DOCSLIB.ORG

Lexicalization by Phase: the Role of Prepositions in Argument Structure and Its Cross-Linguistic Variation

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Lexicalization by Phase: the Role of Prepositions in Argument Structure and Its Cross-Linguistic Variation LEXICALIZATION BY PHASE: THE ROLE OF PREPOSITIONS IN ARGUMENT STRUCTURE AND ITS CROSS-LINGUISTIC VARIATION Cristina Real Puigdollers Doctoral Dissertation Supervisor: Gemma Rigau Oliver PhD Program in Cognitive Science and Language Centre de Lingüística Teòrica Departament de Filologia Catalana Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Spring 2013 Abstract This dissertation proposes an account for cross-linguistic variation at the lexical level. The proposal stems from a strong version of Hale and Keyser’s hypothesis according to which lexicalization processes are syntactically driven. I claim that variation at the lexical level should be analyzed as variation at the sentential level, by means of the unification of the l(exical) and s(entential)-syntax through the theory of ciclycity provided by Phase Theory. The phase is interpreted as a point of access of the interfaces to the derivation and as the domain for lexicalization. From this perspective, the difference in the specification of φ-features in functio- nal heads determines what is a phase and what is not in a particular language, so that the emergence of variation is derived despite the uniformity of syntax. With that framework in mind, I propose a unified solution to the variation across lan- guages of certain lexicalization patterns, namely, the expression of path, manner and possession. The theory I develop builds on a syntactic theory of argument structure that takes into account the role that non-relational elements, namely, roots, have in the model. I propose that syntax operates with root positions that are semantically and phonologically underspecified and that are defined as non-projecting heads, i.e., non-labeling heads, which by general syntactic principles can only be present at the bottom, first merge position of every (sub)derivation. I propose that phase heads establish domains for lexicalization that allow us to consider morphological i operations such as feature percolation or vocabulary insertion as two distinct ways for phonologically interpreting syntactic representations. As for the case studies, I first study the properties of path expressions in Ro- mance and Germanic languages. I propose a simplified structure for PPs in which features such as boundedness arise configurationally, not through a specific func- tional projection. Then, I argue that case in the adpositional system is structural and emerges from the agreement relation between a DP and the φ-features of the functional projection or phase head, p. I argue that spatial expressions in Romance are always locative and that there is defectivity in the content of φ-features of path heads that makes them to be non-phase heads and to belong to the vP domain. Second, I deal with some cases of verbal elasticity attested in Romance lan- guages: the existence of cognate objects, that is, unergative intransitive verbs that can take under certain restricted conditions a direct object; and the existence of re- sultative constructions in Romance where a secondary predicate is said to denote a resultative change of state. In order to account for these constructions in a uni- fied way I propose that they all involve a preposition of central coincidence that establishes a predicative relation between the complement and the verbal root. Finally, I study Measure Verbs that are characterized by having a comple- ment, a Measure Phrase, that behaves sometimes as an adjunct and sometimes as an argument. I propose that this is due mainly to the referential properties of this quantificational element. However, I add into the picture another property that has never been discussed before: the variable behavior of Measure Verbs with respect to unaccusativity. I propose that Measure Verbs have an underlying possessive structure that is headed by a BE predicate that selects a central coincidence prepo- sition, p. The non-defective phase p head in Romance languages can incorporate into BE extending the phase and transforming BE, a defective unaccusative phase, into a non-defective transitive phase, HAVE, which is able to license accusative case and to allow for an external argument position. ii Resum Aquesta tesi proposa una teoria que dóna compte de la variació interlingüística al nivell lèxic. La present proposta parteix d’una versió forta de la hipòtesi de Hale i Keyser, segons la qual els processos de lexicalització estan dirigits per principis sintàctics. Sostinc que la variació al nivell lèxic s’ha d’analitzar com la variació al nivell oracional, unificant la sintaxi-l(èxica) i la sintaxi-o(racional) per mitjà de la teoria de la ciclicitat basada en la noció de fase. La fase s’interpreta com l’estadi derivacional a què tenen accés les interfícies i com el domini de lexicalització. Des d’aquest punt de vista, la diferència en l’especificació dels trets-φ dels nuclis funcionals determina què és una fase i què no ho és en una determinada llengua, de la qual cosa es deriva l’emergència de la variació lingüística malgrat la uniformitat de la sintaxi. A partir d’aquest marc teòric, proposo una solució unificada per tal de donar compte de la variació interlingüística de certs patrons de lexicalització, com ara l’expressió del trajecte, la manera i la possessió. La teoria que desenvolupo recolza en una teoria sintàctica de l’estructura ar- gumental que pren en consideració el paper que tenen els elements no relacionals (és a dir, les arrels) en el model. Proposo que la sintaxi opera amb les posicions de les arrels que estan subespecificades en termes semàntics i fonològics i que estan definides com a nuclis que no projecten (és a dir, que no forneixen cap etique- ta), les quals per principis sintàctics generals només poden ocórrer al capdavall de l’estructura, la posició de primer ajuntament de cada (sub)derivació. També proposo que els nuclis de fase estableixen dominis de lexicalització que habiliten iii operacions morfològiques com ara la percolació de trets o la inserció de vocabula- ri com dues maneres diferents per interpretar fonològicament les representacions sintàctiques. Pel que fa als casos que estudio, en primer lloc m’ocupo de l’expressió del trajecte en les llengües romàniques i germàniques. Proposo una estructura simpli- ficada del SP en què trets com ara els de fitació emergeixen de manera configura- cional i no per mitjà d’una projecció funcional privativa. Així, argüeixo que el cas en el sistema d’adposicions és estructural i emergeix de la relació de concordança entre un SD i els trets-φ d’una projecció funcional o nucli de fase, p. Sostinc que les expressions espacials en romànic són sempre locatives i que els trets-φ dels nuclis de trajecte són defectius, de manera que els inhabilita per ser nuclis de fase i els situa en el domini de Sv. En segon lloc, tracto diversos casos d’elasticitat verbal que es poden obser- var en les llengües romàniques: l’existència d’objectes cognats, això és, els verbs intransitius de tipus inergatiu que seleccionen, en certes condicions especials, un complement directe; d’altra banda, es poden constatar certes construccions resul- tatives en romànic, en què un predicat secundari denota un canvi d’estat resultatiu. A fi d’explicar les construccions esmentades d’una manera unificada, proposo que en tots els casos hi participa una preposició de coincidència central que estableix una relació predicativa entre el complement i l’arrel verbal. En darrer lloc, estudio els verbs de mesura que es caracteritzen per tenir un complement, el sintagma de mesura, que o bé es comporta com un adjunt o bé com un argument. Proposo que això és degut a les propietats referencials d’a- quest element quantificador. A més, hi afegeixo una altra propietat que mai no s’ha discutit abans: el comportament variable dels verbs de mesura respecte de la inacusativitat. Proposo que els verbs de mesura tinguin una estructura possessiva subjacent, que té com a nucli un predicat SER que selecciona una preposició de coincidència central, p. En les llengües romàniques el nucli de fase p no és defec- tiu i es pot incorporar a SER, de manera que la fase s’estén i transforma SER, una iv fase inacusativa i defectiva, en una fase transitiva i saturada, TENIR, que permet legitimar el cas acusatiu i fornir una posició per a l’argument extern. v Acknowledgements I must express first of all my deep gratitude to my supervisor Gemma Rigau, for her advice, assistance and unconditional support during these years. Without her help and trust I doubt I could have finished this dissertation. Grateful thanks are extended to Cedric Boeckx for having generously read many drafts of this dissertation and reviewed them so carefully. His help has also been decisive for the development of the ideas discussed in this dissertation. I also want to thank the other two members of the evaluation committee, Violeta Demonte and Ricardo Etxepare, for having agreed to be part of it. I am also indebted with Aritz Irurtzun and Jaume Mateu, substitute members of my com- mittee. I would like to specially thank Jaume Mateu for awakening my interest in Argument Structure. His many works on these topics have been very inspiring to me. Thanks goes to all people who have helped me through the different stages of my dissertation. Special mention goes to Guglielmo Cinque, Marcel den Dikken, and Richard Kayne for their guidance in my research stays at the Università Ca’Foscari in Venice in 2007, and at CUNY and NYU in New York City in 2008, respectively. Thanks to all faculty members and graduate students who I found there and who helped me in different ways. I would like to thank all the people from the CLT at the UAB who have been a kind of family during all these years.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Root and Semi-Phrasal Compounds: a Syntactic Approach Dimitrios Ntelitheos & Katya Pertsova*
    2019. Proc Ling Soc Amer 4. 30:1-14. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4530 Root and semi-phrasal compounds: A syntactic approach Dimitrios Ntelitheos & Katya Pertsova* Abstract. We present a syntactic account of the derivation of two types of attributive nominal compounds in Spanish, Russian and Greek. These include right-headed “root” compounds, which exhibit more “word”-like properties and single stress domains, and left-headed “semi-phrasal” compounds with more phrasal properties and independent stress domains for the two compound members. We propose that both compound structures are formed on a small clause predicate phrase, with their different properties derived from the merger of the predicate member of the small clause as a root or as a larger nominal unit with additional functional projections. The proposed structures provide an explanation of observed lexical integrity effects, as well as specific predictions of patterns of compound formation crosslinguistically. Keywords. morpho-syntax; compounds; Distributed Morphology; lexical integrity; predicate inversion; small clauses 1. Introduction. A hotly debated issue is to what extent morphological principles are independ- ent from the syntactic ones. There is no agreement on how and why differences between “words,” “phrases,” and other units proposed to exist in-between these two categories arise. Syn- tactic approaches to word-formation such as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, Marantz 1997 and related work), antisymmetry (Kayne 1994, Koopman and Szabolcsi 2000) and more recently nanosyntax (Starke 2009) derive morphosyntactic properties of different units from the derivational path of their formation. For instance, Marantz (2001) proposes a difference between units created via combinations of functional heads with roots vs.
    [Show full text]
  • Clark, H.H. Clark, E.V. When Nouns Surface As Verbs 1979.Pdf
    WHEN NOUNS SURFACE AS VERBS EVEV. CLARKand HERBERTH. CLARK Stanford University People readily create and understand denominal verbs they have never heard before, as in to porch a newspaper and to Houdini one's way out of a closet. The meanings are best accounted for by a theory of interpretation that specifies what the verbs mean on particular occasions of their use. Our proposal is that their use is regulated by a con- vention: in using such a verb, the speaker means to denote the kind of state, event, or process that, he has good reason to believe, the listener can readily and uniquely com- pute on this occasion, on the basis of their mutual knowledge, in such a way that the parent noun (e.g. porch or Houdini) denotes one role in the state, event, or process, and the remaining surface arguments of the denominal verb denote others of its roles. This convention accounts for the meaning and acceptability of innovative verbs in various contexts; similar conventions may be needed to account for other innovative uses of language.* One remarkable aspect of our capacity to use language is our ability to create and understand expressions we have never heard before; we will call these INNOVA- TIONS. In the right contexts, we readily understand He enfant terrible'd gracefully (said of a workshop participant), or Ruling in death of Ferrari woman (newspaper headline referring to a woman whose will stipulated that she be buried in her Ferrari), or Never ask two China trips to the same dinner party (cartoon caption referring to people who had taken trips to China)-even though we have never before heard enfant terrible used as a verb, Ferrari woman used as a compound noun, or China trips used as a shorthand expression.
    [Show full text]
  • The Function of Phrasal Verbs and Their Lexical Counterparts in Technical Manuals
    Portland State University PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses 1991 The function of phrasal verbs and their lexical counterparts in technical manuals Brock Brady Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds Part of the Applied Linguistics Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Brady, Brock, "The function of phrasal verbs and their lexical counterparts in technical manuals" (1991). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 4181. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.6065 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Brock Brady for the Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (lESOL) presented March 29th, 1991. Title: The Function of Phrasal Verbs and their Lexical Counterparts in Technical Manuals APPROVED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE THESIS COMMITTEE: { e.!I :flette S. DeCarrico, Chair Marjorie Terdal Thomas Dieterich Sister Rita Rose Vistica This study investigates the use of phrasal verbs and their lexical counterparts (i.e. nouns with a lexical structure and meaning similar to corresponding phrasal verbs) in technical manuals from three perspectives: (1) that such two-word items might be more frequent in technical writing than in general texts; (2) that these two-word items might have particular functions in technical writing; and that (3) 2 frequencies of these items might vary according to the presumed expertise of the text's audience.
    [Show full text]
  • A Construction Approach to Innovative Verbs in Japanese*
    A construction approach to innovative verbs in Japanese* NATSUKO TSUJIMURA and STUART DAVIS Abstract Innovative verbs in Japanese are formed from nouns of various sources includ- ing loanwords, Sino-Japanese nouns, mimetics, and proper names. Regardless of their different origin, these innovative denominal verbs exhibit a collection of intriguing properties, ranging from phonological, morphological, to seman- tic and pragmatic. These properties are not strictly predictable from the com- ponent parts including the nature of the parent noun and verbal morphology. Such an unpredictable nature is suggestive of a constructional analysis. The form-meaning-function complex takes a templatic representation, which ex- presses the phonological and morphological characteristics, and associated with it are semantic and pragmatic properties. These phonological, morpho- logical, semantic, and pragmatic properties combine to capture the nature of innovative denominal verbs as a construction. The analysis supports the idea of applying construction grammar to morphology along the lines of the devel- oping field of construction morphology (e.g., Booij 2005, 2007, 2009a, 2009b). We further show how insights from templatic (or prosodic) morphology (e.g., McCarthy and Prince 1986, 1990) can be conceptualized in terms of construc- tion grammar. * Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Adam Albright, Adele Goldberg, and Satoshi Ue- hara for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Aspects of the current work were presented at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in May 2008, at the 5th International Con- ference on Construction Grammar at the University of Texas at Austin in September 2008, at a workshop on the lexicon held at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo, Japan, in March 2010, and at the 14th International Morphology Meeting held in Buda- pest, Hungary, in May 2010.
    [Show full text]
  • Pronouns in Nanosyntax a Typological Study of the Containment Structure of Pronominals
    Pronouns in Nanosyntax A typological study of the containment structure of pronominals *Name* *Student number* rMA Linguistics Universiteit van Amsterdam 24-06-2015 Acknowledgements This paper is the result of my Research Project Linguistics, the final part of my Research Master Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. In following this rMA, I had the opportunity to study the fields that I am interested in the most: linguistic theory and typology. These two fields are fused in this research project, that was sometimes challenging but more often fun to work on. I would like to thank all my teachers and fellow students, in particular my co-students at the rMA, for the educational and fun experience this rMA has been. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to two of my teachers: Eva van Lier and Jan Don. I would like to thank Eva van Lier, for introducing me to the field of typology and for being an inspirational teacher. Besides that, I am grateful for her comments on earlier versions of this paper which made me evaluate my own work critically. I am most grateful to Jan Don, for making me realise that linguistics is the most interesting field of study, for his valuable lessons about linguistics and academic research, and for his faith in my capacities. Above all, I want to thank him for being the most inspirational, encouraging and helpful supervisor of this thesis project that a student could wish for. i Abbreviations 1 1st person 2 2nd person 3 3rd person ABS absolutive ACC accusative ALIEN alienable possession C common gender
    [Show full text]
  • A Minimalist Study of Complex Verb Formation: Cross-Linguistic Paerns and Variation
    A Minimalist Study of Complex Verb Formation: Cross-linguistic Paerns and Variation Chenchen Julio Song, [email protected] PhD First Year Report, June 2016 Abstract is report investigates the cross-linguistic paerns and structural variation in com- plex verbs within a Minimalist and Distributed Morphology framework. Based on data from English, German, Hungarian, Chinese, and Japanese, three general mechanisms are proposed for complex verb formation, including Akt-licensing, “two-peaked” adjunction, and trans-workspace recategorization. e interaction of these mechanisms yields three levels of complex verb formation, i.e. Root level, verbalizer level, and beyond verbalizer level. In particular, the verbalizer (together with its Akt extension) is identified as the boundary between the word-internal and word-external domains of complex verbs. With these techniques, a unified analysis for the cohesion level, separability, component cate- gory, and semantic nature of complex verbs is tentatively presented. 1 Introduction1 Complex verbs may be complex in form or meaning (or both). For example, break (an Accom- plishment verb) is simple in form but complex in meaning (with two subevents), understand (a Stative verb) is complex in form but simple in meaning, and get up is complex in both form and meaning. is report is primarily based on formal complexity2 but tries to fit meaning into the picture as well. Complex verbs are cross-linguistically common. e above-mentioned understand and get up represent just two types: prefixed verb and phrasal verb. ere are still other types of complex verb, such as compound verb (e.g. stir-fry). ese are just descriptive terms, which I use for expository convenience.
    [Show full text]
  • Identification of Zero Copulas in Hungarian Using
    Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4802–4810 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC Much Ado About Nothing Identification of Zero Copulas in Hungarian Using an NMT Model Andrea Dömötör1;2, Zijian Gyoz˝ o˝ Yang1, Attila Novák1 1MTA-PPKE Hungarian Language Technology Research Group, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics Práter u. 50/a, 1083 Budapest, Hungary 2Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Egyetem u. 1, 2087 Piliscsaba, Hungary {surname.firstname}@itk.ppke.hu Abstract The research presented in this paper concerns zero copulas in Hungarian, i.e. the phenomenon that nominal predicates lack an explicit verbal copula in the default present tense 3rd person indicative case. We created a tool based on the state-of-the-art transformer architecture implemented in Marian NMT framework that can identify and mark the location of zero copulas, i.e. the position where an overt copula would appear in the non-default cases. Our primary aim was to support quantitative corpus-based linguistic research by creating a tool that can be used to compile a corpus of significant size containing examples of nominal predicates including the location of the zero copulas. We created the training corpus for our system transforming sentences containing overt copulas into ones containing zero copula labels. However, we first needed to disambiguate occurrences of the massively ambiguous verb van ‘exist/be/have’. We performed this using a rule-base classifier relying on English translations in the English-Hungarian parallel subcorpus of the OpenSubtitles corpus.
    [Show full text]
  • SYNTAX MASTER LIST Semester 2
    NOUN SYNTAX Syntax Explanation Latin I Latin II NOMINATIVE Subject The actor of an active verb, receiver of a passive verb, or “it” of an impersonal/stative verb ✓ ✓ Predicate The noun renames the subject via sum, esse ✓ ✓ GENITIVE Possession The genitive owns the noun to which it is connected (sometimes via sum, esse) ✓ ✓ Material The noun is made up of this genitive ✓ Quality The genitive gives a characteristic of the noun (requires attributive adjective) ✓ Partitive The genitive is made up of this noun ✓ Objective The genitive receives the noun as its object ✓ With Adjective The genitive is connected to an adjective ✓ With Verb The genitive is connected to a verb (verbs of reminding, accusing, condemning, feeling, etc.) ✓ Value The genitive indicates how important is an object ✓ DATIVE Indirect Object The dative receives the direct object (explicit or implicit [intransitives/compounds]) ✓ ✓ Possession The dative owns the noun to which it is connected via sum, esse ✓ Agent The dative indicates the actor of a passive verb (typically with gerundives or compoundeds) ✓ Reference The dative indicates to whom, or for whom, a statement refers or is of interest ✓ Ethical A subset of reference, typically used with person pronoun to show interested felt by a person Separation The dative indicates motion away (it has no preposition and is used with verbs of taking away) ✓ Purpose or End The dative indicates the reason for an action ✓ With Adjective The dative is connected to an adjective ✓ With Verb Another name for the dative indirect object
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 6 Morphological Split
    Chapter 6 Morphological Split Chapter 6 Morphological Split: Accusative Behaviour of Pronouns As mentioned in the previous chapters, Tongan shows a morphological split based on types of nouns. Specifically, full NP’s are divided into ERG and ABS, while pronouns show an accusative pattern: S and A appear as a subject pronoun, while O is realised in a distinct form. We will argue, however, that the accusative pattern does not mean that the pronouns receive NOM in the subject position and ACC in the object position. Rather, it is due to the fact that pronominal subjects are realised as clitics in Tongan. We will argue that the form of a subject clitic reflects the theta-role it bears and not the case. In particular, we will argue that despite the identical phonological form, a subject clitic receives ERG when it refers to A, and ABS when it refers to S. In §6.1, we will look at the data that demonstrate the apparent accusative pattern, which Tongan pronouns show. Our data demonstrate another peculiar property of the Tongan pronouns, namely, the compulsory word order alternation. In §6.2, we will argue that the SVO order results from the fact that the subject pronouns are clitics attached to T. We will also argue that object pronouns are full pronouns. Object clitics are not part of the lexical inventory of Tongan. In §6.3, we will develop the hypothesis that the subject clitics in Tongan are theta-role absorbers in the sense of Aoun (1985) and therefore, are arguments. This hypothesis explains why the pronouns in Tongan show an accusative pattern.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Observations on the Hebrew Desiderative Construction – a Dependency-Based Account in Terms of Catenae1
    Thomas Groß Some Observations on the Hebrew Desiderative Construction – A Dependency-Based Account in Terms of Catenae1 Abstract The Modern Hebrew (MH) desiderative construction must obey four conditions: 1. A subordinate clause headed by the clitic še= ‘that’ must be present. 2. The verb in the subordinate clause must be marked with future tense. 3. The grammatical properties genus, number, and person tend to be specified, i.e. if the future tense affix is underspecified, material tends to appear that aids specification, if contextual recovery is unavailable. 4. The units of form that make up the constructional meaning of the desiderative must qualify as a catena. A catena is a dependency-based unit of form, the parts of which are immediately continuous in the vertical dimension. The description of the individual parts of the desiderative must address trans-, pre-, and suffixes, and cliticization. Catena-based morphology is representational, monostratal, dependency-, construction-, and piece-based. 1. Purpose, means and claims The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the Hebrew desiderative construction. This construction is linguistically interesting and challenging for a number of reasons. 1. It is a periphrastic construction, with fairly transparent compositionality. 2. It is transclausal, i.e. some parts of the construction reside in the main clause, and others in the subordinated clause. The complementizer is also part of the construction. 3. The construction consists of more than one word, but it does not qualify as a constituent. Rather the construction cuts into words. 4. Two theoretically 1 I want to thank Outi Bat-El (Tel Aviv University) and three anonymous reviewers for their help and advice.
    [Show full text]
  • Reflections on Noun-To-Verb Conversion in English*
    Reflections on Noun-to-Verb Conversion In English* HEIKE BAESKOW Abstract English denominal verbs formed by conversion adopt complex morpho- syntactic and semantic information in a rather mysterious way. For exam- ple, the lexical item bottle is unambiguously interpreted as a referential expression in a sentence like John bought a bottle of wine, but how do we account for the event-reading of the same lexical item in a sentence like John bottled the wine? In this study it will be argued that the lexical information of converted denominal verbs is not provided by an unspecified zero-affix, but by conceptual qualia structures, i. e. by modes of explana- tion, and that these make explicit the implicit knowledge speakers of Eng- lish have about the referents of nominal bases and determine the interpreta- tion and formation of the corresponding verbs. Moreover, qualia structures yield not only the basic meanings of denominal verbs, but also allow for context-dependent interpretations, which are a result of coercion (e. g. John bottled the spectators). A mapping relation between qualia struc- tures and argument structures, the latter of which are part of the lexical representation of the denominal verbs, will be established by meaning pos- tulates. Keywords: word-formation, conversion, lexicon, qualia structures, coercion, proto-roles * I would like to thank Gisa Rauh, Thilo Tappe, Stefan Engelberg, Colin Foskett, Patrick Deegan, the participants of the linguistic colloquium held at the University of Wupper- tal and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this study. Remaining mis- takes are however my responsibility. I am particularly indebted to the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung (Cologne), whose financial support enabled me to complete the work on this study, which is part of the project on “Word-Formation and the Lexicon” supervised by Gisa Rauh.
    [Show full text]
  • Glossary of Linguistic Terms
    Glossary of Linguistic Terms accent Often used to refer to distinctive pronuncia­ tions which differ from that of Received Pronunciation It differs from dialect which includes syn­ tax and vocabulary as well acronym A word formed from the initial letters of the words which make up a name, e.g. NATO (from North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) active A clause in which the subject is the actor of the verb; in a passive clause the actor is not the grammatical subject; seep. 14 addressee The person being addressed or spoken to in any form of discourse adjective In traditional grammar a word which de­ scribes a noun, as happy in 'the happy man'; an adjective phrase is a group of one or more words fulfilling the function of an adjective; seep. 11 adverb In t:r:aditional grammar a word which de­ scribes a verb; in 'he ran slowly', slowly describes how he ran An adverb phrase is a group of one or more words fulfilling the function of an adverb; see p. 11 affix A morpheme which is attached to another word as an inflection or for derivation Affixes include prefixes at the beginning of a word and suffixes at the end of a word, e.g. un-god-ly with prefix un- and suffix -ly A derivational affix is used to form a new word, e.g. the suffix -less with hope gives the new word hopeless; an inflectional affix marks grammatical relations, in comes, the -s marks third person singular present indicative 159 160 Glossary alliteration The repetition of the same sound at the beginning of two or more words in close proximity, e.g.
    [Show full text]