DOCSLIB.ORG

Identifying English and Hungarian Light Verb Constructions: a Contrastive Approach

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Identifying English and Hungarian Light Verb Constructions: a Contrastive Approach View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by SZTE Publicatio Repozitórium - SZTE - Repository of Publications Identifying English and Hungarian Light Verb Constructions: A Contrastive Approach Veronika Vincze1,2, Istvan´ Nagy T.2 and Richard´ Farkas2 1Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Group on Artificial Intelligence [email protected] 2Department of Informatics, University of Szeged nistvan,rfarkas @inf.u-szeged.hu { } Abstract 2 Light Verb Constructions Here, we introduce a machine learning- based approach that allows us to identify Light verb constructions (e.g. to give advice) are light verb constructions (LVCs) in Hun- a subtype of multiword expressions (Sag et al., garian and English free texts. We also 2002). They consist of a nominal and a verbal present the results of our experiments on component where the verb functions as the syn- the SzegedParalellFX English–Hungarian tactic head, but the semantic head is the noun. The parallel corpus where LVCs were manu- verbal component (also called a light verb) usu- ally annotated in both languages. With ally loses its original sense to some extent. Al- our approach, we were able to contrast though it is the noun that conveys most of the the performance of our method and define meaning of the construction, the verb itself can- language-specific features for these typo- not be viewed as semantically bleached (Apres- logically different languages. Our pre- jan, 2004; Alonso Ramos, 2004; Sanroman´ Vi- sented method proved to be sufficiently ro- las, 2009) since it also adds important aspects to bust as it achieved approximately the same the meaning of the construction (for instance, the scores on the two typologically different beginning of an action, such as set on fire, see languages. Mel’cukˇ (2004)). The meaning of LVCs can be only partially computed on the basis of the mean- 1 Introduction ings of their parts and the way they are related to In natural language processing (NLP), a signifi- each other, hence it is important to treat them in a cant part of research is carried out on the English special way in many NLP applications. language. However, the investigation of languages LVCs are usually distinguished from productive that are typologically different from English is or literal verb + noun constructions on the one also essential since it can lead to innovations that hand and idiomatic verb + noun expressions on might be usefully integrated into systems devel- the other (Fazly and Stevenson, 2007). Variativ- oped for English. Comparative approaches may ity and omitting the verb play the most significant also highlight some important differences among role in distinguishing LVCs from productive con- languages and the usefulness of techniques that are structions and idioms (Vincze, 2011). Variativity applied. reflects the fact that LVCs can be often substituted In this paper, we focus on the task of identify- by a verb derived from the same root as the nomi- ing light verb constructions (LVCs) in English and nal component within the construction: productive Hungarian free texts. Thus, the same task will be constructions and idioms can be rarely substituted carried out for English and a morphologically rich by a single verb (like make a decision – decide). language. We compare whether the same set of Omitting the verb exploits the fact that it is the features can be used for both languages, we in- nominal component that mostly bears the seman- vestigate the benefits of integrating language spe- tic content of the LVC, hence the event denoted cific features into the systems and we explore how by the construction can be determined even with- the systems could be further improved. For this out the verb in most cases. Furthermore, the very purpose, we make use of the English–Hungarian same noun + verb combination may function as an parallel corpus SzegedParalellFX (Vincze, 2012), LVC in certain contexts while it is just a productive where LVCs have been manually annotated. construction in other ones, compare He gave her a 255 Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 255–261, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013. c 2013 Association for Computational Linguistics ring made of gold (non-LVC) and He gave her a and Kuhn (2009) argued that multiword expres- ring because he wanted to hear her voice (LVC), sions can be reliably detected in parallel corpora hence it is important to identify them in context. by using dependency-parsed, word-aligned sen- In theoretical linguistics, Kearns (2002) distin- tences. Sinha (2009) detected Hindi complex guishes between two subtypes of light verb con- predicates (i.e. a combination of a light verb and structions. True light verb constructions such as a noun, a verb or an adjective) in a Hindi–English to give a wipe or to have a laugh and vague ac- parallel corpus by identifying a mismatch of the tion verbs such as to make an agreement or to Hindi light verb meaning in the aligned English do the ironing differ in some syntactic and se- sentence. Many-to-one correspondences were also mantic features and can be separated by various exploited by Attia et al. (2010) when identifying tests, e.g. passivization, WH-movement, pronom- Arabic multiword expressions relying on asym- inalization etc. This distinction also manifests in metries between paralell entry titles of Wikipedia. natural language processing as several authors pay Tsvetkov and Wintner (2010) identified Hebrew attention to the identification of just true light verb multiword expressions by searching for misalign- constructions, e.g. Tu and Roth (2011). However, ments in an English–Hebrew parallel corpus. here we do not make such a distinction and aim to To the best of our knowledge, parallel corpora identify all types of light verb constructions both have not been used for testing the efficiency of an in English and in Hungarian, in accordance with MWE-detecting method for two languages at the the annotation principles of SZPFX. same time. Here, we investigate the performance The canonical form of a Hungarian light verb of our base LVC-detector on English and Hungar- construction is a bare noun + third person singular ian and pay special attention to the added value of verb. However, they may occur in non-canonical language-specific features. versions as well: the verb may precede the noun, or the noun and the verb may be not adjacent due 4 Experiments to the free word order. Moreover, as Hungarian is a morphologically rich language, the verb may In our investigations we made use of the Szeged- occur in different surface forms inflected for tense, ParalellFX English-Hungarian parallel corpus, mood, person and number. These features will be which consists of 14,000 sentences and contains paid attention to when implementing our system about 1370 LVCs for each language. In addition, for detecting Hungarian LVCs. we are aware of two other corpora – the Szeged Treebank (Vincze and Csirik, 2010) and Wiki50 3 Related Work (Vincze et al., 2011b) –, which were manually an- notated for LVCs on the basis of similar principles Recently, LVCs have received special interest in as SZPFX, so we exploited these corpora when the NLP research community. They have been au- defining our features. tomatically identified in several languages such as To automatically identify LVCs in running English (Cook et al., 2007; Bannard, 2007; Vincze texts, a machine learning based approach was ap- et al., 2011a; Tu and Roth, 2011), Dutch (Van de plied. This method first parsed each sentence and Cruys and Moiron,´ 2007), Basque (Gurrutxaga extracted potential LVCs. Afterwards, a binary and Alegria, 2011) and German (Evert and Ker- classification method was utilized, which can au- mes, 2003). tomatically classify potential LVCs as an LVC or Parallel corpora are of high importance in the not. This binary classifier was based on a rich fea- automatic identification of multiword expressions: ture set described below. it is usually one-to-many correspondence that is The candidate extraction method investi- exploited when designing methods for detecting gated the dependency relation among the verbs multiword expressions. Caseli et al. (2010) de- and nouns. Verb-object, verb-subject, verb- veloped an alignment-based method for extracting prepositional object, verb-other argument (in the multiword expressions from Portuguese–English case of Hungarian) and noun-modifier pairs were parallel corpora. Samardziˇ c´ and Merlo (2010) an- collected from the texts. The dependency labels alyzed English and German light verb construc- were provided by the Bohnet parser (Bohnet, tions in parallel corpora: they pay special attention 2010) for English and by magyarlanc 2.0 to their manual and automatic alignment. Zarrieß (Zsibrita et al., 2013) for Hungarian. 256 The features used by the binary classifier can be Csirik, 2010) in the case of Hungarian. Then, we categorised as follows: investigated whether the lemmatised verbal com- Morphological features: As the nominal com- ponent of the candidate was one of these fifteen ponent of LVCs is typically derived from a verbal verbs. The lemma of the noun was also applied stem (make a decision) or coincides with a verb as a lexical feature. The nouns found in LVCs (have a walk), the VerbalStem binary feature fo- were collected from the above-mentioned corpora. cuses on the stem of the noun; if it had a verbal Afterwards, we constructed lists of lemmatised nature, the candidates were marked as true. The LVCs got from the other corpora. POS-pattern feature investigates the POS-tag se- quence of the potential LVC. If it matched one pat- Syntactic features: As the candidate extraction tern typical of LVCs (e.g. verb + noun) the methods basically depended on the dependency candidate was marked as true; otherwise as false.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Variation and Change in Past Tense Negation in African American English
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English Sabriya Fisher University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Fisher, Sabriya, "Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2925. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2925 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2925 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English Abstract This dissertation investigates the use of ain’t for negation in past tense contexts in Philadelphia African American English [PhAAE]. This use of ain’t, which varies with didn’t, is a unique feature of AAE (Labov et al. 1968) and has implications for the expression of tense/aspect in the language. First, it further levels tense/aspect cues from auxiliaries in negative contexts. Second, whereas verbal complements of didn’t are uninflected (1a), complements of ain’t may either be uninflected or in preterit form (1b). This asymmetry indicates potential structural differences between ain’t and didn’t. (1) a. They didn’t play yesterday. b. They ain’t play(ed) yesterday. Consequently, this dissertation joins a quantitative study of the social and linguistic factors conditioning use of ain’t with a distributional investigation of its syntax and interaction with tense morphology. Toward that end, I analyze naturalistic speech data from 42 speakers in a corpus of casual conversations collected in the early 1980s from African American Philadelphians.
    [Show full text]
  • Contracted Forms of Auxiliary Verbs
    Contracted Forms Of Auxiliary Verbs Special Anthony sometimes deoxygenizes any paradise decongests coincidently. Gary apostrophised her sleepwalking vigilantly, she regenerating it forgetfully. Collateral and necked Collin undercharging her auriculas gemmating superciliously or autolyzing earthward, is Jeromy consultative? According to the simple and interrogative contexts seems far to raise, scottish variety of auxiliary That auxiliaries referring to have contraction in contracted forms are less economical than two verbs? How auxiliary verb forms, contracted weak as sentential operators. Laka uses the report that if same strategies are distinct in emphatic affirmative and negative sentences as page that negation and affirmation are vulnerable of time same projection. Mouton de and of verbs are. Before after on them discuss AC in depth, are important distinction must be union between the phonological forms in which auxiliaries may appear. On form verb forms of auxiliary surfaces as contracted weak and for informational purposes only. The feedback of these suggestions is highly controversial as English modals are, without exception, always finite. As a modal auxiliary verb. English, and are attested in Scottish and Northern varieties of British English. The verb of a clitic negation should violate the pieces of the first problem for temp? If pronouns can be used to replace phrases then pronouns themselves also be phrases, not heads. Update card payment information immediately and avoid losing access into your subscription. It more auxiliary verb forms of? If she used. Do it is derived by means they have contraction which are usually preferred combinations of a contracted weak form differs across not an i have as contracted forms.
    [Show full text]
  • 6 = Verbs and Tenses Chart
    ﺍﺳﭘﻭﮐﻥ ﺍﻧﮕﻠﺵ ﮐٹ ٠ ڈﺍٹ ﮐﻭﻡ Spoken English Kit A Complete Set of 24 Books, 6 Cds and 6 DVDs for Learning and Improving Your English Language with Help and Support from Urdu Language Spoken English Kit- www.SpokenEnglishKit.Com A unique set of 24 Books + 6 CDS + 6 DVS Set For Details Talk to us at 99 89 66 92 61 1 | Page 2 | Page LIST OF THE BOOKS IN SPOKEN ENGLISH KIT INTRODUCTION TO SPOKEN ENGLISH KIT AND HOW TO USE THE BOOKS AND CDS AND DVDS, OVERVIEW AND GUIDELINES. 1. BOOK- 1 = PARTS OF SPEECH. 2. BOOK- 2 = STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES. 3. BOOK- 3 = WORD POWER AND VOCABULARY. 4. BOOK- 4 = FLUENCY TECHNIQUES. 5. BOOK- 5 = PARTS OF SPEECH IN DETAIL. 6. BOOK- 6 = FORMATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF SENTENCES EXERCISES. 7. BOOK- 7 = VERBS AND TENSES CHART (ACTIVE VOICE AND PASSIVE VOICE) 8. BOOK- 8 = SENTENCES OF DAILY USE. 9. BOOK- 9 = BASIC TERMINOLOGY OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR. 10. BOOK-10= CLASSIFIED VOCABULARY AND MOST COMMON WORD OF DAILY USE. 11. BOOK-11= CONVERSATION OF DAILY USE. 12. BOOK-12= WORD POWER AND CORRECT USE OF PARTS OF SPEECH. 13. BOOK-13= READING, COMPREHENSION, UNDERSTANDING, WRITING, LISTENING AND SPEAKING SKILLS DEVELOPMENT TECHNIQUES. 14. BOOK-14= PARAGRAPHS WRITING, ESSAYS WRITING, STORY WRITING, LETTER WRITING EXERCISES. 15. BOOK-15= FLUENCY TECHNIQUES EXERCISES, GROUP ACTIVITIES AND GROUP DISCUSSION PRACTICES. 16. BOOK-16= PRONUNCIATION, ACCENT AND PHONETICS. 17. BOOK-17= CONJUGATION OF NOUNS. 18. BOOK-18= CONJUGATION OF PRONOUNS. 19. BOOK-19= CORRECT USE OF ADJECTIVES. 20. BOOK-20= USES OF VERBS IN DETAILS.
    [Show full text]
  • A Bi-Clausal Account of English 'To'-Modal Auxiliary Verbs
    A Bi-clausal Account of English ‘to’-Modal Auxiliary Verbs Sungshim Hong Chungnam National University Sungshim Hong. 2014. A Bi-clausal Account of English ‘to’-Modal Auxiliary Verbs. Language and Information 18.1 , 33–52. This paper pro- poses a unified structural account of some instances of the English Modals and Semi-auxiliaries. The classification and the syntactic/structural description of the English Modal auxiliary verbs and verb-related elements have long been the center for many proposals in the history of generative syntax. According to van Gelderen (1993) and Lightfoot (2002), it was sometime around 1380 that the Tense-node (T) appeared in the phrasal structures of the English language, and the T-node is under which the English Modal auxiliaries occupy. Closely related is the existing evidence that English Modals were used as main verbs up to the early sixteenth century (Lightfoot 1991, Han 2000). This paper argues for a bi-clausal approach to English Modal auxiliaries with the infinitival par- ticle ‘to’ such as ‘ought to’ ‘used to’ and ‘dare (to)’ ‘need (to)’, etc. and Semi- auxiliaries including ‘be to’ and ‘have to’. More specifically, ‘ought’ in ‘ought to’ constructions, for instance, undergoes V-to-T movement within the matrix clause, just like ‘HAVEAux’ and all instances of ‘BE’, whereas ‘to’ occupies the T position of the embedded complement clause. By proposing the bi-clausal account, Radford’s (2004, 2009) problems can be solved. Further, the historical motivation for the account takes a stance along with Norde (2009) and Brin- ton & Traugott (2005) in that Radford’s (2004, 2009) syncretization of the two positions of the infinitival particle ‘to’ is no di↵erent from the ‘boundary loss’ in the process of Grammariticalization.
    [Show full text]
  • Minimum of English Grammar
    1. Case Theory and Phrase Expansion Following-up on our last chapter regarding tree template structures, one perspective that has emerged out of syntactic theory is the hypothesis that trees grow, phrase by phrase, and expand outward from a need to check formal features. The one feature which seems to be the driving force behind such tree expansion in Case assignment. So, it is only natural that after our chapter on ‘tree structures’, we next turn our attention to Case. 1. 1. Preliminary thoughts on Case: ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’ accounts Along the way in determining an eventual ‘bottom-up’ licensing of case, other ‘top-down’ accounts will be considered. While it may be safe to say that current linguistics trends toward preferring some version of a ‘top-down’ model in the guise of it being either more parsimonious in nature (addressing the learnability problem), or that only ‘top-down’ acquisition models speak to how children acquire their target languge (the continuity problem), contrary to current orthodoxy, our accepted (alternative account) will show that there is rather sound syntactic evidence that a Head/verb can actually enter into a bottom-up (c-command ‘from’) case-checking relationship with the higher Spec/pronoun within the same clause. Evidence comes from looking at truncated vP structures as found in African-American English (AAE) as well as in certain English Creole utterances (EC)) which, inter alia, demonstrate correct Nom case assignment despite catastrophic failure to mark for Tense & Agreement—(e.g., What they do?
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Twenty Little Words: Auxiliary Verbs Are Simply There to Help. in The
    1 Twenty Little Words: Auxiliary Verbs Are Simply There To Help. In the Classroom special feature in ENGLISH TEACHING professional, Issue 46 (Sept. 2006), 50-52. Loucky, J.P. Seinan JoGakuin University, Kitakyushu, JAPAN 2 Twenty little words: Auxiliary verbs are simply there to help John Paul Loucky Abstract: For the past ten years, I have been using a basic framework to help my students grasp question and answer structures. I find that this enables them to develop their language skills quickly and increases their confidence in their conversational ability. Without mastering questions, learners can’t even get to first base in terms of making a conversation on their own, let alone decipher the meaning of English that they hear or read, whether in print, film or on the internet. The key to handling question and answer forms correctly lies in an understanding of auxiliary verbs. Teachers need to show learners how to use these verbs in a clear and systematic way in order to enable them to become more fluent English speakers as fast as possible. A simple framework My simplified framework, which includes all basic English questions, began with ideas from V F Allen’s Inside English, which focuses on the 20 basic ‘green or go words’, the most common English auxiliary verbs (also known as ‘helping and being’ verbs). These verbs are called ‘green’ as they make English grammar function, and ‘go verbs’, as their position usually changes from the end (in a statement) to the beginning (in a question). For example, the initial auxiliary verb in the question ‘Are there any people swimming in the pool today?’ goes to the end of the answer, ‘Yes, there are.’ All the English ‘helping’, ‘being’ and ‘Wh-question’ words are easy to teach, if isolated and presented in a basic framework.
    [Show full text]
  • Investigating the Use of Modal Auxiliary Verbs in Tempo Editorial
    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, p-ISSN:2688-0120 LITERATURE, AND EDUCATION (IJELLE) e-ISSN:2686-5106 Vol. 2, No. 1, 2020 pp 49-56 http://journal.univetbantara.ac.id/index.php/ijelle Investigating The Use of Modal Auxiliary Verbs in Tempo Editorial 1AZKA SAEFUL HAQ, 2SUTIONO MAHDI 1UniversitasPadjadjaran, 2UniversitasPadjadjaran [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Editorial texts provide opinions to influence publics toward actual issues in society. The opinions contain critics served in suitable dictions and argumentations to access wider comprehension toward reality. Government policyissue in this research is provided to trace the preference of Tempo in serving its own tendency. This research aims to investigate frequency of modal auxiliary verbs in Tempo editorial and the meaning of the frequency which furthermore reflect Tempo strategy in delivering its own news. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative that employs sampling technique to gain selected data. The data is collected from online Tempo editorial text with the similar national issue and categorized into major types of modal auxiliary verb. The researcher only chooses 9 texts in November 2019 because of their relevance in a topic each other. The result consists of 104 data that is divided into three major types of modal auxiliary verb function, namely prediction, necessity, and probability. Keywords: Modal Auxiliary Verb, Editorial, Prediction, Necessity, Probability INTRODUCTION Editorial texts certainly do not aim to give the opinions only, they convey the effect of phenomena informed to social world in news as well.They have crucial role in influencing society towards an actual issue that will be broadly consumed by public.
    [Show full text]
  • Shakespeare and the Language of Possibility Lynne Magnusson Professor of English, University of Toronto a Folger Shakespeare Library Podcast
    Shakespeare and the Language of Possibility Lynne Magnusson Professor of English, University of Toronto A Folger Shakespeare Library podcast Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture 2015 April 16, 2015 ---------------------- Lynne Magnusson: It’s exciting to be here on the occasion of Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations to speculate about what gave birth to Shakespeare’s creativity with language. Thank you all for coming out tonight, and a very special welcome to members of the symposium on "Shakespeare’s Language" that’s starting tomorrow. Many of you, I hope, are going to recognize your influence in these ideas tonight, and I am so grateful for the stimulation of your work. It may be helpful to know that this paper runs 50 minutes. This is a paper about a set of small words—words like “may," "can," "will," "should," "ought," "must," "shall." These words are way more important than people usually imagine. Today I want to focus on how Shakespeare uses them creatively in his plays to ground situations in potentiality or possibility. I’ll address three main questions: First, how is Shakespeare’s language of possibility rooted in these small words? Second, what are the origins of Shakespeare’s extraordinary creative use of these words? How would he have had access to ways of thinking about these elements in the English language of his day? Third, what analytical methods best illuminate this creative artistry? Should literary close reading be replaced or supplemented by computer-generated linguistic analysis? And what about historical reading practices fostered by Shakespeare’s schooling? Usually unnoted, these small words are among the most common in the language.
    [Show full text]
  • Lezione 7. Decline and Fall - Summary
    20/12/2019 Lezione 7. Decline and Fall - summary • In this lesson we are going to trace the changing grammatical landscape of English • In doing so, we will discover… • Why the syntax of Standard Modern English is so regular • Where irregular nouns come from, and why English has a genitive case as well as the “a noun of noun” structure • When and why English stopped distinguishing between “thou” and “you” • When do, have and be became auxiliaries indicating verb aspects (simple, perfective, progressive, passive) • How and when the modal verbs became ‘defective’, i.e. reduced to auxiliary verb status 1 Nouns in English • All SVO languages have something in common… • An absence (or virtual absence) of noun cases • Nominative (subject) • Accusative (direct object) • Dative (indirect object, indicating beneficiary/receiver) • Genitive (indicating possession or ownership) • Instrumental (indicating manner) • etc. • English nouns are not marked for case, except for… • The genitive (-’s) • Pronouns • Nominative (I, he, they) • Accusative (me, him, them) • Datives take the same form but are introduced by a preposition • Genitive (mine, his, theirs) • English adjectives are unmarked, always 2 1 20/12/2019 Nouns in English: chronological comparison • Modern English has • Anglo-Saxon had • 1 definite article (the) • 21 definite articles • 1 indefinite article (a) • 15 indefinite articles • The alternant, an, is for • And 6 variants of the dual phonological purposes (=two) form • 2 types of noun • 2 types of noun (s. + pl.) • Mass nouns (no inflection)
    [Show full text]
  • The Auxiliary Verbs and Their Fuctions: an Overview
    IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 25, Issue 4, Series. 4 (April. 2020) 01-06 e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845. www.iosrjournals.org The Auxiliary Verbs and Their Fuctions: An Overview Bakoji Mohammed Fema PhD1, Haruna Shuaibu2, Alhaji Abubakar3 1Department of English Aminu Saleh College of Education, Azare Bauchi State 2Department of English Aminu Saleh College of Education, Azare Bauchi State 3Department of English Aminu Saleh College of Education, Azare Bauchi State Abstract: Several researchers have pointed out that the verbal group, being an obligatory element of the clause structure, carries high syntactic and semantic loads. As such, it is an area of maximum divergence and one of the most difficult aspects to master particularly by learners of English as a second language. On this note, this paper discusses the English auxiliary verbs, being integral components of the verbal group. The discussion is done through reviewing the works of different authors on the auxiliaries distinguishing the two sets - the primary auxiliaries (have, be & do) and the modal auxiliaries (can, could, dare, may, might, must, need, ought, shall, should, will & would). Each set of the auxiliaries are discussed with much emphasis on different usages to illustrate how crucial the auxiliaries are, as far as the conjugation of the verbal group is concerned. Key Words: Primary Auxiliaries, Model Auxiliaries, Verbal Group ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Date of Submission: 06-03-2020 Date of Acceptance: 20-04-2020 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- I. INTRODUCTION Auxiliary verbs are among the grammatical elements that play crucial roles in the construction of grammatical units particularly clauses and sentences.
    [Show full text]
  • Rise of the Auxiliaries: a Case for Auxiliary Raising Vs. Affix Lowering
    The Linguistic Review 2014; 31(2): 295 – 362 William Harwood Rise of the Auxiliaries: a case for auxiliary raising vs. affix lowering Abstract: The syntax of auxiliaries has given rise to much discussion in the generative literature (Akmajian and Wasow 1975; Emonds 1978; Akmajian et al. 1979; Pollock 1989; Chomsky 1993; Lasnik 1995b; Roberts 1998; Bjorkman 2011; Rouveret 2012). This paper explores the distribution of non-finite auxiliaries in Standard English, in particular the issue as to whether such auxiliaries raise for inflectional purposes or remain in their base positions and have their inflections lowered onto them. It is shown that auxiliary distribution is not determined by auxiliary type (passive, copular, progressive etc.) as the lowering accounts predict, but by the morphological form that the auxiliary takes. In particular, the auxiliaries be/been and being exhibit significantly different distributional properties across ellipsis, fronting and existential constructions in English that are difficult to capture under an affix lowering model, and lend themselves more easily to an auxiliary raising account. I therefore offer a syntactic account of auxiliary inflections which employs the theoretical uniformity of an Agree-based approach, with the empiri- cal advantages that an auxiliary raising analysis affords. The auxiliary raising system that will be proposed essentially harkens back to Chomsky’s (1993) and Lasnik’s (1995b) approach to the auxiliary system, though with the utilisation of Bošković’s (2007) notion of foot-driven movement. Keywords: auxiliary verbs, head movement, affix lowering, tense, aspect DOI 10.1515/tlr-2014-0001 1 Introduction It is largely accepted that finite lexical verbs in English are unable to raise to T° for tense/agreement and instead have finite inflections somehow lowered onto them.
    [Show full text]
  • Grammatical Analysis of Urdu Auxiliary Verbs
    Grammatical Analysis of Urdu Auxiliary Verbs A Thesis submitted to the University of Management and Technology for the Degree of MS Applied Linguistics By Zakia Mushtaq 110984003 Student of MS- Applied Linguistics Department of English Language and Literature University of Management and Technology 1 Abstract This thesis examines and illustrates the existence, internal structure, syntactic arrangement and semantic contribution of Urdu auxiliaries (single to multiple in a verb phrase). The study investigates the behavior of auxiliary verbs ending with different morphemes and how these auxiliaries can be classified on the basis of different morphological forms. The different auxiliaries have been classified and enlisted in the form of tables so that one group can be clearly distinguished from the other. The dissertation explores that syntactic places of multiple auxiliaries are generally fixed and the position of auxiliaries cannot be changed or swapped. This aspect has been explained with the help of linear examples as well as syntactic trees. It has been shown that the syntactic trees can acquire various auxiliaries and intensifier simultaneously that evolves the trees from simple to complex forms. The current work also draws attention towards the semantic information Urdu auxiliaries bring with them. It attempts to describe that the inflection in auxiliaries contributes the aspectual meanings of the main verb. Moreover, it is noticed that addition of auxiliaries does not always refer to the addition or change of meanings; it generally emphasizes or strengthens the existing interpretations. This research attempts to enlist all auxiliaries and their individual semantic properties. 2 Acknowledgements I find myself unable to thank Allah Almighty adequately who gave me strength, understanding and determination to continue and accomplish this work successfully.
    [Show full text]