Transitive Sentences Research Articles

Event-distributivity and exhaustivity

Abstract Distributive-share markers such as jeweils in German or po in Serbian allow for event-distributive readings, where events are distributed over spatio-temporal units, unlike distributive quantifiers such as each in English that only allow individual-distributive readings. Some researchers propose that German jeweils should be analyzed as a universal event-distributive quantifier. In contrast, other researchers claim distributive share markers (e.g. Serbian po) are simply event plurality markers. We investigated these claims with jeweils in two experiments. Experiment 1 tested if both individual and spatial (event) distributive readings are readily available for transitive sentences in German, and if there is an exhaustivity requirement on the restrictor argument. Experiment 2 was designed to force event-distributive readings and further disambiguate the results from Experiment 1. Our findings suggest that jeweils seems to be a true universal event quantifier, and highlight that distributive share markers can differ in fundamental features cross-linguistically.

Production Before Comprehension in the Emergence of Transitive Constructions in Dutch Child Language.

Although 2-year-old English- or Dutch-speaking children tend to use correct subject-object word order in their own utterances, they appear to make a substantial number of word order errors in their comprehension of other people’s utterances. This pattern of adult-like production but poor comprehension is challenging for linguistic theory. While most approaches to language acquisition explain this pattern from extra-linguistic factors such as task demands, the constraint-based approach Optimality Theory predicts this asymmetry between production and comprehension to arise as a result of the linguistic competition between constraints on word order and animacy. This study tests this prediction by investigating how children’s comprehension and production of word order in transitive constructions develop, and to what degree their comprehension and production are influenced by animacy. Two- and three-year-old Dutch speaking children (n = 32) and adult controls (n = 41) were tested on their comprehension and production of simple transitive sentences, in which the animacy of the grammatical subject and object were manipulated. Comprehension was tested in a picture selection task and a preferential looking task, and production was tested in a parallel sentence elicitation task. Children’s comprehension of transitive sentences in the picture selection task was found to be less accurate than their production of the same sentences in the sentence elicitation task. Their eye gaze in the minimally demanding preferential looking task did not reveal a more advanced understanding of these sentences. In comprehension, children’s response accuracy, and to a lesser extent their eye gaze, was influenced by the animacy of subject and object, providing evidence that their poor comprehension is due to the competition between word order and animacy, as predicted by the constraint-based approach. In contrast, animacy may have a facilitating effect on children’s production of transitive sentences. These findings suggest that the mature form and meaning of a transitive construction are not acquired together. Rather, the form-meaning pairings of transitive constructions seem to arise gradually as the by-product of acquiring the constraint ranking of the grammar. This leads to the gradual alignment of forms and meanings in child language and hence to the emergence of linguistic constructions.

Türk İşaret Dili’nde Sözdizime Deneysel Bir Yaklaşım

The present study offers an experimental linguistic perspective to investigate word order in sign languages, focusing particularly on word order in Turkish Sign Language (Turk Isaret Dili-TID), one of the oldest, yet relatively understudied, sign languages. Two experiments were conducted to investigate TID signers’ acceptability judgments of various orders of linguistic forms in a sentence. Experiment 1 consisted of 26 intransitive sentences with a 2x2 (SV vs. VS; Human vs. Animal) within-subjects design whereas Experiment 2 consisted of 28 transitive sentences with a 3x2 (Subject order: First vs. Middle vs. Last; Object order: Object-before-Verb vs. Object-after-Verb) within-subjects design. Both experiments asked native TID signers (n=8 and n=6, respectively) to rate sentences using 5-point Likert scales. Results from Experiment 1 showed that there was a significant main effect of Sign Order, indicating that participants gave significantly higher ratings to SV order over VS order. There was no main effect of Subject Type but an interaction between Sign Order and Subject Type. Results from Experiment 2 showed a significant main effect of object-verb order indicating that participants’ ratings for the Object-before-Verb order were significantly higher than those for the Verb-before-Object order. In Experiment 2, there was no significant main effect of subject order or interaction. These findings suggested that TID has a preference for SV and OV over other possible orders.

ERP indexes of number attraction and word order during correct verb agreement production

Successful subject-verb agreement production requires retrieving the verbal forms that agree with the features of the subject head noun and not of other nouns in the sentence. We investigate, for the first time, the electrophysiological indexes of number attraction and word order during agreement production. Twenty-four Basque native speakers were tested while producing auxiliary verbs during sentence completion of transitive sentence preambles involving singular subjects and singular or plural objects in canonical (SOV) and non-canonical (OSV) structures. ERP results yielded a larger production P2 (pP2) amplitude for mismatching than matching objects in SOV sentences, and larger negativity for OSV than SOV in number matching condition. We explain these results in terms of distinct contributions of number and word order during correct agreement production, with the pP2 indexing morphosyntactic retrieval difficulty of agreement-inflection, and the frontal negativity reflecting word order effects during monitoring the correctness of the selected verbal form.

Subject animacy and transitive sentence expression

Subject animacy and transitive sentence expression

Learners’ harmonic preferences are modulated by lexical retrieval difficulty

Typological work has established the existence of language universals – features or combinations of features that (co-) occur in unrelated languages more frequently than expected by chance. The origins of language universals are a fundamental question in language sciences as these universals are considered a reflection of cognitive mechanisms underlying human language. In this study, we use a miniature artificial language learning paradigm to explore whether a well-known universal – a preference for harmonic word ordering between adpositional and verb phrases (i.e., placing the head in a consistent position with respect to the complements across the two phrase types) – originates in biases during language learning and whether this preference interacts with memory constraints (operationalized as lexical retrieval difficulty). We first trained participants on miniature languages containing adpositional phrases of a deterministic word order (either prepositional or postpositional inputs) and then briefly exposed them to simple transitive sentences (verb-subject-object and subject-object-verb order, equally frequent in the input). At test, we asked learners to describe simple transitive scenes. We found that in the hard lexical retrieval condition, learners exposed to a postpositional language showed a preference for harmonic ordering but learners of the prepositional language did not, which is only partially consistent to the typological distribution. In the easy lexical retrieval condition, learners of neither the postpositional nor prepositional language showed a preference for harmonic ordering, indicating that this preference is modulated by memory constraints.

Indexation of the zone of infinitive-modal structures in Russian language

The relevance of this topic is substantiated by the need to objectivize the results of analysis of transposition mechanism of modalation of verbs in finite and attributive forms using quantitative methods of material processing. The goal of this article is to examine the levels of correspondence of differential signs of infinite forms of verbs in the zone of hybrid structures to the signs of nuclear representatives of the initial and final elements of inter-categorical introductory-modal transposition. The subject of this research became the infinitive-modal structures in transitive sentences that combine the attributes of conjunctionless complex sentences and simple expanded sentence (with unattached introductory-modal component). On the example of word form, the author demonstrates the combinatorial structure and proportion of attributes of verbs and introductory-modal units interacting with each other within the hybrid structure. The conducted research illustrates that the level of modalation of hybrids is determined by the proportion of differential properties of nuclear infinitive and nuclear introductory-modal words. It is established that in transitive structure, which balance on the border of conjunctionless complex and simple expanded sentence, hybrids of the type “to know”  show 68% of correspondence to nuclear infinitives (“know”) and 45% of correspondence to introductory-modal words (“must be”). In syntactic constructs with such hybrid the external syntactic position of modus framework of conjunctionless complex is combined with internal syntactic position of introductory-modal component of the expression.

The Role of Verbs in Sentence Production.

To investigate the role of verbs in sentence production, the experiment reported here employed a simple sentence elicitation technique based on separate elicitor images for the different sentence constituents: subject, verb, and verbal modifier. This permitted presenting them in different temporal configurations to see whether the time taken to start uttering the subject of a sentence was contingent on having access to information about the action that would determine verb selection. The results show that sentence onset latencies varied in relation to the presentation of the verb elicitor, suggesting that sentence processing depends crucially on having access to the information pertaining to the verb. What is more, increases in the lexical frequency of the actual verbs used significantly reduced onset latencies for the subject noun as expected if the verb lemmas have to be retrieved before the sentence can be processed. Among other things, this argues against strict linearity and in favor of hierarchical incrementality in sentence production. Additionally, the results hint at the possibility that other obligatory sentence constituents [namely, direct objects (DOs) in transitive sentences] may also have to be available before the sentence can be processed.

Uma proposta de teoria unificada de fatores nominais e verbais na marcação diferencial do objeto

A questão principal deste artigo é a seguinte: de um ponto de vista tipológico, qual é generalização semântica mais significativa subjacente à marcação diferencial do objeto (DOM)? Minha proposta é que o DOM é motivado pela presença, em sentenças transitivas, de porções altamente individuadas de matéria e de tempo. Faço uso de um conceito mais amplo de porções individuadas, abrangendo tanto a noção de eventos completos quanto a individuação de referentes. Tal como no domínio da matéria existem objetos delimitados, no domínio do tempo existem eventos delimitados (PINKER, 2008). Este conceito mais amplo de porções individuadas possibilita uma explicação mais satisfatória do DOM. Não existe uma teoria que tente unificar as diferentes motivações do DOM. Não há uma explicação para a relação entre a semântica do verbo e a semântica do sintagma nominal no DOM. Nossa proposta é que estes diferentes fatores podem ser unificados em uma única teoria.

Agent demotion through inverted word order

Abstract Passivization has been characterized as a strictly morphological phenomenon. Some definitions of passivization even require the passive construction to exhibit special verbal morphology. Increasingly, however, there have been descriptions of languages that have “morphology-free” passive constructions. This paper presents data from Ulwa, a Papuan language of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, which forms its passive constructions through a syntactic operation. Specifically, passives are formed through the inversion of subject and predicate. Whereas the canonical transitive active sentence in Ulwa has the basic constituent order SOV, the corresponding passive sentence has the order VS, where the S of the passive corresponds to the O of the active. Agent arguments are optional; when they do appear in passive constructions, they are marked as obliques. The Ulwa data support claims that it is possible for passivization to be a syntactic phenomenon that operates on the level of the clause.

Konstruksi Kalimat Transitif dalam Berita Daring Merdeka.COM Edisi Januari 2019: Kajian Lexical Functional Grammar

This study examines the syntactic nature of the transitive sentence construction in the January 2019 edition of Merdeka.com online news. The sentence construction in this study is influenced by the affixation process. The affixation process changes the structure into several different arguments from before. While obscene arguments often occur to hide objects or actors as objects. Argument based Lexical Functional Grammar analysis based on structure takes into account the complex nature of unusual structures. Provision of data using the listen method and in analyzing data using the distribution distribution method. The data is sourced from the use of sentences in Merdeka.Com online news in writing. The results of this study verbs undergo an affixation process on the predicate function to determine their arguments. Some words do not undergo the process of affixation to form more than two arguments. The same subject in the parent sentence and clause form the X-Comp in the formal word.
 Keywords: Transitive Sentences, Lexical Functional Grammar, Online News, Verbs

Crosslinguistic Differences in the Encoding of Causality: Transitivity Preferences in English and Japanese Children and Adults

ABSTRACTLanguages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence preferences to describe causal events in English- and Japanese-speaking children (aged three and five years) and compared this to preferences displayed by adults. We studied two factors suggested to influence this choice: Language (Corpus study & Experiment 1) and Intentionality (Experiment 2). Participants watched videos depicting familiar and novel causal actions, and made a best-match choice between a transitive and intransitive description. We found a stronger preference for intransitive sentences with causal verbs and more frequent argument omissions in Japanese child-directed speech than in English child-directed speech. The trajectory of acquisition in the selection of transitive sentences for causal events differed between languages. For intentionality, with familiar verbs both Japanese and English speakers selected fewer transitives for accidental than intentional scenes, but this pattern was more pronounced in Japanese speakers. However, with novel verbs, only five-year-olds and adults showed this preference. These data provide important new information to constrain theories about the process of learning to map event structure to language, and its interdependence with intentionality and the distributional properties of linguistic input to children.

Syntax and processing in Seediq: an event-related potential study

In many languages with subject-before-object as a syntactically basic word order, transitive sentences in which the subject precedes the object have been reported to have a processing advantage over those in which the subject follows the object in sentence comprehension. Three sources can be considered to account for this advantage, namely, syntactic complexity (filler-gap dependency), conceptual accessibility (the order of thematic roles), and pragmatic requirement. To examine the effect of these factors on the processing of simple transitive sentences, the present study conducted two event-related potential experiments in Seediq, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, by manipulating word orders (basic VOS vs. non-basic SVO), the order of thematic roles (actor vs. goal voice), and discourse factors (presence/absence of visual context). The results showed that, compared to VOS, SVO incurred a greater processing load (reflected by a P600) when there was no supportive context, irrespective of voice alternation; however, SVO did not incur a greater processing load when there was supportive context and the discourse requirement was satisfied. We interpreted these results as evidence that the processing difficulty of the non-basic word order in Seediq is associated with a discourse-level processing difficulty.

REPRESENTASIANAK KALIMAT DALAM TEKS BERITA POLITIK PILPRES PADA SURAT KABAR KOMPAS EDISI OKTOBER 2018 s.d MARET 2019

The journalist task has shifted from the news transmitter to the news formator and instructor. It shows that in writing news, journalist adds various comment, opinion and review that are difficult to distinguish from the news itself. A journalist should have a variety of rights and obligations, namely to deliver news in accordance with fact without mixing opinion.This study aims to reveal and expose the hidden aspects behind an apparent reality.This research methodology uses a qualitative descriptive approach. A qualitative approach is a research procedure that produces descriptive data in the form of the phenomenon description contained in the data. The data collected is in the form of newspaper document.The result of study shows that there is finding regarding representation, namely association and metaphor. The association was appeared in the news of compass newspaper by journalist to bring assumption in the mind of public in interpreting a certain reality regarding the debate between Jokowi and Prabowo. Journalist brings up how Prabowo take an action against Jokowi which is marked by transitive sentence namely subject + verb + object. Bring up a general symptom or phenomenon that occurs in the society regarding the legislative candidate photo displayed along the road. The form of participant as victim or object can be known from the construction of passive sentence, or victim caused by other.

The role of word order in bilingual speakers’ representation of their two languages: the case of Spanish–Kaqchikel bilinguals

When bilingual speakers plan to speak in one of their languages, the other language remains active and exerts an influence on the chosen language. However, the factors that modulate this influence, and particularly the extent to which syntactic structures and word order need to be the same in both languages for this influence to occur, are not yet fully understood. In this study, we explore the role of free word order in bilinguals’ representation of their two languages by analyzing the connections of linguistic representations in Spanish–Kaqchikel early bilinguals, two languages that allow word order variation in transitive sentences. In Experiment 1, a structural priming experiment within Kaqchikel was conducted with voice and word order of prime as independent variables. Results showed priming of both structure and word order, independently from each other. In Experiment 2, cross-linguistic structural priming was used from Spanish to Kaqchikel. Results showed priming of voice, regardless of word order, but not priming of word order. Taken together, these results suggest that, in languages with greater flexibility in their basic word orders, structural selection and word order choice seem to be independent processes.

Sentiment Analysis of News Articles in Spanish using Predicate Features

The automatic prediction of the course of action of agents involved in social or economic trends is an imperative challenge nowadays. However, it is a difficult task because stance or opinion is often spread throughout long, complex texts, such as news articles. The current study tests sentence predicates as features to automatically determine the writer’s stance in news articles. We capture the semantics and stance of the text by encoding features such as the attribute of copulative sentences, the predicate of transitive sentences, adjectival phrases, and the section of the article. Under the assumption that these features are informative enough to model the semantics of the text, each word sequence is disambiguated and assigned a sentiment value using weighting rules. Different experiments were run using either SentiWordNet and ML-Senticon to determine words’ sentiment. Feature vectors are automatically built to populate a database that is tested using two machine learning algorithms. An efficiency of 69% was achieved using a SVM with Gaussian kernel along with a feature selection strategy. This score outperformed the bag-of-words baseline in 12%. These results are promising considering that the sentiment analysis is performed on very complex texts written in Spanish.

KALIMAT BAHASA SIANG

The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method because the method and technique of this research is fact findings that exist in the field as it is. Problem solved in this research are the problems associated with the system language syntax Siang. Thus, this study generally aims to collect data, analyze, and describe in depth and detail the syntax of the language system Siang. The results of this study indicate that the constituents of sentences in Siang include core constituents and constituents periphery. Common constituent sequence is the subject-predicate-object or simply the subject and predicate. Based on capital characteristics, characteristics, types, and patterns of sentences in Siang include declarative sentence, imperative and interrogative. Based on the characteristics of the predicate sentence in Siang include 1) an active sentence consisting of active transitive sentences, active bitransitif, active intransitive transitive and intransitive sentences, 2) stative sentence consists of stative sentences ejuatif, locative, descriptive, eksistensional, and possessive. Characteristics, types and patterns Siang language sentence by sentence with diathesis include diathesis active and passive voice

Transitive and Intransitive Sentences in Savu Language

Language is a communication tool that is seen as a channel for delivering information or messages to others. Language is expressed through sentences that composed of several words in order to form a certain meaning. To form a certain sentence which is apply in a language must follow its rules. For example, Indonesian has a main element that must exist in a sentence, namely predicate or verb. The verb forms become the basic of forming the various sentences, including in determining the types of transitive and intransitive sentences. Predicate or verb is one characteristic that determines whether the sentence is transitive or intransitive in language skills. This reason is one of the authors' interests in discussing more details about the transitive and intransitive sentences of Savu language, which is one of the local languages in the East Nusa Tenggara Province, with speakers of the Savu tribe. Transitive and intransitive sentences in Savu have the most flexible additional elements which can be accompanied by various kinds of objects and adverb. Transitive sentences have two core arguments that are broadly called actors and undergoers, as in the following sentence: (1) ana no era do due do; (2) ta ngedi ke no pidu bue moto; these two transitive sentences of Savu have two core arguments. The predicate on transitive sentences, namely: era 'having' in data (1): ngedi 'see' in data (2), with two core arguments, they are ‘ana no’ ‘his son’ 'and due do 'two people' in data (1), then, no ‘he’ and pidu bue motto ‘seven stars’ in data (2).. Whereas the intransitive sentence has no object. Then, the arrangement of functional elements is Subject + Predicate and Predicate + Subject. The following is an example of the intransitive sentence of Savu: (3) ta mari ina; (4) ro kako la rae; the intransitive sentence of Savu language indicates that they do not have objects. In data (3) ta mari 'laugh’ is the verb; ina ‘lady' is the subject. As well as in data (4) ro 'they’ is the subject, while kako la ‘go to' and rae ‘adverb of place’.

The Sequential Unfolding of First Phase Syntax: Tutorial and Applications to Development.

Purpose This tutorial is an introduction to first phase syntax (FPS; Ramchand, 2008 ). FPS provides a new, cross-linguistically motivated perspective on clause internal structure. A new sequence of syntactic development is proposed based on FPS with 4 levels of complexity: (0) verb particles and adjectives in the 1-word stage, (1) semantic relations of entity + location/attribution, (2) intransitive structures encoding change of location/state, and (3) transitive sentences with an internal argument that changes state/location and an external, causer argument. A novel prediction of this framework is that a Level 2 structure emerges earlier than a Level 3 structure. Method Archival longitudinal data of 15 children (8 boys) were selected to test the proposed developmental sequence. The 15 children's data were drawn from the DeKalb corpora ( Rispoli, Hadley, & Holt, 2008 , 2009 ) and Champaign corpora ( Hadley, Rispoli, Holt, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen, 2014 ), selected because their mean lengths of utterance did not exceed 2.54 at age 2;6 (years;months). One-hour language samples taken every 3 months from 1;9 to 2;6 were searched for Level 1-3 structures. The diversity of the internal argument was tracked across levels. Results Average argument diversity shifted across levels over the period of 1;9-2;6. At 2;0, argument diversity was highest for Level 1; at 2;3, diversity was highest for Level 2; and at 2;6, it was highest for Level 3. Paired-samples t test revealed that, at 2;3, argument diversity in Level 2 was significantly higher than that in Level 3. Conclusion This developmental application of FPS provides a theoretical framework for a developmentally ordered sequence of syntactic goals and treatment targets for children struggling with the acquisition of syntax.

Syntax of Testimony: Indexical Objects, Syntax, and Language or How to Tell a Story Without Words.

Language—often said to set human beings apart from other animals—has resisted explanation in terms of evolution. Language has—among others—two fundamental and distinctive features: syntax and the ability to express non-present actions and events. We suggest that the relation between this representation (of non-present action) and syntax can be analyzed as a relation between a function and a structure to fulfill this function. The strategy of the paper is to ask if there is any evidence of pre-linguistic communication that fulfills the function of communicating an absent action. We identify a structural similarity between understanding indexes of past actions of conspecifics (who did what to whom) and one of the simplest and most paradigmatic linguistic syntactic patterns – that of the simple transitive sentence. When a human being infers past events from an index (i.e., a trace, the conditions of a conspecifics or an animal, a constellation or an object) the interpreters’ comprehension must rely on concepts similar in structure and function to the ‘thematic roles’ believed to underpin the comprehension of linguistic syntax: in his or her mind the idea of a past action or event emerges along with thematic role-like concepts; in the case of the presentation of, e.g., a hunting trophy, the presenter could be understood to be an agent (subject) and the trophy a patient (direct object), while the past action killed is implied by the condition of the object and its possession by the presenter. We discuss whether both the presentation of a trophy and linguistic syntax might have emerged independently while having the same function (to represent a past action) or whether the presentation of an index of a deed could constitute a precursor of language. Both possibilities shed new light on early, and maybe first, language use.