Case Alternations on Verb-Phrase Internal Arguments No, Yongkyoon, Ph.D

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Case Alternations on Verb-Phrase Internal Arguments No, Yongkyoon, Ph.D Order Number 9211104 Case alternations on verb-phrase internal arguments No, Yongkyoon, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1991 Copyright ©1901 by No, Yongkyoon. All rights reserved. UMI 300N. ZeebRd. Ann Axbor, MI 48106 CASE ALTERNATIONS ON VERB-PHRASE INTERNAL ARGUMENTS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Yongkyoon No, B.A., M.A. afc * $ * * The Ohio State University 1991 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Arnold M. Zwicky David R. Dowty Robert D. Levine Advisor Carl J. Pollard Department of Linguistics Copyright © 1991 by Yongkyoon No To My Parents ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Arnold Zwicky for perhaps more than half of my linguisthood. He guided me with patience and tender loving care to what I now believe is a better understanding of language. Especially unforgetful is his attention to details of all aspects of language which is accompanied by a restrictive framework. David Dowty has broadened my vision about semantic problems and taught me how to be humble when I don’t have a better analysis. Robert Levine has been most generous with his time. He helped me improve this dissertation in terms of the exposition of data and argumentation, the organization, and the accuracy of generalizations. The conferences with him in Summer 1991 were invaluable. Carl Pollard provided me with relevant comments of technical nature throughout the last stage of this writing. His comments enabled me to think through evident alternative analyses, when I was inclined to be egotistical. I am grateful to them all. The faculty members of the Department, most notably Mary Beckman, Michael Geis, Brian Joseph, David Odden, Craige Roberts, and Donald Winford, have provided me with opportunities to talk seriously or tongue-in-cheek, about lots of things that make life worth living, including linguistics. Surely their friendship has been important in making me feel at home in Columbus. People who have hanged around in Cunz Hall, Benjamin Ao, Jill Beckman, Hee-Rahk Chae, Chan Chung, Monica Crabtree, John Xiangling Dai, Brad Getz, Ken de Jong, Sun-Ah Jun, Hyeonseok Kang, Bob Kasper, Gina Lee, Mark Libucha, Jane Smirniotopolus, Uma Subramanian, Kate Welker, and Chuck Yocom, are hereby thanked for their time shared with me and their kindness. Thanks are also due to Byengbok Ahn, Avery Andrews, Riitta Blum, Pe­ ter Culicover, Roger Evans, Donna Gerdts, Katrina Hagblom, Takako Haraguchi, Thomas Hukari, Paul Kroeger, Joan Maling, Yoshiko Matsumoto, Shigeru Miya- gawa, Anneli Pajunen, and Anelya Rugaleva for their helping me otherwise: they either made available to me important information, they kindly sent to me their articles, or they provided me with their judgments on strings of words. My former teachers in Seoul have not failed to encourage me during the time of my staying in the States. Professors Suk-Jin Chang, Chungmin Lee, and Baekin Sung all influenced me while and after I was in the graduate program in 1982 through 1984. I am grateful for their open-mindedness that has helped keeping the Korean linguistics circle abreast with the world. It might have not occurred to Professors Maengsung Lee, Sangbum Jun, Choonhak Cho, and Jeokryoon Hwang, teachers from my undergraduate days, that I would end up as a linguist. But I did just like they did. Thanks be to them. The love and sacrifice my family has shown are tremendous ones. In retro­ spect, what little achievement I have made wouldn’t have been possible without my understanding wife and fellow linguist, Sookhyang Lee, and my daughter Chung-A’s decorum. I am grateful to them for their understanding my frequent absences. VITA August 12, 1959 Born — Sunsan, Korea 1980 ................................................................................. B.A., Seoul National University 1984 .................................................................................M.A., Seoul National University 1984 — 1985 ............................................. Instructor of Korean as a Second Language Language Research Institute, Seoul National University 1985 — 1986 ..................... Graduate Research Associate, The Ohio State University 1986 — 1991..................... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS No, Yongkyoon. 1991. A centering approach to the * [CASE] [TOPIC] restriction in Korean. Linguistics 29.4- No, Yongkyoon and Mark Libucha eds. 1991. The Proceedings of the 1990 Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University. No, Yongkyoon. 1990. On the weak generative capacity of Depth-n Grammars. In The Proceedings of Seoul International Conference on Natural Language Processing. Seoul, Korea: Seoul National University. vi De Jong, Kenneth and Yongkyoon No eds. 1990. The Proceedings of the 1989 Eastern States Conference on Linguistics. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University. No, Yongkyoon. 1989. Existential quantification of experiencer: Person constraint on emotion verbs and zero anaphora. In Kuno, Susumo et al. (eds.) Harvard Studies in Korean Linguistics S. No, Yongkyoon. 1989. Turkish inflection and copula cliticization. In Powers, Joyce, Uma Subramanian, and Arnold Zwicky (eds.) Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics 87. No, Yongkyoon. 1988. Negative morphemes in Korean: evidence for a derivational treatment. In Baek, Eung-Jin ed. The Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Korean Linguistics. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Linguistics Syntax, Morphology, and Semantics TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION..................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..............................................................................................iii VITA......................................................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES.............................................................................................................. x CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Generative Grammar ..........................................................................................2 1.3. Morphology.......................................................................................................... 4 1.4. Filtering by the Semantic Component and the User’s Manual 9 1.5. Desiderata of Completeness, Soundness, and Tractability vs. Economy 13 1.6. Purpose and Organization of Dissertation ...................................................19 CHAPTER II. VERB PHRASE, MORPHOSYNTACTIC CASE, AND ALTERNATION 2.1. Introduction .................................................................................................. 21 2.2. Verb P h rase........................................................................................................22 2.3. Morphosyntactic Case , ..........................................................................25 2.4. Alternation .........................................................................................................26 2.5. A Typology of Case Alternations on Direct Object ................................... 31 2.6. A General Theory of Case ............................................................................... 35 CHAPTER HI. LEXICAL, SEMANTIC, AND DISCOURSE-ORGANIZATIONAL ALTERNATIONS 3.1. Introduction .......................................................... 40 3.2. Voice in Tagalog................................................................................................43 3.2.1. Case m arker............................................................................................43 3.2.2. Verb aspects............................................................................................46 3.2.3. Voice m arking.........................................................................................50 3.2.4. Sortal incorrectness rather than ungram m atically.........................60 3.2.5. The Tagalog verb phrase-what is remarkable?................................63 3.3. The Accusative/Genitive Alternation in Russian ....................................... 73 3.4. The Alternation Between NP and Accusative PP in Korean ...................81 CHAPTER IV. SYNTACTIC ALTERNATIONS 4.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 84 4.2. Korean Emotion Expressions ...................................................................... 85 4.2.1. A fragment of Korean ........................................................................... 86 4.2.2. Emotion verbs and the pragmatic properties of emotion-expressiong sentences .............................. 90 4.2.3. Case alternations involving emotion expressions .............................94 4.3. The “potential” verb and emotion expressions in Japanese ....................100 4.3.1. A fragment of Japanese ...................................................................... 100 4.3.2. Case alternation involving the “POTENTIAL” verb ....................102 4.3.3. Emotion adjectives and the pragmatic properties of emotion-expressing sentences 103 4.3.4. Case alternations involving emotion expressions ...........................104 4.4. Fourth Person, Imperatives, and Infinitives in Finnish ........................... 106 4.4.1.
Recommended publications
  • Introduction, Page 1
    Introduction, page 1 Introduction This book is concerned with how structure, meaning and communicative function interact in human languages. Language is a system of communicative social action in which grammatical structures are employed to express meaning in context. While all languages can achieve the same basic communicative ends, different languages use different linguistic means to achieve them, and an important aspect of these differences concerns the divergent ways syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact across languages. For example, the noun phrase referring to the entity being talked about (the ‘topic’) may be signalled by its position in the clause, by its grammatical function, by its morphological case, or by a particle in different languages, and moreover in some languages this marking may have grammatical consequences and in other languages it may not. The framework in which this investigation is to be carried out is Role and Reference Grammar [RRG].1 RRG grew out of an attempt to answer two basic questions, which were originally posed during the mid-1970’s: (i) what would linguistic theory look like if it were based on the analysis of Lakhota, Tagalog and Dyirbal, rather than on the analysis of English?, and (ii) how can the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics in different grammatical systems best be captured and explained? Accordingly, RRG has developed descriptive tools and theoretical principles which are designed to expose this interaction and offer explanations for it. It posits three main representations: (1) a representation of the syntactic structure of sentences, which corresponds to the actual structural form of utterances, (2) a semantic representation representing important facets of the meaning of linguistic expressions, and (3) a representation of the information (focus) structure of the utterance, which is related to its communicative function.
    [Show full text]
  • Linguistics 21N - Linguistic Diversity and Universals: the Principles of Language Structure
    Linguistics 21N - Linguistic Diversity and Universals: The Principles of Language Structure Ben Newman March 1, 2018 1 What are we studying in this course? This course is about syntax, which is the subfield of linguistics that deals with how words and phrases can be combined to form correct larger forms (usually referred to as sentences). We’re not particularly interested in the structure of words (morphemes), sounds (phonetics), or writing systems, but instead on the rules underlying how words and phrases can be combined across different languages. These rules are what make up the formal grammar of a language. Formal grammar is similar to what you learn in middle and high school English classes, but is a lot more, well, formal. Instead of classifying words based on meaning or what they “do" in a sentence, formal grammars depend a lot more on where words are in the sentence. For example, in English class you might say an adjective is “a word that modifies a noun”, such as red in the phrase the red ball. A more formal definition of an adjective might be “a word that precedes a noun" or “the first word in an adjective phrase" where the adjective phrase is red ball. Describing a formal grammar involves writing down a lot of rules for a language. 2 I-Language and E-Language Before we get into the nitty-gritty grammar stuff, I want to take a look at two ways language has traditionally been described by linguists. One of these descriptions centers around the rules that a person has in his/her mind for constructing sentences.
    [Show full text]
  • A Noun Phrase Parser of English Atro Voutilainen H Elsinki
    A Noun Phrase Parser of English Atro Voutilainen H elsinki A bstract An accurate rule-based noun phrase parser of English is described. Special attention is given to the linguistic description. A report on a performance test concludes the paper. 1. Introduction 1.1 Motivation. A noun phrase parser is useful for several purposes, e.g. for index term generation in an information retrieval application; for the extraction of collocational knowledge from large corpora for the development of computational tools for language analysis; for providing a shallow but accurately analysed input for a more ambitious parsing system; for the discovery of translation units, and so on. Actually, the present noun phrase parser is already used in a noun phrase extractor called NPtool (Voutilainen 1993). 1.2. Constraint Grammar. The present system is based on the Constraint Grammar framework originally proposed by Karlsson (1990). A few characteristics of this framework are in order. • The linguistic representation is based on surface-oriented morphosyntactic tags that can encode dependency-oriented functional relations between words. • Parsing is reductionistic. All conventional analyses are provided as alternatives to each word by a context-free lookup mechanism, typically a morphological analyser. The parser itself seeks to discard all and only the contextually illegitimate alternative readings. What 'survives' is the parse.• • The system is modular and sequential. For instance, a grammar for the resolution of morphological (or part-of-speech) ambiguities is applied, before a syntactic module is used to introduce and then resolve syntactic ambiguities. 301 Proceedings of NODALIDA 1993, pages 301-310 • The parsing description is based on linguistic generalisations rather than probabilities.
    [Show full text]
  • Personal Pronouns, Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement, and Vague Or Unclear Pronoun References
    Personal Pronouns, Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement, and Vague or Unclear Pronoun References PERSONAL PRONOUNS Personal pronouns are pronouns that are used to refer to specific individuals or things. Personal pronouns can be singular or plural, and can refer to someone in the first, second, or third person. First person is used when the speaker or narrator is identifying himself or herself. Second person is used when the speaker or narrator is directly addressing another person who is present. Third person is used when the speaker or narrator is referring to a person who is not present or to anything other than a person, e.g., a boat, a university, a theory. First-, second-, and third-person personal pronouns can all be singular or plural. Also, all of them can be nominative (the subject of a verb), objective (the object of a verb or preposition), or possessive. Personal pronouns tend to change form as they change number and function. Singular Plural 1st person I, me, my, mine We, us, our, ours 2nd person you, you, your, yours you, you, your, yours she, her, her, hers 3rd person he, him, his, his they, them, their, theirs it, it, its Most academic writing uses third-person personal pronouns exclusively and avoids first- and second-person personal pronouns. MORE . PRONOUN-ANTECEDENT AGREEMENT A personal pronoun takes the place of a noun. An antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers. In all of the following examples, the antecedent is in bold and the pronoun is italicized: The teacher forgot her book.
    [Show full text]
  • Verbals and Verbal Phrases Verbals Are Formed from Verbs but Are Used As Nouns, Adjectives, and Adverbs
    Chapter Menu Verbals and Verbal Phrases Verbals are formed from verbs but are used as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. The three kinds of verbals are the participle, the gerund, and the infinitive. A verbal phrase consists of a verbal and its modifiers and complements. The three kinds of verbal phrases are the participial phrase, the gerund phrase, and the infinitive phrase. The Participle GRAMMAR 16e. A participle is a verb form that can be used as an adjective. Present participles end in –ing. EXAMPLES Esperanza sees the singing canary near the window. [Singing, a form of the verb sing, modifies the noun canary.] Waving, the campers boarded the bus. [Waving, a form of the verb wave, modifies the noun campers.] We could hear it moving in the underbrush. [Moving, a form of the verb move, modifies the pronoun it.] Most past participles end in –d or –ed. Others are irregularly formed. EXAMPLES The baked chicken with yellow rice tasted delicious. [Baked, Reference Note a form of the verb bake, modifies the noun chicken.] For more information on the forms of participles, Confused and frightened, they fled into the jungle. see page 644. For a discus- [Confused, a form of the verb confuse, and frightened, a sion of irregular verbs, form of the verb frighten, modify the pronoun they.] see page 646. In your own words, define each term given below. [Given, a form of the verb give, modifies the noun term.] The perfect tense of a participle is formed with having or with having been. EXAMPLES Having worked all day, Abe was ready for a rest.
    [Show full text]
  • TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR REVIEW I. Parts of Speech Traditional
    Traditional Grammar Review Page 1 of 15 TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR REVIEW I. Parts of Speech Traditional grammar recognizes eight parts of speech: Part of Definition Example Speech noun A noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. John bought the book. verb A verb is a word which expresses action or state of being. Ralph hit the ball hard. Janice is pretty. adjective An adjective describes or modifies a noun. The big, red barn burned down yesterday. adverb An adverb describes or modifies a verb, adjective, or He quickly left the another adverb. room. She fell down hard. pronoun A pronoun takes the place of a noun. She picked someone up today conjunction A conjunction connects words or groups of words. Bob and Jerry are going. Either Sam or I will win. preposition A preposition is a word that introduces a phrase showing a The dog with the relation between the noun or pronoun in the phrase and shaggy coat some other word in the sentence. He went past the gate. He gave the book to her. interjection An interjection is a word that expresses strong feeling. Wow! Gee! Whew! (and other four letter words.) Traditional Grammar Review Page 2 of 15 II. Phrases A phrase is a group of related words that does not contain a subject and a verb in combination. Generally, a phrase is used in the sentence as a single part of speech. In this section we will be concerned with prepositional phrases, gerund phrases, participial phrases, and infinitive phrases. Prepositional Phrases The preposition is a single (usually small) word or a cluster of words that show relationship between the object of the preposition and some other word in the sentence.
    [Show full text]
  • Code-Mixing As Found in Kartini Magazine
    Code-Mixing as Found in Kartini Magazine Dewi Yanti Agustina Sinaga [email protected] Abstract This study deals with code-mixing in Kartini magazine. The objective of the study is to analyze the components of language used in code-mixing namely word, phrase, clause and sentence and to find out the components of language which occurs dominantly in code-mixing in Kartini magazine. This study is limited on the use of code-mixing only in English and Indonesian language in articles of Kartini magazine and it taken randomly as the sample. The study was conducted by using descriptive quantitative design. The technique for collecting the data was a documentary technique. The data were analyzed based on the components of language which consists of word, phrase, clause and sentence. Having analyzed the data,it was found that the components of language dominantly used is in word. The percentage of word is 59,6% followed by phrase 38%, sentence 2,4% and clause 0%. Key words : Code mixing, word, phrase, clause and sentence 1. The Background of the Study Communication has become a basic need for human beings. The activity or process of expressing ideas and feelings or giving information is called communication (Hornby, 2008: 84). The main instrument of communication is language. By using it, human can get information through language. Jendra (2010: 1) explains that “The word language is used only to refer to human’s way of communicating. In addition, Alwasilah (1983: 37) also defines that “Language is an activity of human mind, and activities of human minds are wonderfully varied, often illogical, sometimes unpredictable and occasionally obscure.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction: Complex Adpositions and Complex Nominal Relators Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto De Lima, Elena Smirnova, Dejan Stosic
    Introduction: Complex Adpositions and Complex Nominal Relators Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto de Lima, Elena Smirnova, Dejan Stosic To cite this version: Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto de Lima, Elena Smirnova, Dejan Stosic. Introduction: Complex Adpo- sitions and Complex Nominal Relators. Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto de Lima, Dejan Stosic, Elena Smirnova. Complex Adpositions in European Languages : A Micro-Typological Approach to Com- plex Nominal Relators, 65, De Gruyter Mouton, pp.1-30, 2020, Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, 978-3-11-068664-7. 10.1515/9783110686647-001. halshs-03087872 HAL Id: halshs-03087872 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-03087872 Submitted on 24 Dec 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Public Domain Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto de Lima, Elena Smirnova & Dejan Stosic Introduction: Complex Adpositions and Complex Nominal Relators Benjamin Fagard CNRS, ENS & Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle; PSL Lattice laboratory, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1 rue Maurice Arnoux, 92120 Montrouge, France [email protected]
    [Show full text]
  • PARTS of SPEECH ADJECTIVE: Describes a Noun Or Pronoun; Tells
    PARTS OF SPEECH ADJECTIVE: Describes a noun or pronoun; tells which one, what kind or how many. ADVERB: Describes verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs; tells how, why, when, where, to what extent. CONJUNCTION: A word that joins two or more structures; may be coordinating, subordinating, or correlative. INTERJECTION: A word, usually at the beginning of a sentence, which is used to show emotion: one expressing strong emotion is followed by an exclamation point (!); mild emotion followed by a comma (,). NOUN: Name of a person, place, or thing (tells who or what); may be concrete or abstract; common or proper, singular or plural. PREPOSITION: A word that connects a noun or noun phrase (the object) to another word, phrase, or clause and conveys a relation between the elements. PRONOUN: Takes the place of a person, place, or thing: can function any way a noun can function; may be nominative, objective, or possessive; may be singular or plural; may be personal (therefore, first, second or third person), demonstrative, intensive, interrogative, reflexive, relative, or indefinite. VERB: Word that represents an action or a state of being; may be action, linking, or helping; may be past, present, or future tense; may be singular or plural; may have active or passive voice; may be indicative, imperative, or subjunctive mood. FUNCTIONS OF WORDS WITHIN A SENTENCE: CLAUSE: A group of words that contains a subject and complete predicate: may be independent (able to stand alone as a simple sentence) or dependent (unable to stand alone, not expressing a complete thought, acting as either a noun, adjective, or adverb).
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 3 Noun Phrases Pronouns
    Chapter 3 Noun Phrases Now that we have established something about the structure of verb phrases, let's move on to noun phrases (NPs). A noun phrase is a noun or pronoun head and all of its modifiers (or the coordination of more than one NP--to be discussed in Chapter 6). Some nouns require the presence of a determiner as a modifier. Most pronouns are typically not modified at all and no pronoun requires the presence of a determiner. We'll start with pronouns because they are a relatively simple closed class. Pronouns English has several categories of pronouns. Pronouns differ in the contexts they appear in and in the grammatical information they contain. Pronouns in English can contrast in person, number, gender, and case. We've already discussed person and number, but to review: 1. English has three persons o first person, which is the speaker or the group that includes the speaker; o second person, which is the addressee or the group of addressees; o third person, which is anybody or anything else 2. English has two numbers o singular, which refers to a singular individual or undifferentiated group or mass; o plural, which refers to more than one individual. The difference between we and they is a difference in person: we is first person and they is third person. The difference between I and we is a difference in number: I is singular and we is plural. The other two categories which pronouns mark are gender and case. Gender is the system of marking nominal categories.
    [Show full text]
  • Parts of Speech
    PARTS OF SPEECH NOUN: Name of a person, place, thing or quality. (examples: Billy, Chicago, pencil, courage). PRONOUN: Word used in place of a noun. (examples: he, she, it, they, we). ADJECTIVE: Word that describes or limits a noun or pronoun. (examples: big, blue, mean, pretty). VERB: Word expressing action or state of being. (examples: write, kiss, is, feels). ADVERB: Word used to modify the meaning of a verb, adjective, or another adverb. (examples: always, once, quickly, too, there). PREPOSITION: Word used to show the relation between two or more things. (examples: to, at, under, into, between). CONJUNCTION: Word used to join a word or group of words with another word or group of words. INTERJECTION: An exclamation. (examples: oh!, wow!). GRAMMAR Subject: The something or someone talked about or doing the action in a sentence. (ex.: President Johnson disliked his portrait.) Predicate: The verb plus all its modifiers and complements. (ex.: President Johnson disliked his portrait.) Fused Sentence: Two sentences run together with no punctuation between them. (ex.: President Johnson disliked his portrait he felt it made him look too old.) Comma Splice: Two sentences separated only by a comma. (ex.: President Johnson disliked his portrait, he felt it made him look too old.) Fragment: A group of words presented as a sentence but which lacks the elements of a sentence. (ex.: Once upon a time.) Sentence: A group of words containing a subject, a verb, and expressing a complete thought. (ex.: Once upon a time, Jack and Jill tumbled down the hill.) OVER HELPING VERBS be will being would been must am do is did are does was have were has may had might having can shall could should PREPOSITIONS about beyond over above by since across down through after during to against for toward along from under among in underneath around inside until at into up before like upon behind near with below of within beneath off without besides on between onto 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Minimum of English Grammar
    Parameters Morphological inflection carries with it a portmanteau of parameters, each individually shaping the very defining aspects of language typology. For instance, English is roughly considered a ‘weak inflectional language’ given its quite sparse inflectional paradigms (such as verb conjugation, agreement, etc.) Tracing languages throughout history, it is also worth noting that morphological systems tend to become less complex over time. For instance, if one were to exam (mother) Latin, tracing its morphological system over time leading to the Latin-based (daughter) Romance language split (Italian, French, Spanish, etc), one would find that the more recent romance languages involve much less complex morphological systems. The same could be said about Sanskrit (vs. Indian languages), etc. It is fair to say that, at as general rule, languages become less complex in their morphological system as they become more stable (say, in their syntax). Let’s consider two of the more basic morphological parameters below: The Bare Stem and Pro- drop parameters. Bare Stem Parameter. The Bare Stem Parameter is one such parameter that shows up cross-linguistically. It has to do with whether or not a verb stem (in its bare form) can be uttered. For example, English allows bare verb stems to be productive in the language. For instance, bare stems may be used both in finite conjugations (e.g., I/you/we/you/they speak-Ø) (where speak is the bare verb)—with the exception of third person singular/present tense (she speak-s) where a morphological affix{s}is required—as well as in an infinitival capacity (e.g., John can speak-Ø French).
    [Show full text]