| 11. |
- Etebari, Zahra, et al.
(författare)
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Development of contrastive-partitive in colloquial Persian A grammaticalization from possessive =eš
- 2020
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Ingår i: Language Typology and Universals. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 1867-8319 .- 2196-7148. ; 73:4, s. 575-604
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article discusses the development of the contrastive-partitive function of the possessive =eš in colloquial Persian. Examples of colloquial Persian show that the third person singular clitic pronoun =eš in some adnominal possessive constructions does not refer to any obvious referent present either in the syntactic structure (co-text) or in the situational context. Instead, the function of =eš, namely contrastive-partitive, is to mark the host as a part and contrast it with other parts of the similar set. The same function is attested in a few languages of Uralic and Turkic group. We believe that the same development has been occurred in possessive =eš in Persian. To describe the process of the development of the contrastive-partitive function, authentic colloquial examples from Internet blogs and formal examples from a historical corpus of New Persian are investigated. It is argued that this non-possessive function of =eš has originated from the whole-part relation in cross-referencing possessives, where both the lexical and clitical possessor =eš are present. The presence of the lexical possessor facilitates the loss of referentiality in =eš and it is developed to denote partitivity. Furthermore, the pragmatic motivation of communicating contrast makes =eš to be further grammaticalized into denoting contrastive-partitive function.
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| 12. |
- Gast, Volker, et al.
(författare)
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Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon
- 2022
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Ingår i: Linguistic typology. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 1430-0532 .- 1613-415X. ; 26:2, s. 403-438
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article investigates to what extent the semantics and the phonological forms of lexical items are genealogically inherited or acquired through language contact. We focus on patterns of colexification (the encoding of two concepts with the same word) as an aspect of lexical-semantic organization. We test two pairs of hypotheses. The first pair concerns the genealogical stability (persistence) and susceptibility to contact-induced change (diffusibility) of colexification patterns and phonological matter in the 40 most genealogically stable elements of the 100-items Swadesh list, which we call “nuclear vocabulary”. We hypothesize that colexification patterns are (a) less persistent, and (b) more diffusible, than the phonological form of nuclear vocabulary. The second pair of hypotheses concerns degrees of diffusibility in two different sections of the lexicon – “core vocabulary” (all 100 elements of the Swadesh list) and its complement (“non-core/peripheral vocabulary”). We hypothesize that the colexification patterns associated with core vocabulary are (a) more persistent, and (b) less diffusible, than colexification patterns associated with peripheral vocabulary. The four hypotheses are tested using the lexical-semantic data from the CLICS database and independently determined phonological dissimilarity measures. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are less persistent than the phonological matter of nuclear vocabulary receives clear support. The hypothesis that colexification patterns are more diffusible than phonological matter receives some support, but a significant difference can only be observed for unrelated languages. The hypothesis that colexification patterns involving core vocabulary are more genealogically stable than colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon cannot be confirmed, but the data seem to indicate a higher degree of diffusibility for colexification patterns at the periphery of the lexicon. While we regard the results of our study as valid, we emphasize the tentativeness of our conclusions and point out some limitations as well as desiderata for future research to enable a better understanding of the genealogical versus areal distribution of linguistic features.
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| 13. |
- Gast, Volker, et al.
(författare)
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The areal factor in lexical typology : Some evidence from lexical databases
- 2018
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Ingår i: Aspects of linguistic variation. - : Walter de Gruyter. - 9783110607956 - 9783110607963 ; , s. 43-82
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Our study aims to explore how much information about areal patterns of colexification we can gain from lexical databases, such as CLICS and ASJP. We adopt a bottom-up (rather than hypothesis-driven) approach, identifying areal patterns in three steps: (i) determine spatial autocorrelations in the data, (ii) identify clusters as candidates for convergence areas and (iii) test the clusters resulting from the second step controlling for genealogical relatedness. Moreover, we identify a (genealogical) diversity index for each cluster. This approach yields promising results, which we regard as a proof of concept, but we also point out some drawbacks of the use of major lexical databases.
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| 14. |
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| 17. |
- Hörberg, Thomas, 1979-
(författare)
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Probabilistic and Prominence-driven Incremental Argument Interpretation in Swedish
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates how grammatical functions in transitive sentences (i.e., `subject' and `direct object') are distributed in written Swedish discourse with respect to morphosyntactic as well as semantic and referential (i.e., prominence-based) information. It also investigates how assignment of grammatical functions during on-line comprehension of transitive sentences in Swedish is influenced by interactions between morphosyntactic and prominence-based information.In the dissertation, grammatical functions are assumed to express role-semantic (e.g., Actor and Undergoer) and discourse-pragmatic (e.g., Topic and Focus) functions of NP arguments. Grammatical functions correlate with prominence-based information that is associated with these functions (e.g., animacy and definiteness). Because of these correlations, both prominence-based and morphosyntactic information are assumed to serve as argument interpretation cues during on-line comprehension. These cues are utilized in a probabilistic fashion. The weightings, interplay and availability of them are reflected in their distribution in language use, as shown in corpus data. The dissertation investigates these assumptions by using various methods in a triangulating fashion.The first contribution of the dissertation is an ERP (event-related brain potentials) experiment that investigates the ERP response to grammatical function reanalysis, i.e., a revision of a tentative grammatical function assignment, during on-line comprehension of transitive sentences. Grammatical function reanalysis engenders a response that correlates with the (re-)assignment of thematic roles to the NP arguments. This suggests that the comprehension of grammatical functions involves assigning role-semantic functions to the NPs.The second contribution is a corpus study that investigates the distribution of prominence-based, verb-semantic and morphosyntactic features in transitive sentences in written discourse. The study finds that overt morphosyntactic information about grammatical functions is used more frequently when the grammatical functions cannot be determined on the basis of word order or animacy. This suggests that writers are inclined to accommodate the understanding of their recipients by more often providing formal markers of grammatical functions in potentially ambiguous sentences. The study also finds that prominence features and their interactions with verb-semantic features are systematically distributed across grammatical functions and therefore can predict these functions with a high degree of confidence.The third contribution consists of three computational models of incremental grammatical function assignment. These models are based upon the distribution of argument interpretation cues in written discourse. They predict processing difficulties during grammatical function assignment in terms of on-line change in the expectation of different grammatical function assignments over the presentation of sentence constituents. The most prominent model predictions are qualitatively consistent with reading times in a self-paced reading experiment of Swedish transitive sentences. These findings indicate that grammatical function assignment draws upon statistical regularities in the distribution of morphosyntactic and prominence-based information in language use. Processing difficulties in the comprehension of Swedish transitive sentences can therefore be predicted on the basis of corpus distributions.
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| 18. |
- Hörberg, Thomas, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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The neurophysiological correlate to grammatical function reanalysis in Swedish
- 2013
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Ingår i: Language and cognitive processes (Print). - : Informa UK Limited. - 0169-0965 .- 1464-0732. ; 28:3, s. 388-416
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Language comprehension is assumed to proceed incrementally, and comprehenders commit to initial interpretations even in the absence of unambiguous information. Initial ambiguous object arguments are therefore preferably interpreted as subjects, an interpretation that needs to be revised towards an object initial interpretation once the disambiguating information is encountered. Most accounts of such grammatical function reanalyses assume that they involve phrase structure revisions, and do not differ from other syntactic reanalyses. A number of studies using measurements of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provide evidence for this view by showing that both reanalysis types engender similar neurophysiological responses (e.g., P600 effects). Others have claimed that grammatical function reanalyses rather involve revisions of the mapping of thematic roles to argument noun phrases (NPs). In line with this, it has been shown that grammatical function reanalysis during spoken language comprehension engenders a N400 effect, an effect which has been shown to correlate with general problems in the mapping of thematic roles to argument NPs in a number of languages. This study investigated the ERP correlate to grammatical function reanalysis in Swedish. Postverbal NPs that disambiguated the interpretation of object-topicalised sentences towards an object-initial reading engendered a N400 effect with a local, right-parietal distribution. This ‘‘reanalysis N400’’ effect provides further support for the view that grammatical function reanalysis is functionally distinct from syntactic reanalyses and rather involves a revision of the mapping of thematic roles to the sentence arguments. Postverbal subject pronouns in object-topicalised sentences were also found to engender an enhanced P300 wave in comparison to object pronouns, an effect which seems to depend on the overall infrequency of object-topicalised constructions. This finding provides support for the view that the ‘‘reanalysis N400’’ in some cases can be attenuated by a task-related P300 component.
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