scholarly journals Right-dislocation in Catalan: Its discourse function and counterparts in English

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laia Mayol
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Content ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
English Text ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Discourse Function ◽  
Structure Information ◽  
Information Packaging ◽  
Canonical Order ◽  
The Right ◽  
Previous Sentence

This paper presents a corpus study of right dislocation (RD) in Catalan and discusses crosslinguistic differences of information packaging between English and Catalan. The Catalan corpus consists of 93 RDs which have been coded according to three parameters: (1) the point where the entity in the right-dislocated constituent had appeared in the discourse, (2) consequences of eliminating the right-dislocated constituent and (3) consequences of restoring the canonical order. I argue that RD in Catalan is a means to structure information in a coherent way by displacing old information from the main clause. Three main types of RDs can be found: (1) RDs which activate an entity which was no longer accessible in the discourse and make it highly salient, while still marking its discourse-old status; (2) RDs which make explicit an implicit, never textually mentioned, referent and places it in a discourse-old information position. (3) RDs referring to entities mentioned in the previous sentence. Such RDs convey an additional meaning, some ‘emotional content’, having to do with the expression of opposition or emphasis. In order to analyse crosslinguistic differences, an English text and its Catalan translation have been used. The Catalan translation contained 42 instances of RD, while the English text contained none, which shows that the two languages use different strategies to encode information packaging. The Catalan translation uses RDs mostly in cases in which the English original repeats the same phrase in two consecutive utterances and in utterances which convey contrast or opposition.

scholarly journals On the correlative nature of Hungarian left-peripheral relatives

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-313
Author(s):  
Anikó Lipták
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Distributional Properties ◽  
The Right

This paper takes a close look at the properties of Hungarian relative clauses that occur in the left periphery of the main clause, preceding a (pro)nominal associate. It will be shown that these left-peripheral relative clauses differ in many ways from relative clauses dislocated on the right periphery, as well as from relative clauses embedded under a (pro)nominal head. To capture the precise syntax of these left-peripheral clauses, these will be compared to ordinary left-dislocated items, with which they have some properties in common. Despite the surface similarities between the two, however, there are a few decisive aspects of behaviour, most notably, distributional properties and connectivity effects, which argue against taking left-peripheral relatives as cases of clausal left-dislocates in Hungarian. Instead, one is led to consider these as correlative clauses, on the basis of the properties they share with well-established correlatives in languages like Hindi.  

Clause order and syntactic integration patterns in Dutch conditionals

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Alex Reuneker
Keyword(s):  
Initial Position ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Text Mode

Abstract Conditional clauses in Dutch can occur in sentence-initial and sentence-final position. For sentence-initial conditionals, a number of syntactic integration patterns are available. This corpus study investigates to what extent clause order and syntactic integration are associated with text mode (spoken, written) and register (formal, informal). Sentence-initial position of the conditional clause is shown to be most frequent in both modes and registers, although sentence-final position is more frequent than one would expect based on the literature, especially in written texts. The distribution of syntactic integration patterns shows a clear difference between modes, as full integration of the conditional clause into the main clause is most frequent in written texts, whereas the use of the resumptive element dan (‘then’) is most frequent in spoken texts.

A corpus study of kasama ‘companion’ in Tagalog

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-298
Author(s):  
Sergei Klimenko
Keyword(s):  
Main Clause ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Semantic Distinction

Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based study of a number of different types of previously undescribed constructions formed with the Tagalog noun kasama ‘companion’. Apart from independent and attributive uses, kasama frequently occurs as the predicate of an adjunct clause that can introduce a comitative participant, a semantically depictive secondary predicate, an event-oriented adjunct, or a predicative complement. The study analyses the frequency of kasama in all of these types of constructions and looks into their specific properties. This includes: the semantic distinction between additive and inclusory constructions with kasama; animacy agreement between arguments of kasama in additive constructions; variation in case marking of arguments of kasama; the preponderance of the absence of linkers – commonly known to introduce adverbial clauses in Tagalog – which are used to attach the kasama clause to the main clause; attested controllers of the kasama clause; positions available for the kasama clause in the sentence. Variation in case marking and compatibility with linkers suggests a classification of Tagalog adjunct clauses similar to that of Tagalog adverbials and prepositions. There is also some evidence to believe that kasama is being grammaticalized as a preposition. Comitative and semantically depictive constructions with kasama, which account for a quarter of the corpus sample, have never been studied before, despite the fact that Tagalog is included in several typological studies on comitative and depictive constructions.

scholarly journals The Influence of English on the History of Hindi Relative Clauses

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vandana Puri
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Occasional Occurrence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
English I

AbstractThe influence of Hindi on English has been well documented; however, little has been said about the influence of English on the structure of Hindi. In this paper I provide evidence that Hindi “embedded” (i.e. post-nominal) relative clauses result from English influence. Hindi originally had Relative-Correlative (RC-CC) constructions that could adjoin to the left or the right of the main clause. Since evidence from early Hindi is limited, I draw on Awadhi and Braj Bhakha to provide greater time depth for the earlier history of Hindi. In addition I examine early 19 th century grammars and texts. None of these provide unambiguous evidence for embedded relative clauses. By contrast, late 19 th century and early 20 th century Hindi texts translated from English exhibit many instances of central embedded relative clauses (besides the old adjoined relativecorrelatives), thus supporting the argument that Hindi embedded relative clauses result from the influence of English. I argue that what may have helped in this developed is the occasional occurrence of potentially ambiguous structures in earlier Hindi, which could be reinterpreted as involving embedding, rather than a relative-correlative construction with deleted correlative pronoun.

The development of constructions from the right edge: a multinomial regression analysis of clitic left and right dislocation in child French

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Morgane JOURDAIN ◽  
Karen LAHOUSSE
Keyword(s):  
Regression Analysis ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Multinomial Regression ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Learning Mechanism ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
The Right ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Multinomial Regression Analysis

Abstract The aim of the present research is to investigate the development of left and right dislocation in child French through a corpus study of three children until age 2;7 from the corpus of Lyon (Demuth & Tremblay, 2008). We extracted a total of 704 dislocations and analysed their syntactic properties. We show that (i) right dislocations are more frequent than left dislocations and (ii) left dislocations are significantly more complete than right dislocations (fewer omissions of verbs or pronouns). We compare these results to the hypothesis of Freudenthal, Pine, Jones & Gobet (2015, 2016) according to which some properties of child language can be explained by a learning mechanism from the right edge of the sentences from the input. We will show that this hypothesis can explain the general trend found in our data, but it is not sufficient to account for the entire development of dislocation in French.

Reading Vertical Text: Rotated VS. marquee

2002 ◽  
Vol 46 (17) ◽  
pp. 1633-1635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Presentation Format ◽  
English Text ◽  
Frequency Effects ◽  
Horizontal Orientation ◽  
Text Word ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
The Right ◽  
Horizontal Control

There are numerous design situations in which it impossible to present English text in its normal horizontal orientation. There are multiple options available when text must be presented vertically: rotating horizontal text 90° to the left or to the right, or in a downward cascade of letters such as on a theater marquee. While it seems intuitive that horizontal text will be recognized faster than vertical text, which presentation format is best for vertical text? An experiment was conducted to investigate, and found that marquee text is indeed read more slowly than rotated text, and that rotated text is read more slowly than standard horizontal text. However, no evidence was found for a difference between left- and right-rotated text. Word frequency effects were larger in all vertical conditions relative to the horizontal control. These results suggest that rotated text is generally to be preferred to marquee-style presentation.

scholarly journals Exploring Potential Correlation Between CEFR Grammar Profile in English and Learners’ Overall Grammar Knowledge: An Exploratory Study of “that”

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Kasin Janjaroongpak
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Function Word ◽  
English Text ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Syntactic Representation ◽  
Preliminary Study ◽  
The Right ◽  
Grammar Knowledge

This preliminary study explored the possibility of using an opaque polysemous grammatical unit as a representation for the whole grammatical knowledge of a learner. There were two groups of informants, a group with a certified language proficiency level at CEFR B1-B2 and a learner group at A1-A2 level. The informants were asked to provide a Thai translation of an English text as faithful as possible. The first group consistently and correctly answered the questions by supplying the right translation of polysemous “that” while the answers from the second group were divided in that some could correctly identify C2 function of the word, “that”, though their overall grammatical knowledge was considered to be at A1 but other A2 students failed to identify C2 function of the word in question. The result indicated that the grammatical construction in question could not be used as a key predictor for learners’ syntactic representation as the lineage relation between CEFR level of the grammatical unit corresponded with the translated texts provided to a limited extent. On pedagogical implications, insights provided suggested that instructors should spend more time explaining challenging advanced grammatical functions as they were points that learners were struggling with and one possible way to check whether they did understand syntactic meaning of a function word was by asking students to supply a translation.

scholarly journals Common neural bases for processing speech prosody and music: An integrated model

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice M. Proverbio ◽  
Elisabetta Piotti
Keyword(s):  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Integrated Model ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Anterior Cingulate ◽  
Bioelectrical Activity ◽  
Speech Prosody ◽  
Affective Prosody ◽  
Negative Valence ◽  
Processed Eeg ◽  
The Right

It is shared notion that speech and music processing share some commonalities. Brain bioelectrical activity was recorded in healthy participants listening to music obtained by digitally transforming real speech into melodies played by viola. Sentences were originally pronounced with a positive or negative affective prosody. The research's aim was to investigate if the emotional content of music was extracted similarly to how the affective prosody of speech is processed. EEG was recorded from 128 electrodes in 20 healthy students. Participants had to detect rare neutral piano sounds while ignoring viola melodies. Stimulus negative valence increased the amplitude of frontal P300 and N400 ERP components while a late inferior frontal positivity was enhanced in response to positive melodies. Similar ERP markers were previously found for processing positive and negative music, vocalizations and speech. Source reconstruction applied to N400 showed that negative melodies engaged the right superior temporal gyrus and right anterior cingulate cortex, while positive melodies engaged the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus and the inferior frontal cortex. An integrated model is proposed depicting a possible common circuit for processing the emotional content of music, vocalizations and speech, which might explain some universal and relatively innate brain reaction to music.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document