Syntactic Perspective Research Articles

The Discourse Markers 'Olha' And 'Viu' And Their Pragmatic Functions In Language Use

Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate and describe the pragmatic contexts of the discourse markers "olha" and "viu" in vernacular language, identifying patterns of functioning through a functionalist analysis of these phenomena. Theoretical Framework: The main theoretical concepts guiding this research are rooted in a functional approach to language, based on a dynamic conception of language (Bybee, 2016), where use, discourse, and grammar interrelate in linguistic structuring. Additionally, we mapped what key authors (Risso, Silva, and Urbano, 2006; Brinton, 2017; and Traugott, 2022) in the field say about discourse markers, concluding that these elements are multifunctional; although optional from a syntactic perspective, they play an essential discourse-pragmatic role, considering their thetic nature of monitoring and regulating interaction. Method: We adopted a mixed methodology (Cunha Lacerda, 2016), which includes a qualitative and quantitative approach. The study design involves analyzing the phenomenon based on data samples drawn from three corpora: the Corpus of Cultured Portuguese of Vitória da Conquista (PCVC), the Corpus of Popular Portuguese of Vitória da Conquista (PPVC), and the Linguistic Corpus of Ibicoara. These corpora contain a total of 591,425 words from oral interviews following Labovian standards. For data analysis, we used the freeware AntConc, a corpus analysis tool required for linguistic studies, allowing for detailed searches and analyses. After data collection and quantification, we proceeded to an interpretative analysis of each occurrence found. Results and Discussion: Data collection revealed a total of 284 occurrences, of which 147 were for the marker "olha" and 137 for "viu." Pragmatically, these markers demonstrated multifunctionality through six distinct functions, namely: prefacing: delaying or deviating from the expected initial response by the interlocutor; argumentation: marking the speaker's position in presenting or defending a viewpoint and inviting the interlocutor to share it; reported speech: introducing a reported statement in another communicative context; interjection: a phatic function indicating the speaker's feelings; seeking discursive approval: the speaker's request for approval from the interlocutor to continue the discourse; and feedback: complementing the quest for discursive approval and expressing a clear orientation of the listener toward the speaker through attentive engagement with the interlocutor's speech. These data allow us to affirm that the markers are indeed multifunctional and, from a discursive perspective, essential for constructing meaning. Research Implications: We aim to significantly impact the field of linguistic studies from a functionalist perspective based on usage, as well as its discussion in the context of regular education. Teachers can use this study to enhance classroom discussions on issues related to the oral modality of the language, reflecting on aspects of linguistic (in)adequacy as well as paradigmatic analysis. This study also suggests that linguistic discussions should be based on a broad approach that considers extralinguistic aspects. Originality/Value: This study contributes to linguistic discussions that extend beyond syntactic structure relations. By considering discourse markers as thetic elements, we shed light on the discursive aspect of language and how discourse markers function multifunctionally to structure meaning. In this regard, we understand markers as essential elements in the oral modality of language based on their pragmatic functioning, while also hoping to contribute to reducing the stigma surrounding these elements due to a lack of a more in-depth approach in the prescriptive compendiums present in classrooms.

Investigating Translation Students’ Challenges in Rendering Arabic Idioms and Proverbs into English: Insights and Recommendations

This study investigates the challenges faced by 4th-year students majoring in Translation at Al-Buraimi University College in Oman when translating proverbs and idioms from Arabic into English. These expressions pose particular difficulties in translation due to their cultural and linguistic specificity, often requiring more than literal translation to convey their intended meaning accurately in the target language. Understanding these challenges is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of translation education programs and improving students’ proficiency in handling idiomatic expressions. The findings showed that 4th-year translation students experienced three main difficulties in translating proverbs and idioms, ranging from the semantic and syntactic fields to cultural differences. First, semantically speaking, they struggled to grasp the meaning of the source text and find the closest equivalent proverb or idiom in the English language. Second, from the syntactic perspective, learners showed several deficiencies in making a correct structure in English. Third, the high percentage of wrong answers revealed a lack of cultural awareness regarding the target culture. This research employs qualitative methods to identify common difficulties that students encounter, offering insights into potential strategies and pedagogical approaches to address these challenges effectively. By focusing on idiomatic expressions and proverbs, this study contributes to the broader discourse on translation education and highlights the importance of cultural competence in achieving accurate and nuanced translations.

A Comparative Study of English and Translated Kurdish Business Contracts from lexical and Syntactic Perspectives

In Kurdish, legal translation as a non-literary translation has received little attention in the field of translation studies. One genre of legal translation that is specifically under-studied is business contracts. This paper analyses and compares features of English and Kurdish business contracts from lexical and syntactic perspectives. It also addresses the issue of LSP lexical and syntactic precision used in the translated Kurdish contracts by translators. To this end, the paper attempts to identify the translation procedures and norms that manifest in translating business contracts from Kurdish into English. As a result, it scrutinizes a set of 20 Kurdish-English business contracts translated by professional licensed translators using Toury’s (2012) three-phase methodology. The translation direction is from Kurdish into English because it is the most practised direction by the translation service providers in Iraqi Kurdistan. The study demonstrates that both Kurdish and English legal languages use similar syntactic and lexical tools in drafting business contracts. It also reveals that initial norms, preliminary norms, and the law of interference are shown in the Kurdish- English translations. It further discloses that transposition, amplification, and couplets are prominently employed to deal with translation challenges. This paper is significant because it is the first attempt to scientifically investigate semantic features of originally written as well as translated Kurdish business contracts. For further research, it recommends a further focus on differences in legal systems and languages between Kurdish and English

Predicates of Gratification in English and Polish. A Semantic Syntactic Perspective

Predicates of Gratification in English and Polish. A Semantic Syntactic Perspective

Symmetries and Asymmetries in Movement

Symmetric and asymmetric phenomena are prevalent in linguistics. Recently, two famous approaches have been put forward to analyze the symmetry and asymmetry in grammar: Kayne s Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA)[1]and Ackema and Neeleman s human parser[2]. Both of them prove that there is only leftward movement in human s spoken languages. Kayne s theory proves it from a linguistically syntactic perspective while Ackema and Neeleman testify the leftward movement through a mechanic approach. Though these two analyses are quite popular with linguists, exceptions still exist in many languages. In this paper, I will apply two linguists analysis on CPs movement to show that rightward-movement explanation for moved CPs is better than leftward movement. Then, the traditional point of view that human grammar is asymmetric because of the unique leftward movement will be proved to be wrong. From the demonstration of Cp s rightward movement, we will see our grammar is symmetric because both leftward movement and rightward movement exist.

Exploring Ungrammatical Patterns in Indonesian Student Thesis Writing: A Comprehensive Analysis

Exploring Ungrammatical Patterns in Indonesian Student Thesis Writing: A Comprehensive Analysis

Mismatch between syntax and prosody and complex sentence structure in Hittite

Abstract Hittite attests a set of complex sentences in which (mostly) relative clauses (other subordinate clauses are also attested) appear in linear syntax to be within another subordinate (usually conditional, rarely temporal) clause or main clause. The relative clause can be preceded by a very limited array of constituents from the matrix clause, e.g., mān ‘if’ or the quotative particle ⸗wa(r). There are also examples which attest the conditional subordinator and the irrealis particle in two positions simultaneously, at the left edge of the whole sentence and in the conditional clause (= main clause for the relative clause). I provide a fine-grained descriptive and structural analysis of the structure and show that the type cannot be explained as bare indefinites, embedded relative clauses or parenthetic clauses. It is shown that, structurally, the sentences containing subordinate (mostly relative) clauses within other clauses are heterogenous and of three types. The difference lies in the elements that precede the relative clause and in the structure of the sentences, whereby a standard Hittite relative clause adjoins at different heights. All three types display the same mismatch between prosodic domains and syntax/semantics—the constituent that is part of the main clause from the semantic and syntactic perspective is prosodically part of the relative clause. Since there is a clause boundary delimiting the end of the subordinate clause within the main clause, it makes sense to treat the surface structure as a distinct taxonomic unit, which is correspondingly labelled a mismatch sentence. The new evidence allows us to obtain a fuller understanding of the Hittite left periphery than was previously possible. It thus offers an important window into hitherto unrecognized aspects of the underlying structure of the complex sentence in Hittite.

To describe the content of image: The view from image captioning

The aim of developing the technology of "image captioning," which integrates natural language and computer processing, is to automatically give descriptions for photographs by the machine itself. The work can be separated into two parts, which depends on correctly comprehending both language and images from a semantic and syntactic perspective. In light of the growing body of information on the subject, it is getting harder to stay abreast of the most recent advancements in the area of image captioning. Nevertheless, the review papers that are now available don't go into enough detail about those findings. The approaches, benchmarks, datasets, and assessment metrics currently in use for picture captioning are reviewed in this work. The majority of the field's ongoing study is concentrated on robust learning-based techniques, where deep reinforcement, adversarial learning, and attention processes all seem to be at the heart of this research area. Image captioning entails a brand-new field in research on computer vision. Generating a comprehensive natural language description for the source images is the fundamental issue of image captioning. This essay explores and evaluates earlier work on image captioning. Image captioning's application and task situations are introduced. The merits and disadvantages of each approach are explored after the analysis of the image captioning algorithms based on encoder-decoder and template structure. The assessment and baseline dataset for picture captioning are therefore shown. Ultimately, prospects for image captioning's progress are presented.

Towards Informative and Diverse Dialogue Systems Over Hierarchical Crowd Intelligence Knowledge Graph

Knowledge-enhanced dialogue systems aim at generating factually correct and coherent responses by reasoning over knowledge sources, which is a promising research trend. The truly harmonious human-agent dialogue systems need to conduct engaging conversations from three aspects as humans, namely (1) stating factual contents (e.g., records in Wikipedia), (2) conveying subjective and informative opinions about objects (e.g., user discussions on Twitter), and (3) impressing interlocutors with diverse expression styles (e.g., personalized expression habits). The existing knowledge base is a standardized and unified coding for factual knowledge, which could not portray the other two kinds of knowledge to make responses more informative and expressive diverse. To address this, we present CrowdDialog , a crowd intelligence knowledge-enhanced dialogue system, which takes advantage of “crowd intelligence knowledge” extracted from social media (with rich subjective descriptions and diversified expression styles) to promote the performance of dialogue systems. Firstly, to thoroughly mine and organize the crowd intelligence knowledge underlying large-scale and unstructured online contents, we elaborately design the C rowd I ntelligence K nowledge G raph ( CIKG ) structure, including the domain commonsense subgraph, descriptive subgraph, and expressive subgraph. Secondly, to reasonably integrate heterogeneous crowd intelligence knowledge into responses while ensuring logicality and fluency, we propose the G ated F usion with D ynamic Knowledge- D ependent ( GFDD ) model, which generates responses from the semantic and syntactic perspective with the context-aware knowledge gate and dynamic knowledge decoding. Finally, extensive experiments over both Chinese and English dialogue datasets demonstrate that our approach GFDD outperforms competitive baselines in terms of both automatic evaluation and human judgments. Besides, ablation studies indicate that the proposed CIKG has the potential to promote dialogue systems to generate fluent, informative, and diverse dialogue responses.

Solusi University Toponyms: An Ideological and Morpho-Syntactic Perspective

Names are very significant in people’s lives for they reveal historical, social and cultural ideologies of a people. Place names can be said to be an under-utilized resource in historical, social and cultural contexts which, when fully exploited, has much to tell on what people should value. When linguistically analyzing these names, morphological and syntactical aspects usually merge. This study explored the ideological, morphological and syntactic perspectives of the linguistic landscape of Solusi University, specifically focusing on places on the campus, roads, hostels and other important buildings like the library and halls of residents. A critical internal analysis of name-structures was done. The researcher used qualitative research methodology where documents were studied and semi-structured interviews were administered to local elderly people to receive data on names at the university. Findings show that Solusi University names can be classified under the syntagmatic morpho-syntactic category. Again, the naming at the university brought out what can be termed contribution ideology. Most of places were given names of people who significantly contributed to the establishment and development of Solusi (first as a college and later as a university). The structure of these names reveals morphological and syntactical patterns that are worth to be studied. The study recommends people awareness of place names in their locales so that they appreciate what name contributors have done to humanity. People should also study place names for their aesthetic value as well as for their reference to humanity’s social history.

A Study on Chinese and English Transfer in French Writing of L3 French Language Beginners

In order to investigate the language transfer existing in the field of third language acquisition, and to provide effective strategies of learning two or more languages, this research, based on theories related to the third language acquisition and error analysis, collected 32 French compositions written by English majors’ undergraduates as a corpus, analyzed errors in those compositions, and further discussed the negative transfer of Chinese and English in their French learning. Eight types of errors from the lexical and syntactic perspectives were identified in the research findings. What is more, the negative transfer of English and Chinese appeared at both lexical and syntactic level, and the negative transfer of English is more than Chinese. “lexical errors” occupied more than “syntactic errors” in the transfer of English, while syntactic errors existed more frequently than lexical errors in the transfer of Chinese. There are three main reasons for results of transfers: language distance, language exposure, and language frequency, which provide effective strategies for third language acquisition.

Aboutwhat about: the semantics and syntax of irregularwh-questions in English

AbstractAlthough often used as diagnostic tools in discourse studies, irregularwh-questions in English, which take the form ofwhat/how about … ?andwhat/how if … ?, have not received sufficient attention in terms of their semantic and syntactic properties. This article investigates irregularwh-questions from semantic and syntactic perspectives. Semantically, there is a topic-comment relationship between thewh-word and the rest of the sentence. Syntactically, an irregularwh-question neither displays an explicit matrix subject-predicate structure nor involves a fronted auxiliary. This article pursues three objectives. First, a descriptive overview of irregularwh-questions is provided, which shows that the complement ofaboutin irregularwh-questions can belong to various syntactic categories. Second, the topic-comment structure of irregularwh-questions is compared with that of the topic-comment structure in declarative sentences, which reveals some semantic properties of irregularwh-questions. Third, a formal account of irregularwh-questions is formulated in the framework of Dynamic Syntax, which captures the interaction of the semantic and syntactic properties of the components of an irregularwh-question. Additionally, the present dynamic account of irregularwh-questions is contrasted with an existing dynamic account of the hanging topic construction in English, which highlights some merits of the current account.

Forming Derivatives in Hindko Language: A Morpho-Syntactic Analysis

Hindko is an Indo-Aryan Language. The current study aims to investigate the formation of nominative derivatives in Hindko by doing a multi-level analysis in the light of a contemporary etymological perspective. The study categorizes these derivatives in terms of syntactic and semantic aspects. The study employs a multi-level approach to analyzing the derivatives by analyzing prosodic phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantic levels. The study uses the historical literature of the language, the daily conversations of the native speakers, and note-taking techniques to record the data. The study categorizes the verb forms of Hindko into 18 classes, from which nominal derivatives are derived. The verbs are classified into different categories according to their semantic and syntactic behavior. The study shows that, semantically, the verbs share meanings with each other and are also similar in their semantic functions. The study finds that a morphological stem-based approach is used for the derivatives. Prosodically, the study discovers the effects on the stem of the derivatives. Moreover, the study concludes that in Hindko there are six types of nominal derivatives: the active participle, the passive participle, the form of exaggeration, the instrumental noun, the qualificative adjective, and the locative noun. The research reflects the Form I verb stem as input for forming the six types of nominal derivative (the output). The study recommends a further in-depth analysis from syntactic perspective.

The Syntax of Comitative Structure in Standard Arabic: A Minimalist Approach

This paper investigates comitative structures in Standard Arabic from a Minimalist perspective. The main aim is to find generalizations that describe and explain comitative structures. Specifically, the objectives are to distinguish comitative structures from coordinative structures and to analyze comitative structures from syntactic and semantic perspectives. We reach the following results: first, there is a difference between /wa/ in coordination and /wa/ in comitative structures. Second, comitative structures can be symmetric and asymmetric. In the symmetric comitative structures, the concomitate object is an argument and obligatorily agrees with DP1 in terms of the [ animate] feature. In the asymmetric comitative structures, the concomitate object is an adjunct and optionally agrees with DP1 in terms of the [ animate]. In our analysis of comitative structure, we propose the complex DP, headed by /wa/. The difference between the two types of comitative structures is that the derivation of the symmetric one happens at the level of complementation; in contract, the asymmetric one is merged in the adjunct position. Another significant finding is that the verb is not always the one that assigns the accusative Case. The major significance of this study is that it gives a distinction between comitative and coordinative structures, distinguishes between two types of comitative structures, and analyses the structure in the light of the DP hypothesis and the Minimalist program.

A Linguistic Study of Topicalisation in Selected USA Newspapers: North Korea Nuclear Weapon as a Case Study

This research focuses on surveying Topcalisation phenomenon in political texts, and investigating the utilizations of its types. It aims to inspect Topicalisation in construing various types of constructions in the texts of political discourse and display how this phenomenon can construe non-canonical and complex sentences' structures. To achieve these goals, Verma’s division (1976) of Topicalization types is adopted as a model of analysis. Additionally, Quirk et.al (1985) is adopted as a complementary modal. The data of the present study are 17 selected political editorials that are chosen in a random way from three of the most famous American newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. According to Verma’s division, Topicalisaion types are divided into four basic types: passivization, pseudo-cleft, Cleft, and Extraposition. The study hypothesized that: Topicalisation transforms the syntactic construction of simple sentences into complex one, still it is utilized in political editorials in order to grant prominence to specific sentences' items to grab the attention of readers and convince him or her in a specific point of view. Cleft, which offers a highly levels of flexibility by drawing two or more sentences from a simple ones, is utilized heavily in political editorials. From a syntactic perspective, topicalisation supplies diverse syntactic structures, which have rhetorical effective. From a semantic perspective, It clarifies and unambiguously expresses the desired meaning. Data analysis has displayed that Topicalisation provides editorialists with various syntactic constructions for various purposes, involving pique the reader's interest and try to persuade him in a particular view. It has shown that passivization has been the most dominant type used in political discourse. In addition, the analysis has shown that syntactic and semantic aspects of Topicalisation phenomenon produce sentences with effective constructions and unambiguous meaning. The study comes up with the conclusion that Topicalisation has various structures which can serve various purposes. For example, when New piece of information appears at the beginning of the sentence, passivization process can be utilized to reorganize the sentence in order to agree with Given-New principle via postponing it.

An Analysis of Prosodic Features of Chinese EFL Majors’ English Questions

Drawing on the Auto-segmental Metrical theory in intonational phonology, this paper reveals the phonological structure of English interrogatives between Chinese EFL majors and native speakers from a syntactic pragmatic perspective, based on reading documents of eight English majors with Praat being its research tool. Findings show that the prosodic characteristics of interrogatives of English majors are obviously different from those of native speakers, which are mainly reflected in the segmentation of tone groups, boundary tone, intonation nucleus, and stress distribution. It purports to help English majors clarify the important pragmatic functions of intonation in information transmission and interpersonal communication, and foster strengths and circumvent weaknesses so as to better develop "Chinglish pronunciation" with Chinese characteristics; meanwhile, to bring enlightenment to English intonation teaching.

Unexpected Partitive Articles in Francoprovençal*

AbstractThis contribution seeks to add to our knowledge on ‘partitive articles’ (like the French element du in Je bois du vin, ‘I drink (some) wine’) in a highly endangered language spoken in France, Switzerland and Italy, namely Francoprovençal. Based on recent fieldwork data (2017) from the Aosta Valley and data from the ALAVAL atlas project, we will discuss outliers in a geographical and syntactic perspective, i.e. occurrences of ‘partitive articles’ where they should not appear. This either because the regions and their respective varieties do not feature them according to the existing literature or because syntactic regularities known from Standard French do not admit them (under the scope of negation and after quantifying expressions). We will try to propose some explanations for the existence of these unexpected elements, both internal and external, i.e. via language contact, and argue more generally in favour of a more systematic consideration of rare elements in fieldwork data, which should not too readily be “explained away”.

Investigating Sentence Fragments in Comic Books: A Syntactic Perspective

This research is aimed to analyze sentence fragments in a comic. The main research questions raised in this paper are: What types of sentence fragments can be seen in comic Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi 1998? What factor types can be found in comic Hunter X Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi 1998? The paper uses the qualitative method to conduct content and document analysis (Choy & Clark, 2010). The source of data was the comic entitled ‘Hunter X Hunter in which the researchers discovered six forms of Sentence Fragments after studying the data: fragments of adjective clause, adverbial clause, nominal clause, appositive, infinitive clauses, missing subject, participial, and prepositional phrase fragments. The information was gathered from 30 chapters of Yoshihiro's comic. There were 34 Sentence Fragments, 13 (38%) Dependent clause fragment, 21(62%) into-phrase fragment. There are 6 types of sentence Fragment factors that were investigated by Bashir (2016), but in this comic only 4 factors were found; namely, Omission of the Verb (50%), Subject (20%), and Object (10%), omission of both subject and verb (10%), and Appositive or list Fragments (10%).

A Literature Review on Chinese Run-ons

Since the term, Chinese Run-on Sentence (CRS for short), comes up firstly in Lu’s (1979, p.27) fundamental book Issues on Chinese Grammatical Analyses, many have cared deeply about it from multi-faceted aspects. However, early discussions proceed at a descriptive level without explicit elaboration of intricate facts within CRS, and some even stagnated, resulting from the complexity of CRS’s unique features, subject reference and logical relations as well as early scholars’ inclination to study CRS from Indo-European syntactic perspectives. Until Shen (2012), based on a very thought-provoking discussion of Chao’s (1968) minor sentences, reemphasizes the primacy of CRS, much headway of the recent past has been made. Given that, in the present article, there would be an attempt to depict the great accomplishments of the past. In our view, the researches dealing with CRS can fall into four parts: working definition, sentence categories, prosodic nature and structural properties, the details of which can be encapsulated as follows.

A translatological and forensic-linguistic study of the English translation of the German Civil Code

AbstractSince its promulgation in 1896, the German Civil Code, one of the most influential civil codes in the world, has been translated into English several times. Thanks to the Code’s jurisprudential quality, both its English translation and the translating process are of high value and offer various starting points for profound research. However, so far, there have been hardly any substantial studies of the Code’s English translation, neither from the comparative legal or forensic linguistic perspective nor from other angles. This paper attempts to make a substantive, interdisciplinary – i.e., forensic linguistic – content-related, and jurisprudential study of the Code’s English translation to address this research lacuna. To that end, it focuses on two aspects of the statute law’s provisions, i.e., respectively from the lexical and syntactic perspective.