Search results for "Word order"
showing 8 items of 28 documents
Adnominal adjectives in Old English
2010
Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Maruši…
Electrophysiology Reveals the Neural Dynamics of Naturalistic Auditory Language Processing: Event-Related Potentials Reflect Continuous Model Updates.
2016
The recent trend away from ANOVA-based analyses places experimental investigations into the neurobiology of cognition in more naturalistic and ecologically valid designs within reach. Using mixed-effects models for epoch-based regression, we demonstrate the feasibility of examining event-related potentials (ERPs), and in particular the N400, to study the neural dynamics of human auditory language processing in a naturalistic setting. Despite the large variability between trials during naturalistic stimulation, we replicated previous findings from the literature: the effects of frequency, animacy, word order and find previously unexplored interaction effects. This suggests a new perspective …
Ethiopia as a Linguistic Area
2006
The Ethiopian linguistic area is one of the most famous linguistic areas in the world. It is characterized by phonological, grammatical, and lexical features. After summarizing the research done since 1945, this article focuses on the contradictory views concerning the validity of most of the features. For phonological and grammatical features, Ferguson (1976), which is still the most important study, is the starting point of discussion. Lexical features are dealt with only by Hayward (1991, 2000) and there has been therefore little controversy.
Southeast Asia as a Linguistic Area
2006
The languages belonging to the families of Mon-Khmer, Tai, Sinitic, Hmong-Mien, and Chamic (Malayo-Polynesian) spoken in mainland Southeast Asia share a considerable number of properties due to contact-induced convergence. General characteristics of the languages in this area are the lack of obligatory grammatical categories and the central role of pragmatics (indeterminateness), syllabic morphology, and relatively flexible correlations between word class and syntactic positions (versatility). The following properties will be described in some more detail: word order, numeral classifiers, cooccurrence patterns of the verb with coverbs, tense-aspect-modality markers and directional verbs, an…
Two routes to actorhood: Lexicalized potency to act and identification of the actor role
2015
The inference of causality is a crucial cognitive ability and language processing is no exception: recent research suggests that, across different languages, the human language comprehension system attempts to identify the primary causer of the state of affairs described (the “actor”) quickly and unambiguously (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2009). This identification can take place verb-independently based on certain prominence cues (e.g., case, word order, animacy). Here, we present two experiments demonstrating that actor potential is also encoded at the level of individual nouns (a king is a better actor than a beggar). Experiment 1 collected ratings for 180 German nouns on 12 …
Defectivitat morfològica i variació sintàctica
2021
This paper discusses a case of parametric variation between Catalan and Spanish that concerns the fronting possibilities within the CP domain (the so-called ÇLeft PeripheryÈ). In particular, attention is paid to Catalan’s weak left peripheral activity, which prevents it from generating sentences that involve a Çmild focalizationÈ pattern very common in Spanish (e.g., «Mucha tontería dice el Gobierno» vs. *«Molta ximpleria diuel Govern»), first noted by Torrego (1980) and further explored by Uriagereka (1988). Interestingly, the same behavior is observed in the v*P domain, which accounts for the fact that VSO sentences (generated through movement of the subject to a specifier position, as Or…
Word Order Typology and the Minimalist Program: What Do Parameters Belong To?
2019
One of the problems related with the word order and word order typology is connected with derivation obtaining in the narrow syntax and the conditions responsible for the Full Interpretation requirement at LF as well as at PF. If it is assumed that linearization as defined in Kayne (1994) is the reflexion of the asymmetric character of syntax at PF, then it is worth analysing which properties of the syntactic derivation within the narrow syntax are reflected at PF and which configurations seen on the surface are the results of PF conditions. In other words it would be interesting to determine the boundary between the factors responsible for the configuration of syntactic constituents obtain…
Comparing the Effect of Product-Based Metrics on the Translation Process
2021
Characteristics of the translation product are often used in translation process research as predictors for cognitive load, and by extension translation difficulty. In the last decade, user-activity information such as eye-tracking data has been increasingly employed as an experimental tool for that purpose. In this paper, we take a similar approach. We look for significant effects that different predictors may have on three different eye-tracking measures: First Fixation Duration (duration of first fixation on a token), Eye-Key Span (duration between first fixation on a token and the first keystroke contributing to its translation), and Total Reading Time on source tokens (sum of fixations…