Distinguishing Speech Act Roles from Grammatial Person Features
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Sign Language Typology Series
SIGN LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY SERIES The Sign Language Typology Series is dedicated to the comparative study of sign languages around the world. Individual or collective works that systematically explore typological variation across sign languages are the focus of this series, with particular emphasis on undocumented, underdescribed and endangered sign languages. The scope of the series primarily includes cross-linguistic studies of grammatical domains across a larger or smaller sample of sign languages, but also encompasses the study of individual sign languages from a typological perspective and comparison between signed and spoken languages in terms of language modality, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to sign language typology. Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Languages Edited by Ulrike Zeshan Sign Language Typology Series No. 1 / Interrogative and negative constructions in sign languages / Ulrike Zeshan (ed.) / Nijmegen: Ishara Press 2006. ISBN-10: 90-8656-001-6 ISBN-13: 978-90-8656-001-1 © Ishara Press Stichting DEF Wundtlaan 1 6525XD Nijmegen The Netherlands Fax: +31-24-3521213 email: [email protected] http://ishara.def-intl.org Cover design: Sibaji Panda Printed in the Netherlands First published 2006 Catalogue copy of this book available at Depot van Nederlandse Publicaties, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag (www.kb.nl/depot) To the deaf pioneers in developing countries who have inspired all my work Contents Preface........................................................................................................10 -
Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect Peter Auer & Vanessa Siegel
1 Grammatical gender in the German multiethnolect Peter Auer & Vanessa Siegel Contact: Deutsches Seminar, Universität Freiburg, D-79089 Freiburg [email protected], [email protected] Abstract While major restructurations and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, the article demonstrates that the three-fold gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers of immigrant background. We inves- tigate gender in a German multiethnolect, based on a corpus of appr. 17 hours of spontaneous speech by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly of Turkish and Balkan backgrounds). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from child- hood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent processes, such as the frequent use of bare nouns determiners in grammatical contexts where German requires it. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective/noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized, gender-neutral suffix for pre-nominal adjectives (i.e. schwa). The disappearance of gender/case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical cat- egory of gender is lost in A + N phrases (without determiner). 1. Introduction Modern German differs from most other Germanic languages -
Plural Noun Verb Agreement
Plural Noun Verb Agreement Domenico usually syndicated days or casseroles recollectively when aphelian Jonah gelatinated finest and municipally. wittinglyTubular Nedwhen usually Roderic outsteps slavers some his culmination. cripplers or niggardising jingoistically. Burning and chronic Pate never supervening The individual actions of this case, trousers are replacing and verb and the sat are likely to match within noun with which verb agreement mistakes Subject-Verb all Across Prepositional Phrases AJE. That is that singular subject belongs with a singular verb form when a plural. For example topic sentence anyone has incorrect subject-verb agreement. Subject their Agreement TIP Sheets Butte College. Do collective nouns need the plural verb involve The Editor. We can help singular though plural verbs with many collective nouns Pamela and government is she of these. What verb agreement and improve your device. It's easy actually shine a bitter subject contains both a vast and its plural verb or pronoun joined by or the hero just agrees with lean part off the subject. If that noun is plural then the bound is now Take a look at them following two sentences Neither the players nor a coach wants to lose the motto Neither a coach. A random noun at the non-essential clause placed right degree to learn verb in. AWE Grammar Subject-Verb Agreement. It is a poor subject worth the presence of the only noun participants. Subject-Verb Agreement Educationcom. Subject-Verb Agreement schedule and verbs must living in. SUBJECT AND powerful AGREEMENT. Subject-Verb Agreement Examples Singular nor plural subjects are nouns and the rules for those are usually straightforward with most cases you can telling the. -
Measuring the Similarity of Grammatical Gender Systems by Comparing Partitions
Measuring the Similarity of Grammatical Gender Systems by Comparing Partitions Arya D. McCarthy Adina Williams Shijia Liu David Yarowsky Ryan Cotterell Johns Hopkins University, Facebook AI Research, ETH Zurich [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract A grammatical gender system divides a lex- icon into a small number of relatively fixed grammatical categories. How similar are these gender systems across languages? To quantify the similarity, we define gender systems ex- (a) German, K = 3 (b) Spanish, K = 2 tensionally, thereby reducing the problem of comparisons between languages’ gender sys- Figure 1: Two gender systems partitioning N = 6 con- tems to cluster evaluation. We borrow a rich cepts. German (a) has three communities: Obst (fruit) inventory of statistical tools for cluster evalu- and Gras (grass) are neuter, Mond (moon) and Baum ation from the field of community detection (tree) are masculine, Blume (flower) and Sonne (sun) (Driver and Kroeber, 1932; Cattell, 1945), that are feminine. Spanish (b) has two communities: fruta enable us to craft novel information-theoretic (fruit), luna (moon), and flor are feminine, and cesped metrics for measuring similarity between gen- (grass), arbol (tree), and sol (sun) are masculine. der systems. We first validate our metrics, then use them to measure gender system similarity in 20 languages. Finally, we ask whether our exhaustively divides up the language’s nouns; that gender system similarities alone are sufficient is, the union of gender categories is the entire to reconstruct historical relationships between languages. Towards this end, we make phylo- nominal lexicon. -
Will Oxford Curriculum Vitae May 30, 2019
Will Oxford Curriculum vitae May 30, 2019 CONTACT INFORMATION Address Department of Linguistics University of Manitoba 545 Fletcher Argue Building 15 Chancellor’s Circle Winnipeg, MB R3T 5V5 Phone 204-474-9623 Email [email protected] Website http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/∼oxfordwr EDUCATION 2014 PhD, University of Toronto (Linguistics) Thesis: Microparameters of agreement: A diachronic perspective on Algonquian verb inflection 2007 MA, Memorial University of Newfoundland (Linguistics) Thesis: Towards a grammar of Innu-aimun particles 2005 BA, Memorial University of Newfoundland (Linguistics and French) 2005 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, MIT/Harvard PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS 2019– Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Manitoba 2014–19 Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Manitoba 2013–14 Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, University of Manitoba PUBLICATIONS Journal articles 2018 Oxford, Will. 2018. Inverse marking and Multiple Agree in Algonquin: Complementar- ity and variability. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. (Published online; volume number to follow.) 2017 Oxford, Will. 2017. The Activity Condition as a microparameter. Linguistic Inquiry 48: 711–722. Will Oxford • 2 of 18 2017 Oxford, Will. 2017. Variation and change in the Degree Phrase. Linguistic Variation 17: 98–110. 2015 Oxford, Will. 2015. Patterns of contrast in phonological change: Evidence from Algo- nquian vowel systems. Language 91: 308–357. under Lochbihler, Bethany, Will Oxford, and Nicholas Welch. The person-animacy connection: revision Evidence from Algonquian and Dene. Revisions requested by Linguistic Inquiry. Books and edited volumes in prep Ghomeshi, Jila, and Will Oxford, eds. Special double issue of Canadian Journal of Lin- guistics on grammatical person. 2008 Oxford, Will. -
Extending Research on the Influence of Grammatical Gender on Object
doi:10.5128/ERYa13.14 extending reSearCh on the influenCe of grammatiCal gender on objeCt ClaSSifiCation: a CroSS-linguiStiC Study Comparing eStonian, italian and lithuanian native SpeakerS Luca Vernich, Reili Argus, Laura Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė Abstract. Using different experimental tasks, researchers have pointed 13, 223–240 EESTI RAKENDUSLINGVISTIKA ÜHINGU AASTARAAMAT to a possible correlation between grammatical gender and classification behaviour. Such effects, however, have been found comparing speakers of a relatively small set of languages. Therefore, it’s not clear whether evidence gathered can be generalized and extended to languages that are typologically different from those studied so far. To the best of our knowledge, Baltic and Finno-Ugric languages have never been exam- ined in this respect. While most previous studies have used English as an example of gender-free languages, we chose Estonian because – contrary to English and like all Finno-Ugric languages – it does not use gendered pronouns (‘he’ vs. ‘she’) and is therefore more suitable as a baseline. We chose Lithuanian because the gender system of Baltic languages is interestingly different from the system of Romance and German languages tested so far. Taken together, our results support and extend previous findings and suggest that they are not restricted to a small group of languages. Keywords: grammatical gender, categorization, object classification, language & cognition, linguistic relativity, Estonian, Lithuanian, Italian 1. Introduction Research done in recent years suggests that our native language can affect non-verbal cognition and interfere with a variety of tasks. Taken together, psycholinguistic evidence points to a possible correlation between subjects’ behaviour in laboratory settings and certain lexical or morphological features of their native language. -
Person and Number Agreement in American Sign Language
Person and Number Agreement in American Sign Language Hyun-Jong Hahm The University of Texas at Austin Proceedings of the HPSG06 Conference Linguistic Modelling Laboratory Institute for Parallel Processing Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Sofia Held in Varna Stefan Müller (Editor) 2006 CSLI Publications http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/ Abstract American Sign Language (ASL) has a group of verbs showing agreement with the subject or/and object argument. There has not been analysis on especially number agreement. This paper analyzes person and number agreement within the HPSG framework. I discuss person and number hierarchy in ASL. The argument of agreement verbs can be omitted as in languages like Italian. The constraints on the type agreement-verb have the information on argument optionality. 1 Introduction1 During the past fifty years sign languages have been recognized as genuine languages with their own distinctive structure. Signed languages and spoken languages have many similarities, but also differ due to the different modalities: visual-gestural modality vs. auditory-vocal modality. This paper examines a common natural language phenomenon, verb agreement in American Sign Language (ASL, hereafter) through the recordings of a native signer within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).2 Most analyses of signed languages have been based largely on transformational grammar. Cormier et al. (1999) discusses locus agreement in ASL, which is the first work in the HPSG framework. However, their work is limited to locus agreement with singular arguments. This paper examines person and number verb agreement. One type of verb shows agreement with object or/and subject arguments. Main focus in this paper is to show what constraints agreement verbs have, to explain the subject/object-verb agreement. -
Chapter 3: Gender in Amharic Nominals
Page 1 of 31 CHAPTER 3: GENDER IN AMHARIC NOMINALS 1 INTRODUCTION Partially in preparation for the study of gender agreement in Chapter X, in this chapter I examine the gender system of Amharic nominals. I show how natural gender (aka semantic or biological gender, or sex) and grammatical gender (e.g., the arbitrary gender on inanimate objects) both must be part of the analysis of the Amharic gender system, and use Distributed Morphology assumptions about word formation to capture the distinction in a novel way. In Section 2, the main descriptive facts about gender in Amharic are presented. In Sections 3 and 4, I investigate where gender features are located within DPs in Amharic, arguing that natural gender (aka semantic or biological gender) is part of the feature bundle associated with the nominalizing head n, whereas grammatical gender is a diacritic feature on roots. In Section 4, I develop an analysis of gender using licensing conditions that predicts which of the two sources for gender are used for agreement. Previous analyses of gender and the broader implications of the analysis here are discussed in Section 5. Section 6 concludes. 2 GENDER IN NOMINALS As mentioned in Chapter 1, Amharic has two genders: masculine and feminine. The Amharic system for assigning gender is more reliant on natural gender (also called semantic or biological gender) than many of the more widely-known gender assignment systems (e.g., Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, etc.). For example, there is not a more or less equal division of the set of inanimate nouns into masculine and feminine. -
Grammatical Gender and Linguistic Complexity
Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity Volume I: General issues and specific studies Edited by Francesca Di Garbo Bruno Olsson Bernhard Wälchli language Studies in Diversity Linguistics 26 science press Studies in Diversity Linguistics Editor: Martin Haspelmath In this series: 1. Handschuh, Corinna. A typology of marked-S languages. 2. Rießler, Michael. Adjective attribution. 3. Klamer, Marian (ed.). The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology. 4. Berghäll, Liisa. A grammar of Mauwake (Papua New Guinea). 5. Wilbur, Joshua. A grammar of Pite Saami. 6. Dahl, Östen. Grammaticalization in the North: Noun phrase morphosyntax in Scandinavian vernaculars. 7. Schackow, Diana. A grammar of Yakkha. 8. Liljegren, Henrik. A grammar of Palula. 9. Shimelman, Aviva. A grammar of Yauyos Quechua. 10. Rudin, Catherine & Bryan James Gordon (eds.). Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics. 11. Kluge, Angela. A grammar of Papuan Malay. 12. Kieviet, Paulus. A grammar of Rapa Nui. 13. Michaud, Alexis. Tone in Yongning Na: Lexical tones and morphotonology. 14. Enfield, N. J. (ed.). Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistic systems. 15. Gutman, Ariel. Attributive constructions in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic. 16. Bisang, Walter & Andrej Malchukov (eds.). Unity and diversity in grammaticalization scenarios. 17. Stenzel, Kristine & Bruna Franchetto (eds.). On this and other worlds: Voices from Amazonia. 18. Paggio, Patrizia and Albert Gatt (eds.). The languages of Malta. 19. Seržant, Ilja A. & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (eds.). Diachrony of differential argument marking. 20. Hölzl, Andreas. A typology of questions in Northeast Asia and beyond: An ecological perspective. 21. Riesberg, Sonja, Asako Shiohara & Atsuko Utsumi (eds.). Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages. -
Pragmatic Person Features in Pronominal and Clausal Speech Act Phrases Hailey Hyekyeong Ceong* Abstract. This Paper Proposes
2021. Proc Ling Soc Amer 6(1). 484–498. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4984. Pragmatic person features in pronominal and clausal speech act phrases Hailey Hyekyeong Ceong* Abstract. This paper proposes the necessity of pragmatic person features (Ritter and Wiltschko 2018) in pronominal and clausal speech act phrases in Korean, giving three main arguments for such necessity: (i) pragmatic person [ADDRESSEE] is needed for hearsay mye which expresses the meaning of you told me without the lexical verb of saying, (ii) pragmatic person [SPEAKER] is needed for the unequal distribution of first-person plural pronouns with exhortative ca ‘let us’, and (iii) pragmatic persons [SPEAKER], and [ADDRESSEE] are needed for the asymmetric distribution of a dative goal argument in secondhand exhortatives. Based on the compatibility and incompatibility of exhortative ca- and secondhand exhortative ca- mye clauses with a first-person pronoun (e.g., na ‘I’, ce ‘I’, wuli ‘we’, and cehuy ‘we’), I argue that pragmatic person features are needed in syntax to account for their distribution. Keywords. person; formality; clusivity; speech act phrases; hearsay; Korean 1. Introduction. This paper investigates pragmatic person features in pronominal and clausal speech act phrases focusing on the properties of first-and secondhand exhortatives in Korean. Based largely on evidence from a survey of variable pronominal paradigms across languages, Ritter and Wiltschko (2018) state that some languages lexicalize the distinction between prag- matic and grammatical person features. In this paper, I argue, on the basis of the distribution and interpretation of first-and secondhand exhortative markers, first-person pronouns, and the (dis-) agreement with the head of exhortatives and a first-person pronoun, that the distinction is lexical- ized in Korean as well. -
The Proof Is in the Pronoun: Grammatical and Semantic Gender in Anglo Saxon
Athens Journal of Philology - Volume 4, Issue 4 – Pages 257-278 The Proof is in the Pronoun: Grammatical and Semantic Gender in Anglo Saxon By John M. Ryan In the literature on gender systems, anaphoric pronouns are commonly given the proverbial backseat to nouns and even nominal modifiers such as adjectives; however, as this paper will point out, in the case of Old English, the pronominal system played a major role in the development of the gender system that we employ today. Following Curzan (2003), who draws on the Helsinki corpus of Old English texts, this paper will demonstrate how the pronominal gender system in Old English, like its Modern counterpart today, might very well serve as a window to the mind of the Old English speaker and what s/he perceived as "natural" gender. I will show how the pronominal gender system of Old English has in actuality evolved very little into Modern English. I will argue that in Old English for nouns there were two very distinct gender systems: 1) grammatical (e.g., wif [neuter] "woman"); and 2) semantic (or "natural") (e.g., modor [feminine] "mother"), that operated simultaneously. For Old English pronouns, however, I suggest a more complex gender system than for nouns, one that: 1) preferred/ selected "natural" gender pronouns for human or human-like referents despite the grammatical gender of the referent; and 2) preferred/selected grammatical gender for non-human or inanimate referents throughout the Old English period, ultimately gravitating toward overall preference for natural, or semantic, gender by the early Middle English period. -
An Exploration of the Encoding of Grammatical Gender in Word Embeddings
An exploration of the encoding of grammatical gender in word embeddings Hartger Veeman Ali Basirat Dep. of Linguistics and Philology Dep. of Linguistics and Philology Uppsala University Uppsala University [email protected] ali.basirat@lingfil.uu.se Abstract encoded in word embeddings is of interest because it can contribute to the discussion of how nouns The vector representation of words, known as of a language are classified into different gender word embeddings, has opened a new research categories. approach in linguistic studies. These represen- tations can capture different types of informa- This paper explores the presence of information tion about words. The grammatical gender of about grammatical gender in word embeddings nouns is a typical classification of nouns based from three perspectives: on their formal and semantic properties. The study of grammatical gender based on word 1. Examine how such information is encoded embeddings can give insight into discussions across languages using a model transfer be- on how grammatical genders are determined. tween languages. In this study, we compare different sets of word embeddings according to the accuracy of 2. Determine the classifier’s reliance on seman- a neural classifier determining the grammati- tic information by using contextualized word cal gender of nouns. It is found that there is an embeddings. overlap in how grammatical gender is encoded in Swedish, Danish, and Dutch embeddings. 3. Test the effect of gender agreements between Our experimental results on the contextualized nouns and other words categories on the infor- embeddings pointed out that adding more con- mation encoded into word embeddings.