Syntax Commons^™

L’Emprunt Lexical De L’Arabe Algérien À L’Amazighe : Étude Sur Un Corpus Parémiologique, Berkai Abdelaziz

Journal of Amazigh Studies

Résumé :

Une étude très récente de parémiologie contrastive entre le kabyle et l’arabe algérien montre, par-delà l’« isomorphisme » parémiologique existant entre les deux langues-cultures, qu’un certain nombre de mots de l’arabe dialectal seraient des emprunts à l’amazighe. C’est l’étude de ces emprunts au plan lexico-sémantique, et subsidiairement étymologique, qui constitue l’objet de notre proposition de contribution. Nous commencerons chaque fois par la vérification des données en arabe classique et en dialectal algérien, avant d’analyser les matériaux amazighs et d’en tirer les conclusions qui s’imposent.

Mots-clés : emprunt lexical, parémiologie, arabe algérien, et langue amazighe

Lexical borrowing of Algerian …

Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones

Masters Theses

Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …

"Does This Make Sense?": The Effect Of Congruent Guise In Regional Accent On Grammatical Acceptability Judgments, Nour Kayali

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with congruent or incongruent social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgement task. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a congruent place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

Collaborative Textbook On English Syntax (Version 1.0), Matt Garley, Karl Hagen, The Students Of Eng 270 At York College / Cuny

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Evaluation Rubric For Educational Resources For An Undergraduate English Syntax Course, Matt Garley

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Covert Determiners In Appalachian English Narrative Declarative Sentences, William Oliver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I explore the syntax and semantics of covert determiners (Ds) in matrix subject determiner phrases (DPs) with definite specific interpretations. To conduct my investigation, I used the Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English (AAPCAppE), a million-word Penn Treebank corpus, and the software CorpusSearch, a Java program that searches Penn Treebank corpora. My research shows that Appalachian English contains a linguistic phenomenon where speakers drop the D, replacing overt Ds with covert Ds, in definite specific DPs. For example, where Standard English speakers say The doctor came by horseback, Appalachian speakers may use a covert D …

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

Nominal Incorporation In Shiwilu (Kawapanan): Nouns, Classifiers And The Deceased Marker =Ku’, Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Shiwilu is a good representative of the Andes-Amazonia transitional zone, in that it exhibits a mixture of phonological and grammatical traits that are typical of the languages of these two regions (Valenzuela 2015, 2018). The present article addresses a phenomenon that is common in Amazonian languages but absent in the Central Andean families Quechuan and Aymaran: nominal incorporation (Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999: 10; Adelaar with Muysken 2004; Aikhen- vald 2017: 296). In this work, ‘nominal incorporation’ is a cover term to designate the process of inserting into the verb a noun, a classifier, or the deceased marker =ku’."

The Linearization Of V(P)-Doubling Constructions, Rong Yin

Doctoral Dissertations

When an item moves, it is usually pronounced once but in some cases, it is pronounced multiple times. So, a question is: What determines whether a moved item gets pronounced in only one of its positions or in multiple positions? This dissertation aims at providing an answer to this question by designing a linearization process that yields the correct phonetic realization of a moved item, with a focus on V(P) movement. In particular, this dissertation provides a detailed analysis of how V(P)-doubling cases are linearized and thus show how a V(P) ends up being pronounced multiple times.

Regarding the proposed …

How Well Do Lstm Language Models Learn Filler-Gap Dependencies?, Satoru Ozaki, Dan Yurovsky, Lori Levin

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper revisits the question of what LSTMs know about the syntax of filler-gap dependencies in English. One contribution of this paper is to adjust the metrics used by Wilcox et al. 2018 and show that their language models (LMs) learn embedded wh-questions -- a kind of filler-gap dependencies -- better than they originally claimed. Another contribution of this paper is to examine four additional filler-gap dependency constructions to see whether LMs perform equally on all types of filler-gap dependencies. We find that different constructions are learned to different extents, and there is a correlation between performance and frequency of …

Evaluating Structural Economy Claims In Relative Clause Attachment, Aniello De Santo, So Young Lee

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Grillo and Costa (2014) argue for a pseudo- relative (PR) first account of relative clause attachment preferences (RC) such that, when faced with a sentence ambiguous between a PR and a RC interpretation, the parser prefers committing to a PR structure first, thus giving rise to what looks like a high-attachment preference. One possible explanation for this parsing choice is in terms of simplicity of the PR structure, and overall economy principles. Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by testing the predictions of a parser for Minimalist grammars for PR and RC structures in Italian. We discuss the relevance of our …

Can Language Models Capture Syntactic Associations Without Surface Cues? A Case Study Of Reflexive Anaphor Licensing In English Control Constructions, Soo-Hwan Lee, Sebastian Schuster

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

We examine GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019), which is trained only on surface strings, to see whether or not the model makes correct predictions about the agreement patterns of a reflexive anaphor in English control constructions. Our findings show that GPT-2 struggles with transitive subject control constructions, but does well on transitive object control constructions. One reason might be that the model tries to associate the anaphor with the closest noun phrase. Moreover, while we find that a model with a larger number of parameters shows higher accuracy on the tasks related to subject control constructions, performance remains below chance.

Learning Constraints On Wh-Dependencies By Learning How To Efficiently Represent Wh-Dependencies: A Developmental Modeling Investigation With Fragment Grammars, Niels Dickson, Lisa Pearl, Richard Futrell

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

It’s hotly contested how children learn constraints on wh-dependencies, called syntactic islands. When learning this knowledge, a prerequisite is knowing how to represent wh-dependencies so that constraints can be hypothesized over those representations. Previous work has explained disparate sets of syntactic island constraints by assuming different wh-dependency representations, without a unified dependency representation capturing all these constraints. We implement a modeled learner who learns a Fragment Grammar (FG) representation of wh-dependencies–a representation comprised of potentially different-sized fragments that combine to form full dependencies–that best accounts for the input while being as compact as possible. …

Non-Argumental Clitics In Spanish And Galician: A Case Study Of The Distribution Of Solidarity And Ethical Clitics, Susana Huidobro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the properties of what traditional grammars call “superfluous elements” or non-arguments, so-called Ethical Dative Clitics (Bello 1954, Seco 1962 among others) and Solidarity Clitics (Álvarez, Rosario, X.L. Regueira & H. Monteaguedo 1986) in Spanish and Galician. This research fills an important gap in the existing formal literature on these forms, providing the first thorough syntactic and typological investigation of the latter phenomenon.

The study of non-argumental datives encounters difficulties at different levels: at a descriptive/empirical as well as at a theoretical level. From a descriptive point of view, there are no, so far in the literature, clear …

Some Notes On The "Needs Washed" Construction, Jim Wood, Josephine Holubkov, Ian Neidel, Kaija Gahm

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper describes the geographic and social factors that correlate with the acceptability of the needs washed construction, based on the results of recent survey data. After briefly describing the survey methods, we discuss several ways to analyze the geographic distribution of the construction, focusing on the distribution of “hot” and “cold” spots across different versions of the construction. We find certain core areas where the construction is highly accepted, as well as core areas where the construction is highly rejected. Our survey looks at the effect of verb (need, want, like, and love), tense/modality …

Microvariation In Verbal Rather, Jim Wood

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper uses survey results and interactive mapping tools to analyze correlations across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, in particular with participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb HAVE. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but …

The Structure Of The Iraqw Noun Phrase, Chrispina Alphonce

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

The structure of the noun phrase (NP) is demonstrated to differ among languages. Albeit studies that paid attention on Southern Cushitic languages in general and Iraqw in particular, their contribution is selective to the general grammar of the language while the structure of the NP is scarcely described. This study contributes to the description of the language through an empirical explanation of the elements and the morphosyntactic properties of the NP in the language. It describes the orders of the elements, their co-occurrence, and constraints to illuminate the structure of the NP of the language. It draws on the data …

Pragmatic Inferences Of Locative Enclitics In Luganda, Moureen Nanteza

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

This paper examines the non-locative functions of locative enclitics in Luganda (JE 15). Locative enclitics are words which cannot stand alone but attach on a verb to make meaning. Their status is ambiguous between free word and affix, hence motivating their analysis as enclitics. The enclitics are attached on the post final position of their hosts. Although the locative enclitics occur regularly in some Bantu languages (Luganda, Runyankore-Rukiga, Runyoro- Rutooro, Lunda, Ikizu, Fwe, Chichewa, Kinyarwanda among others), they have not been widely studied in the literature. The paper looks at verbal locative enclitics only but the locative enclitics also appear …

Morphosyntactic Variation In Bantu: Focus On East Africa, Peter Edelsten, Hannah Gibson, Rozenn Guérois, Gastor Mapunda, Lutz Marten, Julius Taji

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

Recent studies have developed a systematic approach to morphosyntactic variation among Bantu languages, taking well-known and widely attested construction types as a starting point and sketching their distribution across the family. One such approach, Guérois et al. (2017), utilises 142 morphosyntactic parameters or features, across a sample of some 50 Bantu languages (Marten et al. 2018). The present paper builds on this work and focusses on 10 parameters of variation where there is a significant difference between the values for East African Bantu languages and non-East African Bantu languages of the sample. The parameters relate to areas such as noun …

A Corpus Study Of The Development Of The Adjective Phrase In French Children, Avery Elizabeth Baggett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis I attempt to answer three questions:

H1) Do children use proportionally more prenominal or post-nominal placement of adjectives than adults?

H2) Are children more conservative or more creative in their behavior in alternating prenominal and post-nominal placement of adjectives?

H3) If colored terms are more frequent in child speech will they pattern more like prenominal adjectives or more like post nominal adjectives, as in adult speech?

To do this, I examine two general semantic viewpoints, opting to use Scontras & Goodman (2017) subjectivity hypothesis. Next, I provide a general overview of First Language Acquisition research and then …