The present participle and gender assignment in Swedish

Author(s): Dominika Skrzypek / Language(s): English Issue: 31/2021

The paper considers gender assignment of deverbal nouns, originally present participles, in Swedish. The perspective is diachronic. The corpus consists of a choice of Swedish texts from 1225-1732. The results show that nouns denoting entities ranking higher in the Animacy hierarchy show tendencies to be placed in the utrum gender (originally masculine and feminine genders) and nouns denoting mass, collective or abstract referents to be assigned neuter gender. This tendency is visible throughout the history of the Swedish language.

Two grammatical categories for please in Mandarin imperative clauses

Author(s): Wei-Cherng Sam Jheng / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

This paper develops a syntax-pragmatics interface analysis of imperative clauses overtly marked by two grammatical categories of qing ‘please’ in Mandarin and refines the division of labor among directive force, clause typing and deontic modality jointly computing the interpretative properties of qing imperatives. We present a cluster of properties to differentiate between the two categories of qing and observe that qing1 denotes obligation imposed on the addressee by the speaker, while qing2 denotes permission with which the addressee is allowed to perform an action or make true a state of affairs according to a set of norms. It is argued that qing1 is an imperative mood head, while qing2 is an imperative adverb, but both are endowed with a similar internal composition and extent of the phrasal hierarchies of the CP periphery, and their disparate imperative properties can be ascribed to the addressee-oriented and subject-oriented deontic modality (Tsai & Portner 2008). Following Haegeman & Hill's (2013) version of the Speech Act Phrase, we claim that a speech act layer externally merges to the topmost position of ForceP to drive the syntax-pragmatics interface computation of the speaker-addressee relation and to mediate the imperative mood and clause typing represented in the CP layer.

Studiu lingvistic asupra manuscrisului Sandipa. Sintaxa (4.2.). Sintaxa frazei

Author(s): Galaction Verebceanu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2023

The article describes the syntactic processes that occur at the level of the sentence. Are examined the characteristic features of all the coordinated and subordinate sentences recorded in the text of the popular novel Sandipa, a handwritten copy dated to the end of the 18th century in the northern part of historical Moldavia and preserved at the Russian State Library, Moscow (ms. Rom. 824, Grigorovici fund). The syntactic manifestations are researched from the point of view of their presence in the oldest Romanian language writings and in the contemporary ones with the manuscript we are dealing with, referring, as the case may be, to the situation in the current literary language.

The influence of Latin on Old English adjectival postposition

Author(s): Maciej Grabski / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

The article is a systematic, corpus-based account of Latin’s influence on the position of Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives. While multiple studies on phrase-level syntax suggest that source-text interference may have been partly responsible for placing the adjective after the head noun, this observation has so far received little quantitative underpinning. The present article offers a detailed comparison of OE target noun phrases containing postnominal adjectives with their Latin counterparts to determine the exact extent to which this arrangement may have been a syntactic calque from a foreign language. The study has found that while a fair number of OE postposed adjectives did copy their Latin originals, their placement could be accounted for through reference to tendencies characteristic of OE (i.e. the adjective displays different degrees of “verbalness” or is part of a heavy phrase). Therefore, it appears that translated texts do not have to be excluded or treated with particular suspicion in studies concerned with the position of adnominal adjectives.

Glagolska valencija u idiomskim skupinama

Author(s): Azra Hodžić-Čavkić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 20/2022

The verb in a dependency model of grammatical structure has a central role and therefore exemplifies the approach to natural language as being verb centric. According to the model of dependency grammar, each verb has a number of actants that can be used with that verb. French linguist Lucien Tesnière did not consider valency as something static. On the contrary, according to him, valency becomes dynamic when it comes into an idiomatic surrounding since the cumulative semantic of the construction takes over the behavior of morphology and syntax of its own components. Although it changes the syntactical behavior, it has no effect on the semantic structure of the verbs. Verbs acquire or lose one of the actants just as a sign of a formal change, but semantically speaking, the verbs remain unchanged. In this paper we have dealt with the idiosyncrasy of idiom groups within the corpus of verbal idioms. We showed that the specificities of the category of cognate objects are still conditioned by the so‑called idiomatic principle. Namely, in the structure of verbal tautological idioms, only the morphemic version of the verb can appear as the nominal component, but these cognate objects do not require the appearance of adjectival complements. Nevertheless, the idiomatic principle dictates that verb components cannot be passivized due to the fact that the role of the undergoer is actually abolished from the real argument structure of the transitive verb for semantic reasons. Since these are semantically fixed structures, and thus passivation will be allowed only if the meaning is not affected. The second group of idioms illustrates the significance of metonymy for the redefinition of the argument structure of verbs. In idioms there are certain unexpected cases of nouns, for instance, nouns in the genitive case “suffer” from actions of the verbs according to the metonymy (glava, džan, etc.). There are also examples with nouns in the instrumental case which activate the continuum of metaphor and metonymy, thus affecting the argument structure of the verb.

Reflexives are Results of Impoverishment

Author(s): Yusuke Yoda / Language(s): English Issue: 44/2020

For decades, the central issues surrounding Binding have been investigation of mechanisms of co-referentiality. Most of literature have attempt to find out the mechanisms of binding condition (Chomsky 1981, 1986). This paper will shed new light on the Binding, that is morphological aspects of reflexive anaphors and pronouns, and the source of subject orientation. The purposes of this paper are to claim that Apparent ses (Pica (1985)) in some languages are in fact pronoun and thesubject orientation is emerged as a result of person/gender-feature (φ-feature) impoverishment (cf. Noyer (1997), Halle (1997)). To claim these, this paper looks at Thai and Japanese data. The organization of this paper from next chapter is as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews binding theory we adopt. Then section 3, Thai binding data are introduced. Based on Thai data provided in section 3, section 4 provides proposal and analysis, in which the morpho-semantic framework by Middleton (2018) is introduced. Section 5 shows the current account is also applicable to Japanese reflexives. Section 6 concludes this paper.

Case transmission in Classical Latin control structures: Between syntax and morphology

Author(s): Jarosław Jakielaszek / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Latin nonfinite structures with nonovert subjects exhibit puzzling properties with regard to the case- and ϕ-features of their subjects and their relationship to overt NPs in matrix clauses. While the transmission of case- and ϕ-feature related properties is obligatory when there is a nominative or accusative controller NP, it is only ϕ-feature transmission that remains obligatory when there is a dative controller, case transmission being apparently optional. To avoid an assumption of syntactic optionality, accounts of the phenomenon which rely on syntactic mechanisms propose that the apparent optionality reflects a syntactic difference between two types of nonfinite structures. It is instead proposed that mechanisms of linking of objects via Agree and ϕ-feature and case transmission should be assigned to different components of the grammar, syntax and morphology. The hypothesis allows a unified treatment of the syntactic phenomenon of control in Latin.

Control structures in Kokborok: A case of syntactic convergence

Author(s): Gargi Roy,Rajesh Kumar,Kārumūri V. Subbārāo / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

This paper presents a descriptive study of the control structures in Kokborok, a tibeto-Burman language spoken in tripura (one of the north-eastern states in India) and demonstrates the contact-induced changes in the phenomenon of control in Kokborok which resulted due to the long-term contact with Bangla (Indo-aryan), a genetically different language spoken in the state. the instances of genitive subject and the phenomenon of overt controllee in the embedded subject position in Kokborok are the cases in point. the instance of overt controllee described in this paper points to the deviation from the classic concept of pRo thereby demonstrating a property unique to the study of South asian languages.

РАЗДЕЛИТЕЛЬНЫЕ КОНСТРУКЦИИ В СЛАВЯНСКИХ ЯЗЫКАХ

Author(s): Olga A. Pochinyaeva / Language(s): Russian Issue: 5/2023

The aim of the work is the typological examination of the disjunctive sentences in the systems of three East Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian), one West Slavic language (Polish) and one South Slavic language (Bulgarian). This study is the first attempt at conducting a comparative study of the disjunctive systems in the Slavic languages. Its relevance is determined by the need for a multidimensional comparative description of the disjunctive constructions in related languages, which will make it possible to identify contrasting elements and more clearly identify the specifics of the category of the disjunctiveness in the system of compound sentences. The semantic structure of disjunctive sentences is characterized on the basis of three mutually dependent aspects of meaning: denotative, logical-semantic, and structural-semantic one, consisting in the allocation of the categorical grammatical meaning of the alternative and nine particular meanings determined by the context and the speech situation. The article presents a five-level system organization of the meanings of disjunctive sentences taking into account the semantic differences in the implementation of the main or integral feature.

Event Structure of Hill Mari Denominal Verbs

Author(s): Vadim V. Dyachkov / Language(s): English Issue: 01 (48)/2023

The paper deals with the event structure of denominal verbs in Hill Mari, a Finno-Ugric language. In Hill Mari, denominal (as well as some deadjectival) verbs are derived using the same suffix giving rise to several different structural types of predicates. The paper focuses on the properties of denominal predicates that are of interest to the theory and typology of the phenomenon and that are not predicted by the existing theories of denominal derivation. Some influential theories assume that there is one-to-one correspondence between the semantic properties of the base stems and those of their denominal/deadjectival counterparts. Namely, quantized nouns and closed-scale adjectives should give rise to telic verbs, whereas cumulative nouns and open-scaled adjectives should derive atelic ones. However, in many cases, this prediction is not confirmed by the Hill Mari data. Namely, I present the data showing that the semantic properties of base adjectives are not transferred to the derived predicate and consider some other cases of denominal derivation challenging the existing theories. I also suggest that these facts can be accounted for if one assumes that the derivational suffix encodes the process component (equivalent to DO or BECOME operator in various theories of predicate decomposition) determining distributional properties of the predicate. I present the language-specific tests sensitive to the event structure of the predicate that allow us to confirm this hypothesis. Finally, I show how the Hill Mari data contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon under study and present a tentative typology of denominal derivational affixes.

Движение в японском языке: объектное понимание глагольных аргументов

Author(s): Uliana P. Strizhak / Language(s): Russian Issue: 02 (49)/2023

The study of Japanese agentivity leads to the debatable point of why Japanese, which mainly follows a non-transitive model, demonstrates accusative case marking for the motion, resulting in the increased overall agentivity of the utterance. Since the semantics of the motion verbs lacks an explicit direct transfer of the action to the object, the object marking of Japanese locatives in the description of motion requires closer consideration as to whether they are a prototypical transitive model. This article analyzes the status of the Japanese “movement accusative” in its formal and semantic interpretation and examines the cognitive background of the accusative representation of space in Japanese. The objective and adverbial understanding of movement is singled out and their objective features are determined. In describing the cognitive background of the representation of the motion in Japanese this article puts forward and substantiates a hypothesis that European languages usually designate a spatial landmark as an action platform thus separating the place and the actor, while Japanese encourages a human to identify himself with the assigned territory. As a result, the Japanese formal unity of locative and object formulas does not mean that they are always semantically equal: in some cases, movement can be interpreted either as focusing on a locative object or it is nothing more than a description of circumstances. Consequently, it seems possible to partially exclude locative structures from agentivity due to their discrepancy with the prototypical transitive model, even if they formally correspond to transitive structures. Therefore, some Japanese motion constructions can be considered as low-agentive or completely non-agentive.

DEITTICO, ARTICOLO ‘ARTICOLOIDE’. MULTIFUNZIONALITÀ DEI DIMOSTRATIVI NEL CHRONICON VULTURNENSE

Author(s): Rossana Ciccarelli / Language(s): Italian Issue: 2/2023

Deictic, Article, ‘Articoloide’. Multifunctionality of Demonstratives in the Chronicon Vulturnense. The study of Latin demonstratives in early medieval texts has mainly focused on the diachronic reconstruction of the formation of the article from the demonstrative. The studies have therefore focused exclusively on ille and ipse as precursors of the definite articles of the Romance varieties and on the search for late Latin and early medieval Latin texts in which demonstratives could have had an article or 'articoloid' function. The loss of the deictic trait has often been associated with its high frequency in these texts. A fine-grained analysis of the values of all Latin demonstratives in a “roborated” chronicle, i.e., a chronicle composed of properly historiographical and documentary parts, written around 1115, reveals an interesting semantic stratification in which the same linguistic element can have traits belonging to different phases of its history or specialise as a distinctive element of a specific textual typology.

Ještě k modelování reciprocity v teoretickém popisu češtiny

Author(s): Markéta Lopatková,Václava Kettnerová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2023

The paper addresses the so-called discontinuous reciprocal constructions in Czech and their description in grammar and lexicon, as recently discussed by J. Pergler. Two ways of treating discontinuous constructions are introduced: (i) to handle these constructions in the grammar as one type of constructions of non-reflexive verbs, and (ii) to capture them in the lexicon as constructions of derived reflexive verbs. The advantages and disadvantages of both these approaches are carefully considered with the conclusion that the latter approach is more advantageous as it complies with the fact that discontinuous constructions are – with respect to the lexicon-grammar continuum – rather at the lexical end.

The Polysemy of the Verb wystarczać/wystarczyć [to suffice] in Polish

Author(s): Anna Bondaruk / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

This paper examines the syntax and semantics of the unaccusative verb wystarczać/wystarczyć [to suffice] in Polish. We argue that this verb is polysemous. Besides its idiosyncratic meaning ‘to suffice’, it may also mean ‘to be enough’ or ‘to have enough’. The three above-mentioned meanings of the verb wystarczać/wystarczyć are associated with three different syntactic structures. The idiosyncratic meaning of this verb is found with the nominative argument. The second meaning of the verb surfaces in existential clauses with the genitive nominal argument and an optional locative PP. The third – possessive meaning – arises when the verb appears with the dative possessor and the genitive theme.

OBJECT-VERB IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH: MODELLING MARKEDNESS

Author(s): JAVIER PÉREZ-GUERRA / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Although Verb-Object (VO) is the basic unmarked constituent order of predicates in Present-Day English, in earlier stages of the language Object-Verb (OV) is the preferred pattern in some syntactic contexts. OV predicates are significantly frequent in Old and Middle English, and are still attested up to 1550, when they “appear to dwindle away” (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005: 83). This study looks at OV in Early Modern English (EModE), using a corpus-based perspective and statistical modelling to explore a number of textual, syntactic, and semantic/processing variables which may account for what by that time had already become a marked, though not yet archaic, word-order pattern. The data for the study were retrieved from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1500–1710) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1695), the largest electronic parsed collections of EModE texts. The findings reveal a preference for OV in speech-related text types, which are less constrained by the rules of grammar, in marked syntactic contexts, and in configurations not subject to the general linearisation principles of end-weight and given-new. Where these principles are complied with, the probability of VO increases.

AGREE, MOVE AND THE SCOPE OF THE PHASE IMPENETRABILITY CONDITION

Author(s): Jacek Witkoś / Language(s): English Issue: s1/2021

This paper addresses a certain contradiction in the application of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) to domains involving the long-distance Genitive of Negation (GoN) and wh-movement in Polish. It appears that in syntactic domains of the tensed sentence including an infinitive complement, there is a tension between a long-distance dependency (holding between NEG in the main clause and the embedded object in genitive) and a cyclic operation of wh-movement. The operation of wh- movement, a classic example of Chomsky’s Move, observes cyclicity and the PIC, judging by the standard tests based on reconstruction (Chomsky 1995; Heycock 1995; Fox 1999; Safir 1999; Legate 2003; Witkoś 2003; Lebeaux 2009), while the Agree-based case marking requires the PIC to be inoperative in exactly the same context and in the same domain. Both operations place contradictory requirements on the PIC, which implies that this condition does not apply to them in the same manner: it always holds of Move but does not always hold of Agree.

Inflectional classes without class features

Author(s): Jan Don,Fenna Bergsma,Anne Merkuur,Meg Smith / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive account of the paradigms of Frisian verb-classes. Verb-classes in Frisian are an example of a more general phenomenon of inflectional classes that we encounter in many natural languages across the major word classes. Members of different inflectional classes show different paradigms. Traditionally, inflectional classes have been analyzed using class-features (see e.g., Marzi et al. 2020). However, such features suffer from being ad hoc devices that seem to have no other function in the grammar than to code this difference. In the present analysis we propose that the verb stems from different classes show a difference in size. Using phrasal spell-out, we will show that these stems differ in the amount of morpho-syntactic structure that they may realize, rendering class-features superfluous.

Information packaging strategies serving the communicative needs of speakers

Author(s): Nataša Stojanovska-Ilievska / Language(s): English Issue: 03 (38)/2022

This paper presents the findings of a study of diverse information packaging strategies employed by speakers of English to better serve their communicative needs in given contexts, based on examples from the British National Corpus (BNC). More precisely, the analysis centres around the information packaging possibilities offered by light verb constructions (LVCs) in comparison to their full verb counterparts. As is conventionally recognised in previous studies, LVCs formally stretch the predicate over a verbal and a nominal element (e.g. to order vs to give an order). It is precisely this fact that makes it possible for speakers to structure their utterances in various ways. Thus, either all participants are overtly realized in the sentence and the communicative focus could be placed on each one of them depending on the context, or some participants are reduced, which is the preferred strategy when their identity is implied, unfamiliar, irrelevant or would rather be concealed.

Părţile de vorbire din perspectiva corelaţiei dintre lexic și gramatică

Author(s): Ion Bărbuță / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3 (321)/2023

The purpose of the article is to present an analysis of parts of speech from the point of view of the interference between semantic features and their morphosyntactic behavior. The elucidation of the established relationships between the lexical meaning of words, on the one hand, and their grammatical categories and the syntactic functions with which they are used, on the other, requires the analysis of these entities from a functional perspective. Since the relationships between the mentioned features are revealed when the lexical units function in the structure of the statement, we could say that the research addresses the problem of the correlation between the three components of the statement, namely the lexical, morphological and syntactic components. Revealing the relationships between these components would allow overcoming the artificial separation between the levels of semantic and syntactic description, but also a better understanding of how the utterance is constituted and functions.

Elena CONSTANTINOVICI. O biografie măsurată în cărţi

Author(s): Ion Bărbuță / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3 (321)/2023