The Spread of Change in French Negation

Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne ... pas, and then to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of ne ... pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function (Kroch 1989). Bybee and Thompson (1997) note that the type frequency of a pattern determines its degree of productivity, but high frequency forms with alternations resist analogical leveling.\u27 These two observations provide an explanation for the logistic progression observed by Kroch (1989). Following Lotka (1925) and Volterra (1926), we can extend this model to take into account the competition between constructions to express the same function. To test these models, I have compiled a corpus of French theatrical texts from the twelfth to the twentieth century. The logistic function accurately models the use of ne ... pas in these texts (R2 = 0.899), but the Lotka-Volterra model predicts the post-1600 changes in preverbal ne alone and embracing ne ... pas and ne ... point with even greater accuracy (r = 0.948 and 0.978)

Aspects of Information Structure in Kazakh : the Dynamic Syntax Approach

The Kazakh language is an under-researched Turkic language spoken in the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan and some neighbouring countries. While the grammar of this language is fairly well described, its information structural characteristics have not been examined in detail in the literature to date. This thesis aims to start filling this research gap by providing detailed descriptions of: the relation between information structure and word order; topic markers; and a pragmatically significant particle. Original, contextualised language examples are used to reject previous limited and rigid understanding of the relation between information structure and word order in Kazakh. It is shown that the information structural configurations of a Kazakh sentence are far more diverse than had been assumed. This conclusion is not only a revelation in its own right, but can also serve as a foundation for further research on the information structure of Kazakh, and other under-researched Turkic languages. This thesis also provides the first detailed descriptions of the three Kazakh topic markers. Numerous examples of their uses are presented in order to demonstrate the differences in these markers’ distribution and meaning. Several grammaticalisation processes related to these topic markers are revealed; it is proposed that these processes are currently at different stages of progress. Pragmatically significant particle ğoj is examined in detail for the first time: its distribution and meaning are illustrated with contextualised examples from various sources. It is posited that there are two syntactically diverse variants of this item which do, however, share the same existential semantics. The theoretical framework of Dynamic Syntax is employed throughout the thesis to underpin the first formal analyses of the phenomena under discussion

The Spread of Change in French Negation

Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne … pas, and then to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of ne … pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function (Kroch 1989). Bybee and Thompson (1997) note that “the type frequency of a pattern determines its degree of productivity,” but “high frequency forms with alternations resist analogical leveling.” These two observations provide an explanation for the logistic progression observed by Kroch (1989). Following Lotka (1925) and Volterra (1926), we can extend this model to take into account the competition between constructions to express the same function. To test these models, I have compiled a corpus of French theatrical texts from the twelfth to the twentieth century. The logistic function accurately models the use of ne … pas in these texts (R2 = 0.899), but the Lotka-Volterra model predicts the post-1600 changes in preverbal ne alone and embracing ne … pas and ne … point with even greater accuracy (r = 0.948 and 0.978)

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010. Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jörg Tiedemann and Martin Volk. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 98 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893

The pragmatics of the modern Greek grammatical system

This thesis is primarily concerned with the Pragmatics of the Modern Greek (MG) grammatical system. A secondary aim is the investigation of the relationship between morpho-syntax, phonology and pragmatics’ related features which form part of the grammar, in allowing a speaker’s intention to be formulated into a linguistic expression. The term grammatical mood is used in this work as the category which includes ‘all grammatical elements operating on a situation/proposition, that are not directly concerned with situating an event in the actual world, as conceived by the speaker’ (Hengeveld 2004). Moreover, the analysis undertaken follows the framework provided by Hengeveld et al. (2007) of a systematic hierarchical classification of propositional and behavioural basic illocutions. Recent research has provided an extensive analysis of the syntax and semantics of the MG verb moods; this thesis focuses on the way illocution is codified in a speaker’s message, through the morphosyntactic and phonological choices the speaker has made. Based on morphosyntactic criteria, five MG grammatical moods are formally distinguished, namely the Indicative, the Subjunctive, the Imperative, the Prohibitive and the Hortative. Furthermore, the five prosodic contours available to a speaker when forming a linguistic expression are identified, which contribute to the specification of particular uses. The main contribution of this thesis is a systematic representation of the basic illocutions of MG based on markers that have an illocutionary impact, such as the Verb Mood, the Negation, the Clitic Placement, the Intonation Patterns and any Additional Segmental Strategies used by MG speakers. In addition to Theoretical Linguistics and Pragmatics, the findings could benefit several other disciplines, including natural language acquisition, first and second language teaching as well as natural language interfaces, human-machine interaction, speech processing systems, and on-line language learning systems