Head Noun Research Articles

Noun phrase complexity in English integrated writing placement test responses

Research has shown that the use of noun phrases is a salient characteristic favored in academic writing (Biber et al., 2011; Biber & Gray, 2011; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). Although studies have examined the structure of noun phrases, further research is needed to deepen our understanding of noun phrase complexity in order to inform the instructional content of academic writing courses. In response to this need and the call for more empirical evidence for the developmental stages for complexity features proposed by Biber et al. (2011), this study aimed to investigate differences in the use of noun modifiers among second language learners of English at varying proficiency levels. A corpus consisting of 286 essays, written by international students in response to an English integrated writing placement test, was analyzed for grammatical structures of noun phrases. Results indicated that more proficient writers employed significantly more attributive adjectives, prepositional phrases, finite relative clauses with non-animate head nouns, and nonfinite relative clauses. These findings support previous research on the relationship between writing proficiency and the use of noun modifiers and provide implications for both academic writing instruction and the development of writing assessment criteria.

Determinante e doppio determinante nel code-switching arabo-italiano

This article explores the phenomenon of code-switching, specifically focusing on bilingual Arabic-Italian determiner phrases which consist of a determiner, such as an article or a demonstrative, followed by a noun phrase as a complement. The data examined were selected from a corpus of Arabic-Italian spontaneous speech with the aim of (1) comparing and describing the characteristics and differences of the determiner systems of the two languages; (2) illustrating the features of code-switching in determiner phrases and the various types found in the collected data; and (3) studying the mutual influence of the two languages in contact contexts. The data analysis revealed two types of code-switching: switching at the beginning of a determiner phrase, where both the determiner and its complement are in the same language, and switching within a determiner phrase, where the determiner and the head noun are from different languages. This latter category also includes determiner phrases with double determiners, which will be analyzed in detail in this article to discuss the features of this linguistic structure in Arabic-Italian bilingual phrases.

A META ANALYSIS OF NOMINAL PHRASES WITH DRAMA AS HEAD NOUN AND MODIFIER

This study conducts a meta-analysis of nominal phrases with "drama" as the head noun and modifier, aiming to clarify the terminology within the field of drama education and address discrepancies in term usage across various linguistic contexts. Utilizing a quantitative approach, the research analyzes the frequency and usage patterns of drama-related terms in the British National Corpus (BNC) and Google Scholar. Significant disparities were found, indicating broader usage and diverse applications in Google Scholar compared to the BNC. The study highlights the need for standardized terminology to enhance communication and comparability in academic research. By defining key terms such as "drama activity," "drama play," and "educational drama," the analysis contributes to reducing ambiguities and fostering a more coherent dialogue within drama studies, thereby facilitating more effective educational practices and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The morphosyntax of Ezafe in Southern Zazaki

Abstract The present study describes and analyzes the morphosyntactic expression of the Southern Zazaki Ezafe – a linking element in the nominal domain common among Iranian languages. This morpheme is used to link modifiers (i.e. adjectives and possessors) to their head nouns as follows: n-ez1 mod1-ez2 mod2-ez3 mod3. Southern Zazaki, like other languages of the Kurdish region (and unlike, e.g. Persian) reflects phi-features (and case) of the head noun on each Ezafe morpheme in a noun phrase. This paper is focussed around two morphosyntactic puzzles that arise in Southern Zazaki. First, while the Ezafe marker in general reflects the case of the entire DP, the presence of a possessor produces invariant oblique case, regardless of the case value assigned to the DP externally (Paul, Ludwig. 2009. Zazaki. In Gernot Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian languages, 545–586. Routledge; Todd, Terry Lynn. 2002. A grammar of Dimili. Also known as Zaza. Stockholm: Iremet Forlag; Toosarvandani, Maziar & Coppe van Urk. 2014. The syntax of nominal concord: What Ezafe in Zazaki shows us. Proceedings of NELS 43(2). 209–220 i.a.). Second, Southern Zazaki uniquely employs a separate series of “D-form” Ezafe morphemes in certain syntactic contexts (Keskin, Mesut. 2010. Zazaca üzerine notlar (Notes on Zazaki). In Şükrü Aslan (ed.), Herkesin Bildiugi Sır: Dersim. Iletisim, 221–244; Paul, Ludwig. 2009. Zazaki. In Gernot Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian languages, 545–586. Routledge; Todd, Terry Lynn. 2002. A grammar of Dimili. Also known as Zaza. Stockholm: Iremet Forlag; Werner, Brigitte. 2018. Forms and meanings of the Ezafe in Zazaki. In Saloumeh Gholami (ed.), Endangered Iranian languages. Reichert Verlag i.a.). This study aims to provide a cohesive analysis of Ezafe in Southern Zazaki both with respect to its general phi- and case-sensitive realizations, as well as the distribution of D-forms.

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.

Does interlanguage grammar project intermediate categories? Evidence of partial representation from one‐substitution by Chinese learners of English

AbstractThis study investigates how prepositional phrases within English noun phrases (e.g., the student of physics from Italy) are represented and processed by advanced Chinese‐speaking learners of English (henceforth L2ers). Using grammaticality judgment tasks and self‐paced reading tasks, we aim to examine the offline performance and the real‐time processing of English NP‐internal PPs in relation to the head nouns. To this end, two groups of participants were instructed to provide judgments of testing materials and to respond on‐line to experimental stimuli containing the proform one. Results indicate that highly proficient L2ers processed English NP‐internal PPs utterly differently from English controls in that they demonstrated almost no sensitivity to the existence of PPs as complements following one, mostly without consciously distinguishing them from PP adjuncts. To account for L2ers’ response patterns, we propose a partial representation hypothesis (PRH), claiming that L2ers tend to disregard intermediate categories containing PP‐complements in English NPs, thus only partially representing syntactic constituents of the target language. As a structural explanation, PRH awaits further corroboration and/or falsification from more empirical studies.

A three-way distinction in definiteness: sortal, individual, and functional concepts in Réyoné

Abstract This article offers a case study of a definiteness split in a language in which three different types of nominal expressions are available for definite descriptions. The article contributes ample empirical data and comprises a close investigation of the patterns found in Reunion Creole (Réyoné), the language under study. Réyoné displays one kind of contrast also found in other languages which is frequently analyzed in terms of semantic versus pragmatic definiteness (following Löbner) or uniqueness versus familiarity (following Schwarz). What sets Réyoné apart from other languages though, is that it features a determiner that is dedicated to functional concepts. The language thereby distinguishes individual from functional concepts: the former type (the sun; the News) is exclusively expressed by bare noun phrases, while functional concepts – definite descriptions with functional head nouns (prefect of y; head of y), including a subtype of bridging reference, as well as compositionally created functional relations such as superlatives – are realized by lo-marked noun phrases. These facts offer strong support for Löbner’s theory. The article also discusses demonstrative descriptions, which have already been reported to play a role in certain definiteness splits, and which are obligatory with sortal concepts in Réyoné. It is argued that demonstratives are pragmatic definites.

The Continuity of Head Nouns: The Difference in Relativizability between Korean and Chinese

The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy cannot explain the difference in relativizability between Chinese and Korean in authentic discourse. Korean exhibits a higher preference for relativization compared to Chinese and this article aims to account for this difference from the perspective of topic continuity. Specifically, the continuity of head nouns within relative clauses is stronger in Korean than in Chinese. By analyzing the parameters of referential distance and potential interference, this study finds that the head nouns in Korean relative clauses display a broader range on the continuum of continuity compared to those in Chinese relative clauses. Furthermore, the difference in the strength of continuity of head nouns between Chinese and Korean relative clauses is attributed to the typological distinction between the Component-Integral Languages and Component-Metonymic Languages postulated within the framework of the Event-Domain Cognitive Model.

Matrices de completivas de complemento del nombre: representación bibliográfica y características

Research on noun-dependent subordinate clauses is scarce. This study aims, therefore, to offer an overview of the representation of these head nouns in the grammatical tradition and to contrast it with real corpus uses (CORPES XXI), as well as to describe some of their semantic and morphological features. The analysis of said features in the head nouns that appear in fifteen reference works and those documented in CORPES XXI made it possible to determine that the traditional representation and the corpus examples differ in terms of variety, derivational characteristics, and semantic types, which implies a lack of representativeness in the selected bibliography regarding its use.

Relativization in Likpakpaln (Ghana): New typological perspectives on the Mabia (Gur) languages

AbstractThis article provides the first systematic account of relativization in Likpakpaln, an understudied Mabia (Gur) language of Ghana. Broadly speaking, Likpakpaln features two types of relative clauses: restrictive and non-restrictive. Both types of relative clauses are finite and marked by a relative pronoun as well as a clausal definite determiner. The first type is always headed by an indefinite noun. The second is invariably headed by a definite head noun, is additionally marked by a prosodic break, and is usually under focus. The relative pronoun is a composite form comprised of a noun class agreement marker and an invariant relative marker. A number of the features of relative clauses in Likpakpaln align it with other Mabia languages of the region, whereas others distinguish it from these languages. This analysis situates Likpakpaln within its genealogical and areal context while providing new typological perspectives on the Mabia languages as a whole.

The relative clause resisting unification

Abstract Cinque (2020) presents a unified theory positing that various types of relative clauses (RCs) originate from a single, double-headed universal structure via raising or matching. The Frame Noun-Modifying Clause (FRC) as described and analyzed by Matsumoto et al. (2017a, 2017b) presents a significant challenge to Cinque's framework, as it does not conform to any of Cinque's identified RC types, which include amount RCs, kind(-defining) RCs, restrictive RCs and non-restrictive RCs. The FRC eludes derivation via the proposed matching or raising mechanisms. Determining the semantic link between the head noun and the FRC, as well as its external merger position, remains elusive. One might suggest that inserting additional material into the FRC, which incorporates a plausible internal head, could clarify their connection. This approach falls short of providing a systematic and coherent syntactic criterion, relying instead on semantic intuition that lacks operational reliability.

A collostructional approach to Japanese noun-modifying clause construction use and acquisition: a learner corpus study

Abstract Japanese features a general noun-modifying clause construction (NMCC) with a more versatile range of semantic and pragmatic interpretations than equivalent constructions in other languages. Motivated by the learning challenge NMCCs pose to Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners, this article examines speech data from the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS) to compare learner use of NMCCs against a large L1 Japanese corpus. Instances of the construction from both corpora were analyzed to identify high-frequency part-of-speech categories and subcategories in the modifying clause predicate and head noun slots. A simple collexeme analysis was then employed to identify strongly attracted and repelled lexical items among those identified in realizations of the construction. Taken together, findings from these analyses revealed an important connection between the semantic weight of head nouns in NMCCs and the idiomaticity of the construction, with learner productions demonstrating a tendency toward heavy head nouns. This study lays the groundwork for future research seeking to explore the NMCC at different levels of granularity and to improve its treatment in JFL pedagogical materials.

Intransparent-Gap Relatives in Japanese

Abstract In the present article, we describe what we call Intransparent-Gap Relatives (IGRs) in Japanese. In IGRs, a gap is located within the relative clause, and the head noun appears outside the relative clause. Unlike the standard head-external relatives, the gap in IGRs is not transparently associated with the head noun, but they are mediated through a metonymic relation. We propose a formal account of IGRs in terms of incremental parsing in Dynamic Syntax: an IGR string is processed in a left-to-right manner, and a semantic structure is progressively built up. This account unifies the standard head-external relatives and IGRs, relegating their differences to the ways in which the head noun is parsed and construed against the relative clause structure. Confirmation of this analysis comes from cross-constructional and cross-linguistic considerations. First, the analysis predicts that a metonymic reading is available in relatives but not in other rightward-displacement constructions, such as clefts and postposing. Second, the analysis suggests that IGRs are possible in languages such as Japanese and Korean, where the relative clause is processed before the head noun, but not in languages such as English and French, where the head noun is processed before the relative clause.

Children and adults privilege linguistic over visual information when creating comparison classes for prenominal gradable adjectives

Mastering the semantics of gradable adjectives is a complex acquisition task, since their interpretation requires the calculation of a threshold relative to a comparison class. Context plays a role in determining the comparison class in multiple ways; empirical research has focused on non-linguistic cues, such as world knowledge and visual context, and less on linguistic cues, such as the modified head noun. The present study is the first to examine how preschoolers and adults use the taxonomic category encoded by the modified head noun as well as visual cues to interpret relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable adjectives. Using existing objects from different taxonomic categories (basic-level and superordinate-level), we developed a picture-choice task that allowed us to infer the comparison class and the threshold from participants’ choices. Forty-three children (aged 3 to 5) and 26 adults, all monolingual German-speaking, were tested. Confirming previous research, children, like adults, showed a context-sensitive interpretation of relative but not of absolute gradable adjectives. The taxonomic label was preferred to visual cues in creating the comparison class already by age three; this advantage of linguistic over non-linguistic information was also present in the adults. We explain this finding with the privileged role of information provided by the taxonomic label: the modified head noun encodes the cognitive representation of an object category and the corresponding taxonomic hierarchy. Accordingly, this representation is easily accessible while creating the comparison class, which provides further evidence that language is a powerful tool to modulate our mental computations.

How Is a “Kitchen Chair” like a “Farm Horse”? Exploring the Representation of Noun-Noun Compound Semantics in Transformer-based Language Models

Abstract Despite the success of Transformer-based language models in a wide variety of natural language processing tasks, our understanding of how these models process a given input in order to represent task-relevant information remains incomplete. In this work, we focus on semantic composition and examine how Transformer-based language models represent semantic information related to the meaning of English noun-noun compounds. We probe Transformer-based language models for their knowledge of the thematic relations that link the head nouns and modifier words of compounds (e.g., KITCHEN CHAIR: a chair located in a kitchen). Firstly, using a dataset featuring groups of compounds with shared lexical or semantic features, we find that token representations of six Transformer-based language models distinguish between pairs of compounds based on whether they use the same thematic relation. Secondly, we utilize fine-grained vector representations of compound semantics derived from human annotations, and find that token vectors from several models elicit a strong signal of the semantic relations used in the compounds. In a novel “compositional probe” setting, where we compare the semantic relation signal in mean-pooled token vectors of compounds to mean-pooled token vectors when the two constituent words appear in separate sentences, we find that the Transformer-based language models that best represent the semantics of noun-noun compounds also do so substantially better than in the control condition where the two constituent works are processed separately. Overall, our results shed light on the ability of Transformer-based language models to support compositional semantic processes in representing the meaning of noun-noun compounds.

Spatial Locative Relativization in Three African Varieties of Portuguese: Unity in Diversity and Diversity in Unity

This paper investigates the formation of spatial locative relativization in three African varieties of Portuguese. While research on relative constructions in Portuguese has deserved considerable attention in the literature, it tends to focus on the European and Brazilian varieties, with locative relativization being only marginally addressed. Using data extracted from spoken corpora of contemporary, urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican, and Santomean Portuguese, we aim to discuss whether there is a correlation between syntactic and semantic variables and the selection of the two main locative relative morphemes, onde ‘where’ and que ‘that’. Overall, the three varieties at stake behave similarly with respect to the analyzed syntactic variables and follow the tendency found in Portuguese varieties toward the use of pied-piping and P-chopping as the dominant relativization mechanisms, independent of the syntactic relation between the antecedent and the relative clause. Semantically, we identified some fine-grained differences between the three varieties, with Santomean Portuguese generally being the outlier or one of the outliers. Crucially, definiteness of the head noun stands out as the one variable that plays a major role in the selection of the relative morpheme: [−definite] head nouns show a proportionally higher preference for que in both AP and STP, which is particularly visible with bare nouns in the latter. This motivates the hypothesis that less specified head nouns show a preference for the un(der)specified relative morpheme que. We further show that the role of language contact is at best very limited.

How semantics works in Chinese relative clause processing: insights from eye tracking.

Recent years have witnessed much research on semantic analysis and syntactic anatomy in ordinary language processing. However, it is still a matter of considerable debate about when and how the semantic integration of single word meanings works and interacts with syntax during on-line comprehension. This study, in an eye-tracking paradigm, took 38 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese as the participants and took Chinese relative clauses as stimuli to figure out the functions of semantics by investigating the conditioning semantic factors influencing and governing the word order variation of Chinese relative clauses during different processing stages. Accordingly, this study manipulated two syntactic variables, i.e., relative clause type and the position of the numeral-classifier sequence (NCL) in the relative clause, as well as a semantic variable, i.e., the abstractness of the head noun that the relative clause modified. Specifically, the study addressed two questions: (1) when semantics is activated and interacts with syntax and (2) how semantics affects syntax during the time course of Chinese relative clause processing. The results indicated that: (1) Semantics was activated and interacted with syntax during the early and late processing stages of Chinese relative clauses, which challenged the sequential order of syntactic and semantic processes, and supported the claims of the Concurrent Processing Model. (2) The syntactic order of the Chinese relative clause was affected by the semantic information of the head noun that the clause modified. Object-extraction relative clauses (ORCs) had a conjunction preference for the order "an object relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." Instead, the subject-extraction relative clause (SRC) which modified a concrete noun (CN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "numeral-classifier sequence preceding the subject relative clause and the head noun," while the subject-extraction relative clause which modified an abstract noun (AN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "subject relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." The findings of this study were evaluated in light of the perspectives of truth value semantics of the syntactic components, the semantic compatibility of numeral-classifier sequence and its modified noun as well as the discourse functions of outer modifier nominals and inner modifier nominals.

The Interaction Between Morphosyntactic Features and the Performance of Machine Translation Tools: The Case of Google Translate, Systran, and Microsoft Bing in English-Arabic Translation

The present study compares the performance of three machine translation tools in English-Arabic translation to answer the questions of (a) whether the three machine translation tools, Google Translate, Systran and Microsoft Bing can be ordered in a hierarchy of performance, and (b) whether they can handle lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences. Using a number of constructed and selected English sentences, the morphosyntactic features of number, gender, case, definiteness, and humanness, agreement between cardinal numerals and their head nouns, lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences are used to test the three machine translation tools for performance. The results show that (a) as far as handling the morphosyntactic features of subject-verb agreement in Standard Arabic, all three machine translation tools perform equally well, and no machine translation tool seems to perform significantly better than the other two (b) some marked features (e.g. dual number and humanness) of SA seem to pose some problems for machine translation tools, and (c) lexically and structurally ambiguous sentences and garden path sentences seem to be the most challenging sentences for the three machine translation tools.

Movement and interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses

This paper addresses the semantic typology of internally-headed relative clauses using a case study of two West African languages, Atchan (Kwa) and Bùlì (Gur). Both languages exhibit syntactically-similar relatives, involving overt movement of the head. However, quantifiers on the head are interpreted differently in the two languages. In Atchan, quantifiers on the relative-clause head take the entire relative clause as their restriction; in Bùlì, quantifiers on the head take only the head noun as their restriction. I propose that the former is interpreted via NP reconstruction and Trace Conversion, the latter via DP reconstruction. The empirical difference between these two languages motivates a revision to the typology developed by Grosu (2012), which tightly links head movement and the Atchan-like quantifier interpretation pattern. This work further supports a a modular view in which languages can adopt different strategies to interpret movement-involving structures.

The Effect of Subordination on Antecedent Prominence in Anaphora Processing

One important factor affecting anaphor resolution is the prominence of its antecedent in the discourse. Discourse Prominence Theory (Gordon & Hendrick, 1998) defines antecedent prominence in terms of its height in the phrase structure tree. Two reading time experiments were conducted to test this theory by investigating the effect of subordination on antecedent prominence both within and between sentences. Both experiments had a 2×2 design with Structure (intra- vs. inter-sentential) and Anaphor (pronoun vs. repeated name) as independent variables, and differed in the degree of subordination of the antecedent. The results of the experiments show a main effect of Anaphor such that clauses/sentences containing pronouns were read faster than those containing repeated names, but no interaction between Structure and Anaphor. These results indicate that the repeated name penalty occurs no matter how deeply the antecedent is embedded within subordinate clauses. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that antecedent prominence is not determined by its height in the phrase structure as claimed by Discourse Prominence Theory but rather may be related to the syntactic function (subject) and status (head noun) of antecedents.