DOCSLIB.ORG

On the Periphery of the English Adverb Olga Shevchenko Vitus Bering Kamchatka State University Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
On the Periphery of the English Adverb Olga Shevchenko Vitus Bering Kamchatka State University Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia SSRG International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (SSRG-IJHSS) – Volume 6 Issue 5 – Sep – Oct 2019 On the Periphery of the English Adverb Olga Shevchenko Vitus Bering Kamchatka State University Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia Abstract category belonging to the periphery. They share The prototypical approach is one of the characteristic features with more other examples than important achievements of cognitive grammar. these peripheral instances). The peripheral cases of a According to it, a lot of intricate phenomena category share characteristics with fewer other cases, observed in the English part-of-speech system can they have less in common with the other members of find explanation of their nature. The English adverb the category which are to be found close to the is not either a typical notional or formal part of prototype [5]. speech, it combines the characteristic features of both these groups. Besides, its borders are not clearly II. THE PROTOTYPICAL NATURE OF THE defined as a lot of words often referred to as adverbs ADVERB belong to the intermediary zones sharing properties The principles of cognitive grammar, among with other parts of speech which is manifested in them the prototypical approach, can work well in their semantic, morphological and syntactic description of the English part-of-speech system. peculiarities. The meaning of some adverbs is close Parts of speech are often characterized as classes of to that of pronouns; adverbs are either invariable or words which differ in grammatical meaning, the set form degrees of comparison; together with its most of morphological categories (or form), and syntactic characteristic syntactic function of adverbial modifier properties (combinability and the role in the the adverb can be used as practically any part of the sentence). Within any part of speech the prototype sentence except the predicate. and the periphery can be found; besides, there are intermediary zones where we can find units Keywords – prototype, periphery. intermediary zone, combining properties of two or even more parts of notional parts of speech, formal parts of speech, speech. The word much presents an example of the adverb, semantic group, adverbial modifier. kind: basing on the criteria mentioned above we see that in its meaning it has a lot in common with pronouns as it does not nominate, its function is not I. INTRODUCTION nominating but deictic. It points to some quantity, and At present time cognitive grammar has this peculiarity makes it close to numerals. In some become an effective instrument of language study. contexts it functions like an adverb of degree. As to However, the interpretation of this term is rather its paradigm, it has degrees of comparison and shares wide; some linguists think it is not a single theory but this category with adjectives. So the word much an approach that “has adopted a common set of core combines a lot of features and is to be found in the commitments and guiding principles, which has led to intermediary zone formed by the periphery of a diverse range of complementary, overlapping (and adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and numerals. The use sometimes competing) theories” [3]. of the prototypical method gives us an opportunity to The principles of cognitive grammar are treat such cases not as exceptions but as evidence of widely applied nowadays in different spheres of interaction between parts of speech. language: phonology, lexical semantics and syntax The adverb occupies a special position in the [1]. system of parts of speech as a lot of problems are One of the basic notions of cognitive connected with it which concern the prototypical linguistics is the prototype; its nature has been studied essence of this part of speech. These problems, by a considerable number of scientists. According to grammatical as to their nature, are closely connected the linguistic investigations it is characterized by with the lexical meaning of adverbs. From this point certain features frequently mentioned in the literature of view adverbs have been classified more than once on the subject, among which there is a family- which is natural for classifications of linguistic resemblance structure; different degrees of category phenomena based on the semantic criterion. Henry membership (as not every member is equally Sweet described the following semantic types of representative for a category); blurriness at the edges adverbs: those of place, time, order, quantity, manner, [5]. Several hypotheses have been put forward to cause, and assertion [8]. The classification suggested account for the existence of prototypes. From the by D. Biber a century later differs from this one to point of view of the referential theory formulated by some extent and presents another list of types: place, E. Rosch and developed by other linguists, the cause time, manner, degree, additive / restrictive, stance, of prototypicality lies in the fact that some examples linking, the three major classes being circumstance, of a category have more in common with other stance, and linking ones [2]. In each of these types the examples of the category than certain members of the prototype and the periphery are to be found, and ISSN: 2394 - 2703 www.internationaljournalssrg.org Page 21 SSRG International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (SSRG-IJHSS) – Volume 6 Issue 5 – Sep – Oct 2019 besides, in each of them there are some phenomena 4) Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich any more (R. that can be qualified as belonging to the intermediary Bradbury). zones. 5) It was now or never, she decided (N. Roberts). In sentences 4 and 5 adverbs are used in the functions III. ADVERBS OF PLACE AND TIME of an attribute and of a predicative which are typical Adverbs of place and time can be referred to of adjectives as they describe property of a thing as circumstantial because they describe some external denoted by the subject. factors of an action. Some of them are invariable All these instances illustrate the periphery of while others have degrees of comparison. They the parts of the sentence expressed by adverbs. So the perform the function of an adverbial modifier and in use in these unusual syntactic roles makes such this case they can modify either an action alone or the seemingly typical adverbs as now, here belong to the whole situation. In other words, among them there are periphery of the corresponding parts of the sentence. modifiers proper as they modify a verb or an The notions of time and space are closely adjective; and adverbials which are elements of a connected; it is often mentioned that they belong to clause [2]. Among these adverbs there are some the same philosophical category – temporal / spatial pronominal adverbs which resemble pronouns as the localization of some event or action. That is why lexical meaning of some of them can be rather vague: here, being an adverb of place, can render temporal they do not name time or place but just point to them meaning and this tradition goes back to the Old (now, then; here, there). Like formal words, they are English period. So the borderline between adverbs of invariable and have high frequency. The same place and those of time sometimes tends to disappear. features of most pronouns make them also close to Another problem concerns the status of the formal words. second element of the so-called composite verbs like Their intermediary position in the system of stand up, give up. A lot of theories have been put the parts of speech results in the variety of their forward to define their nature. The question arises syntactic functions: mostly adverbs are used as whether they are separate words or just morphemes, adverbial modifiers of time, place, manner, degree like in German. Most grammarians, however, treat which corresponds to their semantic groups. them as separate words but give them different However, sometimes they perform other functions, names: postpositions, postpositives, preposition-like and such phenomena result in blurring the borderline adverbs, etc. It is hardly possible to explain their between different parts of the sentence. In such cases nature unambiguously because their roles are various: they display their nominal nature and are used in they can be used in the adverbial meanings some functions typical of nouns and adjectives: expressing the direction of motion: “Jump in, 1) Right now isn’t the time to go away and leave inspector,” I said, opening the door of the car (A. him (R. Pilcher). Christie). Besides, they can intensify the meaning of 2) Still, anywhere you recommend is sure to be the verb: I always mix up those two words (A. pretty comfortable (A. Christie). Christie). What is more, they can completely change In sentence 1 now which is mostly used as an the original meaning of the verb: We each put up with adverbial of time performs the function of the subject. the little quirks of the people we love (C. Ahern). At However, it has a clear temporal meaning, so this any rate, all these peculiarities make it necessary to type of subject is to be found on the periphery of this treat such words as peripheral elements or even part of the sentence which expresses a thing (in the belonging to the intermediary zones. widest sense of the word). In a similar way the subject of sentence 2 can be described, as it is also IV. ADVERBS OF MANNER expressed by an adverb, this time rendering spatial Adverbs of manner admit of forming relations. Examples in which the adverb is one of the degrees of comparison; on the one hand, the part of homogeneous subjects and stands next to a noun are speech becomes declinable which makes it close to especially obvious: Here and his bedroom were the the notional ones; on the other hand, such phenomena only rooms in the house she allowed his toys (C.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Subject Relatives and Expletives in Early New High German
    Subject Relatives and Expletives in Early New High German CAITLIN LIGHT University of Pennsylvania Introduction The status of the subject position in German has been the source of some de- bate.1 For example, some studies (Biberauer 2004; Richards and Biberauer 2005) have argued that German does not have an EPP requirement in the traditional sense. The absence of an expletive that occurs specifically in the subject position (as op- posed to the topic position in Spec,CP) seems to support the argument that Spec,TP has no special status in German. This paper will argue against such analyses, and show that in historical stages of German, we see evidence of a subject expletive licensed specifically to fill Spec,TP. This expletive, da in Early New High German (ENHG), is merged specifically when the logical subject does not move to Spec,TP, leaving the position empty. This sup- ports a traditional analysis of the EPP in German. Furthermore, I will show that the existence of expletive da lends support to the argument that two (non-topic) sub- ject positions are available in the German clause structure (cf. Haeberli 1999, 2000, 2005), which I take to be Spec,TP and Spec,vP (the base position of the subject). This study is based on data from a parsed corpus of Martin Luther’s Septem- bertestament, a translation of the New Testament published in 1522. Luther in- tended for his Bible translation to be accessible to a wide audience, and hence the text represents a more colloquial sample of ENHG. The Septembertestament cor- pus, at the time of this study, consisted of approximately 40,000 words that have been fully POS-tagged and parsed.
    [Show full text]
  • Portuguese Syntax
    Eckhard Bick PORTUGUESE SYNTAX Teaching manual Eckhard Bick, Portuguese Syntax Last updated: January 2000 2 Eckhard Bick, Portuguese Syntax 1. Introduction: Grammatical conventions 5 1.1. The flat classical model: word function, no form 6 1.2. Pure Dependency Grammar: word chains (syntactic form), no function 6 1.3. Pure Constituent Grammar: hierarchical word grouping (syntactic form), no function 7 1.4. Adding function 8 1.4.1. Dependency Grammar with function labels 8 1.4.2. Constraint Grammar 8 1.4.3. Enriched Constituent Grammar 9 2. Building trees: The notion of constituent 11 3. Clause level functions 14 3.1. Clause level arguments (valency governed) 14 3.2. Clause level adjuncts (not valency governed) 18 3.3. Syntactic function vs. semantic function 25 4. Subordination 29 5. The function of verbal constituents 34 6. Group forms and group level constituent function 38 6.1. Noun phrases (np) 40 6.2. Ad-word phrases (ap) 47 6.3. Prepositional phrases (pp) 51 6.4. Pronoun phrases 56 7. Clause types 59 7.1. Finite subclauses 62 7.1.1. Nominal finite subclauses 62 7.1.2. Attributive finite subclauses 63 7.1.3. Adverbial finite subclauses 63 7.2. Non-finite subclauses 64 7.2.1. Infinitive subclauses 64 7.2.2. Gerund subclauses 65 7.2.3. Participle subclauses 68 7.2.3.1. Attributive participles 68 7.2.3.2. Participles in verb chains 69 7.2.3.3. Ablativus absolutus 70 7.3. Averbal subclauses 73 7.4. ACI and causatives 76 8. Co-ordination 82 9.
    [Show full text]
  • Adpositional Constructions of Location and Motion in Dutch
    Adpositional constructions of location and motion in Dutch Hans Smessaert, William Van Belle & Ingrid Van Canegem-Ardijns KU Leuven, KU Leuven & KHLeuven In traditional grammar, constructions of location and motion are standardly considered as adverbial adjuncts, i.e. as constituents that do not belong to the nuclear or core elements of the clause. However, in Dutch, as in many other languages, there are different classes of verbal predicates which require the presence of a location or motion constituent in order to yield a grammatical clause. Since these obligatory constituents are manifestly part of the verbal valency frame, the authors call them location and motion objects. The combination of the criterion of (non-)optionality and that of substitutability with pronominal or adverbial elements leads to the tripartition between adjunct, object and predicate complement. This distinction is further shown to pattern with different word order restrictions. 0. Introduction1 Spatial descriptions can be divided conceptually into place (static location) and motion (dynamic location). Levinson and Wilkins (2006: 531–533) argue that there are three different styles of conceptualization of motion events cross-linguistically. First, they differentiate between a durative and a non-durative conceptualization. In a durative conceptualization motion is conceived of as “translocation”, that is, “as a durative displacement of the figure along a continuous trajectory over time”. In a non-durative conceptualization motion is solely thought of as a change of state without transitional phases. Further, a non-durative conceptualization involves either change of location or change of locative relation. However, “it turns out that motion verbs in a language are not necessarily of a consistent type, although a predominant type of semantic content may often be discerned”.
    [Show full text]
  • Portuguese Syntax
    Eckhard Bick PORTUGUESE SYNTAX Teaching manual Last updated: January 2000 Eckhard Bick, Portuguese Syntax 1. Introduction: Grammatical conventions 4 1.1. The flat classical model: word function, no form 5 1.2. Pure Dependency Grammar: word chains (syntactic form), no function 5 1.3. Pure Constituent Grammar: hierarchical word grouping (syntactic form), no function 6 1.4. Adding function 7 1.4.1. Dependency Grammar with function labels 7 1.4.2. Constraint Grammar 7 1.4.3. Enriched Constituent Grammar 8 2. Building trees: The notion of constituent 10 3. Clause level functions 13 3.1. Clause level arguments (valency governed) 13 3.2. Clause level adjuncts (not valency governed) 17 3.3. Syntactic function vs. semantic function 24 4. Subordination 28 5. The function of verbal constituents 33 6. Group forms and group level constituent function 37 6.1. Noun phrases (np) 39 6.2. Ad-word phrases (ap) 46 6.3. Prepositional phrases (pp) 50 6.4. Pronoun phrases 55 7. Clause types 58 7.1. Finite subclauses 61 7.1.1. Nominal finite subclauses 61 7.1.2. Attributive finite subclauses 62 7.1.3. Adverbial finite subclauses 62 7.2. Non-finite subclauses 63 7.2.1. Infinitive subclauses 63 7.2.2. Gerund subclauses 64 7.2.3. Participle subclauses 67 7.2.3.1. Attributive participles 67 7.2.3.2. Participles in verb chains 68 7.2.3.3. Ablativus absolutus 69 7.3. Averbal subclauses 72 7.4. ACI and causatives 75 8. Co-ordination 81 9. Comparatives 88 10. Utterance function 96 2 Eckhard Bick, Portuguese Syntax 11.
    [Show full text]
  • 205 Comparative Overview on Word-Compounding in English And
    ISSN2039Ͳ2117MediterraneanJournalofSocialSciencesVol.3(7)April2012 Comparative Overview on Word-Compounding in English and Albanian M.A. Esmeralda Sherko Faculty of Veterinary Medicine Department of Morpho-Functional Subjects, ESP Division Agricultural University of Tirana e-mail: [email protected] Abstract This paper presents a comparative bilingual overview, by comparing word formation in two languages, respectively Albanian and English, as well as the main word formation trends in both languages. Both languages display a variety of word formation techniques, but their classifications according to different ways are not in complete conformity with each other. An example of this is “pëngjitja”1, which in Albanian is classified as an independent class form the compound nouns, while in English it appears under the heading of “compounds”. The paper will also highlight spelling and phonetic differences in both languages. In Albanian language the “përngjitja” is formed by the monomial of word group or phrase, a prepositional phrase or a group of words in general. The syntactic relations between the terms of the phrase or the group are usually preserved clearly, even in the structure of the newly formed word -të përngjitur. In English compounding, which also includes përngjitja refers to the process of combining two words to form a new one, where the words added at the beginning to a certain extent subcategorizes the words following it. Key words: përngjitja, word-formation, Albanian, English, language 1. Introduction to word formation Word formation is the branch of linguistics that examines derived words synchronically and diachronically and in terms of their origin and functioning, their productivity or unproductivity, as well as their use in different styles of speech.
    [Show full text]
  • Systematic Parameterized Description of Pro-Forms in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0∗
    Systematic Parameterized Description of Pro-forms in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0¤ Magda ŠevcíkovᡠRazímová, Zdenekˇ Žabokrtský Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Charles University, Prague E-mail: {razimova,zabokrtsky}@ufal.mff.cuni.cz 1 Introduction A pro-form is a word that is used to replace or substitute other words, phrases, clauses, or sentences etc. Besides pronouns one can also distinguish pro-adjectives, pro-numerals, pro-adverbs, and pro-verbs.1 Pro-forms are related to a wide range of linguistic phenomena, from word- formative principles, through negation and quantification, to anaphoric and deictic functions. As it was recognized a long time ago (among others in Montague gram- mar), pro-forms are extremely important for studying natural language semantics, even if they constitute only a closed class. Recently, a lot of work has been invested into developing large data resources for exploring natural language semantics, e.g. in the fields of predicate-argument structures or lexical databases. However, the treatment of pro-forms and related phenomena receives only a relatively minor attention in this data-dominated era (perhaps with the only exception of data for anaphora resolution, mostly limited to personal and demonstrative pronouns). Even if tag sets used in various corpora and treebanks clearly indicate some differentiation within the set of pro-forms (e.g. ¤The research reported in this paper was supported by the projects 1ET101120503, GA-UK 352/2005 and GD201/05/H014. 1The well known difficulties with the heterogeneity of the criteria for delimitating the ‘traditional’ parts of speech lead to terminological confusion here: pronouns are often considered to span not only pro-nouns, but also some of the other pro-forms, especially pro-adjectives and also pro-adverbs, often denoted as pronominal adjectives and pronominal adverbs.
    [Show full text]
  • Parts of Speech in Novamorf, a New Morphological Annotation of Czech
    DOI 10.2478/jazcas-2019-0065 Parts OF SPEECH IN NovaMORF, a NEW MORPHOLOGICAL Annotation OF CZECH VLADIMÍR PETKEVIČ1 ‒ Jaroslava Hlaváčová2 ‒ KLÁRA OSOLSOBě3 ‒ Martin SVÁŠEK ‒ JOSEF ŠIMANDL 1 Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Czech Republic 2 Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Czech Republic 3 Institute of the Czech Language, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Czech Republic PETKEVIČ, Vladimír – HLAVÁČOVÁ, Jaroslava – OSOLSOBě, Klára – SVÁŠEK, Martin – ŠIMANDL, Josef: Parts of speech in NovaMorf, a new morphological annotation of Czech. Journal of Linguistics, 2019, Vol. 70, No 2, pp. 358 – 369. Abstract: A detailed morphological description of word forms in any language is a necessary condition for a successful automatic processing of linguistic data. The paper focuses on a new description of morphological categories, mainly on the subcategorization of parts of speech in Czech within the NovaMorf project. NovaMorf focuses on the description of morphological properties of Czech word forms in a more compact and consistent way and with a higher explicative power than approaches used so far. It also aims at the unification of diverse approaches to morphological annotation of Czech. NovaMorf approach will be reflected in a new morphological dictionary to be exploited for a new automatic morphological analysis (and disambiguation) of corpora of contemporary Czech. Keywords: NovaMorf, morphological annotation, parts of speech, morphological categories, subcategorization 1 INTRODUcTION We present a repertoire of morphological categories and, mainly, the parts of speech (POS) and their subcategorization distinguished in NovaMorf, the project of an innovated description of Czech morphology as a linguistic base for a new morphological analysis and subsequent disambiguation of Czech texts.
    [Show full text]
  • Contextual Processing of Locative Prepositional Phrases
    Contextual processing of locative prepositional phrases Nicolas DENAND & Monique ROLBERT Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille 163, avenue de Luminy - Case 901 F-13288 Marseille Cedex 9 France {Nicolas.Denand,Monique.Rolbert}@lif.univ-mrs.fr Abstract locative uses is anaphorically linked to a NP. These uses were already studied (see, for exam- This paper deals with contextual aspects of loca- ple, (Ruwet, 1990)). tive preposition processing. Firstly, accordingly to a study on the referential behavior of the pronominal What about locative uses of the pronominal 1 adverb ”y” in its locative uses, we show that static adverb ”y” ? That is, when it is used to replace locative prepositions are functions, not only at the the locative prepositional complement of a verb conceptual level (as shown in previous studies), but (Locative Prepositional Phrase, or LPP), like also from a contextual point of view. Such functions in: introduce new objects in the discourse context, that (3)Cette ville est belle. J’y ai v´ecu autre- have to be taken into account in classical contex- fois.(This town is beautiful. I lived there tual processing tasks, such as reference resolution or formerly.) question answering. Then, we show how these phe- nomena can fit into contextual formalisms like DRT Here again, in a classical way, one can say that and DPL. ”y”/”there” refers to a ”place” introduced by a NP preceding the pronoun. We have a prob- 1 Introduction lem though, to rebuild the exact locative seman- tics of the pronominal sentence (here, something Most often, in a nominal anaphoric relation, a like ”in this town”).
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction . with the Substantives, Proper Names, Adjectives and Numerals the Pronouns Have in Common That They Take Part in the Categories of Case
    CHAPTER NINE PRONOUNS g.!. Introduction . With the substantives, proper names, adjectives and numerals the pronouns have in common that they take part in the categories of case. They can, however, not be reckoned to belong to any of these systems, because they are different from: substantives and proper names a.o. by the absence of the vocative category;' adjectives by the absence of the vocative and the categories of comparison; 2 numerals a.o. by the absence of the ordinal category." Moreover, they differ from all Greek words existing by their special kind of lexical meaning, the deictic meaning, in which one can distinguish between: a) The indication of the participants or non-participants of the speech event. b) The indication of different relations to these (non- )partici­ pants, or to the speech-event and the language used in it. This distinction runs roughly parallel with a significant difference in the structure of the minor systems constituted by the various pronouns: (r) The pronouns indicating the participants as such, EYW, 0',), and ~!J.eL<;, u!J.eL<;, do not have any correlated adverbs (cf. sub 2), and do not take part in the categories of number and gender: the difference in value between EyW and ~!J.eL<;, crU and u!J.ef:<; is not identical to that between e.g, t7t1to<; and Z7t1tOL . On the other hand these words take part in the oppositions of emphasis (E!J.e vs. !J.e) and of reflexivity (E!J.e vs. E!J.tXU"t"OV) . (2) The pronouns indicating relations to the participants or to the speech event as such do take part in the categories of number and gender, and with the exception of the definite article, consti­ tute minor systems or configurations, which comprise several 1 Except for ~(Lth-e:pe: in Homer e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • Au Boulot! Reference Grammar Book (Pdf)
    Au boulot! 1lEFERENCE GRAMMAR OFFRENCH Revised Edition _ .....-,_fi'> - _.__ �-- .j .. -� -- ;·· . -,,...,.� �� � l' .- , �� r \ . - DaviaA. Dinneen Hope Cbris,tiansen Madeleine Kernen Herve Pensec Au boulot! REFERENCE GRAMMAR OFFRENCH David A. Dinneen Universityo/Kansas Hope Christiansen Universityof Arlcamas Madeleine Kernen SouthwestKISSOllri State Un;hlsity Herve Pensec SL OlafCollege Custom Editor: Peter Nowka © 1995 Dinneen, Christiansen, Kernen, & Pensec This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 ​ ​ International License (CC-BY-NC 4.0). ​ You are free to: ● Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format ​ ● Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material ​ Under the following terms: ● Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and ​ ​ ​ ​ indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but ​ not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. ● NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. ​ ​ ​ ​ No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological ​ ​ ​ measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. ​ The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. Au Boulot! First-Year French and all affiliated supplementary content available at ​ http://hdl.handle.net/1808/15572 were conventionally published by Houghton Mifflin. ​ Upon going out of print, the rights reverted back to the authors, who subsequently worked with KU Libraries to openly license and make them available in KU ScholarWorks as open educational resources (OER). TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. vu The plan of the te:s:t . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. vin PartI.
    [Show full text]
  • UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Split Pronominal Adverbs in Dutch: Searching for Meaning in what is Considered Meaningless Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qn6h0xf Author de Carlo, Nickolas Sebastiano Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Split Pronominal Adverbs in Dutch: Searching for Meaning in what is Considered Meaningless A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages by Nickolas Sebastiano de Carlo 2017 © Copyright by Nickolas Sebastiano de Carlo 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Split Pronominals in Dutch: Searching for Meaning in what is Considered Meaningless by Nickolas Sebastiano de Carlo Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Robert S. Kirsner, Chair Pure synonymy is a myth. This is true in the lexicon of a language as well as its grammar. As such, why do grammars of Dutch label the following two forms below as synonymous? Unsplit: Daarmee heb ik een probleem. Therewith have I a problem. Split: Daar heb ik een probleem mee. There have I a problem with. "I have a problem with that." Calling these two forms above "the same" is an oversimplification. In my dissertation, Itest for difference in meaning between the forms and the motivation to choose one form over the other. To accomplish this goal, Iuse a corpus-based approach integrated with tests from Construction Grammar. We analyze these data in R (a statistics computing language) and Excel. This dissertation includes four tests, all complete.
    [Show full text]
  • Acquiring German Prepositional Subcategorization Frames from Corpora
    Acquiring German Prepositional Subcategorization Frames from Corpora Erika F. de Lima G1VID - German National Research Center for Information Technology DoHvostrasse 15 64293 Darmstadt, Germany delima@darmsCadt, gmd. de July 7, 1997 Abstract This paper presents a procedure to automaticafly learn German prepositionalsubcategofization frames fzom text corpora. It is based on shallow parsing techniques employed to identifyhigh-accuracy cues for prepositional frames, the EM algorithm to solve the PP attachment problem implicit in the task, and a method to rank the evidence for subcategorizationprovided by the collecteddata. 1 Introduction The description of lexical forms in both computation and hun~-oriented lexica include prepositional subcategoriza~ion information. For instance in German, the verb arbeiten ('to work') subcategorizes for a PP headed by the preposition an ('on'), and the verb erinnern ('to remind'), for an accusative NP and a PP headed by an: (1) Mary arbeitet an der Frage P .~ NP. Mary works on the question (2) Mary exinnert ihren Freund an den Terrain. Mary reminds her friend on the deadline 'Mary reminds her friend of the deadline.' Subcategorization information is usually compiled by hand. A procedure to automatically learn prepositional subcategorization would enable the acqui- 153 sition of broad-coverage lexica which reflect evolving usage and which are less subject to lexical gaps. Learning prepositional subcategorization automatically is not a trivial t~LSk; it entails a PP attachment decision problem, and requires being able to distinguish complement from adjunct prepositional cues. For instance in (2) above, it is (syntactically) possible to attach the prepositional phrase [pp an den Termini (to the noun phrase object as well as to the verb phrase.
    [Show full text]