Chapter 8. The ontogeny of relative clauses: How children learn to negotiate complex reference

This study examines the generalization of instruction in foreign language learning. A group of Japanese learners of English served as participants and received special instruction in the structure of genitive relative clauses. The participants were given a pre-test on combining two sentences into one containing a genitive relative clause wherein the relativized noun phrase following the genitive marker "whose" is either the subject, direct object, or object of preposition. Based on the TOEFL and the pre-test results, four equal groups were formed; three of these served as experimental groups, and one as the control group. Each experimental group was given instruction on the formation of only one type of genitive relative clause. The participants were then given two post-tests. The results indicated that the generalization of learning begins from structures that are typologically more marked genitive relative clauses to those structures that are typologically less marked, and not vice versa.

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Formal and Functional Types of Indefinite Pronoun

10.1093/oso/9780198235606.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Martin Haspelmath

Keyword(s):

Relative Clauses ◽

Negative Polarity ◽

Ontological Category ◽

Functional Types ◽

Formal Element ◽

Free Relative ◽

Existential Sentences ◽

Universal Quantifiers ◽

Indefinite Pronoun ◽

Indefinite Pronouns

This chapter examines formal and functional types of indefinite pronoun. It first presents some examples of different indefinite pronoun series in a variety of languages, focusing on a formal element shared by all members of an indefinite pronoun series, such as some and any in English. This element is called indefiniteness marker, an affix or a particle which stands next to the pronoun stem. The chapter proceeds by discussing two main types of derivational bases from which indefinite pronouns are derived in the world's languages: interrogative pronouns and generic ontological category nouns like person, thing or place. It also looks at the main functional types of indefinite pronoun, namely: negative indefinite pronouns and negative polarity (or scale reversal). Finally, it analyses some alternatives to indefinite pronouns, including generic nouns, existential sentences, non-specific free relative clauses, and universal quantifiers.

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The relative verb forms of Cuwabo (Bantu P34) as contextually oriented participles

Linguistics ◽

10.1515/ling-2020-0046 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 58 (2) ◽

pp. 463-491

Author(s):

Rozenn Guérois ◽

Denis Creissels

Keyword(s):

Noun Phrase ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Head Noun ◽

Bantu Languages ◽

Verb Forms ◽

The Subject ◽

North Western

AbstractCuwabo (Bantu P34, Mozambique) illustrates a relativization strategy, also attested in some North-Western and Central Bantu languages, whose most salient characteristics are that: (a) the initial agreement slot of the verb form does not express agreement with the subject (as in independent clauses), but agreement with the head noun; (b) the initial agreement slot of the verb form does not express agreement in person and number-gender (or class), but only in number-gender; (c) when a noun phrase other than the subject is relativized, the noun phrase encoded as the subject in the corresponding independent clause occurs in post-verbal position and does not control any agreement mechanism. In this article, we show that, in spite of the similarity between the relative verb forms of Cuwabo and the corresponding independent verb forms, and the impossibility of isolating a morphological element analyzable as a participial formative, the relative verb forms of Cuwabo are participles, with the following two particularities: they exhibit full contextual orientation, and they assign a specific grammatical role to the initial subject, whose encoding in relative clauses coincides neither with that of subjects of independent verb forms, nor with that of adnominal possessors.

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