Argument Structure and Syntactic Relations

2010 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Syntactic Relations

Case Competition in Finnish

1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Competition Model ◽  
Accusative Case ◽  
Active Case ◽  
Case System ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Syntactic Relations ◽  
Government Binding

In this article, the traditional analysis of grammatical case in Finnish - in which the form of the object depends on the presence of an overt subject — is reworked within a formal syntactic framework. Within the Case competition model adopted here, the role of argument structure in case assignment, captured by Burzio's Generalization, plays a vital role in the underlying mechanisms of the case system: only when a verb governs two arguments, one of them Caseless, may it also license accusative case. This dependency is subsumed under universal syntactic relations, including government, binding and the ECP. It is also argued that Finnish incorporates active case subsystems within a main nominative-accusative system. These facts receive a natural account within the adopted framework.

Publication of a scientific article in for an english-language journal. Part 2

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 116-121
Author(s):  
A. I. Nevorotin ◽  
I. V. Awsiewitsch ◽  
I. M. Sukhanov
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
English Language ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Scientific Article ◽  
Scientific Journals ◽  
English Language Journal ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Syntactic Relations

This article is the continuation of analysis and discussion from the book by Professor AI Nevorotin "Matrix phraseological collection: a manual for writing a scientific article in English". The Matrix phraseological collection is a kind of catalog of text samples. The samples were from articles selected from the leading English-language scientific journals and were systematized in such away that when writing an article in English, a Russian researchers are able easy to find examples suitable for his/her own work. Furthermore, the selected samples can be transformed accordingly saving the semantic and syntactic relations between the elements and, finally, be inserted into the text. The second part of this work is devoted to the detailed analysis of the English scientific literature and also the section "Legality of the provisions of the problem".

Niuean

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Massam
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Noun Incorporation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Theta Role ◽  
Predicate Argument Structure

This book presents a detailed descriptive and theoretical examination of predicate-argument structure in Niuean, a Polynesian language within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, spoken mainly on the Pacific island of Niue and in New Zealand. Niuean has VSO word order and an ergative case-marking system, both of which raise questions for a subject-predicate view of sentence structure. Working within a broadly Minimalist framework, this volume develops an analysis in which syntactic arguments are not merged locally to their thematic sources, but instead are merged high, above an inverted extended predicate which serves syntactically as the Niuean verb, later undergoing movement into the left periphery of the clause. The thematically lowest argument merges as an absolutive inner subject, with higher arguments merging as applicatives. The proposal relates Niuean word order and ergativity to its isolating morphology, by equating the absence of inflection with the absence of IP in Niuean, which impacts many aspects of its grammar. As well as developing a novel analysis of clause and argument structure, word order, ergative case, and theta role assignment, the volume argues for an expanded understanding of subjecthood. Throughout the volume, many other topics are also treated, such as noun incorporation, word formation, the parallel internal structure of predicates and arguments, null arguments, displacement typology, the role of determiners, and the structure of the left periphery.

scholarly journals Frequency Sensitivity of Neural Responses to English Verb Argument Structure Violations

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jona Sassenhagen ◽  
Ryan Blything ◽  
Elena V. M. Lieven ◽  
Ben Ambridge
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Learning ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
Verb Argument Structure ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
Intransitive Verbs

How are verb-argument structure preferences acquired? Children typically receive very little negative evidence, raising the question of how they come to understand the restrictions on grammatical constructions. Statistical learning theories propose stochastic patterns in the input contain sufficient clues. For example, if a verb is very common, but never observed in transitive constructions, this would indicate that transitive usage of that verb is illegal. Ambridge et al. (2008) have shown that in offline grammaticality judgements of intransitive verbs used in transitive constructions, low-frequency verbs elicit higher acceptability ratings than high-frequency verbs, as predicted if relative frequency is a cue during statistical learning. Here, we investigate if the same pattern also emerges in on-line processing of English sentences. EEG was recorded while healthy adults listened to sentences featuring transitive uses of semantically matched verb pairs of differing frequencies. We replicate the finding of higher acceptabilities of transitive uses of low- vs. high-frequency intransitive verbs. Event-Related Potentials indicate a similar result: early electrophysiological signals distinguish between misuse of high- vs low-frequency verbs. This indicates online processing shows a similar sensitivity to frequency as off-line judgements, consistent with a parser that reflects an original acquisition of grammatical constructions via statistical cues. However, the nature of the observed neural responses was not of the expected, or an easily interpretable, form, motivating further work into neural correlates of online processing of syntactic constructions.

scholarly journals Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Bugaeva ◽  
Johanna Nichols ◽  
Balthasar Bickel
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Japanese Language ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Finite Clause

Abstract Some languages around the Pacific have multiple possessive classes of alienable constructions using appositive nouns or classifiers. This pattern differs from the most common kind of alienable/inalienable distinction, which involves marking, usually affixal, on the possessum, and has only one class of alienables. The Japanese language isolate Ainu has possessive marking that is reminiscent of the Circum-Pacific pattern. It is distinctive, however, in that the possessor is coded not as a dependent in an NP but as an argument in a finite clause, and the appositive word is a verb. This paper gives a first comprehensive, typologically grounded description of Ainu possession and reconstructs the pattern that must have been standard when Ainu was still the daily language of a large speech community; Ainu then had multiple alienable class constructions. We report a cross-linguistic survey expanding previous coverage of the appositive type and show how Ainu fits in. We split alienable/inalienable into two different phenomena: argument structure (with types based on possessibility: optionally possessible, obligatorily possessed, and non-possessible) and valence (alienable, inalienable classes). Valence-changing operations are derived alienability and derived inalienability. Our survey classifies the possessive systems of languages in these terms.

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