Syntactic Variation Research Articles

Pluralism Concepts and Reasons

Praise be to God who guided us and enabled us to do this, and prayers and peace be upon the master of the Messengers, Muhammad and his family his home, the pure and immaculate, and after: Plurality is a term used in Arabic dictionaries to refer to abundance and counting. Grammatical faces in singular parsing. What is meant by pluralism is the abundance of grammatical guidance in the syntax of the word. The syntactic diversity occurred as a result of several reasons that had a prominent role in the possibility of the singular in more than one grammatical aspect, some of which are related to submission and delay, and the multiplicity of the meaning of the structure, and some of them are related to the functions of the word, stopping and starting.

MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AND SEMANTIC-SYNTAX POTENTIAL OF ANALYTICAL UNITS (ON THE MATERIAL OF V. SHEVCHUK’S NOVELS)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the morphological structure and the semantic-syntactic sphere of functioning of one of the varieties of syncretic connecting means – analytical units – in the idiostyle of Valerii Shevchuk.
 The specificity of the syncretism of conjunctions is studied on the material of the novels "House on the Mountain", "On the Humble Field", "Eye of the Abyss", "The Beginning of Horror", "The Ghost of the Dead House", "Three Leaves Outside the Window". The analysis of part of speech belonging and the meaning potential of structural components of analytical units is made by five lexicographic sources.
 The morphological structure of the studied syncretic connecting means was analyzed and the creative modes of them were identified. The semantic-syntactic potential of analytical units, selected by L. V. Shityk, based on the typology by K. G. Horodenska – connecting means used in syncretic composite sentences, is characterized. Each type of conjunctive combination is correlated with the corresponding type of syncretic composite sentence (with causative consecutive interrelation, relation of time sequence, disjunctive-concessive meaning) or with a syntactic variant of a simple complicated sentence. Frequency of the conjunctive combinations’ the functioning and the peculiarities of their semantic and syntactic manifestation are confirmed by examples from the writer's novels. The most frequently presented in the author's idiostyle are the conjunctions а відтак – in the sentences with the sequence of action or generalization of the thought expressed in the previous part, і від того – in the constructions with the causative-consecutive meaning, і навіть – to give the sentence a tinge of unexpectedness, to strengthen the disjunctive-concessive connection. The types of syncretic complex sentences inherent in V. Shevchuk's novels have been clarified-subordinate in form and subordinate in content and subordinate-coordinate in form and meaning. Quantitative indicators of the frequency of use of each conjunctive are determined.

The Syntactic Pasts of Nouns Shape Their Prosodic Future: Lexico-Syntactic Effects on Position and Duration.

Phrasal prosody is often viewed as a level of linguistic representation at which the phonetic profile of an utterance varies independently of the lexical items it contains. For example, the same word, when produced at the edges of prosodic phrases, will take longer to produce than when it is produced within the edges of a phrase. Lengthening effects have also been found for words when placed in different syntactic or lexical contexts. Recent evidence suggests that lexico-syntactic information-for example, the global syntactic distributions of words-affects phonetic duration in production, irrespective of other factors. The present study asks whether these lexico-syntactic effects on duration interact with prosodic position within the phrase. Specifically, we ask whether (a) the lexico-syntactic information of a word determines its prosodic position, and (b) whether, beyond any categorical effects on positioning, lexico-syntactic factors affect duration within prosodic positions. We address these questions using the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. We operationalize syntactic information as the diversity and the typicality of the syntactic distributions of nouns based on a dependency parse of the British National Corpus. We find that earlier positions in the prosodic phrase generally prefer words with higher syntactic diversity. In addition, diversity and typicality modulate duration more reliably in nonfinal positions. Together, our results point to an early influence of lexico-syntactic considerations on prosodic planning.

A typological study on the syntactic variations of counterfactual clauses

ABSTRACT This paper differs from previous studies that focused on counterfactual markings by establishing a typological classification of counterfactuals (CFs) based on syntactic variations. By taking this approach, the paper is able to answer questions surrounding the downgrading of counterfactuals and its effects on clause linkage, clause order and TAM expression. The author proposes a new working definition that emphasizes meaning while also considering form. Through a survey of 155 languages, the paper provides evidence that the syntax of counterfactuals is more diverse than previously thought, challenging mainstream views on their connection to conditional frameworks. Non-conditional CFs like coordination or insubordination which tend to get marginalized in linguistic analysis and description are also explored in the paper. The preliminary systematization of data presented here will encourage an overall rethinking of the syntactic variations of counterfactuals.

Why do we say them when we know it should be they? Twitter as a resource for investigating nonstandard syntactic variation in The Netherlands

AbstractTwo Twitter-based corpus studies are reported to account for the increasing preference in The Netherlands for the stigmatized subject use of the object pronoun hun ‘them.’ Twitter data were collected to obtain a sufficient number of hun-tokens, but also to investigate the validity of two hypotheses on the preference for hun, this is, that subject-hun is a contrast profiler which thrives in contexts of evaluation and qualification, and that subject-hun is propelled by its dynamic social meaning, being a tool for nonposh and streetwise self-stylization. Although the latter is not normally a predictor included in regression analyses of constructional choice, it turns out that expressively spruced up tweets with vivid contrast profiling are the prime biotope of subject-hun. Along the way, this paper reviews the potential of Twitter data for the reconciliation of macro-big-data analysis with micro-sociolinguistic focus, but it also reports and attempts to remedy three concerns.

Вариантность политических фразеологизмов

This article analyses the variability of phraseological units in the Russian language. The purpose of the study was to describe key characteristics and functional features of variants of political phraseological units, i.e. fixed units genetically related to political discourse. The paper examines and systematizes the existing approaches to solving the question of the boundaries of phraseological variability and identifies those features of variants that distinguish them from phraseological synonyms, on the one hand, and from occasional modifications of phraseological units, on the other hand. The article defines variants as fixed units that differ in their plane of expression but are relatively similar in their plane of content. The study revealed that the political phrasemics of the Russian language contains phonetic, derivational, lexical, morphological and syntactic variants, the largest group being lexical variants, which include quantitative variants. Fixed units that go back to political discourse form different variant paradigms: binomial, consisting of two variants, and polynomial, including more than two variants. All of the above phraseological variants are actively used in the modern political journalistic text and have different functions. The data obtained are important for further study of ways to enrich the phraseological component of the Russian language in general and political phrasemics in particular. The results of this research can serve as a basis for analysing the cognitive and semiological mechanisms of the formation of political phraseological units, as well as for studying the functions of variable fixed units in political texts of different genres.

The Syntactic Variations in Adverb Phrase ‘As well’ in Initial Position in Pakistani English (PakE): A Corpus Based Study

This study aims to pinpoint the variations in Adverb Phrase ‘As well’ in the initial position in PakE, and investigate the influence of the substrate linguistic effect of the Urdu language on PakE. For this study, a corpus GlowbE-PK was utilized. In total, 192 Adverb phrases in the initial position of the sentence were found. This study utilized the mixed method research and also kept in view the Sociolinguistic Variation and World Englishes conventions of research.The number and frequency of tokens per million words were calculated. Overall, PakE reveals a frequency of 3.84% per 1 million words. The results and discussions indicated a noticeable variation in the Adverb phrase of PakE from Standard BrE. This research also confirms the negative linguistic influence of the substrate language Urdu on Pakistani English in the use of the Adverb phrase 'As well', although the substrate language clearly shows the influence on many other features of PakE, as in Adjective phrase – the use of Double comparatives and superlatives. Furthermore, this research identifies the same feature Adverb phrase ‘as well’ in other varieties of English.

Syntactic complexity and diversity of spontaneous speech production in schizophrenia spectrum and major depressive disorders

Syntax, the grammatical structure of sentences, is a fundamental aspect of language. It remains debated whether reduced syntactic complexity is unique to schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD) or whether it is also present in major depressive disorder (MDD). Furthermore, the association of syntax (including syntactic complexity and diversity) with language-related neuropsychology and psychopathological symptoms across disorders remains unclear. Thirty-four SSD patients and thirty-eight MDD patients diagnosed according to DSM-IV-TR as well as forty healthy controls (HC) were included and tasked with describing four pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test. We analyzed the produced speech regarding its syntax delineating measures for syntactic complexity (the total number of main clauses embedding subordinate clauses) and diversity (number of different types of complex sentences). We performed cluster analysis to identify clusters based on syntax and investigated associations of syntactic, to language-related neuropsychological (verbal fluency and verbal episodic memory), and psychopathological measures (positive and negative formal thought disorder) using network analyses. Syntax in SSD was significantly reduced in comparison to MDD and HC, whereas the comparison of HC and MDD revealed no significant differences. No associations were present between speech measures and current medication, duration and severity of illness, age or sex; the single association accounted for was education. A cluster analysis resulted in four clusters with different degrees of syntax across diagnoses. Subjects with less syntax exhibited pronounced positive and negative symptoms and displayed poorer performance in executive functioning, global functioning, and verbal episodic memory. All cluster-based networks indicated varying degrees of domain-specific and cross-domain connections. Measures of syntactic complexity were closely related while syntactic diversity appeared to be a separate node outside of the syntactic network. Cross-domain associations were more salient in more complex syntactic production.

Gender variation across the Oromo dialects: A corpus‐based study*

AbstractThis study aims to (1) demonstrate the position of the Oromo gender system in Corbett's (1991) typology of gender; (2) illustrate major syntactic gender variation across the Oromo dialects; (3) identify factors that contributed to the gender variation, and (4) illustrate the morphosyntax of the Oromo gender system. The data obtained from the Oromo Speech Corpus shows a high degree of lexical and syntactic variation between the Western‐Northern dialects on the one hand, and the Eastern‐Southern dialects on the other hand. The Western and Northern dialects have shifted from the historically Cushitic phonology‐based gender assignment pattern to the semantic‐based assignment pattern. This shift has resulted in a widespread neutralization of feminine gender markers. The contact between Oromo and the neighboring non‐Cushitic languages contributed to these changes. The study also argues that Kramer's (2015) morphosyntactic approach can be extended to the analysis of Oromo gender system.

Transitivity and polysemy of the Verb in Romanian Language

The present article studies the semantic-syntactic structure of polysemantic verbs, following the stratification of their meanings. Analyzing the syntactic neighborhoods of a certain polysemantic verb, with the matrix of obligatory thematic roles, characteristic for actantial, circumstantial or predicative relations, we notice that in the process of functioning, various transformational processes of a different nature take place. Following the research, it was found that these transformations modify the argumentative structure of the verb at the referential level, changing its semantic-syntactic structure, which allows it to pass from one semantic class to another to fully reveal its communicative role. Responsible for these would be the phenomenon of actantial derivation. Only two forms of actantial derivation were discussed – transitivization and intransitivization – given that transitivity, an unmarked semantic feature, influences the ability of the verb to accumulate meanings with different syntactic patterns. It was found that there is an obvious oscillation between the positive or negative marking of transitivity and the realization of a verb as intransitive or transitive. The phenomenon of free syntactic variation also participates in the diversification of the syntactic structure of a polysemantic verb, which allows the operation of semantically equivalent but syntactically different variants.

Sociolinguistic perception of lexical and syntactic variation among Persian-English bilinguals

This study examines the relationship between sociolinguistic perception and Persian language variation. Prior work has shown that preconceived notions about how speakers use language and what kind of language they produce can affect listeners’ perceptions (D’Onofrio 2016; Hansen Edwards et al. 2019; Mack & Munson 2012; Niedzielski 1999). However, many questions remain unanswered regarding how social meaning is applied in contact situations, especially among self-identified native and heritage speakers. Within Persian language studies, some work has observed linguistic practices among both native and non-native speakers, finding that both vary significantly in their production patterns of certain syntactic and lexical features (Megerdoomian 2020). I ask whether Persian-English bilinguals associate non-standard forms with certain social personae categorized by linguistic background. Sixteen bilingual Persian-English speakers participated in an online survey with the task of matching standard and non-standard written productions to a pre-defined linguistic persona. Results so far suggest that Persian-English bilinguals actively construct associations between language use and speaker personae, with specific grammatical categories appearing more likely to index a non-native speaking identity. This brings up further questions about how bilinguals navigate sociolinguistic ideologies tied to speaker identity, and how heritage speakers and learners approach these notions. This study adds to the growing literature on bilingualism and sociolinguistic perception, with implications for critical discussions surrounding the various ideologies that place communities of multilingual speakers into strict social categories.

A Study on the Acquisition of Possession Constructions in Chinese Preschool Children’s Natural Utterances

Based on the natural utterances of six Chinese-speaking preschool children, this paper examines the syntactic and semantic features of possession constructions. First of all, in terms of the syntax, there are three main types of possession constructions, including adnominal, predicative, and external possessions, as well as eight variations. Meanwhile, the older the children are, the more syntactic variations and frequencies they produce, and the more complex their syntactic structures become, following a developmental pattern from simple to complex. Secondly, in terms of semantics, the children express four main types of semantics: interpersonal, whole-part, ownership and spatiotemporal relationships, involving nine subtypes, such as social relationships, kinship and so on. The longitudinal features of the semantics have a developmental path from familiar to unfamiliar, concrete to abstract, and single to diverse. Finally, Studies have shown that children actively and gradually construct language in their interactions with adults, in a certain degree, which means that the driving force for children’s syntactic acquisition and development comes from language use.

The Syntactic Variations in Verb Phrase – Double Modals in Pakistani English (PakE) and Malaysian English (MyE): A Comparative and Corpus-Based Study

This study aims to detect the variations and compare the use of Verb Phrase – Double Modals in PakE and MyE. For this study, two recently released corpora – GlowbE-PK and GlowbE-MY were utilized. Twenty Verb phrases with double Modals in PakE and MyE were selected from thousands of concordance lines and a large amount of text. This study utilized mixed method research and also kept in view the Sociolinguistic Variation and World Englishes conventions of research by utilizing corpora.The Frequency of each token (phrase), and then the accumulative and average frequencies of both Englishes were given separately. A comparative analysis of both varieties of English was done. It was an interesting fact to know that MyE displays comparatively more use of VP-Double Modals than PakE. The frequency of VP - Double Modals in MyE is 1.88, which is 0.41 more than the frequency of VP – Double Modals in PakE.The results and discussion indicated a noticeable variation in the use of VP with Double Modals of PakE and MyE from Standard British English (BrE). This research also indicates a linguistic pattern in the different dialects of English. The PakE and MyE have different phases of development, and contact languages with English in both varieties are also different. However, they both display the use of Double Modals.

Natiolectal Variation in Dutch Morphosyntax: A Large-Scale, Data-Driven Perspective

AbstractIn this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

Jouissance in Association or Dissociation? psycho-linguistic Signals of Kristeva’s Psychoanalytic Concept of “Abjection” in Morrison’s Beloved

Kristeva’s description of motherhood as a "demented jouissance," the pleasure of the pain, reveals the ambivalence of love and hate relationship as the child attempts for individuality by detaching from her mother and a woman within herself. It is an excruciating experience for both mother and daughter since the female identity is not delimited, autonomous, separated, or individuated. Morrison’s Beloved is saturated with conversations that signal actual utterances in the real world, manifesting Kristeva’s concept of abjection through mother-daughter conversational analysis. This study is concerned with how conversational language in terms of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and lexico-syntaic choices can be a psycho-linguistic indicator of psychological functioning. Specific linguistic style, lexical choices, or syntactic variations used by characters implicate psychological tendencies and inclinations since the mental function is a constituent of the textual structure. This article intends to broaden the insights regarding Kristeva's notion of “abjection” in mother-daughter relationship.

Babble: Learning Better Abstractions with E-Graphs and Anti-unification

Library learning compresses a given corpus of programs by extracting common structure from the corpus into reusable library functions. Prior work on library learning suffers from two limitations that prevent it from scaling to larger, more complex inputs. First, it explores too many candidate library functions that are not useful for compression. Second, it is not robust to syntactic variation in the input. We propose library learning modulo theory (LLMT), a new library learning algorithm that additionally takes as input an equational theory for a given problem domain. LLMT uses e-graphs and equality saturation to compactly represent the space of programs equivalent modulo the theory, and uses a novel e-graph anti-unification technique to find common patterns in the corpus more directly and efficiently. We implemented LLMT in a tool named babble. Our evaluation shows that babble achieves better compression orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art. We also provide a qualitative evaluation showing that babble learns reusable functions on inputs previously out of reach for library learning.

Seem and Appear and Their Norwegian Verbal Counterparts: A Cross-Register Contrastive Study

ABSTRACT Verbs such as seem and appear combine features of evidential meaning with epistemic modality. This study takes a corpus-based, contrastive view of such verbs in Norwegian and English. It investigates the frequencies, patterns and meanings of seem, appear and their Norwegian correspondences virke, synes and se ut in English fiction and academic prose. Both similarities and differences are found across languages and registers. Appear and synes are clearly more frequent in academic prose and can therefore be characterised as more formal. Of all the verbs investigated, seem has the greatest syntactic flexibility. The Norwegian verbs show more syntactic variation across lexemes than the English verbs do. The English verbs are arguably more grammaticalised in their evidential meanings: they occur more regularly with catenative function, and are also complemented directly by NPs and nominal clauses rather than by PPs and adverbial clauses, which is often the pattern of the Norwegian verbs.

A probability distribution of dependencies in interlanguage

AbstractThe diversity of syntactic units in second language has attracted much scholarly attention. Most existing studies on syntactic diversity have focused on only a small number of syntactic structures, and it is difficult to find studies that consider the full range of syntactic dependencies present in the dataset. Based on a syntactic annotated interlanguage corpus that we constructed, this paper is a quantitative study of dependencies in English-speaking Chinese learners’ interlanguage across proficiency levels. We fit the frequency distributions of dependency type, word class (both as dependent and governor), verb as a governor, and noun as a dependent with a modified right-truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution and Zipf’s law. Our findings show that: (1) from the mathematical model, interlanguage followed distributional regularities like natural languages in terms of the syntactic structure distribution; (2) most of the determination coefficients’R2were high, indicating that the investigated distributions in interlanguage fit the distributional law finding in natural languages. This also demonstrated that both interlanguages and natural languages consistently conform to the law of linguistic diversity and uniformity; (3) the dependency relation distribution parametersaandbmanifest the developmental trend of L2 learners’ proficiency levels, demonstrating that the parameters had universal applicability in reflecting interlanguage proficiency.

From Dialect Syntax to Regional Language Syntax

The long-term project Regionalsprache.de (REDE) aims at the investigation of the (morpho-)syntactic variation space in German between the two poles dialect and standard language. We are surveying speakers of German with differing socio-demographic profiles using the indirect method. We first present the methods of data collection we have opted for in our main investigation and then discuss some initial results in light of the methodological challenges.

Figures of contrast as a tool for creating comic effect in standup comedy discourse

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of using figures of contrast (antithesis, acrothesis) in the discourse of stand-up comedy in order to achieve a comic effect and to influence the target audience. The authors describe stand-up in terms of discourse. According to the study, antithesis, as a stylistic device based on the contrast of elements of the statement, is widely used by stand-up comedians to attract the attention of the audience and humorously convey complex ideas. The authors of the article set their tasks to identify and classify examples of antithesis use in stand-up comedy performances; to analyze the strategies of achieving comic effect based on the identified examples and, based on antithesis and acrothesis, in combination with the stylistic device of irony. The paper describes semantic and syntactic variations of antithesis in standup comedy discourse, expressed both implicitly and explicitly. The results of the study show that standup comedians skillfully use antithesis in the creation of their works to compare opposing concepts, use negation and play based on the use of direct and figurative meanings of words, and manipulate semantic and syntactic structures. Understanding the basis for the use of such figures of contrast as antithesis and acrothesis in standup comedy discourse will allow us to understand this complex sociolinguistic and global cultural phenomenon. This use of figures of contrast helps standup comedians to create a polymodal communicative space by provoking an emotional response in the target audience and then engaging in a dialog with the actor, without requiring complex intellectual actions that can cause a delayed response.