Clause Types Research Articles

Preferences for Competing Temporal Forms in Subordinate Clauses in Contemporary Bulgarian. An Analysis of Survey Data

This study presents and discusses the results of a non-representative survey conducted with 3166 Вulgarian native speakers, investigating respondents’ preferences for competing temporal forms of verbs in different types of subordinate clauses, when the context expresses temporal features that the verb in the subordinate clause should carry. The hypothesis tested includes the expectation that both when choosing from suggested competing verb forms in the subordinate clause and in independently creating forms, respondents would prefer a less marked verb form, replacing the marked one due to syntagmatic (contextual) neutralization of one or more temporal oppositions. However, when choosing from suggested competing forms, it is possible, though not predominantly, for some respondents to opt for a more marked verb form.

A gradient typology of gerund clauses: revisiting the internal and external syntax of Portuguese gerund clauses

Abstract Focusing mostly on European Portuguese, this paper proposes that the internal syntax of Portuguese gerund clauses and the gradience in their degree of defectiveness may be explained by an interplay between their external syntax (locus of merge), agreement relations between embedded Tense and matrix Tense and the presence/absence of an intervening head. We first revisit the distinction between peripheral adverbial gerund clauses and central adverbial gerund clauses and show that their internal syntax correlates with their external syntax: central adverbial gerund clauses are merged in lower positions and appear to be more defective. We derive their defectiveness from the agree relation established between embedded T and matrix T. We then consider predicative gerund clauses and show that they are even more defective and restricted in their aspectual value, lacking a T head. Finally, we consider predicative gerund clauses introduced by como ‘as’ and show that, although they are merged in a low position, they are less defective than central adverbial gerund clauses. We attribute this mismatch between the internal and external syntax of this specific type of gerund clause to the presence of the Predicate head como, which intervenes between matrix T and embedded T and blocks the agreement relation.

Clausal Postpositioning in German Regional Language

This article presents the results of a corpus study of clausal postpositioning, that is, the occurrence of a sentential constituent in the postfield of the matrix clause to which it is syntactically linked, in German regional language. Analysis of 11,027 clauses from 60 spoken regiolect and dialect texts reveals that clausal postpositionings occur most frequently as non-relative finite clauses, followed by relative clauses, and lastly, infinitival constructions. Notably, while non-relative finite clauses comprise a smaller proportion of postpositionings in regiolect compared to dialect, relative clauses and infinitival constructions show the opposite trend. Adjunct clauses occur most frequently, followed by complement clauses, in both regiolect and dialect. Furthermore, in both varieties, postpositioning is more prevalent in verb-first and verb-second clauses than in verb-final clauses. This finding is attributed to restrictions on syntactic subordination. Finally, non-relative finite clause and relative clause types that may be embedded in both the postfield and inner field are center-embedded at mean relative frequencies of 13.42% and 28.17%, respectively. These findings shed light on contradictory claims in the literature regarding the possibility and frequency of clausal embedding in the inner field.

M&A contractual innovation in SME sector: the effect of valuation adjustment mechanism clause on SME growth

Identifying and effectively managing growth models for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) poses a significant challenge for entrepreneurs. Prior research has indicated that the dominant model is an acquisition-led growth strategy. Our paper introduces a novel acquisition growth model for SMEs in China, which incorporates the use of valuation adjustment mechanism (VAM) clauses in M&A contracts. We thoroughly analyze the financial implications of this innovative model on SME growth, the specific SME profiles that favor this approach, and the prevalent types of VAM clauses adopted by these SMEs. All hypotheses were rigorously tested using primary data from Chinese public SME companies. The results reveal a positive financial impact of VAM clauses in M&A contracts on SME growth. It was found that SMEs with lower equity concentration or smaller holdings are more likely to adopt the VAM Clauses Model, and the inclusion of equity payments as compensation in the VAM clause is highly common in practice. These findings hold significant implications for both theoretical research on SMEs and the practical strategies of entrepreneurs.

The division of main and subordinate discourse information in real-time comprehension

The study examines the role of discourse structure representation in real-time comprehension, with a focus on how main discourse and subordinate discourse information guides language processing. Using a web-based visual world eyetracking paradigm, we investigated pronoun resolution in two types of relative clauses: appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and restrictive relative clauses (RRCs). While ARCs were generally considered as secondary and side-commentary information, aligning with subordinate discourse, RRCs were usually construed as part of the main discourse. Making use of this distinction between ARCs and RRCs, the current study examined pronoun resolution with two possible antecedents. In one condition (RRC), the two antecedents were part of the same discourse whereas in the other (ARC), they were in distinct discourse units. We found stronger competition between the two possible antecedents in the former condition than the latter. Our findings can potentially be explained by an encoding interference, where linguistic entities encoded with similar discourse status information can lead to an interference effect.

Exploring Clause Complexity: A Detailed Analysis Within a Specific Text

This study investigates the role of clause complexity in students' academic writing, focusing on the application of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) symbols to create persuasive and coherent discourse. Employing a qualitative single-case method, the analysis examines a specific text on the dangers of smoking produced by students. The findings showcase the students' effective use of varied clause types and relationships, as well as their ability to present a systematic and logical flow of ideas supported by factual evidence. The results emphasize the importance of mastering multiple elements, such as utilizing diverse clause types and maintaining a strategic narrative flow, for successful academic writing. These insights can serve as valuable information for educators and academic writers alike, offering a deeper understanding of the implications of clause complexity and its role in fostering effective communication in academic writing.

The Representation of Social Media in English Textbook: A Hallidayan Perspective

This Hallidayan transitivity study explores how social media is represented in the reading texts of a nationally issued English textbook for Indonesian year-twelve students. In particular, this study aims to reveal the transitivity system patterns constructed in the reading materials about social media. This study adopted qualitative perspective as the approach and content/text analysis as the method. The data were reading materials of three chapters selected purposely from an English textbook. The reading texts then were analysed into Hallidayan six types of process, namely material, mental, behavioural, verbal, existential, and relational clauses. After that, each process type was further analysed. The findings firstly reveal that material (55%), mental (30%), and relational clauses (12%) appear in sequence as the dominant process types. Other processes were also found in the data but their occurrences are limited, namely 1% for each of behavioural, verbal, and existential clauses. Secondly, the findings expose that each process type is patterned distinctively in representing different issues about social media. It is expected that the findings of this study contribute to how to represent events in English textbooks functionally so that the educational goal set by book can be obtained. Despite its findings, this study relies only on a single book as the data source. Further studies can make use of more data sets.

Russian Children and Their Relatives: What Can a Free Word Order Language Reveal About the Subject/Object Asymmetry?

ABSTRACT The present study revisits the well-attested phenomenon of Subject/Object Asymmetry in relative clause comprehension by monolingual Russian pre-school children. Additionally, it examines the NP-V and the V-NP word order types when the embedded NP precedes or follows the verb. Both the word orders are grammatical for Russian subject and object relative clauses alike. Object relative clause comprehension difficulty was evidenced across all the age groups. Word order alternation (V-NP vs NP-V) did not significantly affect the accuracy rates. Besides the efficacy of the agent-first strategy, growing morphological knowledge compels children to update their ongoing structural analysis, which results in embedded NP errors. Yet, even at 6 years of age, children do not display word order preferences to go with a particular relative clause type that are found in Russian-speaking adults. Restricted exposure to written texts at pre-school age as well as low validity of word order as a cue to thematic role assignment are discussed as possible reasons for children’s insensitivity to word order manipulation in Russian relative clauses.

Restrictions on Indexicals in Directive Clauses

We discuss the existence of a set of previously unnoticed restrictions on indexicals. Specifically, some indexicals are ruled out and others cannot freely occur in two clause types that have directive force but are distinct from canonical imperatives. These restrictions suggest that these clause types are interpreted with respect to a context that is “deficient” in some sense, or that they lack some syntactic structure needed to license these indexicals. Thus, the patterns of data we present have the potential to significantly affect the understanding of indexicality and clausal architecture.

The Alignment of Verb Ada and Its Existence to Understand the Existential Clause Structure of Balinese

An existential clause is a clause that shows a proposition about the existence or an event. This paper aims to describe the structure of existential clauses, the types of existential clauses, and the constraints of noun phrases that fill the existence elements in Balinese. This study used the descriptive qualitative method. The data used are primary data taken from five Balinese language teachers. The Balinese language teachers elicited the data made by the first teacher. Written data from Balinese stories are also used to assist the oral data. The data analysis technique chosen is comparison, omission, and replacement. Some research results are found in this paper. The core structure of Balinese existential clauses is verb ada + existence, and the extended structure of Balinese existential clauses is verb ada + existence + extension. There are two types of existential clauses in Balinese: bare and extended existential clauses. The definiteness of a noun phrase filling the existence element determines the choice of existential or non-existential clauses. This paper is helpful as a reference for Balinese grammar, which concerns the existential clauses of Balinese.

Single-Argument Clause in Bahasa Indonesia

A previous study was conducted on types of clauses or sentences in Bahasa Indonesia. This study attempted to focus more on the clauses constructed by a single argument in BI. The data were collected from BI speakers, literature, and the researchers' intuition as BI speakers. Data analysis was implemented using a descriptive method. The results found that BI has several clauses, such as intransitive, antipassive, stative, and passive. However, BI owns no non-stative and split transitive clauses. It can be shown that affixes in BI play a significant role in determining types of construction, particularly in the passive. As one of the agglutinative languages, BI shows its property, in which affixed occurred.

Decoding IELTS writing performance: Grammatical Clauses mastery by Universitas Ahmad Dahlan students

Indonesian learners of English produced ungrammaticalities in their writing for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and faced complicated writing score descriptors for self-evaluations and improvements. These problems were observed among students at Universitas Ahmad Dahlan during their preparatory course for IELT. To address this issue, this study focused on identifying some rules in grammar, the grammatical and ungrammatical clauses based on subject-verb (S + V) structures in their writing performances and measuring the proportions of the two clause types in accordance with the performance’s score variation. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed. To do so, the study conducted archival research by retrieving data from the teacher's course documents. The archived handwritten writing performances were transcribed manually into digital texts. It employed syntactic analysis to classify the clauses as either grammatical or ungrammatical. It converted the numbers of each clause type per performance into percentages for comparison, and grouped them according to the different scores as the variable. The results showed that the participants produced predominantly simple grammatical clauses to minimize failures when generating more complex structures. To achieve the minimum score of 6 in the writing section, the proportion of grammatically correct and incorrect clauses should be above 47% and below 53%, respectively. These findings offer valuable insights into predicting scores, especially concerning the dimension of 'grammatical range and accuracy in the writing assessment, which benefit both learners and educators.

Variation in the Usage of Relativisation Strategies in Migrant and Non-migrant English Speakers

ABSTRACT This study considers the use of adnominal restrictive relative clauses based on data from an acceptability rating task. We asked non-migrant native speakers (n = 24) of English and migrant native speakers (n = 28) of English to judge three different types of relative clauses. Results indicated that these speakers rate the relative markers that and zero more positively in line with the current situation in Present-day English. 1 The similar behaviour in the rating shows that major driving forces of language variation such as colloquialisation and Americanisation are stronger than other forces such as language contact. The similarities in the usage of relativisation strategies observed between contemporary Englishes and language competences of migrant and non-migrant speakers support the emergence of a new variety of English similar to other documented varieties that emerged in comparable contexts. 2

Non-discourse-configurationality in Imbabura Kichwa

This study investigates the syntactic structure of Imbabura Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in the Imbabura Province of Ecuador, with a focus on the seemingly free word order in grammatical functions and discourse-semantic functions (i.e., topic and focus). We first provide the data and overviews of the non-configurationality and non-discourse-configurationality of Imbabura Kichwa. Then, we demonstrate that the underlying syntactic structure of Imbabura Kichwa is built up hierarchically based on the agreement of focus enclitics with clause types and polarity. Finally, we argue that the non-configurationality and non-discourse-configurationality are the surface realization of the movement from the underlying structure to the daughter positions of a non-projective category S.

The relative clause resisting unification

Abstract Cinque (2020) presents a unified theory positing that various types of relative clauses (RCs) originate from a single, double-headed universal structure via raising or matching. The Frame Noun-Modifying Clause (FRC) as described and analyzed by Matsumoto et al. (2017a, 2017b) presents a significant challenge to Cinque's framework, as it does not conform to any of Cinque's identified RC types, which include amount RCs, kind(-defining) RCs, restrictive RCs and non-restrictive RCs. The FRC eludes derivation via the proposed matching or raising mechanisms. Determining the semantic link between the head noun and the FRC, as well as its external merger position, remains elusive. One might suggest that inserting additional material into the FRC, which incorporates a plausible internal head, could clarify their connection. This approach falls short of providing a systematic and coherent syntactic criterion, relying instead on semantic intuition that lacks operational reliability.

Como-gerund clauses in European Portuguese

Previous literature on the typology of gerund clauses in Portuguese has overlooked a peculiar type of clauses which are always introduced by como (‘as’) and display an array of characteristics that set them apart from all other gerund clauses (and from other, somehow similar, constructions in different languages). In this paper, we provide an in-depth syntactic and semantic characterisation of these como-gerund clauses and the contexts in which they arise, highlighting their similarities and differences regarding other constructions, namely resultative and depictive secondary predicates. We put forward a proposal to deal with their syntactic configurations and the restrictions they exhibit. We also propose that como is obligatory in these clauses because it marks a type-shift operation, which gives como gerund clauses a predicative interpretation, usually found in the nominal domain.

Dėl vienos lietuvių kalbos tikslo sakinio konstrukcijos

The article deals with the use of the Lithuanian anteriority converb in -us in a certain type of purpose clauses whose implicit subject is coreferential with the (often also implicit) main clause subject or agent (as in kad veltui neišmetus pinigų ‘in order not to throw money away’). The article offers a historical account for its rise based on internal reconstruction. It is argued that the anteriority converb was introduced as a pseudo-conditional strategy used to avoid a factive reading in constructions with evaluative predicates (as in gerai būtų suradus... = gerai būtų, jeigu surastume... ‘it would be a good thing if we found…’). From evaluative constructions the converb then spread to optative clauses with kad tik ‘if only’ (gerai būtų suradus ‘it would be a good thing to find…’ → kad tik suradus... ‘if only one could find…’). Apart from a semantic shift (from evaluative to desiderative/deontic) this also involved a process of syntactic insubordination. In a subsequent process of resubordination, constructions with the anteriority converb finally came to function as adverbial purpose clauses. In the final part of the article it is argued that the negative view prescriptivist sources take of purpose clauses with the anteriority converb might be up for a revision.

Use of Embedded Clauses in Heritage and Monolingual Russian

This study investigates the production of clausal embeddings by 195 Russian speakers (67 monolingually raised speakers, 68 heritage speakers in the US, and 60 heritage speakers in Germany) in different communicative situations varying by formality (formal vs. informal) and mode (spoken vs. written). Semi-spontaneous data were manually annotated for clause type and analyzed using a binomial generalized mixed-effects model. Our results show that heritage speakers of both groups and monolingually raised speakers behave alike regarding their use of embedded clauses. Specifically, all speaker groups produce embedded clauses more frequently in formal situations compared to informal situations. Mode was not found to influence the production of embedded clauses. This behavior suggests an underlying register awareness in heritage speakers of Russian. Such register awareness might be a result of the high involvement of heritage speakers with Russian. This study contributes to our understanding of linguistic outcomes of heritage speakers and highlights the influence of communicative situations on language production.

Diachronic evolution of the subordinator kak in Russian

Abstract In Russian, the subordinator kak ‘how’ is both a manner question word and an eventive complementizer. The Russian linguistic tradition explains the colexification of the two functions in terms of a semantic shift from manner as characteristic of a situation to event description as a whole. Alternatively, a grammaticalization scenario from manner complements to event/propositional complements has been suggested: manner complements originally have a propositional frame, which is foregrounded concurrently with the loss of the manner meaning, giving rise to both eventive and propositional interpretations. This article is aimed at testing both hypotheses. We study several large Old Russian manuscripts, starting from the first available documents of the 11th century, and show that at the earliest documented period Old Russian kako/kakъ could be used in all types of complement clauses. It could introduce eventive, propositional, manner and irrealis purposive-like complements. Accordingly, the evolution of the subordinator kak in complementation involves a narrowing of its functional domain. We classify Old Russian texts based on the period and trace the gradual loss of particular functions during the centuries. Thus, we show that the Russian data supports the second grammaticalization scenario.

التأويلُ النَّحويُّ في كتابِ ”معاني القرآنِ“ للفراء: مَظَاهِرُهُ وأحكامُهُ

Abstract Syntactic interpretation is one of the important methods that grammarians resort to when they find some words that have semantic as well as pragmatic meanings. This method is essential to avoid problems of contradiction in parallel structures and the nonsensical message that could be conveyed when a text is understood with its surface meaning. This research sheds some light on one of the most important books, “The Meanings of the Qurʾān” by al-Frrāʾ (AH 207/822 AD), and shows how he employed the various aspects of interpretation to apply his syntactic Kufic doctrine to the topics he discussed. The study also shows how he uses interpretation as a means to reach the meaning that brings him closer to the Qurʾānic intended meaning that he adopted. The conclusion of this research shows that there is a frequent occurrence of the interpretations of conditional clauses in this book due to the existence of the various types of conditional clauses and their grammatical rules.