An Event Structure Analysis of Object-oriented Adverbial Clauses

Reviewed by: The Salish language family: Reconstructing syntax by Paul D. Kroeber M. Dale Kinkade The Salish language family: Reconstructing syntax. By Paul D. Kroeber. (Studies in the anthropology of North American Indians.) Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pp. xxxi, 461. Cloth $45.00. This book is probably unique among studies of North American Indian languages in its accomplishments, and it is an important work for anyone interested in comparative syntax, those interested in the syntax of American Indian languages, and, above all, anyone studying Salish or other Northwest languages. The subtitle is crucial to knowing what to expect in general although it promises more than is actually presented (not surprisingly, given the huge array of possible syntactic issues in any language); what Kroeber actually does is compare a limited number of syntactic features of Salish languages, suggest reconstructions of them, and explain how they must have developed in various parts of the family. All this was no mean feat; Salish is one of the largest language families in North America (with 23 languages), and availability of pertinent data is very uneven. To make his job harder, K chose some of the most complex types of constructions that languages have to offer: complement and adverbial clauses, relative clauses, and extraction. The volume begins with prefatory remarks on the sources he uses and how he has normalized transcriptions, essential lists of abbreviations, and a map showing the location of Salish and neighboring languages. Ch. 1 (1–78) provides a background for the rest of the book: the phonological inventory of Proto-Salish and many of its pertinent developments into modern Salish languages, then quick overviews of morphological and clausal structures that are necessary for an understanding of the body of the volume. Chs. 2 and 3 (79–251) look at complement and adverbial clauses; Chs. 4–6 (252–363) examine relative clauses, Ch. 7 (364–411) looks briefly at various fronting constructions, and Ch. 8 (412–32) speculates on possible influences from neighboring non-Salish languages. Other major syntactic issues are not treated at all, not bearing significantly on his major themes; thus there is nothing about compounding, lexical suffixes, causatives, or applicatives, all of which were found in Proto-Salish and have important syntactic ramifications in all modern languages of the family. Very briefly, K’s findings are the following: (1) ‘Proto-Salish must have had a conjunctive inflectional paradigm of some sort’ (246), and this conjunctive ‘presumably marked conditional clauses’ (246), although how many varieties of conditional and adverbial clauses is indeterminate. (2) ‘Propositional nominalization can be assumed to have been used in most complement clauses other than interrogative ones’ (249). (3) ‘Relativization of subjects and objects presumably was marked not by any special overt inflection distinct from that of main clauses, but (if at all) merely by omission of subject or object pronominal morphology from the predicate complex’ (307). He finds it difficult to be sure how relativized objects or possessors were treated; ‘subject-centered clauses followed the present-day Bella Coola pattern’ (307); relativized oblique objects used nominalization by means of a prefixed /s-/. The reader who pays close attention may observe a bias toward some Salish languages and a neglect of others. This was inevitable, given the availability of data. Just over 49% of K’s examples are from the Interior branch of Salish, 28% from the three northern languages of this branch alone. Forty percent are from the Central Salish branch; Tillamook and Bella Coola, [End Page 573] isolates within the family, are adequately represented. However, the Tsamosan branch, comprising four languages, is represented by Upper Chehalis alone, and only 2.5% of the examples come from that language. The reasons for this imbalance are simple: K himself worked on these very issues in his Thompson fieldwork but largely on other matters when he earlier worked on Sliammon (Central Salish). Other syntacticians have worked on the other two Northern Interior languages, on Okanagan (Southern Interior), and on Halkomelem (Central Salish) and on Bella Coola. K carefully went through the manuscript texts in Tillamook that had been collected by Franz Boas in 1890 and May Edel in 1931. I am greatly impressed with what...

This book presents an analysis of Spanish prepositional clauses (< P + CP >) - complement and adverbial clauses. The goal is to examine the syntax and evolution of those clauses and their components in Spanish, contrasting them with other European languages. Prepositional argument and adjunct clauses are grammatical in present-day Spanish. However, Medieval Spanish only attests the latter; the former were not frequent until the 16th/17th centuries. Both types are examined in their syntactic evolution and properties, including clausal nominality, argumenthood, nature of prepositions, and optionality. Latin and Portuguese, French, and Italian - both in their present-day and past forms - are studied and compared to Spanish. Likewise, several Germanic languages are surveyed. These languages show variable grammatical degrees of < P + CP >. The comparison reveals aspects which challenge the commonly accepted conclusions about the clausal patterns of each language. This study offers a novel approach to the analysis of Spanish prepositional clauses by looking at its properties and formation not only from within but also in contrast with other languages. It argues for cross-linguistically valid categories and explanations in order to comprehend the properties of human language.

Parts and boundaries

Resultative verb compounds (RVCs) in Mandarin appear in a V1-V2 sequence and have three major subtypes—result-state, directional and completive RVCs with different degrees of compositionality depending on the extent to which the compound’s meaning can be derived from the meanings of the component verbs. The derivation of the RVC has been analyzed as a lexical or syntactic process. Previous acquisition studies show that the RVC’s compositionality and event structure are not fully acquired before the age of three. Findings conflict on whether the acquisition process revealed by early RVCs is usage-based or rule-based. We examined longitudinal data from two Mandarin-speaking children and administered a novel verb experiment on 32 children. The lexicalist approach to RVC formation is a better account for our data than the syntactic approach. Our data lend support to rule-based learning of RVCs. Children master the event structure of RVCs and its interaction with aspect gradually. The headedness of the RVC in relation to event structure depends on its type: V2 is more salient than V1 for the result-state RVC, while V1 is more salient than V2 for the directional RVC.

The present study aims to show that language exposure at certain age ranges is crucial for the successful acquisition of certain syntactic structures, such as complement clauses, adverbial clauses, clauses involving movement and clauses involving both movement and embedding. Twenty-nine Italian heritage children living in Germany and ranging in age between 7;08 and 12;06 took part in the study. We assessed their acquisition of syntactic structures in Italian by using a Sentence Repetition Task. We also assessed their language exposure across different age ranges (between 0 and 3, 3 and 6 and at 6 years) by using parental questionnaires. The results show that the acquisition of different syntactic structures is sensitive to different language exposure variables as related to different age ranges. We interpret the results as showing that the effects of language exposure on the acquisition of syntactic structures are modulated by their timing in monolingual language acquisition. Language exposure in critical periods seems to play a relevant role in bilingual language acquisition.

This unique three-volume 2007 survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world's languages. Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts-of-speech, passives, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, inflectional morphology, tense, aspect, mood, and diexis. The contributors look at the major ways that these notions are realized, and provide informative sketches of them at work in a range of languages. Each volume is accessibly written and clearly explains each new concept introduced. Although the volumes can be read independently, together they provide an indispensable reference work for all linguists and fieldworkers interested in cross-linguistic generalizations. Most of the chapters in the second edition are substantially revised or completely new - some on topics not covered by the first edition. Volume II covers co-ordination, complementation, noun phrase structure, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, discourse structure, and sentences as combinations of clauses.

This chapter provides a phrase structure analysis of the simple clause in Barayin, as well as several types of complex sentences. The clause is analyzed as a relatively flat exocentric structure, and and other analyses of the clause (headed by a functional category, or further dissected into binary constituents) are considered and rejected. Three complex sentence types are analyzed as structures headed by a functional head of the category C: subordinating conjunctions, quotatives and the background marker. A marked sentence-initial position is analyzed as a left-adjunction to the clause. At the end of the chapter, the XLE implementation of the clause analysis is introduced.

The event structures expressed by sentences consist of relations among subevents and their participant roles, called thematic roles or relations. We will say that a theory of the thematic structure of sentences is strictly configurational if every thematic role distinction is represented by a configurationally distinct position in this structure. Strict Thematic Configurationality therefore implies an isomorphism between thematic relations and equivalence classes of positions in syntactic structures. Thus, given this principle, thematic or event-structural aspects of semantics must be purely syntactic. More specifically, meaning or interpretation in respect to these aspects must be a function of category type (functional properties) and configuration (purely formal structural/syntactic relations) only. There can be no representation of thematic relations as substantive categories or features. The syntactic forms representing thematic structure may or may not be identified with those of a component of grammatical syntax. However, a minimalist conception of Strict Thematic Configurationality would seem to require that they are: that there is no autonomous system of thematic relations apart from grammatical syntax.

This paper argues that subjecthood is a relevant concept in the grammar of (Mandarin) Chinese, i.e., Chinese is subject-prominent as well as topic-prominent, and the most appropriate way of characterising subjects is by determining their regular structural position in clause structure. Subjects are claimed to occupy a structural position distinct from, and to the right of, the typical position associated with topics. This position, furthermore, is shown to stand to the left of the whole predicate phrase, as well as preposed distributive-universal quantifiers, associated with the function word dou. The structural analysis is set in the clause-structural model of Beghelli-Stowell (1995, 1997). Apparent counterexamples to the linking of subjects to the determined subject position are discussed, too, and shown to pose no problem to the proposal laid out here.

The distinction between manner and result verbs arises from the event structure approach to verb meaning. In this approach verb meaning consists of two parts, a structural component that includes a small number of primitive predicates indicating event types, and a root component that describes idiosyncratic actions and states. Manner verbs describe actions but not the end results; they have a simple event structure. By contrast, result verbs describe the end results but not the way actions are carried out; they have a complex event structure. The distinction plays an important role in argument realization and constraints on possible verb meanings. It is also related to an issue that has been controversial in the study of Chinese verbs—whether there are simple accomplishments in Chinese. On the basis of Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s diagnostics for manner and result verbs in English, five tests are suggested for Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Chinese) verbs. Two tests concern result: (a) result cannot be denied; (b) in forming resultative verb compounds the second verb and the object are restricted. Three tests identify manner verbs: (a) subject cannot be nonhuman, (b) action cannot be denied, (c) action has duration. Relying on the five tests, dynamic simple verbs in Chinese are classified into three groups—manner, result, and manner + result. Result verbs include verbs of damage, for example, duan ‘cut off’ and hui ‘destroy’; manner verbs include the verb of killing sha ‘kill’, de-adjectival degree achievement verbs, for example, re ‘heat up’, verbs of cooking, for example, kao ‘bake’; and one verb is found to lexicalize both manner and result—mie ‘put out, extinguish’. The verb of killing sha ‘kill, do killing’ is examined in detail, as its status has remained unresolved in the literature. It is found that sha entails change but not culminating change; morphosyntactically it patterns like manner verbs, hence its manner status. In terms of the affectedness hierarchy, the cutoff between result and manner is between verbs of quantized change and non-quantized change. The grammatical relevance of the verb classification can be seen in argument realization. Manner verbs takes more than one type of object, whereas result verbs only take one type of object, where the patient undergoes scalar change. In argument alternation, result verbs, but not manner or manner + result verbs, participate in causative alternation, and only manner verbs allow object alternations. This data suggests that Chinese does have simple accomplishments.

The study of sentence patterns plays a very important role in foreign language learning. Linguistic researchers have analyzed and discussed sentence meaning structures and their representation from various angles, but few of them except theories of event structures study from the origin of sentence production. The current mainstream theories of the event structures mainly introduce the event structures by the characteristics of verbs. These theories are bound to lead to the existence of many inexplicable linguistic expressions within their own theoretical frameworks. Adapting to the trend of integrated study of events, the present study attempts to integrate the basic views of events in the various fields and puts forward a view of attribute-space-time based events. On that basis, this study further defines and classifies the events and finally represents their event structures. The mastery of attribute-space-time events, event structures and their representations can help foreign language learners to better grasp the laws of foreign language and to learn them more effectively.

Lip reading aims at decoding texts from the movement of a speaker's mouth. In recent years, lip reading methods have made great progress for English, at both word-level and sentence-level. Unlike English, however, Chinese Mandarin is a tone-based language and relies on pitches to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning, which significantly increases the ambiguity for the lip reading task. In this paper, we propose a Cascade Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Chinese Mandarin (CSSMCM) lip reading, which explicitly models tones when predicting sentence. Tones are modeled based on visual information and syntactic structure, and are used to predict sentence along with visual information and syntactic structure. In order to evaluate CSSMCM, a dataset called CMLR (Chinese Mandarin Lip Reading) is collected and released, consisting of over 100,000 natural sentences from China Network Television website. When trained on CMLR dataset, the proposed CSSMCM surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art lip reading frameworks, which confirms the effectiveness of explicit modeling of tones for Chinese Mandarin lip reading.

Syntactic parsing deals with syntactic structure of a sentence. The word 'syntax' refers to the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence and their relationship with each other. The objective of syntactic analysis is to find syntactic structure of a sentence which is usually depicted as a tree. Identifying the syntactic structure is useful in determining the meaning of a sentence. Natural language processing is an arena of computer science and linguistics, concerned with the dealings amongst computers and human languages. It processes the data through lexical analysis, Syntax analysis, Semantic analysis, Discourse processing, Pragmatic analysis. This paper gives various parsing methods. The algorithm in this paper splits the English sentences into parts using POS tagger, It identifies the type of sentence (Facts, active, passive etc.) and then parses these sentences using grammar rules of Natural language. The algorithm has been tested on real sentences of English and it accomplished an accuracy of 81%.

The paper presents empirical evidence for six reconstruction effects in Mandarin Chinese. It includes data concerning the copula verb, epistemic modals, scope of aspectual sentence-final particle –le over indefinite wh-phrases, downward entailing quantifiers, predicates of creation, Binding Condition B, quantifier scope and dōu-quantification. The syntactic structures in which reconstruction applies can be derived either by A- or A-bar-movement. Our investigation brings empirical facts to bear on the syntax-semantics interface showing an essential property of natural language that semantic properties and syntactic structures do not vary freely.

The paper presents a compiler, named Rasti, developed witth the Rustemo library. Compiler name Rasti was chosen, because it is implemented in the Rust programming language. This work provides the theoretical foundation for all phases of compilation realized in Rasti, namely lexical, syntax and semantic analysis, with the greatest focus on syntax analysis. Rasti consists of a lexical analyzer (implemented manually and generated with Rustemo), a syntax analyzer (also implemented manually and generated with Rustemo), a semantic analyzer and an evaluator.