scholarly journals Decoding Middle Welsh clauses or “Avoid Ambiguity”

2014 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
Axel Harlos ◽  
Erich Poppe ◽  
Paul Widmer
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Morphological Features ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Lower Tier ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
Narrative Context ◽  
Free Word

Abstract Middle Welsh is a language with a restricted set of morphosyntactic distinctions for grammatical relations and with relatively free word order in positive main declarative causes. However, syntactic ambiguity rarely, if ever, arises in natural texts. The present article shows in a corpus-based study how syntactic ambiguity is prevented and how morphological features interact with two referential properties, namely animacy and accessibility, in order to successfully identify grammatical relations in Middle Welsh. Further lower-tier factors are the semantics of the verb and the wider narrative context. The article complements recent insights suggesting that subject-verb agreement is not only determined by wordorder patterns, but also by referential properties of subjects.

The mosaic acquisition of grammatical relations

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Rispoli
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Semantic Structure ◽  
Role And Reference Grammar ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
Reference Grammar ◽  
Discrete Structures ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Logical Semantic

ABSTRACTThe view that grammatical relations have substantial essence, designated as ‘subject’ or ‘object’ has difficulty in accounting for the variety of naturally acquirable grammatical relations. The acquisition of grammatical relations is examined from a theoretical framework, ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR, in which grammatical relations are decomposed into two separate types of structure: logical (semantic) structure and information (pragmatic) structure. The acquisition of grammatical relations from four languages is compared: (1) the definite accusative suffix and pragmatically motivated word order of Turkish; (2) Kaluli verb agreement, case and focus marking postpositions, and pragmatically motivated word order; (3) Hungarian definite and indefinite verb conjunction; and (4) Italian participial agreement and anaphoric, accusative case pronouns. Two conditions on structures are found to cause difficulty: the neutralization of a semantic or pragmatic distinction by interfering structures (e.g. Kaluli and Italian), and global case marking which forces the child to discover relevant semantic characteristics of both the actor and the undergoer (e.g. Hungarian and Kaluli). Structures that encode semantic or pragmatic distinctions independently are more easily acquired (e.g. Turkish). Piecing together discrete structures in a mosaic fashion, the child can acquire the great variety of grammatical relations that exist in human languages.

scholarly journals On the dating and nature of verb agreement in Tibeto-Burman

1992 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy J. LaPolla
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
The Many

This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of grammatical relations in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to develop a hypothesis on the typological nature of word order and grammatical relations in the mother language which gave rise to all of the many languages within the Sino Tibetan language family. As the verb agreement (pronominalization) systems of Tibeto-Burman have been said to be a type of ergative marking, and to have been a part of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations, the questions of the dating and nature of the agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman are relevant to the discussion of the nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

scholarly journals Extending Hawkins’ comparative typology: Case, word order, and verb agreement in the Germanic languages

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.93 ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunther De Vogelaer
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
Original Idea ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Extra Parameter

In a well-known book, Hawkins (1986), expanding on an original idea by Sapir (1921), attributes a number of typological differences between German and English to the fact that German uses morphological means (i.e. case) to distinguish grammatical relations, whereas English makes use of a strict-SVO word order. Dutch seems problematic to Hawkins’ generalisation, in that neither case nor word order can be used consistently to express the basic grammatical relations. Using verb agreement as an extra parameter, Dutch can be integrated in Hawkins’ typology. In addition, data from Scandinavian languages and Afrikaans indicate that Hawkins’ notion of ‘grammatical word order’ can be replaced by a more precise word order feature, viz. the possibility to place verbs in between subjects and objects in all sentence types.

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

scholarly journals Honorifics: A sociocultural verb agreement cue in Japanese sentence processing

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-569 ◽  
Author(s):  
YUKI YOSHIMURA ◽  
BRIAN MACWHINNEY
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Role Assignment ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
New Type

ABSTRACTCase marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs as cues to case role assignment by Japanese native speakers and second-language learners of Japanese. The results for native speakers replicated earlier findings regarding the predominant strength of case marking. However, when case marking was missing, native speakers relied more on honorific marking than word order. In these sentences, the processing that relied on the honorific cue was delayed by about 100 ms in comparison to processing that relied on the case-marking cue. Learners made extensive use of the honorific agreement cue, but their use of the cue was much less accurate than that of native speakers. In particular, they failed to systematically invoke the agreement cue when case marking was missing. Overall, the findings support the predictions of the model and extend its coverage to a new type of culturally determined cue.

scholarly journals Word order in Latin locative constructions: a corpus study in Caesar’s De bello gallico

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Structural Domains ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
First Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.

Dependency Parsing in Bangla

2013 ◽  
pp. 155-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Utpal Garain ◽  
Sankar De
Keyword(s):  
Test Data ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Dependency Parsing ◽  
Order Problem ◽  
Simple Sentences ◽  
Free Word

A grammar-driven dependency parsing has been attempted for Bangla (Bengali). The free-word order nature of the language makes the development of an accurate parser very difficult. The Paninian grammatical model has been used to tackle the free-word order problem. The approach is to simplify complex and compound sentences and then to parse simple sentences by satisfying the Karaka demands of the Demand Groups (Verb Groups). Finally, parsed structures are rejoined with appropriate links and Karaka labels. The parser has been trained with a Treebank of 1000 annotated sentences and then evaluated with un-annotated test data of 150 sentences. The evaluation shows that the proposed approach achieves 90.32% and 79.81% accuracies for unlabeled and labeled attachments, respectively.

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