Grammatical Subject Research Articles

Agentless Transitive Verbs in Georgian

The Georgian language has an unusual abundance of indirect (dative-subject) verbs. Most of these are intransitive, but several dozen are formally transitive. The focus of this article is on the subset of Georgian indirect transitives that lack overt grammatical subjects (e.g., ‘I shiver’, lit., ‘it makes me shiver’). The semantic, morphological, and syntactic features of Georgian agentless transitives are presented and compared to those of similar verb types from other languages. Of particular interest is a small group of bodily emanation verbs, such as ‘yawn’ and ‘belch’, that are paired with syntactically inverse direct-transitive verb forms. A scenario is reconstructed for the origin of such direct-indirect pairings, which are otherwise unknown in Georgian.

A data-driven study of temporal adverbials as discourse segmentation markers

Many linguistic and psycholinguistic studies present sentence-initial temporal adverbials as good markers of discourse segmentation. This paper proposes a corpus-based evaluation of their potential to signal discontinuity such as a discourse break or shift. We look in particular at how temporal adverbials interact with other features, such as position in the text (in relation to document structure), and type of referring expression as grammatical subject in the host sentence. Our methodology calls upon a large diversified tagged corpus, and combines quantitative and qualitative approaches in order to systematically explore these configurations and their relation to text-type. Temporal adverbials are shown in this corpus to signal discontinuity only when in certain configurations, i.e., they cannot be considered as segmentation markers in their own right.

The wind chilled the spectators, but the wine just chilled: Sense, structure, and sentence comprehension.

Anticipation plays a role in language comprehension. In this article, we explore the extent to which verb sense influences expectations about upcoming structure. We focus on change of state verbs like shatter, which have different senses that are expressed in either transitive or intransitive structures, depending on the sense that is used. In two experiments we influence the interpretation of verb sense by manipulating the thematic fit of the grammatical subject as cause or affected entity for the verb, and test whether readers' expectations for a transitive or intransitive structure change as a result. This sense-biasing context influenced reading times in the post-verbal regions. Reading times for transitive sentences were faster following good-cause than good theme subjects, but the opposite pattern was found for intransitive sentences. We conclude that readers use sense-contingent subcategorization preferences during on-line comprehension.

More than Words: Adults Learn Probabilities over Categories and Relationships Between Them

This study examines whether human learners can acquire statistics over abstract categories and their relationships to each other. Adult learners were exposed to miniature artificial languages containing variation in the ordering of the Subject, Object, and Verb constituents. Different orders (e.g., SOV, VSO) occurred in the input with different frequencies, but the occurrence of one order versus another was not predictable. Importantly, the language was constructed such that participants could match the overall input probabilities only if they were tracking statistics over abstract categories, not over individual words. At test, participants reproduced the probabilities present in the input with a high degree of accuracy. Closer examination revealed that learners were matching the probabilities associated with individual verbs rather than the category as a whole. However, individual nouns had no impact on word orders produced. Thus, participants learned the probabilities of a particular ordering of the abstract grammatical categories Subject and Object associated with each verb. Results suggest that statistical learning mechanisms are capable of tracking relationships between abstract linguistic categories in addition to individual items.

BY + complément dans les énoncés passifs anglais : une relation non-spatiale représentée spatialement

By assumes a large array of meanings and there are semantic links between its superficially diverse uses. These include agency, cause, instrumentality, means, manner, etc.... Among this large array, the preposition is also used to head complements in long passive clauses.The purpose of this article is to show that the preposition may be given a locative interpretation when it is used to (re)introduce the noun phrase that corresponds to the grammatical subject of the active counterpart.The demoted Agent or Cause that activates a change of state can be viewed as an intermediate point (or L0Ci/o) on a path or route to an endpoint, i.e. the resultant state of the Patient or Experiencer.

A pioneering theory of information structure

The paper deals with Samuel Brassai, a 19th-century Hungarian linguist and polyhistor, who was the first in the world to discover the role of information structure in the syntactic organization of the sentence. Preparing to describe Hungarian syntax, he first wanted to establish the universal and typical characteristics of the sentence on the basis of a number of genetically unrelated languages. The universal structure he identified is essentially the topic-comment structure (called inchoativum-bulk articulation by him). French-type languages realize a constrained version of this universal structure, requiring the topicalization of the grammatical subject. In Hungarian, the initial position of the comment is a focus (in his terminology: attribute ) position. His Hungarian sentence model is a forerunner of today’s generative sentence structure.

Research article abstracts in applied linguistics and educational technology: a study of linguistic realizations of rhetorical structure and authorial stance

The abstract found at the beginning of most journal articles has increasingly become an essential part of the article. It tends to be the first part of the article to be read and, to some extent, it `sells' the article. Acquiring the skills of writing an abstract is therefore important to novice writers to enter the discourse community of their discipline. Based on 30 abstracts from three journals, the present study aims at exploring not only the rhetorical moves of abstracts in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology, but also the linguistic realizations of moves and authorial stance in different abstract moves. The results show that there are three obligatory moves in abstracts in these two disciplines — Presenting the research, Describing the methodology, and Summarizing the results. The results also indicate that a combination of certain linguistic features such as grammatical subjects, verb tense and voice can help distinguish moves in the abstract. The findings of the study have some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses for graduate students, especially students from non-English backgrounds.

On a syntactic-semantic model with the locative case

The topic of this paper is a syntactic-semantic model whose distinctive element is the locative case with the preposition U (IN) and the relevant feature (+) human being. This model is realized in three different variants - with the intransitive (A) or transitive verb (B), where the nominative in the function of subject and the locative indicate different (B1) or the same (B2) referents. Furthermore, the verb belongs to a semantic class which denotes emerging, stimulation, duration, fading away, diminishing or change in the intensity, in principle, of any phenomenon, and concretely in this model such verbs appear in the collocational link with the nouns implying man's psychological, physiological or mental states, feelings or mood. With an adequate analytic procedure, all the three variants of this model are approached from the syntactic-semantic and pragmatic perspective. The paper points to the causative semantics of these structures, reduced to the metalinguistic formula 'make that X V', which confirms that the semantics of these verb-noun collocational links, syntactically speaking, condenses a complex two-member sentential structure represented by the semantically deficient verb (= causative component) in the basic, matrix structure, and the complement clause with the conjunction DA (THAT) and the basic verb. And precisely from this semantic feature there follows that the notion in the locative case semantically, actually, represents the BEARER of a physiological, physiological or mental state, feeling, mood, so that it represents the GRAMMATICAL SUBJECT of the corresponding basic subordinated predication whose exponent, actually, is the grammatical subject in the structure with the intransitive verb (or with the syntactically-semantically intransitive verb structure), that is the object in the structure with the transitive verb. Two possible semantic interpretations of this model are presented: the one related to the referential pointing to the situation (a) and the other when the sentential proposition also includes the corresponding presupposition (b).

Predicting the causal agent in verbally described social interactions

Implicit causality in interpersonal verbs (i.e., causal assumptions about the initiator of a social interaction) has been extensively investigated, especially in English and German language (cf. Rudolph & Forsterling, 1997). The present study is the first to investigate verb causality in Danish language using a student sample (N = 96) while simultaneously examining consensus (i.e., to what extent others besides the grammatical subject treat the object like this) and distinctiveness (i.e., to what extent solely the object person is treated by the subject like this) as predictors of causal attribution to subject or object. A strong verb causality effect in Danish language emerged. Consensus proved to be a better predictor than distinctiveness for causal attribution.

Graded representations in the acquisition of English and German transitive constructions

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., ‘ The frog is pushing the lion’, when the lion was actually the ‘agent’ or ‘doer’ of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All children mostly corrected the familiar verb (i.e., they used the agent as the grammatical subject), but there were cross-linguistic differences among the two-year-olds concerning the novel verb. When English 2-year-olds used the novel verb they mostly corrected. However, their most frequent response was to avoid using the novel verb altogether. German 2-year-olds corrected the novel verb significantly more often than their English counterparts, demonstrating more robust verb-general representations of agent- and patient-marking. These findings provide support for a ‘graded representations’ view of development, which proposes that grammatical representations may be simultaneously abstract but ‘weak’.

The Light Subject Constraint in Spoken Spanish

The Light Subject Constraint in Spoken Spanish The purpose of this study is to explore Chafe's hypothesis (1994) that grammatical subjects obey the light subject constraint (LSC). The data consists of six half-an-hour semiformal interviews with Caracas native speakers recorded in 1987. Chafe's hypothesis is based on the claim that in any given clause one of the referents receives the unique and special status of grammatical subject. Subjects show two types of restrictions: i) from the information load perspective, they tend to code given or accessible rather than new information; and ii) from a referential viewpoint, they can have three degrees of importance: primary, secondary or trivial (1994: 88). Information load (high or low) and referential importance combined constitute the LSC: Chafe's findings prove that in English subjects tend, on the one hand, to be given or accessible and, on the other, of primary or secondary importance. Heavy subjects, on the contrary, tend to be of trivial importance. Broderick 1999 confirms the LSC's existence in a conversational English corpus. All subjects in the corpus have been coded according to information load and referential importance. The results of the analysis show that spoken Spanish also conforms to LSC.

Writing In Efl: An Analysis Of Developing Cognitive Processes

This study aims at finding out a writer's developing cognitive processes in EFL writing. The data are analyzed based on the classic theory of Odell (1977). It was found that the writer develops better in using: 1) grammatical subjects; 2) connectors and superlative forms; 3) lexicons showing similarity, resemblance, and class; 4) physical words; and, 5) sequence. He is less developed or stagnant in using comparisons and negatives, syntaxes, lexicons showing difference, change, paradox, contrast and examples.

Semantic and Structural Characteristics of Impersonal Sentences with Introductory “it”

The article aims to reveal the nature of sentences with introductory it where the predicative is expressed by an adjective (it is…). The introductory it is followed by a compound nominal predicate with a predicative expressed by an adjective while the conjunction that introduces an object clause. The semantic aspect of these constructions is of certain interest, but it is also important to see through what English patterns it is expressed. Unlike the sentence It is a house, where the grammatical subject it preserves its deictic meaning, the pronoun it in the abovementioned sentences is fully abstracted and specified by the object clause. The adjective following the construction it is… acts as an epithet which expresses the person’s opinion and evaluation of the given action and reality. The nature of the grammatical noun – logical noun and subject – predicate correlations is also specified.

Between Reasoning

In two experiments we investigated three-term reasoning with spatial relational assertions using the preposition between as compared to projective prepositions (such as to the left of). For each kind of assertion we distinguish the referent expression (i.e., the grammatical subject) from the relatum expression (i.e., the internal argument of the preposition; e.g., [The hedgehog]referent_expressionis to the left of [the frog]relatum_expression; [the snake]referent_expressionis between [the donkey and the deer]relatum_expression). Previous research has shown that integrating premises with projective prepositions is easier (a) when the relatum expression of the second premise denotes an element already given by the first premise (relatum = given), and (b) when the term denoting a given element precedes the term denoting a new element (given-new). Experiment 1 extended this finding to second premises with the preposition between. In Experiment 2, between figured in the first premise. In this case, participants built an initial preferred model already from the first premise, although such a premise is indeterminate with respect to the array that it describes. Since there is no need left for integrating the second premise, this premise is instead used to verify the initial model and to modify it when necessary. A further investigation of conclusion evaluation times showed that conclusions were evaluated faster when they first mentioned the element that was included most recently into the mental model of the premises. The use of premises with between permitted the separation of recency of model inclusion from recency of appearance of an element in a premise.

Word order variation in spatial descriptions with adverbs

Previous research has shown that in a three-term spatial reasoning task, the second premise of a German premise pair is especially easy to comprehend if (1) the prepositional object rather than the grammatical subject denotes the given entity, and if (2) the term denoting the given entity precedes the term denoting the new entity. Accordingly, the second premise is easiest to comprehend with noncanonical word order--that is, with the prepositional object in preverbal position denoting the given entity (e.g., To the right of the given object is the new subject). This finding is explained in terms of contextual licensing of noncanonical word order. Here, we discuss and tested two alternative accounts of contextual licensing, given-new and partially ordered set relations (Poset). The given-new account claims that noncanonical word order is licensed by the term denoting the given entity preceding the term denoting the new entity. On the Poset account, noncanonical word order is licensed if the preverbal constituent introduces a new entity that stands in a transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric relation to a given entity. Comprehension times for second premises with spatial adverbs in four different word orders support both accounts of contextual licensing; Poset licensing was stronger than given-new licensing.

A CRITIQUE OF FREGE ON COMMON NOUNS

AbstractFrege analyzed the grammatical subject‐term ‘S’ in quantified subject‐predicate sentences, ‘q S are P’, as being logically predicative. This is in contrast to Aristotelian Logic, according to which it is a logical subject‐term, like the proper name ‘a’ in ‘a is P’– albeit a plural one, designating many particulars. I show that Frege’s arguments for his analysis are unsound, and explain how he was misled to his position by the mathematical concept of function. If common nouns in this grammatical subject position are indeed logical subject‐terms, this should require a thorough reevaluation of the adequacy of Frege’s predicate calculus as a tool for the analysis of the logic and semantics of natural language.

Dividing Zero: Beholding Nothing

IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE THAT NOTHING AT ALL COULD BE SO EXCITING, COULD BE SO MUCH FUN. — Byrne (Talking Heads), "Heaven" 6/1 How is it possible to write about nothing? Only by forcing it into one of something's categories; by turning it inside out so that its contours might become visible; or by clothing it in vapid vestments that pretend to show what they in fact disguise? If we begin by defining nothing as something that does not exist,1 then nothing has already been negated on at least two levels: such a definition turns nothing into its ontological opposite (something) and then annuls its existence. In order to attempt to grasp, hold, pin down nothing, the grammatical subject of its definition must already be assumed to be the opposite of what is being defined. From this perspective, nothing can only be understood as the negation (does not exist) of the negation (something); it is rarely defined in terms of its own ontological categories. We can thus only approach the always already impossible task of writing or representing nothing by inverting the ontological categories governing such a definition and writing about nothing that does exist, nothing that is. As long as nothing is put aside by thinking of it as something—which is to substitute it with a defined opposite—and then eliminating it as an object that exists, we cannot reflect on nothing on its own terms, cannot think of it seriously as nothing that is, as nothing that is open to the potential for engagement. Can we simply regard or behold nothing instead of trying to grasp and hold it? Can we experience nothing as both emptiness and plenitude? If nothing can be thought at all, it might be by means of a paradoxical poetics that necessarily questions its own enterprise—a poetics that tries to perform nothing, to produce non-meaning, but that cannot seem to escape asking for the meaning of that absence of meaning; a poetics that insists on nothing as an object of perception (and does not try to eliminate it or collapse it with the subject); [End Page 71] a poetics that strives to articulate alternative modes of perceiving the relation between subjects and objects; a poetics that insists on nothing as existing, and on our capacity for experiencing it; a poetics, finally, that calls for accepting nothing for what it is, an impossibility that provokes possibility. 5/2 Must the act of perception always already involve an act of interpretation? Must what we perceive mean something? Can it not mean, and just be, nothing? Is it possible at all to perceive nothing for what it is? Wallace Stevens reflects on this problematic nature of perception in his early poem "The Snow Man," considering what it would mean to see the world without assigning it meaning. The paradoxical meaning of this non-meaning turns in on itself in the final lines of the poem, which climax in a trio of mind-chilling nothings: 13 [. . . ] the listener, who listens in the snow, 14 And, nothing himself, beholds 15 Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (8) In asking what it would mean if we were to recognize nothing not only as an object but also as a part of ourselves as subjects, Stevens's poem envisions a form of man able to perceive without interpretation. This man—the snow man—does not define himself in opposition to others: he is in harmony with nature. Though traditionally2 man has been conceived as a creature that must distinguish himself from nature to see himself as complete, his recognition of nothing makes any absolute distinction impossible, in part because nothing escapes our categorization of the perceived world. It is therefore no longer possible for the "listener" in Stevens's poem to assign meaning and to establish hierarchies by appropriating the objects of his beholding. Instead, the poem posits a state of being that redefines...

Speakers gaze at objects while preparing intentionally inaccurate labels for them.

When describing scenes, speakers gaze at objects while preparing their names (Z. M. Griffin & K. Bock, 2000). In this study, the authors investigated whether gazes to referents occurred in the absence of a correspondence between visual features and word meaning. Speakers gazed significantly longer at objects before intentionally labeling them inaccurately with the names of similar things (e.g., calling a horse a dog) than when labeling them accurately. This held for grammatical subjects and objects as well as agents and patients. Moreover, the time spent gazing at a referent before labeling it with a novel word or accurate name was similar and decreased as speakers gained experience using the novel word. These results suggest that visual attention in speaking may be directed toward referents in the absence of any association between their visual forms and the words used to talk about them.

Colonização lingüística: Linguas, política e religião no Brasil (séculos XVI a XVIII) e nos Estados Unidos da América (século XVIII)

Reviewed by: Colonização lingüística: Línguas, política e religião no Brasil (séculos XVI a XVIII) e nos Estados Unidos da América (século XVIII) Antônio R. M. Simões Mariani, Bethania . Colonização lingüística: Línguas, política e religião no Brasil (séculos XVI a XVIII) e nos Estados Unidos da América (século XVIII). São Paulo: Pontes Editores, 2004. 187 pp. Colonização lingüística investigates linguistic identity in Brazil, during the Portuguese colonization. The book discusses the extent of the influence of the língua geral1 on Brazilian Portuguese and on Brazil. The língua geral gradually became the main language spoken in Brazil until the 18th-century. It is considered to be a language based on the indigenous language Tupinambá, namely the ancient Tupi.2 Orlandi (Nanterre: CRL, 1996; cited in Mariani, 22) calls the língua geral an "imaginary language," a "Jesuitic" Tupi, with which I can only agree. The Jesuits wrote a grammar of the língua geral, originally intended to catechize the Indians and to teach it to other Jesuits either during their missions in Brazil or before they left Europe. According to Mariani, her book draws into her experience as a member of the project História das idéias lingüísticas: A construção de um saber metalingüístico e a constituição da língua nacional, which started in 1991, as a consortium of two Brazilian and one French universities: Universidade de São Paulo, Unicamp and École Normale Supérieur de Fontenay-aux-roses. Colonização lingüística is divided into five chapters. In chapter 1, "Colonização lingüística," Mariani revisits Calvet (Paris: Payot, 1974)3 to elaborate her own concept of "linguistic colonization," within her line of work in the "history of linguistic ideas" (25–33). Chapter 2, "Novos territórios e línguas desconhecidas," firstly presents her framework for discourse analysis (40–45) based on the works of Michel Pêcheux and Eni P. Orlandi. Then, it analyses the discourse of the initial colonial period taking into account the birth of Portugal as a nation in terms of its linguistic memory from Latin to Portuguese. The last part uses a similar approach to describe the situation of Peninsular Portuguese in terms of the other languages on the Brazilian territory. In Chapter 3, "A questão das línguas e os discursos da colonização," the book analyses the discourse of colonial texts in an attempt to understand the linguistic confrontration of the languages of Brazil. Chapter 4, "Línguas, política e religião," describes the implementation of Portuguese as the official language of Brazil, and the role of the key actor in this process during the 18th-century, the Marquis of Pombal; Chapter 5, "Inglês e português: duas diferentes línguas de colonização" concludes the book with a comparison of the linguistic colonization in the US and Brazil. Mariani's work is of course a monumental enterprise which should be praised [End Page 161] for its ambitious effort, but also read with some reservation, because a project of this proportion has a potential for shortcomings. Mariani analyses the origins of Brazilian Portuguese as a network of elements interrelated in the makeup of natural languages, viz. nation, languages in contact, church and state, language memory, language history, culture, literature, social and the political factors. However, probably for fear of falling into an atomistic analysis, Mariani does not study the morpho-syntax and phonology of the Brazilian Portuguese language from that time period. In addition to her study of language as a network of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, Mariani focuses on discourse analysis to explain the use of indeterminate "subject" and lexicon in colonial texts. The term "subject" is used in her investigation as a general term for grammatical subject, semantic subject (i.e. the actor or agent) and the epistemological subject. In Mariani's interpretation, this indetermination of the subject can be linked to the formation of Brazil as a nation and the origins of Brazilian Portuguese as a language. To counter Mariani's thinking, a different way of explaining...

Structuring Information in English

This paper describes an empirical study of information structure (Functional Sentence Perspective) in the English translation of a German special-language text, an investment report. The focus of the study is on sentence beginnings, where German typically locates known information and English locates the grammatical subject, sometimes preceded by certain types of adverbial phrase. A special-language text is chosen, as the more formulaic nature of special languages may restrict choices in translation, thereby providing a challenging test-bed for the claim that translators tend to resolve syntactic/communicative tensions by prioritizing the syntactic requirements of the target language. The aim of the study is three-fold: to establish whether information structure is carried over from source to target language on a sentence-by-sentence basis; to describe the means by which this is achieved where applicable; and to describe what happens where this is not the case. The analysis draws on a framework adapted from Thompson’s (1978) pragmatic-grammatical language typology continuum. The results of the study show that in the case of both sentence-initial thematic arguments of the verb and adverbial adjuncts, a range of restructuring techniques is used to mirror the perspective of source sentences. While these techniques are not always deployed, changes in perspective in translation do not necessarily disrupt the communicative build-up in the target-text sentence.