Syntactic Description Research Articles

Conditional Constructions in Yemsa

Introduction. The main objective of this study is to produce a comprehensive description of Yemsa conditional constructions. The existing studies do not describe conditional clauses in Yemsa. This study aims to fill the gap in the description of the internal structure conditional clause of Yemsa.Methodology and sources. The data were collected through the elicitation technique through informant interviews about the conditional clause in Yemsa. The data were analyzed using a descriptive approach without considering any particular theoretical framework. The data was described and analyzed in light of general definitions and typological classifications of conditional constructions in the linguistic literature.Results and discussion. Antecedent and consequent clauses are attested. The morphemes occur in different types of conditional clauses. Canonical and non-canonical forms of conditional have been identified. The semantic-based classification of Yemsa conditionals is dealt with in light of Thompson et al.'s typological view. Real, unreal, counterfactual, hypothetical, concessive, and exceptive conditional are discussed. In Yemsa, the protasis of the real conditional clause type differs from the unreal protasis conditional clause type. A subordinate clause (the protasis) states some condition, the truth of which is not asserted, under which another main clause (the apodosis) holds.Conclusion. The study will provide some syntactic data to researchers in the comparative syntactic description of the Omoto languages about conditional clauses. It will serve as a good resource material for further theoretical studies concerning conditional constructions in general.

Directions and Results of Punctuation Management

The article discussed the development of the basics and principles of punctuation in the descriptions of the management of punctuation. The mentioned bases for punctuation—grammar (syntax), meaning, and intonation and pauses—are proposed to be consolidated into two, grammatical (syntactic) and meaning- and intonation-based punctuation, regarding intonation as one of the ways of realizing the meaning of the text. The intonational basis is auxiliary in the realization of the general meaning of the text. It is appropriate to interpret these two bases as criteria for punctuation practice and rule development, and to consider the functionality of the punctuation marks and rules to be the general principle. For specific cases of interpretation of punctuation of syntactic units, the grammatical (syntactic) basis is important.Over the period of 100 years, the regulation of punctuation has largely adhered to a combination of grammatical (syntactic) and meaning- and intonation-based reasoning, only in isolated periods was there a greater tendency toward a more formal syntactic description of punctuation. In the recent period, more and more priority is given to the preferences of the author of the text, if it is necessary for the general meaning of the text.In recent decades, the phenomenon of incomplete, undeveloped or contracted (compressed) structures, which has come increasingly into focus in the descriptions of punctuation, can help to clarify problematic cases of punctuation of altered structures and more accurately define the possibilities of using punctuation marks. Punctuation rulescan be made more functional by breaking down syntactic phenomena in more detail and adding previouslyunexplored syntactic units to the rules.

Conversion in languages with different morphological structures: a semantic comparison of English and Czech

This article presents a comparative study of the semantics of conversion between verbs and nouns in two languages with different morphological structures – English and Czech. To make the cross-linguistic comparison of semantic relations possible, a cognitive approach is used to provide conceptual semantic categories applicable within both languages. The semantic categories, based on event schemata introduced by Radden and Dirven (2007) primarily for syntactic description, are applied to data samples of verb–noun conversion pairs in both languages, using a dictionary-based approach. We analyse a corpus sample of 300 conversion pairs of verbs and nouns in each language (e.g., run.v – run.n, pepper.n – pepper.v; běhat ‘run.v’– běh ‘run.n’, pepř ‘pepper.n’ – pepřit ‘pepper.v’) annotated for the semantic relation between the verb and the noun. We analyse which relations appear in the two languages and how often, looking for sizeable differences to answer the question of whether the morphological characteristics of a language influence the semantics of conversion. The analysis of the annotated samples documents that the languages most often employ conversion for the same concepts (namely, instance of action/process and result) and that the range of semantic categories in English and Czech is generally the same, suggesting that the differences in the morphology of the two languages do not affect the range of possible meanings that conversion is employed for. The data also show a difference in the number of types of combinations of multiple semantic relations between the verb and the noun in a single conversion pair, which was found to be larger in English than in Czech, and also in the frequency with which certain individual semantic relations occur, and these differences seem to be at least partially related to the morphological characteristics of Czech and English.

A corpus-based analysis of light verb constructions with MAKE and DO in British English

The comparison of light verb constructions with the verbs make and do has not received much attention. The present paper is an attempt to contribute to the study of these constructions. It aims to analyze the light verbs make and do in combination with the same deverbal nouns to identify similarities and differences between the two light verbs and examine the contribution of the light verbs and deverbal nouns to the light verb construction in terms of semantic and syntactic features. The research is corpus-based, and the data for analysis are collected from the British National Corpus (BNC). The semantic description deals with characteristics such as generality, polysemy and aspectual meaning, and the syntactic description focuses on complementation. The analysis of findings demonstrates that, despite some similarities, almost all constructions with the two light verbs show either meaning or/and complementation differences. The study also reveals that both light verbs and deverbal nouns have an impact on the semantics and syntax of the construction. Light verbs may affect light verb constructions semantically in terms of generality and polysemy, and the aspectual meaning of constructions depends on both light verbs and deverbal nouns. Likewise, both light verbs and deverbal nouns have an influence on complementation, but in their own way: light verbs on the selection of complements and deverbal nouns on complementation patterns.

The Parts of Speech from the Perspective of the Correlation between Lexicon and Grammar

The purpose of the article is to present an analysis of parts of speech from the point of view of the interference between semantic features and their morphosyntactic behavior. The elucidation of the established relationships between the lexical meaning of words, on the one hand, and their grammatical categories and the syntactic functions with which they are used, on the other, requires the analysis of these entities from a functional perspective. Since the relationships between the mentioned features are revealed when the lexical units function in the structure of the statement, we could say that the research addresses the problem of the correlation between the three components of the statement, namely the lexical, morphological and syntactic components. Revealing the relationships between these components would allow overcoming the artificial separation between the levels of semantic and syntactic description, but also a better understanding of how the utterance is constituted and functions.

“한국어와 한국문화” 교재에서의 연결어미 기술과 교육에 관한 고찰

This study examined the presentation and description of the connective endings of the textbook “Korean Language and Korean Culture” for the purpose of social integration, and proposed the selection, description, and method of education of the connective endings. Chapter 2 revealed that a total of 45 connective endings were presented in “Korean Language and Korean Culture”, analyzed the characteristics and descriptive aspects of the form presentation of these connective endings, and examined the lack of syntactic and pragmatic descriptions in this textbook. In Chapter 3, based on the results discussed in Chapter 2, the selection and the description of connective endings were proposed to supplement the “Korean Language and Korean Culture” textbook in the future. Chapter 4 introduced Gagné's nine class situations in terms of the education of the connective endings and then presented educational procedures in line with the purpose of social integration.

The Structure and Communicative Import of Selected Proverbs in Nzema Language and Culture

Adopting an Ethno-pragmatics framework, the current study aims to describe the sentential structures and communicative imports of selected proverbs in Nzema, a Kwa language of Ghana, West Africa. Using data obtained from primary and secondary sources, this study identifies the structural properties of the proverbs by further highlighting structures which contribute to the pragmatic interpretations of these proverbs. The findings revealed that structural properties such as conditional constructions, causative constructions, focus constructions, and simple, compound, and complex-embedded sentences are prevalent in the syntactic manifestation of Nzema proverbs; which make affirmative and negative propositions. Hence, it was observed that these structural features have a significant contribution to determining the pragmatic import of these proverbs, based on the Nzema social norms, values, beliefs, experiences, and cultural worldview. This research also underscores existing postulations that proverbs are ‘multi-layered’ in terms of their interpretations, and they rely heavily on metaphoric representations and contextual use in any situation. Additionally, it was also noted that the oral construction of proverbs in Nzema is grammatically insightful; and thus, provides a window to the syntactic description of the Nzema language.

A contrastive study of the semantic prosody of Time adverbs "jiàn jiàn" and " màn màn "

This study taking " màn màn" and " jiàn jiàn" as an example, on the basis of syntactic description, using the theory of semantic prosody, combined with the research methods of employing data and analysis、being qualitative and quantifying, under the support of professional knowledge and technique, analyses contrastively the colligation and semantic prosody of the overlapping time adverbs "màn màn" and " jiàn jiàn". It is found that " jiàn jiàn" is more commonly used when describing the state, while "màn màn" is more commonly used when modifying the action. What’s more, the proportion of the neutral collocation of " jiàn jiàn" and "màn màn" is basically same. In the comparison between positive collocation and negative collocation, the negative collocation of " jiàn jiàn" is more, and the positive collocation of "màn màn" is more. P.

Introducing the detailed semantic interface description to support a modular safety approval of automated vehicles – S2I2

The concept of a modular safety approval for automated vehicles dispenses with tests on vehicle or system level. Individually approved modules can be updated and reused without requiring new safety approvals. Similar to a system’s operational design domain description, an environmental description is required for a safety approval on module level. This paper presents how the environment of a module can be described at module interfaces. Uncertainty about other modules’ behaviour, dependencies between modules, and impacts of their outputs on the system behaviour are key reasons for missing specifications or tests of existing methods, leading to an erroneous approval of modules. To reduce uncertainties, we expand the state-of-the-art syntactical and semantic interface description and additionally describe dependencies to other modules’ behaviour or conditions and impacts of their outputs. The resulting detailed semantic interface description is categorised into syntax, semantics, influencing factors, and impacts. The novel description structure is a condensed way to consider the behaviour and its impacts on other modules in module development and testing. The description fundamentally supports the modular safety approval by identifying stimuli usually only seen during integration.

ADVENTURES OF THE GREEK PREPOSITION μετά: FROM METAPHYSICS TO METAFILES

The present paper discusses the unique role which the Greek preposition μέτα (meta) plays in forming international terms. The research is conducted with three purposes: a) to outline the stages of the functional transposition of the Greek word μέτα (meta) tracking down its transformation into derivational morpheme with a set of homonymous meanings; b) to reveal the status of μέτα in terminological units and c) to show the role of this morpheme in the formation of the notion of metalanguage. It is claimed that μέτα had undergone functional transposition before it caused real “terminological pandemic” becoming a component of hundreds of international terms – from adverb to preposition and finally to affix. Having discussed the cluster of ideas concerning the morphemic status of this and similar Greek and Latin affixes in a variety of terminological units, the authors substantiate the idea that it is a prefix that can add different senses to derived terms. A substantial portion of the paper is dedicated to the term “metalanguage”. The latter is viewed from the standpoint of the dynamic term-forming perspective and defined as a universal semiotic code of the semantic and syntactic description of the object-language and thus is an important fragment of an operative configuration of knowledge. The article approaches different issues of the interpretation of metalanguage trying to explain the logic of the development of this notion via the driving force of the prefix. Key words: derivational morpheme, Greek prefix μέτα-, term-formation, international term-element, metalanguage.

Two Examples on How FDO Types can Support Machine and Human Readability

Two Examples on How FDO Types can Support Machine and Human Readability

The Syntax of the Negation Marker Laa in Najdi Arabic: An HPSG Approach

Negation is considered one of the controversial cross-linguistic areas of research. One of its interesting topics is the syntax of negation markers. This paper aims to contribute to the current linguistic research in negation through exploring one of the negation markers in Najdi Arabic: the negator laa. It first categories laa into three types according to its meaning and the syntactic constructions in which it occurs: the imperative laa, the conjunct particle laa, and the clausal laa. The syntactic properties of each one of these are described with sufficient examples illustrating them. Where appropriate, these properties are compared to those of the negator laa in Standard Arabic and other negators. In addition to the syntactic description of laa in its three types or uses, the paper presents a theoretical account for all the relevant syntactic properties of each type of the negator laa by using the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

On the notion of the subordinate clause in German linguistics

In traditional linguistic research on German syntax the term “subordinate clause” is defined on the basis of its two distinguishing features, namely its syntactic-functional integration into the matrix, as well as its formal exponents (the presence of introductory elements and the placement of the finite verb at the end of the clause). However, this classical approach to subordination is in fact a descriptive simplification which leads to the exclusion of all reference to the scalar character of this category from syntactic description. In this paper, an alternative approach to subordination is presented through defining the dependent clause as a scalar category, encompassing a wide range of representatives differing in the degree of prototypicality. The proposed model consists of four interrelated components: a precisely defined set of integration features, type-independent general principles, a description of the type-specific clusters of integration features and the differences in the degree of integration between representatives of the same syntactic class, as well as construction-specific restrictions.

A Comparative Analysis of Tense in the Standard Ígbò and the Ìmìlìkè Dialects

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic analytic descriptions of tense in the standard Ígbò and Ìmìlìkè dialect with emphasis on both the affirmative and negative constructions. The study was inspired by the dearth of scholarly work in this aspect of the Igbo language (Niger Congo: Nigeria). The theoretical framework of Bull’s (1963) analysis of Tense and Aspect is adopted. The analysis was justified with the use of concrete examples given from the standard Ígbò and the dialect. The findings reveal that in addition to the occurrence of tense in the standard Ígbò and Ìmìlìkè dialect, there is also a morphological opposition between the present and past tense in both dialects. However, it was observed that there exist tonal distinctions which occur in the derivation of the different tense systems in both dialects in the affirmative and negative constructions. It also reveals that lexical units interact with tone and the components of INFIL (Inflection) to derive either the affirmative or the negative construction appropriately.

A modern semantic similarity method using multiple resources for enhancing influenza detection

With the widespread of the data resources over the World Wide Web (WWW), there is an overlapping between these resources that contributes to helping researchers in discovering more information and facts. However, extracting information and data and then, calculating the semantic similarity between them is a non-trivial task as such resources have varying ways to describe the information. Thus, such a problem can be overcome by designing a new semantic similarity method which takes into account different factors and not exclusive on the syntactical description of the data.The paper describes a new semantic similarity method which exploits different factors to calculate the semantic similarity between different resources. The factors are the description of the node and the surrounded relations (i.e. ascending and descending) from multiple ontologies. This will contribute to calculating semantic similarity based on many perspectives and will help to strengthen the similarity relations between different resources to discover new semantic similarities between influenza symptoms. This may lead to control the expansion of the influenza outbreak. The method has been applied over a set of influenza ontologies to find new cases of similarity that may not be explicit in the original resources. An off-line evaluation method has been also conducted on a set of ontologies and compared with the baseline and specialist methods where it exceeded both methods and satisfied more accurate similarity scores.

Morphological and syntactic identification of clauses of universal concession in British National Corpus

The article investigates morphological and syntactic organization of English sentences of universal concession in modern English fiction dramatic, prose and verse texts of the British National Corpus. In the context of the studied sentences identification with the semantics of concessive action, the main attention is focused on generalization of morphological and syntactic characteristics of universal sentences of concession with the verification of their statistical data implementation in the modern English corpus. It has been found out that in the fiction texts of the British National Corpus English sentences of universal concession are actualized in four syntactic types of sentences: in simple, compound, complex, and cohesive types, where the concessive action clause is introduced by various types of conjunctions such as though, even though, although; in any case, in spite of; yet … (al)though etc. with / without punctuation for the cohesive type. Morphological features of means of syntactic connection are defined in three types of clauses of concession with hypotactic, paratactic, cohesive conjunction coherence in the morphological configuration as: “simple means of connection – conjunctions or adverbs”, “complex or composite means of connection – prepositional phrases”, “correlative means of connection – correlative conjunctions or disjuncts”. Seven basic morphological and syntactic subtypes of English sentences of universal concession have been identified with the syntactic description of models of concessive clauses as: finite / non-finite -ed (-ing) participial / non-finite to infinitive / nominative / prepositional / adjective / adverb clause of concession. In order to identify the structural semantic grid of the studied sentences, taking into account the corpus analysis in terms of the semantic marking tagging with the collocation [+1 Right] to the right of the conjunction of the universal concession, the quantitative indicators of nine structural and semantic types of concessive clauses are determined and calculated in the adjustment of the concessive conjunction with any verb, noun, adjectival, adverbial, conjunctive, prepositional, pronominal categorical phrase, as well as the agreement with any article and punctuation.

Метод непрямого приховування інформації в процесі стиснення відеозображень

It is substantiated that steganographic systems should be used to ensure the protection of special information resources in conditions of its prompt delivery. Here, steganographic technologies are an integral part of complex information protection systems. Simultaneously, for steganographic systems, there is a contradiction between the density of embedded data and level of information compaction of video container (level of reduction of volume bit volume of compact presented video image concerning bit volume of an initial video image). It leads to the fact that under the conditions of the required quality (reliability) of digital video information, the bit rate level of the covert channel is insufficient. Consequently, the scientific-applied problem concerns the necessity to increase the integrity (the level of correspondence of the hidden information before its embedding in a video container and after its extraction) and bit rate of the hidden channel of special information transmission. It is relevant. The solution of the described problem in the field of application of steganographic transformations can be realized based on the application of two different approaches. The first approach is based on methods of direct message embedding. But this approach is characterized by introducing distortions in the video images used as a container. Therefore, changes in structural and statistical patterns in the syntactic description of the video container happen. It reduces the potential for video container compaction. The second approach to creating steganographic transformation methods is based on information hiding using indirect embedding technique. Here, the embedding process exploits the functional dependency between the elements of the video container and the elements of the embedded message. Setting a specific dependency between the elements in the video container corresponds to the embedded element with a value of "0" or "1". However, the existing indirect steganographic transformation methods have a disadvantage. It consists of an insufficient value of embedded data density. To eliminate these disadvantages, it is proposed to develop an approach that allows using not only psychovisual but also structural redundancy of video container for concealment. Therefore, the research objective of this paper is to develop a method for indirect information withholding in the video container compression process to increase the bit rate of the hidden message channel. In the process of research, a steganographic multiagent system is constructed, which allows embedding hidden message elements without loss of information based on the indirect approach by modifying the active bases of the multiagent basis considering their uncertainty. To select transformants (data sets) as containers for information embedding, the requirement of the existence of a base system with all active bases is taken into account. The number of embedded bits of the hidden message is equal to the number of active bases in the base system of the multiadic space. Because of the made experiments, the following results have been received: in the process of embedding messages based on the created method distortions in a video container is not brought; for the created method the additional increase in the hidden channel bit rate in average 5 … 7 times are reached.

Semantic Enterprise Architecture Oriented Test Case Generation for Business process

Background and Objectives: The area of enterprise architecture encompasses various domains, the most complicated of which concerns developing an enterprise business architecture. Although many state-of-the-art enterprise architecture frameworks describe the architecture by abstract levels, they still fail to provide accurate syntactic and semantic descriptions. Several previous conducted studies were looking for different objectives elaborated on modeling enterprise architectures. However, none of those studies tried to develop a modeling that generates test cases which would later be used for validation and/or verification. Therefore, the main contribution of this study is generating a set of test cases based on the descriptions yielded from enterprise business processes in early steps; then, the amount of later reviews and changes can be significantly lessened.Methods: Following the objective of accurate validation and/or verification of the enterprise business processes within an enterprise's architecture development, this paper proposes a new method based on the enterprise architecture design. Throughout the iterative cycle of the proposed method, initially, the enterprise goals will be extracted based on the TOGAF framework. Afterwards, it will be subjected to syntactical modeling based on the Archimate language. Then, semantics will be added to the syntactic model of the enterprise business processes based on the WSMO framework and formalize manually to B language by using defined transition rule. Therefore, in order to discover test cases, a set of test coverage will be tested on the formal model. Results: The proposed method has been implemented in the marketing and sales department of a petrochemical corporation, where the results show the validity and also the effectiveness of the method. Based on the implementation of our method on the selected case study, the details of the business process have been defined based on an enterprise level, the level of abstraction is decreased by syntactic and semantic modeling of enterprise architecture description, the formal descriptions created using the proposed transition rules for sampling.Conclusion: The proposed method starts from the goals of enterprises; therefore, the output samples are efficiently precise. By adding semantics to the syntactic models of enterprise architecture, the degree of abstraction has been decreased. By creating a formal model, the model can be subjected to sampling. For future work, it is suggested to use the proposed method for the automatic generation of codes.

СИНТАКТИЧНАТА ПАРАДИГМА ВЪВ ФОРМАЛНОТО СИНТАКТИЧНО ОПИСАНИЕ / SYNTACTIC PARADIGM IN THE FORMAL SYNTACTIC DESCRIPTION

The paper deals with the scope of the term syntactic paradigm with a view to the syntactic description in the framework of a normative grammar of Bulgarian. The overview of the content of the term as understood by different authors shows that the proposed definitions do not satisfy the requirement for an independent description of form and content adopted as a basic principle in normative grammar. The reason for this is that scholars take as a point of departure the lexeme, an idiomatic (individual) set of word forms with an identical and regularly differentiated semantic characteristics that enter into regular oppositions. The paper offers an entirely formal understanding of the term syntactic paradigm whose applicability in the syntactic component of normative grammar is illustrated with selected subparadigms that include formal sentence structures consisting of simple endocentric syntactic constructions with verbs, prepositions and nouns. Keywords: syntactic paradigm, formal description, sentence structures, normative grammar, Bulgarian language

GRAMATIČKI OPIS ZAMJENICA I BROJEVA U BENEŠIĆEVOJ GRAMATICI HRVATSKOGA JEZIKA

Among the linguistic heritage of Julije Benešić, a significant place is held by his grammar of the Croatian language (Gramatyka języka chorwackiego czyli serbskiego, 1939), which encompasses the morphology of parts of speech with brief references to word formation and particular syntactic characteristics. This paper inquires into Benešić’s approach to the grammatical description of pronouns and numbers as parts of speech. The division between pronouns and numbers is analysed within the framework of the author’s grammatical, morphological, and syntactic description; which of the corresponding categorical characteristics the author notes is also analysed. Selected examples are also analysed, which serve in the grammatical explanation of linguistic facts (e.g. ta dva brata, ova dva čovjeka, ove tri sestre, svađa dvije/dviju žena, otac dvoje/*dvoga djece, nas/mi dvojica, etc.). The goal of this research is to use the grammatical description of pronouns and numbers to show the following: a) the author’s contrastive approach to linguistic facts in Croatian as compared to Polish; b) the author’s contribution to grammatical description as a guideline towards modern principles of grammatical description in the Croatian language.