Relational Nouns Research Articles

The acquisition of relative clauses and noun phrase accessibility: testing the NPAH in Cantonese

ABSTRACT The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NAPH) posits a subject advantage in extraction from relative clauses and other constructions – a claim supported by numerous cross-linguistic language acquisition studies. However, Chinese languages differ from the majority of the languages hitherto studied in having SVO (head-initial) word order and prenominal relative clauses, a typologically peculiar combination that provides the opportunity to tease apart predictions of various theories of relative clauses. This study uses Cantonese in an experiment on children’s comprehension of relative clauses to investigate the effects of NP accessibility using pair-wise comparisons across the NP positions of subject, direct object, indirect object, and oblique. The results strongly support a universal subject preference and also support, to some extent, the NPAH’s predictions for the acquisition order of relative clauses. In addition, children’s errors reveal a multifactorial influence, suggesting that their processing of relative clauses is affected by semantic prominence and word order canonicity.

On the position of dative DPs in Spanish middle-passive sentences

This paper examines external possession between a dative possessor and a relational noun in Spanish middle-passive configurations. The dative DP in these contexts must surface preverbally in out-of-the-blue contexts, either by itself –presumably in preverbal subject position–, or along with the theme containing the possessee. When the dative precedes the theme, it cannot be assumed that the former is left-dislocated while the latter sits in preverbal subject position, for this would imply a violation of locality under a low applicative analysis of dative possessors: Tº would skip the possessor argument in Spec,ApplP to probe the possessee in Applº’s complement position to its specifier. Rather, I provide data showing that preverbal DPs –dative or otherwise– in Spanish middle-passive contexts are clitic left-dislocations co-referring with empty pronouns in argument position. I offer a biclausal analysis of these configurations that avoids any potential intervention effects, while at the same time accounting for the extra-sentential properties of these constituents.

Gaplessness in Chinese relative clauses

This study posits the existence of a covert gap in Chinese gapless relative clauses, seeking to elucidate how this gap, created by the omission of certain sentential elements, can be recovered via coercion from the relative head noun. This mechanism is elucidated by analyzing the relativization process in prepositional phrases and serial verb constructions. Within prepositional phrases, two subtypes are discerned. The first subtype involves the omission of the preposition, a process termed Preposition Ghosting, which occurs to avoid a violation of the Edge Constraint. Conversely, in the second subtype, the preposition remains in situ without undergoing direct relativization, attributable to its less straightforwardly inferable thematic relationship with the head noun. In serial verb constructions, the process of relativization may lead to the omission of either the first or second verb, with the omitted verb subsequently recoverable through coercion from the relative head noun. The findings suggest that ‘gapless’ relative clauses in Chinese are, in fact, ‘gapped’, which highlight syntactic universals that transcend surface-level forms and meanings.

Exploration of the Combination of Online and Offline Teaching of Undergraduate Computer English

In the undergraduate computer English teaching, it is found that the prior knowledge base of undergraduates is uneven, and the cognition of professional English terms of related nouns is different, which brings difficulties to the teaching of this course, resulting in poor teaching effect, and it is necessary to explain the knowledge before it can be carried out in the follow-up teaching. Therefore, the online platform is used to interact with students in real time during the course to ensure that the students' online rate and concentration in the classroom are high, improve the teaching efficiency, and promote the improvement of students' thinking and professional English skills.

Effects of Errorless Learning-based Semantic Feature Analysis Treatment on Naming and Cognitive Abilities for Individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease

Objectives: Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) patients characteristically show a decline in various cognitive functions, including memory and language skills. Additionally, naming deficits are evident from the early stages of dementia in AD patients. This study aimed to consider these characteristics of AD patients and develop a semantic feature analysis based on errorless learning. The effect of this naming treatment on the language and cognitive abilities of AD patients was examined, with participants divided into treatment group and control groups. Methods: Ten patients with early to severe AD were divided into a treatment group and a control group. The noun list was individualized for each participant, and to prevent the production of errors, the researcher provided the names and semantic features of the nouns, which the AD patients then learned. Results: The treatment group showed statistically significant improvements in naming trained nouns, semantically related non-treatment nouns, and semantically unrelated non-treatment nouns. The control group did not show statistically significant improvements in overall noun naming. In the treatment group, the performance in the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT), specifically in naming animals, significantly increased post-treatment compared to pretreatment. In contrast, the control group showed a significant decrease in digit span test performance post-treatment compared to pre-treatment. Conclusion: A semantic feature analysis based on errorless learning was effective in improving naming performance in AD patients. It also had a positive impact on the enhancement and maintenance of performance in language and cognitive tests.

The Grammaticalization of Self and Self-World in East Mekeo: Personhood as a Closed System

Abstract: Relational nouns have been studied extensively, typically under the rubric of inalienable possession. Such nouns are typically bound to presupposed referents by an anaphoric morpheme indicating person and number. In Oceanic languages, one large class of relational nouns is linked contingently to nonhuman entities that are routinely specified in the utterance. However, another large class is linked noncontingently to presupposed human referents that typically need not be specified in the given utterance. In this paper, I propose that, in East Mekeo, the latter class of nouns corresponds with (and reveals to the investigator) the main parameters of the Mekeo self and its social world.

Пам’ять у лінгвістичному і соціокультурному вимірах

The article explores the linguistic characteristics of the concept of memory as one of the key cultural concepts among other meaningful ones — person, life, language, word. The starting point was the position that memory is a psychological category that is verbalized in different ways by linguistic means, models synonymous series, mental image forms. It is noted that the word-concept memory correlates with the words consciousness, memory, imagination, mind, knowledge through the prism of individual and collective experience of the past, and acts as a tool for evaluating human existence. In a comparative aspect, the semantics of the Ukrainian verb to remember and the Czech zapomnět, as well as the related nouns nezabudka and pomněnka, are considered. Verbs, having at first glance a similar grammatical structure, are characterized by antonymic meanings in modern literary languages. The factors that led the original semantic feature of the root pomn- (memor- [пам’ят-]) — «to remember» — to develop to the opposite meaning in the Czech verb zapomnět «to forget / not to remember something» are analyzed. It was noted that under the influence of other Slavic languages, the parallel use in the XVI–XVII c. in the Ukrainian language, two words — «пам’ятати / помнити» — led to the fact that the word to remember displaced the word to remember from usage. The semantics of ʽmemory’ in the interpretation of figurative means — metaphors and phraseology, which show signs of high semantic stability, reproducibility in the language from memory, and thus have the status of collective memories. The evidence presented in the article shows that the conceptual field of memory is structured by concepts that are relevant both for the individual and for the whole human community in a particular time dimension and have a high axiological potential.

The Grammaticalization of Self and Self-World in East Mekeo: Personhood as a Closed System

Relational nouns have been studied extensively, typically under the rubric of inalienable possession. Such nouns are typically bound to presupposed referents by an anaphoric morpheme indicating person and number. In Oceanic languages, one large class of relational nouns is linked contingently to nonhuman entities that are routinely specified in the utterance. However, another large class is linked noncontingently to presupposed human referents that typically need not be specified in the given utterance. In this paper, I propose that, in East Mekeo, the latter class of nouns corresponds with (and reveals to the investigator) the main parameters of the Mekeo self and its social world.

Children’s generalization of novel names in comparison settings: The role of semantic distance during learning and at test

There is considerable evidence showing that, in novel noun learning and generalization tasks, comparisons of several learning stimuli lead to more taxonomically based generalizations of novel nouns than single stimulus presentations. This study investigated the role of semantic distance (close vs. far) between learning examples and between learning examples and transfer items (near vs. distant) in comparison designs. In two experiments, we investigated the case of object nouns (e.g., foods, Experiment 1) and relational nouns (e.g., is the cutter for, Experiment 2) in 4- to 6-year-old and 3- to 4-year-old children, respectively. As predicted, the comparison conditions led to better results than the no-comparison conditions. In comparison conditions, far training items and near generalization items gave the best performance. Semantic distance effects are discussed in terms of abstracted representations during learning as well as in terms of cognitive constraints on generalization. It is argued that both object nouns and relational nouns are construed in the light of the type of example used during learning (i.e., single or multiple). Depending on the distance between learning and generalization items, children build different categories and are more or less likely to accept distant referents.

Men Who Brew: Masculinity and the Production of Drink in Medieval Icelandic Literature

Men Who Brew: Masculinity and the Production of Drink in Medieval Icelandic Literature

The Effect of Semantic Context on Lexical Access in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

Objectives: Lexical access problems are one of the limitations observed in children with developmental language disorders during the initial years of schooling. Semantic context has a powerful influence on lexical access. The cross-modal visual-auditory picture-word interference paradigm is a method for studying adults and children's lexical access. Because few studies have examined lexical access in Persian-speaking children, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of different semantic contexts on lexical access in children with and without developmental language disorder. Methods: In this experimental study, 20 children aged 7-9 years with developmental language disorders and 20 age-matched peers were recruited according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. At first, the picture-word interference paradigm was prepared. In so doing, 16 common pictures of objects paired with four auditory interfering words (related verb, related noun, unrelated verb, and unrelated noun) were presented to the children in a silent condition to determine their naming accuracy and latency. The DMDX software calculated the naming latency. The percentage of correct names also calculated naming accuracy. Results: Naming latencies were significantly faster in children without language disorders (P≤0.05). In addition, a reliable interference effect was found. According to the results, naming latencies were significantly faster for related verb distractors than unrelated verbs and related noun distractors (P<0.05). In addition, a significant difference was observed between the silent and interference conditions regarding the naming accuracy. However, accuracy was not affected by distractors. Discussion: Different semantic contexts affect lexical access differently in children. These differences cause semantic relatedness between verbs and nouns in lexical networks. The present study findings indicate that lexical knowledge and semantic relatedness are lower in children with developmental language disorders than in those with typical language development. These results can be useful for future studies and interventions on lexical access in children with and without language disorders.

Грамматикализация существительных side и Stelle в предлоги в английском и немецком языках

The research aims to prove the similarity between the processes of grammaticalization of relational nouns into spatial prepositions in Germanic languages of different structure. The paper is original in that it is the first to carry out a comparative analysis of grammaticalization of the English and German nouns ‘side’ and ‘Stelle’ into prepositions with the use of etymological dictionaries. The research results have shown that the process of grammaticalization of these nouns exposed to common ways of grammati-calization is similar and caused by the same grammaticalization mechanisms: desemanticization of original lexical units, decategorialization and phonetic erosion. As a result of grammaticalization of the nouns ‘side’ and ‘Stelle’ (place), the prepositions beside and anstelle von ‘instead of’ have appeared through fusion. It is noted that in the German language, grammaticalization leads to the loss of more grammatical catego-ries (gender, number, case), as the grammatical category of gender does not exist in English. The research proves the role of original meanings of content words in grammaticalization in two languages of different structure belonging to the same language group.

Quantifying relational nouns in corpora

While relational nouns (cousin) are traditionally delineated in a binary and theory-dependent manner, this article approximates relationality as a continuous, objective corpus metric (Percent Possessive) – allowing for lexicon-wide exploration of which nouns are more or less relational and why. Comparing across nouns and accounting for the ontological class of the noun's referent (focusing on nouns denoting artifacts, natural kinds, occupations, humans and locations), I find that Percent Possessive is positively correlated with a noun's per-million-word frequency. Comparing across different web communities, I find that a noun is more frequent, and shows a greater ratio of definite to indefinite tokens, in the community where its Percent Possessive is significantly higher. I take these findings to be consistent with the claim that a noun is more easily interpreted as relational (as measured by Percent Possessive) when human interaction with its referent is more conventional (as measured by its frequency and definite-to-indefinite ratio). Inspired by the many authors who have suggested a socio-cultural component to relationality and possession, this article explores at scale in English how nouns reflect the conventions of the people who use them.

Los «posesivos enfáticos» en dos sociolectos del español europeo

AbstractThe «emphatic» possession has been traditionally related to American Spanish, specially, surfacing in language-contact situations. Taking this for granted, the present paper explores the sociolinguistic and dialectal distribution of this possessive construction in European Spanish and attempts to characterize it both semantically and syntactically. This paper analyzes over 20,000 tokens of possessive pronouns. Data are extracted from two corpus representative of the spoken varieties of urban and rural European Spanish. The analysis confirms the colloquial-familiar character of this syntactic construction and supports that the so-called «redundant» possessive acts as an index of type-shifting from a sortal to a relational noun.

"Etape ale fixării patronimicului în onomastica românească medievală. Alcătuirea și funcționalitatea formulelor de descendență"

"The lexical filiation periphrases, inserted right after the personal name (usually baptize name, very seldom personal surname) occur in internal and both external documents, after several decades of the exclusive use of the single name (nomen singulare). These types of periphrases could be found in documents coming all over the romance chancelleries, therefore this denominative practice must have been widely spread at a certain historical stage. Soon after the occurence of the patronimic (by eliminating the relational noun (filius or proles) from the latin filiation periphrases), these lexical kinds of denomination are to be used especially in legal contexts, indicating thus the relation with the head of the family in certain situations. As for Romanian at the moment of the first intern texts were released, one can notice the use of the lexical filiation in all three chancelleries but not as an exclusively mean of naming. As a certain particularity we are to mention the use of filiation in the official denomination of the Wallachian ruler, probable a trace of a Byzantine influence. Regarding the occurrence of filiation periphrases within the internal documents these are used especially in judicial contexts and in legal texts, but not as a unique way of naming. On the contrary, one can notice the alternative use of all the ways of naming (surnames, agent names, toponymical references a.s.o.)."

Auditory Verb Generation Performance Patterns Dissociate Variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome in which patients progressively lose speech and language abilities. Three variants are recognized: logopenic (lvPPA), associated with phonology and/or short-term verbal memory deficits accompanied by left temporo-parietal atrophy; semantic (svPPA), associated with semantic deficits and anterior temporal lobe (ATL) atrophy; non-fluent (nfvPPA) associated with grammar and/or speech-motor deficits and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) atrophy. Here, we set out to investigate whether the three variants of PPA can be dissociated based on error patterns in a single language task. We recruited 21 lvPPA, 28 svPPA, and 24 nfvPPA patients, together with 31 healthy controls, and analyzed their performance on an auditory noun-to-verb generation task, which requires auditory analysis of the input, access to and selection of relevant lexical and semantic knowledge, as well as preparation and execution of speech. Task accuracy differed across the three variants and controls, with lvPPA and nfvPPA having the lowest and highest accuracy, respectively. Critically, machine learning analysis of the different error types yielded above-chance classification of patients into their corresponding group. An analysis of the error types revealed clear variant-specific effects: lvPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “not-a-verb” responses and the highest number of semantically related nouns (production of baseball instead of throw to noun ball); in contrast, svPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “unrelated verb” responses and the highest number of light verbs (production of take instead of throw to noun ball). Taken together, our findings indicate that error patterns in an auditory verb generation task are associated with the breakdown of different neurocognitive mechanisms across PPA variants. Specifically, they corroborate the link between temporo-parietal regions with lexical processing, as well as ATL with semantic processes. These findings illustrate how the analysis of pattern of responses can help PPA phenotyping and heighten diagnostic sensitivity, while providing insights on the neural correlates of different components of language.

Morphophonemic variation in the nominal morphology of Assamese

This paper seeks to analyse and describe the nature of morphophonemic variation in the nominal morphology of Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Assam. Previous discussions of morphophonemic variation in the language have focused on the phonological aspects of such variation (Goswami and Tamuli, 2003: 410-13). However, the present study seeks to examine the nature and range of phonological variations within morphemes triggered by nominal morphological processes such as (a) deictic inflections for relational nouns, (b) case inflections for nouns and pronouns and (c) nominal word-formation via derivation and compounding.Identifying the phonological and morphological factors behind the morphophonemic variation in nominal morphology will serve to uncover the patterned nature of the underlying regularities of a major area of Assamese grammar. Moreover, in seeking to align the morphophonemic variations with specific nominal morphological processes rather than treating them in intrinsic phonological terms, this study proposes to highlight the interdependent functioning of the levels of analysis. Such functioning is evident in instances of phonological variations within morphemes that serve to mark different grammatical functions in the language. In addition to such descriptive considerations, the range of variations and their associated morphological processes can also shed light on specific aspects of diachronic change when they are cross-linguistically compared with cognate languages. The study will be based mainly on corpus data using the empirical methodology of corpus linguistics. Supplementary introspective data will also be used where necessary.

Parallelism Between Sentence Structure and Nominal Phrases in Japanese: Evidence from Scrambled Instrumental and Locative Adverbial Phrases

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with SAdvOV (S is subject phrase, Adv adverb, O object phrase and V verb), AdvSOV, SAdvOV and SOAdvV word orders. SAdvOV word order was found to be the most quickly processed, for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 1) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 2). Thus, the canonical position for these adverbial phrases is identified as the position immediately preceding the object (Theme argument). This finding was replicated when the same experimental methods were applied to event-denoting noun phrases. Adverbial adjuncts in the initial position (AdvON, N is noun phrase) were processed more quickly and accurately than noun phrases with adverbial phrases in the second position (OAdvN), for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 3) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 4). Therefore, the position immediately preceding the object is the canonical position for both instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in sentences and in noun phrases. In conclusion, this indicates that the base structure of a sentence is shared by its related noun phrase.

An exemplar-based approach to composite predicates in the history of American English

This study examines composite predicates (CPs) in the history of American English and uses an exemplar-based model to explain changes in the frequency of verb–noun pairings over time. Two different types of verb-nominal CPs are considered, including those liketake a look, in which a light verb occurs with an abstract nominal object, and others likelose sight, with a more lexically specific verb. Using a corpus of texts written between 1820 and 2009, I track the frequency of different CPs and analyze several families of semantically related nouns that occur with the same verb (e.g.take a look,peak, etc.). Representative families are analyzed to determine the presence of highly frequent verb–noun pairings, or exemplars, that separate themselves over time. The success of exemplars is evaluated according to several factors that may shape patterns of use, including the relative size of noun families, the frequency band of tokens of each family and the distribution of tokens across types within a family. Results indicate that the two types of CPs differ with respect to the evolution and success of exemplary verb–noun pairings and indicate that frequency bands play a role while the size of the noun family and their distributional patterns do not.

Argument structure in the Spanish Determiner Phrase: Acquisition of hierarchies through posessivization

Four types of Determiner Phases (DP) in Spanish have arguments in the form of Prepositional Phrases (PP) introduced by de (‘of’). Picture (foto ‘photo’) and deverbal nouns (descripción ‘description’) project a more complex argument structure than relational (primo ‘cousin’) and deadjectival nouns (belleza ‘beauty’). The possessivization test implies that the most prominent de-PP of each DP type can be possessivized depending on different thematic hierarchies. This study analyzes whether comparative complexity affects convergence on possessivization, with earlier convergence predicted for comparatively simpler relational and deadjectival DPs. To test this prediction, this study examines order of DP acquisition in 52 L1 Spanish-speaking children (6-year-olds (N = 14), 7-year-olds (N = 21), 8-year-olds (N = 17)). A Graded Grammaticality Judgment Task (GGJT) containing 32 items divided across four conditions (relational, deadjectival, picture, deverbal) with four contexts each was administered. Results reveal developmental improvement and partial support for the prediction in that relational DPs are converged upon first, while deverbal DPs are converged upon last. This study’s import is the novel examination of argument structure across four DP types in Spanish-speaking children with the aim of observing and explaining the developmental path.