Grammatical Subject Research Articles

Using syntax and semantics to acquire subjective adjective meanings

ABSTRACT Adjectives like good, nice, pretty, and big are among the most frequent adjectives heard by children in the ambient language, and among the first adjectives produced by children. While these gradable adjectives are ostensibly short and sweet, their abstract semantic representations encode reference to features of the discourse context, including speaker subjectivity, which are surprisingly complex, and which also give rise to specific subclasses. How, then, do children acquire these fine-grained adjectival meanings? In this research, we hypothesize that as with verbs, the linguistic environments in which these adjectives appear provide surface-level distributional cues that narrow the space of meaning. In a proof-of-concept experiment with adults following in the footsteps of the Human Simulation Paradigm, we provide empirical evidence that surface-level linguistic patterns support the acquisition of different subclasses of subjective adjectives. Adults were presented with scripted dialogues featuring novel words in controlled linguistic environments manipulating grammatical subjects, adverbial modifiers, standard phrases, syntactic complements, and evidence of faultless disagreement among speakers. Participants were then asked to guess the word meaning (either incrementally after each ‘frame’ or after multiple frames) and rate their confidence. Results, as measured by the percentage of category-consistent, frame-compliant guesses, paired with an increase in confidence levels, indicate a sensitivity to this surface-level information, thereby highlighting the role of the linguistic environment in supporting the acquisition of adjective meaning.

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.

Étude des interférences intralinguistiques en FLE: l'impact des homographes et des pronoms sur l'apprentissage des compléments et articles définis à Osun State University-Nigeria

Study of Intralinguistic Interference in FLE: The Impact of Homographs and Pronouns on the Learning of Complements and Definite Articles at Osun State University-Nigeria Linguistic interference is a psycholinguistic phenomenon which slows down the learning process of the target language due to the existing similarities between it (L2) and the one already acquired (L1). Many research works had been carried out on linguistic transfer and interference. However, among those works, only a significant few have underscored the intra-linguistic interference as a trap associated with understanding the homographs, personal pronoun complements and definite articles in the class of French as a foreign language FLE. Therefore, this paper evaluates the grammatical implications that the distinctions between le, la, la les as personal pronoun complements and definite articles in Allah n’est pas obligé by Ahmadou Kourouma have on Anglophone French learners. The theoretical framework adopted to foreground our claims is linguistic transfer and interference. Percentage (%) is the scale used to interpret their performance while data are analysed based on textual analysis. The text is purposively selected to situate our analysis in the context of a postcolonial Francophone African literary text whose learning is always complicated among Anglophone and Yorubaphone French learners. Five questions were asked to evaluate the language skills of the seventy-five (75) third-year students at Osun State University across twenty corpora drawn from the work. The morpho-phonetic similarities between the definite articles and the personal pronoun complement inhibit the comprehension of instructional materials. In conclusion, contextual interpretation and more rigorous study of the grammatical subject matters are suggested to both teachers and learners, respectively, to eliminate the confusion associated with the teaching and learning of the homographs. To significantly improve academic performance among non-French-speaking learners, authorities should implement the pragmatic interventions outlined in this article, involving teaching professionals and learners alike.

Absence of syntactic passive in creoles: Evidence from French-based Mauritian Creole

Abstract This article examines passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole, arguing that they are topic, not passive constructions. I claim that their initial argument (the displaced object) occupies the specifier position of a Topic Phrase, not the structural subject position. This proposal is motivated by the fact that nothing at the surface identifies the displaced object as a grammatical subject, except its position relative to an auxiliary or verb. The topic analysis is supported by both semantic restrictions relating to specificity and animacy and syntactic restrictions relating to distribution (word order) and coordination. It is also supported by the fact that these same restrictions do not apply in unaccusatives, a structurally similar type of construction. The important contribution of this article is that passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole are ‘apparent’ rather ‘real’ passives, with the wider implication being that creoles, like many languages, do not use canonical passives to express passive meaning.

The impact of the #MeToo movement on language at court A text-based causal inference approach.

This study assesses the effect of the #MeToo movement on the language used in judicial opinions on sexual violence related cases from 51 U.S. state and federal appellate courts. The study introduces various indicators to quantify the extent to which actors in courtrooms employ language that implicitly shifts responsibility away from the perpetrator and onto the victim. One indicator measures how frequently the victim is mentioned as the grammatical subject, as research in the field of psychology suggests that victims are assigned more blame the more often they are referred to as the grammatical subject. The other two indices designed to gauge the level of victim-blaming capture the sentiment of and the context in sentences referencing the perpetrator. Additionally, judicial opinions are transformed into bag-of-words and tf-idf vectors to facilitate the examination of the evolution of language over time. The causal effect of the #MeToo movement is estimated by means of a Difference-in-Differences approach comparing the development of the language in opinions on sexual offenses and other crimes against persons as well as a Panel Event Study approach. The results do not clearly identify a #MeToo-movement-induced change in the language in court but suggest that the movement may have accelerated the evolution of court language slightly, causing the effect to materialize with a significant time lag. Additionally, the study considers potential effect heterogeneity with respect to the judge's gender and political affiliation. The study combines causal inference with text quantification methods that are commonly used for classification as well as with indicators that rely on sentiment analysis, word embedding models and grammatical tagging.

Verbal marking, intransitivity, and argument structure

Abstract This paper provides an intransitive analysis for an array of predicates which exhibit specific marking patterns in Budai Rukai. Contra previous lexical approaches, it is argued that a verbal prefix found on the predicates instantiates a functional head v, which constructs an intransitive vP. Its spell-out form is conditioned by its interaction with other higher functional categories, including tense, causative, passive, and complementizer. With respect to intransitivity, the resulting vP does not admit an accusative object, and it exhibits unergative, unaccusative, and anticausative properties. Regarding argument structure, these predicates are mostly one-place predicates. The sole argument is the grammatical subject which usually denotes an affected theme or an experiencer.

Bisubstantive Sentences with Semantics of External Characteristics and Object State in Russian

The article examines bisubstantive sentences, whose grammatical subject is represented by a concrete-nominal noun, while the prepositional-case combinations of the noun in the copulative-substantive predicate represent the meanings of external characteristics and object state. The means of expressing the characteristics of color and shape of an object, the size of an object (dimensional meaning), the material from which an object is made (fabricative meaning), distinctive details of an object (their presence or absence), structural features of an object, patterns on the surface of an object, and external coating of an object are identified, systematized, and described. Two varieties of object state meaning are analyzed: external state and existential-functional state. It is emphasized that these meanings often turn out to be syncretic, indicating a change in the semantics of prepositional-case forms when they perform a predicative function and confirming the tendency to separate some of them from the system of grammatical forms of a noun.

Mode of production and (referential) cohesion: An L2 English corpus-based study of syntactic coordination

This study investigates mode of production effects on narrative discourse configuration and referring expression (RE) selection in contexts of reference maintenance in syntactic coordination. It looks at 3rd person singular grammatical subjects across intermediate and advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English, in contrast with L1 English. The data are written and spoken narratives from the COREFL corpus produced by the same participant and under the same task conditions. The study reveals an effect of the mode of production in L2 English (referential) cohesion, while no such an effect has been found in L1 English performance. In general, in L2 English deficits in spoken production seem to persist while those in written production disappear by advanced level. In particular, referential cohesion seems more challenging for L2 English learners than the discourse-syntactic configuration of their narrative texts. By advanced level, the learner's discourse configuration is comparable to that of native speakers' both in their written and in their spoken narratives. However, the spoken productions by advanced learners still show a higher amount of fuller REs, in comparison to the spoken productions by the native participants.

Grammatical Object Passives in Yucatec Spanish

Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-phrase headed by the preposition por introduces an agent rather than a cause or reason. The verb has active morphology—it is always third-person plural, and accusative clitics (e.g., te) and DOM-marked objects are possible. This type of sentence, which I descriptively label an active–passive (A-P) hybrid, has been mentioned in previous literature on contact varieties in Mayan-speaking regions of Mexico and Guatemala, but it has not been precisely described or analyzed formally. I argue that A-P hybrid constructions are instances of grammatical object passives. Grammatical object passives have certain active properties—accusative case is assigned to a theme argument and the morphology of the verb is active, but like passives, they require that the expression of the agent be a by-phrase rather than a grammatical subject. I claim that this is possible in this variety of Spanish due to the emergence of a null pronoun, absent in other varieties of Spanish, that can merge in the specifier of Voice and restrict, rather than saturate, an agent argument, permitting the subsequent addition of a third-person by-phrase. I demonstrate that this analysis is able to explain its hybrid properties as well as other person restrictions on the by-phrases that express the agent. Finally, I describe avenues of future research that will help discern the role that language contact may have played in the emergence of A-P hybrids.

Middle-Passive Constructions, Dative Possessors, and Word Order in Spanish

This paper examines data from Spanish middle-passive sentences whose grammatical subject contains a body-part noun, externally possessed by means of a dative possessor. I advocate for an analysis whereby the possessor originates inside the theme DP and raises to the specifier of an applicative projection to be licensed with dative case. I show that the unmarked order for dative DPs in these configurations is preverbal. These phrases may appear as the sole preverbal constituent, presumably in preverbal subject position, thus forcing the theme DP to remain inside the VP; alternatively, both the dative DP and theme DP can occur preverbally, in which case, the former appears to be left dislocated while the latter would be probed to preverbal subject position. This last scenario leads to a minimality violation, since the theme would be probed over the empty pronominal standing for the possessor that must necessarily sit in Spec, ApplP for the inalienable possession construal to obtain. Instead, I argue that both preverbal dative and theme DPs in Spanish middle-passive sentences are left dislocated and corefer with empty pronominals inside the sentence; the null dative possessor, being closer to T° always raises to subject position, which avoids any potential intervention effects. Finally, I explore how these data can be analyzed within a paratactic approach.

Сдвиг фокуса внимания в проекции на язык и речь

This article considers the connection between cognitive and speech activity through the prism of the concept of shifting the focus of attention. The object of the research is language and speech material that reflects the results of shifting the focus of attention within the framework of information being communicated. The study is aimed to identify and generalize such phenomena as well as analyse the mechanism bringing to the front the most important part of information in an utterance. The shift in the focus of attention, related to the cognitive sphere, projected onto language and speech results in multiform processes that are associated with units of different levels and implement the said intention. Among the most obvious linguistic projections of the shift in the focus of attention, the article describes lexical metonymy in its classical and broader sense, transfer of attribute from one component to another, changes in the lexical content of the positions of the grammatical subject and object, introduction or omission of arguments of a predicate, functional sentence perspective, converse terms, expansion of the metaphorical image as a means of conceptualizing one and the same denotative sphere, etc. Comparison of projections of the shift in the focus of attention onto units of different levels of the language system allows us to identify a general mechanism that ensures the communicative effect of bringing to the front a certain element of the content of an utterance. The general condition for this mechanism is contiguity between the elements of an utterance or the elements of a situation. At the cognitive level, the contiguity of elements is determined by their belonging to one and the same concept, in the case of the phenomena under study, primarily by belonging to the proposition as a type of concept. Based on this, a consistent multilateral variation occurs among the elements associated with the structure of an utterance: words, sentences, concepts, etc. Variation is observed in the form, semantics and denotative reference of a unit. As a result of the analysis, a conclusion was made about a strong community of completely different systemic linguistic phenomena that are associated with bringing to the front a part of an utterance; in other words, they perform one and the same cognitive function.

On the conceptual nature of hybrid adverbials in Isu

We review Kießling’s (2011) assessment of the emergence of hybrid adverbials from serial verb constructions in Isu of Bantoid and the Narrow Grassfield group of East Benue Congo. He posits two paths, preverbal and postverbal, that coverb elements follow as they abandon verbal properties pertaining to syntax, morphology, and tone. Our focus rests on whether this impressive array of grammatical change might reflect a particular system of semantic concepts. We contend that one lens through which to view such a system consists of a merger of Dixon’s secondary concept types and Nuyts’ hierarchy of categories conveying clausal modification. To support our contention, we apply the resulting system of semantic concepts to Isu preverbal hybrid adverbials, finding eight conceptual types oriented toward characterization of grammatical subject. Despite the highly tentative nature of this effort, results align with a similar range of conceptual types that occur as preverbs in West Benue Congo Yoruboid and Edoid, which have also grammaticalized from verbs.

English contracted negation revisited: Evidence from varieties of Scots

Abstract: This article is concerned with the syntactic position of negation and how that connects to negation’s morphological realization and semantic and pragmatic effects. We focus on the case of contracted negation in English, which may appear both before and after the grammatical subject, and which has been classically analyzed as involving a single syntactic element placed by syntactic rule into distinct linear positions. We argue that this analysis is incorrect and that, in fact, there are multiple negations in English which are not related by a syntactic movement rule. We use the rich and complex morphosyntactic and semantico-pragmatic variation in the behavior of negation in varieties of Scots to motivate the argument and to develop a new approach that comes with both empirical and theoretical advantages.

A Research on Conjunctions and Interjections Jointly Used in Turkish and Urdu

Common words and grammatical similarities between languages, increase the interaction of languages with each other and accelerate the language learning process. Over the centuries, many grammatical subjects from Arabic and Persian have been transferred to Turkish and Urdu under the influence of the religion of Islam. Urdu, which comes from ordo/ordu in Old Turkic, means khan’s mansion, military camp. Nowadays, Urdu language appears as a common means of communication of different cultures in many parts of the Indian Subcontinent. Scientific studies in the literature show that the common words used today between Turkish and Urdu languages are mostly of Arabic and Persian origin. This study put emphasis on the common conjunctions that connect the sentences and concepts related to the meaning used in Turkish and Urdu languages and common exclamations that describe emotional states or reflect a nature sound; it was tried to draw attention to sound changes and meaning changes with the examples of sentences given in the form of tables.

To Be or Not To Be?

This squib accounts for the inconsistencies in the occurrence of genitive of negation with the Russian verb byt’ ‘to be’ and other genitive verbs by distinguishing two independent lexical entries for byt’ with a specified location that have differing syntactic and semantic characteristics. One is predicative/argument-taking, while the other is the copula in a copular construction with a locational prepositional predicate. Sentential negation invariably assigns genitive of negation to the grammatical subject of the copular construction, whereas the subject of predicative byt’ is in the wrong syntactic configuration to receive genitive of negation and therefore receives nominative case via agreement with the finite Infl.

The Problematic of the Grammatical Term, its Concept and Subject in “The Councils of Scholars” in the Light of Probing Theory

Probing is a theory that serves most of the sciences, and is based on ontological, epistemological, and metalinguistic foundations. It is ontological because it reconsiders existence through six categories called probes, namely: unit, act, relation, condition, emotions, and time. It is epistemological because it analyzes human knowledge in various sciences, discusses the philosophy that stands behind its awareness, corrects its origins on which it was built, codifies the development of its terminology, and provides a mechanism for the precise separation of its overlapping concepts. It is a metalinguistic because it is a new Organon that regulates thinking through a unified language that has a new idiomatic and conceptual apparatus. The Probing theory believes that behind the "term" are complex concepts and multiple problems, and that if we look deeply at it in a probical way based on understanding the difference between the types of probes, the logical relationships that link them, and their relationship to their three worlds (the world of minds, the world of nature, the world of symbols), and their relationship to fields (sciences, knowledge, and disciplines). The scientific addition offered by the Probing theory is to provide an innovative working mechanism to renew Arabic grammar, solve its idiomatic and conceptual problems, and analyze its procedures.
 
 

Preverbs: Their syntax and semantics in West Africa

Preverbs are positionally-delimited grammatical forms that remain understudied. We examine their semantic classes in West Benue Congo (WBC) and its minor language Emai, which until recently was undocumented. Preverb classes in Emai display a subset of semantic categories identified in Dixon (1991, 2006, 2010) and Nuyts (2001, 2005, 2006, 2016). There are eight semantic classes for 30 odd preverb forms. They are apportioned according to their qualitative or quantitative character. Preverbs do not include traditional auxiliary categories of aspect, tense, and modality, which exhibit distinct diachronic and synchronic character. Common to preverbs is their orientation to grammatical subject, rather than utterance speaker. Members of each class ascribe a property to clausal subject. Preliminary evidence suggests that preverbs of similar semantic character exist in other West African languages.

David L. Mathewson. Voice and Mood: A Linguistic Approach

David L. Mathewson. <i>Voice and Mood: A Linguistic Approach</i>

A Corpus-Based Study on the Spanish Translation of 道 (dao) in The Analects

This article has chosen seven Spanish translations of The Analects to conduct comparative research focusing on one culture-specific item, 道 (dao). Subscribed to a descriptive approach based mainly on norms postulated by Toury and Equivalence by Nida, it endeavors to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the main strategies in its translation? 2) What are the possible motivators of translation similarities and differences? This research combines quantitative and qualitative analysis methods based on corpus building. Corpus-based, this study describes the translation of 道 in Classical Chinese and its translation equivalence into Spanish. The findings demonstrated that various strategies and words are used to translate 道. When it functions as a verb, the literal translation is used, and different verbs are employed to express the meaning given the context. Moreover, decisions on verb tense, sentence structure, and grammatical subject also seem to vary significantly across translators. When 道 is used as a noun, translators show different preferences for word choices. Instances for both dynamic and formal equivalence have been observed, pointing out that these two concepts should not be analyzed in isolation, as they stand in a dynamic relationship. Translators also make adaptations to reach adequacy and acceptability in translation. Detailed results are discussed in light of these theories, and this study views translation as a socio, linguistic, cultural, and translator-based activity.

AUTHORS’ AFFILIATION INFLUENCE TOWARDS RHETORICAL MOVES AND LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF REJECTED RAAS

An abstract is the selling point of a research article (RA), due to the fact that it can help the readers and particularly journal reviewers in selecting which RAs are remarkable to be read further and accepted. A plethora of research has analyzed the rhetorical moves and linguistic features of accepted RAAs. Nevertheless, almost none of them have explored the rejected one, based on the authors’ affiliation. Invoking Hyland’s (2000) rhetorical move model as the main instrument, this study intends to dismantle and fill up those lacunas by utilizing 31 rejected RAAs in total from Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJAL), submitted in 2019, 2020, and 2021. The data were then separated into the same affiliation (13 abstracts) and different affiliation (18 abstracts) groups in order to find the commonality and discrepancy in the rhetorical move and linguistic features (i.e. tenses, voice, and grammatical subjects). As a result, the authors’ affiliation had some influences on the structure of rhetorical moves of RAAs and the accommodation of linguistic features in each move. It also appeared that there were some primary shortcomings found in the rejected abstracts as compared to the accepted ones. This study can be adopted as the reference for future research in rhetorical moves analysis, specifically regarding the authors’ affiliation and rejected RAAs.