Koncepcje składniowe naszych mistrzów

The article presents a brief overview of the syntactic theories of the Professors of the Pedagogical University in Kraków: Tadeusz Milewski (a structural-typological concept), Stanisław Jodłowski (a functional-cursory concept) and Stanisław Karolak (a semantic concept) in the context of other directions of syntactic research, which may be referred to as functional, stylistic, psychological, logical and textual-discursive syntax.

An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a complement clause headed by to yuu ‘that say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the island status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are complex NPs, but uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded clear evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, and that noun complements are not. Our second experiment replicated the relative clause and coordinated NP results, but yielded an inconclusive null result for noun complements. Taken together, our results suggest either that noun complements are not islands, or that noun complements yield a small island effect that cannot be reliably detected at the typical sample sizes of 30-40 participants used here. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to grammatical NP-scrambling, thus corroborating our conclusions. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).

“Expletives” as Discourse Markers: Semantic and Pragmatic Considerations in “It” and “There”

This paper explores the syntactic and semantic configurations of expletives “it” and “there.” It attempts to show that expletives are not just syntactic fillers; they are semantic markers and are pragmatically bound NPs that can be co-indexed with covert referents. The study follows a theoretical approach and applies Bolinger’s (1977) Meaning and Form model to the syntactic configurations of expletives. The syntactic structures of expletives are based on the syntactic theories of generativist linguists, namely Chomsky (1986). Chomskyan syntactic theories describe the various formal characteristics of expletives without analyzing their semantic and pragmatic implications. This study premises that Bolinger’s theoretical modal can fill these missing gaps and can provide a conclusive yet not final description of these gaps. The study recognizes expletives as discourse-bound markers and authenticates their contextual and sociological significance.

ANALYSIS OF SYNTACTIC THEORIES OF ASSOCIATION IN LINGUISTICS

This article discusses the syntactic theories of compounding in world linguistics, examines the views of linguists on compounding, and points out the differences and similarities in these studies. In particular, the theoretical and practical work of Russian, German, Turkish and English linguists on linguistics has been studied and their views have been highlighted. In particular, it was noted that until now, the problem of vocabulary has been one of the most important issues on the agenda of scientific research

Formal Syntax and Deep History

We show that, contrary to long-standing assumptions, syntactic traits, modeled here within the generative biolinguistic framework, provide insights into deep-time language history. To support this claim, we have encoded the diversity of nominal structures using 94 universally definable binary parameters, set in 69 languages spanning across up to 13 traditionally irreducible Eurasian families. We found a phylogenetic signal that distinguishes all such families and matches the family-internal tree topologies that are safely established through classical etymological methods and datasets. We have retrieved “near-perfect” phylogenies, which are essentially immune to homoplastic disruption and only moderately influenced by horizontal convergence, two factors that instead severely affect more externalized linguistic features, like sound inventories. This result allows us to draw some preliminary inferences about plausible/implausible cross-family classifications; it also provides a new source of evidence for testing the representation of diversity in syntactic theories.

Morpho-Syntax of Non-VO Separable Compound Verbs in Cantonese

Verb-object (VO) separable compound verbs (SCVs), for example, lí-le-hūn ‘divorced’, have long been studied. A small group of non-VO compounds in Cantonese are also separable, but have not yet been addressed. In this study, a preliminary judgment test was used for the first time, to look into the separation of non-VO compounds. We found that the separation of non-VO compounds, though limited, is different from that of VO compounds in terms of their ways of separation. There seems to be an effect of the ways of separation and the morphological structures of the verbs on the separability. We also showed that the underlying identity of non-VO SCVs is lexical, as most of them do not have a phrasal form. This group of separable verbs, which was neglected before, could have an impact on related morpho-syntactic theories.

Linguistic intuitions and the puzzle of gradience

This chapter addresses the question of whether gradience in acceptability should be considered evidence for gradience in grammar. Most current syntactic theories are based on a categorical division of grammatical versus ungrammatical sentences. In contrast, acceptability intuitions, that is, the data used to build those theories, have long been recognized to be gradient. The chapter presents two experiments collecting acceptability ratings for 100 sentences extracted from papers published in Linguistic Inquiry. The results show a gradient pattern. It is argued that this gradience in acceptability is highly unlikely to be due to methodological and other known extra-grammatical factors. Unless another factor can be identified, it seems reasonable to assume that the observed gradience comes (also) from the grammar. Furthermore, the chapter presents a proposal concerning diacritics, according to which the traditional asterisk is reserved for ungrammaticality only, and a new diacritic (“^”) indicates reduced acceptability.

A user’s view of the validity of acceptability judgments as evidence for syntactic theories

The primary goal of this chapter is to discuss the validity of acceptability judgments as a data type. The author’s view is that acceptability judgments have most, if not all, of the hallmarks of a valid data type: syntacticians have a plausible theory of the source of acceptability judgments, a theory of how to leverage judgments for the construction of syntactic theories using experimental logic, and a set of evaluation criteria that are similar to those used for other data types in the broader field of psychology. At an empirical level, acceptability judgments have been shown to be relatively reliable across tasks and participants, to be relatively sensitive, and to be relatively free of theoretical bias. Therefore the author’s view is that acceptability judgments are at least as valid as other data types that are used in the broader field of language science.

Evidence from the Visual World Paradigm Raises Questions about Unaccusativity and Growth Curve Analyses

Many syntactic theories posit a fundamental structural difference between intransitive verbs with agentive subjects (unergative verbs) and those with theme subjects (unaccusative verbs). This claim garners support from studies finding differences in the online comprehension of these verbs. The present experiments seek to replicate one such finding using the visual world paradigm (Koring, Mak, & Reuland, 2012). We control for several factors that were uncontrolled in previous studies. We find no differences in the processing of unergative and unaccusative sentences in logistic regressions and cluster analyses. However, in growth curve analyses, modeled closely on the original paper, we find differences between the verb conditions that appear to be statistically significant but are unstable across experiments. A resampling analysis reveals that the growth curve analyses are highly anticonservative, suggesting that the earlier finding was a false positive. We conclude that there is no strong evidence that unaccusatives are processed differently from unergatives. We suggest that growth curve analyses only be used with visual world paradigm data when the underlying assumptions of the analysis can be validated via resampling.