Search Results (17)

This paper revisits the diachronic changes to Romanian DOM by focusing on the emergence of the DOM particle pe: the prenominal preposition pe is shown to undergo loss of analyzability when (i) the adjacent noun phrase is the direct object of the verb; and (ii) pe-DP falls under a certain pragmatic treatment. In other contexts, pe continues as a preposition. Loss of analyzability entails modification of the feature bundle associated with pe, as well as chunking and sensitivity of pe-noun phrases to discourse related priming factors. Briefly, the chunk consisting of two segments (i.e., prepositional phrase and nominal phrase: PP > DP) is gradually reduced to one segment (i.e., DP). This transition is context dependent; that is, it intensifies when the DPs receive a reading that involves discourse salience and animacy. The loss of analyzability regarding the properties of pe and the structural consequences it implied provide the basis for assessing the advent of animacy and definiteness/specificity as priming factors for DOM in Modern Romanian. Full article

This paper presents accounts of preposition selection and agreement in English within Dynamic Syntax. To achieve this, I introduce two new, non-semantic, labels into the tree language: $Ph$ that takes as values phonological forms which are modelled as ordered sets of phonemes and $Md$ which takes as values sets of $Ph$ values, the phonological forms of certain words and forms with which a particular word can collocate. While these labels are not grounded in semantic concepts like type and formula, they are nevertheless grounded in phonological concepts and thus ultimately in phonetic phenomena. These labels are introduced through the parsing of words and are used to constrain the forms of other words they can felicitously appear with, such as nouns and certain determiners or verbs with selected prepositions or prepositional phrases, in a straightforward manner. It is shown how the remnant agreement and selection patterns in modern (standard) English can be captured without any recourse to traditional categories such as gender, person and number. Certain disagreement phenomena are discussed as are the broader implications of the approach. Full article

This study is concerned with the formal and functional development of the pragmatic marker not gonna lie. It comprises a detailed investigation into the usage and development of not gonna lie in American English. This study shows that not gonna lie develops from the clause NP BE not going to lie to NP. From its earliest attestations onward, the marker occurs in contexts carrying face threats, which points towards face-threat mitigation as its main function. This discourse function can only be observed for variants with first-person subjects and you in the prepositional phrase (if present). The later omission of elements through the course of the development indicates an increase in syntactic autonomy. The remaining chunk, not gonna lie, leaves little room for variability and is dominated by its discursive function. The findings are interpreted through the lens of usualization as described in the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model. This dynamic, usage-based and cognitive model of language use and change lends itself to providing a fine-grained description and explanation of the grammaticalization-like processes observed in this case study. Full article

A grammatical construction resembling Present-Day English locative inversion has already been found in Old English, with a fronted prepositional phrase prompting V2 word order, both in main and subordinate clauses. It has been demonstrated that several discourse-related factors influence the positioning of objects, fronted locatives, finite verbs and subjects in subordinate clauses. One of the main aims of the present paper is to provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the locative inversion construction in Old English subordinate clauses. The Old English data for this study were obtained from the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, and they were analysed using Corpus Studio. The results were compared with those for main clauses, and discourse-related factors such as PP anaphoricity or subject type were analysed in order to find the motivation for the existence of this alternation of word orders. PP anaphoricity proved not to be a determining factor in triggering finite verb inversion, while other factors such as subject weight and subject type do seem to motivate finite verb inversion, thus yielding an embedded PP-V-S word order. Full article

Keyword extraction from Knowledge Bases underpins the definition of relevancy in Digital Library search systems. However, it is the pertinent task of Joint Relation Extraction, which populates the Knowledge Bases from which results are retrieved. Recent work focuses on fine-tuned, Pre-trained Transformers. Yet, F1 scores for scientific literature achieve just 53.2, versus 69 in the general domain. The research demonstrates the failure of existing work to evidence the rationale for optimisations to finetuned classifiers. In contrast, emerging research subjectively adopts the common belief that Natural Language Processing techniques fail to derive context and shared knowledge. In fact, global context and shared knowledge account for just 10.4% and 11.2% of total relation misclassifications, respectively. In this work, the novel employment of semantic text analysis presents objective challenges for the Transformer-based classification of Joint Relation Extraction. This is the first known work to quantify that pipelined error propagation accounts for 45.3% of total relation misclassifications, the most poignant challenge in this domain. More specifically, Part-of-Speech tagging highlights the misclassification of complex noun phrases, accounting for 25.47% of relation misclassifications. Furthermore, this study identifies two limitations in the purported bidirectionality of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) Pre-trained Language Model. Firstly, there is a notable imbalance in the misclassification of right-to-left relations, which occurs at a rate double that of left-to-right relations. Additionally, a failure to recognise local context through determiners and prepositions contributes to 16.04% of misclassifications. Furthermore, it is highlighted that the annotation scheme of the singular dataset utilised in existing research, Scientific Entities, Relations and Coreferences (SciERC), is marred by ambiguity. Notably, two asymmetric relations within this dataset achieve recall rates of only 10% and 29%. Full article

Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-phrase headed by the preposition por introduces an agent rather than a cause or reason. The verb has active morphology—it is always third-person plural, and accusative clitics (e.g., te) and DOM-marked objects are possible. This type of sentence, which I descriptively label an active–passive (A-P) hybrid, has been mentioned in previous literature on contact varieties in Mayan-speaking regions of Mexico and Guatemala, but it has not been precisely described or analyzed formally. I argue that A-P hybrid constructions are instances of grammatical object passives. Grammatical object passives have certain active properties—accusative case is assigned to a theme argument and the morphology of the verb is active, but like passives, they require that the expression of the agent be a by-phrase rather than a grammatical subject. I claim that this is possible in this variety of Spanish due to the emergence of a null pronoun, absent in other varieties of Spanish, that can merge in the specifier of Voice and restrict, rather than saturate, an agent argument, permitting the subsequent addition of a third-person by-phrase. I demonstrate that this analysis is able to explain its hybrid properties as well as other person restrictions on the by-phrases that express the agent. Finally, I describe avenues of future research that will help discern the role that language contact may have played in the emergence of A-P hybrids. Full article

Possession has been scarcely studied in the variety of Spanish in contact with Mapudungun and in Chilean Spanish. In this contribution, we analyze the nominal possessive constructions found in a corpus of interviews with speakers from five communities: three Mapudungun–Spanish bilingual communities from the Araucanía Region, one Spanish monolingual rural community from the Bío Bío Region, and one Spanish monolingual urban community from the Araucanía Region. The possessive constructions found in the contact Spanish, rural Spanish, and urban Spanish varieties are analyzed and compared to describe the domain of possession and to propose some possible explanations from the perspective of language contact theory for the case of the Spanish spoken by bilinguals. From the corpus of transcribed interviews, nominal possessive constructions were selected, classified, described, and compared. Double possession with restrictive relative clauses, and unstressed possessive pronouns plus a prepositional phrase with genitive/specific value, showed a limited frequency of occurrence. These constructions are analyzed using the Code-Copying framework. This perspective accounts for the observed equivalencies between both languages in contact and the constructions emerging in the bilinguals’ speech. This work contributes to the documentation of the variety and, more generally, to the description of the expression of possession in the Latin American contact varieties of Spanish. Full article

The primary objective of this study is to identify the types of errors made by Korean college students in an oral proficiency interview in relation to specific task topics, and to examine how these errors affect their lexico-grammatical proficiency scores. Ninety-six two-minute-long audio clips of 32 Korean college students on three different topics were transcribed. Lexico-grammatical errors were then coded for statistical analysis and lexico-grammatical scores were estimated using many-facet Rasch measurement analysis with two raters. Friedman tests and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests showed that noun phrase, verb phrase, and prepositional phrase errors were more frequently found with the descriptive tasks than compare-and-contrast or hypothetical prompts. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that noun phrase and verb phrase errors accounted for 22% of the variance in lexico-grammatical scores. Adding utterance length variables to the initial regression model explained an additional 43% of the variance in the lexico-grammatical scores. These findings suggest that noun phrase errors and verb phrase errors should be a priority in English classes, and that it is beneficial to teach English speaking skills in a way that takes into account the task characteristics and contextual factors. Full article

We motivate a ‘rooted’ PP shell analysis of Arabic prepositional phrases, which takes into account the prepositional dual life, as a lexical root item and as a vocabulary word, projecting a lexical √P headed by the P root, and a functional pP headed by p, the syntactic case assigner. Moreover, PlaceP and PathP projections are motivated by differentiating locative and directional PPs, and AxPartPs represent the structure of adverbial spatial nouns (đ̣uruuf). It is shown that alternative analyses using a single source (or projection) of PPs are inadequate in dealing with prepositional polysemies, and their morpho-syntactic alternations or variations. A bifurcation analysis instead (distinguishing root syntax from category syntax) is motivated and implemented along the lines of distributive models of word formation, making use of the simplest composition operation Merge in both syntax and the lexicon. Full article

This paper examines multiple sluicing constructions in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth, MC) experimentally. The acceptability status of such constructions in MC is controversial, and the judgments reported in the previous literature vary. Obtaining experimental evidence on the acceptability status is, therefore, important to advance the research on multiple sluicing in MC. Consequently, the present study conducts two sets of experiments to investigate factors affecting the acceptability of multiple sluicing sentences and the influence of the distribution of shi preceding wh-remnants on acceptability ratings. The results show that multiple sluicing in MC is generally a marked construction. Nevertheless, factors including prepositionhood and specificity have ameliorating effects on the acceptability of such constructions. Moreover, the influence of the distribution of shi on the acceptability ratings is related to the nature of wh-remnants; that is, its presence significantly improves the acceptability of cases of multiple sluicing when it precedes bare wh-arguments. We argue that the observed ameliorating effects on multiple sluicing can be explained by a cue-based retrieval approach to cross-linguistic elliptical constructions. Compared to bare wh-arguments, prepositional and discourse-linked wh-phrases provide cues to facilitate the retrieval of information from antecedent clauses. Full article

R-pronouns are R-words which feature as pronouns in prepositional phrases (among other things). They are common in Dutch and German (e.g., D. daarmee, G. damit, lit. ‘therewith’, ‘with that’, D. erna, G. danach, lit. ‘hereafter’, ‘after this’). This contribution concerns a quantitative study of variation in R-pronouns in modern Moroccan and Turkish ethnolectal Dutch. In conversational speech of bilingual speakers of Moroccan Dutch, Turkish Dutch and two groups of monolingual ‘white’ Dutch (one of them being the control group), R-pronouns appear to vary in three dimensions: the R-pronoun can or cannot be realized (with the latter option violating the norms of Dutch); if it is realized, the R-pronoun and the preposition can or cannot be split (both options conform the norms of Standard Dutch), if the R-pronoun is not realized, then either another pronoun is used instead or there is no substitute (both variants violate the norms of Dutch). For all three dimensions of variation, statistical analyses were carried out, starting from a total of 1160 realizations by 52 representatives of the four groups. The analyses involved three internal parameters and four social ones. The results serve to answer research questions concerning the origin of the variation, its place in the verbal repertoires and the social spread of the variation. Full article

The present study investigated bilingual language control among preschool children in a sentence repetition task containing unilingual stimuli and codeswitched stimuli within prepositional phrases (PPs). Cross-language errors, that is, codeswitches that were not part of the stimulus sentences, were taken as evidence of difficulties in language control. Specifically, we investigated cross-language errors as a function of stimulus sentence type (codeswitched or unilingual), CS site within the PP, directionality (English or Hebrew stimulus sentences), and group status (children with typical language development (TLD), and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)). We also examined cross-language errors in terms of word class and locus in the sentence. The participants were 65 English (home language)–Hebrew (societal language) bilinguals with TLD and 13 with DLD, ages 5;5–6;10 (M = 5;11). Stimulus sentences contained five codeswitch conditions within prepositional phrases, for example, a codeswitched preposition (P) or a codeswitched preposition, determiner and noun (P+DET+N), and a ‘no switch’ condition. The stimuli were 36 English and 36 Hebrew sentences (+24 fillers) matched for semantic content and syntax. English sentences contained switches to Hebrew, and Hebrew sentences contained switches to English. The results showed more cross-language errors for codeswitched than unilingual sentence stimuli. The children with TLD showed a directionality effect, producing more cross-language errors in Hebrew sentence stimuli than in English, but the children with DLD did not. The children with DLD had more cross-language errors than their peers with TLD for English stimuli. Most cross-language errors appeared in the sentence-final, adverbial temporal phrase. Findings are discussed in terms of language co-activation and competition in order to account for the difference in performance on unilingual versus codeswitched stimuli and in light of sociopragmatic and psycholinguistic factors to account for the directionality effect among children with TLD and the lack thereof among children with DLD. Full article

This study tests the acceptability of preposition stranding in the intrasentential code-switching of US heritage speakers of Spanish. Because languages vary when extracting determiner phrases from prepositional phrases, known as preposition stranding or p-stranding, a contrast arises for Spanish–English bilinguals. English allows p-stranding, but in Spanish the preposition is traditionally pied-piped with the DP. Heritage speakers of Spanish, though, have shown variability, with child sequential bilinguals requiring said pied-piping, but simultaneous bilinguals allowing p-stranding in Spanish. Participants (n = 24) completed a written acceptability judgment task with a 7-point Likert scale. The task included code-switched sentences (n = 16) with p-stranding, switching from either English to Spanish or vice versa, with comparison monolingual equivalents for Spanish (n = 8) and English (n = 8) included as well. The results found that the simultaneous bilinguals accepted p-stranding in both languages, while also showing no restriction in either code-switching condition. Child sequential bilinguals, however, showed the expected monolingual distinction between Spanish and English, and p-stranding was only accepted with Spanish determiner phrases extracted from an English prepositional phrase (i.e., Spanish-to-English). These findings support the previously reported differentiation between simultaneous and child sequential bilinguals regarding p-stranding, while expanding it to code-switching. Full article

The aim of this article is to provide an evolutionarily grounded explanation of central aspects of the structure of language. It begins with an account of the evolution of human causal reasoning. A comparison between humans and non-human primates suggests that human causal cognition is based on reasoning about the underlying forces that are involved in events, while other primates hardly understand external forces. This is illustrated by an analysis of the causal cognition required for early hominin tool use. Second, the thinking concerning forces in causation is used to motivate a model of human event cognition. A mental representation of an event contains two vectors representing a cause as well as a result but also entities such as agents, patients, instruments and locations. The fundamental connection between event representations and language is that declarative sentences express events (or states). The event structure also explains why sentences are constituted of noun phrases and verb phrases. Finally, the components of the event representation show up in language, where causes and effects are expressed by verbs, agents and patients by nouns (modified by adjectives), locations by prepositions, etc. Thus, the evolution of the complexity of mental event representations also provides insight into the evolution of the structure of language. Full article

Grammatical variation has often been said to be determined by cognitive complexity. Whenever they have the choice between two variants, speakers will use that form that is associated with less processing effort on the hearer’s side. The majority of studies putting forth this or similar analyses of grammatical variation are based on corpus data. Analyzing preposition stranding vs. pied-piping in English, this paper sets out to put the processing-based hypotheses to the test. It focuses on discontinuous prepositional phrases as opposed to their continuous counterparts in an online and an offline experiment. While pied-piping, the variant with a continuous PP, facilitates reading at the wh-element in restrictive relative clauses, a stranded preposition facilitates reading at the right boundary of the relative clause. Stranding is the preferred option in the same contexts. The heterogenous results underline the need for research on grammatical variation from various perspectives. Full article