Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: a Case Study from Koro
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English Dative Alternation and Evidence for a Thematic Strategy in Adult SLA
UCLA Issues in Applied Linguistics Title English Dative Alternation and Evidence for a Thematic Strategy in Adult SLA Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64d102q5 Journal Issues in Applied Linguistics, 5(1) ISSN 1050-4273 Author Davies, William D Publication Date 1994-06-30 DOI 10.5070/L451005171 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California English Dative Alternation and Evidence for a Thematic Strategy in Adult SLA William D. Davies University of Iowa INTRODUCTION A body of recent work in second language acquisition is concerned with applying constructs from Chomsky's conception of Universal Grammar in both constructing an overall theory of SLA and explaining various phenomena in L2 learners (e.g., Flynn, 1984, 1987; Hilles, 1986; Phinney, 1987; White, 1985a, 1985b; papers in Flynn and O'Neil, 1988). A key linguistic construct that has received relatively little attention in SLA research is thematic roles—notions such as AGENT, THEME, GOAL, LOCATION, SOURCE, and others that are believed to contribute to semantic encoding and decoding. Although thematic roles (alternatively, thematic relations, semantic roles, case roles, 9-roles) have long been part of modem linguistic theory (cf. Gruber, 1965; Fillmore, 1968; Jackendoff, 1972), they have enjoyed increased popularity in the recent linguistic literature owing in part to their central role in Chomsky's (1981) government and binding (GB) theory, as embodied in the G-Criterion.^ Various formulations of the 9-Criterion have been proposed, but the simple formulation in (1) will suffice here. (1) e-Criterion (Chomsky 1981, p. 36): Each argument bears one and only one H-role, and each H-role is assigned to one and only one argument. -
Long and Short Adjunct Fronting in HPSG
Long and Short Adjunct Fronting in HPSG Takafumi Maekawa Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Linguistic Modelling Laboratory, Institute for Parallel Processing, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Held in Varna Stefan Muller¨ (Editor) 2006 CSLI Publications pages 212–227 http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/HPSG/2006 Maekawa, Takafumi. 2006. Long and Short Adjunct Fronting in HPSG. In Muller,¨ Stefan (Ed.), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Varna, 212–227. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Abstract The purpose of this paper is to consider the proper treatment of short- and long-fronted adjuncts within HPSG. In the earlier HPSG analyses, a rigid link between linear order and constituent structure determines the linear position of such adjuncts in the sentence-initial position. This paper argues that there is a body of data which suggests that ad- junct fronting does not work as these approaches predict. It is then shown that linearisation-based HPSG can provide a fairly straightfor- ward account of the facts. 1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to consider the proper treatment of short- and long-fronted adjuncts within HPSG. ∗ The following sentences are typical examples. (1) a. On Saturday , will Dana go to Spain? (Short-fronted adjunct) b. Yesterday I believe Kim left. (Long-fronted adjunct) In earlier HPSG analyses, a rigid link between linear order and constituent structure determines the linear position of such adverbials in the sen- tence-initial position. I will argue that there is a body of data which sug- gests that adjunct fronting does not work as these approaches predict. -
Animacy and Alienability: a Reconsideration of English
Running head: ANIMACY AND ALIENABILITY 1 Animacy and Alienability A Reconsideration of English Possession Jaimee Jones A Senior Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation in the Honors Program Liberty University Spring 2016 ANIMACY AND ALIENABILITY 2 Acceptance of Senior Honors Thesis This Senior Honors Thesis is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation from the Honors Program of Liberty University. ______________________________ Jaeshil Kim, Ph.D. Thesis Chair ______________________________ Paul Müller, Ph.D. Committee Member ______________________________ Jeffrey Ritchey, Ph.D. Committee Member ______________________________ Brenda Ayres, Ph.D. Honors Director ______________________________ Date ANIMACY AND ALIENABILITY 3 Abstract Current scholarship on English possessive constructions, the s-genitive and the of- construction, largely ignores the possessive relationships inherent in certain English compound nouns. Scholars agree that, in general, an animate possessor predicts the s- genitive while an inanimate possessor predicts the of-construction. However, the current literature rarely discusses noun compounds, such as the table leg, which also express possessive relationships. However, pragmatically and syntactically, a compound cannot be considered as a true possessive construction. Thus, this paper will examine why some compounds still display possessive semantics epiphenomenally. The noun compounds that imply possession seem to exhibit relationships prototypical of inalienable possession such as body part, part whole, and spatial relationships. Additionally, the juxtaposition of the possessor and possessum in the compound construction is reminiscent of inalienable possession in other languages. Therefore, this paper proposes that inalienability, a phenomenon not thought to be relevant in English, actually imbues noun compounds whose components exhibit an inalienable relationship with possessive semantics. -
PUMICE: a Multi-Modal Agent That Learns Concepts and Conditionals
PUMICE: A Multi-Modal Agent that Learns Concepts and Conditionals from Natural Language and Demonstrations Toby Jia-Jun Li1, Marissa Radensky2, Justin Jia1, Kirielle Singarajah1, Tom M. Mitchell1, Brad A. Myers1 1Carnegie Mellon University, 2Amherst College {tobyli, tom.mitchell, bam}@cs.cmu.edu, {justinj1, ksingara}@andrew.cmu.edu, [email protected] Figure 1. Example structure of how PUMICE learns the concepts and procedures in the command “If it’s hot, order a cup of Iced Cappuccino.” The numbers indicate the order of utterances. The screenshot on the right shows the conversational interface of PUMICE. In this interactive parsing process, the agent learns how to query the current temperature, how to order any kind of drink from Starbucks, and the generalized concept of “hot” as “a temperature (of something) is greater than another temperature”. ABSTRACT CCS Concepts Natural language programming is a promising approach to •Human-centered computing ! Natural language inter enable end users to instruct new tasks for intelligent agents. faces; However, our formative study found that end users would of ten use unclear, ambiguous or vague concepts when naturally Author Keywords instructing tasks in natural language, especially when spec Programming by Demonstration; Natural Language Pro ifying conditionals. Existing systems have limited support gramming; End User Development; Multi-modal Interaction. for letting the user teach agents new concepts or explaining unclear concepts. In this paper, we describe a new multi- INTRODUCTION modal domain-independent approach that combines natural The goal of end user development (EUD) is to empower language programming and programming-by-demonstration users with little or no programming expertise to program [43]. -
On Binding Asymmetries in Dative Alternation Constructions in L2 Spanish
On Binding Asymmetries in Dative Alternation Constructions in L2 Spanish Silvia Perpiñán and Silvina Montrul University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1. Introduction Ditransitive verbs can take a direct object and an indirect object. In English and many other languages, the order of these objects can be altered, giving as a result the Dative Construction on the one hand (I sent a package to my parents) and the Double Object Construction, (I sent my parents a package, hereafter DOC), on the other. However, not all ditransitive verbs can participate in this alternation. The study of the English dative alternation has been a recurrent topic in the language acquisition literature. This argument-structure alternation is widely recognized as an exemplar of the poverty of stimulus problem: from a limited set of data in the input, the language acquirer must somehow determine which verbs allow the alternating syntactic forms and which ones do not: you can give money to someone and donate money to someone; you can also give someone money but you definitely cannot *donate someone money. Since Spanish, apparently, does not allow DOC (give someone money), L2 learners of Spanish whose mother tongue is English have to become aware of this restriction in Spanish, without negative evidence. However, it has been noticed by Demonte (1995) and Cuervo (2001) that Spanish has a DOC, which is not identical, but which shares syntactic and, crucially, interpretive restrictions with the English counterpart. Moreover, within the Spanish Dative Construction, the order of the objects can also be inverted without superficial morpho-syntactic differences, (Pablo mandó una carta a la niña ‘Pablo sent a letter to the girl’ vs. -
2008. Pruning Some Branches from 'Branching Spacetimes'
CHAPTER 10 Pruning Some Branches from “Branching Spacetimes” John Earman* Abstract Discussions of branching time and branching spacetime have become com- mon in the philosophical literature. If properly understood, these concep- tions can be harmless. But they are sometimes used in the service of debat- able and even downright pernicious doctrines. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the pernicious branching and prune it back. 1. INTRODUCTION Talk of “branching time” and “branching spacetime” is wide spread in the philo- sophical literature. Such expressions, if properly understood, can be innocuous. But they are sometimes used in the service of debatable and even downright per- nicious doctrines. The purpose of this paper is to identify the pernicious branching and prune it back. Section 2 distinguishes three types of spacetime branching: individual branch- ing, ensemble branching, and Belnap branching. Individual branching, as the name indicates, involves a branching structure in individual spacetime models. It is argued that such branching is neither necessary nor sufficient for indeterminism, which is explicated in terms of the branching in the ensemble of spacetime mod- els satisfying the laws of physics. Belnap branching refers to the sort of branching used by the Belnap school of branching spacetimes. An attempt is made to sit- uate this sort of branching with respect to ensemble branching and individual branching. Section 3 is a sustained critique of various ways of trying to imple- ment individual branching for relativistic spacetimes. Conclusions are given in Section 4. * Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA The Ontology of Spacetime II © Elsevier BV ISSN 1871-1774, DOI: 10.1016/S1871-1774(08)00010-7 All rights reserved 187 188 Pruning Some Branches from “Branching Spacetimes” 2. -
Layers and Operators in Lakota1 Avelino Corral Esteban Universidad Autónoma De Madrid
Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 36 (2015), 1-33 Layers and operators in Lakota1 Avelino Corral Esteban Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Abstract Categories covering the expression of grammatical information such as aspect, negation, tense, mood, modality, etc., are crucial to the study of language universals. In this study, I will present an analysis of the syntax and semantics of these grammatical categories in Lakota within the Role and Reference Grammar framework (hereafter RRG) (Van Valin 1993, 2005; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997), a functional approach in which elements with a purely grammatical function are treated as ´operators`. Many languages mark Aspect-Tense- Mood/Modality information (henceforth ATM) either morphologically or syntactically. Unlike most Native American languages, which exhibit an extremely complex verbal morphological system indicating this grammatical information, Lakota, a Siouan language with a mildly synthetic / partially agglutinative morphology, expresses information relating to ATM through enclitics, auxiliary verbs and adverbs, rather than by coding it through verbal affixes. 1. Introduction The organisation of this paper is as follows: after a brief account of the most relevant morpho- syntactic features exhibited by Lakota, Section 2 attempts to shed light on the distinction between lexical words, enclitics and affixes through evidence obtained in the study of this language. Section 3 introduces the notion of ´operator` and explores the ATM system in Lakota using RRG´s theory of operator system. After a description of each grammatical category, an analysis of the linear order exhibited by the Lakota operators with respect to the nucleus of the clause are analysed in Section 4, showing that this ordering reflects the scope relations between the grammatical categories conveyed by these operators. -
Romani Syntactic Typology Evangelia Adamou, Yaron Matras
Romani Syntactic Typology Evangelia Adamou, Yaron Matras To cite this version: Evangelia Adamou, Yaron Matras. Romani Syntactic Typology. Yaron Matras; Anton Tenser. The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics, Springer, pp.187-227, 2020, 978-3-030-28104- 5. 10.1007/978-3-030-28105-2_7. halshs-02965238 HAL Id: halshs-02965238 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02965238 Submitted on 13 Oct 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. Romani syntactic typology Evangelia Adamou and Yaron Matras 1. State of the art This chapter presents an overview of the principal syntactic-typological features of Romani dialects. It draws on the discussion in Matras (2002, chapter 7) while taking into consideration more recent studies. In particular, we draw on the wealth of morpho- syntactic data that have since become available via the Romani Morpho-Syntax (RMS) database.1 The RMS data are based on responses to the Romani Morpho-Syntax questionnaire recorded from Romani speaking communities across Europe and beyond. We try to take into account a representative sample. We also take into consideration data from free-speech recordings available in the RMS database and the Pangloss Collection. -
Definiteness and Determinacy
Linguistics and Philosophy manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Definiteness and Determinacy Elizabeth Coppock · David Beaver the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later Abstract This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Defi- niteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a (weak) uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate (and thus denote an individual) or indeterminate (functioning as an existential quantifier). The latter option is observed in examples like `Anna didn't give the only invited talk at the conference', which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of `only invited talk at the conference'. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether posses- sives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them. Keywords definiteness · descriptions · possessives · predicates · type-shifting We thank Dag Haug, Reinhard Muskens, Luca Crniˇc,Cleo Condoravdi, Lucas -
Chapter 6 Mirativity and the Bulgarian Evidential System Elena Karagjosova Freie Universität Berlin
Chapter 6 Mirativity and the Bulgarian evidential system Elena Karagjosova Freie Universität Berlin This paper provides an account of the Bulgarian admirative construction andits place within the Bulgarian evidential system based on (i) new observations on the morphological, temporal, and evidential properties of the admirative, (ii) a criti- cal reexamination of existing approaches to the Bulgarian evidential system, and (iii) insights from a similar mirative construction in Spanish. I argue in particular that admirative sentences are assertions based on evidence of some sort (reporta- tive, inferential, or direct) which are contrasted against the set of beliefs held by the speaker up to the point of receiving the evidence; the speaker’s past beliefs entail a proposition that clashes with the assertion, triggering belief revision and resulting in a sense of surprise. I suggest an analysis of the admirative in terms of a mirative operator that captures the evidential, temporal, aspectual, and modal properties of the construction in a compositional fashion. The analysis suggests that although mirativity and evidentiality can be seen as separate semantic cate- gories, the Bulgarian admirative represents a cross-linguistically relevant case of a mirative extension of evidential verbal forms. Keywords: mirativity, evidentiality, fake past 1 Introduction The Bulgarian evidential system is an ongoing topic of discussion both withre- spect to its interpretation and its morphological buildup. In this paper, I focus on the currently poorly understood admirative construction. The analysis I present is based on largely unacknowledged observations and data involving the mor- phological structure, the syntactic environment, and the evidential meaning of the admirative. Elena Karagjosova. -
Argument Structure and Animacy Entailment
ARGUMENT STRUCTURE AND ANIMACY ENTAILMENT Seth A. Minkoff (Mariano Galvez University) 1. Introduction1 This paper delineates and accounts for restrictlons on the distribution of arguments whose thematic roles select them for animacy. An example of such an argument is the subject of (1) which, following standard accounts, must be animate on account of the selectional properties of the AGENT role assigned by "steal." (1) Mary stole the money. The effect of these selectional properties is attested by the unacceptability of the inanimate substitution in (2). (2) *The wind stole the money. I argue that this requirement of animacy, which I shall refer to as "animacy entailment", represents part of the AGENT thematic relation. Moreover, I assume that animacy entailment is a theoretically genuine part of any thematic relation that selects an animate argument. As I will show, this makes it possible to discern abstract syntactic principles constraining the generation of all such thematic rela tions. Another important property of the AGENT thematic role assigned to the subject position of (1), or rather of its animacy entailment, is reflected by the fact that there are sentences like (3), whose syntactic structures are identical to (1), but in which the thematic role of AGENT -or, more precisely, the animacy entailment- is optional. (3) Mary hit John. Here, the role of AGENT, or rather its animacy entailment, can be dispensed with entirely. For example, (3) could perfectly well describe a situation in Mary is asleep (1) I am grateful for all of the ways in which this article has benefited from the comments of Noam Chomsky, Ken Hale, Marco Haverkort, Carol Neidle, Orin Percus, and an anonymous reviewer. -
Word Order, Parameters and the Extended COMP
Alice Davison, University of Iowa [email protected] January 2006 Word order, parameters, and the Extended COMP projection Abstract The structure of finite CP shows some unexpected syntactic variation in the marking of finite subordinate clauses in the Indic languages, which otherwise are strongly head-final.. Languages with relative pronouns also have initial complementizers and conjunctions. Languages with final yes/no question markers allow final complementizers, either demonstratives or quotative participles. These properties define three classes, one with only final CP heads (Sinhala), one with only initial CP heads (Hindi, Panjabi, Kashmiri) and others with both possibilities. The lexical differences of final vs initial CP heads argue for expanding the CP projection into a number of specialized projections, whose heads are all final (Sinhala), all initial, or mixed. These projections explain the systematic variation in finite CPs in the Indic languages, with the exception of some additional restrictions and anomalies in the Eastern group. 1. Introduction In this paper, I examine two topics in the syntactic structure of clauses in the Indic languages. The first topic has to do with the embedding of finite clauses and especially about how embedded finite clauses are morphologically marked. The second topic focuses on patterns of linear order in languages, parameters of directionality in head position. The two topics intersect in the position of these markers of finite subordinate clauses in the Indic languages. These markers can be prefixes or suffixes, and I will propose that they are heads of functional projections, just as COMP is traditionally regarded as head of CP. The Indic languages are all fundamentally head-final languages; the lexically heads P, Adj, V and N are head-final in the surface structure, while only the functional head D is not.