TOPIC and subordination in Whitesands

This paper examines subordination constructions in Narak (alias Whitesands, WSN, ISO: TNP), an under-described Oceanic language of southern Vanuatu spoken by roughly 5000 speakers. The primary data presented here was collected in situ by the author. In particular, I address various syntactic problems found in the Echo Subject switch reference-like system (see Lynch 1983 and Crowley 2002 for background on the system in related languages). Special attention is given to the properties of co-subordinate clauses, serial verb constructions and relative clauses. I argue that posited information structure categories, such as TOPIC, can account for some of the syntactically tricky data and that the behaviour of these subordinate clauses supports this hypothesis

Learning Sentence-internal Temporal Relations

In this paper we propose a data intensive approach for inferring sentence-internal temporal relations. Temporal inference is relevant for practical NLP applications which either extract or synthesize temporal information (e.g., summarisation, question answering). Our method bypasses the need for manual coding by exploiting the presence of markers like after", which overtly signal a temporal relation. We first show that models trained on main and subordinate clauses connected with a temporal marker achieve good performance on a pseudo-disambiguation task simulating temporal inference (during testing the temporal marker is treated as unseen and the models must select the right marker from a set of possible candidates). Secondly, we assess whether the proposed approach holds promise for the semi-automatic creation of temporal annotations. Specifically, we use a model trained on noisy and approximate data (i.e., main and subordinate clauses) to predict intra-sentential relations present in TimeBank, a corpus annotated rich temporal information. Our experiments compare and contrast several probabilistic models differing in their feature space, linguistic assumptions and data requirements. We evaluate performance against gold standard corpora and also against human subjects

The development of subordinate clauses in German and Swedish as L2s: a theoretical and methodological comparison

In this article, we aim to contribute to the debate about the use of subordination as a measure of language proficiency. We compare two theories of SLA—specifically, processability theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998) and dynamic systems theory (de Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2007)—and, more particularly, their addressing of the development of subordinate clauses. Although DST uses measures from the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) research tradition (see Housen & Kuiken, 2009), PT uses the emergence criterion to describe language development. We will focus on the development of subordinate clauses and compare how subordination as such is acquired and how the processing procedures related to a specific subordinate clause word order is acquired in the interlanguage (IL) of second language German and Swedish learners. The learners’ language use shows that the use of subordination (as measured by a subordination ratio) fluctuates extensively. From the beginning of data collection, all learners use subordinate clauses, but their use of subordinate clauses does not increase linearly over time, which is expected by DST. When focusing on processability and the emergence of subordinate clause word order, however, a clear linear developmental sequence can be observed, revealing a clear difference between the nonacquisition and the acquisition of the subordinate clause word order rules. Our learner data additionally reveal a different behavior regarding lexical and auxiliary or modal verbs

The Hausa perfective tense-aspect used in wh-/focus constructions and historical narratives: a unified account

In this paper I revisit and elaborate some of the ideas I outlined in the earlier paper, concentrating on the semantic characteristics of the paired Perfective tense-aspects in a major (universal) discourse context—spontaneously-produced past-time narrative. The main focus is on the role of the paradigm known traditionally (and unfortunately) as the “Relative Perfective”, a set which is in partial complementary distribution with the “General/Neutral Perfective”. This specially inflected tense-aspect form is the one exploited at discourse-level to assert prominent events on the time-axis in foregrounded narrative sequences, but it is also required in classic clause-level wh-constructions, i.e., wh-interrogatives, declarative focus constructions, and relative clauses, operations which often share structural properties across languages. The central claim is that the fronted focus/wh- constructions and pivotal foregrounded portions of past-time narratives utilize the same specialized Perfective tense-aspect morphology because they achieve the same discourse-pragmatic goals—they all supply the most communicatively PROMINENT and focal NEW information

A privative derivational source for standard negation in Lokono (Arawakan)

Abstract It has recently been argued that Arawakan languages of South America provide evidence for a novel historical source for standard negation, a privative derivational affix. This hypothesis posits that the prefixal standard negation found in some languages of the family developed from a privative prefix, ma-, present in Proto-Arawakan, that originally derived privative stative verbs from nouns. According to this account, the function of this prefix extended, in many languages of the family, to negating nominalized verbs in subordinate clauses, and then, via insubordination, to standard main clause negation, in a smaller subset of languages. The purpose of this paper is to substantiate this hypothetical trajectory in detail in a particular Arawakan language: Lokono, a highly endangered language of the Guianas. On the basis of modern linguistic fieldwork and colonial-era language materials, we show that 18th-century Lokono exhibited a standard negation construction based on the privative, and that this construction exhibits clear signs of its subordinate clause origin. We show that Lokono also exhibits the full range of functions for the privative ma- that are predicted to be historical precursors to the standard negation function, substantiating the historical trajectory from privative derivation to standard negation. We conclude by observing that the prefixal standard negation strategy has lost ground since the 18th century to a standard negation particle that originally expressed constituent negation, possibly due to contact with colonial languages that employ similar strategies

Anchoring a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for Discourse

We here explore a ``fully'' lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for discourse that takes the basic elements of a (monologic) discourse to be not simply clauses, but larger structures that are anchored on variously realized discourse cues. This link with intra-sentential grammar suggests an account for different patterns of discourse cues, while the different structures and operations suggest three separate sources for elements of discourse meaning: (1) a compositional semantics tied to the basic trees and operations; (2) a presuppositional semantics carried by cue phrases that freely adjoin to trees; and (3) general inference, that draws additional, defeasible conclusions that flesh out what is conveyed compositionally.Comment: 7 pages, uses aclcol.st

Where has the new information gone? : the chinese case

In this paper I would like to show that the principles which have been proposed so far to account for the relationship between the informational level and the syntactic level in a Chinese utterance are unable to predict some interesting and regular facts of that language. To my mind, the form and the position of the question operator in an interrogative utterance provide two distributional tests which univocally indicate where the new information lies. Hence, the pairing of affirmative and interrogative sentences might be a better approach to locate where the new information lies in a Chinese utterance