Editorial Board
Publication date: April 2019Source: Lingua, Volume 222Author(s): (Source: Lingua)
Source: Lingua - April 8, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Chunks are components: A dependency grammar approach to the syntactic structure of Mandarin
This article employs chunking data collected from informants to examine and reach conclusions about the syntactic structure of Mandarin sentences. Five prominent constructions are explored: 1) pivotal sentences, 2) serial verb constructions (or co-verbs), 3) V-de constructions, 4) bǎ constructions, and 5) bèi constructions. The account is couched in a dependency grammar (DG) approach to syntax. A relatively new unit of syntax, the component, plays a central role in the analysis. The message is in part that the component is a more suitable unit of syntax for predicting how informants choose to chunk sentences than the phr...
Source: Lingua - April 6, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Word order as an interface between syntax and pragmatics: The case of identifying topics in mixed case-marking patterns in Mandarin Chinese
Publication date: Available online 4 April 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Xiujin Yu, Hui ZhangAbstractThe typological classification of Mandarin Chinese as an isolating language lacking inflection brings about a theoretical consideration that word order in Mandarin serves as an interface between syntax and pragmatics. This paper provides from typological perspective a unified framework to examine the role that word order in Mandarin plays in marking case as well as topics. The study finds that Mandarin exhibits a mixed case-marking pattern through word order, namely that nominative-accusative pattern coexists with ergative-a...
Source: Lingua - April 5, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
When prosody meets syntax: The processing of the syntax-prosody interface in children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder
Publication date: Available online 3 April 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Martina Caccia, Maria Luisa LorussoAbstractProsody and syntax are assumed to interact strictly, both in terms of processing and of brain activation. According to some authors, the interaction between prosody and other components of language such as syntax and pragmatics would be problematic for children with DLD and/or dyslexia, whereas prosody itself would not. Sixteen children with typical development (TD), 16 children with developmental dyslexia (DD) and 16 with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) aged 10–13 took part in the experiment. Children...
Source: Lingua - April 4, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Psychological verbs as a vulnerable syntactic domain: A comparative study of Latin and Italian
Publication date: Available online 29 March 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Giuliana Giusti, Rossella IovinoAbstractSo-called psychological verbs such as Italian temere ‘fear’, preoccupare ‘worry’, and piacere ‘like’ denote a particular state that involves an Experiencer and a second role taker that causes, initiates or is related to the psychological state. They present an extremely varied argument structure across languages that arranges these two roles in apparently inverted hierarchies and assigns them different grammatical functions (subject, direct, indirect and prepositional objects). This paper aims to pro...
Source: Lingua - March 30, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Optional ergative marking in Tujia
This article investigates optional ergative marking in Tujia, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in south-central China. It is shown that the Agent in Tujia is optionally marked, and that the use of the optional ergative marker ko35 is multifunctional. It is used to disambiguate the semantic role of Agent, to emphasize agency, and to focalize an Actor in a discourse context. Several factors, including word order, telicity, perfectivity, verbal semantics, information structure and discourse-pragmatics, play a role in determining the use or non-use of the ergative marker. Secondly, the historical source of the optio...
Source: Lingua - March 28, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Shifting responsibilities: Student e-mail excuses and how faculty perceive them
This study examines e-mail excuses sent by undergraduate university students to professors. First an initial corpus of 200 messages is analyzed according to the type of infraction, the nature of the excuse and the different strategies used. Secondly, a small group of ten professors was asked to evaluate a random sample of 50 messages on an effectiveness scale of 1–5 and explain their ratings. The metadiscursive comments (n = 500) were coded and quantified in order to determine a ranking of the factors influencing the professors’ reactions. Overall, the body of messages received an average numerical rating of ...
Source: Lingua - March 28, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The morphosyntax of numerals ʥi33/ʥĩ35 ‘one’ in Shuhi and implications for the semantics of numerals
We present empirical data from this language to support the Fregean view that numerals are number-referring terms (deficient numerals), while ʥi33 ‘one’ in Shuhi and possibly liǎ ‘two-Cl’ and sā ‘three-Cl’ in Mandarin Chinese are full-fledged numerals that should be best treated as denoting properties of cardinality. (Source: Lingua)
Source: Lingua - March 21, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Editorial Board
Publication date: April 2019Source: Lingua, Volume 221Author(s): (Source: Lingua)
Source: Lingua - March 16, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Can dependency distance and direction be used to differentiate translational language from native language?
In this study, in the framework of dependency grammar, we use mean dependency distances (MDD) and dependency direction for analyzing translated texts and native texts in an attempt to differentiate translational language from native language in a quantitative way, while displaying holistic features. We built a dependency-annotated treebank consisting of translated English texts, native English texts and native Chinese texts. To eliminate the influence of sentence length and text size on the MDD and dependency direction, we calculated the MDD of each sentence length, and made sure each text was similar in size. We found tha...
Source: Lingua - March 15, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Translanguaging as trans-identity: The case of ethnic minority students in Vietnam
This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ translanguaging beliefs and practices, and their identity construction through translanguaging. It specifically explores how the students’ translanguaging between their ethnic language (L1), Vietnamese (L2) and other languages is related to their language shift and identity transformation as they participate in the mainstream society where Vietnamese is dominant. Data for the study were obtained from multiple semi-structured interviews with a group of college-age students and their parents/family members. Findings suggest that the students revealed or performed...
Source: Lingua - March 9, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Methodological confusions in universal grammar: Reply to Kim
Publication date: Available online 8 March 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Francis Y. LinAbstractKim (2018) argues that the method adopted in universal grammar (UG) is the same as that employed in the empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology, and that my rejection of UG in Lin (2017a) amounts to a rejection of these sciences. In this reply I show that Kim has misunderstood the main point of my original paper, which is that UG is crucially different from typical scientific theories in that it does not consider causal factors. I further show that once this misunderstanding is cleared his objections can be disso...
Source: Lingua - March 8, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Distance and word order between lexical heads and noun dependents in Chinese–English code-switching
Publication date: Available online 8 March 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Lin WangAbstractThis paper investigates the effects of code-switching on the dependency distance and the word order of the dependencies with lexical heads and noun dependents, using data from a Chinese–English code-mixed treebank. It is found that (1) except the object relation, mixed dependencies with English lexical heads and Chinese noun dependents present shorter dependency distances than monolingual ones; (2) mixed dependencies with Chinese lexical heads and English noun dependents present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones; (3) w...
Source: Lingua - March 8, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
A syntactic analysis of Persian deverbal nominals: An exo-skeletal approach
Publication date: Available online 7 March 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Hoda Siavashi, Abbas Ali Ahangar, Ali AlizadehAbstractNominalized words are complex nominals, which have their own particular derivational structure. These nominals can be derived from different parts of speech. Correspondingly, a deverbal nominal is a nominal that is derived from a verb; although, this is a critical issue in syntactic analysis, few researchers have addressed Persian deverbal nominals with no attention paid to their underlying syntactic structures. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to provide a descriptive syntactic analysis o...
Source: Lingua - March 7, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
An acceptability judgment study of 1+1 NN compounds in Chinese
In this study, we gathered acceptability scores from 17 Chinese native speakers on 1000 randomly constructed 1+1 NNs. It is found that the mean acceptability score is only 22.6%, even lower than that of Qin and Duanmu (2017). In addition, while Qin and Duanmu (2017) found ambiguity, naturalness, and frequency to have significant effects on acceptability scores, the present study did not find ambiguity to be relevant. We also found that 1+1 NNs consisting of two elastic nouns are significantly less acceptable than those consisting of one or two non-elastic nouns, although the effect size is rather small. Possible reasons fo...
Source: Lingua - March 6, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
