11. Syntactic properties of the definitive accent in Tongan

2007 ◽  
pp. 147-158
Author(s):  
Therese Mary Aitchison
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Properties

Sentence Repetition: A Clinical Marker for Developmental Language Disorder in Danish

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (12) ◽  
pp. 4450-4463
Author(s):  
Rikke Vang Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Likelihood Ratios ◽  
Clinical Marker ◽  
Sentence Repetition ◽  
Good Identification ◽  
Syntactic Properties

Purpose The aim of the study was to explore the potential of performance on a Danish sentence repetition (SR) task—including specific morphological and syntactic properties—to identify difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to typically developing (TD) children. Furthermore, the potential of the task as a clinical marker for Danish DLD was explored. Method SR performance of children with DLD aged 5;10–14;1 (years;months; n = 27) and TD children aged 5;3–13;4 ( n = 87) was investigated. Results Compared to TD same-age peers, children with DLD were less likely to repeat the sentences accurately but more likely to make ungrammatical errors with respect to verb inflection and use of determiners and personal pronouns. Younger children with DLD also produced more word order errors that their TD peers. Furthermore, older children with DLD performed less accurately than younger TD peers, indicating that the SR task taps into morphosyntactic areas of particular difficulty for Danish children with DLD. The classification accuracy associated with SR performance showed high levels of sensitivity and specificity (> 90%) and likelihood ratios indicating good identification potential for clinical and future research purposes. Conclusion SR performance has a strong potential for identifying children with DLD, also in Danish, and with a carefully designed SR task, performance has potential for revealing morphosyntactic difficulties. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.10314437

Focus Position for Stripping Remnant

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Al Zahrani ◽  
Khulud Helal Al Thagafi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Focus Position ◽  
Focus Movement ◽  
The One ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Pf Deletion ◽  
Minimalist Framework

The current paper examines the syntactic properties of HA stripping: a type of ellipsis. Within the Minimalist framework, the paper adopts the PF-Deletion approach to show that stripping in HA is derived firstly by the movement of the remnant constituent from TP to Focus Position (FP), and, secondly, by the deletion of the TP. These two operations are licensed by the Ellipsis feature (E) located in the focus head F°. Thus, on the one hand, the paper contributes to the existing body of literature supporting the hotly-debated issues on the movement of the stripping remnants, and on the other, enriches the very minimal HA studies on ellipsis. The findings show that HA stripped constituents must move to Spec, FP, before the TP- deletion process. Two pieces of evidence in support of the focus movement to FP spring from Island sensitivity and p-stranding facts in HA.

Overview

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Haspelmath
Keyword(s):  
Functional Variation ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Typological Approach ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns

This book examines the connections between the formal and functional (semantic and syntactic) properties of indefinite pronouns. It considers the main theoretical debates surrounding the semantic and syntactic properties of indefinite pronouns as well as the diachronic sources of the markers of indefinite pronouns. It describes the new generalizations that emerge from the typological and diachronic research and provides explanations. It also outlines the goals and methods of the typological approach, focusing on the important preconditions for typology such as the availability of data from a variety of languages. Other topics covered by the book include the space of formal and functional variation found in indefinite pronouns, implicational universals, theoretical approaches to the functions of indefinite pronouns such as the tradition of structuralist semantics, the grammaticalization of indefinite pronouns, further sources of indefinite pronouns that cannot be easily subsumed under grammaticalization, and the cross-linguistic patterning of negative indefinite pronouns.

Commands in Wolaitta

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azeb Amha
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Type ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Leave Taking ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This chapter examines expressions of commands (imperatives) in Wolaitta and the ways in which the imperative is distinguished from statements and questions. Although each sentence type is formally distinct, imperatives and questions share a number of morpho-syntactic properties. Similar to declarative and interrogative sentences, imperatives in Wolaitta involve verbal grammatical categories such as the distinction of person, number, and gender of the subject as well as negative and positive polarity. In contrast to previous studies, the present contribution establishes the function of a set of morphemes based on -árk and -érk to be the expression of plea or appeal to an addressee rather than politeness when issuing a command. Instead, politeness in commands is expressed by using plural (pro)nominal and verbal elements. The imperative in Wolaitta is a robust construction which is also used in formulaic speeches such as leave-taking as well as in blessing, curses, and advice.

Verb-initial declaratives in Old High German and in later German

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Petrova
Keyword(s):  
Main Part ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Diachronic Syntax ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This chapter investigates the syntactic properties and the pragmatic behaviour of verb-initial declarative clauses in the history of German. The focus is on OHG because in this period, verb-initial declaratives represent a frequent, well-known alternative to canonical verb-second main clauses. It is argued that verb-initial declaratives are native in origin, and that they are derivable under a special interpretation of the verb-second rule. The main part of the chapter deals with the pragmatic properties of verb-initial declaratives in OHG, summarizing the various attempts at explaining the distribution of these orders and showing that further research is needed to arrive at a more adequate understanding of their function in the discourse. The chapter closes up with the discussion of the later development of verb-initial declaratives in German, sketching the controversial treatments of this question in the literature on German diachronic syntax.

Morpho-syntactic Variation in Romance v: A Micro-parametric Approach

Probus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-437
Author(s):  
Ángel J. Gallego
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Parametric Approach ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
University Of Leiden ◽  
Parametric Variation ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Auxiliary Selection ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Syntactic Properties

AbstractThis paper discusses a series of morpho-syntactic properties of Romance languages that have the functional projection vP as its locus, showing a continuum that goes from strongly configurational Romance languages to partially configurational Romance languages. It is argued that v-related phenomena like Differential Object Marking (DOM), participial agreement, oblique clitics, auxiliary selection, and others align in a systematic way when it comes to inflectional properties that involve Case-agreement properties. In order to account for the facts, I argue for a micro-parametric approach whereby v can be associated with an additional projection subject to variation (cf. D’Alessandro, Merging Probes. A typology of person splits and person-driven differential object marking. Ms., University of Leiden, 2012; Microvariation and syntactic theory. What dialects tell us about language. Invited talk given at the workshop The Syntactic Variation of Catalan and Spanish Dialects, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, June 26–28, 2013; Ordóñez, Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan. In Sergio Baauw, Frank AC Drijkoningen & Manuela Pinto (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2005: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’, Utrecht, 8–10 December 2005, 259–280. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). I label such projection “X,” arguing that its feature content and position varies across Romance. More generally, the present paper aims at contributing to our understanding of parametric variation of closely related languages by exploiting the intuition, embodied in the so-called Borer-Chomsky Conjecture, that linguistic variation resides in the functional inventory of the lexicon.

Promoting learning and unlearning through textual enhancement in a closely related L1-L2 relationship

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Paolo Della Putta
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Instructional Treatment ◽  
Group A ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Textual Enhancement ◽  
Group B ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Grammatical Judgment

AbstractThis study investigates the differential effects of Textual Enhancement (TE) on the learning and unlearning of two syntactic properties of Spanish – the absence of the Pre-possessive Determiner Article (PPDA) and the presence of the Prepositional Accusative (PA) – which each pose specific acquisitional difficulties for Italian-speaking learners of Spanish (ISS) due to their asymmetrical relationships with corresponding L1 structures. 77 ISS were divided in two experimental groups: group A read 5 texts with TE on PA – the feature to be learned – and group B read the same 5 texts with TE on PPDA – the feature to be unlearned. The participants took a timed grammatical judgment task three times (before, five days after, and two months after the instructional treatment). The results are compared with those of Della Putta (2016), a symmetrical study to this, in which the same teaching intervention and experimental conditions were adopted with Spanish-speaking learners of Italian, whose task was to unlearn PA and to learn PPDA. The bidirectional comparison shows a similar, weak effect of TE, although in the present study, unlike in Della Putta (2016), unlearning did not seem to be more difficult than learning. These similarities and differences are discussed and theoretically motivated.

Two Indo-Portuguese Creoles in contrast

2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Clancy Clements ◽  
Andrew J. Koontz-Garboden
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Independent Origin ◽  
The Common ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This paper presents a comparative study of two Indo-Portuguese creoles, Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) and Daman Creole Portuguese (DP). Using recently collected data, the phonology, pronominal systems, TMA markers, syntactic properties, and lexical items of KP and DP are compared and contrasted. The question of the common vs. independent origin of KP and DP is also discussed.

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