Syntactic Configurations Research Articles

A Syntactic Analysis of Lexical and Functional Heads in Nigerian English Newspaper Headlines

Nigerian English newspaper headlines have been examined mostly from stylistic, pragmatic, critical discourse analytic and critical linguistic perspective but not from a syntactic perspective in terms of lexical and functional heads. This study, therefore, examines lexical and functional heads in Nigerian newspaper headlines. The data for this study were collected from Nigerian national newspapers including ‘The Punch’, ‘The Nation’, ‘Nigerian Tribune’, ‘Vanguard’ and ‘The Sun’. The study uses the X-bar theory of Generative Grammar to syntactically analyze the data. It is discovered that both lexical and functional heads are projected in Nigerian newspaper headlines. However, their representation depends on the syntactic configuration of the headlines. Sentence type headlines have more heads than phrasal headlines. While both heads occur in the headlines, lexical heads have more projection than functional heads.

La réinterprétation des prédicats statifs dans les supplétives en DO SO

The VP-substitute DO SO is usually said to corefer with a dynamic predicate. Corpus studies have shown that this is apparently not always the case, that DO SO can also have ‘stative antecedents’.This paper examines DO SO with purely stative antecedents, here defined as the sum of four negative features: [− process, − culmination, − control, − perform]. It is here shown that DO SO may have a stative antecedent (unlike do it/this/that/the same), but only if the do so clause or VP induces a different (and more dynamic) representation of the ‘event’ represented in the antecedent clause or VP. For DO SO to be an acceptable option, this ‘reinterpretation’ must imply the transformation of at least one of the negative features into its positive equivalent. The two features most often implied are [+/− process] and [+/− perform].Four syntactic configurations are taken into account. In the first two (coordination of two clauses + do so in a subordinate clause), DO SO has its own grammatical NP-subject that can have its own distinct semantic (or thematic) role. The third is a coordination of two VPs and so with only one grammatical NP-subject (factorized for the two VPs); and in the fourth, do so’s antecedent VP is embedded within do so’s own NP-subject. Seeing that the stative antecedent VP has to be reinterpreted for DO SO to be an acceptable option, this brings me to hypothesize that in these structures, DO SO must have a covert semantic subject with its own distinct semantic role.

The Adverbial Phrases with syntactic configuration and Grammaticalization

The Adverbial Phrases with syntactic configuration and Grammaticalization

Morpho-Syntactic Load in Judging Adjective Plural Agreement

The study examined the impact of two grammatical factors on marking Hebrew adjectives in agreement with plural nouns in adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared with peers without ADHD. Participants were 36 adult speakers of Hebrew, who were administered a judgment test of 144 sentences, each containing an adjective in agreement with a plural noun in one of three different syntactic configurations—predicative adjectives, attributive adjectives in sentence–initial position, and attributive adjectives in sentence–final position. Noun suffixes were regular, semiregular (ambiguous), and irregular. Findings showed that participants with ADHD displayed lower accuracy and longer response time compared with controls. As morphological and morpho-syntactic difficulty simultaneously increased, participants with ADHD were significantly more likely to perform less well compared with controls on both accuracy and speed. These findings indicate that adults with ADHD might be suffering from a linguistic impairment exacerbated under more cognitively and linguistically demanding conditions.

The syntax of argument structure by Leonard H. Babby (review)

Reviewed by: The syntax of argument structure by Leonard H. Babby Peter Arkadiev Leonard H. Babby. The syntax of argument structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. xviii + 307. [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 120.] In the book under review, Leonard Babby,1 an eminent linguist renowned for his influential work on many aspects of the syntax of Russian, presents an ingenious and sophisticated theory of morphosyntax stemming from his previous studies and in many important ways diverging from the current mainstream of generative grammar. While for most proponents of Government and Binding and Minimalist Program “argument structure” is either read off the semantic representation of predicates (as in, e.g., Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995as in, e.g., Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1998) or reduced to syntactic configurations (e.g., Borer 2005, Ramchand 2008), Babby argues for a view that argument structure is an autonomous module of grammar, and in fact the core one, from which syntactic representations are built, and which cannot be fully reduced to semantics. For Babby, argument structure is not just a static representation, but a dynamic component of language where various operations such as passivization, causativization, etc., apply, and which is crucial for the determination of the initial syntactic representation of clauses. Despite its explicit theory-constructing goals, the book is thoroughly empirically-oriented, presenting a number of in-depth case studies of Russian morphosyntax, such as the structure and syntax of “short” (SF) and “long” (LF) forms of adjectives, control of infinitives, participles and gerunds, and the predicate instrumental construction, each elucidating particular aspects of the theory. A reader, accustomed to associating the term “argument structure” with such issues as “unaccusativity,” “dative shift,” or “spray/load alternations,” might be surprised by Babby’s choice of subject matter. However, the book shows, and quite convincingly, [End Page 259] that the phenomena Babby investigates can be elegantly and revealingly accounted for from the chosen perspective. The book consists of an introduction, five chapters, endnotes, references and indices. In the introduction (pp. 1–10) Babby provides the reader with a very useful nutshell presentation of the main theoretical claims of the book and locates his conception of argument structure against the background of current generative theorizing. Importantly, Babby acknowledges from the outset that his theoretical thinking has been largely motivated by his empirical work on Russian, whose morphosyntax, being different from English in many important respects, cannot necessarily be adequately accounted for by “Anglocentric” approaches reducing all grammatical complexity to basic syntactic operations such as Merge and Move. In chapter 1 “The structure of argument structure” (pp. 11–73) Babby presents the conceptual and technical basics of his theory of argument structure and syntactic projection. The theory rests on the notion of diathesis consisting of two “autonomous but related tiers” (p. 13) of theta selection and category selection, in part going back to the corresponding notion developed in the Leningrad school of typology (Xolodovič 1974). Two assumptions about diathesis underlying the whole theory are the following: (i) all predicates and productive predicate affixes in all languages have the same universal diathesis structure (see below); (ii) syntactic operations such as movement cannot alter the predicate’s diathesis and, consequently, the basic grammatical relations in the clause. From (ii) it follows that many argument-structure-related operations often assumed to be syntactic, e.g., passivization or subject suppression with infinitives, occur at the level of argument structure and not in syntax proper. Therefore, argument structure is a dynamic morphosyntactic component of grammar where the lexically determined diathesis of the verbal stem is successively combined (“amalgamated”) with the diatheses of whatever productive affixes2 the verb attaches, and this interaction between the diatheses of the predicate stem and affixes determines the potential syntactic configurations in which the predicate occurs. Technically, the diathesis is a 2 × 4 grid where the upper tier represents up to three thematic roles and the lower tier, in turn, the syntactic categories corresponding to them; see (1) below for a tabular notation [End Page 260] and (2) for the corresponding linear notation of the diathesis of a three-argument ditransitive predicate. The order of theta positions in the upper tier and their mapping to phrase structure...

The Äiwoo verb phrase: Syntactic ergativity without pivots

Formal models of syntax typically accord the structural position external to the verb's domain a privileged status in the overall syntactic makeup of a language, either by assuming that external arguments are always S or A, or by linking external argument position to syntactic pivothood. This paper demonstrates that the Oceanic language Äiwoo has an ergative verb phrase – i.e. A as the VP-internal argument and S/O as external arguments – but no corresponding S/O pivot. That is, the ergative structure of the verb phrase in Äiwoo does not entail any syntactically privileged status of the VP-external arguments; rather, it is simply a by-product of various diachronic developments. This situation shows that what has traditionally been perceived as fundamental differences in grammatical organisation – the difference between an accusative and an ergative pattern of VP structure – need not in fact be associated with any broader differences in syntactic or pragmatic structure. More importantly, it goes against the assumption that it is possible to assign universal functions to syntactic configurations. Instead, it can be seen as providing support for the view argued for by Evans & Levinson (2009: 444) that ‘most linguistic diversity is the product of historical cultural evolution operating on relatively independent traits’.

Putting Old Wine in New Wineskins: A New Synthesis of the Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew that is Neither new nor a Coherent Synthesis

the Hebrew verbal forms, scattered in various journal articles and book chapters, appear together here in a work whose scope is ambitious. In the first four chapters, he discusses the basics of the inventory of forms and their semantic and text-linguistic functions (chap. 1), he provides an overview of the system through an examination of the oppositions among the verbal forms (chap. 2), he explores meaning variation for the verbal forms due to interactions with lexical semantics, adverbial modification, and similar syntactic configurations (chap. 3), and he treats inter-clausal relationships among verbal forms (chap. 4). At this point he returns in detail to the the wayyiqtol, qatal, predicative participle, yiqtol and weqatal, and the volitives, respectively (chaps. 5 9). The final three chapters he devotes to text-linguistic perspectives on the verbal forms (chap. 10), changes to the system in late Biblical Hebrew (in contrast to the focus of his work on the Classical Biblical Hebrew corpus; chap. 11), and the function of the verbal forms in poetry (chap. 12). In the back of the book are a bibliography, index of Scripture references, and a detailed table of contents, which presumably serves in lieu of a topical index.

Differential Object Marking, Case and Agreement

In this paper, we present empirical evidence showing that Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish is determined by structural conditions related to Case and agreement. We also argue that semantic concepts such as specificity, definiteness, animacy, or topicality, tightly connected to the presence or absence of A, must be parasitic on the syntactic configurations where DOM is licensed. We also present some consequences of our analysis for the general theory of agreement. We argue that the same structural relation is involved in all cases of DOM, as well as in Dative Clitic Constructions, where the presence of the particle A preceding clitic-doubled datives is syntactically unified with DOM phenomena. The accusative/dative distinction traditionally attributed to the Spanish pronominal system does not correspond, in synchronic terms, to different case relations, but distinguishes between agreeing and non-agreeing arguments. Similarly, the distribution of DOM corresponds to a Case-checked/Caseless difference. We extend the analysis to account for well-known restrictions on the co-appearance of two DOM arguments, which are analyzed as the consequence of a competition between two arguments for a single target.

Parasitic participles in the syntax of verbal rather

In this paper, I discuss the syntax of parasitic participles in (varieties of) colloquial English, which can be found when rather is used as a verb. The syntax of verbal rather has not, to my knowledge, been studied before, and turns out to be of substantial interest, for two reasons. First, it presents a syntactic configuration that is not found elsewhere in the language, with the result that one perfect auxiliary can license two perfect participles. While rare in English, this phenomenon has been studied in a number of other Germanic languages, and has been argued to be diagnostic of restructuring. Second, its syntactic and argument structural properties in ECM contexts suggest that it may license a null variant of ECM have, providing a perhaps unique angle for studying the syntax of verbal elements dependent on the availability of various uses of ‘have’.

Joint Arc-factored Parsing of Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies

In this paper we introduce a joint arc-factored model for syntactic and semantic dependency parsing. The semantic role labeler predicts the full syntactic paths that connect predicates with their arguments. This process is framed as a linear assignment task, which allows to control some well-formedness constraints. For the syntactic part, we define a standard arc-factored dependency model that predicts the full syntactic tree. Finally, we employ dual decomposition techniques to produce consistent syntactic and predicate-argument structures while searching over a large space of syntactic configurations. In experiments on the CoNLL-2009 English benchmark we observe very competitive results.

The syntax of Russian by John Frederick Bailyn (review)

Reviewed by: The syntax of Russian by John Frederick Bailyn Egor Tsedryk John Frederick Bailyn. The syntax of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xvii + 373 pp. Rich case morphology and word order flexibility are two interrelated properties of Russian that have long intrigued syntacticians from various schools and traditions. In The syntax of Russian, Bailyn dismisses anything that could potentially be qualified as “optional” or “non-configurational” in Russian. In a nutshell, he claims that: (i) Russian has the same major constituents as English, including verb phrase (VP) and determiner phrase (DP); (ii) case marking is a by-product of syntactic configurations, and it is attributed to a limited number of categories; (iii) basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), while other patterns are derived by movement; (iv) discourse-related movement occurs at the level of Functional Form,1 which is “a point of interface between linguistic and non-linguistic [discursive] systems” (320). As Bailyn notes in the preface, his general goal is to describe the main structural properties of modern Russian. Thus, he targets a large readership, including anyone interested in Russian or in syntax more generally. At the same time he has a narrower goal of highlighting those aspects of Russian that represent a particular interest in current syntactic theory. In my opinion, this book is more successful in achieving its narrower goal. A reader who does not have a back-ground in minimalism, or more generally in generative syntax, may find it difficult to follow, especially parts two and three. The book contains seven chapters organized into three parts. The first part (Basic configurations, chapters 1–3) follows the logic of an introductory textbook in syntax: it outlines the internal structure of phrases, describes constituency tests applicable to Russian, and presents the minimal structure of main and subordinate clauses. The second two parts (Case, chapters 4–5, and Word order, chapters 6–7) reveal the syntactic nature of core cases (Nominative, Accusative, Dative, [End Page 341] Genitive, and Instrumental) and uncover movement processes deriving various word order patterns in Russian. In the remainder of this review I will first go through each chapter, highlighting the key ideas, claims, and assumptions. Then I will provide my comments, focusing on specific issues that caught my attention, and I will finish with a general assessment of the book. 1. Chapter Summary Chapter 1 (Verb phrases, 3–33) presents Bailyn’s assumptions about phrase structure, focusing on selectional properties of verbs and their extended projections. Bailyn follows Adger (2003) in assuming that the basic syntactic operation Merge is triggered by the necessity to eliminate an uninterpretable categorial feature. This chapter also presents classical constituency tests, such as coordination, fronting, and ellipsis, which motivate the existence of VP. Binding tests further support a constituent structure, in which the subject asymmetrically c-commands the object. In addition, Bailyn illustrates the difference between arguments and adjuncts and at the end of the chapter provides the minimal sentence structure for Russian. Chapter 2 (Nominal phrases, 34–72) extends the idea of a hierarchical structure to the nominal domain. Special attention is paid to adnominal complements expressing possession, identification, and event participants, such as Agent and Theme. As expected, nominalizations, featuring a variety of adnominal Genitives and Obliques, constitute the bulk of the discussion on argument structure. Another important theme of this chapter is the DP-hypothesis. Even though Russian is an article-less language, Bailyn supports this hypothesis by analyzing a variety of prenominal elements such as demonstratives, possessives, numerals, and quantifiers. He also discusses the data that could potentially refute it (e.g., left-branch extraction, following Bošković 2005), and suggests an account in terms of an enriched functional structure of Russian DPs (65). Finally, Bailyn presents his analysis of adjectival modification, focusing on long and short form adjectives. Chapter 3 (Types of clauses, 73–119) closes the first part of the book, offering a detailed overview of Russian clauses. It is subdivided into five parts: (i) independent declarative, interrogative, and imperative clauses; (ii) subordinate indicative and subjunctive clauses, (iii) wh-structures, (iv) small clauses, infinitives, and gerunds, and (v) impersonals. [End Page 342] Bailyn starts with a presentation of the...

Locality

Natural language syntax is unbounded, but syntactic processes respect fundamental locality principles. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate linguistic locality through various phenomena uncovered by formal and comparative syntacticians, and show the relevance of syntactic locality for the experimental study of language as a cognitive capacity, both in acquisition and in adult speakers. Two major concepts of locality seem to be operative: impenetrability, expressing the fact that certain syntactic configurations are impervious to rules (e.g., island constraints), and intervention locality, blocking movement and other processes across an intervening element. This paper will focus on a subclass of locality effects, looking at intervention on movement dependencies. One crucial property of intervention locality is that it is calculated in hierarchical, not in linear terms, the crucial hierarchical relation being c-command: this is just a subcase of the general fact that linguistic computations are typically sensitive to hierarchical properties (dominance, c-command) rather then to linear properties (precedence in the linear order). The paper will present featural Relativized Minimality, a particular formal implementation of intervention locality, will illustrate its application through various kinds of locality effect in cases of extractions from embedded domains, and will show its explanatory capacity not only on issues of comparative syntax, but also on aspects of the acquisition of syntactic dependencies.

Emphasis as reduplication: Evidence from sì che/no che sentences

In this article we investigate the syntax of Italian emphatic replies in which a polarity particle is followed by an embedded clause introduced by the declarative complementizer che, which we label sì che/no che sentences. We propose that the relation between the polarity particle and the clause introduced by che is mediated by the presence of a null operator, which binds a variable inside the clause, and that this operator is what makes other movement operations impossible (along the lines of Haegeman, 2007, 2009, 2010b,a). We further suggest that sì che/no che sentences contain two copies of the triggering utterance: a null one in the Hanging Topic position and an overt one in the clause introduced by che, thus accounting for the observation that these sentences (a) cannot be embedded and (b) exhibit restrictions on their content. The effect of emphasis is thus seen as stemming from a syntactic configuration that involves reduplication.

A configuração patêmica no conto “A Escola da Noite”, de Rubens Figueiredo

The general objective of this article is to analyze the configuration of fear in the short story “A escola da noite” by Rubens Figueiredo. The analysis is done from the French Semiotics theoretical standpoint. To do so, it brings forth the concept of passion. A reflection on some theoretical and methodological aspects such as modal arrangements, micro and macro passional syntaxes, mentioned and represented passions, simple and complex passions is also made during the analysis of the short story. The plot revolves around fear. More specifically, the objective of this article is to show how the short story creates the meaning of fear. For instance, the analysis shows how the syntactic configuration of fear is directly connected with other passions such as frustration, suspicion, and anger. The fear felt by Andreia, the main character, is always dissimulated, and that of the other characters is kept as a secret. Therefore, fear is structured from the being axis versus seeming axis. The main character experiences a psychological conflict, since she feels the fear but does not want to feel it, and blames herself for it. She is hesitant and such hesitation is the result of a syncretism of roles. The main character is sometimes the performer and sometimes the judging subject. From this conflicting situation, a new, stronger, more decisive and independent character arises in the short story

Team Weak Crossover

It is generally assumed that the weak crossover (WCO) effect arises when an operator fails to bind a pronoun that stands in a particular syntactic configuration with the given operator. In this article, I introduce a new kind of crossover effect in which the binding dependencies of two different operators work in tandem to yield the given effect. The new effect is radically different from the traditional crossover cases, which involve the binding dependency of just one operator. I show that theories that define the WCO principle as a condition regulating the binding of pronouns cannot account for the new effect. I also show that to account for all the varieties of crossover effects, the WCO principle must be defined as a condition regulating the semantic relation of dependence and must make use of the notion of Spell-Out domain discussed by Chomsky ( 2001 , 2004 ).

Prosody and Syntax in Sign Languages.

Prosody and Syntax in Sign Languages.

The interpretation of stressed and non-stressed pronouns in Spanish language breakdown

Background: Earlier research has indicated that patients with agrammatic Broca's aphasia have problems with constraints on the intra-sentential interpretation of object pronouns, incorrectly allowing them to refer to the subject of the same sentence. However, these studies do not show how agrammatic patients deal with constraints on the extra-sentential interpretation of pronouns. Also, studies that did investigate patients' extra-sentential interpretation of pronouns were on English and Dutch, languages with a pronominal system that differs substantially from the pronominal system of Romance languages, such as Spanish. Aims: To test Spanish agrammatic patients on the interpretation of stressed and non-stressed subject and object pronouns in coordinated structures (the Spanish counterparts of sentences such as “First the girl pushed the mother, and than she / SHE pushed the boy”), in order to investigate whether they exhibit the same referential preferences as non-brain-damaged individuals and English- and Dutch-speaking patients. Methods & Procedures: In the present study seven Spanish patients with agrammatic Broca's aphasia and six non-brain-damaged adults were tested with a picture selection task on their interpretation of non-stressed and stressed pronouns in coordinated sentences. Patients were presented coordinated sentences and were shown four pictures, one on the left page, three on the right page. The left page picture represents the first conjunct of the test sentence, the right page represent the two theoretically possible referents of the pronoun (subject of the first conjunct, or object of the first conjunct) and a non-related picture. The patient's task was to indicate out of the three pictures the one that correctly represented the meaning of the second conjunct of the test sentence. Outcomes & Results: Agrammatic individuals exhibit difficulties with the interpretation of non-stressed object pronouns, and even more difficulties with the interpretation of contrastively stressed pronouns. An additional finding is that they tend to prefer subjects as the antecedents of pronouns. Conclusions: We claim that patients' problems with the interpretation of pronouns are not the result of missing syntactic knowledge, but are due to patients' limited ability to keep syntactic configurations in their syntactic working memory. We argue that their preference for subjects as antecedents for pronouns reflects a fall-back strategy in agrammatic patients when, as a result of limited processing resources, syntax-based interpretative operations fail.

Information structure and epistemic modality in adverbial clauses in French

In this paper it is argued that, contrary to what is often assumed, embedded adverbial clauses have an information structure articulation independent from that of the main clause. More particularly, it is shown that the specific way in which information structure is expressed in adverbial clauses depends on the possibility vs. impossibility of epistemic qualification in the adverbial clause. The claim is based on new empirical evidence concerning the distribution of a clearly information structure-driven syntactic configuration: verb-subject word order in French.

Who Can See the Forest for the Trees? Extracting Multiword Negative Polarity Items from Dependency-Parsed Text

Ever since the groundbreaking work by Fauconnier (1975) and Ladusaw (1980), research on negative polarity items (npis) has been dominated by two fundamental assumptions about the licensing contexts of npis and their inherent semantic-pragmatic properties. The contexts in which npis may occur felicitously are said to have the semantic property of being downward entailing (which we will briefly explain below), and the elements themselves are often said to be located at the end of a pragmatically motivated scale, typically signalling a minimal amount, a smallest size, or similar concept. While the Ladusaw-Fauconnier theory has been substantially refined over time, and while there are very diverse variations on how the technical details of the theory are spelled out, its core insights are currently widely accepted and remain a point of reference for practically any ‘formal’ theory of npis. Some theories are syntactic in nature and formulate the relevant scope constraints relative to (possibly quite abstract) syntactic configurations, others are semantic and define hierarchies of negations of varying strength, and yet another group of theories is predominantly pragmatic, relying heavily on scalar implicatures, domain widening, and related concepts. There are, of course, also approaches in which syntax, semantics, and pragmatics all play a role. Overall, the number of papers and books that have been published on the subject of npis over the last 40 years is nothing short of intimidating.1 Given the sheer volume of the npi literature, it is all the more surprising and striking that much of the discussion revolves around a very small set of items. Especially some of the most sophisticated and influential papers, such as Kadmon and Landman (1993), Krifka (1995), and Chierchia (2006), discuss hardly more than a handful of items, and some studies almost exclusively focus on one, viz. English any, which can be regarded as the classical example for a minimizer, with its variants anything, anyone, anybody, anywhere, etc. Since with any one of the most prominent items of interest is a minimizer, investigations into the significance of this particular property for the entire class of npis have turned into a dominating topic and occasionally even push aside the observation that being a minimizer is not a necessary (nor a sufficient) property of npis. As a result of its narrow empirical focus, the tendency to build a very comprehensive theory on an extremely small, carefully chosen but deeply researched set of examples is characteristic for large parts of the literature on npis. This might mean that only a fraction of the properties and behavior of npis are treated in current theories.

Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan

This paper presents an analysis of bare nominals unmarked for number (BNs) occurring in object position in Spanish and Catalan, on which the BN is a syntactic complement to the verb, but not a semantic argument. After describing the properties that distinguish BNs from other indefinite expressions (bare plurals, indefinite singulars preceded by un ‘a’, and bare mass terms), we argue that these BNs occur in a monadic syntactic configuration in the sense of Hale & Keyser (1998), that they denote first-order properties, and that they are combined with the verb via a modified version of Dayal's (2003) semantics for pseudo-incorporation. Specifically, the proposal consists of a lexical rule that generates the class of verbs that productively accept BN objects, plus a composition rule that treats the BN as modifier of the verb. We point out the advantages of this analysis over three other well-known semantic analyses for combining verbs with property-type nominals. Finally, we show how the analysis can be naturally extended to existential sentences, which combine with BNs although, prima facie, they do not appear to meet the lexical conditions for doing so.