Search results for "relative clause"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Wh-Relative Clauses and Left Periphery from Latin to some Romance Languages
2011
The paper is organized as follows: after an introduction of the issue we will examine, in the first section we shall discuss the theory of the antisymmetry of syntax as specifically concerns relative clauses, evidencing also problems linked to the application of this theory to the syntax of relative clauses in Latin and in other Indo-European languages; the second section will present our first attempt at some analysis of the left periphery of the Proto-Indo-European sentence; in the third section we shall discuss the categorial status of the relative pronoun in Latin and we shall produce a model of the left periphery of the Latin subordinate clause, supplying examples taken from literary a…
The role of animacy in the real time comprehension of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from auditory event-related brain potentials.
2007
Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which modulated the assignment of actor and undergoer roles to the arguments), both arguments were either animate or inanimate. This allowed us to examine the interplay of animacy with thematic interpretation. In Experiment 1, we observed no effect of animacy at NP1, but N400 effects for inanimate actor arguments in second position. This result mirrors previous findings in German, thus suggesting that an initial undergoer univer…
Old French Parataxis: syntactic variant or stylistic variation?
2012
The existence of paratactic constructions in Old French is a well-known fact, as in the following: Co sent Rollanto la veue ad perdue‘Roland feels (that) he has lost his sight’ (Chanson de Roland2297). These structures alternate with structures containing que: Co sent Rollant que s’espee li tolt‘Roland feels that his sword has been taken from him’ (Chanson de Roland2284). Although traditional philologists note that different types of asyndetic subordinate clauses exist, they do not provide an explanation of how and why such structures alternate with those introduced by que. Moreover, a detailed analysis reveals that the distribution of paratactic constructions does not seem to be homogeneou…
Semantic Complexity in Natural Language
2015
This chapter presents the technical framework that the authors used to define fragments of natural languages and formulate questions as to their semantic complexity. It examines the study of the classical syllogistic and its extensions. It analyzes the semantic complexity of various salient fragments of English. It highlights that the language of argument, featuring transitive verbs, is in an objective sense inferentially no more complex than the language of classical syllogisms exemplified by argument, indeed, the analogous extension featuring ditransitive verbs involves only a modest increase in complexity. On the other hand, the language of argument, which adds relative clauses to the cl…
La costruzione 'con + DP + pseudorelativa': proposta per una duplice interpretazione
2015
This chapter deals with the so-called "absolute construction", an adverbial prepositional phrase headed by the preposition 'con' ('with') followed by a noun and a pseudo-relative clause (e.g. "Con Maria che piange, non possiamo uscire"). The main aim of the chapter is to show that Pseudo-relative clauses can have three different structures, and that two different types are used in the absolute construction, depending on the degree of syntactic integration of the prepositional phrase in the main clause. Fronted 'con'-clauses select a pseudo-relative clause with clausal status (CP), while sentence-final 'con'-clauses, which are more integrated, select a pseudo-relative clause with nominal sta…
Pseudo-relatives and their left-periphery
2016
In this article I propose a new analysis of Pseudo-Relative clauses ('PRs') within the Cartographic model (Rizzi 1997 a.o.). Heretofore, the apparently contradictory behaviour of PRs in the syntactic tests used to determine their structure has been very problematic. Based on new data from Italian, I show that PRs are Small Clauses with a ForceP projection. Moreover, I explain the inconsistent results of the syntactic tests by claiming that PRs can be embedded in different syntactic environments. More specifically, they can be inserted as 'bare' Small Clauses into the matrix clause or be part of a bigger structure: i.e., a Complex-DP, a locative adjunction or a 'Larsonian' structure.