Syntax-Semantics Interface

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to reflect a semantic distinction. There are three approaches to what such a semantic distinction may consist in: an extension-based approach, an object-based approach, and a more recent grammar-based approach. The paper will pursue the grammar-based approach, on which count categories convey a notion of unity at a level of 'grammaticized individuation' to use Rothstein's (2017) term. It will argue that verbs with respect to their Davidsonian event argument position exhibit the diagnostics of mass, rather than count. This is correctly predicted by the grammar-based approach, but not object- or extension-based approaches. The paper will account for the mass diagnostics of verbs in terms of semantic selection.

L'articolo propone: 1) Un paragone tra linguistica computazionale e Natural Language Processing. Dovrebbero essere campi di ricerca diversi: lo sono ancora? 2) Gli esiti generati da un parser basato su un sistema a regole per una frase causativa con il verbo 'fare'. Tali esiti sono replicabili per qualsiasi altra frase con 'fare' causativo.

Sentential negation in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) may be accomplished through three different kinds of structures: Neg1 [Neg VP], Neg2 [Neg VP Neg] and Neg3 [VP Neg]. This distribution is quite rare in natural languages, which usually feature only one structure to express sentential negation, with an optional structure to convey a discourse function. In the linguistic literature, it is frequently claimed that the Neg1 structure is the only one devoid of syntactic restrictions. This idea has been presented as an argument for its status as the standard negation form in BP. Schwenter (2005) has explained the other two constructions in terms of information structure. However, he also recognizes some differences between the informational status of Neg2 and Neg3. In this study, I aim to describe the occurrence of these structures in BP in an attempt to formulate an analysis that considers both distributive characteristics and possible interpretations of these structures.

The study explores the grammatical means employed for the expression of information structure in standard colloquial Burmese on the basis of a corpus of written and spoken texts. It analyses the morphosyntactic and prosodic devices identified as relevant for its goals, namely the differential subject and object marking, constituent order, particles used to create a range of interpretations related to the notions of topic, focus and contrast, stand-alone sentence nominalisations and prosody.
The study argues for the existence of a grammatical system of informational PACKAGING in Burmese that has no direct linking to information structural categories like topic, focus and contrast. Expressed by various morphosyntactic means, it segregates information into separate informational units (PACKAGES) and establishes structural relations between them. This partition shows a robust correspondence to prosody.
The PACKAGING system is mobilised for creation of diverse information structure-related interpretive effects through its different configurations and interaction with the context. Concepts like topic, focus, contrast and apparent contrast-degrees observed in Burmese are interpretive outcomes of this interaction and have no immediate expression in the language. Furthermore, the usage of PACKAGING is not restricted to information structural effects and the system plays a crucial role in discourse structuring and content management in Burmese.
Analysis of stand-alone nominalised sentences along the lines of a speaker’s subjective channel of communication suggests the resemblance with the function of similar phenomena in many other Tibeto-Burman languages. It proposes PACKAGING motivations for this function and shows how this can be mobilised for information structure-related interpretations.
Hence, the study rejects the view of a direct expression of information structural categories by linguistic means. Instead, similarly to many other linguistic categories, it proposes an indirect interpretive link between a pragmatically-semantically underspecified grammatical system and the derived interpretation.

While matrix clauses pronouns are almost never dropped in matrix clauses in Russian, silent pronouns are licensed in almost all kinds of embedded clauses. Null pronouns in such positions share similarities with PRO, but they also differ from PRO in many respects. In this paper, I show that there are two kinds of environments in which such pronouns can appear. The first kind of environment includes complements of attitude verbs, where there is strong evidence for a syntactic relation between the null pronoun and its antecedent. In the second kind of environment, which includes sentential adjuncts and embedded wh-questions, the nature of this relation seems to be different. I propose that Russian possesses a minimally specified silent pronoun which is phonologically deficient and must cliticize onto a higher projection and thus can only be found in the presence of an overt complementizer. I adopt the proposed in Holmberg (2005) that a major feature of pro-drop phenomena is the valuation of the D feature of the null pronoun. I propose that in Russian the null pronoun is unable to value this feature inside the clause where it is merged and therefore needs to probe outside the clause to get the D feature valued. The difference between properties of silent pronouns in the two kinds of environments is derived from the exact mechanism by which the valuation takes place. In the case of complements of attitude verbs, the valuation takes place as a result of an agree relation, in other cases the valuation takes place via a topic-chain.

This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo, whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers, representing a wide spectrum of frameworks, approaches and methods, from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects, to corpus-based discussions of language and gender, to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes, to laboratory experiments, and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data, as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured, acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics, and Southeast Asian languages more generally.

This article investigates Paul’s use of the term οἱ δοκοῦντες in the letter to the Galatians. Firstly, the term is considered from the standpoint of lexical semantics. Secondly, select relevant parallels from Ancient Greek literature are adduced and studied comparatively. Based on these considerations, it is argued that Paul uses οἱ δοκοῦντες as a rhetorical device whereby he distances himself from the Jerusalem leaders and, in so doing, turnes his opponents’ argument against them. 

The placement of French adjectives has long been both controversial and misconstrued within the literature. In this Romance language, postnominal adjectives are considered to be the rule rather than the exception (Alexaidou, 2007). Within this paper, the semantic and syntactic underpinnings of prenominal and postnominal adjectives will be discussed in relation to theoretical and descriptive data. Semantic structures attempt to classify adjective placement. However, data indicate greater flexibility and ambiguity in placement than what has been previously understood (Thuilier, 2013). Within Branching Direction Theory (Song, 2012), noun movement up the syntactic tree with pied-piping and snowballing movement will join with the mirror image adjective orderings developed within semantic theory (Cinque, 1994; Laenzlinger, 2005). While current theory attempts to describe these phenomena, many issues are yet to be resolved. Do to the recent growth in Optimality Theory (Song, 2012), there is hope that elegant, more fully explanatory theories can be developed. Overall, within Universal Grammar’s framework (Chomsky, 1986), the variation in adjective placement in French and within human language is the basis for the research developed within this paper.

The position of the reason-asking ‘why’ has been under much discussion for the past few years. Although some have suggested that it is situated within the CP domain, its exact position varies depending on different proposals. Meanwhile, a noncanonical why-like ‘what’ has also attracted much attention. Some assume it to be merged to the top of a sentence while some assume it to be merged lower. In this study, new evidence is provided to show that in Chinese the reason-asking ‘why’ should be merged to the Int(errogative)P in the CP zone, confirming Rizzi’s (2001) and Tsai’s (2008) claims, whereas the why-like ‘what’ should be merged as low as in vP but target the topmost of a clause, supposedly ForceP, by covert movement.

We further develop the self-centered model of mental representations for language with the focus on the mechanisms underlying syntactic calculus and the construction of larger meaningful constructs out of the basic syntactic units. We consider the inborn multimodal perception and  the self-concept as an actor in an environment as the basis for concept formation and syntactic construction. Based on relevant findings in language acquisition, we investigate the perceptual, semantic, and syntactic aspects of mental apparatus. We see this apparatus as an overall system that can handle the task of conceptualization and the task of syntactic construction using the same mechanisms. Based on the argument-centered model of mental representations which involves such processing homogeneity, we show the gradual development of the complexity of syntactic formants during language acquisition.

Keywords: language acquisition, syntax complexity, mental operations
ACM classification keywords: I.2.0: Artificial Intelligence, I.2.7: Natural Language Processing

This study investigates the licensing conditions on Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in Jordanian Arabic (JA). JA exhibits both types of NSIs that are discussed in the literature: Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) and Negative Concord Items (NCIs). Although these two sets of items seem to form a natural class in the sense that they show certain sensitivity to negation, they display important distributional differences that call for different analyses. First, NCIs can sometimes express negation on their own as in fragment answers; whereas NPIs cannot do so. Second, the licensing of NCIs is clause-bound; whereas the licensing of NPIs is not. Third, NPIs are acceptable in a number of contexts that do not involve overt negation; whereas NCIs are acceptable in only a subset of these contexts, namely without-clauses and before-clauses.
The licensing of NPIs and NCIs in JA is discussed in light of previous theories that are mainly based on the distribution of these items in English and European languages. The investigation of NPI licensing in JA shows that the distribution of these items can best be captured by the semantic notion of (Non-)veridicality (Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2011). Data from JA show that NPIs in the language need to be in the c-command domain of a non-veridical function at LF as proposed by the (Non)-veridicality Approach.
The investigation of NCI licensing in JA shows that none of the NCI licensing theories previously proposed in the literature extends to JA. Alternatively, an account is proposed that is basically a crucial modification of the Non-negative Indefinites Approach (Zeijlstra 2004, 2008; Penka 2007, 2011) which takes Negative Concord to be a manifestation of syntactic agreement between an NCI and a semantic negation in the clause, where syntactic agreement is defined in terms of feature checking following recent assumptions within Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, 1998, 2000, 2001). I argue that NCIs are non-negative indefinites that are endowed with an [uNEG]-feature that needs to be checked against an [iNEG]-feature of a semantic negation that can be either overt or abstract in the clause. I also propose that Spec-head agreement and Head complement agreement exist side by side with c-command as licensing configurations for NCIs. I further argue that the level of representation at which NCI licensing takes place is not the same among all NCIs: while some NCIs are licensed at LF, other NCIs are licensed in the surface syntax. I show that this alternative account can capture the distribution of NCIs in JA. I also show that this account extends to NCIs in other languages such as Moroccan Arabic, Polish, and Spanish and is thus supported cross-linguistically.

Ausgehend von der methodischen Frage, auf welche Weise kognitive Ansätze der Diskursforschung auf historische Texte Anwendung finden können, rekonstruiert der Vortrag grammatische Muster zur Etablierung von Textwelten im Mittelhochdeutschen. Auf der theoretischen Grundlage der Text-Welt-Theorie (Werth 1999) und der théorie des espaces mentaux (Fauconnier 1984) wird das exemplarisch für den Bereich der Tempora durchgeführt.

Clitic le in structures like ándale, apúrale, échale has been described in terms of verbal intensifi cation (Torres, 2005), or as a process of grammaticalization (Company, 2004); nevertheless, no exhaustive analysis has been made, in which its grammatical contribution, ** precise meaning or true origin are detailed. The present article offers the reader a general description of the studies conducted on this particular phenomenon regarding linguistic change; it also includes the different points of view of researchers who have tried to explain it, and ends with a proposal of a semantic classifi cation of some of these structures, which are common in Mexican Spanish, as well as with a series of tests that will allow observing the syntactic behavior of such constructions.

This paper deals with the semantic and constructional variation of the
Spanish verb hablar and o�ers a description of the multiple contexts in which this
verb can appear, based on the study of the focalization semantics of its root and
the temporal configuration of the event in the model of Wotjak (2010, 2012).

Abstract (in English)

This review talks about the main analysis of prepositions with regards to their relations with verbs in Malay predicates in the book 'Perkaitan sintaksis-semantik kata kerja dengan preposisi bahasa Melayu' [The relation between syntax and semantics of verb with prepositions in Malay] written by Maslida Yusoff in 2016 published by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. The theoretical underpinnings of Role and Reference Grammar is used to explicate prepositions in the Malay language. It reveals a new characterization of malay prepositions which captures the whole gamut of the functions of structure and meaning of malay prepositions. One missing element of the book is the typology that Malay belongs to based on this new synergized description. The book engages in abstract discussions of the data and could be further concretize by language sample data for the undergraduate and teacher trainee audience who studies malay grammar.

This study investigates two types of adjunct WHAT merged at peripheral positions in Chinese. The L-WHAT denotes a why-interpretation with an aggressive, prohibitive force. A VP shell construction is adopted to accommodate the L-WHAT. The H-WHAT is merged at the left periphery of a sentence and is exclusively used in expressing a speaker’s refutatory force without interrogativity. The two WHATs are encoded with different modalities: the L-WHAT with root modality while the H-WHAT with epistemic modality. Such is a natural consequence if it is assumed that the former is derived from vP and the latter CP. It is proposed that the interpretation of the two types of WHAT is compositionally derived from the modality and the speaker force that each WHAT carries. This study not only explores the origins of different interpretations of adjunct WHATs, but also advances a uniform approach in mapping the speaker force unto syntax.

The Causative/Inchoative alternation involves pairs of verbs, one of which is causative and the other non-causative syntactically and semantically (e.g., John broke the window vs. The window broke). In its causative use, an alternating verb is used transitively and understood as externally
caused. When used non-causatively, the verb is intransitive and interpreted as spontaneous. The alternation typically exhibits an affected argument (i.e., a Theme) in both intransitive and transitive uses, whereas the transitive use also involves a Causer that brings about the event.
Although they are often volitional agents (e.g., John broke the window with a stone), external causers may also be non-volitional causers (e.g., The earthquake broke the windows) and instruments (e.g., The hammer broke the window). Morphologically, languages exhibit different patterns reflecting the alternation, even intralinguistically. In languages like English, alternations are not morphologically coded, but they are in most languages. Languages like Hindi commonly mark causative (or transitive) alternations by means of different mechanisms, such as internal vowel changes or causative morphology. In many European languages, a subset of alternating verbs may exhibit an uncoded alternation, but most alternating verbs mark anticausativization with a reflexive-like clitic. In Yaqui (Uto-Aztecan), different patterns are associated with different verbal roots. The alternation may be uncoded, equipollent (i.e., both alternating forms are coded), and anticausative. Theoretically, different approaches have explored the alternation. Both lexical and syntactic causativization and anticausativization accounts have been proposed to explain the alternation. A third approach postulates that both forms are derived from a common source.

This study will present a tool designed for meaning extraction with monoclausal sentences in Italian. Its main features will be illustrated with instances of the Italian causative clause type featuring the verb fare 'make' (e.g. Egli fa piangere il bambino 'He makes the child cry'), a construction which invariably embeds a clause (e.g. Il bambino piange 'The child cries') with which it establishes an entailment relationship. The tool automatically accomplishes the following tasks: it answers relevant wh-questions (e.g. Who cries? Who makes someone cry?) and detects the entailment. Concurrent with this presentation, this study will also encourage a reflection on the research currently being conducted in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, in which data-driven approaches prevail over rule-based systems.

This book explores relationships and maps out intersections between discussions on causation in three scientific disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The book is organized in five thematic parts, investigating connections between philosophical and linguistic studies of causation; presenting novel methodologies for studying the representation of causation; tackling central issues in syntactic and semantic representation of causal relations; and introducing recent advances in philosophical thinking on causation.

Beyond its thematic organization, readers will find several recurring topics throughout this book, such as the attempt to reduce causality to other non-causal terms; causal pluralism vs. one all-encompassing account for causation; causal relations pertaining to the mental as opposed to the physical realm, and more.
This collection also lays the foundation for questioning whether it is possible to evaluate available philosophical approaches to causation against the variety of linguistic phenomena ranging across diverse lexical and grammatical items, such as bound morphemes, prepositions, connectives, and verbs. Above all, it lays the groundwork for considering whether the fruits of the psychological-cognitive study of the perception of causal relations may contribute to linguistic and philosophical studies, and whether insights from linguistics can benefit the other two disciplines.

The monograph presents a multi-faceted contrastive survey of the syntactic systems of Bulgarian and Russian. This presentation makes available a number of practical and theoretical findings in Bulgarian, a language “classical and exotic” at the same time, according to an apt remark of S. Ivanchev. This language, purely Slavic in its origin, has developed over its history some features radically differentiating it from many Slavic languages, including Russian. Part of those are typically Balkanic, while the others are their derivatives or are resulting from an independent language development. Main specific features of Bulgarian that have shaped the sentence structure in this language are, among others: a) the loss of nominal declension, b) the morphologisation of definiteness, c) the loss of the infinitive and the development of the DA construction, d) the loss of past adverbial participles and the transformation of the system of participles, accompanied by the activisation of predicative attributes, e) Null Subject structures, f) the preservation of an evolved clitic system, etc. These features gave rise to the formation of essential syntactic peculiarities of Bulgarian in contrast with Russian, such as: redistribution of types of subordinate syntactic relations (the propagation of the adjoining relation); specific means of the semantic subject eviction; specific structures of impersonal sentences; the expansion of the DA construction with imperatives, interrogatives and complex sentences (including the positions filled in Russian by the conditional mood); specific structures of complex sentences with the DA element (regular splitting of compound conjunctions, restrictions on the choice of tenses); the doubling of the object at the level of the simple and complex sentences; specific word order and peculiarities of the movement of sentential and group clitics, etc.
The system of Bulgarian syntax is described in a number of aspects (“sentence parts” analysis, referential, communicative, communicative functional aspects) to form an integral view of the object of the study. 1) Conventional “sentence parts” analysis has been enriched with state of the art insights of the modern linguistic theory. Each partition in the traditional classifications of the simple and complex sentence is supplemented with substantial contrastive observations. In an outline of the features of the Bulgarian syntactic system contrasted with the Russian syntax, the focus is given to the phenomena having a general typological importance. Translation equivalents are widely used not only as the basis of confrontation between the two languages, but also as a guidance for the linguists lacking the knowledge of Bulgarian. A similar purpose is assigned to morphological (or other, where appropriate) comments and notes dispersed in the text as sources of additional information on the discussed phenomena. The study is amply supported with the data from parallel Bulgarian-Russian and Russian-Bulgarian corpora, as well as from the National Corpora of Bulgarian and Russian. 2) An important part of the study is dedicated to the referential aspect of the Bulgarian sentence. This section presents the article system of Bulgarian, outlining the correspondences between article markers and referential statuses of noun phrases, as well as existing dependencies between reference/article markers and verbal categories. 3) The study describes the inventory of the main communicative semantic features in Bulgarian, such as theme, rheme, contrast, emphasis, etc. The peculiarity of Bulgarian in developing linear intonation shifts is revealed, which is due to the relatively fixed word order and flat intonation as compared to Russian. Another point of discussion is the difference between Bulgarian and Russian in realising specific communicative strategies of the speaker, arising from the increased functional load of articles in expressing communicative features when the linear intonation variation is restricted. 4) Communicative functional aspect is brought into the forefront in the description of the semantic subject eviction (passive, subject impersonal, indeterminate finite and participial impersonal constructions); in the analysis of the role of descriptive predicates in passive, decausative, affective impersonal constructions; in the treatment of constructions with the nominalisation, attributisation, adverbialisation of the verbal component of descriptive predicates, etc. 5) The study outlines the principles of the word order in the Bulgarian sentence, as well as the range of issues associated with the Bulgarian clitics. 6) The difference between the Bulgarian and Russian punctuation systems is clearly exposed. The revealed distinctions are shown to be mainly related to the deviations from the syntactic principle of punctuation underlying many rules in Bulgarian. Presently the Bulgarian system is largely eclectic, and in future it is likely to continue drifting towards the French-like systems..
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Forest fire causes serious damage to the Flora and fauna of a country. This is one of major environmental concern. Early prediction of fires saves large number of Flora and fauna and prevents the ecosystem. By predicting the area burnt we can also classify whether the fire into small or big. The key motivation for this prediction is to help fire management team in proper resource allocation and to help the fire-fighters in a best possible way. The meteorological conditions of the forest are the key factors of the forest fire. These climatic data can be obtained using the local sensors which are incorporated in the nearest meteorological stations. This research proposes various Machine learning approaches such as Naïve Bias, Decision Trees, SVR, Random forest, Stochastic Gradient Descent and Bagging for predicting the amount of land burnt in the forest. Here the predictive model is build using the outbreaks of fire caused in the northeast region of Portugal.

An evaluation of whether the special endings that appear on Anatolian neuter gender nouns in Agent-function reflect split-NP ergativity or an 'animatising' derivative. Appendix includes an exploration of why the Anatolian 'animatising' derivative may have emerged.

In Construction Grammar, grammatical patterns are conventional pairings of form and meaning that are analogous to words. This article contrasts Construction Grammar with competing syntactic theories that are based on universal constraints and the projection properties of words. It reviews arguments for construction-based syntax derived from the following linguistic phenomena: semantic and syntactic variability of verbs, coercion, idiomatic patterns and ‘family resemblances’ among idioms, paradigm-based constraints on form and meaning, exceptions to cross-constructional generalizations, and the inadequacy of derivational rules. Verbal and nominal syntax are used to exemplify the formal mechanism that combines constructions and words, unification grammar. A concluding section outlines connections between Construction Grammar and use-based models of grammar, acquisition and sentence processing.

В статье обсуждаются критерии выделения неканонических подлежащих с признаками нулевых местоимений и обсуждается корреляция между сегментацией текста и параметрами грамматики, лицензирующими употребление разных видов нулевых подлежащих в финитных клаузах. Изучение нулевых подлежащих и параметра нулевого субъекта является областью, где применение реляционной типологии А. Е. Кибрика вполне оправдано, поскольку факторы, обуславливающие выбор конструкций с нулевым подлежащим в ряде случаев связаны с комбинированным применением формально-синтаксических, коммуникативно-синтаксических и референциально-дейктических механизмов. В синтаксически аккузативных языках, для которых был ранее предложен параметр нулевого подлежащего, имеются разные типы нулевых подлежащих, в том числе, ‘нули Мельчука’, т. е. нулевые подлежащие с ролевой семантикой, контролирующие согласовательную форму предиката. Встречаются языки, использующие в разных типах клауз более одного типа нулевых подлежащих с ролевой семантикой. Корреляция между семантикой и согласовательной морфологией нулевого подлежащего не является принципом общей грамматики, но зависит от сочетания морфосинтаксических параметров, сложившегося в конкретном языке. Прямолинейное отождествление ‘нулей Мельчука’ с малым pro непродуктивно, так как эти единицы имеют разные категориальные свойства и разную дистрибуцию. Вместе с тем, все типы нулевых подлежащих, по-видимому, связаны со стратегией на экономное использование синтаксического материала клаузы и на опущение информационно избыточных элементов дискурса/текста. При этом частое использование pro, т. е. нулевого тематического местоименного подлежащего в позиции повторной номинации, в ряде случаев создает благоприятные условия для воспроизводства конструкций с ‘нулями Мельчука’, имеющими ролевую семантику Агенса, в ситуациях, где уточнение референции Агенса нерелевантно для развертывания текста. Эта связь была продемонстрирована на примере разных языков, в том числе, на базе оригинальных текстов древнескандинавских языков и на базе текстов субнормативного русского языка.