Phrasal Category Research Articles

On the etymology and distribution of verb forms in Arabic-based pidgins

Abstract In this paper, we add to the body of existing literature on Arabic-based pidgins. We focus on the verbal system because the structure of this phrasal category and how it is used in discourse remain inconclusive. For instance, while some claim these speakers prefer the imperfective form which is marked for male third person singular (e.g. y-iji ‘3sg.m-come.ipf’), others claim it is the imperative that is most preferred (e.g. rūh ‘2.sg.m-go.imp’). Equally, while some argue the choice between either verb forms is pragmatically motivated, others claim it is phonologically motivated. To add to this mix, a third group claims there is a systematic division of labor in that non-state verbs usually follow the prefixed type while the state verbs follow the unprefixed type. We evaluate these proposals. Analysis of ‘frog story’ narratives by 10 GPA speakers in the United Arab Emirates reveal the prefixed form to be the most preferred and this preference is influenced by the contriving of phonological, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Frequency as well as item-based analogy as understood within usage-based theories of learning provide a viable framework in which the apparent inconsistencies between the competing proposals are resolved.

A Statistical Study of Telugu Treebanks

The paper is an attempt to compare Hyderabad Telugu Treebank (HTTB) and HCU-IIIT-H Telugu Treebank from a statisticalpoint of view. HTTB has 2,715 annotated sentences and HCU-IIIT-H TTB has 3,222 annotated sentences. Both the Treebanks were annotated by following Paninian Grammar Formalism proposed by Bharati, A.; Sharma, D.M.; Husain, S.; Bai, L.; Begam, R. and Sangal, R.(2009).HTTB is an inter-chunk-based treebank data. HCU-IIIT-H TTB is an intra-chunk-based treebankdata. Both the treebanks’ data size is random. Later, the paper discusses the Telugu Treebanks in detail. The paper focuses on statistical frequencies viz. POS, Chunk and Syntactic labels. VM (3807 times) and NN (5486 times) are the frequent POS labels inHTTB and HCU-IIIT-H TTB respectively. NP (7954 and 6223 times) is the frequent phrasal category in both the treebanks. The most frequent k-labels are kartā(k1) (2375-2381 times) and karma(k2) (1408-1437 times) and non-frequent label is karaṇa(k3) (17-39 times) in both the treebanks. The most frequent non-k-labels are verb modifier (vmod) (949 times) and noun modifier (nmod) (1033 times) in both the treebanks. The statistical distribution mentions the coverage of the labels (kāraka, non-kāraka) of both theTelugu treebanks. Later it discusses the comparison of both the treebanks and tries to provide the reasons for the highest and lowest frequencies in both the treebanks. k1 and k2 have 60% of the coverage in karaka labels, vmod, nmod, adv, ccof, pof also has 60% of the coverage in non-karaka labels. This kind of statistical study can help to boost the accuracy of the parser.

NOMINALISASI BAHASA BALI (BB)

[Title: Nominalization in Balinese Language] The study deal with the process of nominal formation (nominalization) and Nominal structure of Balinese language. The data being analyzed is obtained from the researcher’s intuition that is the gained from language potency of the researcher as a native Balinese speaker. In addition, the data was also gained from Balinese texts such as novels, short stories, and folk tales. As a reference in analyzing the data it is applied X-bar theory developed by N, Chomsky and his adherers from the beginning of 1970-s. The most important essence of this theory is that every phrase structure has head. In other words, that every phrase structure is endocentric in nature. At the initial phrase, this theory was developed to describe phrasal category, then it was applied for clausal level. Recently, this theory is applied to analyze word level (Xo). Nouns in Balinese can be base and derived nouns. Derived nouns can be formed through some process: affixation, compounding, reduplication, and derivation of clauses. Nouns in Balinese can place syntactical functions such as subject, predicate, object, complement, and adverb.

Text Structuring in Written English: The Role of Inversion

Full-verb inversion constructions in which the subject follows the entire verb phrase in a declarative clause—as in “At the top of each Ministry was a British adviser” or “Here, in otherwise total darkness, shone a single square of light”—have been the subject of extensive research in recent years, the focus of different studies varying according to the nature and goals of the specific theoretical framework adopted. On the basis of the kind of phrasal category occurring as clause-initial constituent, five different types of full inversion have traditionally been distinguished in the literature: noun phrase, adverb phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, and prepositional phrase full inversion. Broadly speaking, analyses of full-verb inversion carried out within the generative and functional paradigms have focused mainly on inversions following a locative constituent, which subsumes spatial locations, path, and directions, and their extension to some temporal and abstract locative domains. In this sense, they neglect the analysis of those full inversion types, namely noun phrase and adjective phrase full inversion, which do not normally contain such clause-initial constituents. In order to bridge this gap, the present paper offers a corpus-based analysis of noun phrase inversion in present-day written English texts. It is argued that the distribution of the construction is related to the degree of abstractness of its texts, and that noun phrase inversion can be considered a syntactic device that codes abstract relations.

Satisfying V2 in early Romance: Merge vs. Move

In early Romance the finite verb raises in root clauses to the vacant C position, a movement operation frequently accompanied in turn by fronting of a pragmatically salient constituent to a preverbal position within the C-domain. Although this structural characterization of early Romance V2 word order overwhelmingly accounts for the core cases, there remains a smaller number of contexts in which the V2 effect appears to be satisfied by other means. More specifically, in addition to the move option, we argue that the V2 constraint may be met in early Romance by the Merge option: in the former case this involves movement of the finite verb to the empty C head, whereas in the latter case the V2 requirement is met by mergingsì(<sic‘thus, so’) directly in C°. This analysis radically departs from traditional analyses of Romancesì, which characterize it either as a coordinating conjunction or, in recent generative analyses, as a pleonastic phrasal category associated with a specifier position within CP. Our proposed analysis makes some interesting and novel predictions both about the rather restricted distribution ofsìin Old Neapolitan, many aspects of which remain unexplained under the alternative accounts, and the C-related functional positions involved in medieval Romance V2.

Evaluating gestural overlap as an influence on perception of fricative-stop clusters

This study investigates the effect of intergestural timing and prosodic context on perception. The articulation and perception of word-edge /sk/ and /sp/ clusters in words preceding or following various prosodic boundaries are considered. Excised acoustic recordings of these words provided stimuli for a perception experiment in which listeners did a phoneme-monitoring task, listening for [s]. Using magnetometer data, articulatory overlap of the two consonants was measured. Listener reaction times were evaluated to determine whether the overlap measure and/or the prosodic category in which the cluster occurred had an influence on the speed of response. This presentation will focus on the onset clusters. Results show: (1) reaction times for /s/-monitoring differed according to phrasal position, such that cluster stimuli following larger prosodic boundaries have longer RTs; (2) responses are significantly faster when clusters have greater articulatory overlap; and (3) intergestural overlap is more important in capturing response variability than phrasal category. Similar studies examining stop clusters [Byrd, Phonetica (1992); Goldstein and Suprenant, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 104, 518 (1998)] have found that overlap among stops can cause perceived deletion; the study suggests listeners utilize the information encoded by increased overlap when the overlapped segments aerodynamics allows preservation, rather than loss, of information. [Work supported by NIH.]

Wh-In-Situ and Movement in Sinhala Questions

This article shows that Sinhala, a wh-in-situ language, implements movement of a Q-element to determine the scope of wh-phrases; this movement, which displays the behavior of a phrasal category, may be induced either in overt syntax or in LF. Covert Q-movement observes island conditions in the same manner as overt phrasal category movement. When the option of Q-movement is not available, Sinhala makes use of a strategy to merge a null operator directly in its local scope position to fix the scope of a wh-phrase.

Binding of Indeterminate Pronouns and Clause Structure in Japanese

This article shows, on the basis of indeterminate pronoun binding, that tense-related elements are checked in the checking domain of T and that other elements are checked in the checking domain of the topmost light verb v. The data pertaining to indeterminate pronoun binding, coupled with the data on focus particles, reveal that in Japanese, checking configurations are established in LF. LF movement employed for Case checking is argued to involve the raising of a phrasal category, on the basis that it displays properties different from those of nonphrasal movement in LF. The newly attested data from Japanese lead to the conclusion that constituents can be reordered after “narrow” syntax and that strict locality is required for checking to take place, contrary to Chomsky's (2000, 2001) proposal.

Nominalization and ellipsis in the Greek DP

Two DP-internal phenomena in Greek are being distinguished: nominal subdeletion and substantivization. We show that the two cannot be analyzed as instances of the same phenomenon, and that a unified account in terms of ellipsis is untenable. Instead, nominal subdeletion is analyzed as a genuine case of nominal ellipsis, and substantivization as nominalization in the sense of Chierchia (1998). Two novel results can be drawn as consequence of our analysis. First, the question of whether the omitted constituent in subdeletion is of zero (lexical) or phrasal category can be dispensed with, as it is simultaneously both (just a lexical N(oun) or N with a merged A(djective)). Second, the 'expletive' definite determiner which appears in generic DPs is not at all expletive but contentful: it is the locus of the nominalization operator.

Demonstratives and reinforcers in Romance and Germanic languages

Abstract Recent work on the internal structure of noun phrases has argued that several word order differences between Romance and Germanic languages may be explained by the presence of syntactic movement of the noun in Romance, and by the relative absence of this movement in Germanic. This paper examines constructions consisting of demonstrative and reinforcer elements. It is argued that prenominal deictic demonstratives in Romance and Germanic languages, generated in a specifier position below DP (Giusti, 1993a,b), raise to D overtly. In several languages the demonstrative may be ambiguous between a deictic interpretation and what is labelled an indefinite specific interpretation. A deictic demonstrative must raise up into the DP projection overtly; with an indefinite specific, only covert feature movement to D takes place. With respect to the demonstrative reinforcement construction, both the demonstrative and its reinforcer precede the noun in Germanic languages, while the demonstrative precedes, and the reinforcer follows, the noun (plus modifiers) in Romance. Under the assumption that the demonstrative and its reinforcer are base-generated as the specifier and head, respectively, of a functional projection FP, the pattern in Romance is argued to involve syntactic movement of a phrasal category to the left of FP, deriving the postnominal position of the reinforcer. The Germanic pattern is explained by the absence of this movement. The behavior of demonstratives and reinforcers in relative clause constructions is also examined.

Syntactic QR in wh-in-situ languages

Japanese is gererally recognized as a language in which there is no observable wh-movement. In this paper, it will be shown that there are two types of wh-elements: one identifiable as wh-operators and the other as non-quantificational variables. I claim that focus phrases and wh-operators undergo syntactic movement to a position that appears immediately above VP. This position is associated with a phrasal category, which I label Focus Projection (FocP). This paper discusses peculiar ordering restrictions in multiple questions in Japanese, as observed by Saito (1987, 1994) and Watanabe (1992). Given that operators undergo syntactic movement, I will provide a unified account for the ordering restrictions in relation to the Minimal Link Condition, as outlined by Chomsky (1992, 1995) and Chomsky and Lasnik (1993).

Pronoun comprehension in aphasia: A comparison of three languages

The research reported here investigated the effect of phonological and syntactic factors on the processing of pronouns by aphasics. The comprehension of these “closed-class” elements was studied in three different languages: French, Dutch, and German. The cross-linguistic design made it possible to vary phonological status (clitic/nonclitic) and phrasal category (noun phrase/prepositional phrase) as well as grammatical relation (direct/indirect object) while keeping class membership (closed class) and meaning constant. A sentence-picture matching task was given to 20 German-speaking, 16 Dutch-speaking, and 14 French-speaking aphasics, half of each language group being classified as agrammatic Broca's and half as paragrammatic Wernicke's aphasics. The results suggest that Broca's aphasics' limitations in retrieving pronouns, and therefore other closed-class elements, are not a function of either phonological status, phrasal category, or grammatical relation. These subjects' observed high level of performance on pronouns in language comprehension appears due to the kind of semantic and syntactic information they encode. Our findings indicate that a more refined distinction than closed class vs. open class is necessary.

Language-particular or language-independent factors in acquisition? Children's comprehension of object pronouns in Dutch, French and German

Children's comprehension of direct and indirect object pronouns in Dutch, French and German was studied in order to determine the role of language-particular factors in acquisition. The pronoun systems of the three languages differ on a number of dimensions that have been assumed to influence the acquisition process: the phonological proper ties of pronouns (clitic vs. non-clitic); the position of the pronoun in the sentence and the phrasal category in which the pronoun occurs: prepositional ([ppPREP[NP[PRO]]]) vs non-prepositional ([NP[PRO]]). A picture-matching task was used. Three age groups, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children, were tested. The results indicate that language- particular properties, at least in the part of the grammar investigated here, do not play the role assumed in some theories of language development, but that more abstract, language-independent proper ties of the pronouns, such as their function as internal verbal argu ments, are relevant for acquisition. Those language-particular factors which were observed are secondary and restricted to limited domains.