Search

The order of clitics (CLs) in Romance languages has been studied in depth by many scholars since Perlmutter's first approach. This author points out that person and case features impose a filter that results in the following pattern in Spanish: Se- II- I- IIIdat- IIIacc. This pattern has been revisited because it is not restrictive enough: it gives rise to impossible sequences. In this context, the goal of this work is to define a pattern of morphosyntactic features for River Plate Spanish clitics, and an ordering pattern, with the purpose of developing a computational model for an automatic analysis of this phenomenon. This kind of analysis is justified because the algorithm output shows the degree of success of the descriptive proposal. To this end, we use NooJ, a linguistic development environment that has diverse tools. The computational modeling involves two stages: (i) the creation of an electronic dictionary and (ii) the creation of a computational grammar. The algorithm developed can generate all correct sentences conformed by Nominative Pronoun + CL + CL + Verb, Non-Finite Verb-CL-CL and Imperative Verb-CL-CL, and it can recognize these kinds of expressions in written text assigning the correct semantic labels. With these results, we conclude that our descriptive proposal is adequate for the analysis of sequences of clitics in River Plate Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We make two claims regarding weather expressions in Basque: first, based on Eriksen et al.'s (2010) typology, we show that Basque tends towards the argument type (and less frequently so to the predicate-argument type) when coding dynamic (precipitation or other) events and to both the argument and the predicate type when coding static events; Basque often has transitive structures (i.e. both transitive predicate and argument transitive types), apparently a rare typological feature. Second, with respect to two key issues in the study of weather predicates within Generative Grammar, we claim (a) that Basque supports the view that both lexicalizations of weather verbs (unaccusative and unergative/transitive) are possible across languages, as argued by Bleotu (2015) and Levin & Krejci (2019); and (b) that the empty pro subject of Basque transitive weather constructions is closer to a quasi-argument (Chomsky 1981; Levin & Krejci 2019) rather than to a true expletive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic iconicity has been studied since ancient times (e.g., Plato's Cratylus, see Cooper & Hutchinson 1997). Within modern grammatical description, this notion was mostly developed by Jakobson and Benveniste; nowadays, iconicity in language is even being experimentally tested (e.g., Blasi et al. 2016; Diatka & Milička 2017). However, most studies on linguistic iconicity pertain to prosody, sound symbolism, or morphology; syntactic iconicity has been vastly underexplored. In this paper, we present two hypotheses concerning syntactic iconicity: (1) syntactic descriptions of natural language strings have an inherent structure which is isomorphic to that of representations in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system; or (2) linear order imposed on phrase structure is isomorphic to that in some other component of grammar or a non-grammatical system. We will argue in favour of the former, which constitutes a novel perspective on iconicity in grammar. We furthermore discuss the place that iconicity may have in the architecture of a generative system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I provide a critical survey of the role that semantics took in the several models of generative grammar, since the 1950s until the Minimalist Program. I distinguish four different periods. In the first section, I focus on the role of formal semantics in generative grammar until the 1970s. In Section 2 I present the period of linguistic wars, when the role of semantics in linguistic theory became a crucial topic of debate. In Section 3 I focus on the formulation of conditions on transformations and Binding Theory in the 1970s and 1980s, while in the last Section I discuss the role of semantics in the minimalist approach. In this section, I also propose a semantically-based model of generative grammar, which fully endorses minimalism and Chomsky's later position concerning the primary role of the semantic interface in the Universal Grammar modelization (Strong Minimalist Thesis). In the Discussion, I point out some theoretical problems deriving from Chomsky's internalist interpretation of model-theoretic semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1965, I became a student of Dutch and general linguistics at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. The rise of generative grammar played an important role in this change of perspective within Dutch linguistics. Word formation rules, as conceived of and discussed in that monograph, are incompatible with generative grammar or with any grammar-based linguistic framework, because, like the tradition they encode, these rules cross the synchronic-diachronic boundary that is central to all post-Saussurean structural linguistics. The Dutch tradition of morphology before the rise of generative grammar in the 1960s had a different focus, even though it also wanted to account for the word-forming creativity of the language user. [Extracted from the article]

Summary: Despite being a recent development in generative linguistics, Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993) has had a profound impact on linguistics, particularly on phonology in North America. OT posits that observed forms of language arise due to conflicting linguistic constraints. When proposed in 1993, OT saw virtually overnight success in American phonology despite not having been the first theory of grammar to focus solely on the constraint. I argue, that the reasons for which OT saw such immediate success due in large part to the efforts of Prince and Smolensky to work at getting the word out, the state of American phonology at the time which felt stagnant to some, and the coincidence of OT's birth with the Internet Boom which Prince and Smolensky used to their advantage [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a methodology for the automatic extraction of specialized Arabic, English and French verbs of the field of computing. Since nominal terms are predominant in terminology, our interest is to explore to what extent verbs can also be part of a terminological analysis. Hence, our objective is to verify how an existing extraction tool will perform when it comes to specialized verbs in a given specialized domain. Furthermore, we want to investigate any particularities that a language can represent regarding verbal terms from the automatic extraction perspective. Our choice to operate on three different languages reflects our desire to see whether the chosen tool can perform better on one language compared to the others. Moreover, given that Arabic is a morphologically rich and complex language, we consider investigating the results yielded by the extraction tool. The extractor used for our experiment is TermoStat (Drouin 2003). So far, our results show that the extraction of verbs of computing represents certain differences in terms of quality and particularities of these units in this specialized domain between the languages under question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Chomsky's report of the mid 1970s, he and Harris developed their theories in an essentially independent way; whereas according to some statements by Harris, some contact actually took place between them. To shed light on this issue, it may be useful to systematically compare their respective views of the notion 'transformation' as well as their analyses of certain syntactic phenomena. Among the topics dealt with in the present article are: the system of syntactic categories and their symbols; the notion of 'zero elements'; the phenomenon of discontinuous constituents; the English auxiliary system; wh-constructions; the typology of transformations; the notions of 'kernel' and 'kernel sentence'. Several of these analyses show many points of contact between the two scholars (e.g., the analysis of wh-constructions or that of English auxiliaries), which allow us to maintain that they surely influenced each other. The overall differences between the two models are also clear: the transformational relation holds between sentences in Harris's framework, while it holds between underlying strings on the one hand and actual sentences on the other in Chomsky's. As a consequence of this different view of the notion of transformation, two problems which were fundamental for Chomsky had no importance for Harris, namely the order of transformations and the distinction between optional and obligatory transformations. It can therefore be concluded that, if the two scholars certainly influenced each other when they were working out their respective transformational theories, their theoretical views were acutely different almost from the beginning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on sign language grammaticalization have demonstrated that most of the attested diachronic changes from lexical to functional elements parallel those previously described for spoken languages. To date, most of these studies are either descriptive in nature or embedded within functional-cognitive theories. In contrast, we take a generative perspective on sign language grammaticalization, adopting ideas by Roberts & Roussou (2003), who suggest that grammaticalization can be characterized as 'reanalysis 'upwards' along the functional structure'. Following an overview of some of the attested modality-independent pathways, we zoom in on the grammaticalization of two types of agreement auxiliaries, the lexical sources of which are the verb give and the noun person. We argue that the grammaticalization of give-aux (in Greek Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language) follows directly from Roberts & Roussou's model because a lexical verb is reanalyzed as an element which is merged in a structurally higher functional position (little v). The same is true for person, but this change has an additional modality-specific flavor. In spoken languages, agreement affixes typically enter the functional domain of V via cliticization. In contrast, in German Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language, person, after having been reanalyzed as a determiner-like element, 'jumps' directly from D into AgrO - most probably because it has the relevant spatial properties necessary to express agreement. Thus, grammaticalization in sign languages, while being structurally similar, allows for types of reanalysis that are not attested in spoken languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a critical response to linguist Pieter Seuren's review of the book "Linguistics and the Formal Sciences: The Origins of Generative Grammar," by Marcus Tomalin. The author argues that Seuren fails to fully investigate the origins of the transformational generative grammar, since Seuren failed to survey the history of cognitive psychology and connect the resources used by linguist Noam Chomsky in his review of linguist B. F. Skinner's article on the philosophy of language. The history of the Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) is discussed, along with the psychology of linguistics, behaviorism and language, and the methodological technique of distributional analysis.

Normally, European languages are considered to express evidentiality only by lexical means, while numerous non-Indo-European languages present specific grammatical items which function as evidential markers. In recent years, numerous studies have pointed out the existence of evidential markers in various Indo-European languages, included Spanish. This article intends to be another contribution to the study of evidentiality in Spanish. My claim is that generalizations expressed with the particle se, on the one hand, and generalizing constructions with uno, 2nd person singular and 3rd person plural, on the other hand, contrast with each other in terms of evidentiality. While the latter constructions express a generalization based on the speaker’s personal experience, the se-construction refers to established rules or hearsay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the systematic description of the most productive particle, which has been used in English phrasal verb construction "up" and aims to possibly highlight all possible ambiguity. Accordingly, the particle "up" appears to be used most of the time, as an intensifier or as an aspect marker, which is said to have changed the activity into one of accomplishment and has the chance to be deleted in almost 40% of the cases being scrutinized. It is being concluded that the subcategorization refinements would help mitigate ambiguity that involves English phrasal verbs and that some uncertainty still remains, when the ambiguity involves subject commutation.

Sinclair’s grammatical work is notable for its strict reliance on performance data and its avoidance of psychological theorising. His argument rests on the observation that large corpora reveal a huge discrepancy between the predictions made by cognitive models of grammar and what actually happens in performance. This discrepancy cannot be explained away by appeal to encoding/processing deficiencies, but must be taken as reason to revise our view of grammar, especially by exploring its interdependence with lexis. In this he follows Halliday’s (1966) idea that every word has its own grammar. Sinclair’s 1991 paper on the word of (‘The meeting of lexis and grammar’) exemplifies his thinking in this area with particular energy and originality. Questioning the traditional classification of of as a preposition, he proposes a new, more semantically based, approach to the analysis of noun phrases traditionally said to contain postmodification of the head with an of-phrase, e.g. the horns of the bull. This chapter reviews Sinclair’s development as a grammarian, examines the arguments of the 1991 paper and suggests that while his work has been radically transformative in linguistics, it should not indefinitely avoid engaging with the problem of how best to represent what it is that we know when we say we know a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view of pattern grammar is that syntactic structures and lexical items are co-selected and that grammatical categories begin to align very closely with semantic distinctions. While this is certainly a valid position when analysing the phenomenon of collocation, it does not really solve the problem for open choice issues. Not all language use can be subsumed under the idiom principle. The noun hatred, for instance, can co-occur with any discourse object for which hatred can be expressed. It can also co-occur with other lexical items standing for various circumstantial aspects. The grammatical structure itself often does not tell us whether we find expressed the object of hatred or some circumstantial aspect, as these structures tend to have more than one reading. Lexicogrammar, or local grammar, is more than equating a syntactic structure with a semantic pattern. We have to be aware of the different functions or readings a given grammatical structure can have. The framework of valency/dependency grammar can help us to make the necessary distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge patterns are an effective tool for automatically or semi-automatically locating specific types of information — such as conceptual relations — in text corpora. However, pattern-based approaches are vulnerable to a number of types of variation; one of these is the expression of multiple participants in a single occurrence of a relation. Despite the challenges posed by this phenomenon, however, such cases may be particularly rich in useful information about the principal relation expressed and/or others involving the relation participants. Strategies that allow for formal evaluation and processing of such cases can enable pattern-based applications to capitalize on this information. This article will present a description, in English and French, of the types of relation occurrences in which multiple participants in CAUSE–EFFECT and ASSOCIATION relations are named, and the information that each can offer in addition to these primary relations. In addition, some strategies and challenges for processing these cases automatically will be discussed, and the phenomena as observed in the two languages will be briefly compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition and extraction of terms and their variants in texts are crucial processes in text mining. We use the ILC platform, an automatic controlled indexing platform, to perform these linguistic processes. We present a methodology for enhancing the recognition of syntactic term variation in English, using syntactic and morpho-syntactic features. Principal spurious variants of terms are ascribed to incorrect word dependencies. To overcome these problems, we consider each term variant as a window on the sentence and introduce two criteria: an internal syntactic criterion which checks that the dependencies between words in the window are respected, and an external criterion which defines boundaries, making it possible to ensure that the window is well positioned in the sentence. The use of these criteria improves filtering of the variants and assists the expert in validating the indexing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the role of Evert Beth in the introduction of generative grammar in the Netherlands. Evert Beth is a professor of Logic at the University of Amsterdam who presented a paper in establishing generative grammar. The author examines how Beth became involved in linguistics and became a major proponent of generative grammar and the arguments against Anton Reichling's criticism of Chomsky. The exchange of letters between Beth and Reichling about the latter's criticism of Chomsky are also investigated.

Every project of automated lemmatization is confronted to the problem of lexical ambiguities. The aim of the authors is to provide a description of the lexical ambiguities to be found in Ancient Greek. They also wish to present a first set of local grammars intended to solve them. Results of automated desambiguisation are compared with lexical data previously treated by hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to study the French pronoun y in its spatial uses. y can refer to different types of phrases and, in particular, to spatial prepositional phrases. This induces that those phrases have contextual effects, as other nominal phrases have. We study the role played by certain spatial prepositions in this process and conclude that they act as functions, working on entities of the universe of interpretation to produce new entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an experiment dealing with corpus-based construction of “differential ontologies”, which are organised according to semantic similarity and differential features. We argue that knowledge-rich defining contexts can be useful to help an ontology modeller in his task. We present a method, based on lexico-syntactic patterns, to spot such contexts in a corpus, then identify the terms they relate (definiendum and genus or “characteristics”) and the semantic relation that links them. We also show how potential co-hyponyms can be detected on the basis of shared words in their definiens. We evaluate the extracted defining sentences, semantic relations and co-hyponyms on a test corpus focusing on childhood and on an evaluation corpus about dietetics (both corpora are French). Definition extraction obtains 50% precision and recall of approximately 40%. Semantic relation identification reaches an average of 48% precision, and co-hyponyms 23.5%. We discuss the results of these experiments and conclude on perspectives for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from natural languages (in contrast to, say, the results of psycholinguistic experiments) are still a major source of evidence used in linguistics, whether they are elicited through grammatical judgments, as in generative linguistics, or by collecting samples, as preferred in typology. The underlying assumption is that data are alike in their value as evidence if they occur in natural languages. The present paper questions this assumption in showing that there is a difference in the naturalness of languages because languages like German or English have originally emerged as secondarily learned written languages, that is they once were languages without native speakers. Although they are nowadays acquired as first languages, their grammars still contain inconsistent properties which partly disqualify standard languages as a source of evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses multi level Optimality Theory (OT) and the ways of dealing with stages in phonological processing. OT should aim at ways to incorporate multiple levels of phonological processing, rather than focus on retaining the single evaluation hypothesis. In an OT approach, the constraints responsible for preferred syllable content are active only at pre-phonetic levels of evaluation, whereas a constraint on segmental markedness, saying that consonants should be as consonantal as possible and therefore nonsonorant is active at the pre-phonetic, as well as at the phonetic level. The tools of OT seem particularly suited to give a representation of the conflict between markedness constraints with opposing output goals Aphasia, in this approach, comprises the lowering of faithfulness constraints at the affected level of processing. Language breakdown provides a window on the workings of the language system and linguistic theories should be able to deal with the view thus offered.

The past ten years have shown an ever-increasing revival of interest in phonological acquisition. The most fundamental change is probably that Optimality Theory (OT) has reinstated continuity developmental grammars and final adult grammars have the same representational units and organizational principles. The development from an initial grammar to a final grammar had been pictured as a continuous process. In OT the basic idea is that constraints are innate and universal and come with an initial ranking where all markedness constraints outrank all faithfulness constraints. The learner needs to acquire the language-specific ranking of these constraints. By subsequent rerankings, the initial grammar gradually develops into the target-appropriate final grammar. With this state-of-the-art paper in mind, a survey was sent out to a large group of people involved in research on phonological acquisition. They were asked, among other things, what they thought the "state of the art" of the field was, and in which directions the field should proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the workshop on Computational and Computer-Assisted Terminology on May 25, 2005 in Lisbon, Portugal. The major themes discussed in the workshop were term extraction, semantic relation extraction, and terminology and knowledge organization and management. It also reflected the increasing development of terminological tools in a variety of languages.