Prepositional Complement Research Articles

Prepositional Verbs and the Individual-/Stage-Level distinction

Drawing on Catalan, we show how the aspectual classification of intransitive prepositional verbs is, partially, a predictor of their argument structure properties. Prepositional verbs qualifying as Stage-Level form a heterogeneous class, comprising both unergative and unaccusative verbs. By contrast, those prepositional verbs that qualify as Individual-Level predicates are homogenous as regards argument structure: their prepositional complement is robustly obligatory and their subject is not an external argument, suggesting that they involve a predicative configuration whose predicate is the prepositional complement. This result supports the more general Property Verbalization Constraint hypothesis (Acedo-Matellán 2019), which states that Individual-Level property predicates cannot be encoded as unergative verbs.

A Minimalist Analysis of Relative Clauses in the Ifẹ̀ Dialect of Yorùbá

A considerable amount of scholarly works have been carried out on the syntax of relativisation in Yorùbá but with little attention paid to how the Ifẹ̀ dialect forms its relative clauses. This paper therefore, investigates the syntax of relative constructions in the Ifẹ̀ dialect detailing the strategies employed for them. Ten native speakers aged 60 years and above were purposively selected for structured oral interview based on their proficiency. Data were subjected to syntactic analysis using the Minimalist Program. The Ifẹ̀ dialect operates “kí” as its relative marker, this is optionally dropped. When the dialect stacks two or more relative clauses in a complex sentence it optionally drops only the first relative marker, others are always visible to the PF interface. The dialect operates Head Raising Analysis (HRA) whereby the relativised argument DPs are copied to the clause left peripheral position to check the [+Rel] feature on the Rel0. Relativisable constituents are subject DPs, object DPs (comprising direct objects, objects in serial verb constructions and prepositional objects) genitive DPs and prepositional complements. Relativising a VP/predicate, the dialect either externally merges the nominalised form of a verb as the specifier of the RelP or lexicalises the [+nominal] feature copied from the main verb at the spec RelP. The Ifẹ̀ dialect exhibits some dialectal variations lexically and structurally.

Valency patterns of manner of speaking verbs in Croatian

Abstract Manner of speaking verbs denote the transfer of a message through speech, emphasizing the volume, intensity, comprehensibility, psychophysical condition of the speaker, and/or the impression that the speaker leaves on the hearer. In this article, verbs are semantically divided into four subclasses: 1. Verbs with emphasis on volume, 2. verbs of incomprehensible speaking, 3. verbs of meaningless speaking and complaining, and 4. verbs with emphasis on emotional component. Their syntactic peculiarities have been extensively researched in English, while no special attention has been paid to these verbs in Croatian. It is stated that in Croatian they are monovalent verbs. However, these verbs can be bivalent, and even trivalent. The recipient can be expressed by a dative complement within all four semantic subclasses. With the verbs of loud speaking and verbs with negative emotions, it can be expressed by a prepositional complement na ‘at’ + accusative and za ‘after’ + instrumental. The theme can be expressed by a quotation and a clausal complement, a prepositional complement o ‘about’ + locative, an accusative complement, sometimes a prepositional complement protiv ‘against’ + genitive, za ‘for’ + accusative, and with fewer verbs with prepositional phrases za ‘for’ + instrumental or nad ‘over’ + instrumental. Interestingly, there are certain restrictions for the complements’ combination within the same clause, which are described in more detail in the article.

Diversity of Advanced Sentence Structures (DASS) in writing predicts argumentative writing quality and receptive academic language skills of fifth-to-eighth grade students

Prior adolescent writing research typically used omnibus length-based measures, such as Mean Length of Clauses (MLC), to describe and evaluate students’ performance at constructing complex sentences. This study undertook to: (1) develop a novel approach, Diversity of Advanced Sentence Structures (DASS), with a more detailed inventory of students’ complex sentence structures; and (2) provide evidence of DASS’ validity. To develop DASS, seven types of sentence structures (adverbial clause, clausal complement, clausal prepositional complement, relative clause as modifier, clausal subject, noun as modifier, and passive voice) that characterize school-based texts in adolescence, were identified. Students’ essays were coded for the presence or absence of each structure; the total types of structures present in an essay determined the 0-to-7-point DASS score. A cross-sectional sample of fifth-to-eighth graders (N = 512) wrote argumentative essays responding to a school policy controversy. DASS scores in seventh or eighth grade were significantly higher than those in fifth grade. DASS significantly and positively predicted both students’ writing quality and their receptive academic language, while MLC did not show significant associations with either, controlling for students’ grade, gender, socio-economic status. This study suggests that the DASS offers a promising novel approach to capturing a detailed picture of how emerging academic writers construct complex sentences.

Constructions in competition: The development of the impersonal verb hunger and the adjectival periphrasis be hungry in Early Modern English

ABSTRACT The present study is concerned with the syntactic and semantic development of the impersonal verb hunger in Early Modern English. An analysis of corpus data has been carried out on ca. 20 million words drawn from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700). Results show that, from a semantic perspective, the verb hunger undergoes a process of metaphorical extension involving a change from the original meaning ‘to feel hunger’, in the domain of Physical Sensation, to the meaning ‘to desire’, in the domain of Emotion. In this latter sense, the verb becomes predominantly associated with prepositional complements (e.g. 1542, our hungry soules [...] hunger for y^ word of God). Also in the course of the Early Modern period, the verb is subject to competition with the adjectival periphrasis be hungry, especially in the sense ‘to feel hunger’. The article concludes by putting forward hypotheses to explain the motivations for these various developments.

L'uso dell'articolo determinativo davanti ai singenionimi affettivi preceduti da un possessivo: un quadro statistico

Among the most complex rules of Italian grammar are those relating to the use of the definite article with possessive adjectives followed by kinship names: in this case, the article is not employed, but its omission is subject to various structural, syntactical, and semantic restrictions concerning the noun / phrase in question. Grammar books usually highlight the use of the article with plural nouns or with the possessive form loro, but they are much less careful about other features of the kinship noun / phrase in which possessives are involved (compound nouns, nouns followed by prepositional complements, etc.). Furthermore, they disagree with regard to the syntax of affective names, in which case the use of the article is often considered optional. With this study, then, I intend to analyze the use of the definite article with possessive adjectives followed by the affective kinship names mamma and papà (therefore, nouns without suffixes) in the largest corpus of written Italian, Italian Web 2016 of the Sketch Engine system. The results of this research are interesting because, statistically, the use of the article depends on the possessive adjective used in the text (mio, tuo, suo, etc.) and, therefore, on the degree of the speaker's emotional involvement.

Gramatica limbii române în veșminte noi

In 2005, The Romanian Academy published a new Romanian Language Grammar, four decades after the last edition of the previous Grammar. The event sparked a lot of controversy, even indignation, especially among those familiar with the old grammar and unwilling to embrace the interpretations of a new one. Only five years after this publication, a group of researchers separated themselves from the 2005 edition’s authors and clustered around Professor Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, into a team of scholars who undertook the toilsome mission of aligning the Romanian grammar to the European research manner. The list of these works, purposefully set up in chronological order, offers on overall view of the researcher groups that have put an effort in this direction over the last ten years. The present paper addresses both the Romanian native speakers and those interested in the grammar of this language. It brings under scrutiny three segments: the pronominal clitics, verb voices and the prepositional complement.

Pseudo-grammaticalization: The anatomy of "come" in Modern Hebrew pseudo-coordination constructions

The paper examines the pseudo-coordination construction featuring the verb come preceding a lexical verb in Modern Hebrew, and shows that this is a mono-clausal mono-eventive construction, which did not emerge via a process of grammaticalization. That is, there is no tightening of internal dependencies between parts of the construction (Haspelmath 2004), nor evidence of a lexical unit starting to assume grammatical functions (Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991). I go on to argue that, in this particular construction, the verb come is a “lexical restructuring verb” (Wurmbrand 2004, 2014), whose lexical properties do not differ from those of ‘simple’ change-of-location uses of come in that both feature a deictic meaning component. Particular attention will be paid to what looks like the absence of a motion component, suggesting that even if simple come selects for a prepositional complement, it does not necessarily encode a motion component, and therefore the absence of the PP, in a complex verb construction is not tied to loss of motion, but merely to a change in the type of complement. The current account provides substance to claims stressing a metaphorical relation between the two occurrences of come, since it points to the close similarities in the lexical-pragmatic properties of this lexeme in its two environments of use, and locates the difference between them in the choice of complement that produces the effect of transfer from the location realm to a more abstract one characteristic of metaphoric meanings.

La oración subordinada sustantiva en el texto escrito en español

espanolEste trabajo se fija en el rendimiento de la subordinacion sustantiva en el texto escrito en espanol. Se evalua como se emplea en cuatro modos del discurso (narraciones, descripciones, instrucciones y exposiciones) y se estudia el rendimiento de tales subordinadas segun asuman funcion de sujeto, de complemento directo o de complemento preposicional, sea este del verbo, del nombre o del adjetivo. Se presta especial atencion a la morfologia de los verbos subordinados y a las condiciones que llevan a que tales subordinadas se construyan en indicativo, en subjuntivo o en infinitivo. Asimismo, se valora su uso en construcciones indirectas y de estilo directo. EnglishThis paper focuses on the performance of substantive subordination in Spanish written texts. The article evaluates how it is used in four modes of discourse (narrations, descriptions, instructions and expositions). It also studies the use of such subordinates when they function as the subject, the direct complement or the prepositional complement (of a verb, a noun or an adjective) within the main clause. Special attention is paid to the morphology of subordinate verbs and to the conditions that lead such subordinates to be constructed in indicative, subjunctive or infinitive. Moreover, its patterns of usage are specifically analysed in indirect and direct speech structures

THE NOMINAL CLAUSES OF ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN LANGUAGE

The Nominal Clauses function as like the noun phrases. This means that a nominal clause has subject, object, complement or prepositional complement etc. The nominal groups are things “ we usually add some information about it which shows how we experience or perceive the thing it is important to remember language is not reality itself, but only the way we see reality, the way we experience it ”.We can usually test the nominal clause by seeing whether we can replace the clause with it or something, e.g. He thinks you will be surprised. (He thinks something.) That she got better was a miracle. (Finite nominal clause – subject) I heard that you were there. (Finite nominal clause – subject) I wanted you to know. (Non-finite nominal clause – object) He likes playing rugby. (Non-finite nominal clause – object) Article visualizations:

Deutsche Präpositionen als Träger lexikalischer Informationen. Eine Segmentierung nach Kriterien lexikalischer Autonomie

This article is related to the study of the semantic load of the lexical category of prepositions. German prepositions, as in most Anglo-Germanic languages, are especially productive in the framework of two very specific syntactic functions: circumstantial complement and prepositional complement. Traditionally, in the context of the first one some type of semantic load is conferred on them, especially in cases where opposition pairs are available, while in the context of the second function they usually talk about uses of a purely conventional type with little lexical motivation. Through this article the possibility of relativizing this approach will be considered, and, thus, highlighting cases of prepositions with hardly any lexical load within the framework of a function as circumstantial complement, and, in the same way cases of prepositions with some kind of semantic value in the framework of the function as a repositional complement.

The Discriminativeness of Internal Syntactic Representations in Automatic Genre Classification

ABSTRACT Genre characterizes a document differently from a subject that has been the focus of most document retrieval and classification applications. This work hypothesizes a close interaction between syntactic variation and genre differentiation by introspecting stylistic cues in functional and structural aspects beyond word level. It has engineered 14 syntactic feature sets of internal representations for genre classification through Machine Learning devices. Experiment results show significant superiority of fusing structural and lexical features for genre classification (F∆max. = 9.2%, sig. = 0.001), suggesting the effectiveness of incorporating syntactic cues for genre discrimination. In addition, the PCA analysis reports the noun phrases (NP) as the most principle component (66%) for genre variation and prepositional phrases (PP) the second. Particularly, noun phrases with dominant structures of prepositional complements and pronouns functioning as a subject are most effective for identifying printed texts of high formality, while prepositional phrases are useful for identifying speeches of low formality. Error analysis suggests that the phrasal features are particularly useful for classifying four groups of genre classes, i.e. unscripted speech, fiction, news reports, and academic writing, all distributed with distinct structural characteristics, and they demonstrate an incremental degree of formality in the continuum of language complexity.

A Corpus-based Study of Valency Sentence Patterns of English Verbs

Based on the COCA, this paper investigates valency sentence patterns of the English verb APPOINT from the perspective of syntactic valency. And it analyzes the dominated components of verbs with the corpus linguistic method of collocation. It has been found: (1) The verb APPOINT has seven valency sentence patterns identified in the active sentences and fifteen patterns in the passive sentences. (2) The complement types associated with the verb APPOINT include subject complement, object complement, nominal complement with or without as, verbal complement with an infinitive or with to-be followed by a noun or a noun phrase, prepositional complement with the preposition to, by or for. (3) There is regularity existing in the complements. This present study describes valency sentence patterns of verbs, taking the sentence as the smallest research unit and verbs as the core of the sentence. The research results provide a new sight for second language teaching, especially for English vocabulary teaching.

The semantics of underived event nouns in French

This paper deals with underived nouns that denote events in French (e.g. crime ‘crime’, proces ‘trial’, emeute ‘riot’, seisme ‘earthquake’). We compare the properties of these nouns with those of deverbal nominalizations, especially as regards complement structure and lexical aspect. The heterogeneity and specificities of underived event nouns (UENs) are highlighted. First, the event denotation for UENs can have various semantic origins, and be derived metaphorically or metonymically from a non-event meaning. Second, some UENs are completely autonomous event nouns and never combine with participant-denoting complements, whereas others are role assignors and determine the semantics of their prepositional complements. Despite those specificities, UENs share many properties with deverbal event nouns, most notably regarding lexical aspect. UENs can denote durative or punctual, telic or atelic, foreseen or unforeseen events. We argue that lexical aspect is not primarily a property of verbs. It is a matter of semantic rather than grammatical categories, and fundamentally depends upon the denotation of eventualities

Noun Phrases of Jace Wayland�s Utterances in Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

A noun phrase is one of the important elements in building a sentence. Every noun phrase has its own head of the phrase. The structure of the noun phrase can be different according to the modification of the head. There are two kinds of modification to the head of the phrase: pre-modification and post-modification. The existence of the modifiers plays certain roles to the noun phrase. This article presents how the pre-modification affects the character in a literary work. Cassandra Clares Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was chosen as the work to observe. Stylistic approach is used in order to conduct this study. The data of the study is collected from the noun phrases found in one of the characters utterances, Jace Wayland. The analysis presented in this article covers the types of structure, distribution, and function of noun phrases. This study found several results of the analysis. First, there are seven types of noun phrase structure found in the utterances of Jace Wayland. Second, there are four main functions of a noun phrase in a clause: subject, object, prepositional complement, and predicative complement. Third, the noun phrases also have significant role in revealing the character of Jace Wayland: being descriptive and direct.Keywords: noun phrase, stylistics, pre-modification

NOUN PHRASES OF JACE WAYLAND’S UTTERANCES IN MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES

A noun phrase is one of the important elements in building a sentence. Every noun phrase has its own head of the phrase. The structure of the noun phrase can be different according to the modification of the head. There are two kinds of modification to the head of the phrase: pre-modification and post-modification. The existence of the modifiers plays certain roles to the noun phrase. This article presents how the pre-modification affects the character in a literary work. Cassandra Clares Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was chosen as the work to observe. Stylistic approach is used in order to conduct this study. The data of the study is collected from the noun phrases found in one of the characters utterances, Jace Wayland. The analysis presented in this article covers the types of structure, distribution, and function of noun phrases. This study found several results of the analysis. First, there are seven types of noun phrase structure found in the utterances of Jace Wayland. Second, there are four main functions of a noun phrase in a clause: subject, object, prepositional complement, and predicative complement. Third, the noun phrases also have significant role in revealing the character of Jace Wayland: being descriptive and direct.Keywords: noun phrase, stylistics, pre-modification

De om-alternantie: een verkennende casestudy

This paper focuses on the Dutch om-alternation, i.e. the variation between infinitivalcomplements (=IC) with and without the prepositional complementizer om, as demonstratedin Hij beloofde om op tijd te komen vs. Hij beloofde op tijd te komen ('He promisedto be on time'). The choice between one of the two alternating constructions is not randomas it depends on different syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. We test theeffects of a series of potential factors culled from the literature through a multifactorialcorpus investigation on the basis of real-language examples from the Dutch Parallel Corpus,with special attention for register effects - the possible influence of register on thisalternation has not been addressed before. This attention for register can be related to theemerging Cognitive Sociolinguistics movement, which has led to a new or renewed attentionfor the possible influence of all kinds of lectal factors on syntactic alternation phenomena.The analysis will reveal that both register and complexity-related factors play asignificant role in the choice between the two alternants.

DIREKTNA PARCIJALNA PITANJA IZVEDENA POMOĆU PROSTIH UPITNIH ZAMENICA U FRANCUSKOM JEZIKU I NJIHOVI EKVIVALENTI U SRPSKOM

U francuskom jeziku, direktna parcijalna pitanja izvedena pomoću prostih upitnih zamenica podrazumevaju složen sistem u okviru koga su mnogi elementi podložni varijaciji. Pre svega, odabir prostih upitnih zamenica u konkretnom upitnom iskazu zavisi od toga da li se odnosi na bića (qui) ili na stvari i pojmove (que/qu’, quoi). Kada se odnose na stvari i pojmove, proste upitne zamenice, koje spadaju u nepromenljivu vrstu reči, imaju svoj nenaglašen (que/qu’) i naglašen oblik (quoi), a njihova upotreba zavisi od pozicije proste upitne zamenice u upitnom iskazu, kao i od toga da li je ona upotrebljena samostalno ili ne, uz predlog ili bez njega. Između ostalog, u zavisnosti od funkcije upitne zamenice u rečenici, često postoje dvojni upitni oblici: neprošireni (koji zahtevaju upotrebu inverzije osim ako upitna reč ima funkciju subjekta) i prošireni pomoću upitnog izraza est-ce que, est-ce qui (koji zahtevaju isti red reči kao u izjavnoj rečenici). Najzad, u govornom jeziku, upotreba direktnih parcijalnih pitanja izvedenih pomoću prostih upitnih zamenica pokazuje strukturnu varijabilnost koja nosi različita stilska obeležja. U našem radu, oslanjajući se na relevantnu normativnu i deskriptivnu literaturu, kao i na analizu korpusa, nastojaćemo da utvrdimo koji su oblici, u srpskom jeziku, ekvivalentni navedenim direktnim parcijalnim pitanjima.

Improving term extraction with linguistic analysis in the biomedical domain

This paper presents a linguistic-based approach to term extraction from corpora in the biomedical domain. The method is based on an analysis of terms and their context that verify linguistic constraints. It focuses on participles and prepositional complements. The purpose of our approach is to obtain terms that are relevant for knowledge acquisition applications, such as the creation and en- richment of terminologies and ontologies. We report on the evaluations we conducted by applying two complementary strategies, using a reference termi- nology and a manual validation. They were applied to two corpora of differing genres and Life Science domains, namely pharmacology patents and animal physiology scientific articles. Our work shows that the linguistic analysis-based developments significantly improve the extraction results. The method is espe- cially efficient when dealing with gerunds and to prepositional modifiers.

The Syntax of Bi-Comparatives in Mandarin Chinese

The study attempts to propose a syntactic account of bi-comparatives in Mandarin Chinese under the generative framework. Bi plays a role reminiscent of a prepositional complementizer projecting a self-completed clause (Hsing 2003, Chung 2006), a preverbal adjunct in the wake of Liu (1996). Following Abney (1987), Kennedy (1997), Kennedy & Merchant (1997), it is suggested that a gradable adjective projects an extended functional structure DegP headed by a degree morpheme in the bi-comparative. The adjunction of the bi-clause onto the SpecDegP is triggered by the need to saturate and restrict the degree argument of the adjective (Liu 2007ab, 2010c). An adjective or verb phrase within the bi-clause is deleted. By studying bi-comparatives in depth, this study not only can shed light on the clausal analysis of bi-comparatives, but also provide useful data for future research on Comparative Deletion (Bresnan 1973, 1975).