8 Grammatical Relations
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When Dependent Case Is Not Enough
When dependent case is not enough András Bárány, [email protected] SOAS University of London Michelle Sheehan, [email protected] Anglia Ruskin University 9 May 2019, GLOW 42, University of Oslo Our claims • Even if dependent case exists, we need case-assignment via Agree • CPs can be case competitors, but do not get case-marking • Agreement-based case splits in Romance, Kashmiri and elsewhere suggests a closer link between φ-features and case than in dependent case theory • It is possible to adapt both Agree and dependent case to these patterns but we argue that Agree is often more parsimonious 1 The dependent case approach (1) Dependent case theory Morphologically marked cases (acc/erg/dat) result from a relationship between two DPs rather than from a relationship between a head and a DP. There are many different versions of this general approach, e.g. Anderson (1976), Yip, Maling & Jackendoff (1987), Marantz (1991), Bittner & Hale (1996), McFadden (2004), Baker & Vinokurova (2010), M. C. Baker (2015), Levin & Preminger (2015), Nash (2017). • M. C. Baker (2015) argues that dependent cases are determined at the phase level and as- signed at the transfer to spell-out bárány & sheehan — dep. case — GLOW 42 (2) Dependent case by c-command (M. C. Baker 2015: 48–49, our emphasis) a. If there are two distinct NPs in the same spell out domain such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP2 as accusative unless NP1 has already been marked for case. b. If there are two distinct NPs in the same spell out domain such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP1 as ergative unless NP2 has already been marked for case. -
Chapter 30 HPSG and Lexical Functional Grammar Stephen Wechsler the University of Texas Ash Asudeh University of Rochester & Carleton University
Chapter 30 HPSG and Lexical Functional Grammar Stephen Wechsler The University of Texas Ash Asudeh University of Rochester & Carleton University This chapter compares two closely related grammatical frameworks, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Among the similarities: both frameworks draw a lexicalist distinction between morphology and syntax, both associate certain words with lexical argument structures, both employ semantic theories based on underspecification, and both are fully explicit and computationally implemented. The two frameworks make available many of the same representational resources. Typical differences between the analyses proffered under the two frameworks can often be traced to concomitant differ- ences of emphasis in the design orientations of their founding formulations: while HPSG’s origins emphasized the formal representation of syntactic locality condi- tions, those of LFG emphasized the formal representation of functional equivalence classes across grammatical structures. Our comparison of the two theories includes a point by point syntactic comparison, after which we turn to an exposition ofGlue Semantics, a theory of semantic composition closely associated with LFG. 1 Introduction Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar is similar in many respects to its sister framework, Lexical Functional Grammar or LFG (Bresnan et al. 2016; Dalrymple et al. 2019). Both HPSG and LFG are lexicalist frameworks in the sense that they distinguish between the morphological system that creates words and the syn- tax proper that combines those fully inflected words into phrases and sentences. Stephen Wechsler & Ash Asudeh. 2021. HPSG and Lexical Functional Gram- mar. In Stefan Müller, Anne Abeillé, Robert D. Borsley & Jean- Pierre Koenig (eds.), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: The handbook. -
The Concept of Intentional Action in the Grammar of Kathmandu Newari
THE CONCEPT OF INTENTIONAL ACTION IN THE GRAMMAR OF KATHMANDU NEWARI by DAVID J. HARGREAVES A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Linguistics and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 1991 ii APPROVED: Dr. Scott DeLancey iii An Abstract of the Dissertation of David J. Hargreaves for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics to be taken August 1991 Title: THE CONCEPT OF INTENTIONAL ACTION IN THE GRAMMAR OF KATHMANDU NEWARI Approved: Dr. Scott DeLancey This study describes the relationship between the concept of intentional action and the grammatical organization of the clause in Kathmandu Newari, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken primarily in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal. In particular, the study focuses on the conceptual structure of "intentional action" along with the lexical, morphological, and syntactic reflexes of this notion in situated speech. The construal of intentional action consists of two distinct notions: one involving the concept of self-initiated force and the other involving mental representation or awareness. The distribution of finite inflectional forms for verbs results from the interaction of these two notions with a set of evidential/discourse principles which constrain the attribution of intentional action to certain discourse roles in situated interaction. iv VITA NAME OF AUTHOR: David J. Hargreaves PLACE OF BIRTH: Detroit, Michigan DATE OF BIRTH: March 10, 1955 GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE -
9 Argument Structure and Argument Structure Alternations Gillian Ramchand
9 Argument structure and argument structure alternations Gillian Ramchand 9.1 Introduction One of the major scientific results of Chomskian syntactic theory is the understanding that the symbolic representations of natural language are structured, by which I mean that symbols are organized in hierarchical constituent data structures, and are not simply linearly ordered strings or lists of memorized items. The semantic ‘arguments’ of predicates are expressed within natural language data structures, and therefore also form part of structured representations. This chapter is devoted to exam- ining the major theoretical results pertaining to the semantics of verbal predicate argument relations and their systematic patterning in lan- guage. However, we will see that even isolating the logical domain of inquiry will involve certain deep questions about the architecture of grammar, and the relationship between listedness and compositional semantics. Historically, the most important results in argument structure have come from those studying the properties of the Lexicon as a module of grammar, for a number of rather natural reasons as we will see. While this chapter will aim to give the reader a clear historical and ideological con- text for the subject matter and will document major influential strands of research, it will primarily concentrate on extracting the generalizations that I judge to be the lasting results of the past fifty years, and then secondarily, draw attention to the (still unresolved) architectural and theoretical issues that are specific to this domain. Section 9.2 gives the perspective on the issues from the vantage point of the Lexicon, i.e. the practical problem of deciding how much and what kind of information is necessary for the listing of verbal lexical entries. -
Ditransitive Constructions Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (Germany) 23-25 November 2007
Conference on Ditransitive Constructions Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (Germany) 23-25 November 2007 Abstracts On “Dimonotransitive” Structures in English Carmen Aguilera Carnerero University of Granada Ditransitive structures have been prototypically defined as those combinations of a ditransitive verb with an indirect object and a direct object. However, although in the prototypical ditransitive construction in English, both objects are present, there is often omission of one of the constituentes, usually the indirect object. The absence of the indirect object has been justified on the basis of the irrelevance of its specification or the possibility of recovering it from the context. The absence of the direct object, on the other hand, is not so common and only occur with a restricted number of verbs (e.g. pay, show or tell).This type of sentences have been called “dimonotransitives” by Nelson, Wallis and Aarts (2002) and the sole presence in the syntactic structure arises some interesting questions we want to clarify in this article, such as: (a) the degree of syntactic and semantic obligatoriness of indirect objects and certain ditransitive verbs (b) the syntactic behaviour of indirect objects in absence of the direct object, in other words, does the Oi take over some of the properties of typical direct objects as Huddleston and Pullum suggest? (c) The semantic and pragmatic interpretations of the missing element. To carry out our analysis, we will adopt a corpus –based approach and especifically we will use the International Corpus of English (ICE) for the most frequent ditransitive verbs (Mukherjee 2005) and the British National Corpus (BNC) for the not so frequent verbs. -
Grammatical Relations Typology
Draft of a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Language Typology, ed. Jae Jung Song. Grammatical Relations Typology Balthasar Bickel University of Leipzig 1. Grammatical relations past and present Traditionally, the term ‘grammatical relation’ (GR) refers to the morphosyntactic pro- perties that relate an argument to a clause, as, for example, its subject or its object. Alternative terms are ‘syntactic function’ or ‘syntactic role’, and they highlight the fact that GRs are defined by the way in which arguments are integrated syntactically into a clause, i.e. by functioning as subject, object etc. Whatever terminology one prefers, what is crucial about the traditional notion of GRs is (a) that they are identi- fied by syntactic properties, and (b) that they relate an argument to the clause. This differentiates GRs from semantic roles (SRs), also known as thematic roles (θ-roles): SRs are semantic, not syntactic relations, and they hold between arguments and predicates (typically verbs), rather than between arguments and clauses. The difference between GRs and SRs is best visible in such contrasts as Sue killed the shark vs. Sue was killed by the shark: in both cases, the NP Sue is the subject of the clause. But in the active version, the referent of Sue is the agent of ‘kill’, while in the passive version, Sue is the patient of ‘kill.’ The syntactic properties that have traditionally been considered the key identifiers of GRs are the property of triggering verb agreement and the property of beeing assigned a specific case. In our example, Sue triggers third person singular agreement in the verb and this identifies the NP as the subject of the clause. -
Transitive and Intransitive Constructions in Japanese and English: a Psycholinguistic Study
TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN JAPANESE AND ENGLISH: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDY by Zoe Pei-sui Luk BA, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006 MA, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH THE KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Zoe Pei-sui Luk It was defended on April 24, 2012 and approved by Alan Juffs, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics Charles Perfetti, University Professor, Department of Psychology Paul Hopper, Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University Dissertation Advisor: Yasuhiro Shirai, Professor, Department of Linguistics ii Copyright © by Pei-sui Luk 2012 iii TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN JAPANESE AND ENGLISH: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDY Zoe Pei-sui Luk, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2012 Transitivity has been extensively researched from a semantic point of view (e.g., Hopper & Thompson, 1980). Although little has been said about a prototypical intransitive construction, it has been suggested that verbs that denote actions with an agent and a patient/theme cannot be intransitive (e.g., Guerssel, 1985). However, it has been observed that some languages, including Japanese, have intransitive verbs for actions that clearly involve an animate agent and a patient/theme, such as ‘arresting’ (e.g., Pardeshi, 2008). This dissertation thus attempts to understand how causality is differentially interpreted from transitive and intransitive constructions, including non-prototypical intransitive verbs, by rating and priming experiments conducted in both English and Japanese. -
From Lexical to Functional Categories: New Foundations for the Study of Language Development
From Lexical to Functional Categories: New Foundations for the Study of Language Development Cristina Dye (Newcastle University), Yarden Kedar (Beit Berl College) & Barbara Lust (Cornell University) 1. Introduction We will use the term Functional Categories (FCs) in this article in contrast to the term Lexical Categories (LCs) to capture a distinction between the nouns, verbs and adjectives (LCs) exemplified in (1) below versus the underlined determiners (the, an), the verb phrase markers (the auxiliary will and the morphological verb inflection -s), the preposition (with), and the complementizer (that) – all of which constitute FCs in this sentence. (1) The young girl will eat an ice cream that her friend shares with her. All natural languages appear to distinguish FCs and LCs (e.g., Abney, 1987; Chomsky, 1995), and FCs, as a fundamental part of syntax, are thought to be unique to human languages (Hauser, Barner, & O’Donnell, 2007, p. 111). In general, FCs are assumed to carry major grammatical weight in sentence construction, whereas the LCs are assumed to carry major semantic force. However, we must recognize the difficulty in making this distinction. For example, even FCs may carry semantic relevance, and some units appear to be mixed, that is, the small class of pronouns such as her in (1) above which involves limited semantic factors such as gender, and plays a functional role in determining phrase structure. In addition, FCs vary across languages in their range and nature. In spite of the fact that FCs are often viewed as representing a small, closed class word category, it is now recognized that “the number of functional elements in syntax is not easy to estimate.. -
Transitivity and Intransitivity in English and Arabic: a Comparative Study
International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2015, Vol. 7, No. 6 Transitivity and Intransitivity in English and Arabic: A Comparative Study Yasir Bdaiwi Jasim Al-Shujairi Faculty of Modern Language and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: [email protected] Ahlam Muhammed Faculty of Modern Language and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: [email protected] Yazan Shaker Okla Almahammed Faculty of major languages studies, Islamic Science University of Malaysia ‘USIM’, Malaysia E-mail: [email protected] Received: October 20, 2015 Accepted: October 31, 2015 Published: December xx, 2015 doi:10.5296/ijl.v7i6.8744 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v7i6.8744 Abstract English and Arabic are two major languages which have many differences and similarities in grammar. One of the issues which is of great importance in the two languages is transitivity and intransitivity. Therefore, this study compares and contrasts transitivity and intransitivity in English and Arabic. This study reports the results of the analysis of transitivity and intransitivity in the two respective languages. The current study is a qualitative one; in nature, a descriptive study. The findings showed that English and Arabic are similar in having 38 www.macrothink.org/ijl International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2015, Vol. 7, No. 6 transitive and intransitive verbs, and in having verbs which can go transitive or intransitive according to context. By contrast Arabic is different from English in its ability to change intransitive verbs into transitive ones by applying inflections on the main verb. -
Complex Verb Formation in Eskimo*
JANE GRIMSHAW AND RALF-ARMIN MESTER COMPLEX VERB FORMATION IN ESKIMO* 0. INTRODUCTION Polysynthetic languages characteristically exhibit complex verb forms: single lexical items which correspond in meaning to entire clauses in languages like English. This paper presents an analysis of Labrador Inuttut (LI) derivational morphology in which passive, antipassive, and the complex verb formation rules themselves are all morphological opera- tions. General principles of well-formedness and the interaction among lexical rules then explain the fundamental characteristics of the complex verb system: the internal structure and general syntactic behavior of complex verbs, restrictions on the application of complex verb formation, and the appearance of recursion within complex verbs. We begin with a brief description of the grammatical system of LI. Then we give our analysis of complex verb formation and present the results which follow from our approach. Finally we argue that to obtain these results would require considerable stipulation in a non-lexical account. 1. GRAMMATICAL BACKGROUND Our data are drawn largely from Smith's studies of Labrador Inuttut (Smith, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982a, 1982b). LI is an Inuit Eskimo dialect which has an ergative case system (Comrie, 1973; Dixon, 1979; Plank, 1979; Levin, 1983). Both the subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object of a transitive verb receive absolutive case, and the subject of a transitive verb is marked with ergative case. 1 A transitive verb agrees in person and number with both its subject and its object, and an intransitive * This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IST 81-20403 to Brandeis University and BNS 80-14730 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to the first author. -
Chapter 4: Syntactic Relations and Case Marking
Chapter 4, page 72 Chapter 4: Syntactic Relations and Case Marking 4.0 General Considerations An important locus of the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics is grammatical relations. RRG takes a rather different view of grammatical relations from other theories. In the first place, it does not consider them to be basic, nor does it derive them from structural configurations. Second, it recognizes only one syntactic function, not three like other theories; there is nothing in RRG corresponding to notions like direct object and indirect object. The syntactic function posited in RRG is not, therefore, part of the same system of oppositions as the traditional notions of grammatical relations (i.e. subject vs. direct object vs. indirect object), and consequently it is not really comparable to the traditional notion that is its closest analog, subject. Third, RRG does not assume that grammatical relations are universal, in two senses. On the one hand, it does not claim that all languages must have grammatical relations in addition to semantic roles, which are universal. On the other hand, in those languages in which a non-semantic grammatical relation can be motivated, the syntactic function posited need not have the same properties in every language; that is, the role of this syntactic function in the grammar of language X may be very different from that played by the syntactic function in language Y, and consequently, the two cannot be considered to be exactly the same. Variation in grammatical relations systems is directly related to differences in the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface across languages. -
Split Intransitivity in Basque
cambridge occasional papers in linguistics COP i L Volume 11, Article 1: 001–035, 2018 j ISSN 2050-5949 Split intransitivity in Basque J a m e s B a k e r University of Cambridge Abstract e split intransitive case system of Basque has been a topic of some interest in the literature; this article identies the semantic basis of this paern and also other split intransitive paerns in the language. It is shown that split intransitivity in Basque presents further support for Sorace’s (2000) Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy. However, it is also shown that dierent split intransitivity diagnostics identied dierent classes of verbs, and that this creates diculties for the traditional Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmuer 1978); an alternative account based in a more rened understanding of syntactic argument structure is sketched (cf. Baker 2017, Baker 2018). 1 Introduction is article contributes to the discussion of ‘split intransitivity’: phenomena whereby certain intransitive or monovalent predicates are observed to allow particular mor- phosyntactic behaviours where others are not. Specically, its purpose is to provide a descriptive account of various ‘split intransitive’ paerns in Basque. e best- known manifestation of this type of paern in the language comes in its system of case, agreement and auxiliary selection. Consider the examples in (1), both exempli- fying monovalent verbs. In (1a), the argument of the verb occurs with the ergative case ending -k, whereas in (1b) it occurs in the zero-marked absolutive: (1) a. Gizon-a-k ikasi du. man-def-erg studied has ‘e man has studied.’ b. Gizon-a-Ø etorri da.