Interspeaker variation in the negated perfective aspect of Zamboanga Chavacano

Framed from four perspectives, (1) Schütze & Curbach (2019), grammaticality judgment and linguistic methodology; (2) Mcwhorter’s (2011), description of the complexity of creoles as flourishing over time from an original state; (3) Steinkruger (2013), explanation of negated sentences in the perfective aspect; and (4) Lee (2005), delineation of native speakers of a language, this research paper looked into the combination of the negator nohay and the perfective aspect markers ya and yan (ya man) in the sentence. A negated sentence with a perfective aspect is a structure that seems to be accepted by some native speakers of Chavacano (or Chabacano) but rejected by others. In the literature, only Steinkruger (2013), describes the permissibility of the forenamed combination in the syntactic structure of Chavacano. It was hypothesized that such a combination is acceptable in Chavacano and that there is an interspeaker variation pertinent to its acceptability. To confirm these hypotheses, data were collected via grammaticality judgment from 105 native Chavacano speakers and another set of data were collected via interview from 10 native speakers of Chavacano for corroborative purposes.

Processing Aspectual Agreement in an Inflexionless Language: An ERP Study of Mandarin Chinese

This is a study of the collocation of Chinese verbs with different lexical aspects and aspect markers. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we explored the processing of aspect violation sentences. In the experiment, we combined verbs of various lexical aspect types with the progressive aspect marker zhe, and the combination of the achievement verbs and the progressive aspect marker zhe constituted the sentence’s aspect violation. The participants needed to judge whether a sentence was correct after it was presented. Finally, we observed and analyzed the components of ERPs. The results suggest that when the collocation of aspect markers and lexical aspect is ungrammatical, the N400-like and P600 are elicited on aspect markers, while the late AN is elicited by the word after the aspect marker. P600 and N400-like show that the collocation of Chinese verbs with various lexical aspects and aspect markers involve not only syntactic processing, but also the semantic processing; and the late AN may have been due to the syntax revision and the conclusion at the end of sentences.

Verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese: An HPSG account

The current study presents an HPSG analysis for verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese. After discussing its interaction with Aktionsarten and aspect markers, we argue that it is a morphological rather than syntactic process. We put forward a lexical rule for verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese and the different forms of reduplication are captured in an inheritance hierarchy. The interaction between verbal reduplication and aspect marking is handled by multiple inheritance. This analysis covers all forms of verbal reduplication in Mandarin Chinese and has none of the shortcomings of the previous analyses.

Interacting with Explanations through Critiquing

Using personalized explanations to support recommendations has been shown to increase trust and perceived quality. However, to actually obtain better recommendations, there needs to be a means for users to modify the recommendation criteria by interacting with the explanation. We present a novel technique using aspect markers that learns to generate personalized explanations of recommendations from review texts, and we show that human users significantly prefer these explanations over those produced by state-of-the-art techniques. Our work's most important innovation is that it allows users to react to a recommendation by critiquing the textual explanation: removing (symmetrically adding) certain aspects they dislike or that are no longer relevant (symmetrically that are of interest). The system updates its user model and the resulting recommendations according to the critique. This is based on a novel unsupervised critiquing method for single- and multi-step critiquing with textual explanations. Empirical results show that our system achieves good performance in adapting to the preferences expressed in multi-step critiquing and generates consistent explanations.

Adverbs in the Austronesian languages of Taiwan

This is a study of adverbs in nine typologically divergent Austronesian languages of Taiwan, Atayal, Bunun, Favorlang, Kavalan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiyat, Thao, and Tsou. There are only a few adverbs in each of these languages. The form of an adverb is usually invariant and its position in a sentence is relatively free. On the contrary, the form of a verb usually varies and its position in the sentence is usually fixed. Since the function of an adverb is to modify a verb, it may not occur without a verb in a sentence, whereas a true verb may occur without any other verb. Many adverbial concepts in Chinese and English, such as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘often’, and ‘again’, are expressed using verbs that manifest different foci and take aspect markers. When these words function as the main verb in the sentence, they may attract bound personal pronouns in many Austronesian languages of Taiwan. However, there are a few genuine adverbs in each of these languages. It varies from language to language whether a certain lexical item functions as a verb or adverb.

PENANDA ASPEK SECARA MORFOLOGIS DALAM BAHASA INDONESIA

The Indonesian language has particle category used to explain the meaning of aspectual verbal. The aspectual particle can support various aspects, such as (a) perspective, that is the aspect referring to an overview of events as a whole (complete situation), and (b) Imperfective, namely aspects that describe imperfect events (incomplete situations). This study aims to find markers of morphological aspects that determine the types of aspects in Indonesian. Observation methods and note taking techniques were used in data collection, synchronic descriptive methods were used to analyze data assisted by inductive or deductive techniques, while the presentation of analysis results used informal methods, namely methods of presenting the results of the analysis using the formulation of words. In this study, ten types of aspects were found, namely durative, frequentative, inkoative, perfective, futurative, iterative, habituative, momentant, spontaneity, and indeterminative aspects. Morphological aspect markers that determine the appearance of the types of aspects in Indonesian are affixation (affixation), repetition (reduplication), and compounding. Keywords: aspect, language, morphology

Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children’s non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children’s difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children’s immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way.

Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese

In 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.

diversity of Maa (Nilotic) adverbs

Maa linguistic varieties (Maasai, Parakuyo, Chamus, Samburu, among others), of the Eastern Nilotic family (Nilo-Saharan phylum), have words which can modify a predicate or predication and have the function of what cross-linguistically are called adverbs. While these words can be considered a single class due to this shared function and distribution, there are nevertheless morphosyntactic and usage distinctions. This is partly due to disparate historical origins, but also to semantics and different typical collocations. Among other distinctions, some adverbs can function as nominal tense/aspect markers within a determined nominal phrase (DP). Though the origins of all adverbs cannot be traced, the paper documents sources in oblique prepositional phrases, relational nouns, adjectives, relative clauses, and perhaps infinitive verbs, involving a wide range of lexical roots, such as ‘little’, ‘paint, mark’, ‘be abundant (with grass), be generous’, and others. Some synchronic adverbs do not have evident sources in other word classes, including the ­most frequently used word for ‘previously, before’, and the modal adverb ‘probably not, unlikely’ which is also an attenuative adverb. Maa adjectives and nouns largely overlap in their morphosyntax, but the ability to be modified by certain adverbs distinguishes them.