Syntactic Phenomena Research Articles

<tiger2/>: serialising the ISO SynAF syntactic object model

This paper introduces , an XML format developed to serialise the object model defined by the ISO Syntactic Annotation Framework SynAF. Based on widespread best practices we adapt a popular XML format for syntactic annotation, TigerXML, with additional features to support a variety of syntactic phenomena including constituent and dependency structures, binding, and different node types such as compounds or empty elements. We also define interfaces to other formats and standards including the Morpho-syntactic Annotation Framework MAF and the ISOCat Data Category Registry. Finally a case study of the German Treebank TueBa-D/Z is presented, showcasing the handling of constituent structures, topological fields and coreference annotation in tandem.

Order in NP conjuncts in spoken English and Japanese

In the emerging field of cross-linguistic studies on language production, one particularly interesting line of inquiry is possible differences between English and Japanese in ordering words and phrases. Previous research gives rise to the idea that there is a difference in accessing meaning versus form during linearization between these two languages. This assumption is based on observations of language-specific effects of the length factor on the order of phrases (short-before-long in English, long-before-short in Japanese). We contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of such differences by investigating the variables underlying the internal order of NP conjuncts in spoken English and Japanese. Our quantitative analysis shows that similar influences underlie the ordering process across the two languages. Thus we do not find evidence for the aforementioned difference in accessing meaning versus form with this syntactic phenomenon. With regard to length, Japanese also exhibits a short-before-long preference. However, this tendency is significantly weaker in Japanese than in English, which we explain through an attenuating influence of the typical Japanese phrase structure pattern on the universal effect of short phrases being more accessible. We propose that a similar interaction between entrenched long-before-short schemas and universal accessibility effects is responsible for the varying effects of length in Japanese.

Towards a dialogic syntax

AbstractThis paper argues for the need to recognize a new order of syntactic phenomena, and for a theory of syntax capable of addressing it. Dialogic syntax encompasses the linguistic, cognitive, and interactional processes involved when speakers selectively reproduce aspects of prior utterances, and when recipients recognize the resulting parallelisms and draw inferences from them. Its most visible reflex occurs when one speaker constructs an utterance based on the immediately co-present utterance of a dialogic partner. Words, structures, and other linguistic resources invoked by the first speaker are selectively reproduced by the second. The alignment of utterances yields a pairing of patterns at varying levels of abstraction, ranging from identity of words and affixes, to parallelism of syntactic structures, to equivalence of grammatical categories and abstract features of form, meaning, and function. This mapping generates dialogic resonance, defined as the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances. The key unit of analysis is the diagraph, recognized as a higher-order, supra-sentential syntactic structure that emerges from the structural coupling of two or more utterances. Dialogic syntax goes beyond traditional linear syntax to recognize as integral to the task of syntactic analysis a new kind of structural relation that arises between otherwise independent sentences.

Moderne Sprachatlanten und ihre Darstellung von Morphologie und Syntax<BR> Überlegungen anlässlich des Erscheinens des <I>ALD-II</I>

In recent years, the focus of dialectological research has shifted towards morphology and syntax. The Internet has revolutionized the availability of tools such as audio data, database searches, electronic maps, etc. Published in 2012, the second part of the monumental Linguistic Atlas of Dolomitic Ladinian and Neighbouring Dialects (ALD-II) focuses on morphological and syntactic phenomena. These developments suggest that the time has come to reconsider the relationship between linguistic theory and dialectology: Data collected in recent atlas projects offer new insights into grammatical structures and the limits of grammar-internal variation – providing an opportunity to test linguistic hypotheses against the variation encountered. The ALD-II, with its rich and reliable data gathered painstakingly in a significant part of northern Italy, allows dialectologists and theoreticians alike to test their assumptions on field data now available in electronic and print format complementing one another.

Fenómenos de fonética sintáctica y resilabeo en las gramáticas de francés para españoles entre los siglos XVI y XVIII

In this article we analyze explanations of the process of re-syllabication or re-syllabic cutting in French syntactical phonetic phenomena—such as the liaison, the sequence, or the elision—as they appear in a corpus of twenty-eight grammars and French textbooks intended for the Spanish public during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We suggest a classification of these works according to the importance that their authors give to the aforementioned process, and we try to explain the different classification methods.

Contrast and intervention at the periphery

The paper investigates the role of contrast in the distribution of some syntactic phenomena and offers an account on the basis of feature intervention. It shows that a large series of distributional facts concerning the distribution of cleft sentences in both English and French and argument preposing in English, as well as the relative position of contrastive topics and foci, are accounted for by adding the feature contrast, ©, to the features Q(uantificational) and δ (d-linking, non-contrastive clitic left-dislocation) which are already used in literature on featural Relativized Minimality. Evidence from scrambling in Dutch and from contrastive focus preposing in Italian shows that the feature © blocks movement of another constituent endowed with the same feature. This feature is also responsible for distributional facts concerning argument preposing in English. In particular, it accounts for the impossibility of a non-contrastive argument to get preposed in a non-assertive clause. Similarly, the feature © is shown to have a blocking effect for an element bearing the feature Q.

Free Word-Order and Restarting Automata

In natural languages with a high degree of word-order freedom, syntactic phenomena like dependencies (subordinations) or valences do not depend on the word-order (or on the individual positions of the individual words). This means that some permutations of sentences of these languages are in some (important) sense syntactically equivalent. Here we study this phenomenon in a formal way. Various types of j-monotonicity for restarting automata can serve as parameters for the degree of word-order freedom and for the complexity of word-order in sentences (languages). Here we combine two types of parameters on computations of restarting automata: the degree of j-monotonicity, and the number of rewrites per cycle. We study these notions formally in order to obtain an adequate tool for modelling and comparing formal descriptions of (natural) languages with different degrees of word-order freedom and word-order complexity.

REMARKS ON SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF NOUNS IN JAPANESE

In this paper, I discuss some characteristics of Japanese nouns. First, I point out some syntactic phenomena concerning nouns. Second, I insist that they can be explained only by classifying nouns into two types according to the “argument” of nouns. Third, I show how nouns are classified into these two types: 1-place nouns, which take an argument syntactically obligatorily, and 0-place nouns, which take no argument obligatorily. Fourth, I present the argument structure for both noun types. Fifth, I explain the aforementioned phenomena in terms of their argument structure. Sixth and finally, I comment on textual functions of nouns and show that nouns have a potential to create a complete text.

Analysis of Ba Marker in Chinese

A large number of linguists have long been interested in ergativity, however ergative languages have long presented a vexing problem for them. The characteristics causing a language to be described as “ergative” is that the intransitive subject is marked in the same way as the transitive object morphologically, while the transitive subject receives a different case marking. Morphological case marking is the original criterion of ergativity. But, later, the term “syntactic ergativity” is used to characterize languages where syntactic phenomena treat the single argument of a verb like ‘run’ in the same way as the patient argument of a verb like ‘hit’, while the agent argument of this two-argument verb is treated differently. What about Chinese? Because scholars claim that in linguistics, Chinese is well known as an isolating or an analytic language which lacks case inflection or verb agreement, it is not morphologically ergative. In this paper, I’ll first discuss Li and Yip’s argument against the analysis of ba as an absolutive marker, then Fujii (1989)’s belief that the entire syntax is centred more or less round the absolutive in Chinese, and finally show that ba as an absolutive marker is unmotivated, rather than ba should be treated as an object marker, sometimes optionally, sometimes obligatorily.

Zur morphologisch-syntaktischen Charakteristik der Handelskorrespondenz

The article deals with morphological and syntactic phenomena of German business correspondence. The surveyed phenomena are quantified; the reasons of their frequent or lessfrequent occurrence in business correspondence and their purpose are examined. The results are contrasted to usage patterns in Czech business correspondence.

A Connectionist Model for Acquisition of Syntactic Islands

This paper addresses learning biases for language acquisition in a computational modeling approach for the task of learning complex syntactic phenomena. Children have learning biases for acquisition of their language. Many generative linguists have argued that children have at least an innate, domain-specific bias (i.e., “Universal Grammar”(UG) hypothesis). This controversial hypothesis has been supported by studies on language acquisition and complex language phenomena, such as rules on long- distance wh-dependencies, the so-called “Syntactic islands”. Some researchers have proposed probability-based computational models that successfully learn syntactic islands. However, these models assume implausible biases. To overcome this problem, we propose a connectionist model using Jordan's recurrent network and demonstrate successful acquisition of syntactic islands by this model, under a developmental processing limitation. Our model not only learns syntactic islands, but also simply assumes more plausible and developmentally realistic biases than the probability-based models. These results suggest that the developmental processing limitation in the early period is necessary for acquisition of syntactic islands.

Distributional learning of parallel multiple context-free grammars

Natural languages require grammars beyond context-free for their description. Here we extend a family of distributional learning algorithms for context-free grammars to the class of Parallel Multiple Context-Free Grammars (pmcfgs). These grammars have two additional operations beyond the simple context-free operation of concatenation: the ability to interleave strings of symbols, and the ability to copy or duplicate strings. This allows the grammars to generate some non-semilinear languages, which are outside the class of mildly context-sensitive grammars. These grammars, if augmented with a suitable feature mechanism, are capable of representing all of the syntactic phenomena that have been claimed to exist in natural language. We present a learning algorithm for a large subclass of these grammars, that includes all regular languages but not all context-free languages. This algorithm relies on a generalisation of the notion of distribution as a function from tuples of strings to entire sentences; we define nonterminals using finite sets of these functions. Our learning algorithm uses a nonprobabilistic learning paradigm which allows for membership queries as well as positive samples; it runs in polynomial time.

Embedded scalars

For over a decade, the interpretation of scalar expressions under embedding has been a much debated issue, with proposed accounts ranging from strictly pragmatic, on one end of the spectrum, to lexico-syntactic, on the other. There has been some confusion as to what exactly the controversy is about, and we argue that what is at stake is the division of labour between pragmatic and truth-conditional mechanisms. All parties to the debate agree that upper-bounded construals of scalar expressions are variously caused by conversational implicatures and truth-conditional narrowing, but whereas Griceans argue that the former mechanism is the main cause, conventionalists point to the latter, assuming as a matter of course that the source of truth-conditional narrowing lies in linguistic convention; on this view, narrowing is either a lexical or a syntactic phenomenon. Since researchers’ introspective judgments tend to agree with the theories they advocate, a number of experimental studies have recently tried to shed light on this issue. In this paper, we review the experimental record, and argue that the extant data favour a pragmatic account. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.9 BibTeX info

Atlas sintaktikoaren aplikazio informatikoa

In order to study the syntactic variations of Basque dialects, we have developed an application to store, organize and manage all the information concerning that dialectal variation. The application consists of three modules: a data-base, a search engine and the cartographic module. All the data are organized and stored in the data-base. The search engine makes it possible to search for any field included in the data-base. Thanks to the cartographic module, we can see, in the map, in which places the searched syntactic phenomena have been collected. In order to display the answers to the queries in the map, we have made use of the free technology offered by Google Maps. The provinces and regions of the Basque Country are visualized in the map, and if the answers of a query belong to more than one province, each province is displayed in a different colour in order to distinguish them. There are different options to consult the maps: satellite image, the map itself, the combination of both, the possibility of using the zoom, etc. In order to store the data, to search for any linguistic phenomena or to see the maps, the application developed will be accessed via a web browser.

Názory Sama Czambela na niektoré fenomény slovensko-maďarských a maďarsko-slovenských jazykových kontaktov

Samu Czambel established his theoretical knowledge while studying with the most famous contemporary Slavists. He attended O. Asbóth’s lectures at the university in Pest, F. Mikosich’s and V. Jagić’s readings in Vienna, and M. Hattala’s lectures in Prague. After graduating he got work as a legal translator at the Hungarian Ministry of Home Affairs. He became perfectly bilingual and gained a practical attitude during his work that he went deeply into when collecting Slovak dialects in the country. In the centre of his interest was to define the place of the Slovak language within the Slavic language group. He considered important to research the Slovak–Hungarian as well as Hungarian–Slovak language contacts, especially the borrowing of words but – while studying phraseology – he also dealt with morphological and syntactic phenomena. He approached the phenomenon of bilingualism in a sensitive way, and he raised several problems when referring to the Middle Slovak language area and Palots dialects. These problems are to be cleared even today. Considering the importance of Slovak–Hungarian and Hungarian–Slovak language contacts, Samu Czambel formulated the need for a relatively big bilingual dictionary.

Zur Morphologisch-Syntaktischen Charakteristik der Handelskorrespondenz

The article deals with morphological and syntactic phenomena typical of business correspondence in German. The surveyed phenomena are quantifi ed; the reasons for their frequent or less frequent presence in business correspondence and their functioning in it are examined; the results are compared with general language usage. At the same time, possible different usage in Czech is pointed out.

Application of lexical information in grammar: On the data of Czech verbs

The interplay between lexical information and the rules of grammar is demonstrated by selected morphological and syntactic phenomena from the domain of Czech verbs. The application of some grammatical rules is based on the data stored in the lexicon. The information about valency is a substantial part of a lexical entry and it contains a great deal of supplementary information about this item. Systemic surface omissions of the obligatory valency positions are indicated in the valency frame in the lexicon (Sect. 2). Conditions for the choice of the formal expressions of the valency members (e.g. conjunctions in content clauses, infinitive forms of participants) depend on the features given in the corresponding lexical item of their governing verb as well (Sect. 3 and 6). Two types of semantic conversions are demonstrated in Section 4 with regard to the distinctions in their valency frames. The relation of reciprocity is understood here as a syntactic diathesis (Sect. 5). The introduction of the new types of grammatical diatheses is discussed in Sect. 7: The morphologhy and syntax of resultative, recipient and dispositional diatheses are described here together with the requirements of the grammatical component regarding the shape of lexical items of the verbs participating in these diathesis (Section 8).

Sara Shilo’s No Gnomes Will Appear : A Linguistic Analysis

This article examines the unique, nonstandard features of the Hebrew language of Sara Shilo’s award-winning book No Gnomes Will Appear (2005). Raising the question of whether this language is simply nonstandard Hebrew, or whether its “faults” have an identifiable background, it identifies the origins of many of its features in the spoken Judeo-Arabic that underlies the Hebrew of the book’s protagonists. Subjecting the colorful language of the book’s characters to a linguistic analysis, it notes and exemplifies the influence of North African Judeo-Arabic on semantic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic phenomena in what is defined here as the “language of the periphery.”

Some arguments and nonarguments for reductionist accounts of syntactic phenomena

Many syntactic phenomena have received competing accounts, either in terms of formal grammatical mechanisms, or in terms of independently motivated properties of language processing mechanisms (“reductionist” accounts). A variety of different types of argument have been put forward in efforts to distinguish these competing accounts. This article critically examines a number of arguments that have been offered as evidence in favour of formal or reductionist analyses, and concludes that some types of argument are more decisive than others. It argues that evidence from graded acceptability effects and from isomorphism between acceptability judgements and on-line comprehension profiles are less decisive. In contrast, clearer conclusions can be drawn from cases of overgeneration, where there is a discrepancy between acceptability judgements and the representations that are briefly constructed on-line, and from tests involving individual differences in cognitive capacity. Based on these arguments, the article concludes that a formal grammatical account is better supported in some domains, and that a reductionist account fares better in other domains. Phenomena discussed include island constraints, agreement attraction, constraints on anaphora, and comparatives.

Verbal grammar in the Russian explanatory dictionary

The subject of the present paper are interactions of the lexical senses of Russian verbs (a) with the grammatical forms of aspect, tense, voice, mood and the like and (b) with the meanings of certain grammemes (such as IMPERF) in cases of their polysemy. An instance of the latter are constraints imposed by the given lexical sense of a verb on the possibility of its use in certain aspectual meanings (progressive, praesens historicum and the like). The focal point of the paper are non-trivial, i.e. lexicalized interactions. Dictionary is the only place where such interactions can be described exhaustively, yet they are completely ignored in most authoritative explanatory dictionaries of Russian. All such interactions are broken into two large groups ? paradigmatic (like the ones pointed out in (a) and (b)) and syntagmatic. In the latter group aspect turns out to be the most active grammatical category capable of multifarious interactions with a number of syntactic phenomena, especially with various syntactic forms of implementing the verb?s semantic actants, and also with such contextual factors as modality, negation, and parenthesis.