Neutral Word Order Research Articles

Word order and closest-conjunct agreement in the Greek Septuagint: On the position of a biblical translation in the diachrony of a syntactic correlation

AbstractClauses can show closest-conjunct agreement, where the verb agrees only with one conjunct of a conjoined subject, and not with the full conjoined subject. The aim of this study is to examine the properties of word order and closest-conjunct agreement in the Greek Septuagint to distinguish which of them are due to the native syntax of Koiné Greek, possibly influenced by contact with Hebrew, and which of them are the result of a biblical translation effect. Both VSO and closest-conjunct agreement in the case of postverbal subjects have been considered characteristics of Biblical Hebrew. VSO becomes a neutral word order for Koiné Greek, and Koiné Greek exhibits examples of closest-conjunct agreement as well. The present study shows that VSO is the neutral word order for various types of texts of Koiné Greek (biblical and non-biblical, translations and non-translations) and that closest-conjunct agreement is also present with similar characteristics in pre-Koiné Greek. All relevant characteristics reflect a type of a syntactic change in Greek related to the properties of the T domain, and evidenced not only in translations or Biblical Greek. However, the frequencies of word orders are indeed affected by the source language, and indirect translation effects are evident in the Greek Septuagint.

ULTRA: Universal Grammar as a Universal Parser

A central concern of generative grammar is the relationship between hierarchy and word order, traditionally understood as two dimensions of a single syntactic representation. A related concern is directionality in the grammar. Traditional approaches posit process-neutral grammars, embodying knowledge of language, put to use with infinite facility both for production and comprehension. This has crystallized in the view of Merge as the central property of syntax, perhaps its only novel feature. A growing number of approaches explore grammars with different directionalities, often with more direct connections to performance mechanisms. This paper describes a novel model of universal grammar as a one-directional, universal parser. Mismatch between word order and interpretation order is pervasive in comprehension; in the present model, word order is language-particular and interpretation order (i.e., hierarchy) is universal. These orders are not two dimensions of a unified abstract object (e.g., precedence and dominance in a single tree); rather, both are temporal sequences, and UG is an invariant real-time procedure (based on Knuth's stack-sorting algorithm) transforming word order into hierarchical order. This shift in perspective has several desirable consequences. It collapses linearization, displacement, and composition into a single performance process. The architecture provides a novel source of brackets (labeled unambiguously and without search), which are understood not as part-whole constituency relations, but as storage and retrieval routines in parsing. It also explains why neutral word order within single syntactic cycles avoids 213-like permutations. The model identifies cycles as extended projections of lexical heads, grounding the notion of phase. This is achieved with a universal processor, dispensing with parameters. The empirical focus is word order in noun phrases. This domain provides some of the clearest evidence for 213-avoidance as a cross-linguistic word order generalization. Importantly, recursive phrase structure “bottoms out” in noun phrases, which are typically a single cycle (though further cycles may be embedded, e.g., relative clauses). By contrast, a simple transitive clause plausibly involves two cycles (vP and CP), embedding further nominal cycles. In the present theory, recursion is fundamentally distinct from structure-building within a single cycle, and different word order restrictions might emerge in larger domains like clauses.

Cicero’s Pro Roscio Amerino volgens de positionele lectuurmethode

Summary This article provides an example of how to read Cicero’s early speech in defence of Sextus Roscius junior according to the positional reading method. This reading method is based on a colometric reading of Latin texts and emphasizes the tension between the neutral word order and the word order that was chosen by the author. This tension is made visible for students and their teachers by a scheme that shows the fixed order of content positions in Latin sentences and offers a new perspective on the content of Latin texts.

The fundamental left–right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster

Cinque (Linguist Inq 36(3):315–332, 2005; Universals of language today. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 165–184, 2009; Functional structure from top to toe. Vol. 9 of The cartography of syntactic structures. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 232–265, 2014a) observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinque’s ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative ‘let’, a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinque’s fundamental left–right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinque’s generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly.

Wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance: A locative account

This paper explores the hypothesis that wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance is a type of locative inversion, involving a null locative argument. Ibero-Romance displays fine-grained, systematic variation determined by verbal class and variety, offering evidence that Ibero-Romance neutral word order is SVO, rather than VSO as claimed by some null-subject accounts. It is proposed that ‘locative’ subject-verb inversion is a consequence of grammatically-encoded deictic features correlating with the semantic properties of the verbs involved. The locative element, available unequally across Ibero-Romance, can surface in different positions in the left periphery, yielding the variation encountered. The data indicate that the licensing of these constructions depends neither on the null-subject parameter, since this type of inversion also occurs in non- and partial null-subject varieties, nor on the unaccusative/unergative division, though in both cases a degree of correspondence exists.

Word order and focusing effects in the memory representation of Hungarian sentences

In two acoustic sentence recognition experiments the relative importance of recognition times (0 to 40 seconds) and relationships between the target sentence and test sentences were varied. Hungarian promised to be a good testing ground for traditional theories that claim that while form is readily forgotten, sentence meaning is preserved. In Hungarian, the informational structure of sentences allows for clear contrasts between neutral and meaning-related order variations. In the stimulus material, target sentences were compared in recognition scores with identical, neutral word order, paraphrased, and focused sentence pairs. The results partly support our starting hypotheses, but partly show that the intricacies of Hungarian sentential syntax call for a more reserved and more carefully qualified expression of the initial proposals of Sachs (1967) and Johnson-Laird and Stevenson (1970). Focused sentences are clearly contrasted with non-focused initial targets even after 40 seconds. It seems that the infor...

Euskararen zatiketa informazionalaren eredu baterantz

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of informational segmentation for Basque on the basis of Asher's (1993) Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). A new theory of the categories focus and informational theme is proposed which distinguishes between main focus and main theme. It is also shown that the means to codify these notions in Basque are mainly neutral word order and movement of constituents (to preverbal position, and to initial and final position in the sentence). Finally, we analyze (by means of formal restrictions) the interaction between informational segmentation and two types of contexts: question-answer pairs and corrections.