Syntactic Universals Research Articles

Corpus Construct: A Research Tool in Syntactic Analysis of Bantu Languages

Syntax of languages is understood to be shaped by syntactic universals principles. Despite operating within the constraints of these universals, languages have managed to display their unique syntactic features. This is explained by specificity in the ranking of these universals across languages. To establish the unique features, researchers have to use data collected using a variety of methods some of which are corpus studies, linguistic elicitation, introspection and experimentation. Each of these methods requires a research tool whose development or adoption is dependent on the research question(s)formulated to fill a study gap. The use of corpus construct to generate data, as other research tools, requires an understanding of what type of data is needed to answer which questions on which linguistic features. The construction of a corpus can be done from plain texts or annotated texts. The question is: how can corpus construct be used as a tool in the study of languages whose corpus is yet to be compiled and made available online? This article, therefore, intends to answer this question with biases on Bantu languages. It will be necessary to make databases from the corpus constructs available by building corpora for the languages in question. The findings of this article are deemed important in offering knowledge on building of corpus and how to use the built corpus to investigate a syntactic feature in a Bantu language.

Frasa Numeralia dalam Bahasa Batak Toba

Every language featured numeral as part of its syntactic system. It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that numerals are one place where cross-linguistic comparisons are especially fruitful and syntactic universals may be uncovered. However, once these systems are examined more closely, the picture becomes a lot more complicated, for it appears that numerals do not belong to a uniform syntactic category. This article is a descriptive analysis of the syntactic category which discussed the numeral phrase structure in the Toba Batak language. The study of this phrase structure applied generative syntax sub-theory; X-bar theory. The research method was from written resources, the distributional method, and intensifying technique. The data analysis results showed numeral phrase structure in the Toba Batak language consists of complement, specifier, adjunct, and nucleus.

Universal principles underlying segmental structures in parrot song and human speech

Despite the diversity of human languages, certain linguistic patterns are remarkably consistent across human populations. While syntactic universals receive more attention, there is stronger evidence for universal patterns in the inventory and organization of segments: units that are separated by rapid acoustic transitions which are used to build syllables, words, and phrases. Crucially, if an alien researcher investigated spoken human language how we analyze non-human communication systems, many of the phonological regularities would be overlooked, as the majority of analyses in non-humans treat breath groups, or “syllables” (units divided by silent inhalations), as the smallest unit. Here, we introduce a novel segment-based analysis that reveals patterns in the acoustic output of budgerigars, a vocal learning parrot species, that match universal phonological patterns well-documented in humans. We show that song in four independent budgerigar populations is comprised of consonant- and vowel-like segments. Furthermore, the organization of segments within syllables is not random. As in spoken human language, segments at the start of a vocalization are more likely to be consonant-like and segments at the end are more likely to be longer, quieter, and lower in fundamental frequency. These results provide a new foundation for empirical investigation of language-like abilities in other species.

EMBEDDEDWH-QUESTIONS IN L2 ENGLISH IN INDIA

This corpus study brings a second language (L2) research perspective, insights from generative grammar, and new empirical evidence to bear on a long-accepted claim in the World Englishes literature—namely, that inversion withwh-movement in colloquial Indian English is obligatory in embedded clauses and impossible in main clauses. It is argued that this register of Indian English is a L2 variety, functioning as part of a multilingual code repertoire, but that syntactic universals apply to first and second languages alike. Despite recent attempts at formalization, this distribution should be unattested, as such a grammar would fall outside the constraints of Universal Grammar and would contradict proposed discourse-pragmatic principles of natural language. A Perl program was created to search the Indian subcorpus of the International Corpus of English (Greenbaum, 1996) for relevant distributional patterns. Results reveal thatwh-inversion in Indian English operates in the same way as in other varieties: It is robustly attested in main clauses and appears only occasionally in embedded clauses where syntactic and pragmatic conditions allow; it is obligatory only with interrogative complementizer deletion. Thus, contrary to the standard account but commensurate with recent corpus studies, users of English in India exhibit knowledge of universal constraints in this domain.

Universal Grammar? Or prerequisites for natural language?

AbstractThis commentary aims to highlight what exactly is controversial about the traditional Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis and what is not. There is widespread agreement that we are not born “blank slates,” that language universals exist, that grammar exists, and that adults have domain-specific representations of language. The point of contention is whether we should assume that there exist unlearned syntactic universals that are arbitrary and specific to Language.

Universals in syntax

Two traditions devoted to the formulation and explanation of syntactic universals coexist in the field of linguistics. The surface universals tradition draws inductive generalizations pertaining to easily observable surface features in the world's languages. By and large it seeks to account for the universals that it uncovers by means of external, typically function-based, explanations. The deep universals tradition is part-and-parcel of most approaches to generative grammar. The central constructs of that theory, including the set of categories posited and the form of the principles at work, are ipso facto ‘deep universals’ provided by an innate Universal Grammar. Many generative grammarians take the position that deep universals are central to the explanation of surface universals, though there is good reason to be skeptical of such an idea. While most linguists would welcome a rapprochement between the two approaches to universals, a number of conceptual and empirical barriers stand in the way of its realization.

Universals and grammaticality: wh-constraints in German and English

In this article we investigate the movement constraints superiority and discourse linking. These have played an important role in the tradition of generative syntax and might therefore be expected to be universal, but they are usually argued to be absent from German. We looked for evidence of them in German data using the methodology of magnitude estimation of well-formedness, and compared this data with parallel results from English. The results showed these effects to be robustly active in the grammar of German, and revealed few differences between the two languages. We suggest that the reason why linguists have denied their existence in German is that they have been assuming a binary and categorical concept of grammaticality, forgetting that this is merely a simplifying abstraction from the primary linguistic data. We demonstrate that the admittedly convenient assumption of categorical grammaticality is obscuring our view of the syntax, and that studies using our own more empirically adequate assumptions of grammaticality can be productive. In particular, we hope that our conceptions of constraint survivability and definition of syntax relevance may permit insights into the size of the grammar, crosslinguistic variation, and syntactic universals.

TEORIA SINTÁTICA: DE UMA PERSPECTIVA DE "-ISMOS" PARA UMA PERSPECTIVA DE "PROGRAMAS"

Este trabalho tenta mostrar que os desenvolvimentos nas ciências lingüísticas seriam mais bem compreendidos como estágios de um único programa de pesquisa do que como diferentes -ismos. A primeira parte contém uma retrospectiva das crenças estruturalistas sobre a universalidade e a equivalência das línguas humanas e sua busca por universais sintáticos. A parte referente ao programa gerativo, por seu turno, tenta responder porque a língua é uma faculdade universal na espécie humana e levanta questões sobre sua forma, seu desenvolvimento e seu uso. O artigo dá uma pequena idéia das respostas provisórias que o programa vem dando a cada uma dessas questões.

A non-nativist account of language universals

Much of the impact which linguistics has had on philosophy in recent years stems from Noam Chomsky's arguments from linguistic universals to a 'nativist' or 'rationalist' account of mind. Before Chomsky, linguists tended to believe that (as Martin Joos, 1957: 96, put it) "languages [can] differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways". Ac cording to Chomsky this is wrong: there are certain respects in which all human languages are cut to a common pattern. The most plausible explanation for these common properties, Chomsky argues, is that our species inherits complex fixed psychological equipment which deter mines the nature of the ideas or mental structures that are accessible to us. If a language fits our inborn psychological machinery, we can learn it and use it; if it does not, we cannot. Chomsky thus uses linguistic universals to attack the view (traditional, at least in the English-speaking world) of mind as relatively plastic or adaptable; Chomsky urges us instead to assimilate our account of individuals' mental development to our account of individual physiological development, as a process in which heredity plays a role as large as or larger than that played by environment. Clearly (and Chomsky is well aware of this, e.g. 1972: 42-3) the force of the argument from linguistic universals to nativism depends critically on the lack of plausible alternative explanations for the linguistic uni versals. Some have taken this as a ground for dismissing Chomsky's argument altogether (e.g. Putnam, 1967: ?ii, (e)). That seems unreason able, since the logic of Chomsky's argument is simply that of the deductive-nomological explanations which are standard in empirical science: all scientific theories are convincing only so long as the obser ved data which they predict are not also predicted by rival and more plausible theories. It may well be true (I believe it is true) that some of the relatively peripheral universals mentioned by Chomsky, such as those having to do with phonology, can be 'explained away' without recourse to innate psychological machinery (see e.g. Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972; Ohala, 1974); but the extant attempts to explain away the syntactic universals which have always played the central role in Chomsky's nativist arguments seem quite unsuccessful. (I survey and

An empirical hypothesis about natural semantics

Chomsky has constructed an empirical theory about syntactic universals of natural language by defining a class of ‘possible languages’ which includes all natural languages (inter alia) as members, and claiming that all natural languages fall within a specified proper subset of that class. I extend Chomsky's work to produce an empirical theory about natural-language semantic universals by showing that the semantc description of a language will incorporate a logical calculus, by defining a relatively wide class of ‘possible calculi’, and by specifying a proper subset of that class which, I hypothesize, includes the calculi needed for the semantic description of any natural language. I argue that the special status, with respect to natural languages, of this particular type of logical calculus is an empirical finding which does not follow from any independently-known principles, and I conclude that the question why the laws of human thought have the structure they do is a biological rather than a logical question.

LEARNING-THEORETIC FOUNDATIONS OF LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS

Abstract : Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a constraint on the relationship between semantic and syntactic structure that makes verifiable predictions of syntactic universals. The relationship between the notion of 'explanatory adequacy' of a theory of grammar and the learnability of a class of transformational grammars is discussed.