Lexical Noun Research Articles

Discourse Reference Is Bimodal: How Information Status in Speech Interacts with Presence and Viewpoint of Gestures

ABSTRACTSpeakers use speech and gestures to represent referents in discourse. Depending on referents’ information status, in speech speakers will vary richness of expression (e.g., lexical noun phrase [NP]/pronoun), nominal definiteness (indefinite/definite), and grammatical role (subject/object). This study tested whether these three linguistic markers of information status interact with presence of gestures and gestural viewpoint (observer/character). The results show that gestures are more frequent with less accessible referents expressed with richer spoken forms but that richness of expression does not interact with viewpoint. In contrast, nominal definiteness and grammatical role interact with both presence and viewpoint of gestures. Gestures occur mainly with indefinite lexical NPs and objects. Character viewpoint gestures occur mainly with indefinite lexical NPs and objects plus predicates. The results shed light on when and how speakers use gestures in connected discourse and specifically highlight the discursive function of gestural viewpoint.

Left dislocation in main and subordinate clauses

Left dislocation is a common feature in the Nordic languages. In main clauses, a lexical noun phrase is positioned in a dislocated position in the left periphery, while a pronoun occurs in the clause-internal, prefield position, i.e., in the position preceding the finite verb. This is described by Faarlund et al (1997:904-5) for Norwegian, Teleman et al (1999 4:440–447) for Swedish and Hansen and Heltoft (2011:1828) for Danish.

Partitivity and case marking in Turkish and related languages

The paper discusses the conditions for case marking on partitive constructions in direct object position in Turkish and some related languages. We focus on Turkish and then turn to some details of corresponding constructions in some other Turkic languages and in Standard Mongolian. Turkish exhibits Differential Object Marking, which primarily depends on the semantic-pragmatic factor of specificity. Partitive constructions with the ablative for the superset in Turkish come in different forms, depending on how the subset expression is realized: (a) by a lexical noun as head, (b) by the classifier tane ‘item’, functioning as a “dummy noun”, and (c) by a numeral, quantifier or adjective. Case marking of the direct object is optional for (a), and obligatory for (most instances of) (c). This type of obligatory case marking is dependent on the obligatory marking of the adjective, quantifier or numeral with a default 3rd person singular agreement suffix, which then requires case marking. Construction (b) does not allow for case marking, when the classifier is bare; when the classifier is followed by the default 3rd person singular agreement marking, that marking requires obligatory case morphology, just like in construction (c). We hypothesize that structural case marking can either express the semantic-pragmatic condition of specificity in terms of referential anchoring or it must obey a formal condition, namely the requirement of the agreement suffix to be followed by overt case. The languages we have studied show an interesting micro-variation. They differ (among other properties) with respect to classifiers – in particular, with respect to whether they have [+human] classifiers or not. In addition, one language among the languages under investigation, namely Kirghiz, substitutes the agreement marker in its function as a filler of the partitive’s nominal head by a different marker: a morpheme expressing a set. Here, the agreement marker is used to express specificity, given that its presence is not required for formal reasons. In direct object partitive constructions with subset expressions that are expressed as full noun phrase/lexical noun heads (option (a) above), overt accusative case indicates specificity in most of the investigated languages. In options (b) and (c), the investigated languages provide different patterns when marking the referential status of the partitive heads, thus indicating the variation among these languages with respect to the nominal category feature of the partitive heads involved.This article is part of the Special Collection: Partitives

Lexical plurals through meronymy and hyperonymy

This study uses meronymy and hyperonymy as semantic criteria applied to French collective nouns (CollNs) and lexical plural nouns (LPNs) in the issue of noun classification. After having outlined the semantic properties of CollNs and explained their links with meronymy and hyperonymy, LPNs are tested in different glosses related to these two relationships. These tests outline that CollNs and LPNs form two kinds of nouns that could hardly converge. They also enlighten the way the different subclasses of LPNs match with meronymy and hyperonymy.

More Than Person Deixis: Uses of Ya (丫) among Native and Non-Native Beijingers

This paper examines how the morpheme ya is used among native and non-native speakers of the Beijing dialect. It traces the development of ya from a lexical noun to a third person singular pronoun, initially with derogatory meaning, and then extending into a social identity marker signaling familiarity and intimacy. Evidence from both production and perception studies also shows that the use of ya has extended to other regions, with non-native uses of ya emerging in the process. In addition to native vs. non-native use, other factors also contribute to differences in the use of ya constructions. Among the factors identified in this study are age group, gender, and length of residency in Beijing.

Input Subject Diversity Enhances Early Grammatical Growth: Evidence from a Parent-Implemented Intervention

ABSTRACTPurpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children’s sentence diversity.Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21–30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained at 21, 24, 27, and 30 months. Treatment parents (n = 19) received instruction on strategies designed to increase lexical NP subjects (e.g., The baby is sleeping.). Instruction consisted of one group education session and two individual coaching sessions which took place when children were approximately 22–23 months of age.Results: Treatment substantially increased parents’ lexical NP subject tokens and types (ηp2 ≥ .45) compared to controls. Children’s number of different words was a significant predictor of sentence diversity in the analyses of group treatment effects and individual input effects. Treatment condition was not a significant predictor of treatment effects on children’s sentence diversity, but parents’ lexical NP subject types was a significant predictor of children’s sentence diversity growth, even after controlling for children’s number of different words over time.Conclusions: These findings establish a link between subject diversity in parent input and children’s early grammatical growth, and the feasibility of using relatively simple strategies to alter this specific grammatical property of parent language input.

Typology, documentation, description, and typology

Typology, Documentation, Description, and Typology Marianne Mithun University of California, Santa Barbara Abstract If the goals of linguistic typology, are, as described by Plank (2016): (a) to chart linguistic diversity (b) to seek out order or even unity in diversity knowledge of the current state of the art is an invaluable tool for almost any linguistic endeavor. For language documentation and description, knowing what distinctions, categories, and patterns have been observed in other languages makes it possible to identify them more quickly and thoroughly in an unfamiliar language. Knowing how they differ in detail can prompt us to tune into those details. Knowing what is rare cross-linguistically can ensure that unusual features are richly documented and prominent in descriptions. But if documentation and description are limited to filling in typological checklists, not only will much of the essence of each language be missed, but the field of typology will also suffer, as new variables and correlations will fail to surface, and our understanding of deeper factors behind cross-linguistic similarities and differences will not progress. 1. Typological awareness as a tool Looking at the work of early scholars such as Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, it is impossible not to be amazed at the richness of their documentation and the insight of their descriptions of languages so unlike the more familiar languages of Europe. It is unlikely that Boas first arrived on Baffin Island forewarned to watch for velar/uvular distinctions and ergativity. Now more than a century later, an awareness of what distinctions can be significant in languages and what kinds of systems recur can provide tremendous advantages, allowing us to spot potentially important features sooner and identify patterns on the basis of fewer examples. As typological findings become finer-grained, they serve as ever sharper tools for observation and analysis. It is now well known, for example, that languages are not simply nominative/accusative, ergative/absolutive, or agent/patient; different areas of grammar often show different patterns. Where there are differences, we know where to start looking for sub- patterns: pronominal systems are more likely to show nominative/accusative or agent/patient patterning, even if lexical noun phrases show ergative/absolutive patterning, but not the reverse, for example. We know, furthermore, that differential argument marking is not uncommon across languages. Rather than standing by helplessly when our ergative/absolutive patterns seem to founder, we can jump right into searching for principles behind the apparent exceptions. Perhaps only animate or identifiable (definite) expressions can carry absolutive marking, or can even have absolutive status at all.

Pick it up: a look at referential devices in Estonian child-directed speech

This paper compares the forms of expression of core verbal arguments in Estonian child-directed speech (CDS) with those in Estonian speech between adults (ADS). The data, consisting of nearly 600 utterances, is taken from a mother speaking to her two-year-old child, and two adult women speaking to each other. The analysis confirms the observation that one-on-one conversation with toddlers includes a reduced number of declarative sentences (43% vs. 62.5% in the ADS sample), in favor of imperatives and interrogatives. Leaving out the unexpressed subjects of imperatives, we find that CDS contains 20% more overt arguments than ADS, and in the object argument role, nearly 30% more. Avoidance of ellipsis and a preference for lexical (rather than pronominal) noun phrases characterises the CDS in our sample; the data analysed support the principles of Preferred Argument Structure, aligning grammatical role, morphosyntactic form and pragmatic prominence, with some peculiarities accounting for the specific character of mother-child interaction.

Person shift at narrative peak

Narrators like to highlight important events in their stories. In some languages, they may shift to first- or second-person pronouns to refer to third-person referents in order to do so. Such pronoun shifts show functional parallels with tense shifts like the historical present, as both highlight events through shifts in deictic categories. Longacre (1983:138–39) discusses the parallels between person and tense shifts in his account of narrative peak, that is, the formal marking of important narrative events. Labov (1972) analyzes similar strategies as internal evaluations. Person shifts constitute a phenomenon of the discourse-syntax interface and present a clear case of discourse structure influencing grammar. Both person shifts themselves and their motivation in narrative structure have been little investigated. The article reviews person shifts in a number of languages reported in the literature and analyzes in detail the characteristics of this discourse strategy in Saliba-Logea, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The study contributes to the growing body of research on pronouns and person markers, and on referring expressions more generally, by adding a new angle of investigation. Previous studies have tended to focus on the morphosyntactic choices of referring expressions and their motivations, that is, on the choices between lexical nouns, free vs. bound pronouns, and so forth. The present study focuses on the paradigmatic choices between different person forms within one and the same morphosyntactic expression type. In doing so it offers a new perspective on pronoun choice and the factors influencing it crosslinguistically. While some types of person shift appear to be rare, overall, the strategy of person shift at narrative peak seems to constitute a solid crosslinguistic phenomenon.

Overexplicit Referent Tracking in L2 English: Strategy, Avoidance, or Myth?

The tendency of intermediate and advanced second language speakers to underuse pronouns and zero anaphora has been characterized as a developmental stage of overexplicitness, yet little consideration has been given to whether learners create sufficient contexts for their use. This study analyzed references across eight degrees of accessibility, revealing that this did not account for infrequent pronoun use by Chinese learners of English. Further analysis revealed that participants were seldom overexplicit when referring to highly accessible individuals, particularly those that represented continued topics, but were significantly more likely than native speakers to use lexical noun phrases elsewhere, particularly for main characters. This is discussed in relation to a possible role of overexplicitness as a clarity‐based communication strategy.

Pronominal datives

Based on a large corpus of dative constructions in Hebrew, we propose that dative-marked pronominals manifest a facilitated path from adjunct to argument. Since datives tend to be pronominal, adding them onto existing argument structures avoids a clash with the Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) Quantity constraint against more than one lexical noun phrase per clause. Supporting a more fluid adjunct/argument distinction, our first claim is that different Hebrew datives are grammaticized as arguments to different degrees. We then demonstrate a correlation between the degree of grammaticization of the dative as an argument and pronoun/lexical ratios. We show that incipient grammaticization phases involve virtually exclusive use of pronominal datives, but deeper grammaticization phases allow increased use of lexical nouns, within the constraints of PAS. Thus, it is pronouns that blaze the path from adjunct to argument status.

Limits on Allomorphy: A Case Study in Nominal Suppletion

Reporting on a study of 79 languages (see appendix B), I argue that (morpho-)syntactic structure plays a crucial role in two observed asymmetries: (i) in nouns number-driven root suppletion is common while case-driven root suppletion is virtually unattested, and (ii) in contrast to lexical nouns, pronouns commonly supplete for both number and case. I propose that the structural difference between lexical nouns and pronouns, combined with locality effects as proposed in Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle and Marantz 1993), account for the two asymmetries, which raises the question whether these can be captured in frameworks that deny that hierarchical syntactic structure plays a role in the morphology, such as Word and Paradigm approaches (e.g. Anderson 1992, Stump 2001).

The Auditory Comprehension of Wh-Questions in Aphasia: Support for the Intervener Hypothesis.

This study examines 3 hypotheses about the processing of wh-questions in both neurologically healthy adults and adults with Broca's aphasia. We used an eye tracking while listening method with 32 unimpaired participants (Experiment 1) and 8 participants with Broca's aphasia (Experiment 2). Accuracy, response time, and online gaze data were collected. In Experiment 1, we established a baseline for how unimpaired processing and comprehension of 4 types of wh-question (subject- and object-extracted who- and which-questions) manifest. There was no unambiguous support found for any of the 3 hypotheses in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2 with the Broca's participants, however, we found significantly lower accuracy, slower response times, and increased interference in our gaze data in the object-extracted which-questions relative to the other conditions. Our results provide support for the intervener hypothesis, which states that sentence constructions that contain an intervener (a lexical noun phrase) between a displaced noun phrase and its gap site result in a significant processing disadvantage relative to other constructions. We argue that this hypothesis offers a compelling explanation for the comprehension deficits seen in some participants with Broca's aphasia.

The syntax of anaphoric possessives in Hungarian

AbstractStarting with the seminal work of Szabolcsi, morphologically unmarked and Dative-marked possessors in Hungarian have been the subject of rich investigation. Anaphoric possessive constructions, however, have remained poorly researched. In these possessives the possessor bears the mysterious-ésuffix and the covert possessum is interpreted under identity with an antecedent. This paper presents new evidence in favour of Bartos’ (2001) analysis of anaphoric possessives, which holds that-éis the Genitive case. I further argue that anaphoric possessives in Hungarian involve a pro-form rather than deletion of a lexical noun, and this accounts for the restricted modification of the possessum.

Pronoun processing in anglophone late L2 learners of French: Behavioral and ERP evidence

Abstract This study investigated offline, behavioral, and online cortical responses to French clitic and strong pronouns by two groups of anglophone learners (L2) and native French controls. English in situ object pronouns behave morphosyntactically like full lexical noun phrases (I saw Bill/I saw him), whereas in French they are cliticized to the verb (J'ai vu Guillaume/Je l'ai vu/*J'ai vu le/lui). We used ERPs, known to be sensitive to word order and morphological violations in natives, to investigate neural responses to word order violations of in situ pronouns. Results indicate native sensitivity to ungrammatical in situ pronoun placement in offline (grammaticality judgment (GJ)), as well as online end-of-sentence and ERP responses, notably a robust P600. L2 groups demonstrated distinct capacities according to level. Both high- and low-intermediates showed online cortical sensitivity to ungrammatical in situ prounouns, producing a P600 in response to such violations (though with distributions that sometimes differed from native controls). However, on behavioral measures the L2 groups differed, both from natives and from each other. Native controls correctly rejected more in situ clitic and strong pronouns than both the L2 groups, and the high-intermediate group correctly rejected more than the low-intermediate group. For natives, the similarity of online/offline responses confirmed a grammaticalized representation and processing of pronouns. Both groups of learners showed a stronger ERP response to in situ pronoun placement than behavioral data would suggest. This is especially true for low-intermediate learners who, despite high rates of acceptance of strong pronouns/clitics in situ, showed a cortical response in the P600 window though without the canonical topography of the native response. While both learner groups are apparently using (at least some) L1 English settings for pronoun placement, their cortical response clearly demonstrates unconscious increasing sensitivity to French parameters.

Hybrid Model of Automated Anaphora Resolution

Anaphora resolution has proven to be a very difficult problem of natural language processing, and it is useful in discourse analysis, language understanding and processing, information exaction, machine translation and many more. This paper represents a system that instead of using a monolithic architecture for resolving anaphora, use the hybrid model which combines the constraint-based and preferences-based architectures, each uses a different source of knowledge, and proves effective on theoretical and computational basis. An algorithm identifies both inter-sentential and intra-sentential antecedents of “Third person pronoun anaphors”, “Pleonastic it”, and “Lexical noun phrase anaphora”. The algorithm use Charniak parser (parser05Aug16) as an associated tool, and it relays on the output generated by it. Salience measures derived from parse tree, in order to find out accurate antecedents from the list of potential antecedents. We have tested the system extensively on 'Reuters Newspaper corpus'.

Toy Talk: Simple Strategies to Create Richer Grammatical Input

The purpose of this initial feasibility study was to determine whether brief instruction in toy talk would change grammatical properties of adult language, specifically 3rd person lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects. Eighteen college students participated in the study. The use of 3rd person subjects was examined before and after instruction on toy talk strategies (i.e., talk about the toys, give the item its name). Change in the input informativeness for tense (i.e., the proportion of verb forms marked for tense out of all verb forms) was also examined, although adults were not instructed on use of tense/agreement morphemes. Following instruction, statistically significant increases with large effect sizes were observed for use of 3rd person subjects, lexical NP subjects, and input informativeness for tense (Cohen's d = 1.20, 2.08, and 0.89, respectively). These findings demonstrate that young adults can learn these simple strategies with relatively brief instruction, and the use of toy talk also changes the richness of tense/agreement marking in adult language input. Considerations for incorporating toy talk into existing language modeling practices and future plans for evaluating the efficacy of toy talk are discussed.

An Innovated Possessor Suffix and Category in Central Choiseul

Oceanic languages typically display possessor-indexing suffixes that distinguish the usual four Oceanic person categories, along with at least singular and plural. However, a group of languages of central Choiseul (Solomon Islands), including Ririo, Babatana, and Sisiqa, display only three possessor-indexing suffixes. Two reflect Proto-Oceanic forms and index 1 sg and 2 sg possessors. The third, an innovated form, indexes all other person number categories (that is, 3 sg and all nonsingular categories). This paper investigates the formal and structural characteristics of this innovated non-1/2 sg suffix. It examines the phenomenon in each of the three languages, including allomorphy of the suffix, and the manner in which person and number categories are expressed in the presence of the innovated suffix. In terms of the former, it finds each language displays different allomorphy patterns, with both - e and - a occurring, along with - i when following a high vowel. Various other factors are at play in one or more languages, including vowel harmony and presuffix vowel loss. In terms of the coding of non-1/2 sg person and number categories, the paper finds that the innovated suffix licenses a possessor NP that may contain a lexical noun or dependent pronoun. However, in the absence of an overt possessor NP, the suffix prompts a default 3 sg reading.

Failure to produce direct object clitic pronouns as a clinical marker of SLI in school-aged Italian speaking children

We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations.

Subject and object omission in children's early transitive constructions: A discourse-pragmatic approach

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates discourse effects on the provision of both subjects and objects and investigates whether pragmatic discourse features govern the realization/omission of both constituents alike. In an elicitation study, we examined how the discourse-pragmatic feature contrast, as applied to the subject, verb, or object of a transitive utterance affected the provision of elements in the remainder of the sentence when all elements were previously introduced. The results showed that 3.5-year-old children were more likely to realize a contrasted argument with a lexical noun but more likely to omit the argument when it was not part of a contrast, regardless of its subject or object status. This suggests that contrast presents a unifying discourse feature for argument omission in language development.