Properties Of Lexical Items Research Articles

Prototypentheorie und Flexionsmorphologie

This article presents an application of the theory of prototypes to the field of inflectional morphology and especially to the treatment of exceptions. From the assumption that the handling of irregular facts is basically ruled by the same principles of categorization as the handling of regular facts, the article shows on concrete examples of German nouns - weak masculine nouns, feminine nouns with inflected e-plural and er-plural - that the principle of the motivation of inflection by other properties of lexical items (phonological, semantic, syntactic properties) also works in inflectional classes with few elements. This type of analysis leads to the hypothesis of much more complex categorial structures, which includes subcategories with very few elements, instead of the traditional dichotomy between regular and irregular or a simple continuum prototypical - non prototypical.

Empathetic Adverbs and Adjectives in the Corpus of Meteorological News

A lot of research has been conducted on the properties of lexical items on the basis of data extracted from various corpora. Following this tendency, this study investigates diverse empathetic adverbs and adjectives retrieved from a corpus of meteorological news. All the adverbs and adjectives occurring in the corpus are first identified in a tagged corpus that is obtained through the help of a part-of-speech tagger. The concordances of these adverbs and adjectives are then obtained automatically by applying a concordancer to the tagged corpus. Empathetic adverbs and adjectives are finally collected manually through a close look at each of these concordances. This study shows that in meteorological news empathetic adverbs convey positive/negative or expected/unexpected feelings about weather-related situations described in the news and that empathetic adjectives convey positive/negative feelings about weather-related entities mentioned in the news. Therefore, the use of these empathetic adverbs and adjectives in everyday meteorological news provides important clues as to whether the weather in question has an adverse influence or a helpful influence on people.

The acquisition of possessive have-clauses by Turkish and Moroccan learners of Dutch

This study describes how Turkish and Moroccan adults acquire Dutch possessive clauses in which the verb have expresses the possessive relationship. The acquisition process is explained within the framework of recent generative theory in which have-clauses are assumed to be copular locative constructions. In this theory, predicate inversion of the locative PP and incorporation of the locative P0 into a be-copula are the main characteristics of a possessive have-clause. Assuming that all linguistic knowledge of the L1 is present, L2 learners rely on it from the earliest stages, irrespective of whether this L1 knowledge is parameter-related or not. The results confirm such a “conservation” viewpoint, which accounts for how the possessive relationship is expressed in the earliest stages and why these learners have their language-specific difficulties in discovering the target have-construction. The results corroborate the conservation effect of both parametrized linguistic knowledge, viz., the strong features triggering predicate inversion, and non-parametrized knowledge, viz., knowledge of syntax, morphology and morphological realization rules, and properties of lexical items.

A Categorial Approach to Latin Syntax

AbstractThis work investigates the effects of the application of a categorial grammar to Latin syntax. Due to the wide variety of constructions admitted in Latin, the analysis will focus on those properties of lexical items which more directly and intuitively offer the opportunity of evaluating the salient aspects and the effectiveness of the categorial strategy. Subcategorization properties of lexical items and certain word order patterns are considered in this perspective, and a picture of the case system is suggested, representing the traditional cases in terms of the categorial notation implemented by an appropriate system of syntactic features.

Sémantique et approximation

Semantics and approximation: the presquel'a peine problem. "Scalar" linguistic items, such as those involving fuzziness and approximation, seemingly support the view that natural language is free from any deductive process, and calls rather for a sociology of arguing or applied fuzzy set theory. Observation suggests that some of these items are in fact correlated with complex reasoning-like features, in which linguistic hierarchies (most notably presuppositional ones) and dynamic logical properties (under the generic label of "partial inference") get entangled. In French, presque and à peine exhibit an operational structure: semantic features are activated according to a special ordering, which filters out some subsequent utterances, accounting for the contrast in pairs like: C'est presque cent francs, c'est cher / ? C'est presque cent francs, ce n'est pas cher. In this respect, the linking of utterances appears to be controlled by properties of lexical items.