is represented in student writing. This discrepancy is interpreted relative to the development of advanced proficiency in the use of complexity features by university students.