The syntactic derivations of interrogative verbs in Amis and Kavalan

Interrogative words that denote ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘where’, and ‘how many’ in Amis and Kavalan have the same morphosyntactic distribution as verbs. The present paper argues that their use as verbs is not due to unconstrained lexical idiosyncrasies, but exhibits consistent syntactic and semantic patterns. Their grammatical properties and restrictions follow from the interaction of the following factors: the inherent semantics of interrogative words, the available interpretation of the question where they occur, the verbal structures of the voice markers, and the syntactic principles and constraints like the Head Movement Constraint or the Transparence Condition. The syntactic analysis advocated in this paper can extend to other atypical non-interrogative verbs in the two languages and makes falsifiable predictions about what interrogative words can and cannot be used as verbs

Generative grammar

Generative Grammar is the label of the most influential research program in linguistics and related fields in the second half of the 20. century. Initiated by a short book, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), it became one of the driving forces among the disciplines jointly called the cognitive sciences. The term generative grammar refers to an explicit, formal characterization of the (largely implicit) knowledge determining the formal aspect of all kinds of language behavior. The program had a strong mentalist orientation right from the beginning, documented e.g. in a fundamental critique of Skinner's Verbal behavior (1957) by Chomsky (1959), arguing that behaviorist stimulus-response-theories could in no way account for the complexities of ordinary language use. The "Generative Enterprise", as the program was called in 1982, went through a number of stages, each of which was accompanied by discussions of specific problems and consequences within the narrower domain of linguistics as well as the wider range of related fields, such as ontogenetic development, psychology of language use, or biological evolution. Four stages of the Generative Enterprise can be marked off for expository purposes

Typologies of agreement: some problems from Kayardild

In this paper I describe a number of agreement-type phenomena in the Australian language Kayardild, and assess them against existing definitions, stating both the boundaries of what is to be considered agreement, and characteristics of prototypical agreement phenomena. Though conforming, prima facie, to definitions of agreement that stress semantically based covariance in inflections on different words, the Kayardild phenomena considered here pose a number of challenges to accepted views of agreement: the rich possibilities for stacking case-like agreement inflections emanating from different syntactic levels, the fact that inflections resulting from agreement may change the word class of their host, and the semantic categories involved, in particular tense/aspect/mood, which have been claimed not to be agreement categories on nominals. Two types of inflection, in particular - 'modal case' and 'associating case' - lie somewhere between prototypical agreement and prototypical government. Like agreement, but unlike government, they are triggered by inflectional rather than lexical features of the head, and appear on more than one constituent; like government, but unlike agreement, the semantic categories on head and dependent are not isomorphic. Other types of inflection, though unusual in the categories involved, the possibility of recursion, and their effects on the host's word class, are close to prototypical in terms of how they fare in Corbett's proposed tests for canonical agreement

PP licensing in nominalizations

In this paper we compare the distribution of PPs introducing external arguments in nominalizations with PPs introducing external arguments in the verbal domain. We show that several mismatches exist between the behavior of PPs in nominalizations and PPs in the verbal domain. This leads us to suggest that while PPs in the verbal domain are licensed by functional structure alone, within the nominal domain, PPs can also be licensed via an interplay of the encyclopaedic meaning of the root involved and the properties of the preposition itself. This second mechanism kicks in in the absence of functional structure

On past participle agreement in transitive clauses in French

This paper provides a Minimalist analysis of past participle agreement in French in transitive clauses. Our account posits that the head v of vP in such structures carries an (accusativeassigning) structural case feature which may apply (with or without concomitant agreement) to case-mark a clause-mate object, the subject of a defective complement clause, or an intermediate copy of a preposed subject in spec-CP. In structures where a goal is extracted from vP (e.g. via wh-movement) v also carries an edge feature, and may also carry a specificity feature and a set of (number and gender) agreement features. We show how these assumptions account for agreement of a participle with a preposed specific clausemate object or defective-clause subject, and for the absence of agreement with an embedded object, with the complement of an impersonal verb, and with the subject of an embedded (finite or nonfinite) CP complement. We also argue that the absence of agreement marking (in expected contexts) on the participles faitmade and laissélet in infinitive structures is essentially viral in nature. Finally, we claim that obligatory participle agreement with reflexive and reciprocal objects arises because the derivation of reflexives involves A-movement and concomitant agreement

MAKING MEANING USING SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS AND VISUAL GRAMMAR ANALYSIS: COMPARISON OF SOURCE TEXT AND TARGET TEXT REFLECTED IN THE MAIN CHARACTER OF GRAPHIC NOVEL V FOR VENDETTA

This research presents a project designed to investigate a systemic way of analyzing metafunctions’ shifts between source texts and target texts using systemic functional linguistic (SFL) collaborated with visual grammar (VS; systemic functional approach for images). The study tries to examine the correlation between verbal and visual systems and how it affects the making of meaning in graphic novel. The research is descriptive qualitative with embedded case study. The data is acquired from monologue and dialogue uttered by main character of the first graphic novel book V for Vendetta. Content analysis, questionnaire and focus group discussion are conducted to obtain necessity data. The results shows there are shifts in transitivity structure, lexical items, and clauses' interdependency undergo ideational metafunction, modality system and discourse marker shifts undergo interpersonal metafunction, thematic structures, cohesion devices, physical presentation shifts undergo textual metafunction. Also shifts in target text caused by context of visual structure in representational metafunction and compositional metafunction. Those shifts demonstrate meaning changed in target text and can be identified in each metafunctions. The metafunction representational and ideational deal with interpreting content, form, context and symbolized expression in graphic novel. The shifts in transitivity structure and lexical items are caused by intertextuality and the theatricality in the content, form, context and symbolized expression of V for vendetta graphic novel. Interpersonal metafunction relates with enacting social relation. Whereas textual and compositional metafunction deal with organizing text/images, contextualizing the narrative scope and build reading order

Predication and equation

English is one language where equative sentences and non-equative sentences have a similar surface syntax (but see Heggie 1988 and Moro 1997 for a discussion of more subtle differences). In this paper we address the fact that many other languages appear to use radically different morphological means which seem to map to intuitive differences in the type of predication expressed. We take one such language, Scottish Gaelic, and show that the real difference is not between equative and non-equative sentences, but is rather dependent on whether the predicational head in the structure proposed above is eventive or not. We show that the aparently odd syntax of “equatives” in this language derives from the fact that they are constructed via a non-eventive Pred head. Since Pred heads cannot combine with non-predicative categories, such as saturated DPs, “equatives” are built up indirectly from a simple predicational structure with a semantically bleached predicate. This approach not only allows us to maintain a strict one-to-one syntax/semantics mapping for predicational syntax, but also for the syntax of DPs. The argument we develop here, then, suggests that the interface between the syntactic and semantic components is maximally economical— one could say perfect