Head Of Phrase Research Articles

The morphosyntax of the Hungarian sociative and dissociative suffixes

Abstract This paper examines the morphosyntax of (dis)sociative ‘with(out)’, with particular reference to the facts of Hungarian but with an eye towards universality. The morphological analysis of -stul/stül ‘with’ and -talanul/telenül ‘without’ unpacks these complex forms, utilizing a variety of morphemes treated as heads of phrases in the syntax; the syntax, in turn, represents (dis)sociatives as depictive secondary predications, with a PRO-subject controlled by either the subject or the object of the containing clause. The morphophonology and semantics of sociative -stul and dissociative -talanul unfold compositionally from the syntactic structure. The analysis of (dis)sociatives reveals the benefits of composing complex word-level formatives in syntax, shows that snowballing head movement and phrasal movement are two discrete strategies for syntactic word formation, and sheds new light on several grammatical formatives and their interactions.

Neural representation of words within phrases: Temporal evolution of color-adjectives and object-nouns during simple composition.

In language, stored semantic representations of lexical items combine into an infinitude of complex expressions. While the neuroscience of composition has begun to mature, we do not yet understand how the stored representations evolve and morph during composition. New decoding techniques allow us to crack open this very hard question: we can train a model to recognize a representation in one context or time-point and assess its accuracy in another. We combined the decoding approach with magnetoencephalography recorded during a picture naming task to investigate the temporal evolution of noun and adjective representations during speech planning. We tracked semantic representations as they combined into simple two-word phrases, using single words and two-word lists as non-combinatory controls. We found that nouns were generally more decodable than adjectives, suggesting that noun representations were stronger and/or more consistent across trials than those of adjectives. When training and testing across contexts and times, the representations of isolated nouns were recoverable when those nouns were embedded in phrases, but not so if they were embedded in lists. Adjective representations did not show a similar consistency across isolated and phrasal contexts. Noun representations in phrases also sustained over time in a way that was not observed for any other pairing of word class and context. These findings offer a new window into the temporal evolution and context sensitivity of word representations during composition, revealing a clear asymmetry between adjectives and nouns. The impact of phrasal contexts on the decodability of nouns may be due to the nouns' status as head of phrase-an intriguing hypothesis for future research.

Incorporação nominal e aspecto lexical em Tenetehára (Tupí-Guaraní)

Este trabalho tem por objetivo investigar o mecanismo de Incorporação Nominal na língua Tenetehára e sua relação com as classes aspectuais propostas por Vendler (1967). Nessa língua, o mecanismo de Incorporação Nominal se realiza por meio de dois diferentes contextos morfossintáticos: (i) incorporação total do objeto ao vo e (ii) incorporação do núcleo do sintagma genitivo ao vo. Na incorporação total, quando o objeto direto se incorpora ao predicado verbal, é gerado um predicado que se comporta como um verbo intransitivo. Todavia, nas construções de alçamento do possuidor, apenas parte do sintagma genitivo, a saber seu núcleo, pode se incorporar ao núcleo do vP. O resultado desse processo não altera a estrutura transitiva inicial. Assim, nas construções de alçamento do possuidor não ocorre diminuição de valência, apesar de haver Incorporação Nominal. Ademais, em relação ao plano semântico das construções de alçamento de objeto, o que tenho observado é que os falantes dessa língua costumam apontar duas interpretações distintas, uma para a versão sem Incorporação Nominal outra para a versão com Incorporação Nominal. Assim, no presente artigo, pretendo responder qual organização constante se pode depreender do paradigma de interpretação apresentado. A hipótese que defenderei é que as nuances de sentido entre estes dados têm a ver com a noção de aspecto verbal e as definições de accomplishment e achievement delineadas por Vendler (1967). Neste sentido, minha hipótese é de que as construções sem Incorporação Nominal podem se conformar à classe semântica de predicados verbais de accomplishment, ao passo que as versões com Incorporação Nominal em contextos de alçamento de objeto abrangem obrigatoriamente os predicados de achievement.

Numeral Classifiers in Udi: A Unique Contact-Induced Development among Nakh-Daghestanian?

Abstract Following Stilo’s (2018) study of small-inventory classifier systems in a number of Indo-European, Turkic, Kartvelian and Semitic languages of the Araxes-Iran Linguistic Area, the paper presents an account of numeral classifiers in Udi, a Nakh-Daghestanian (Lezgic) language spoken in northern Azerbaijan. Being a peripheral member of the linguistic area in question, Udi possesses an even more reduced version of a small-classifier system, comprising one optional classifier dänä (Iranian borrowing, most likely via Azerbaijani) used with both human and inanimate nouns. A dedicated classifier for humans is lacking, although there is a word tan (also of Iranian origin) only used after numerals or quantifiers, but predominantly as a noun phrase head. The behaviour of dänä and tan is scrutinized, according to a set of parameters, in both spoken and written textual corpora of the Nizh dialect of Udi. Drawing in the data from the related Nakh-Daghestanian languages, the paper shows that among the languages of the family Udi may be unique in possessing classifiers (albeit as a result of contact), Khinalug possibly being the only other exception.

A natureza das posposições em Tenetehára (Tupí-Guaraní)

Este artigo tem como objetivo oferecer uma análise acerca da concordância estabelecida entre o núcleo do sintagma posposicional e seu complemento na língua Tenetehára (Tupí-Guaraní). Assumo que, em Tenetehára, os complementos das posposições deslocam-se para uma posição de especificador de uma categoria funcional acima de PP com o intuito de checar o Caso oblíquo. Rotulo provisoriamente tal categoria funcional como FP. Assim, no ponto da derivação em que o núcleo Fo, o qual se moveu a partir de Po, encontra-se em uma relação Spec-Head com o especificador de FP, gerado com complemento de Po, é estabelecida a concordância relacional.

Teop – an Oceanic language with multifunctional verbs, nouns and adjectives

Abstract The corpus-based analysis of Teop word classes demonstrates that lexical multifunctionality is not incompatible with the grammatical distinction between verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs, because this distinction does not manifest itself in their syntactic functions of heads of phrases, but in the kinds of modifier the words can combine with. Consequently, the Teop word class system falsifies all word class typologies that assume that a formal differentiation of event, object and property words presupposes a distinctive distribution across the head positions of determiner-marked referential expressions and TAM-marked predicative expressions. In addition to the multifunctionality of verbs, nouns and adjectives, the Teop lexicon shows regular patterns of conversion. The paper concludes with an assessment of the results and the limitations of the corpus-based approach and suggests four topics for further research: (1) the development of elicitation methods to supplement corpus-based analyses; (2) a typology of formally distinguished phrase types; (3) regular patterns of conversion across languages; and (4) possessive comparative constructions.

Prenominal and Postnominal Adjectives in Arabic

This article discusses the status of prenominal and postnominal adjectives in Arabic. It is argued that Kremers’s treatment of adjectives is non-economic as it generates two different syntactic representations for prenominal and postnominal adjectives. It also undermines endocentric properties of phrasal projections and fails to correctly predict the definiteness status of adjectival construct state heads. The article proposes an alternative analysis with a single underlying syntactic structure for both types of adjectives. The need to have nominal features of the specifier (Spec) of the agreement phrase head (Agr) checked and licensed within the determiner phrase (DP) triggers leftward noun phrase (NP) movement, thus forming postnominal adjectives. In prenominal adjectives, however, the strong Definiteness Feature (DEF) on the determiner (D) causes the adjective phrase to raise to the specifier of the DP.

German sentence accents and embedded prosodic phrases

This paper proposes a new approach to German sentence accent assignment and intonational patterns using embedded prosodic domains. The concept of embeddedness is restricted to prosodic domains embedding and differs from Cinque's (1993) syntactic embeddedness. It is shown that both syntax and prosody play a role in sentence accents. Prosodic domains are projected from syntax, and every syntactic maximal projection is mapped into its own domain. However, some peculiarities of sentence accents are better accounted for in terms of prosodic structure itself. I propose extending the phenomenon called ‘integration’, which up to now has been exclusively applied to a sequence of argument and predicate: the head of a phrase can be at the same time the head of a larger phrase containing it. In this new account, integration is a prosodic phenomenon and it applies to a larger set of cases than assumed so far. It is shown that an OT account making use of a few well-motivated constraints can explain the default (unmarked) accent pattern, as well as a large number of more complicated data.

Small Clause as Unified TP-AgrP Structure

This paper is to defend for the unified clause structure in which nonfinite clauses including ECM and small clauses are all analyzed as constituents formed by the combination of two functional categories of TP and AgrP. The main purpose of the unified TP-AgrP approach is to simplify and generalize the various clause structures. For this, I propose the verbal predication mediated by functional heads and copulars. In verbal predication mediated by copulars, the small clause subject occurs in the Spec(TP) position and the small clause predicate is AgrP with the head Agr containing a predication operator or a predicate particle that turns small clause predicate into a predicate, and copulars move from VP to the predicational phrase head, Agr. In this proposal, the structure of the small clause parallels to that of infinitival ECM clause so that both clauses are proposed to be TP-AgrP. Accordingly, the parallel interpretations of ECM and small clauses can be explained by parallel structures. In a unified TP-AgrP structure, we can uniformly say that T is the head of finite clauses as well as infinitival clauses including ECM and small clauses. The small clause predicate is the verbal predication, so it is different from non-verbal predication. Therefore, the proposed verbal predication gives rise to satisfactory solutions to the problems previously raised by non-verbal predication. The proposed uniform structure TP-AgrP also explains the different behavior in predicate raising of ECM and small clauses with the argument that predicate raising is allowed only to A`-position. (Hanbat National University)

Children's relative clause markers in two non-mainstream dialects of English

We examined children's productions of mainstream and non-mainstream relative clause markers (e.g. that, who, which, what, where, Ø) in African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) as a function of three linguistic variables (syntactic role of the marker, humanness of the antecedent and adjacency of the noun phrase head). The data were language samples from 99 typically developing 4–6-year-olds: 61 spoke AAE and 38 spoke SWE. The majority of the children's relative clauses included mainstream markers. Non-mainstream markers were rare, with 3–6% involving Ø subjects and 2% involving what. The children produced who exclusively as subjects and with human antecedents, where exclusively as locatives and with non-human antecedents and Ø and what primarily as direct objects or objects of prepositions and with non-human antecedents. Although AAE- and SWE-speaking children produce some non-mainstream relative markers, the majority of their markers are mainstream. Their use of relative markers is also influenced by linguistic variables in ways that are consistent with a wide range of mainstream and non-mainstream English dialects. These findings show across-dialect similarity in children's relative clauses, even though characterisation of relative clauses as a contrastive dialect structure remains justified.

Pausing preceding and following to in to-infinitives of Obamas G-20 summit speech in London: Read vs spontaneous speech

Research on pausing in read and spontaneous speech has been the concern of researchers in the past few decades. While elicited data reveals that in read speech pauses preceding heads of phrases are produced considerably longer by native speakers of English than pauses following heads in read speech, the situation tends to differ in spontaneous speech. Based on this premise, this study reports on President Obama’s audio recording of the speech he made in the G-20 Summit in London in 2009, thus aiming to describe different silent pausing strategies, as they were employed by the President during his address to an international community. The recordings of both the first part of the speech he made during the opening of his address, assumed as a recitation of previously written text and during question-answer session, when he spontaneously responded to questions of international journalists were measured in milliseconds. Measurement was conducted utilizing Goldwave, the sound analyzing software. Each part was analyzed separately in terms of pauses preceding and following the to particle in to-infinitive phrases, and later, a comparison between the two types, read and spontaneous, was made in order to observe any potential differences/similarities between the two types of speeches. Obtained results display significant differences between pausing preceding and following to in read speech, in that the to particle was kept intact with the infinitive phrase while in spontaneous speech, preceding and following pauses did not display any statistically significant differences in terms of duration. Key words: Pausing, prosody, speech, teaching speaking/reading, principles and parameters theory.

Individuating and Measure Readings of Classifier Constructions: Evidence from Modern Hebrew

Classifier constructions in English such as three glasses of water are ambiguous between an individuating reading, in which the DP denotes plural objects consisting of three individual glasses of water, and a measure reading, in which the DP denotes quantities of water which equal the quantity contained in three glasses. A plausible semantic account of the contrast has been given in Landman 2004. In this account, on the individuating reading, the nominal glasses is the head of the noun phrase and has its expected semantic interpretation, while in the measure reading, three glasses is a modifier expression modifying the nominal head of the phrase water . However, there is little direct syntactic evidence for these constructions in English. Modern Hebrew, however, provides support for Landman's analysis of the dual function of classifier heads. There are two ways to express three glasses of water in Modern Hebrew. The first is via the free genitive construction where a nominal head in absolute form takes a prepositional phrase complement as in salos kosot sel mayim , and the second using the construct state as in salos kosot mayim . The first has only the individuating reading, while the second is ambiguous between the individuating and measure readings. We show that only in the construct state are the syntactic conditions fulfilled which allow the classifier + numeral to be interpreted as a (complex) modifier of the syntactically embedded noun.

Syntaktische Funktionen und Kasusrollen

Sentences normally exhibit a complex meaning and a plain illocution. Both are functions of the phrases of the sentence. The components of a sentence can be retrieved by different means. One option is to start with the primary constituents, nominal phrase and verbal phrase, in terms of traditional grammar subject and predicate. A different way is to refer to valency theory. This approach differentiates between complements and adjuncts. In German the first group is characterised by nouns as heads of phrases, the functions of nouns are indicated by case marking. The second group is prototypically hallmarked by adverbs. But in both groups many different forms occur. The list of complements in German comprises subject, direct and indirect objects, case marked by accusative, dative and genitive, prepositional objects and a set of specialised forms such as directional phrases or concatenations of verbal constructions. Besides common adverbials, special words are to be found, i. e., sentence adverbials and sentence particles. Both types are highly frequent in modern German. - From a universal point of view, on the surface structure of a sentence deep roles - in a generative approach called “theta roles” - become manifest. Case roles are verbalised in different ways according to the means which are available in a specific language. - Analogue to the constituents on the primary level of the sentence, on a secondary layer attributes are found. They are governed by words of the primary level. On the one hand, attributes introduce additional semantic material into the sentence, but on the other hand they lead to more compact structures and make the sentence less explicit. Structurally seen, attributes behave like constituents on a prior level. Recent approaches in linguistics, above all x-bar theory, refer to the structural parallels between all phrases.

Form and function of intonational phrase heads

This study examines the phonetic and phonological features essential to the investigation of the internal structure of the intonational phrase. This is crucial for identifying and explaining the forms and functions of basic intonational units. There are two primary intonational contour modeling theories [Ladd (1983) and references therein]. One suggests that phrasal contours are the basic units of intonation. Within this theory, contour shapes are associated with particular functions or meanings. In contrast, a more recent theory claims that individual tones (i.e., abstract phonological units) are the basic units of intonation, and intonational contours result from the concatenation of adjacent tones in a phrase. Using 756 utterances from the Switchboard and Buckeye corpora, the present study takes a closer look at the basic units that compose the intonational contour. While the nucleus has long been identified as a functionally important part of an intonational phrase, the head of an intonational phrase has not been considered, in kind. This work examines global and local phonetic and phonological features (e.g., intensity, pitch range, pitch height, downstepped tones) of intonational phrase heads in an attempt to better understand their forms and functions.

Locatum and location verbs in Lexeme—Morpheme base morphology

Hale and Keyser's L exical A argument S tructure (LAS) (1993, 1997, 1998) is a currently influential hypothesis of verb derivation based entirely on the syntactic principles of head movement/incorporation (Travis, 1984/Baker, 1988). A specific claim of LAS concerns two types of denominal verbs: locatum, e.g., to saddle, from the syntax of the light verb to provide with, and location, e.g., to shelve, from the light verb to put. This article presents a reanalysis of locatum/location verbs within the framework of L exeme-M orpheme B ase M orphology (LMBM) (Beard, 1995). LMBM, one detailed realization of the type of lexeme-based morphology long advocated by Aronoff (1976, 1994), maintains a strict segregation of open-class lexical categories ( lexemes: adjectives, verbs and nouns) from closed-classes ( morphemes: adpositions, affixes, pronouns, etc.). By eliminating preposition as a lexical head of phrase, Prepositional Phrases (PP) must be reanalyzed as either Noun Phrase (NP) or Adjective Phrase (AP), a distinction which allows us to take advantage of insights provided by Kiparsky (1997), who notes that syntax of the type assumed by Hale and Keyser is incapable of distinguishing non-existent from existing locatum/location verbs. In addition to the syntactic distinctions provided by LMBM, the adoption of the notion telic role, “information about the use or purpose of an object” (Pustejovsky, 1995: 86), as part of the semantic representation of nouns, provides a mechanism to account for Kiparsky's observation that a denominal locatum/location verb must be derived from a “canonical use” of the base (Kiparsky, 1997: 482). In contrast with Hale and Keyser's arguments for syntactic sufficiency and Kiparsky's call for reliance on semantic principles, however, we argue in accord with LMBM's strict modularity that both syntax and semantics have a role.

Nature's Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness

Impar coniugium: an unequal union, a of unlikes, a mixed marriage. The Latin phrase heads an emblem in Geoffrey Whitney's 1586 A Choice of Emblemes, and Other Devises, a popular compendium of images gathered out of sundrie writers.' The emblem itself illustrates an ancient mode of punishment (attributed to tyrants) in which naked criminal/victim is lashed to a corpse and left to die in that coerced embrace (see fig. 1). The margin refers us to book 8 of Aeneid for Virgil's report of such punishment (lines 485-86), which emphasizes part-by-part physical (mis)matching effected by conjoining hand to hand and face to face.2 Whitney's moralizing gloss emphasizes obscene conjunction of binding the quicke, and dead, togeather sure.3 In a forced union across ontological divide of life and death, quicke partner in this couple will pine to death. To say least: a pose of erotic communication is hijacked for abuse as an instrument of juridical violence, and way it simulates desire or intimacy fuels revulsion this punishment works to inspire. A canny punitive power makes such mingling fatal, as if death works its effects by a sinister graft. Caught in a death sentence that inverts norms of attraction and repulsion, nature rebels, but it cannot move.

Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar

We present the design, implementation and simulation results of a psycholinguistic model of human syntactic processing that meets major empirical criteria. The parser operates in conjunction with a lexicalist grammar and is driven by syntactic information associated with heads of phrases. The dynamics of the model are based on competition by lateral inhibition (‘competitive inhibition’). Input words activate lexical frames (i.e. elementary trees anchored to input words) in the mental lexicon, and a network of candidate ‘unification links’ is set up between frame nodes. These links represent tentative attachments that are graded rather than all-or-none. Candidate links that, due to grammatical or ‘treehood’ constraints, are incompatible, compete for inclusion in the final syntactic tree by sending each other inhibitory signals that reduce the competitor's attachment strength. The outcome of these local and simultaneous competitions is controlled by dynamic parameters, in particular by the Entry Activation and the Activation Decay rate of syntactic nodes, and by the Strength and Strength Build-up rate of Unification links. In case of a successful parse, a single syntactic tree is returned that covers the whole input string and consists of lexical frames connected by winning Unification links. Simulations are reported of a significant range of psycholinguistic parsing phenomena in both normal and aphasic speakers of English: (i) various effects of linguistic complexity (single versus double, center versus right-hand self-embeddings of relative clauses; the difference between relative clauses with subject and object extraction; the contrast between a complement clause embedded within a relative clause versus a relative clause embedded within a complement clause); (ii) effects of local and global ambiguity, and of word-class and syntactic ambiguity (including recency and length effects); (iii) certain difficulty-of-reanalysis effects (contrasts between local ambiguities that are easy to resolve versus ones that lead to serious garden-path effects); (iv) effects of agrammatism on parsing performance, in particular the performance of various groups of aphasic patients on several sentence types.

Possessive-like Attribute Constructions in the Oceanic Languages of Northwest Melanesia

In many Oceanic languages in northwest Melanesia the default attribute construction ('a big house') is one whose morphosyntax looks like that of a possession construction: the attribute occupies the (possessed) head slot, the noun the (possessor) modifier slot ('a big one of a house'), that is, the opposite of the cross-linguistic norm and a rare phenomenon worldwide. I briefly describe these constructions, which are morphosyntactically varied, then examine their history, proposing that a major factor in their genesis was the presence in Proto-Oceanic of a small class of adjectival nouns whose reflexes in languages scattered across Oceania either may still behave as noun phrase heads or retain features reflecting this earlier status. The adjectival noun class had a small membership but high token frequency, and provided the template for a pattern extension that in a number of northwest Melanesian languages drew in the much larger adjectival verb class. I also address the question of why this change occurred in northwest Melanesia but not elsewhere in Oceania

Hishkaryana (Carib) Syntax Structure: II

2. The phrase is defined as a sequence or potential sequence of two or more words which function as a unit. The term 'potential sequence' refers to group (i) phrases, which have as nucleus a minimum of one obligatory tagmeme, such as phrase head; the term 'sequence' to group (ii) phrases, which have as nucleus a minimum of two tagmemes, such as focus and orienter. Both of these groups have satellite optional tagmemes of two types: phrase margin 1, manifested by one or more (usually only one) postpositional modifier attributives; and phrase margin 2, manifested by one or more (frequently a sequence of two or three) modal particles. The phrase fills a slot at sentence level (most commonly), within another phrase structure, or within a word. Phrase types are grouped together into hyperclasses in the same way as words, according to external distribution and internal structuring. The primary division follows closely that of word hyperclasses: verb phrase, noun phrase, attributive phrase, locative phrase, and time phrase. There are also: possession phrase hyperclass, quantitative phrase, ideophone phrase, and vocative phrase. 2.1. The verb phrase hyperclass consists of ten classes of verb phrases, which parallel the ten classes of verbs. Each of these verb phrases manifests the predicate tagmeme in each of the first ten sentence types respectively; thus, the intransitive declarative verb phrase (Vx.l) manifests the tagmeme +Intr.Dec.Pr. in the intransitive declarative sentence. All verb phrases are group (i) types, having obligatory nucleus tagmeme,