An Analysis of Polysemy of “anding-andingen” Proverb in Karo Language: Problems of Natural Semantic MetaLanguage

This article aims at proposing a way to identify polysemy ‘anding-andingen’ or proverb in bahasa karo. The writer has an interest to use proverb or anding-aningen in this study because in proverb contains a lot of semantic meaning. This study was conducted using the descriptive qualitative approach in nature; therefore it only describes the semantic knowledge theory. The results of this study indicate that the element DO may occur either with a subject (Actor) alone with a second (Patient) argument as well (in English, as DO TO). It opened the way for a new semantically-inspired approach to grammar constructions. An analysis of ‘X does this’ as ‘X can say this’ and of ‘A because B’ as if not B, the not A’, the writers admitted that both DO and BECAUSE into the stable of semantic primitives. A similar entailment-like relationship obtains between PEOPLE and SOMEONE, but there is at least one significant syntactic difference, namely, that PEOPLE cannot occur with quantifier ONE.

An Analysis of Polysemy of “anding-andingen” Proverb in Karo Language: Problems of Natural Semantic MetaLanguage

This article aims at proposing a way to identify polysemy ‘anding-andingen’ or proverb in bahasa karo. The writer has an interest to use proverb or anding-aningen in this study because in proverb contains a lot of semantic meaning. This study was conducted using the descriptive qualitative approach in nature; therefore it only describes the semantic knowledge theory. The results of this study indicate that the element DO may occur either with a subject (Actor) alone with a second (Patient) argument as well (in English, as DO TO). It opened the way for a new semantically-inspired approach to grammar constructions. An analysis of ‘X does this’ as ‘X can say this’ and of ‘A because B’ as if not B, the not A’, the writers admitted that both DO and BECAUSE into the stable of semantic primitives. A similar entailment-like relationship obtains between PEOPLE and SOMEONE, but there is at least one significant syntactic difference, namely, that PEOPLE cannot occur with quantifier ONE.

Covert movement in English probing wh-questions

Besides fronted information-seeking questions, English also allows for two types of wh-in-situ ones: echo questions, which are used to request a repetition or a clarification of a previous utterance, and probing questions, which are often used in quiz shows, classroom settings, and child-directed speech to “prompt” the addressee for an answer. An acceptability judgment task shows that PQs with multiple wh-phrases get a significantly lower acceptability score than echo questions with multiple wh-phrases despite their similarity in surface structure, which suggests a syntactic difference below the surface. Independent syntactic evidence confirms the result and further suggests that while echo questions involve no syntactic movement (Dayal, 1996), probing questions involve covert wh-movement.

Excessive serial verb construction

This paper identifies a distinct serial verb construction in Mandarin Chinese: the Excessive serial verb construction. This construction exhibits formal similarity to the Resultative serial verb construction, since both of them involve adjacent unmarked verbs. Despite the similarity, the former construction differs from the latter most evidently in that it conveys an excessive meaning rather than a resultative meaning. This paper proposes that there is a syntactic difference between the two constructions. In contrast to the tight structure in the Resultative serial verb construction, which can be represented as S[vp V1 V2] le. The Excessive serial verb construction has a looser structure, which is structurally S[[vpV1] [vp V2-le]]. With respect to diagnostics of constituency, the two constructions behave in different ways. This paper further argues that correlating with a distinct structure, the Excessive serial verb construction requires obligatory topicalization of its undergoer argument, a phenomenon that is not observed in the Resultative serial verb construction. This study thus contributes to representing the interaction between the semantic properties – in particular, the function of le in the two constructions – and the syntactic properties.

Late Placement of the Finite Verb in Old Norse Fornyrðislag Meter

In Old Norse poetry, there is a syntactic difference between bound clauses (subordinate clauses and main clauses introduced by a con-junction) and unbound clauses (main clauses not introduced by a conjunction). In bound clauses, the finite verb is often placed late in the sentence, violating the V2 requirement upheld in prose. In unbound clauses, the V2 requirement is normally adhered to, but in fornyrðislag poetry, late placement of the finite verb is occasionally found. Hans Kuhn explained these instances as a result of influence from West Germanic poetry. The present article argues that these instances can be explained as a remnant of the Proto-Norse word order, and that this explanation is better supported by the data.*

Null Referential Subjects in Övdalian

This article is concerned with the description and analysis of Övdalian referential null subjects. A general background to Övdalian is provided together with the syntactic restrictions on the possible null subjects (wįð‘we’ andið‘you’). Interestingly, these null subjects in Övdalian do not appear in the same syntactic positions. This syntactic difference leads us to the conclusion that the distribution of the two possible null subjects must be explained individually. I argue here that the syntactic restrictions indicate that nullwįðrequires a link to the surrounding context in order to be identified, whereas the identification of nulliðseems to be dependent on the agreement affix. I build on the proposal of Koeneman (2006), and argue that affixes may have pronominal properties, proposing that this gives an explanation as to why nulliðis not restricted in the same fashion as nullwįð. Finally, Övdalian is discussed in a wider Germanic context, and it is shown that Övdalian is one of a small number of non-standard Germanic languages which allow referential null subjects.

Dialects of Written Arabic: Syntactic differences in the treatment of object pronouns in Egyptian and Levantine newspapers

Despite the notion that written Arabic is invariable across the Arab world, a few researchers, using large corpora to discover patterns of usage, have demonstrated regional differences in Arabic writing. While most such research has focussed upon the lexicon, this corpus-based study examines a syntactic difference between Egyptian and Levantine writing: the treatment of object pronouns. A search of an entire year of writing in regional newspapers found that Levantine writers tend to use the free object pronoun iyyā-, placing the direct object after the indirect, about twice as often as Egyptian writers do, who for their part prefer to place the direct object before the indirect. A proposed reason for this is that the free object pronoun is used to mark the direct object in spoken Levantine vernaculars but not in Egyptian. This seems to indicate that local spoken vernaculars exert a fundamental influence on writing.

Control, raising and case: From the perspective of passives

Since Pollard and Sag (1994) it has been assumed that raising involves full structure sharing, whereas a control verb merely shares the content of one of the lower verb's arguments. This has been considered a property of the phenomena, despite the fact that Pollard and Sag (1994) present this syntactic difference as a hypothesis confirmed for Icelandic only. In this paper we discuss the difference between raising and control from the perspective of Dutch and German passives. It has already been shown by Van Noord and Kordoni (2005) that the secondary object passives in these languages are raising structures, in which the case of the raised argument changes. In this paper we provide additional evidence for the raising analysis, and we propose a new analysis, which allows for a uniform account of Dutch and German passives as raising structures. Przepiorkowski and Rosen (2004) show that control may exhibit case transmission; the data presented in this paper shows that raising may not. Therefore, we claim that the distinction between raising and control is found in theta-role assignment. Syntactically they tend to behave differently, but they may also behave in the exact same way.