Negative Clauses Research Articles

Polarity and Positioning in Public Facebook Comments among Filipino ESL Teachers

Research on teacher discourses is growing but only a few studies have focused on teachers’ construction of comments publicly posted on social media. Hence, this study aims at describing the polarity of comments and positioning of Filipino ESL teachers in their public Facebook comments via Systemic Functional Linguistics. A total of 281 public comments with 863 clauses publicly posted by ESL teachers on selected Facebook groups associated with ESL teaching were analyzed. Polarity (positive and negative polarity) was also analyzed and was further described via three types of positioning: Attitudinal, Dialogistic, and Intertextual. Results show that material processes heavily characterize the comments. The ESL teachers resort to the default material processes when writing comments related to ESL teaching and employment. Under polarity, positive clauses dominate over negative clauses. These comments heavily fall under Attitudinal Identities and seconded by Dialogistic and Intertextual Identities. This research hopes to contribute to the existing literature that explores the ever-changing nature of ESL teaching and employment, especially with the proliferation of public social media discourses.

Existential, locative and possessive predication in Kamas

Abstract This paper describes and analyses existential, locative and possessive predications in Kamas. Starting from a functional-semantic perspective, we show that the three types of predications share many features, but they also exhibit some important differences. Given that two layers of Kamas can be distinguished, we demonstrate that the reactivated Kamas of the last speaker, Klavdiya Plotnikova, exhibits some peculiarities which can be explained partly by Russian influence. The most important result of the study is that the boundaries between the three predication types are rather fluid in Kamas, whereas the distinction between affirmative and negative clauses is morphosyntactically unambiguously manifested. This polarity split, given that it is seldom recognised in the general literature, may provide important implications for linguistic typology and theory.

The interaction of standard negation in clauses of substitution: a typological account

Abstract This paper explores clauses of substitution (e.g. instead of relaxing on the beach, he went to a concert) in a sample of forty-six languages. It is shown that clauses of substitution marked with monofunctional conjunctions or monofunctional converbs may not occur with standard negative markers. Clauses of substitution appearing with polyfunctional conjunctions or polyfunctional converbs may occur with obligatory standard negative markers. In these cases, negation shows a negative import as an effect of compositional interpretation. Interestingly, there are languages in which clauses of substitution marked with monofunctional clause-linking devices may occur with optional negative markers. In this scenario, the presence or absence of the negative marker does not change the adverbial relation holding between clauses. Instead, it seems to have an expressive- evaluative layer of semantic interpretation. When the negative marker is present in the clause of substitution, it indicates that the situation was not surprising. When the negative marker is absent, the situation must be understood as surprising.

Non-canonical structures in locative and existential predication in the Ob-Ugric languages

The study at hand deals with different structures applied for expressing locative and existential predication in Khanty and Mansi, analysing a comparably large amount of data from various databases. Apart from the “expected” and traditionally described pattern “figure (theme) + ground (location) + copula”, the paper also accounts for posture verbs and transitive habeo-verbs playing a role in the named functional domain. Additionally, it is shown that a significant number of relevant clauses are structurally ambiguous between a locative and an existential reading. Finally, the paper underlines that the Ob-Ugric languages show a clear polarity split in the expression of locative and existential predication since the observed variation mainly touches affirmative clauses. In contrast, negative clauses are, as a rule, formed with negative existential particles.

WORD ORDER STRATEGIES IN THE OLD HIGH GERMAN NEGATIVE SENTENCE

This paper presents a description of word order patterns in Old High German with special emphasis given to the negative constructions. The Old Germanic syntax exhibits a relatively high variety in ordering constituents in the surface sentence structure, derived from the SOV-, SVO- and VSO-patterns. The study highlights the peculiarities of OHG word order with its verb-first, verb-second, and verd-third/last position of the finite verb regarding the conditions of such syntactic arrangement. The special attention is paid to the negative clauses, with the emphatically charged NEG-clitic in the proposition to the foregrounded finite verb. Sentence negation strategies in OHG (eighth-eleventh century) that display early signs of grammaticalization have been presented in the context of the available linguistic triggers, i.e., structural pressure and discourse specific to requirements of the texts under consideration. The paper provides the data-based analysis of NEG V1 patterns, retrieved from the OHG sources, aiming to show the role of the negative clitic in the word order arrangement. We assume that it was the interaction between the specific samples of the Old High German discourse and grammar that brought about the foregrounding of the negated head-initial VP. The discourse prose is regarded as a special case in the overall bulk of texts in the religious prose. The material shows that preposed negative clitic is placed separately or merged with the finite verb. The last option is represented rather strong in the negative verb-initial sentences. It is claimed that negation itself is an influential factor of the verb-first word order tightly related to the discourse peculiarities, shaped by the features of the religious texts of the mentioned period.

Class imbalance mitigation: A select-then-extract learning framework for emotion-cause pair extraction

The class imbalance problem arises in the current end-to-end models for the emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) task, and a large number of negative clause pairs interfere model to depict the characteristics of emotion and cause. Most existing methods adopt a window-constrained strategy to limit the relative distance between candidate clauses to a smaller range to filter negative pairs. However, those methods ignore the semantic association between distant clauses, and using an artificial window size is imperfect due to the inherent ambiguity and delicacy of emotion. Inspired by the centrality principle of discourse, in this paper we propose a select-then-extract framework for the ECPE task, where the core clauses are first selected from the original document as candidate emotion and cause clauses, and then emotions, causes and emotion-cause pairs are jointly extracted from the candidate clauses. Specifically, our model includes two main components: core clause selector and emotion-cause pairs extractor. For the Core Clause Selector, we introduce the extractive document summarization (EDS) task and present a multi-granularity semantic awareness cooperative graph model (MGCOG) to extract core clauses from documents. Compared to the previous methods, the core clause selector is more effective for alleviating the category imbalance because the global causal cues and context can be captured by learning global keywords and inter-clause relationships, which determines more efficient candidate clauses. For Emotion-Cause Pairs Extractor, we put forward a multi-task learning model to jointly extract emotions, causes and emotion-cause pairs from the selected core clauses. Here, a multi-head attention is used to further model the relationship between candidate clauses, and a co-predictor is designed for assigning scores to all possible emotion-cause pairs. We further investigate the pipeline and the joint model under the select-then-extract framework, and show that the experimental results on benchmark datasets are consistently superior to the comparative baseline models. Extensive ablation experiments also verify the effectiveness of each component.

Discourse anaphoricity vs. perspective sensitivity in emoji semantics

This paper aims to provide a foundation for studying the interplay between emoji and linguistic (natural language) expressions; it does so by proposing a formal semantic classification of emoji- text combinations, focusing on two core sets of emoji: face emoji and activity emoji. Based on different data sources (introspective intuitions, naturalistic Twitter examples, and experimental evidence), we argue that activity emoji (case study I) are essentially event descriptions that serve as separate discourse units (similar to free adjuncts) and connect to the accompanying (linguistic) text by virtue of suitable discourse relations. By contrast, face emoji (case study II) are expressive elements that are anchored to an attitude holder and comment on a proposition provided by the accompanying text. We provide further evidence for the distinct behavior of face emoji and activity emoji by looking at their scopal behavior with respect to linguistically- expressed negation. In particular, we probe interactions of emoji and texts that contain clausal negation, and conclude that both face emoji and activity emoji generally do not scope under negation. However, the appearance of such a scope relation arises with activity emoji when the emoji are connected to the accompanying text by virtue of an Explanation discourse relation. With face emoji, scopal interactions seem to appear in cases where the default interpretation would result in a discourse contribution that is pragmatically infelicitous, and also in cases that involve a specialized emoji-repetition construction where a repeated alternation of face emoji with words assumes a scope-marking role.

A Comparative Analysis of Romanian and Southern Italian Untensed Finite Clauses

The paper compares the Balkan phenomenon known as “infinitival loss” in two varieties of Romance that have not been in direct contact, i.e., Romanian and some southern Italian dialects. The aim is to investigate how the Romance clausal structure realizes a phenomenon that does not generally appear in Romance. We focus on two main properties: the fine structure of the complementizer field, with left-dislocated elements sandwiched between two overt complementizers, and that of the inflectional field, in which clitic pronouns and clausal negation adjoin to Tense and Mood, respectively. The differences between the two varieties of Romance are reduced to the different first-merge positions of the particles characterizing untensed finite clauses. Comparison with Romanian permits a better understanding of the southern Italian dialects, which show micro-variation and optionality in the position of complementizers and particles and the realization of negation.

Public Interest and Safeguard Clauses in Private International Law

In its judgment in case C-135/15 dated April 20, 2016 the Court of Justice of the European Union confirmed the most important provisions of the doctrine of F.C. Savigny: 1) the public policy of the state is protected both by a general public policy clause (negative clause) and by special rules of a strictly positive, imperative nature (positive clause); 2) the application of positive and negative public policy clauses is based on considerations of public interest that are of fundamental importance for the political, social or economic structure of the country. In the constitutional law of Russia and foreign countries, the political, social and economic foundations of the country’s structure are the three fundamental foundations of the state, enshrined as provisions of the Constitution. The EU Regulation Rome I (Art. 9), the Civil Code of the Netherlands (Art. 10:7) and other modern foreign legal acts, as characteristics of super-imperative norms, fix the protection of public interests related to the three fundamental foundations of the organization of the state: political, social or economic structure (organization) of the state.Art. 1193 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation establishes the elements on the legal, political or economic system of the state used by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation as a template to determine the differences in the system of the state. Therefore, they are not suitable for the characteristics of public policy and protective clauses on public policy. Enshrined in Part 3 of Art. 55 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, public interests (constitutionally significant values) are of fundamental importance for the political, social or economic structure of the country. In accordance with the doctrine, modern legislation and practice, public policy is based on these interests within the meaning of private international law. Considerations related to the indicated public interests underlie the application of both positive (Article 1192 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation) and negative (Article 1193 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation) public policy clauses.

A history of conjunctions introducing negative clauses in English: The case of 'for dread that'

A history of conjunctions introducing negative clauses in English: The case of 'for dread that'

A diachronic analysis of Spanish alg- series and n- series items in negated clauses

Abstract While previous studies have analyzed the changing nature of polarity items (PIs) in Latin (see Gianollo 2018, 2020) and the licensing conditions of PIs in modern languages (see Homer 2021), less research has analyzed the diachronic behavior of PIs in the development of the Spanish language. The present study takes a quantitative approach to historical corpus data in showing that in older varieties of Spanish, there was an increased degree of competition between items of the alg- series (i.e., alguno ‘some’) and items of the n- series (i.e., ninguno ‘none’) in negated clauses which later decreased as the language entered its modern age. We find that the competition between these items in negated clauses is influenced by factors such as register, the syntactic role of the PI, and activation status (following Larrivée 2012, 2017). These data provide quantitative support for Martins (2000), who suggested that earlier forms of Spanish exhibited more versatile licensing conditions of PIs, and that this variation gradually decreased over time due to a greater salience of the n- series in negated clauses. In total, the present work aims to use corpus data to connect historical linguistic research to theoretical approaches regarding the contemporary usage of PIs.

Conservation easements: A tool for preserving wildlife habitat on private lands

AbstractConservation easements are an essential tool for conserving private lands, and they have great potential for enhancing wildlife habitat and biodiversity. Private land conservation in the United States is likely to increase in the coming years, in light of Executive Order No. 14,008, issued by President Joseph Biden on January 27, 2021, which set a goal of conserving at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030 (Executive Office of the President 2021). There is, therefore, a need to evaluate the effect of conservation easements on wildlife habitat and biodiversity and to make recommendations for further enhancing the effectiveness of easements. Herein we propose a shift from primarily negative clauses and restrictive language to a more affirmative approach, developing language to proactively improve management of properties under conservation easement in order to maximize benefits to wildlife and ecosystems. In addition, we identify areas for further research on landowner perceptions and experiences regarding conservation easements.

The use of the indefinite pronoun keegi ‘someone’ in Estonian dialects

Abstract The Estonian indefinite pronouns keegi ‘someone’ and miski ‘something’ are distinguished by being able to refer to animate or inanimate entities, respectively. However, in certain Estonian dialects, keegi is used to refer to inanimate entities as well. The aim of this paper is to describe the functions and use of keegi based on the data in the Corpus of Estonian Dialects. We used statistical analyses to determine which dialects typically use keegi to refer to inanimate entities and which variables (polarity, function, position in the clause, case marking) contribute most to this variation. The results show that there are significant differences between the dialects: keegi is mostly used to refer to inanimate entities in the northern dialects (most frequently in the Western, Mid, and Eastern dialects), but this phenomenon is rare or non-existent in the southern dialects. All of the variables studied contribute to this variation: keegi is most likely to refer to an inanimate being when it is in the partitive case, functions as an object, a partitive subject, or a negative polarity item, and is positioned at the end of a negative clause.

Nada, nadie: A Study of Negative Concord in L2 Spanish

Abstract Research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has studied negation in a wide variety of languages but has mainly focused on the acquisition of clause negation, or the negation of finite verbs in main clauses (Dimroth, Christine. 2008. Age effects on the process of L2 acquisition? Evidence from the acquisition of negation and finiteness in L2 German. Language Learning 58(1). 117–150). The present study discusses the acquisition of negative concord (NC) in L2 Spanish, from both a syntactic and a lexical approach to the analysis of learner production data. The results of a structured oral elicitation task indicate that learners produce NC with the negative concord items (NCIs) nada ‘nothing’ and nadie ‘no one’ in argument position, and also ascertain their appropriate usage contexts, with greater accuracy as their L2 proficiency increases. These findings are discussed in relation to studies of NC in English and English First Language Acquisition (FLA), and also to recent work in English SLA on the acquisition of negative polarity items (NPIs) (Gil, Kook-Hee, Heather Marsden & Melinda Whong. 2019. The meaning of negation in the second language classroom: Evidence from ‘any. Language Teaching Research 23(2). 218–236; Marsden, Heather, Melinda Whong & Kook-Hee Gil. 2018. What’s in the textbook and what’s in the mind: Polarity item “Any” in learner English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 40(1). 91–118; Puig-Mayenco, Eloi & Heather Marsden. 2018. Polarity-item “anything” in L3 English: Where does transfer come from when the L1 is Catalan and the L2 is Spanish? Second Language Research 34(4). 487–515). Ultimately, this study aims to contribute to further research in the literature on complex negation constructions in SLA and underline the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and lexical issues in the acquisition of these structures.

The Two Spanish Subjunctives: The Required and Default Subjunctives

Standard Spanish grammar states that desideratives (querer que), directives (aconsejar que), purpose clauses (para que), causatives (hacer que), emotive-factives (alegrarse de que), negated epistemics (no creer que), dubitatives (dudar que), and modals (ser posible que) embed subjunctive complement clauses. However, in spite of these classifications, some predicates exhibit a certain degree of mood variation. For instance, emotive-factives can take indicative complements (Crespo del Río 2014; Faulkner 2021a). Similar variability between the moods may also come about in negated epistemic (Bolinger 1991), dubitative (Blake 1981), and modal clauses (Deshors and Waltermire 2019). 
 I propose that such variation stems from the Spanish mood system involving a split between two types of subjunctives - one that is required in preference-based contexts, and another that is default and can be replaced by the indicative. I argue that, whereas preference-based expressions (desideratives, directives, purpose clauses, causatives) are inflexibly subjunctive, emotive-factives and verbs of uncertainty (negated epistemics, dubitatives, modals) may accept indicative if the speaker intends to add the affirmative or negated proposition to the common ground; i.e., if the speaker intends to assert the complement in question. I close these arguments by stating that assertion with the indicative is most likely to occur if the proposition (affirmative or negated) is informative (new or unknown to the addressee, important, contrastive, and/or highly probable).

A Quantitative Approach to Microvariation: Negative Marking in Central Romance

This work presents an exploratory data analysis of the syntactic distribution of pre- and postverbal negation (N1 and N2) in a corpus of data gathered from two linguistic atlases, the Linguistic Atlas of France (ALF) and the Italo-Swiss Atlas (AIS). Metadata concerning the distribution of N1 and N2 across dialects and syntactic contexts are analyzed with the r package Rbrul. Multiple logistic regression allows us to assess how independent variables affect the presence/absence of N1/N2. Geographical and grammatical factors are examined; the latter concern mainly clause typing and negative concord, i.e., the co-occurrence of clausal negation and a negative word. The data from the two atlases are first analyzed separately and eventually merged in order to strengthen the statistical significance. Both geographical and grammatical factors prove to be significant. In particular, the preliminary findings show that N1 is more likely retained in sentences containing another negative word, the incidence of N1 varies according to the type of co-occurring negative word, and veridicality has a mild effect on N2 but not N1.

Neg-raising, IP-internal topic and focus phrases and the structure of the Awing SOV clause

Ever since Kayne (1994) which argues that the universal word order in a phrase is Head-Complement, many studies had proliferated in support of the LCA. Basically, at the level of the clause, many languages exhibit the SVO pattern but there are languages which display distorted word order among which the SOV. The Awing language has both orders and there are determined on the basis of the opposition positive versus negative clause. This paper examines the derivation of the Awing SOV structure and argues that this derivation involves basic movements such head and A- movements (Chomsky 1995) in addition to remnant and heavy pied-ping. It also proposes a reanalysis of the landing site of the raised remnant VP and argues (in contradiction to Nyomy (2019) who posits that the position of the raised VP is spec, AgrOP) that the raised remnant VP lands in spec, TopP (an IP-internal left periphery position as posited by Jayaseelan (2001)).

Negative Markers in Lamaholot, Eastern Flores – Indonesia: The Case of Kiwangona Dialect

This paper aims at answering two following questions: (1). What are the types of negative markers in Kiwangona dialects of the Lamaholot based on Mosel and Spriggs’ negation patterns ? ; (2). To what extent do negative markers in the Kiwangona dialect fill the stages in Jespersen Cycle? This research is qualitative in nature. The data were obtained from a two-week field trip to Bayunta’a village of Ile Boleng subdistrict on Adonara island. Data were collected through a series of elicitation processes and note-taking activities from five informants. The data were then analyzed by using Mosel and Spriggs’s theory of negation patterns (1999) as well as the stages of the Jespersen Cycle (1917). Results show that (1) negative markers in Kiwangona fill all five kinds of negative patterns hypothesized by Mosel and Spriggs. Second, the most significant finding is that due to historical contact with a non-Austronesian language, Kiwangona as a single dialect fills all three stages of the Jespersen Cycle compared to Fricke's assessment on negative markers in Flores-Lembata languages. Furthermore, certain lexico-grammatical changes that appeared in Kiwangona negative clauses are mainly due to grammaticalization and a higher degree of negators' movability. Dealing with the results above, the Kiwangona dialect may be considered as a more complex Lamaholot dialect in terms of negation patterns compared to others. Therefore, more research should be carried out on many other undocumented dialects in order to end up with a clearer situation of the negation in Lamaholot dialects.

ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURE AND TEXTURE OF THE TEXT AS A REVIEW THE WORTHINESS OF A CHILD'S FABLE SERIES OF KESETIAAN MERPATI BY M. SYAFII MASYKUR

This research was intended to identify the sctructure and texture of the text in a child’s story Kesetiaan Merpati by M. Syafii Masykur in addition to reviewing the language worthiness which is used by children under five years of age. The design of this research was qualitative descriptive research using the discourse analysis approach. The source of data in this research was the children's book story Kesetiaan Merpati, the data from this research was a lingual unit of words, clauses, or sentences found in children’s book story Kesetiaan Merpati. The data was collected by using the responsive technique and note-taking technique. To fulfill the aim of this research the data was taken by using a criterion-based sampling technique. The data were analyzed by using the distributional method and interactive analysis, which were data collection, data reduction, data presentation, deduction, and verification. The research found in the text structure of children's story Kesetiaan Merpati, there were orientation, complications, evaluation, resolution, and coda. Meanwhile, textual texture in the children’s story Kesetiaan Merpati consisted of grammatical and lexical. The narration of Kesetiaan Merpati found 45 grammatical errors; among these were ineffective sentence in 5 sentences, infrequent punctuation in 4 sentences, uneconomical word as 4, infrequent use of words as 4, the error of phonology as 3, the error of morphology as 1, the error of conjunction as 3, double subject as 2, the error of preposition as 1, the negative clause as 2, vocabulary as 8, nominalization as 6, technique term as 2 and the type of sentence used were paratactic and hypotactic complex. Hereinafter, on lexical of narration in 56 sentences. From the grammatical mistaken identification of the book story Kesetiaan Merpati by M. Syafii Maskur, it was not worthy to be given to a child under 5 years of age. This was seen in the many grammatical errors of a vocabulary that is difficult and uneasily understood by children of that age, as well as the clauses and metaphors.

Irrealis in Baltic and Baltic Fennic

This article is a study in the use of irrealis in complementation in the two Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian, and in two Fennic languages, Estonian and Finnish. Four domains of complementation are singled out: propositional, desiderative, apprehensional and evaluative. All investigated languages show limited use of irrealis in the propositional domain (in identical conditions, viz. under main clause negation), as well as in the apprehensional and evaluative domains. The most important differences are observed in the state-of-affairs domain, in particular with desiderative predicates, where Lithuanian shows consistent irrealis marking whereas Finnish has mostly realis. Estonian and Latvian are intermediate. Estonian has a rather strong predominance of irrealis, but it might be recent; in Latvian realis and irrealis are about equally distributed, but this situation seems to differ from that in Old Latvian. In these two languages changes seem therefore to have been going on, and areal convergence might to some extent have been involved in this.