Syntactic Configurations Research Articles

Covariation in processing: grammar vs. context

In addition to referential uses, pronouns can have covarying interpretations, i.e., exhibit the behavior of a bound variable. The grammatical mechanism(s) behind such readings have been subject to longstanding debates: Some authors argue for a fairly flexible but unified semantic mechanism that is not tied closely to syntactic configurations. Others distinguish a core class of bona fidebinding with tight syntactic constraints from other mechanisms that give rise to ultimately parallel effects, but do so more indirectly. Psycholinguistic work has started to uncover the processing mechanisms involved in evaluating dependencies between covarying pronouns and (candidate) antecedents. Moulton and Han (2018) leverage the processing perspective to try to shed light on the theoretical question of what grammatical mechanism is at play for a given covarying pronoun. They argue that so-called Gender Mismatch Effects only arise for cases of bona fide binding, supporting the existence of distinct grammatical mechanisms. However, Kush and Eik (2019), looking at another construction involving the relevant other covariation mechanisms, do find Gender Mismatch Effects. These authors suggest that various contextual factors can make a covarying interpretation harder to obtain, and they propose adjustments to Moulton and Han’s stimuli that they think should lead to fast Gender Mismatch Effects even when no bona fide binding is involved. A series of self-paced reading experiments replicate the results from Moulton and Han, and then extend the paradigm to variations along the lines suggested by Kush and Eik. The adjustment of contextual factors indeed results in Gender Mismatch Effects for both environments. We discuss how the processing evidence informs the theoretical issues.  

Are There Serial Verb Constructions in Old English? A New Perspective on the Changes in Verbal Complementation

This article discusses the existence of serial verb constructions in Old English and explores the complementation of aspectual and control verbs as well as other related constructions. The discussion of the Old English data finds remarkable differences with respect to the syntactic configurations of Present-Day English that are described as serial by Roberts (2010). Although the range of serial constructions is more restrictive in Old English, at least with aspectual verbs, the analysis of verbal complementation from the perspective of serialisation allows us to bring other convergent constructions to the discussion, including configurations with linked infinitives and participles in predicative constructions and configurations with pre-modals and the causative verb dōn ‘to do’.

The Passive Voice in Urdu: A Syntactic Investigation and Transformational Analysis

This paper explores passive structures in the Urdu language. It aims to understand their syntactic configuration and how to convert active sentences into passive ones. Limited research exists on Urdu's passivization compared to English. The research questions focus on the structure of passive sentences in Urdu and the necessary modifications for passivization. A qualitative research methodology is used, analyzing written texts and daily conversations of native Urdu speakers. The literature review compares Urdu's passive structures with English, including the standard "be" passive and less common "get passive" and "have passive." Findings show that Urdu passives use the auxiliary “Gaya” and the agent can be explicitly mentioned using "from-PP" rather than "by-PP." The paper also covers passivization in imperative sentences, using “ja:” and “cha:hi:e” morphemes. Moreover, voice neutrality is examined, showing that passive and active sentences in Urdu often convey the same event with similar agent-patient relationships. The study’s conclusive remarks on passive construction in Urdu have the potential to ignite future research in this domain. The paper contributes to the knowledge of passive constructions in Urdu which can significantly impact translation accuracy and interpretation between Urdu and English. This research also adds to the big picture of how languages work.

The knowledge of binding principles in early child grammar: Experimental evidence from 30-month-old toddlers

ABSTRACT We investigated toddlers’ understanding of the hierarchical syntactic configurations that constrain the referential meanings of reflexives and pronouns. In particular, reflexives must co-refer with the c-commanding antecedent within the local domain (Principle A) (e.g., Hei washes himselfi. Johni knows that Billj likes himselfj.), and pronoun reference must be disjoint from its local c-commanding antecedent (Principle B) (e.g., Hei washes himj. Johni knows that Billj likes himi.). French-learning 30-month-olds participated in an eye-tracker task. In Experiment 1 each trial presented a simple sentence containing a reflexive or a pronoun and a target verb (e.g., Il i se i/le j lave. “hei washes himselfi/himj”), while displaying side-by-side pictures depicting self- directed versus other-directed actions of the target verb. Experiment 2 tested the locality conditions of the principles using complex sentences, with the target verb and the reflexive/pronoun appearing in the embedded clause (e.g., Le bébé i voit que le papa j se j /le i lave. “The babyi sees that the dadj washes himselfj/himi”); the pictures were those of Experiment 1, with the patient of the verb being the local antecedent in the embedded clause versus the non-local antecedent in the matrix-clause. Experiment 3 tested the c-commanding requirements of the principles with sentences containing a complex subject, a reflexive/pronoun and a target verb (e.g., Le bébé i du papa j se i /le j lave. “The babyi of the dadj washes himselfi/himj”). In the pictures the patient was the linearly farther versus closer antecedent. Eye-gazes to action images showed adult-like interpretations across sentential structures, demonstrating that binding principles are in child grammar during age two.

Como-gerund clauses in European Portuguese

Previous literature on the typology of gerund clauses in Portuguese has overlooked a peculiar type of clauses which are always introduced by como (‘as’) and display an array of characteristics that set them apart from all other gerund clauses (and from other, somehow similar, constructions in different languages). In this paper, we provide an in-depth syntactic and semantic characterisation of these como-gerund clauses and the contexts in which they arise, highlighting their similarities and differences regarding other constructions, namely resultative and depictive secondary predicates. We put forward a proposal to deal with their syntactic configurations and the restrictions they exhibit. We also propose that como is obligatory in these clauses because it marks a type-shift operation, which gives como gerund clauses a predicative interpretation, usually found in the nominal domain.

The Domains of Monotonicity Processing

Abstract This paper reports an investigation into the nature of Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing conditions from a processing perspective. We found that the processing cost of Downward Entailingness (a k a the Monotonicity Effect) is determined by the number of monotonicity reversals of NPI domains, rather than by the number of Downward-Entailing (DE) operators. This conclusion is not based on the standard judgment paradigm, but rather, on the measurement of continuous variables (error rates, Reaction Times (RTs)) in a verification task, in which the truth value of a sentence is determined against a scenario. We conducted two experiments with sentences that contained one or two DE operators, which featured in different syntactic configurations. We explored how RT is affected by the manipulation of both the number of DE operators, and the syntactic environments in which they reside. We ran these experiments in Hebrew and in English, with different participant populations and different testing methods. Despite the linguistic subtlety of the theoretical issues, our results were remarkably sharp, leading to two firm conclusions: (i) that processing time is determined not by the number of DE operators, but rather, by the monotonicity of the minimal constituent in which they reside; (ii) that DE-ness is not a property of operators, but of environments. We show how our results bear directly on the current debate about the nature of monotonicity, which we describe below. Finally, we provide quantitative tests of alternative, non-semantic explanations, and show how our results do not support them.

A syntactic analysis of <no + event deverbal nominalization> in Spanish

Abstract This paper addresses how the negative particle no interacts with Spanish deverbal nominalizations that denote an event. Firstly, it is pointed out that, when preceded by negation, these nominalizations only give rise to the inhibited eventuality reading, contrary to what happens with verbs, which give rise to both the inhibited eventuality reading and the negated eventuality reading. Secondly, it is shown that, when these nominalizations co-occur with no, their lexical aspect is modified, as they share properties with events, but with states as well. Thirdly, a proposal of analysis for <no + event deverbal nominalization> is presented. We claim that both the interpretation and lexical aspect of this construction follow from the interaction of negation with the syntactic configuration of the nominalization and, specifically, with the projection responsible for the triggering of the eventuality.

Syntax and semantics of laisser in causative constructions

The French verb laisser (‘to let’) allows for two different syntactic constructions, an Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) construction and a Faire-Infinitive (FI) construction with a postverbal Causee, and for two different interpretations, authorize and not-intervene. According to previous studies (e.g. Kayne 1975), constructions are related to interpretations: the ECM can express intentionality, the FI cannot. In this paper, we explore a different hypothesis: the ECM construction is underspecified and allows for both interpretations, while the FI is restricted to the not-intervening interpretation. We provide empirical evidence from three distinct forced choice tasks in which participants had to match constructions and interpretations. The results reveal that, contrary to both early observations and our initial hypothesis, both constructions may allow for both interpretations, and variation depends less on the syntactic configuration than on semantic and pragmatic factors, namely on the lexical inferences triggered by the embedded verb and the authority relation between Causer and Causee expressed in the contexts.

Signalling digression in Spanish and English: Evidence from parliamentary discourse

Digression is a discourse function that is identifiable and distinct from other similar functional strategies, and varies cross-linguistically. This paper investigates the way speakers of Spanish and English digress from their main discourse topics and how these transitions are marked. Once digression is defined by the proposal of four features considered to be inherent in this concept, the paper focuses on so-called 'digression formulating phrases', recurrent expressions which make explicit reference to the digression and signal that a new direction with respect to topic is proposed. The paper thus adopts a less common than the usual approach to discourse coherence and digression, whose literature has largely focused on discourse markers. The dataset, extracted from a corpus of parliamentary discourse, is analysed in an attempt to address two research questions. I investigate, first, the frequency and distribution of the selected digression formulating phrases in the two languages, and discern which of the two contexts of digression (i.e. beginnings and ends) is more highly marked, and, second, their use in connection to aspects such as syntactic configuration and position, and co-occurring features of semantic and pragmatic meaning. The contrastive perspective adds precision and richness to the treatment of digression.

Causative alternation in Zuo Tradition

Abstract This study examines the different variants of causative alternation in Zuo Tradition (左傳), an archaic Chinese narrative history from the Pre-Qin period. It is found that denominal verbs, unergative verbs, and “pure” unaccusative verbs participate actively in the alternation, and that the causative variant bears a complex relation with the agentive and putative variants; this causes problems for previous analyses. This paper proposes a two-step build-up of eventuality for causative alternation in archaic Chinese. Specifically, I propose that verbs in archaic Chinese are monadic and select only one argument. The merger of the verb with this argument is the realization of its eventuality conceptualized in the Lexicon; any further merger is determined by the eventuality composed by different light verbs in syntax. The uninitiated light verb is a placeholder with an empty argument. A specific light verb value is determined by the eventuality that is sent to the syntactic structure. Thus, the difference between all variants in causative alternation witnessed in Zuo Tradition lies in the different eventualities which they introduce into the syntactic configuration.

The interpretation of overt subject pronominals in Turkish

This study explores the interpretation of co-indexation between overt subject pronominals, specifically o and kendisi, with quantified/wh-word antecedents among native Turkish speakers. The research employs a task designed to elicit responses that either force a bound or disjoint interpretation within biased contexts. The findings reveal that o and kendisi are not interchangeable within the same context. A closer examination unveils that the interpretation of o is governed by certain syntactic constraints, although target-deviant interpretations are observed. In contrast, kendisi is more likely to be interpreted as a bound pronoun, even though both bound and disjoint interpretations are syntactically accessible. This shows that the constraint governing the binding of overt subject pronominals to quantified/wh-word antecedents, known as the Overt Pronoun Constraint, is operative for o but not for kendisi. The distinction in the behavior of these pronominals can be attributed to the diffrences in their syntactic configurations: o is costly configured than kendisi, hence displaying asymmetry across quantified/wh-word antecedents. Since the binding relations of kendisi is similar to pro, it is more prone to binding by the matrix subject.

A Comparative Analysis of Dholuo and Lubukusu Anaphors within the Government and Binding Theory

Languages exhibit anaphors, reflexives and reciprocals as either lexical items or affixes. This makes it interesting to identify their occurrence and interpretation. The study aimed at comparing anaphoric system of two African languages: Dholuo and Lubukusu to establish their morphological configuration and syntactic properties. Corpus of data for study were drawn from different sources. Dholuo data was derived from native speaker intuition, elicitations and from existing work by scholars. Lubukusu drawn was derived from works from scholars. First, data was categorized to establish their configuration. Then, the data from Dholuo and Lubukusu were compared to establish their morphological and syntactic configuration. Thereafter, a comparison of the anaphors from the two languages was performed. Syntactically, the anaphors were descriptively analyzed using X-bar syntax and Binding Theory modules of the Government and Binding Theory (GB). Results indicate that the two languages belong to different families: Dholuo, a Nilotic language while Lubukusu Bantu. Typologically, both Dholuo and Lubukusu were found to be agglutinating languages characterized with presence of affixes. Similarly, the affixes are bound to the verb. Contrastively, Lubukusu contains reflexives which occur as prefixes and reciprocals as suffixes; while Dholuo anaphors occur as suffixes. Conversely, Lubukusu exhibit the reflexive which occurs as an allomorph with two different morpheme markers; whereas Dholuo has a single reflexive marker. Furthermore, Lubukusu’s reciprocal is distinctly marked while in Dholuo the reciprocal and the reflexive are marked with the same morpheme. Apparently, context is paramount in the interpretation of Dholuo anaphor whereby both the speaker and listener must be aware of what is being conveyed. Lastly, both languages met the conditions highlighted in Chomsky’s Binding Principle A in establishing grammaticality of constructions. The anaphors are bound to respective antecedents irrespective of their positions in the two languages.

Psych verbs in Japanese: Inchoativity and boundary types

Psych(ological) verbs pose a problem to theories about argument realization that assume a uniform and universal mapping between semantic relations and syntactic configurations. A number of attempts try to explain variation in argument structure in terms of the aspectual differences, assuming that the argument realization of a predicate is a reflection of the temporal properties of the predicate to some extent. However, it is challenging to classify psych verbs into any of Vendler’s four aspectual classes because of the “inchoativity” of these verbs. In this study, we take the notion of 'boundary' and its different types as relevant semantic components to describe the internal temporal structure of predicates. We demonstrate that Japanese psych verbs are not aspectually homogeneous but include different types of inchoatives. Accordingly, we propose that the argument realizations of psych verbs can be ascribed to the types of the ‘boundary’ (i.e. left boundary, right = left boundary and its explicitness/implicitness) the predicates denote.

Semantic Integration in It-Clefts: A Multifactorial Exploration of Agreement Variability in World Englishes

Agreement variation is a critical issue in discussing syntactic configuration and semantic integration. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed to account for how semantic integration contributes to agreement variation: the lexical-grammatical hypothesis and the notional hypothesis. Using data from NOW, a large corpus of World Englishes, this study presents a multifactorial analysis of the probabilistic factors that constrain agreement variation in it-clefts, an important but low-frequency construction, with collective nouns as clefted constituents. We employ random forests and conditional inference trees to examine how the Outer circle varieties have developed preferences different from those of the Inner circle varieties for agreement patterns of it-clefts. The principal findings include: (1) singular agreement is the default pattern worldwide, while plural agreement appears probabilistically along the continuum of collective plurality; (2) Inner circle speakers use more plural agreement than Outer circle speakers, with British English users employing more plural agreement than American English users; and (3) Semantic integration exerts more influence on Inner circle speakers in agreement implementation than on Outer circle speakers, who are more easily affected by morpho-grammatical markers. The quantitative case study on the collective noun team corroborates the lexical-grammatical hypothesis that semantic integration encourages plural agreement. This focused attention on agreement variation in it-clefts with collective nouns as clefted constituents further suggests that the extraposition analysis, rather than the expletive analysis, offers a suitable theoretical model for the syntactic configuration of the it-cleft construction.

The Meaning of Inchoative se in Brazilian Portuguese: A Replication of Lundquist et al.'s (2016) Experiment.

In the well-known causative alternation, a verb appears either in a causative-transitive or in an inchoative-intransitive form. The inchoative form is marked with a reflexive clitic in some languages, such as Norwegian, but is unmarked in others, such as English. There are two main proposals to explain the alternation: a lexical-derivational account (a lexical rule is responsible for the demotion of the cause argument), and a syntactic-derivational one (in a type of reflexivization, the theme/patient is construed as responsible for causing the event). A third type of approach posits that the alternation emerges when a verb can be found in different constructions and no derivation is involved. Lundquist et al. (Glossa J Gen Linguist 1:1-30, 2016) put the first two approaches to experimental testing and found that while the decausativization approach is adequate for English, the reflexivization approach explains the Norwegian facts. The present experimental study investigates which proposal is adequate to explain the alternation in Brazilian Portuguese. Differently from both English and Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese allows reflexive-marked and unmarked inchoatives with the same verb. In a replication of Lundquist et al.'s (Glossa J Gen Linguist 1:1-30, 2016) experiment, our results show that Brazilian Portuguese assigns distinct meanings to the two forms of the inchoative. We conclude that the reflexive pronoun se indicates that the change of state described in the inchoative sentence was caused by some entity, but not an agent. We then argue that a non-derivational approach explains the alternation, as a single verb occurs in distinct syntactic configurations, with distinct meaning implications.

An Experimental Comparison of the Availability of Inverse Scope in English and German

We present two offline experiments on the interpretation in German and English of doubly quantified sentences with an existential subject and a universal object, which have been reported to allow for inverse readings only in English. We show for this specific syntactic configuration that there is no categorical crosslinguistic difference, but only a gradual one, with English more readily allowing for inverse scope than German. These results support a crosslinguistically unified analysis of inverse scope on which gradual differences between languages follow from language-specific properties and exposure effects. Moreover, they suggest that relative clauses with indefinite head NPs allow for inverse readings, thereby challenging the status of these clauses as scope islands (May 1977, Huang 1995), while according with introspective claims in semantic accounts (Barker 2012, 2019). Finally, our results suggest a high between-speaker variability and a strong impact of pragmatics.

To Be or Not To Be?

This squib accounts for the inconsistencies in the occurrence of genitive of negation with the Russian verb byt’ ‘to be’ and other genitive verbs by distinguishing two independent lexical entries for byt’ with a specified location that have differing syntactic and semantic characteristics. One is predicative/argument-taking, while the other is the copula in a copular construction with a locational prepositional predicate. Sentential negation invariably assigns genitive of negation to the grammatical subject of the copular construction, whereas the subject of predicative byt’ is in the wrong syntactic configuration to receive genitive of negation and therefore receives nominative case via agreement with the finite Infl.

Perceived similarity as a window into representations of integrated sentence meaning.

When perceiving the world around us, we are constantly integrating pieces of information. The integrated experience consists of more than just the sum of its parts. For example, visual scenes are defined by a collection of objects as well as the spatial relations amongst them and sentence meaning is computed based on individual word semantic but also syntactic configuration. Having quantitative models of such integrated representations can help evaluate cognitive models of both language and scene perception. Here, we focus on language, and use a behavioral measure of perceived similarity as an approximation of integrated meaning representations. We collected similarity judgments of 200 subjects rating nouns or transitive sentences through an online multiple arrangement task. We find that perceived similarity between sentences is most strongly modulated by the semantic action category of the main verb. In addition, we show how non-negative matrix factorization of similarity judgment data can reveal multiple underlying dimensions reflecting both semantic as well as relational role information. Finally, we provide an example of how similarity judgments on sentence stimuli can serve as a point of comparison for artificial neural networks models (ANNs) by comparing our behavioral data against sentence similarity extracted from three state-of-the-art ANNs. Overall, our method combining the multiple arrangement task on sentence stimuli with matrix factorization can capture relational information emerging from integration of multiple words in a sentence even in the presence of strong focus on the verb.

Differential Object Marking and Nominal Licensing

This paper presents a novel account of Differential Object Marking as an instance of case assigned by a post-syntactic Agree-Case operation that transduces agreement relations established in the syntax by marking the goal rather than the probe. In this sense, it is a modern interpretation of Nichols' (1986) Head-Marking and Dependent Marking dichotomy. Analyzing the intricate details of Differential Object Markin in Kashmiri, I show that not all but some nominals need licensing under well defined syntactic configurations. Expanding on Kalin's (2018) observation that Person Case Constraint (PCC) and Differential Object Marking occur in similar configurations, I argue that PCC is observed in languages that do not have an Agree-Case mechanism.

Maximal syntactic/semantic divergence in deadjectivals: Evidence from Romance

AbstractThis article explores semantic and syntactic properties of a set of Romance deadjectival verbs sharing comparable derivational morphology. I note: (i) asymmetries between languages where the choice of verbalizer does not become a significant variable; (ii) languages where the use of the verbalizer is associated with distinct syntactic and semantic properties. In Italian, the verbalizer defines a maximal structural contrast in a nontrivial derivation. Italian and Catalan verbs pattern as statives. Yet lack of eventivity and scalarity in Italian defines an empirically relevant distinction between stative types reflected by syntax (unergative behaviour correlated with lack of affected theme/change-of-state denotation). This differentiates Italian from Spanish or Catalan forms in not showing two key properties: (i) unaccusativity/transitivity; (ii) change-along-scale entailment. A continuum from minimally to maximally different aspectual and syntactic configurations obtains. Although the focus is set on deadjectival verbs and the unusual properties of Italian -ggiare, the results are extendable to further data.