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First, Mattiello's core hypothesis is that the meaning of - o is essentially derogatory (35), but the lexicographic analysis is said to only focus those senses that "revolve around aggressive languages" (39): in this way, uses of the suffix that could (potentially) falsify the hypothesis were excluded since the beginning. Those that do, however, represent important contributions to our understanding of the grammar-pragmatics interface in hateful discourse and are likely to establish themselves as crucial references in this growing field of studies. Otherwise, particularly welcome aspects of the chapter are the explicit definition of aggressive discourse and distinction of different types thereof, as well as the discussion of the prosody of expressive compounds. [Extracted from the article]

This paper provides a unified syntactic account of the distribution of English have in causative constructions (e.g. John had Mary read a book) and experiencer constructions (e.g. John had the student walk out of his classroom). It is argued that have is realized in the context of an applicative head (Appl) and an event-introducer v, regardless of the type of v. Have is spelled out in the causative when Appl merges under vCAUSE, and in the experiencer construction when Appl merges under vBE. This proposal is extended to have in possessive constructions (e.g. John has a hat/a brother): have is realized in the context of vBE and Appl. The proposed account provides empirical evidence for expanding the distribution of Appl: (i) a causative can take ApplP as a complement, which was absent in Pylkkänen's (2008) typological classification, and (ii) Appl can merge above Voice, contrary to Pylkkänen's analysis in which Appl is argued to always merge below VoiceP, never above. Moreover, the proposed account supports the theoretical claim that argument structure is licensed by functional syntactic structure; in particular, it shows that the relevant functional heads are not aspectual heads, but Appl and v. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the positive effect that modification has on the distribution of noun phrases in otherwise illicit environments. I focus on de nominals in French. By focusing on these nominals, whose distribution is altered by the addition of modifiers, the paper shows that modifiers can do much more than simply modify: they can change the syntactic and semantic status of a noun phrase. The licensing property of modifiers is an intriguing topic and has not been greatly discussed in the literature. I argue that modifiers can come to play the role of determiners in French as long as they are accompanied by a head de, which is the spell-out of a Cardinal head (see Lyons 1999). My proposal goes back to an old idea put forward by Damourette & Pichon (1911–1940) according to which, in modified contexts, de functions as one half of the article while the adjective functions as the other half. More generally, articles in French are seen as dual entities comprising of a specifier and a head. In the absence of the determiner les, an adjective can raise to the specifier of CardinalP. This is achieved via phrasal rather than head movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 1982 paper in the journal Glossa, Pullum outlined a set of arguments for treating English infinitival to as a defective auxiliary verb. Twenty years later, in his entry on infinitival constructions in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL, 2002), Huddleston argues that several distributional facts about auxiliaries fit poorly with this hypothesis. He proposes, on the basis of significant structural parallels, that to is a subordinator (complementizer). I show that Huddleston's arguments constitute a flawed analysis in CGEL's otherwise superb coverage of English descriptive grammar, and that the facts run strongly counter to his claims, often falling out independently from generalizations about auxiliaries that Huddleston overlooks. Several of these points were anticipated in Pullum's paper, but recent research on an idiosyncratic auxiliary-specific pattern of English nonrestrictive relative clause formation provides a powerful new argument in support of the auxiliary claim. In this respect, as in all others, the assignment of to to the class of auxiliaries provides the simplest and broadest account of its syntactic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a concise overview of the cross-modal priming methodology, it presents a selection of key studies to illustrate how this method can be used to address lexical and syntactic processing and discusses advantages and disadvantages, along with issues that need to be taken into consideration when designing studies that address sentence processing in bilinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the emergence of atypical noun+noun structures exhibiting regressive order (head-final or NN) in contemporary French such as la grève attitude (‘the strike attitude’) or la Marcelle solidarité (‘the Marcelle solidarity’). Using attested examples drawn from contemporary media, the aim of the paper is to provide a detailed description and history of these data, as well as to study its productivity through the emergence of patterns such as la N attitude or la N Academy/Académie. Using traditional tests, the paper also investigates the morphological versus syntactic nature of the construction and concludes in favour of the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines rule-based learning and item-based learning in relation to a Swedish child's acquisition of verb second in main clauses. While rule-based accounts assert that young children have access to syntactic structure and acquire a rule of generalized verb second, item-based accounts claim that young children are reproducing frequent word combinations in the input. The paper provides new and important data from one Swedish child, concluding that the acquisition of verb second is the result of rule-based learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short communication is concerned with long object shift of reflexives in Swedish. Only 3rd person reflexives can shift across their antecedent. For some reason this is possible even if the antecedent is 1st or 2nd person as well, but certain requirements on the antecedent are necessary. This paper shows that neither a purely syntactic nor a purely semantic analysis can account for all the facts. Instead the best analysis seems to be one that makes use of Bonet's (1995) post-syntactic morphological processes: feature delinking, feature erasure and feature insertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a detailed new analysis of the English expressions once, twice and thrice. These, we claim, are primarily compound determinatives, analogous in many respects to expressions like someone and somewhere. The new analysis exploits the framework of the Cambridge grammar of the English language (2002) in which the morphological nature of the compound determinative category reflects a fusion of functions, typically determiner (or modifier) and head of NP. We refine the notion of fusion of functions, and show that constructions which employ fusion of functions have properties which clearly distinguish them from superficially similar constructions which employ incorporation or hybridization. The paper therefore provides further evidence for the existence of fusion of functions as a distinct syntactic configuration, and indirectly supports theoretical frameworks which treat functions and categories as distinct primitives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a unified analysis of adverb scope and quantifier scope phenomena in a lexicalist approach to complex predicates. I first observe that the availability of scope ambiguity for adverbs and for quantifiers always coincides for a given type of complex predicate, drawing on data from different kinds of compound verb constructions, the verbal noun-taking predicates and the nominative object construction. The challenge for a unified treatment in lexicalist frameworks comes from the fact that syntactic structures cannot be taken as the locus for representing the scope of adverbs and quantifiers, unlike in derivational frameworks where such an analysis is the most natural. Thus, a previous lexicalist analysis by Manning, Sag & lida (1999) makes use of completely different mechanisms to account for adverb scope and quantifier scope, failing to capture the close parallel between them. I remedy this problem of Manning et al.'s analysis by proposing a unified account of adverb scope and quantifier scope that crucially makes use of a slightly enriched semantic representation explicitly encoding the property of mono-/biclausality with respect to scopal phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic behavior of object arguments in Moro, a Kordofanian language spoken in central Sudan. In particular, we focus on multiple object constructions (ditransitives, applicatives, and causatives) and show that these objects exhibit symmetrical syntactic behavior; e.g., any object can passivize or be realized as an object marker, and all can do so simultaneously. Moreover, we demonstrate that each object can bear any of the non-agentive roles in a verb’s semantic role inventory and that the resulting ambiguities are an entailment of symmetrical object constructions of the type found in Moro. Previous treatments of symmetrical languages have assumed a syntactic asymmetry between multiple objects and have developed theoretical analyses that treat symmetrical behaviors as departures from an asymmetrical basic organization of clausal syntax. We take a different approach: we develop a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar account that allows a partial ordering of the argument structure (arg-st) list. The guiding idea is that languages differ with respect to the organization of their arg-st lists and their consequences for grammatical function realization: there is no privileged encoding, but there is large variation within the parameters defined by arg-st organization. This accounts directly for the symmetrical behaviors of multiple objects. We also show how this approach can be extended to account for certain asymmetrical behaviors in Moro. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most statistical machine translation systems typically rely on word alignments to extract translation rules. This approach would suffer from a practical problem that even one spurious word alignment link can prevent some desirable translation rules from being extracted. To address this issue, this paper presents two approaches, referred to as sub-tree alignment and phrase-based forced decoding methods, to automatically learn translation span alignments from parallel data. Then, we improve the translation rule extraction by deleting spurious links and inserting new links based on bilingual translation span correspondences. Some comparison experiments are designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses aspects of the loss of verb-second (V2) in Old French in a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Data come from sequences in which a main declarative is preceded immediately by a tensed subordinate clause (Vance, Donaldson, and Steiner, 2010). Following Romaine (1982), represented speech and narrative are considered to represent distinct registers within a single text. An analysis of intra-textual variation between narrative and represented speech reveals stylistic variation, in that represented speech evinces higher rates of surface subject-verb-(object) orders in main clauses than narrative passages within the same text. The data also reveal gender variation, as the represented speech of women tends to be more linguistically conservative than that of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract meaning representation (AMR) is a graph-based sentence-level meaning representation that has become highly popular in recent years. AMR is a knowledge-based meaning representation heavily relying on frame semantics for linking predicate frames and entity knowledge bases such as DBpedia for linking named entity concepts. Although it is originally designed for English, its adaptation to non-English languages is possible by defining language-specific divergences and representations. This article introduces the first AMR representation framework for Turkish, which poses diverse challenges for AMR due to its typological differences compared to English; agglutinative, free constituent order, morphologically highly rich resulting in fewer word surface forms in sentences. The introduced solutions to these peculiarities are expected to guide the studies for other similar languages and speed up the construction of a cross-lingual universal AMR framework. Besides this main contribution, the article also presents the construction of the first AMR corpus of 700 sentences, the first AMR parser (i.e., a tree-to-graph rule-based AMR parser) used for semi-automatic annotation, and the evaluation of the introduced resources for Turkish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends the analysis of Scandinavian ‘pancake sentences’ as semantic or referential agreement (Enger 2004). Alternative analyses assuming that pancake sentences are to be analysed as syntactic agreement (Josefsson 2009), have some drawbacks. Notably, the distinction between different kinds of gender is not well motivated; the connection between different uses of the neuter is lost, and the use of ‘light verbs’ and of invisible elements is problematic. The referential agreement analysis, in combination with the Agreement Hierarchy, yields diachronic predictions that turn out to be correct; the syntactic analysis does not yield anything equivalent. Furthermore, the agreement pattern for very ‘general’ nouns follows more naturally under the referential agreement analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

qhɔ-qhô ί-kâʔ cɔ̀, Lâhō tɔ̂-mɔ̂ cɔ̀.The mountains have [springs of] water; the Lahu have proverbs. (#1012)Proverbs are a particularly interesting type of sentential formulaic expression. This paper analyses a rich corpus of proverbs in Lahu, a language of the Central Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, in terms of both their syntactic structure and their semantic content. Overwhelmingly bipartite in form, these proverbs reflect cultural and moral preoccupations of the Lahu people, and are sometimes expressed in similes and metaphors that are quite obscure to the outsider. They make implicit or explicit analogies between phenomena in the outside world and aspects of the behaviour of human beings. They often use earthy, scatological imagery, which tends to be bowdlerized in Chinese translation. Many of them bear a resemblance to the cryptic Chinese folk similes known as xiēhòuyû 歇后语. The proverbs cited are compared to similar ones in other languages, revealing the universal aspects of folk wisdom. Most Lahu proverbs seem to be original creations, although some look like literal equivalents of Western or Chinese sayings. A full-scale comparative study of Sino-Tibetan proverbs would shed light on possible paths of transmission, whether via missionaries or Chinese or Indian influence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to a `radical orphanage' approach, non-restrictive relative clauses are not part of the syntactic representation of the sentence that contains them. It is an appealing view, and seems to capture some important properties of non-restrictive relative clauses. Focusing mainly on empirical shortcomings, this paper aims to show that the appeal of such approaches is illusory. It also outlines an empirically superior `syntactically integrated' account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, I combine the semantics of Mares and Goldblatt [20] and Seki [29, 30] to develop a semantics for quantified modal relevant logics extending ${\bf B}$. The combination requires demonstrating that the Mares–Goldblatt approach is apt for quantified extensions of ${\bf B}$ and other relevant logics, but no significant bridging principles are needed. The result is a single semantic approach for quantified modal relevant logics. Within this framework, I discuss the requirements a quantified modal relevant logic must satisfy to be "sufficiently classical" in its modal fragment, where frame conditions are given that work for positive fragments of logics. The roles of the Barcan formula and its converse are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amuzgo (Otomanguean: Mexico) has a large inventory of lexically arbitrary tonal inflection classes in person/number paradigms, where inflectional tones overwrite the root's lexical tone. In causatives, however, inflectional tones are predictable from phonological properties of the root, primarily lexical tone. The inertness of root inflection classes in causatives is argued to follow from cyclicity: once the causative Voice head triggers spell-out, lexical inflection-class specifications are no longer visible, and only phonological information can condition allomorphy in the outer domain of person/number agreement. The grammatical behaviour of inflectional tone thus reflects its structural morphosyntactic position, as distinct from its linear phonological one. I distinguish between several possible analyses of phonologically conditioned tonal-overwriting allomorphy, and propose that the Amuzgo case involves constraint-mediated competition among a priority-ranked list of allomorphs in the input, rather than creation of tonal allomorph candidates purely within the phonology or subcategorisation frames in the lexical representations of allomorphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly after arriving in Copenhagen five years ago, I realized what many linguists have long understood: the case situation in the Nordic languages is formidably complex. Of course, the broad outlines of inter-speaker (or, cross-linguistic) variation in Nordic nominal case inflection are well known. Within two major language families, (North) Germanic and Uralic, there are dozens of closely related language varieties. The Finnic and Sami languages of Uralic have adpositional case systems, while the North Germanic languages can be further subdivided into the Mainland and Insular groups, partially on the basis of their different case systems. The latter group, namely Icelandic, Faroese, and Älvdalian (which is spoken in a fairly isolated rural community in the interior of Sweden), has ‘rich’ inflectional case morphology on a range of elements comprising nominal phrases, including articles, determiners, demonstratives, nouns, pronouns, wh-words, and more. The former group, namely Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, are ‘case-poor’, maintaining only a vestige of their historically rich case morphology on a subset of personal pronouns, which have Nominative, Oblique, and Possessive forms. Furthermore, certain varieties of Swedish and Norwegian retain vestigial Dative forms of clitic pronouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the term `passive' has been systematically misapplied to a class of impersonal constructions that suppress the realization of a syntactic subject. The reclassification of these constructions highlights a typological contrast between two types of verbal diathesis and clarifies the status of putative `passives of unaccusatives' and `transitive passives' in Balto-Finnic and Balto-Slavic. Impersonal verb forms differ from passives in two key respects: they are insensitive to the argument structure of a verb and can be formed from unergatives or unaccusatives, and they may retain direct objects. As with other subjectless forms of personal verbs, there is a strong tendency to interpret the suppressed subject of an impersonal as an indefinite human agent. Hence impersonalization is often felicitous only for verbs that select human subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that data from the Atlas Linguistique de la France (ALF, Edmont and Gilliéron, 1902–1910) can shed light on the fine-grained syntax of sentential negation in the Oïl dialects spoken in North Eastern France, Belgium and Switzerland. The Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in this area possess a larger variety of negative structures than those found in (Standard) French: in addition to ne...pas , ne can be followed by negations mie , pont or even appear alone. Although the dialects under study are highly endangered, I show how we can use syntactic data 'hidden' in the ALF to study their syntactic patterns. I present a quantitative study of variation in sentential negation in authentic transcriptions and French translations of the 22 negative data points in the ALF at 150 points in France, Belgium and Switzerland (N = 2989). I show that the pont form is significantly more frequent in negative constructions with 'weak NPs' (de phrases) and that there is a significant correlation between dropping of secondary negation and the ability of the secondary negation mie to be realized as an enclitic -m. This study supports Dagnac (2018)'s conclusion that the ALF is an invaluable tool for the study of syntactic microvariation in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution gives in its first part an overview on factors of the decay and death of whole languages, focusing on dependency relations between these factors. They are organised along the following dimensions: socio-political, socio-economic, sociocultural, socio-psychological, and linguistic dimensions. The order of these dimensions partially represents a causal chain from left to right, but with many feedback relations. The second part of this article deals with early (socio-)linguistic indicators of language decay and discusses in this respect massive and asymmetric borrowing from the dominant into the recessive language, the loss of productivity of word formation patterns in the latter (illustrated from Breton), changes in name-giving (doubtful), shift of 'foreign accent' from the dominant to the recessive language, borrowing of morphological and syntactic patterns (inconclusive). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses morphological case variation, arguing that individual cases are not syntactic objects or features but PF interpretations of a range of different underlying syntactic relations. Nevertheless, it turns out that case variation can, to a large extent, be analyzed in terms of only two atomic ‘ingredients’: event licensing of NPs and PF marking of the licensing relation (where marking is analyzed in terms of Chomskyan case stars). Ergative is a Voice/ag*-case, whereas accusative is a v*-case, licensed under c-command by Voice/ag (ergative and accusative marking thus being two sides of the same coin). Individual cases in case-expanding morphological/PF case systems, it is argued, behave like viruses, striving to expand beyond their original ‘reasonable’ domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the findings of parallel studies of variable subject presence in two closely related sign language varieties, Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL). The studies expand upon research in American Sign Language (ASL) (Wulf, Dudis, Bayley, & Lucas, 2002) that found subject pronouns with noninflecting verbs to be more frequently unexpressed than expressed. The ASL study reported that null subject use correlates with both social and linguistic factors, the strongest of which is referential congruence with an antecedent in a preceding clause. Findings from the Auslan and NZSL studies also indicated that chains of reference play a stronger role in subject presence than either morphological factors (e.g., verb type), or social factors of age, gender, ethnicity, and language background. Overall results are consistent with the view that this feature of syntactic variation may be better accounted for in terms of information structure than sociolinguistic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the use of the Stylized Italian English (SIE) by Italian Canadians living in Ontario. It states that SIE is a linguistic resource of the second and third generation family members who use Italian phonological, morphological, syntactic features of English language. It notes that SIE is socially meaningful because its language style and social meanings are perceived as contrastive.

AbstractWe report work on adding semantic role labels to the Chinese Treebank, a corpus already annotated with phrase structures. The work involves locating all verbs and their nominalizations in the corpus, and semi-automatically adding semantic role labels to their arguments, which are constituents in a parse tree. Although the same procedure is followed, different issues arise in the annotation of verbs and nominalized predicates. For verbs, identifying their arguments is generally straightforward given their syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank as they tend to occupy well-defined syntactic positions. Our discussion focuses on the syntactic variations in the realization of the arguments as well as our approach to annotating dislocated and discontinuous arguments. In comparison, identifying the arguments for nominalized predicates is more challenging and we discuss criteria and procedures for distinguishing arguments from non-arguments. In particular we focus on the role of support verbs as well as the relevance of event/result distinctions in the annotation of the predicate-argument structure of nominalized predicates. We also present our approach to taking advantage of the syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank to bootstrap the predicate-argument structure annotation of verbs. Finally, we discuss the creation of a lexical database of frame files and its role in guiding predicate-argument annotation. Procedures for ensuring annotation consistency and inter-annotator agreement evaluation results are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTMany of our surviving Old English (OE) texts are translations from Latin originals. Given that the syntax of Latin and OE differ in a number of ways, the possibility of transference in the process of translation is an important issue for studies of OE syntax. This article examines one syntactic structure where the syntax of the languages differ: the prepositional phrase (PP) with pronominal complement. In Latin, PPs with pronominal complements are essentially head-initial, while in OE they vary between head-initial and head-final. I show that two distinct translation effects can be distinguished, one direct and one indirect, and that these effects apply differentially to two different types of translation, biblical and nonbiblical. I relate these different translation effects to the different strategies of OE translators when faced with biblical and nonbiblical texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis article explores syntactic and regional variation in the choice between declarative (nonrelativizer) thatand zero complementizer. Using a corpus of contemporary prose from New Zealand, Australian, American, and British newspapers, the study examines complementizer choice in complements to verbs and adjectives, extraposed complements to verbs, it-subject constructions (It is obvious(that)), and copula constructions (The trouble is(that), It could be(that), What matters is(that), It was only later(that)). The form of the embedded subject (pronoun, short NP (noun phrase), long NP) is also taken into account. It is shown that significant regional differences in zero rates are to some extent syntactic. The New Zealand and Australian data show less inhibition of zero in clauses that are not adjacent to the clause-selecting lexical head than the American and British data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]