Syntactic Phenomena Research Articles

Syntactic vs. phonological areas: A quantitative perspective on Hessian dialects

AbstractThis paper takes a quantitative perspective on data from the projectSyntax hessischer Dialekte(SyHD), covering dialects in the German state of Hesse, an area with rich dialectal variation. Many previous dialectometric analyses abstracted away from intralocal variation (e.g., by only counting the most frequent variant at a location). In contrast, we do justice to intralocal variation by taking into account local frequency relations. The study shows that the border between Low German and Central German—one of the most important isoglosses in German dialectology—is not relevant for syntactic phenomena. At the same time, a comparison with charactern-grams (a global measure of string similarity) reveals that the traditionally assumed dialect areas, primarily defined according to phonological developments, are still present in the twenty-first century data. Different from previous studies, our results are obtained from a uniform data base. Therefore, the differences between syntax and phonology cannot be due to variation in sampling, elicitation method, or time of elicitation.

PARTICULATE CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE

This article argues that the phenomenon of partsellation was originally interpreted in Uzbek linguistics as an appendix, and studied as a separate syntactic phenomenon on the basis of modern linguistic principles.

Comparing the Effect of Product-Based Metrics on the Translation Process.

Characteristics of the translation product are often used in translation process research as predictors for cognitive load, and by extension translation difficulty. In the last decade, user-activity information such as eye-tracking data has been increasingly employed as an experimental tool for that purpose. In this paper, we take a similar approach. We look for significant effects that different predictors may have on three different eye-tracking measures: First Fixation Duration (duration of first fixation on a token), Eye-Key Span (duration between first fixation on a token and the first keystroke contributing to its translation), and Total Reading Time on source tokens (sum of fixations on a token). As predictors we make use of a set of established metrics involving (lexico)semantics and word order, while also investigating the effect of more recent ones concerning syntax, semantics or both. Our results show a, particularly late, positive effect of many of the proposed predictors, suggesting that both fine-grained metrics of syntactic phenomena (such as word reordering) as well as coarse-grained ones (encapsulating both syntactic and semantic information) contribute to translation difficulties. The effect on especially late measures may indicate that the linguistic phenomena that our metrics capture (e.g., word reordering) are resolved in later stages during cognitive processing such as problem-solving and revision.

Неместоименные вопросительные предложения с прямым порядком слов в английском языке

The research objective includes revealing structural and functional peculiarities of non-pronominal interrogative sentences with the direct word order. The study is conducted by the material of the Spoken English Corpus. The author shows how mechanisms of word order violation in interrogative sentences correlate with the syntactic ellipsis phenomenon, which constitutes scientific originality of the paper. The research findings are as follows: the author suggests a structural-semantic classification of non-pronominal interrogative constructions with the direct word order taking into account the rheme marking function of an interrogative sentence.

Resilient Subject Agreement Morpho-Syntax in the Germanic Romance Contact Area

In this work, we intend to investigate one fundamental aspect of language contact by comparing the distribution of subjects in German, Northern Italian dialects and Cimbrian. Here, we show that purely syntactic order phenomena are more prone to convergence, i.e., less resilient, while phenomena that have a clearly identifiable morphological counterpart are more resilient. The empirical domain of investigation for our analysis is the morphosyntax of both nominal and pronominal subjects, the agreement pattern and their position in Cimbrian grammar. While agreement patterns display a highly conservative paradigm, the syntax of nominal (vP-peripheral and topicalized) subjects is innovative and mimics the Italian linear word order.

BERT syntactic transfer: A computational experiment on Italian, French and English languages

This paper investigates the ability of multilingual BERT (mBERT) language model to transfer syntactic knowledge cross-lingually, verifying if and to which extent syntactic dependency relationships learnt in a language are maintained in other languages. In detail, the main contributions of this paper are: (i) an analysis of the cross-lingual syntactic transfer capability of mBERT model; (ii) a detailed comparison of cross-language syntactic transfer among languages belonging to different branches of the Indo-European languages, namely English, Italian and French, which present very different syntactic constructions; (iii) a study on the transferability of a syntactic phenomenon peculiar of Italian language, namely the pronoun dropping (pro-drop), also known as omissibility of the subject. To this end, a structural probe devoted to reconstruct the dependency parse tree of a sentence has been exploited, representing the input sentences with the contextual embeddings from mBERT layers. The results of the experimental assessment have shown a transfer of syntactic knowledge of the mBERT model among these languages. Moreover, the behaviour of the probe in the transition from pro-drop to non-pro-drop languages and vice versa has proven to be more effective in case of languages sharing a common linguistic matrix. The possibility of transferring syntactical knowledge, especially in the case of specific phenomena, meets both a theoretical need and can have important practical implications in syntactic tasks, such as dependency parsing.

Особенности функционирования стилистических фигур и синтаксических форм в поэзии Веры Полозковой

The study aims to determine distinctive nature of and features peculiar to syntactic organisation of Vera Polozkova’s poetry. The article attempts to identify predominant syntactic features of the author’s poetry and assess significance of poetic syntax phenomena. The work is novel in that it is the first to make an attempt to give a systematic description of syntactic features of Vera Polozkova’s poetic style, which made it possible to identify certain phenomena that are representative of her poetry such as the highest possible concentration of coordinated structures and syntactic parallelism underlying the composition of entire works. The results of the study convincingly illustrate direct relationship between the considered syntactic phenomena and the author’s individual style.

복문으로 나타나는 일본어 「知る」문과 한국어 「알다」문의 통사구조와 재구조화현상

This study examines the syntactic structures and restructuring phenomena of the “siru” sentences in Japanese and the corresponding “alda” sentences in Korean that appear in complex sentences. More specifically, the study shows that although the “siru” sentences in Japanese and the corresponding “alda” sentences in Korean are formed as complex sentences in the deep structure due to the semantic role of the predicates, such syntactic structures can be divided into control structures or raising structures depending on the syntactic roles they perform. In a nutshell, the “siru” sentences in Japanese that take the complementizer of “koto” and the “alda” sentences in Korean that take the complementizer of “il” are of an raising structure, whereas the “siru” sentences that take the complementizer of “no” and “alda” sentences that take the complementizer of “geot” are of a control structure. To present such syntactic structures, this study focuses on the semantic phenomenon related to how idiomatic expressions are interpreted in such syntactic structures. In addition, this study shows that restructuring is observed in these syntactic structures, by demonstrating, through the incidences of cleft sentences, the fact that both the “siru” sentence in Japanese and the “alda” sentence in Korean show in their surface structure such syntactic phenomena as are found in simple-sentence structures.

Assessing BERT’s ability to learn Italian syntax: a study on null-subject and agreement phenomena

The work presented in this paper investigates the ability of BERT neural language model pretrained in Italian to embed syntactic dependency relationships into its layers, by approximating a Dependency Parse Tree. To this end, a structural probe, namely a supervised model able to extract linguistic structures from a language model, has been trained leveraging the contextual embeddings from the layers of BERT. An experimental assessment has been performed using an Italian version of BERT-base model and a set of datasets for Italian labelled with Universal Dependencies formalism. The results, achieved using standard metrics of dependency parsers, have shown that a knowledge of the Italian syntax is embedded in central-upper layers of the BERT model, according to what observed in literature for the English case. In addition, the probe has been also used to experimentally evaluate the BERT model behaviour in case of two specific syntactic phenomena in Italian, namely null-subject and subject-verb-agreement, showing better performance than an Italian state-of-the-art parser. These findings can open a path for the development of new hybrid approaches, exploiting the probe to integrate or improve limits or weaknesses in analysing articulated constructions of Italian syntax, traditionally complex to be parsed.

MATCHING Phrases in Norwegian Object Shift

One significant contribution of generative linguistics has been to our understanding of 'movement,' which occurs when a word is linearized in a position different from where it is interpreted. Even though movement often is considered a syntactic phenomenon, some cases seem best analyzed prosodically, such as pronoun post-posing in Irish (Bennett, Elfner, & McClosky 2016). We explore prosodically driven movement in Norwegian, which is known for having pronominal object shift (OS). We show that OS can be explained by Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), but only if the MATCH constraints are sensitive to lexical items and their projects instead of Elfner's (2012) definition where Match is sensitive to lexical and functional elements and their projections (see also Ito & Mester 2019).

Analysing Appreciating and Criticizing in Standard Arabic: When Morphology Supports Syntax

This paper provides a minimalist (Chomsky 2000, 2001) investigation to a syntactic phenomenon slightly analysed in syntactic research on Standard Arabic (SA) literature of poetry (TaqiAldin 1987). This syntactic phenomenon is derived by a construction of a wh-in situ phrase embedded in a construct state phrase (WICS, henceforth). The novelty about this SA WICS phenomenon is that the entity expressed by the wh-phrase is ambiguously assigned two pragmatic values: med? (appreciating) and hid?a? (criticizing). Holding in abeyance with the idea that SA is frozen, having not developed for decades, this research sets a comparative exploration between SA and Saudi variety of Arabic (SDA). It is shown that SDA syntax-pragmatics interface is straightforward. SDA displays WICS, which derives hid?a?, in addition to displaying wh-ex situ phenomenon, which derives med?. In comparison, SA syntax is restricted to WICS phenomenon, which predicts that in construct state context, SA only derives hid?a?, hence, the ambiguity. With minimalist investigation to further articulated structure in the SA data under analysis, the research concludes that the instance of SA WICS is an occurrence of med?, rather than hid?a?. Evidence for this conclusion is based on the observation that, though the occurrence of SA WICS is associated with lack of movement of the wh-phrase, it is simultaneously associated with a wide-scope of the discourse marker wa, which functions as a pragmatic device assigning speaker positive attitude pragmatic value to the proposition. That is to say, SA grammar requires morphology to support syntax with a morphological device when the latter falls short to activate syntactic operations like movement for med? interpretation.

Psychological, pedagogical and methodological principles of teaching dialogic foreign language speaking and the problem of classification of exercises

The article provides a theoretical analysis of psychological, pedagogical and methodological principles of teaching dialogic speaking. The relevance of the study is related to the need for scientific development and implementation of a model related to teaching dialogic speaking, which will effectively develop quality skills and relevant competencies. The methodological basis for teaching dialogic speaking is the systemic dynamic unity of interconnected and interdependent situational semantic and linguistic characteristics of this form of speaking realised in the model. The article pays attention to the main provisions of the theory of verbal communication which are a real basis for building a system of situational teaching / learning of dialogic speaking within a single complex “situation – meaning – language”. The gradual approximating of educational situations to natural dialogue is based on a number of well-known didactic principles, the observance of which is considered by the author as an important component of the teaching / learning system. Theoretical analysis of the problem regarding classification of exercises for teaching dialogic speaking as the main element of the educational process has been carried out. Basing on the analysis, it has been determined that an exercise should comprise situational, semantic (meaning-centred) and linguistic characteristics of dialogic speech; whereas their systematic application, while being trained, should be aimed at mastering stylistically marked units alongside syntactic and lexical-syntactic phenomena typical for conversational style of dialogic speaking, as well as at practicing a set of operations of semantic order and operations related to the memory peculiarities. Taking into account all these aspects will allow building an effective model of teaching / learning, namely to clearly formulate the requirements to the main component of the education system, to select the most effective ones, as well as to integrate them into an overall model aimed at developing skills and abilities of dialogic foreign language speaking.

Deletion in Syndrome Compounds Perspective Antarah Bin Shaddad: An applied grammatical study

The deletion in the syndromic compounds is a syntactic phenomenon that deals with the syntactic changes that occur to the Arabic sentence in deleting one of the compounds, and the compounds associated with this concept are those terms that the owner does not separate from the other, And its deletion is one of the characteristics of the Arabic language, the structure of the economy in the composition, and the structure of that deletion builds on several purposes and grammatical errors that suggest and summarize that. The research deals with these compounds contained in the commentary of Antarah bin Shaddad, who is one of the knights ’poets from the pre-Islamic era, because of the large number of these omissions in this comment.

Глагольная парадигма в языке томо-кан: о взаимосвязи полипредикатных конструкций, грамматикализации и тонологии

The paper deals with the grammaticalization problems in Tomo Kan (Dogon family, Niger-Congo) and, in particular, with the diachronic relationship of polypredicative constructions and TAM markers. Dogon languages are characterized by TAM systems that seem to be dia-chronically unstable since markers with a similar range of meanings go back to different lexi-cal sources in different languages of the family. TAM markers are apparently associated with polypredicative constructions, which are very common in Dogon and preserve some of their morphosyntactic properties. At the same time, Dogon languages are characterized by complex tonal changes triggered not only by phonological context but also by the syntactic position of constituents. These tonal changes, frequently referred to as tonosyntax, accompany the formation of polypredicative constructions and other syntactic phenomena. A thorough inves-tigation of Tomo Kan TAM markers shows their tonosyntactic properties to resemble those of polypredicative constructions. Moreover, assuming that tonosyntax of polypredicative con-structions triggers certain tonal contour overlays, one can account for tonal alternations ob-served in TAM forms which would have been left otherwise unexplained. However, the anal-ysis also reveals that at least two classes of TAM forms must be distinguished in Tomo Kan: one of them inherits the tonosyntax of polypredicative constructions while the other does not. A hypothesis is put forward that the latter class has a different source of grammaticalization and is probably associated with verb stem incorporation rather than with polypredication. Methodologically, the paper shows a critical role of tonology in the analysis of grammaticalization processes in tonal languages.

SYNTAX AS AN OBJECT OF PARODY

In the mind of the native speaker, there is an idea of the syntactic “optimum”, which allows them to use linguistic units most effectively to achieve a desired communicative effect. It contains a set of pieces of intuitive (“naïve”) knowledge about the parameters of the sentence, the organization of its structure, the rules of correspondence of lexical and grammatical meanings, etc. Deviations from this optimum can become independent objects of not only scholarly research, but also parody in a literary text. The article analyzes the problem lying on the borderline between linguistics, literary criticism and psychology: What syntactic features of the original text are enhanced or hyperbolized in parody? Analysis of numerous examples from Russian fiction allows the author to make a conclusion about the metalinguistic significance of certain features of the structure of the text. Collections of literary parodies (by A. Arkhangelsky, A. Ivanov, etc.) were subject to a special (continuous) analysis. The following syntactic phenomena were identified as the object and reason for their reflection in the parodies: a) excessive length of the sentence; b) artificial complication of its structure, specifically by means of chains of consecutive subordination, homogeneous members, abundance of epithets, etc.; c) absolutization of elements of oral, official and other speech styles, including the “telegraph style”; d) violation of the isosemy rule; e) non-realization of obligatory syntactic valency (unmotivated ellipsis); f) separation from the sentence of its part (parcellation), etc. These phenomena, used systematically, obtain a linguo-psychological characterization of salience (identifiability against the general background). As a result of the study, the author made up a list of syntactic facts that acquire the role of secondary signs in a work of fiction, along with other stylistic categories. Such a list, on the one hand, is intended to serve the convergence of scholarly (“academic”) and mass (“secondary school”) grammar, and, on the other hand, is of interest to experimental psychology, which studies the problems of perception and comprehension of the text.

СИНТАКСИС КАК ОБЪЕКТ ПАРОДИИ

In the mind of the native speaker, there is an idea of the syntactic “optimum”, which allows them to use linguistic units most effectively to achieve a desired communicative effect. It contains a set of pieces of intuitive (“naïve”) knowledge about the parameters of the sentence, the organization of its structure, the rules of correspondence of lexical and grammatical meanings, etc. Deviations from this optimum can become independent objects of not only scholarly research, but also parody in a literary text. The article analyzes the problem lying on the borderline between linguistics, literary criticism and psychology: What syntactic features of the original text are enhanced or hyperbolized in parody? Analysis of numerous examples from Russian fiction allows the author to make a conclusion about the metalinguistic significance of certain features of the structure of the text. Collections of literary parodies (by A. Arkhangelsky, A. Ivanov, etc.) were subject to a special (continuous) analysis. The following syntactic phenomena were identified as the object and reason for their reflection in the parodies: a) excessive length of the sentence; b) artificial complication of its structure, specifically by means of chains of consecutive subordination, homogeneous members, abundance of epithets, etc.; c) absolutization of elements of oral, official and other speech styles, including the “telegraph style”; d) violation of the isosemy rule; e) non-realization of obligatory syntactic valency (unmotivated ellipsis); f) separation from the sentence of its part (parcellation), etc. These phenomena, used systematically, obtain a linguo-psychological characterization of salience (identifiability against the general background). As a result of the study, the author made up a list of syntactic facts that acquire the role of secondary signs in a work of fiction, along with other stylistic categories. Such a list, on the one hand, is intended to serve the convergence of scholarly (“academic”) and mass (“secondary school”) grammar, and, on the other hand, is of interest to experimental psychology, which studies the problems of perception and comprehension of the text.

INTERPRETING DETACHED CONSTRUCTIONS WITH EXPLICIT SUBJECT THROUGH THE PRISM OF RELATED TERMS

This article provides a comprehensive account of the English detached nonfinite and nonverbal constructions with the explicit subject within the framework of construction grammar. The study overviews the terms utilized in Western grammatical studies to nominate the investigated syntactic structures. Depending on the ontological and gnoseological assumptions of a particular linguistic approach, the analyzed terms highlight specific aspects of the syntactic structures under study (morphosyntactic features, syntactic functions, the subject’s case, coreference with the matrix clause, intonation and punctuation marking), and, therefore, cannot fully reveal the nature of the given syntactic phenomenon. The paper discusses the advantages of the term “detached nonfinite and nonverbal constructions with the explicit subject” for cognitive and quantitative operationalization and theoretical substantiation of the examined structures. The component construction is used in the interpretation of the cognitive construction grammar and defined as a noncompositional language sign, a complex pairing of form and meaning, where some aspects of the forms or the meanings cannot be derived from the form and the meaning of its components or from other existing constructions. In present-day English detached [aug/øaug[SubjNP] [PredNF/VL]] constructions constitute a taxonomic constructional network represented through a multiple hierarchy of adjunct clauses combined with the plane of detachment. The network of the analyzed constructions is developed around the constructional schema, represented by the construction of the highest degree of schematicity and abstraction (macro-construction). The features of the macro-construction are inherited by the constructions of a lower level – meso-constructions and individual micro-constructions and are reflected in the specific realized constructions – constructs.

Expanding the JHU Bible Corpus for Machine Translation of the Indigenous Languages of North America

We present an extension to the JHU Bible corpus, collecting and normalizing more than thirty Bible translations in thirty Indigenous languages of North America. These exhibit a wide variety of interesting syntactic and morphological phenomena that are understudied in the computational community. Neural translation experiments demonstrate significant gains obtained through cross-lingual, many-to-many translation, with improvements of up to 8.4 BLEU over monolingual models for extremely low-resource languages.

Türkçenin İkinci Dil Olarak Ediniminde Gösterimsel Kaydırma Değiştirgeni

This paper investigates the L2 acquisition of a specific syntactic phenomenon known as indexical shift. Indexicals are lexical items that pick their referents in discourse. For instance, ‘I’ and ‘you’ refer to the speaker and addressee of the conversation. In some languages, however, indexicals may shift to pick a different referent in the matrix clause when they are embedded in a finite complement clause. In other words, languages are largely divided into two groups: shifting and non-shifting languages. Therefore, a natural question to ask is to what extent does L1 affect the L2 acquisition of indexical shift? To answer this question, I carry out an experiment with learners of Turkish from shifting and non-shifting languages and find that L1 has no effect on the learners’ level of native-like performance. Turkish strongly favours shift and learners fall behind native speakers. But the difference between learners from shifting and non-shifting languages is insignificant. The paper also reiterates and elaborates on the judgments of native speakers previously attained elsewhere.

Voice Reversals and Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Hittite

We address the relationship between syntactic valency and voice morphology in Hittite (Anatolian, Indo-European), focusing on cases where active syntax is expressed using non-active morphology, and vice versa. We argue that apparent “mismatches” between syntax and morphology are strictly a morphological rather than a syntactic phenomenon (contra Alexiadou et al. 2015; Grestenberger 2018). Our study highlights voice “reversals” — i.e., cases in which the expected mismatch disappears and morphological and syntactic valency match. We determine that such reversals correlate with morphological locality, and cannot be derived by hierarchical factors. Our findings provide a novel argument for a uniform syntactic structure of voice (Wood 2015; Wood & Marantz 2018).