Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (6) ◽  
pp. 1501-1542
Author(s):  
Fang Wang ◽  
Fuyun Wu
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Distribution Patterns ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Distributional Patterns ◽  
Chinese Dialects ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Aspect Markers

AbstractIn contrast to well-studied prenominal relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese, little has been known about postnominal RCs that are non-canonical but existent in spoken Chinese. Focusing on Standard Mandarin, this paper examines in a large-scale spoken corpus the distributional patterns of postnominal RCs. Using distribution patterns of prenominal RCs in existing corpus studies as benchmarks, we show that postnominal RCs in our spoken corpus of Standard Mandarin tend to modify sentential objects more frequently than sentential subjects, and that they are likely to be short, with extremely rare presence of aspect markers. Based on these patterns, we propose that postnominal RCs in Standard Mandarin are mostly afterthoughts, motivated by information structure of spoken languages and word order principles. To better understand their general coverage, we further investigate postnominal RCs in Chinese dialects using available resources, including Yue, Min, Xiang, and Wu, followed by a raw comparison of cross-dialectal similarities and differences. We conclude that postnominal RCs in Chinese are similarly motivated, but their degrees of grammaticalization vary.

Sidaama

2020 ◽  
pp. 542-552
Author(s):  
Kazuhiro Kawachi
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
The South ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Grammatical Relations ◽  
South Central ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This chapter describes the grammatical structure of Sidaama (Sidamo), a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in the south-central part of Ethiopia. Although more than three million people speak Sidaama, there has been relatively little research on the language. The introduction gives background information on the Sidaama language and the Sidaama people. The phonology section lists phonemes, consonant clusters, and geminates, and describes the suprasegmentals; it also presents morphophonemic rules. The section on parts of speech deals with types of nouns and verbs, similarities and differences between adjectives and nouns as well as between adjectives and verbs, various pronominal forms, and clitics. The morphology section discusses reduplication of verb roots, suprafixes on nouns and adjectives, and suffixes on nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Finally, the syntax section discusses grammatical relations, word order issues, external possessor constructions, and relative clauses.

scholarly journals The role of verb semantics in Hungarian verb-object order

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Dorottya Demszky
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Logical Function ◽  
Semantic Class ◽  
Verb Semantics ◽  
Semantic Classes

Hungarian is often referred to as a discourse-configurational language, since the structural position of constituents is determined by their logical function (topic or comment) rather than their grammatical function (e.g., subject or object). We build on work by Komlósy (1989) and argue that in addition to discourse context, the lexical semantics of the verb also plays a significant role in determining Hungarian word order. In order to investigate the role of lexical semantics in determining Hungarian word order, we conduct a large-scale, data-driven analysis on the ordering of 380 transitive verbs and their objects, as observed in hundreds of thousands of examples extracted from the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. We test the effect of lexical semantics on the ordering of verbs and their objects by grouping verbs into 11 semantic classes. In addition to the semantic class of the verb, we also include two control features related to information structure, object definiteness and object NP weight, chosen to allow a comparison of their effect size to that of verb semantics. Our results suggest that all three features have a significant effect on verb-object ordering in Hungarian and among these features, the semantic class of the verb has the largest effect. Specifically, we find that stative verbs, such as fed 'cover', jelent 'mean' and övez 'surround', tend to be OV-preferring (with the exception of psych verbs which are strongly VO-preferring) and non-stative verbs, such as bírál 'judge', csökkent 'reduce' and csókol 'kiss', verbs tend to be VO-preferring. These findings support our hypothesis that lexical semantic factors influence word order in Hungarian.

The effects of information structure in the processing of word order variation in the second language

2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832199246
Author(s):  
Priscila López-Beltrán ◽  
Michael A Johns ◽  
Paola E Dussias ◽  
Cristóbal Lozano ◽  
Alfonso Palma
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
Order Constraints ◽  
Structure Patterns

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish–L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new–given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers.

Archi

2021 ◽  
pp. 279-316
Author(s):  
Marina Chumakina
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
The Other ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Language Endangerment ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Complement Clauses ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
The One

The chapter provides a description of Archi, a Lezgic language of the Nakh-Daghestanian family spoken in one village in the highlands of Daghestan. First, the current sociolinguistic situation delivers a view of the language endangerment risks, then the chapter gives an overview of Archi phonological system and discusses the morphosyntactic properties of Archi nouns, pronouns, and minor lexical classes. Next, the article gives an overview of the Archi verb morphosyntax. The chapter then discusses the structure of the simple clause covering such topics as word order, finiteness, valency classes, negation, and agreement, among others. Complex sentences (clause chaining and converbs, relative clauses, complement clauses, adverbial clauses, and long-distance anaphora) are discussed. The chapter closes with outstanding issues that require further research. Whenever possible, the chapter views Archi against the general background of Nakh-Daghestanian languages and discusses the similarities and differences. Due to its unusual history (a Lezgic language which lost the contact with other languages of the group very early on and developed with Lak and Avar as its immediate neighbors), Archi has preserved some archaic phonological as well as morphosyntactic features of Lezgic on the one hand and shows the results of the contact with non-Lezgic languages on the other.

The Oxford Latin Syntax

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harm Pinkster
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Main Text ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Secondary Predicates ◽  
Grammatical Framework

Volume II of the Oxford Latin Syntax deals with the syntax and pragmatics of complex sentences in Latin and other topics that transcend the simple clause (which is the content of Volume I). The volume starts with a chapter on subordination in general, followed by chapters on subordinate clauses that function as argument or as satellite in their sentence. Separate chapters are devoted to subordinate clauses governed by nouns and adjectives and to relative clauses. In addition there are chapters on coordination, comparison, secondary predicates, information structure of clauses and sentences including the use of emphatic particles, word order, and various discourse phenomena such as sentence connection. As in Volume I, the description of the Latin material is based upon texts from roughly 200 BC to AD 450. The Latin texts that are discussed are provided with an English translation. Supplements contain further examples to illustrate the main text. The grammatical framework used is mainly that of Functional Grammar but the description is accessible for readers without a modern linguistic background.

Use of Melastomataceae and pteridophytes for revealing phytogeographical patterns in Amazonian rain forests

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalle Ruokolainen ◽  
Ari Linna ◽  
Hanna Tuomisto
Keyword(s):  
Rain Forest ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Distribution Patterns ◽  
Forest Types ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Forest Sites ◽  
Plant Groups ◽  
The Face ◽  
Geographical Distances ◽  
Similarities And Differences

ABSTRACTSimilarities and differences among eight upland rain forest sites in Peruvian Amazonia were measured separately by using Melastomataceae, pteridophyte and tree species compositions and edaphic characteristics of the sites. All three plant groups showed a similar pattern among the sites, and this pattern could be explained by edaphic differences but not by geographical distances among the sites. The explicability of site-specific edaphic characteristics on the basis of geological history is discussed. The results suggest that both pteridophytes and Melastomataceae can be used as indicators of floristically different rain forest types that are edaphically defined. Distribution patterns of these plant groups can be studied much more rapidly than the patterns of trees and therefore both Melastomataceae and pteridophytes may be used in large scale phytogeographical studies that are urgently needed in the face of rapidly advancing deforestation.

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.

Bare nominals, information structure and word order

Lingua ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 120 (6) ◽  
pp. 1476-1501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Salem
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Bare Nominals

Word Order in Old and Middle English

Diachronica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Extended Version ◽  
Major Parameter ◽  
Language Data ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mixed Systems

In the history of English one finds a mixture of V2 and non-V2 word order in declaratives for several hundred years, with frequencies suggesting a relatively gradual development in the direction of non-V2. Within an extended version of a cue-based approach to acquisition and change, this paper argues that there are many possible V2 grammars, differing from each other with respect to clause types, information structure, and the behavior of specific lexical elements. This variation may be formulated in terms of micro-cues. Child language data from present-day mixed systems show that such grammars are acquired early. The apparent optionality of V2 in the history of English may thus be considered to represent several different V2 grammars in succession, and it is not necessary to refer to competition between two major parameter settings. Diachronic language development can thus be argued to occur in small steps, reflecting the loss of micro-cues, and giving the impression that change is gradual.

scholarly journals Cyclicity and Connectivity in Nez Perce Relative Clauses

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Rose Deal
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Intermediate Position ◽  
Nez Perce ◽  
The Core ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Relative Pronouns

This article studies two aspects of movement in relative clauses, focusing on evidence from Nez Perce. First, I argue that relativization involves cyclic Ā-movement, even in monoclausal relatives: the relative operator moves to Spec,CP via an intermediate position in an Ā outer specifier of TP. The core arguments draw on word order, complementizer choice, and a pattern of case attraction for relative pronouns. Ā cyclicity of this type suggests that the TP sister of relative C constitutes a phase—a result whose implications extend to an ill-understood corner of the English that-trace effect. Second, I argue that Nez Perce relativization provides new evidence for an ambiguity thesis for relative clauses, according to which some but not all relatives are derived by head raising. The argument comes from connectivity and anticonnectivity in morphological case. A crucial role is played by a pattern of inverse case attraction, wherein the head noun surfaces in a case determined internal to the relative clause. These new data complement the range of existing arguments concerning head raising, which draw primarily on connectivity effects at the syntax-semantics interface.

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