Mirative fronting in German

This research is entitled Tataurut Kata Bahasa Mandarin:Tipologi Sintaksis. The theory used to examine the linguistic phenomena of Mandarin in this study includes two theories, namely the word order typology theory by Greenberg and the theory of relational grammar by Comrie. The research data consisted of Mandarin phrases, clauses, and sentences obtained from the Xunbao newspaper and Mandarin books. The research method used is a qualitative. The results of this study are presented using a formal method. Based on the formulation of the problem and research objectives, the results of the study show that the order pattern of Mandarin word order is SPO/SVO. As for changes in word order patterns, they can turn into SOV because O switches position with V after becoming a passive sentence. The word order pattern in imperative sentences is S-P/S-P-O. Under certain conditions, S can be eliminated but does not change the pattern. Declarative sentences have the S-P/S-P-O pattern. S is to the left of P and cannot precede P. If this occurs, then the pattern is unacceptable. Interrogative sentences have a word order pattern S-P or S-V. Chinese interrogative sentence markers can be located in the middle of a sentence and at the end of a sentence. These markers do not affect the basic pattern of word order, that P always precedes S. S is to the left of P or is praverbal. Through a syntactic typology approach, Mandarin is included in the ergative language type. Mandarin language treats S the same as P (patient) but differently from A (agent).

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

Word order correlates with distinctions of information structure, and Gunther Grewendorf’s work has contributed much to our understanding of what the pertinent regularities are in German and other languages such as Italian or Japanese, and it has also shaped our understanding of how these regularities are linked to grammar. Grewendorf (1980) constitutes one of the first concrete proposals of capturing the impact of informational distinctions on German word order. Grewendorf and Sabel (1994, 1999) developed one of the most detailed models of word order variation in the middle field. Grewendorf has also contributed substantially to recent developments concerning the left periphery of clauses, based on the view that categories like focus and topic are directly represented in the syntax. Rizzi (1997) proposed that there are Topic and Focus heads situated in the higher functional layers of the clauses, and that the specifiers of these heads host topic and focus phrases, respectively if not already in the surface representation, then at least at LF. Rizzi’s view has been elaborated for German by Frey (2004), Haftka (1995), Pili (2000), and, of course, Grewendorf (2005a,b). Such approaches in which information structure is directly coded in the syntax constitute one of two extreme ends of a continuum of models of the syntax-information structure interaction. Correlations between positions and informational functions do not necessarily imply that information structure and word order are directly related by syntactic laws. Rather, informational concepts might be correlated with other properties of phrases (say, their length), which could then be the ones really affected by the forces determining word order, such as processability, see, e.g., Hawkins (1994) for such a view.1 In this paper, I will argue that information structure concepts indeed do not play an immediate role in syntax. While word order can reflect information structure categories, it does so because these categories are encoded phonologically in a certain form (or because of the semantic consequences of information structure distinctions) to which

Case, Word Order, and Language Learnability: Insights from Connectionist Modeling Gary Lupyan (il24@cornell.edu) Morten H. Christiansen (mhc27@cornell.edu) Department of Psychology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 USA Abstract How does the existence of case systems, and strict word order patterns a↵ect the learnability of a given language? We present a series of connectionist sim- ulations, suggesting that both case and strict word order may facilitate syntactic acquisition by a se- quential learning device. Our results are consis- tent with typological data concerning the frequen- cies with which di↵erent type of word order pat- terns occur across the languages of the world. Our model also accommodates patterns of syntactic de- velopment across several di↵erent languages. We conclude that non-linguistic constraints on general sequential-learning devices may help explain the re- lationship between case, word order, and learnabil- ity of individual languages. Introduction In language acquisition, children are faced with many formidable tasks, yet they normally acquire most of their native language within the first five years of life. One of the most difficult of these tasks involves mapping a sequence of words onto some sort of interpretation of what that sequence is supposed to mean. That is, in order for the child to under- stand a sentence, she needs to determine the gram- matical roles of the individual words so that she can work out who did what to whom. Although the chil- dren appear to bring powerful statistical learning mechanisms to bear on the acquisition tasks (e.g., Sa↵ran, Aslin, & Newport 1996), the existence of linguistic universals common across radically di↵er- ent languages (Greenberg 1963) points to the pres- ence of innate constraints on such learning. Without such constraints, it becomes difficult to explain why there are few, if any, Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) languages (van Everbroeck, 1999) even though in principle such a language appears to be as good as any other. In this paper, we propose that these con- straints may arise from non-linguistic limitations on the sequential learning of statistical structure, and examine how this perspective may shed light on how children learn to map the words in sentences onto their appropriate grammatical roles. There are two major ways in which languages signal syntactic rela- tionships and grammatical roles—word order (WO), and case markings. In a strict WO language like En- glish, declarative sentences follow a Subject-Verb- Object (SVO) pattern. It is the occurrence of the subject in the first position, and the object in the second, that allows the hearer to comprehend who did what to whom. In contrast, languages such as Russian or Japanese allow multiple word orders and rely on case markings to disambiguate subjects from objects. For instance, Masha lubit Petyoo (SVO), Petyoo lubit Masha (OVS), and Lubit Petyoo Masha (VOS) are all grammatical in Russian and all mean Mary loves Peter (albeit with di↵erent emphases on the constituents), due to the nominative -a, and ac- cusative -u case markers. While long-standing theories describe acquisition of language through an innate language acquisition device (e.g., Pinker, 1995), an alternative approach that is gaining ground is the adaptation of linguistic structures to the human brain rather than vice versa (e.g., Christiansen, 1994; Kirby, 1998). On this ac- count, language universals may reflect non-linguistic cognitive constraints on learning and processing of sequential structure, rather than constraints pre- scribed by an innate universal grammar. Previ- ous work has shown that sequential-learning devices with no language-specific biases are better able to learn more universal aspects of language as com- pared to aspects encountered in rare languages (e.g., Ellefson & Christiansen, 2000; Christiansen & De- vlin, 1997; Van Everbroeck, 1999, 2001). Here, we examine the ways in which case markings and word order may function as cues for a sequen- tial learning device acquiring syntactic structure. In simulation 1, we model di↵erent word orders, and hypothesize that typologically common languages should be easier to learn by a sequential-learning device than the more rare ones. We expand on this idea in simulation 2 by studying the performance of networks trained on languages of varying degrees of case markings and flexibility. Finally, in simulation 3, we establish that our trained networks are able to mimic syntactic performance of children learn- ing English, Italian, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian (Slobin and Bever, 1982).

The article introduces a comparative analysis of the word order in the communicative structure of the sentence in Russian and Persian. The research also covered means and methods of expressing communicative structure, as well as the rules and patterns of word order on the communicative level. In both languages, the communicative aspect of the sentence is closely related to the word order, which is the main tool of expressing the semantic division of the sentence. However, the communicative word order patterns are different. In the neutral speech, both languages put the theme (background information) in front of the rheme (actual information). In expressive speech, the Russian rheme is placed at the beginning of the sentence while the theme follows it. In other words, the thought moves from the actual information to the background information. When the communicative division of the sentence changes, the word order also changes. Based on the analysis of the word order in neutral and expressive speech, direct and inverted word orders are associated with the function that these components perform in the theme-rheme relationship. Persian, however, has a fixed word order, and allows for no inversion: the theme and the rheme are fixed, and the background information always precedes the new one. In the Russian language, any part of the sentence can be the theme or the rheme. In Persian, the function of the theme or the rheme belongs to particular sentence components.

Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 demonstrated priming of the order of case-marked verb arguments. However, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles were confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearization of phrases.

Within early generative grammar as developed in the sixties, grammatical rules and principles were exclusively formulated in terms of constituent structure, and there was no reference at all to grammatical functions like subject and objects, these terms being defined as the NP immediately dominated by S and VP, respectively (cf. e.g. Chomsky 1965). This fundamental claim of early generative grammar had some important implications for the linear ordering of constituents and words, because tangled trees were banned. Consequently, the theory made the prediction that the sequence “Object-Subject-Verb” could not show up, at least as a base structure, as no element which is not dominated by the VP can be positioned between two constituents of the VP. Linguists were very well aware of the existence of languages showing a considerable degree of freeness of constituent order, that are nowadays called nonconfigurational, like Japanese, Turkish, Warlpiri, Hungarian or German. For these languages, a special transformational device was invented, viz. the well-known scrambling rule permuting the elements of a fixed base word order in some random fashion, or governed by thematic or other non-grammatical regularities. The most outstanding property of this treatment of free word order is its claim that there is no connection at all between grammar and linear order in non-configurational languages.

This paper proposes a description of German word order including phenomena considered as complex, such as scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and verbal pied piping. Our description relates a syntactic dependency structure directly to a topological hierarchy without resorting to movement or similar mechanisms.

In this ERP study, we investigated the Korean German learners’ perception of differences between canonical word order and non-canonical word order in German. The experimental materials were constructed by manipulating the canonical word order factor, i.e. nominative-first vs. dative or accusative-first in subordinate sentences in German. During the sentence comprehension, the brain responses of 15 participants in the intermediate level of German were recorded and analyzed. As a result of the experiment, the positivity was elicited at the verb region in the dative-first sentences. In contrast, the positivity was obtained from the all region(first noun region, second noun region, verb region) in the accusative-first sentences. These difference demonstrates that Korean German learners could recognize canonical word order in the accusative sentences, but not in the dative one.

Everyday communication is enriched by the visual environment that listeners concomitantly link to the linguistic input. If and when visual cues are integrated into the mental meaning representation of the communicative setting, is still unclear. In our earlier findings, the integration of linguistic cues (i.e., topic-hood of a discourse referent) reduced discourse updating costs of the mental representation as indicated by reduced sentence-initial processing costs of the non-canonical word order in German. In the present study we tried to replicate our earlier findings by replacing the linguistic cue by a visual attention-capture cue presented below the threshold of perception in order to direct participant’s attention to a depicted referent. While this type of cue has previously been shown to modulate word order preferences in sentence production, we found no effects on sentence comprehension. We discuss possible theory-based reasons for the null effect of the implicit visual cue as well as methodological caveats and issues that should be considered in future research on multimodal meaning integration.

Grammatical structuring in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia in Finnish

WORD ORDER AND RECONSTRUCTION OF BALTIC SENTENCE TYPE Summary The article deals with mutual relations between word order patterns in Lithuanian and Lettish and points out their importance for the reconstruction of earlier Baltic sentence structure. Statis­tic evidence reveals the greater frequency of the OV pattern (from 51% to 75%) in dialects and folklore, especially in the older recordings, in comparison with standard language. The ancient character of this pattern is corroborated by the order of components in nominal compounds such as Lith. kraugerys “blood-sucker”, varkalys (Lett, varkalis) “copper-smith”, bitkopis (Lett, bis kuopis) “honey-taker”. The (S)OV order of the major sentence constituents is in accordance with the majority of phrase constituent patterns in which the modifier (operator) precedes the modified (operandum): AdjNom, PronNom, NumNom, GenNom; AdvV, Adv'Adv, etc. Other patterns with the preceding modifier can be reconstructed for the earlier history of the Baltic languages. The ancient use of postpositions reflect the locatives with -pi< *pie, *en, -na (Lith. Namop(i), lauke, laukuosna), adverbs Lith. kodėl, todėl, kodrin, todrin, Lett, kāpēc tāpēc etc. The standard of compar­ison precedes adjective in the majority of gnomic expressions, proverbs and riddles of Lithuanian folklore and especially in such periphrastic comparatives as Lith. visų gerasis (geriausias), Lett. vislabaks “best of all”. Nominal phrases with definite adjectives, f. i. Lith. gerasis (<*geras+jis) tėvas, represent ancient determinative constructions preceding nouns while the use of -gu in Old Lithuanian shows the postposition of interrogative particles (even after negative particles, cf. Lith. negu “as”). The historical survey of word order patterns reveals the ancient ambivalence between (S)OV and (S)VO types in Baltic with the prevalence of constructions representing the (S)OV type. In this connection the Baltic languages give evidence of an earlier state of development in compari­son with Slavic and manifest a great similarity to Homeric Greek and early Latin. The tendency to fix the position of some modifiers after the modifieds in the history of Baltic languages influ­enced the prepositional constructions earlier and more consistently than it did the standard of comparison (AdjSt) and major sentence constituents (V, O). The syntactic structure of languages with an ambivalent word order is supposed to be depending not only on the order of the most variable sentence constituents (S, 0, V) but mainly on the complex of more fixed patterns reflected in the distribution of stressed and unstressed positions in the sentence.

The two-stage architecture of the Garden-Path Theory with its separation of first- and second-pass parsing has been replaced by simpler architectures in certain probability-based models of the human parser, including the Surprisal Theory. Based on evidence from subject-object ambiguities in German, this paper argues that the two-stage architecture still provides a better account of the garden-path strength observed for object-before-subject sentences in German. In the first part of the paper, corpus findings concerning the relationship between animacy and word order are discussed. Although animacy information is an important predictor of word-order in German, the Surprisal Theory does not predict differences in garden-path strength related to this information because animacy constrains word order only in combination with the verb’s argument structure. Because garden-path strength in verb-final clauses, as they are found in German, is a function of the verb’s expectedness according to the Surprisal Theory, verb specific information itself cannot affect garden-path strength in this theory. In the second part of the paper, a specific implementation of a two-stage model of garden-path recovery, the Linking-and-Checking model, is discussed. This model accounts for the dependence of garden-path strength in object-before-subject sentences on animacy as well as for findings concerning the use of subject-verb agreement for garden-path recovery.

In Turkology, the aspectual status of verb forms is understudied, as are, especially, the compositional means of realizing aspect distinctions. Difficulties arise from specificities of the Turkish language such as its agglutinative nature, lack of articles, the relatively free word order. The verb has a complex paradigm whereby certain forms have tense meanings, some aspectual but the root morpheme itself is neutral vis-à-vis aspect. This paper employs Verkuyl’s two aspect schemata – perfective and imperfective, as an analytical tool, and when these schemata and the compositional aspect theory in general are applied to Turkish, many intriguing questions arise, for example: how does the preterit realize the perfective-imperfective contrast? How is aspect expressed in both the past domain and outside it? How will accusative forms, that are definite, be realized in subjects, indirect objects and adverbial nominals from the point of view of the compositional aspect theory? The paper is a broad initial attempt for preliminary answers to these and similar complex issues. The main generalizations are that the compositional realization of aspect in Modern Turkish is located at the sentence-level and that it takes place predominantly through the definite-indefinite contrast in direct objects, through case values and word order patterns according to the functional sentence perspective, as well as through various other means that are subject to future in-depth research. Keywords: Modern Turkish; Turkish aspect; compositional aspect; perfectivity-imperfectivity contrast

The article examines a persistent word order pattern in Bulgarian, from classical tenth-century Old Bulgarian through Early Modern Bulgarian to the present day. It is characterised by discontinuity between the subject and the predicate due to the insertion of adjuncts. By analysing the attested occurrences in the text of the Bible in Greek, as well as in contemporary Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech, we find that the studied word order pattern is typical of these languages as well. On the basis of these observations, we make conclusions about the possible universality of this word order model.