Syntactic Phenomena Research Articles

Harris, Chomsky and the origins of transformational grammar

According to Chomsky’s report of the mid 1970s, he and Harris developed their theories in an essentially independent way; whereas according to some statements by Harris, some contact actually took place between them. To shed light on this issue, it may be useful to systematically compare their respective views of the notion ‘transformation’ as well as their analyses of certain syntactic phenomena. Among the topics dealt with in the present article are: the system of syntactic categories and their symbols; the notion of ‘zero elements’; the phenomenon of discontinuous constituents; the English auxiliary system;wh-constructions; the typology of transformations; the notions of ‘kernel’ and ‘kernel sentence’.Several of these analyses show many points of contact between the two scholars (e.g., the analysis ofwh-constructions or that of English auxiliaries), which allow us to maintain that they surely influenced each other. The overall differences between the two models are also clear: the transformational relation holds between sentences in Harris’s framework, while it holds between underlying strings on the one hand and actual sentences on the other in Chomsky’s. As a consequence of this different view of the notion of transformation, two problems which were fundamental for Chomsky had no importance for Harris, namely the order of transformations and the distinction between optional and obligatory transformations.It can therefore be concluded that, if the two scholars certainly influenced each other when they were working out their respective transformational theories, their theoretical views were acutely different almost from the beginning.

Еволюція поняття «подвійний синтаксичний зв’язок» в українському мовознавстві

One of the topical problems of modern grammar is the qualification of doublesyntactic connection. Its nature conforms to none of the features of syntactic connection on the axis of closeness /openness. The problem of the particularity of this syntactic phenomenon appeared in the early twentieth century but it is still not resolved. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the conditions for the birth of the idea of double-syntactic connection and to review the evolution of this phenomenon in Ukrainian and Russian scholarly works. As the analysis demonstrates, the double-syntactic connection does not determine a single phenomenon but it includes a set of phenomena. It is a type that combines different varieties of syntactic connection according to their common features, such as three-member-construction and the complex realization of the syntactic connection. Various linguists have interpreted the patterns of the establishment of that phenomenon and the forms of its realization in different ways. The prospective of our study is to define grammatical markers of the double-syntactic connection and to describe the structure of the constructions in which it appears.

Negative polarity illusions and the format of hierarchical encodings in memory

Linguistic illusions have provided valuable insights into how we mentally navigate complex representations in memory during language comprehension. Two notable cases involve illusory licensing of agreement and negative polarity items (NPIs), where comprehenders fleetingly accept sentences with unlicensed agreement or an unlicensed NPI, but judge those same sentences as unacceptable after more reflection. Existing accounts have argued that illusions are a consequence of faulty memory access processes, and make the additional assumption that the encoding of the sentence remains fixed over time. This paper challenges the predictions made by these accounts, which assume that illusions should generalize to a broader set of structural environments and a wider range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. We show across seven reading-time and acceptability judgment experiments that NPI illusions can be reliably switched “on” and “off”, depending on the amount of time from when the potential licensor is processed until the NPI is encountered. But we also find that the same profile does not extend to agreement illusions. This contrast suggests that the mechanisms responsible for switching the NPI illusion on and off are not shared across all illusions. We argue that the contrast reflects changes over time in the encoding of the semantic/pragmatic representations that can license NPIs. Just as optical illusions have been informative about the visual system, selective linguistic illusions are informative not only about the nature of the access mechanisms, but also about the nature of the encoding mechanisms.

The rise and fall of a change from below in Early Modern Spanish

AbstractThis article deals with the patterns of variation and change undergone by a syntactic variable in Early Modern Spanish grammar, namely the alternation betweendeber‘have to, must, should’ anddeber de + infinitive ‘have to, must, should’ as a modal periphrasis. Based on a 1,500,000-word corpus of immediacy texts (private letters, memories) the results of this variationist study suggest that throughout the 16th century, but more especially during its second half, the prepositional periphrasis gradually became more common, above all in stylistic contexts predominated by the spontaneity and proximity of the relationships between the interlocutors. It was also more frequently found in contexts involving members of northern speech communities, particularly males, the young and the middle-low social strata, the incidence being especially high at the points where some of these groups intersect. All this suggests a change from below in the Golden Age period, which reached considerable dimensions in a relatively short time but was destined to stagnate and later decline just as quickly in the centuries that followed as a result of some structural features, such as the special “visibility” of the preposition, which could have led to the stigmatization of the periphrasis in a similar way to what happened in other Spanish syntactic phenomena.

“weil – das ist eben doch richtig so” Teaching variant types of weil‐ and obwohl‐structures in German

Researchers have observed that in spoken German, the conjunctions weil and obwohl commonly occur with verb‐second (V2) instead of verb‐final (Vf) word order (Gaumann, ; Gänthner, , ; Uhmann, ). Current findings document that this syntactic variant of weil/obwohl‐structures has an alternative interactional meaning and function, namely expressing different causalities (Vandergriff, ). Based on the results of interactional linguistic research, we will outline why it is important for foreign language learners of German to be aware of the weil/obwohl+V2 structure. This background provides the basis for step‐by‐step teaching units on variant weil/obwohl‐clauses in the beginning and intermediate German language classroom. The suggested teaching units employ the five phases for teaching and learning pragmatics suggested by Barraja‐Rohan (). The aim is to raise learners’ awareness and understanding for this syntactic phenomenon and its interactional use in spoken German.

Control, causation and Google countsŽ1

Abstract This contribution is a review of Chapter 5.2 of Broekhuis & Corver’s (2015) Syntax of Dutch (pp. 765-935). The chapter describes Dutch infinitival constructions from a formal perspective. In this review I share several theoretical, descriptive and methodological considerations, which relate to the status of control as a purely syntactic phenomenon, the semantic and geographic variation of Dutch causative constructions, and the problems with using Google counts from the World Wide Web when writing a (formal) grammar.

Investigating locality effects and surprisal in written English syntactic choice phenomena

We investigate the extent to which syntactic choice in written English is influenced by processing considerations as predicted by Gibson’s (2000) Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) and Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008). A long line of previous work attests that languages display a tendency for shorter dependencies, and in a previous corpus study, Temperley (2007) provided evidence that this tendency exerts a strong influence on constituent ordering choices. However, Temperley’s study included no frequency-based controls, and subsequent work on sentence comprehension with broad-coverage eye-tracking corpora found weak or negative effects of DLT-based measures when frequency effects were statistically controlled for (Demberg & Keller, 2008; van Schijndel, Nguyen, & Schuler 2013; van Schijndel & Schuler, 2013), calling into question the actual impact of dependency locality on syntactic choice phenomena. Going beyond Temperley’s work, we show that DLT integration costs are indeed a significant predictor of syntactic choice in written English even in the presence of competing frequency-based and cognitively motivated control factors, including n-gram probability and PCFG surprisal as well as embedding depth (Wu, Bachrach, Cardenas, & Schuler, 2010; Yngve, 1960). Our study also shows that the predictions of dependency length and surprisal are only moderately correlated, a finding which mirrors Dember & Keller’s (2008) results for sentence comprehension. Further, we demonstrate that the efficacy of dependency length in predicting the corpus choice increases with increasing head-dependent distances. At the same time, we find that the tendency towards dependency locality is not always observed, and with pre-verbal adjuncts in particular, non-locality cases are found more often than not. In contrast, surprisal is effective in these cases, and the embedding depth measures further increase prediction accuracy. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of language comprehension and production, and conclude with a discussion of questions our work raises for future research.

The Preposition-Opposeme of the Romanian Substantival Non-Ts

The aim of our paper is to prove that, in the Romanian language, at the intrapropositional level, the preposition/prepositional phrase can actualize two hypostases: preposition-relateme, marking the presence of relational meaning, vs preposition-opposeme, marking the absence of relational meaning, depending on the syntactic position in which it occurs alongside certain parts of speech with the status of lexemes, our analysis focusing on the substantival class: structural syntactic position of the type part of sentence and syntactical function, whatever these are, vs. non-structural syntactic position. Apposition or – as it is accepted, from a didactic point of view, by the Cluj-based neotraditional relational School of Grammar with which our research is affiliated – real apposition, by contrast with false apposition, is considered by G. G. Neamţu to be a non-structural syntactic position of the parenthetic or explanatory type, a peculiar syntactic phenomenon, which cannot be relationally subsumed through either coordination or subordination; in other words, it is a syntactical non-function or a non-Ts, regardless of the part of speech through which it is expressed. The placement of the preposition/prepositional phrase in front of the apposition does not change the non-relational context in which the latter is found (it becomes a preposition-opposeme and the apposition remains a non-Ts) or the casual substantival regime of this morphological value; it imposes, in the case of the substantival class that follows it (since Romanian is an inflected language), one of three possible cases – the accusative, the genitive or the dative. In the absence of the preposition/prepositional phrase, the flective of the substantival apposition represents, in its entirety, an opposeme (a unit of expression without a relational sense), a flective-opposeme, as the expression of the grammatical categories of opposition, implicitly, and the case, a flective-opposeme of case, the latter existing in a dichotomy with the flective-relateme of case, which may be actualized in certain syntactic structural positions of the type part of sentence and syntactic function, in the absence of the preposition-relateme.

Editorial: Is the Language Faculty Nonlinguistic?

Editorial: Is the Language Faculty Nonlinguistic?

The Intervention Effect as a Syntactic Phenomenon in Korean Wh-questions

There are mainly three types of approaches to intervention effects in Korean wh-questions: pragmatic, semantic and syntactic. The present paper argues that despite problems presented by pragmatic and semantic accounts, a syntactic approach can explain the intervention effect in Korean wh-questions best because it can logically explain why Korean speakers make different grammatical judgment as far as the intervention effect is concerned and can predict the environment where no intervention effect is observed. Judgmental variability of the intervention effect and crosslinguistic varieties of interveners have been presented against syntactic accounts; however, the present paper claims that there are two superficially identical types of wh-questions in Korean, and due to the ambiguous status, grammatical judgment of the intervention effect can differ among speakers and may fluctuate within the same speaker more markedly than other syntactic phenomena, and also shows that the kind of interveners do not differ so much as has been claimed, and that interveners are contrastive-focused as Kim (2002a, b) argues.

A polysemy account of alternating verbs of creation in Brazilian Portuguese

AbstractVerbs of creation such aswriteandpaint, in English and in other languages, occur in two distinct types of sentences: transitive or intransitive (The teacher wrote the letter/The teacher wrote (a lot)andThe artist painted a picture/The artist painted (a lot)). In this paper, we provide an analysis of such syntactic alternation, drawing on data from Brazilian Portuguese. We argue that this syntactic phenomenon is triggered by a semantic process of polysemy, and not by an argument alternation, as is assumed by some authors. We show evidence to support our proposal, namely, the distinct aspectual interpretations of the different sentences with verbs of creation, the distinct prefixation withre- in the transitive and intransitive forms, and the polysemy found in the nominalizations of the analyzed verbs. In order to formalize our semantic account, we propose a type of representation, a predicate decomposition structure enriched by a simple truth-conditional semantics of the root.

Noun phrase complexity across varieties of English

The noun phrase (NP) is at the heart of several studies investigating regional variation in varieties of English. While so far the bulk of research has focused on isolated structural features, the present study is a comparative analysis of NP complexity across varieties of English. NP complexity is compared across five regional varieties and four text categories, based on data from the International Corpus of English. The study adopts a multinomial regression approach, which takes into consideration the interaction of three potential predictors: syntactic function, text type, and variety. The results underline the need for text-type-sensitive studies and add to an understanding of syntactic contact phenomena in varieties of English. More specifically, we find marked differences in the predictive power of the variables and illustrate how focusing on the interaction of syntactic functions, text type and regional variety contributes to a systematic description of variation in the NP in world Englishes.

On the Normative Evaluation and Presentation of Some Phenomena in Lithuanian Syntax: Cases of the Prepositional Construction tikėti į ką (Believe in sb.) and Attributive Locative

The article is an analysis of issues concerning the relationship of the prepositional construction tikėti į ką (“believe in sb.”) and the attributive locative with the codified language norm. On the basis of the polemic and insights by some linguists and theologists as well as the data of contemporary usage, it is argued in the article whether the phrase tikėti į Dievą (“believe in God”) should reasonably be treated as a translation loanword, whether it does not possess distinctive semantics typical of the Christian discourse, due to which such a prepositional construction should rather be acknowledged as variant of the norm in Standard Lithuanian. The article also contains a discussion on some cases of expressing an attribute using the locative case, as they also have a nuance of location. Therefore, a question is raised whether they are reasonably attributed to syntactic phenomena that should be avoided in standard language.

Analytic tendencies in modern Polish and Russian

Analytic tendencies in modern Polish and RussianModern Polish and Russian are characterized by some features which demonstrate an increasing level of analitism. In the process of transformation from synthetic to analytical language, a crucial role is played by prepositional units. In this research, analitism is understood in a traditional way as a morphological and syntactic phenomenon. The fact that the synthetic structure of a language may, in some conditions, turn into an analytical one, as happened in the case of Bulgarian and Macedonian, has been intriguing linguists ever since, and has made me attempt to answer the question: What is the condition of modern Polish and Russian, which are languages with a rich literary tradition and solid grammatical norms, which belong to a group of synthetic languages? The analytical tendencies in morphology include the following: a decrease in the number of cases in all inflected parts of speech; a more frequent use of uninflected nouns and adjectives; the growing importance of nouns with common gender, and, in particular, the use of forms of masculine gender to depict feminine gender; differences in expressing collectiveness in a group of nouns (using collective meaning for forms that have singular meaning; substituting case forms with prepositions; substituting case forms with subordinate clauses; substituting case forms with “helper” words. Analytical tendencies in the area of numeral functioning include: substituting inflected forms of ordinal numerals with cardinal ones; the gradual disappearing inflection of numerals; confusing the forms of noun cases after numerals; the disappearing declination of collective numerals; displacing other cases with so-called simple cases; changing the syntactical position which the numeral should be inflected in; abandoning the declination of first elements of collective numerals. During the study of analytic tendencies in morphology, it was necessary to examine personal pronouns as this part of speech seems to be the most stable as far as other forms except nominative are concerned. Having analysed the material, it can be claimed that analitism in Slavic pronouns is observed at the level of the replacement of short forms with full ones, through the use of various forms after prepositions and eliminating all the alternative forms of personal pronouns. This review of analytic tendencies has also involved studying the article and its role in analytic languages, as the article is the area of a language which should be filled while the inflection disappears. Having analysed the material, I have concluded that there is a possibility that the article may appear in Polish and Russian.The most important part of speech in analytic languages is the preposition. An increase in the number of prepositional units is said to be an essential element of syntactic transformation in 20th century Polish and Russian i.e. their ongoing transformation from synthetic into analytic languages. In accordance with this tendency, secondary prepositions are gradually replacing proper prepositions and case forms in their traditional usage. The secondary preposition has been defined as a lexical unit, not being a preposition initially but used secondarily in this function. Such a definition requires adopting a functional perspective in the description, more so because the transformation of various language units (nouns, prepositional phrases, adverbs, conjunction, phraseological nexuses) into prepositions takes place gradually and the same set can be interpreted otherwise in different contexts. This comprehensive analysis of two modern Slavonic languages shows that the number of prepositional units in both languages has grown and is still increasing.

Tibidabo: a syntactically and semantically annotated corpus of Spanish

In this paper, I discuss the theoretical and practical issues raised in the development of Tibidabo, a syntactically and semantically annotated corpus of Spanish, which has been developed using the DELPH-IN corpus annotation environment and the HPSG-based grammar, SRG. I describe in detail the linguistic analysis that Tibidabo provides, focussing on various syntactic phenomena that are frequently discussed in the literature and consider alternative analyses proposed in the HPSG literature and in AnCora, another Spanish Treebank. 2 2 This work was funded by the Ramón y Cajal programme of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.

Schwache und starke Adjektivflexion im Deutschen: Kognitive Hintergründe

Inflection is a syntactic phenomenon found in number of natural languages. The phenomenon has been the subject of detailed typological and structural descriptions. Thus, there is a tremendous amount of research findings on this issue and a series of inflectional features has been well investigated: e.g. tense morphology in indicating temporal interrelations in an utterance; case morphology in making precision about who does what to whom; and number morphology showing the plural or singular of the entity talked about. However, the function of some inflectional features is still unclear. An example of such features are the weak and the strong declension of the German adjectives (Example: alle neuen Bücher vs. viele neue Bücher). In order to address this issue, a sample of 187 native speakers of German was included in the investigation described in the present article. The participants were administered a task that involved them deciding which grammatical number they would expect when they encountered determiners like viele, einige, sämtliche, alle during reading. The results suggest that the weak and the strong declension are psycholinguistically indispensable in the German language. Different implications are discussed.

Preposition Stranding in Spanish as a Heritage Language

Previous research examining heritage speaker bilingualism has suggested that interfaceconditioned properties are likely to be affected by crosslinguistic influence (e.g., Montrul & Polinsky, 2011; White, 2011). It is not clear, however, whether the core syntax can also be affected to the same degree (e.g., Cuza, 2013; Depiante & Thompson, 2013). Departing from Cuza’s (2013) and Depiante and Thompson’s (2013) research, the present study seeks to determine the extent to which this is possible in the case of Spanish as a heritage language. With this goal in mind, a total of thirty-three Spanish heritage speakers (divided into sequential and simultaneous bilinguals) and a comparison group of eleven late Spanish-English bilinguals completed a battery of off-line tasks that examined knowledge and use of preposition stranding (i.e., a syntactic construction whereby the object of the preposition is fronted while the preposition itself is left stranded), an understudied core syntactic phenomenon that is licit in English but precluded in Spanish. Overall findings reveal that the sequential heritage speakers pattern with participants from the control group. The simultaneous heritage speakers, on the other hand, seem to have a grammar that is not so restricting as they accept and produce ungrammatical cases of preposition stranding. Herein, we argue that these results do not obtain the way they do due to incomplete acquisition or L1 attrition but crucially because of the timing of exposure to the societal language. We propose that this property was completely acquired, although differently acquired due to the structural overlap observed between the two languages involved (e.g., Müller & Hulk, 2001), and most importantly, to the timing of acquisition of English (e.g., Putnam & Sánchez, 2013).

Der flexible Schreiber in der Sprachgeschichte.

This contribution applies Machas (1991) concept of the “flexible speaker” to a text genre that has remained unknown and hitherto has been unused: unforwarded letters and autobiographical texts from 19th century patients in psychiatric hospitals. Using a newly developed corpus of 212 texts (circa 165,000 words) from eight individuals, it will be demonstrated that even writers of the most common origin can flexibly choose their linguistic variety. In addition, these deci-sions can even be partially commented upon metalinguistically. By quantitatively comparing stigmaticized syntactic phenomena as well as regional and local dialect verb morphology, it becomes clear that the language use of writers with a similar socio-cultural background display clear divergences. Illness and/or age can lead to linguistic changes and either limit or prevent the deliberate choice of varieties.

Subliminal wh-islands in brazilian Portuguese and the consequenceS for Syntactic theory

Categorical acceptability judgments form an important and productive heuristic that provides a substantial body of data to theoretical linguists. Despite its popularity, however, they might not always provide an accurate representation of the acceptability facts, especially when it concerns complex patterns of judgments across a range of different sentences types. In this work, I present evidence that, when categorical acceptability is substituted by a more graded measure of acceptability, one can observe wh-island sensitivity in Brazilian Portuguese in three syntactic phenomena (wh-movement, Topicalization and Left Dislocation), even though the island violating structures are marginally or fully acceptable. I conclude with a discussion about what the existence of such island sensitivity effects in marginally or fully acceptable sentences could mean for theories of syntactic islands, and syntactic theory more broadly construed.

A posição e a colocação de clíticos em predicados complexos: o português brasileiro visto a partir de duas vertentes

Neste texto revisitamos a hipótese de acordo com a qual o português brasileiro é formado por duas vertentes – a norma culta e a norma vernacular ou popular –, a partir do problema da posição e da colocação de clíticos em predicados complexos. Para tanto, construímos uma base de dados composta por cartas escritas em diversos momentos dos séculos XIX e XX, classificadas quanto à escolaridade de seus remetentes. Dois grandes tipos de construções foram identificados: perífrases infinitivas e tempos compostos. Primeiramente, descrevemos a variação na subida de clíticos nos dados do século XIX, a fim de identificar os grupos de fatores relevantes, que se mostraram muito próximos aos dos encontrados no português europeu. Em seguida, analisamos a evolução quantitativa dos dados de posição e colocação até o século XX a partir da classificação em autores cultos e incultos, analisada a partir de um modelo de competição de gramáticas. Observamos que, quanto à posição dos clíticos, a mudança foi paralela em ambas as vertentes estudadas. Isso sugere que a hipótese de que as vertentes formadas por falantes cultos e incultos tendem a se aproximar é uma generalização que depende da sensibilidade de cada fenômeno estudado a variáveis externas, sendo que fenômenos sintáticos como a posição de clíticos tendem a ser menos sensíveis a tais variáveis.