ON the SYNTAX of CHINESE NOMINALS by HUIMIN JI
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Does English Have a Genitive Case? [email protected]
2. Amy Rose Deal – University of Massachusetts, Amherst Does English have a genitive case? [email protected] In written English, possessive pronouns appear without ’s in the same environments where non-pronominal DPs require ’s. (1) a. your/*you’s/*your’s book b. Moore’s/*Moore book What explains this complementarity? Various analyses suggest themselves. A. Possessive pronouns are contractions of a pronoun and ’s. (Hudson 2003: 603) B. Possessive pronouns are inflected genitives (Huddleston and Pullum 2002); a morphological deletion rule removes clitic ’s after a genitive pronoun. Analysis A consists of a single rule of a familiar type: Morphological Merger (Halle and Marantz 1993), familiar from forms like wanna and won’t. (His and its contract especially nicely.) No special lexical/vocabulary items need be postulated. Analysis B, on the other hand, requires a set of vocabulary items to spell out genitive case, as well as a rule to delete the ’s clitic following such forms, assuming ’s is a DP-level head distinct from the inflecting noun. These two accounts make divergent predictions for dialects with complex pronominals such as you all or you guys (and us/them all, depending on the speaker). Since Merger operates under adjacency, Analysis A predicts that intervention by all or guys should bleed the formation of your: only you all’s and you guys’ are predicted. There do seem to be dialects with this property, as witnessed by the American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition, entry for you-all). Call these English 1. Here, we may claim that pronouns inflect for only two cases, and Merger operations account for the rest. -
Learn Pronouns As Part of Speech for Bank & SSC Exams
Learn Pronouns as Part of Speech for Bank & SSC Exams - English Notes in PDF Are you preparing for Banking or SSC Exams? If you aim at making a career in the government sector & get a reputed job, it is very important to know the basics of English Language. To score maximum marks in this section with great accuracy, it is important for you to be prepared with the basic grammar & vocabulary. Here we are with a detailed explanatory article on Pronouns as Part of Speech with relevant examples. So, read the article carefully & then take our Online Mock Tests to check your level of preparation. Before moving ahead with Pronouns, let’s have a look at what are parts of speech in brief: Parts of Speech Parts of speech are the basic categories of words according to their function in a sentence. It is a category to which a word is assigned in accordance with its syntactic functions. English has eight main parts of speech, namely, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions & Interjections. In grammar, the parts of speech, also called lexical categories, grammatical categories or word classes is a linguistic category of words. Pronouns as Part of Speech 1 | Pronouns as part of speech are the words which are used in place of nouns like people, places, or things. They are used to avoid sounding unnatural by reusing the same noun in a sentence multiple times. In the sentence Maya saw Sanjay, and she waved at him, the pronouns she and him take the place of Maya and Sanjay, respectively. -
Possessive Constructions in Modern Low Saxon
POSSESSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN MODERN LOW SAXON a thesis submitted to the department of linguistics of stanford university in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts Jan Strunk June 2004 °c Copyright by Jan Strunk 2004 All Rights Reserved ii I certify that I have read this thesis and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Joan Bresnan (Principal Adviser) I certify that I have read this thesis and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Tom Wasow I certify that I have read this thesis and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Dan Jurafsky iii iv Abstract This thesis is a study of nominal possessive constructions in modern Low Saxon, a West Germanic language which is closely related to Dutch, Frisian, and German. After identifying the possessive constructions in current use in modern Low Saxon, I give a formal syntactic analysis of the four most common possessive constructions within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar in the ¯rst part of this thesis. The four constructions that I will analyze in detail include a pronominal possessive construction with a possessive pronoun used as a determiner of the head noun, another prenominal construction that resembles the English s-possessive, a linker construction in which a possessive pronoun occurs as a possessive marker in between a prenominal possessor phrase and the head noun, and a postnominal construction that involves the preposition van/von/vun and is largely parallel to the English of -possessive. -
The Use of Demonstrative Pronoun and Demonstrative Determiner This in Upper-Level Student Writing: a Case Study
English Language Teaching; Vol. 8, No. 5; 2015 ISSN 1916-4742 E-ISSN 1916-4750 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education The Use of Demonstrative Pronoun and Demonstrative Determiner this in Upper-Level Student Writing: A Case Study Katharina Rustipa1 1 Faculty of Language and Cultural Studies, Stikubank University (UNISBANK) Semarang, Indonesia Correspondence: Katharina Rustipa, UNISBANK Semarang, Jl. Tri Lomba Juang No.1 Semarang 50241, Indonesia. Tel: 622-4831-1668. E-mail: [email protected] Received: January 20, 2015 Accepted: February 26, 2015 Online Published: April 23, 2015 doi:10.5539/elt.v8n5p158 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v8n5p158 Abstract Demonstrative this is worthy to investigate because of the role of this as a common cohesive device in academic writing. This study attempted to find out the variables underlying the realization of demonstrative this in graduate-student writing of Semarang State University, Indonesia. The data of the study were collected by asking three groups of students (first semester, second semester, third semester students) to write an essay. The collected data were analyzed by identifying, classifying, calculating, and interpreting. Interviewing to several students was also done to find out the reasons underlying the use of attended and unattended this. Comparing the research results to those of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Paper (MICUSP) as proficient graduate-student writing was done in order to know the position of graduate-student writing of Semarang State University in reference to MICUSP. The conclusion of the research results is that most occurrences of demonstrative this are attended and these occurrences are stable across levels, similar to those in MICUSP. -
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. -
Quantifying Constructions in English and Chinese a Corpus-Based Contrastive Study
Quantifying Constructions in English and Chinese A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Tony McEnery1 and Richard Xiao1 Abstract Quantifiers are a linguistic concept that mirrors quantity in reality. They indicate ‘how many’ or ‘how much’, for example, the number of entities denoted by a noun, the count of actions or events, the length of time, and the distance in space. All human languages have linguistic devices that express such ideas, though the encoding of natural language semantics can vary from language to language. This paper compares quantifying constructions in English and Chinese on the basis of comparable corpora of spoken and written data in the two languages. We will focus on classifiers in Chinese and their counterparts in English, as well as the interaction between quantifying constructions and progressives, which is normally ruled out by aspect theory, with the aim of addressing the following research questions: • What linguistic devices are used in Chinese and English for quantification? • How different (or similar) are classifiers in Chinese as a classifier language and in English as a non-classifier language? • Can quantifiers interact with progressives in English and Chinese if such interactions are theoretically ruled out by aspect theory? Before these research questions are explored in detail, it is appropriate to first present the principal data used in this study, which includes two written corpora and two spoken corpora. The Freiburg-LOB (FLOB) corpus is a recent update of LOB, which is composed of approximately one million tokens of written British English sampled proportionally from fifteen text categories published in the early 1990s (Hundt et al. -
Gender Differences in the Personal Pronouns Usage on the Corpus of Congressional Speeches
jrds (print) issn 2052-417x jrds (online) issn 2052-4188 Article Gender differences in the personal pronouns usage on the corpus of congressional speeches Dragana Bozic Lenard Abstract Gender differences in language have been extensively investigated by sociolinguists since the 1960s. This paper aimed to study gender differences in the personal pro- nouns usage on the corpus of the 113th United States Congress. All uninterrupted speeches (672 by women and 3,655 by men) whose transcripts were downloaded from the official repository Thomas were analyzed with the text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count calculating the degree to which the politicians use personal pronouns. In addition, the computational analysis results were further analyzed with the software for statistical analysis SPSS. The quantitative analysis results pointed to minor statistically significant gender differences in the personal pronouns usage. However, the qualitative analysis showed more subtle gender differ- ences pointing to linguistic changes in stereotypization. Keywords: congressional speeches; gender differences; LIWC; SPSS; personal pronouns 1. Introduction Language is one of the most important means of humans’ expression of thoughts. Guided by thoughts, choices people make in the forms of expres- sion can be paralleled to their perception of things from the real world and consequently the way they express themselves about those things. Hence, two people may be speaking about the same thing with their descriptions being Affiliation University of Osijek, Osijek, Croatia. email: [email protected] jrds vol 3.2 2016 161–188 https://doi.org/10.1558/jrds.30111 ©2017, equinox publishing 162 Gender differences in personal pronouns usage utterly unrelated. -
Nominative and Objective Cases Reteaching
Name Date Lesson 1 Nominative and Objective Cases Reteaching Personal pronouns change form depending on how they function in a sentence. The form of a pronoun is called its case. The cases are nominative, objective, and possessive. Nominative Objective Possessive Singular First Person I me my, mine Second Person you you your, yours Third Person he, she, it him, her, it his, her, hers, its Plural First Person we us our, ours Second Person you you your, yours Third Person they them their, theirs The nominative form of a personal pronoun is used when the pronoun functions as a subject, as part of a compound subject, or as a predicate nominative. A pronoun used as a predicate nominative is called a predicate pronoun. It takes the nominative case. SUBJECT She is my mother’s niece. PART OF COMPOUND SUBJECT She and I are cousins. PREDICATE PRONOUN The cousin I most resemble is she. The objective form of a personal pronoun is used when the pronoun functions as a direct object, indirect object, or object of a preposition. Use it also when the pronoun is part of a compound object, or when it’s used with an infinitive. An infinitive is the base form of a verb preceded by the word to —to visit, to jog, to play. DIRECT OBJECT You can see her in these old family portraits. INDIRECT OBJECT My aunt sent me invitations to her wedding. OBJECT OF PREPOSITION A distant cousin has been searching for us. PART OF COMPOUND OBJECT My aunt reserved rooms for them and us. -
1 English Subjectless Tagged Sentences Paul Kay Department Of
1 English subjectless tagged sentences Paul Kay Department of Linguistics University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 [email protected] 2 Abstract A colloquial English sentence like Fooled us, didn't they? contains a finite main verb but no expressed subject. The identity of the missing subject of fooled is recovered from the tag subject they: compare Fooled us, didn't she?, Fooled us, didn't you? This paper argues (1) that such subjectless tagged sentences (STSs) pose a problem for grammatical approaches based on movement and empty categories and (2) that STSs receive a revealing analysis as part of a finely articulated family of tagged sentence constructions when viewed within a non-derivational, constructional, multiple-inheritance-based approach.* *I would like to thank Peter Culicover, Liliane Haegeman, Charles Fillmore Andreas Kathol and Richard Oehrle for comments on previous versions of this paper, as well as an anonymous reviewer for Language. They have doubtless offered more good advice than I have accepted. 3 0. Introduction. It has been argued from several points of view that whatever can be done with empty categories (ecs) can be done without them (Ades and Steedman 1982, Gazdar et al. 1984, Kaplan and Zaenen 1989, Pollard and Sag 1994 chapter 9, Sag and Fodor 1994, Kay and Fillmore 1999, Sag 1999). It has also been argued that, because there is no hard evidence for their existence, linguistic theory would be better off dispensing with these unobservable entities (Pickering and Barry 1991, Sag and Fodor 1994, Sag 1999).1 The present paper purports to take the argument one step further by showing that there are things that can be done without empty categories that cannot be done with them, at least not with any of the ecs currently available. -
Department of English and American Studies Possessive Pronouns in English and Czech Works of Fiction, Their Use with Parts of Hu
Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Kristýna Onderková Possessive Pronouns in English and Czech Works of Fiction, Their Use with Parts of Human Body and Translation Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek 2009 0 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… 1 I would like to express thanks to my supervisor, Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek, for his valuable advice. 2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction.................................................................................................................... 5 2 Theory.............................................................................................................................. 7 2.1 English possessive pronouns.......................................................................... 7 2.1.1 Grammatical properties................................................................... 7 2.1.2 Use...................................................................................................... 8 2.2 Czech possessive pronouns............................................................................. 9 2.2.1 Grammatical properties................................................................... 10 2.2.2 Use...................................................................................................... 11 2.3 Translating possessive pronouns................................................................... -
Sequence-Of-Tense and the Features of Finite Tenses Karen Zagona University of Washington*
Sequence-of-tense and the Features of Finite Tenses Karen Zagona University of Washington* Abstract Sequence-of-tense (SOT) is often described as a (past) tense verb form that does not correspond to a semantically interpretable tense. Since SOT clauses behave in other respects like finite clauses, the question arises as to whether the syntactic category Tense has to be distinguished from the functional category tense. I claim that SOT clauses do in fact contain interpretable PRESENT tense. The “past” form is analyzed as a manifestation of agreement with the (matrix past) controller of the SOT clause evaluation time. One implication of this analysis is that finite verb forms should be analyzed as representing features that correspond to functional categories higher in clause structure, including those of the clausal left periphery. SOT morphology then sheds light on the existence of a series of finer- grained functional heads that contribute to tense construal, and to verbal paradigms. These include Tense, Modality and Force. 1. Introduction The phenomenon of sequence-of-tense (SOT) poses several challenges for the standard assumption that a “past tense” verb form signals the presence of a functional category in clause structure with an interpretable ‘past’ value. SOT is illustrated by the ‘simultaneous’ reading of sentence (1): (1) Terry believed that Sue was pregnant. a. The time of Sue’s pregnancy precedes time of Terry’s belief (precedence) b. The time of Sue’ pregnancy overlaps time of Terry’s belief (simultaneity) For the ‘precedence’ reading in (1a), the embedded clause tense is semantically transparent in the sense that the past form was corresponds to a past ordering relation (relative to the time of Terry’s belief). -
Topic Structures in Chinese Author(S): Xu Liejiong and D
Linguistic Society of America Topic Structures in Chinese Author(s): Xu Liejiong and D. Terence Langendoen Source: Language, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 1-27 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413419 Accessed: 11/05/2009 22:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lsa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language. http://www.jstor.org TOPIC STRUCTURES IN CHINESE Xu LIEJIONG D.