A Study of Grammatical Case Forms and their Directionality in Fulfulde: The Transformational Generative Approach

Case Theory interacts with Government Theory in its operation and so, cases are assigned to the complements of governors. Case assigners are the governors of their dependent clauses while the case receivers are the governed NPs. So, the purpose of the study is to survey case assignment in Fulfulde generally by identifying and analysing the elements of Fulfulde structures and their relationship in terms of structural case. Unstructured observation was the method used for eliciting data for this study. Adequate and natural data were recorded and analysed sentence by sentence, the way they were uttered by the native speakers. The Theoretical Framework adopted for data analysis by this study is Principle and Parameters Theory. The study discovered that in Government, apart from (V)erbs, (P)repositions and tensed INFL, (N)ouns, (A)djectives and Focus Markers FMs can also govern and assign case to their complements in Fulfulde. The study has proved that in Fulfulde, cases can be assigned either to the left or to the right, depending on the relation.

Case Valuation in Transitive Clauses: A Comparative Study of Punjabi and English Syntax

Case is a morphological realization on a noun phrase (NP) to represent the NP's grammatical relationship with the main verb of the clause. With respect to case, languages, in many cases, can be broadly divided into two alignment systems, i.e., ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative. In the former type of languages, e.g., Punjabi, the subjects usually receive an ergative post position in transitive clauses (with perfective aspect) while in the latter type of languages, e.g., English, the subject, i.e., in nominative case receives, no post position. There has been a widespread controversy on whether ergative is a structural case or a lexical/inherent case and how the arguments are, i.e., subject and objects valued case in case of ergative clauses. With this ongoing debate in the background, this study aims to compare the marking of case on the arguments, i.e., subjects and objects in the transitive clauses of English and Punjabi. The study is conducted under the minimalist framework of Chomsky (2008), who emphasized on Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT): language provides the best possible solution to the interface conditions imposed by other systems of the human mind, i.e., related to meaning and sound, which interact with language through their interfaces Conceptual Intentional (C-I) and Sensori-Motor (SM) respectively. In this framework, a feature valuation mechanism is induced by the probes, i.e., C and v*. The study finds that in split ergative languages (the languages which take both case patterns, i.e., nominative and ergative) like Punjabi, the EA, i.e., subjects of perfective transitive clauses are assigned the ergative case by the functional heads v* at [Spec-v*] while the IA, i.e., objects are valued accusative case by the same functional head v* under Agree operation. A consequence of this finding concludes that T has default agreement in such languages, which is possible because Punjabi (like its other South Asian counterparts, e.g., Urdu-Hindi, Bengali, and Kashmiri) is a pro-drop language. So, it is easy to assume that EPP and Agree features of T are an option

Against Upwards Agree

Bjorkman, Bronwyn & Hedde Zeijlstra. 2019. Checking up on (φ)-Agree. Linguistic Inquiry 50(3). 527–569 claim that agreement with the absolutive argument in ergative-absolutive languages follows naturally in an Upwards-Agree system supplemented by the relation of Accessibility if φ-agreement is parasitic on structural case assigned to the absolutive noun phrase either by T or by v. By drawing evidence from two distantly related East Caucasian languages—Chirag and Avar—the present article argues that this theory is both too strong and too weak. I then show that the problematical facts are trivially analysable with standard Agree (Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Roger Martin, David Michaels & Juan Uriagereka (eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press et seq.).

When the tune shapes morphology: The origins of vocatives

Many languages use pitch to express pragmatic meaning (henceforth ‘tune’). This requires segmental carriers with rich harmonic structure and high periodic energy, making vowels the optimal carriers of the tune. Tunes can be phonetically impoverished when there is a shortage of vowels, endangering the recovery of their function. This biases sound systems towards the optimisation of tune transmission by processes such as the insertion of vowels. Vocative constructions—used to attract and maintain the addressee’s attention—are often characterised by specific tunes. Many languages additionally mark vocatives morphologically. In this article, we argue that one potential pathway for the emergence of vocative morphemes is the morphological re-analysis of tune-driven phonetic variation that helps to carry pitch patterns. Looking at a corpus of 101 languages, we compare vocatives to structural case markers in terms of their phonological make-up. We find that vocatives are often characterised by additional prosodic modulation (vowel lengthening, stress shift, tone change) and contain substantially fewer consonants, supporting our hypothesis that the acoustic properties of tunes interact with segmental features and can shape the emergence of morphological markers. This fits with the view that the efficient transmission of information is a driving force in the evolution of languages, but also highlights the importance of defining ‘information’ broadly to include pragmatic, social, and affectual components alongside propositional meaning.

Propeller influence on the aeroelastic stability of High Altitude Long Endurance aircraft

This work investigates the propeller’s influence on the stability of High Altitude Long Endurance aircraft, incorporating all resultant loads at the propeller hub, propeller slipstream, and gyroscopic loads. Such effects are usually neglected in the aeroelastic simulation of HALE aircraft. For that goal, a previously developed framework, which couples a geometrically nonlinear structural solver with an Unsteady Vortex Lattice method (uVLM) for lifting surfaces and a Viscous Vortex Particle (VVP) method for propeller slipstream, was employed to generate time-data series. Also, a method, based on a combination of Proper Orthogonal Decomposition and system identification, to extract dynamic information (frequencies, damping, and modes) of the aircraft from a time-series signal is proposed and successfully tested for a purely structural case, for which reference data is available. The method is then applied to investigate the stability of aeroelastic cases. The results demonstrate that the presence of propellers can influence the aeroelastic stability of a Very Flexible Aircraft.

When the tune shapes morphology: the origins of vocatives

Many languages use pitch to express pragmatic meaning (henceforth “tune”). This requires segmental carriers with rich harmonic structure and high periodic energy, making vowels the optimal carriers of the tune. Tunes can be phonetically impoverished when there is a shortage of vowels, endangering the recovery of their function. This biases sound systems towards the optimisation of tune transmission by processes such as the insertion of vowels. Vocative constructions – used to attract and maintain the addressee’s attention – are often characterised by specific tunes. Many languages additionally mark vocatives morphologically. In this paper, we argue that one potential pathway for the emergence of vocative morphemes is the grammaticalisation of tune-driven phonetic variation that helps to carry pitch patterns. Looking at a corpus of 101 languages, we compare vocatives to structural case markers in terms of their phonological make-up. We find that vocatives are often characterised by additional prosodic modulation (vowel lengthening, stress shift, tone change) and contain substantially fewer consonants, supporting our hypothesis that the acoustic properties of tunes interact with segmental features and can shape the emergence of morphological markers. This fits with the view that the efficient transmission of information is a driving force in the evolution of languages, but also highlights the importance of defining “information” broadly to include pragmatic, social and affectual components alongside propositional meaning.

3rd person clitic combinations across Catalan varieties: Consequences of the nature of the dative clitic

This article argues that variation in how 3rd person clitic combinations are solved across Catalan varieties depends on the internal morphosyntactic shape of the dative clitic in each variety. We argue that the dative clitic in Valencian Catalan is an inherently case-marked pronominal form (KP), while non Valencian Catalan varieties, that contain a locative clitic, build the dative as a definite locative pronominal which receives structural case. This allows Valencian Catalan to license each clitic in a different area, while non Valencian Catalan is forced to license a sequence of clitics in the same area, with the result that the two forms compete with each other for the licensing by the same head, leading to surface impoverishment of the sequence. Our analysis provides an explanation of these impoverishments as simple syntactic competition for licensing by the same set of heads, making OCP effects in morphology or syntax unnecessary as analytical devices for such cases.

Semantic Web Service for Global Apparel Business

Nowadays a substantial share of the production processes of the world's apparel business is taking place in developing countries. In the apparel business, supply chain coordination needs resource and information sharing between business partners. Semantic web service computing (SWSC) provides numerous opportunities and value-added service capabilities that global apparel business requires to exchange information between distributed business partners. The ability to dynamically discover and invoke a web service is an important aspect of semantic web service-based architectures. This chapter describes the main features of an ontology-based web service framework, known as CSIA (collaborative service integration architecture) for integrating distributed business information systems in a global supply chain. The CSIA framework uses a hybrid knowledge-based system, which consists of structural case-based reasoning (S-CBR), rule-based reasoning (RBR), and an ontology concept similarity assessment algorithm.