Search results for "Theoretical linguistics"
showing 2 items of 12 documents
Automatic Extraction of Semantic Roles in Support Verb Constructions
2021
This paper deals with paraphrastic relations in Italian. In the following sentences: (a) Max strappò delle lacrime a Sara 'Max moved Sara to tears' and (b) Max fece piangere Sara 'Max made Sara cry', the verbs differ syntactically and semantically. Strappare 'tear/rip/wring' is transitive, fare ‘have/make’ is a causative, and piangere 'cry' is intransitive. Despite this, a translation of (a) as (b) is legitimate and therefore (a) is a paraphrase of (b). In theoretical linguistics this raises an issue concerning the relationship between strappare and fare/piangere in Italian, and that in English between move and make. In computational linguistics, can such paraphrases be obtained automatical…
Radical analyticity and radical pro-drop scenarios of diachronic change in East and mainland Southeast Asia, West Africa and Pidgins and Creoles
2020
Abstract The paucity or absence of inflectional morphology (radical analyticity) and the omission of verbal arguments with no concomitant agreement (radical pro-drop) are well-known characteristics of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages (EMSEA). Both of them have a special status in typology and linguistic theory. Radical analyticity is known under the term of ‘morphological isolation’ and has recently been described as ‘diachronically anomalous’ (McWhorter 2016), while radical pro-drop is a theoretical challenge since Rizzi (1986). The present paper offers an alternative view on these characteristics based on data from EMSEA languages, radically analytic West African languages and …