The history of Beng studies

3.1. Students of the Beng language and society The first publications to report on Beng language and people were motivated by the urge to systematize the languages and peoples of West Africa. Like many other varieties of Côte d’Ivoire, the Beng and the neighboring South Mande Gbin languages were first described by the French colonial administrative officer Maurice Delafosse (1904). His account of the Beng language included just a list of the first ten numerals. Twenty years later, another sc..

Number and agreement

9.1. Number expression within a noun phrase Generally, the number of a noun phrase is not manifested in the head noun. The single exception is the suppletive pair: (76) lɔ́kló ‘child’ – lɔ́mléŋ̀ ‘children’ It is clear however that historically even this pair contains an invariable noun and a number-marked adjective kló (singular) / plé (plural) ‘little’. The plural form also incorporates two copies of ŋ̀, probably a reduced version of the plural marker nṵ̀ŋ̀, so the plural form lɔ́mléŋ̀ ..

Automatic construction of lexical typological Questionnaires

Questionnaires constitute a crucial tool in linguistic typology and language description. By nature, a Questionnaire is both an instrument and a result of typological work: its purpose is to help the study of a particular phenomenon cross-linguistically or in a particular language, but the creation of a Questionnaire is in turn based on the analysis of cross-linguistic data. We attempt to alleviate linguists’ work by constructing lexical Questionnaires automatically prior to any manual analysis. A convenient Questionnaire format for revealing fine-grained semantic distinctions includes pairings of words with diagnostic contexts that trigger different lexicalizations across languages. Our method to construct this type of a Questionnaire relies on distributional vector representations of words and phrases which serve as input to a clustering algorithm. As an output, our system produces a compact prototype Questionnaire for crosslinguistic exploration of contextual equivalents of lexical items, with groups of three homogeneous contexts illustrating each usage. We provide examples of automatically generated Questionnaires based on 100 frequent adjectives of Russian, including veselyj ‘funny’, ploxoj ‘bad’, dobryj ‘kind’, bystryj ‘quick’, ogromnyj ‘huge’, krasnyj ‘red’, byvšij ‘former’ etc. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the Questionnaires confirms the viability of our method.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

when the whole is less than the sum of its parts how composition affects pmi values in distributional semantic vectors

Distributional semantic models, deriving vector-based word representations from patterns of word usage in corpora, have many useful applications (Turney and Pantel 2010 ). Recently, there has been interest in compositional distributional models, which derive vectors for phrases from representations of their constituent words (Mitchell and Lapata 2010 ). Often, the values of distributional vectors are pointwise mutual information (PMI) scores obtained from raw co-occurrence counts. In this article we study the relation between the PMI dimensions of a phrase vector and its components in order to gain insights into which operations an adequate composition model should perform. We show mathematically that the difference between the PMI dimension of a phrase vector and the sum of PMIs in the corresponding dimensions of the phrase's parts is an independently interpretable value, namely, a quantification of the impact of the context associated with the relevant dimension on the phrase's internal cohesion, as also measured by PMI. We then explore this quantity empirically, through an analysis of adjective–noun composition

References

Bearth T., 1979, Observations préliminaires sur la langue ngen ou gan, Ms. Bhaskararao P., Subbarao K. V. (eds.), 2004, Non-nominative subjects. 2 vols. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Carlson G.,1977, Reference to kinds in English, PhD thesis, University of Massachusets Amherst. Comrie B., 2004, “Some Argument-structure properties of ‘give’ in the languages of Europe and Northern and Central Asia”, in LENCA-2. The Typology of Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations, Kazan, pp..

Beng phonology

4.1. Phonological inventory Beng has a typical triangular vocalic system of seven oral and five nasal vowels. Table 2.1. Vocalic phonemes oral   nasal front back front back high i u high ḭ ṵ mid upper-mid e o mid ɛ̰ ɔ̰ lower-mid ɛ ɔ low a̰ low a Minimal pairs. Height: yé ‘mouth’ – yí ‘water’, béŋ́ ‘horn’ – bɛ́ŋ́ ‘black monkey’, bɛ̄ŋ̄ ‘fruit’ – bāŋ̄ ‘rope’, bā ‘earth’ – bɔ̄ ‘to leave’ – bō ‘to remove’, fō ‘to multiply’ – fū ‘to take by surprise’, mḭ̄ ‘to drink’ – mɛ̰̄ ‘to beat’ – m..

Clause structure

12.1. Tense, Aspect, Modality, Polarity 12.1.1. Polarity The clause-final particle ɛ́ is the default negation marker in Beng. The only sentence type that doesn’t use it is the identity statement, marked by clause-final particle ɛ̀ in the affirmative polarity and by nḭ́ in the negative polarity. In a sequence of two or more negative particles ɛ́, which happens when both a matrix clause and its embedded clause are negative, the last one is replaced by an allomorph nḭ̈ (103c). Apart from the n..

Locative phrases

10.1. Distribution A locative phrase consists of either a locative noun, which may or may not have syntactic dependents on the left, or a noun phrase with a locative postposition. On top of that, locative phrases also usually have a deictic marker on the right edge, see 10.3. Locative phrases occur in a variety of contexts: as postverbal modifiers, as predicates in clauses of adverbial type (see 12.4), as prenominal modifiers, or referentially in all NP positions. 10.2. Semantics Locative phr..

Information structure

This section gives a preliminary overview of the ways to express information structure in Beng. I do not attempt to undertake a proper semantic analysis of the constructions in question, only providing their rough equivalents in English. Usually, a constituent F marked for its information structure status is located before the rest of the sentence S. If F is a verb phrase, which has to take the form of nominalization when topicalized or focalized, compare (266), F is replaced in the main clau..

Noun phrase structure

The order of constituents in the (maximal) noun phrase structure is as follows: possessor + nominal modifiers + head noun and appositive modifiers + adjectives + determiners + relative clause. 8.1. Possessors and nominal modifiers Possessor is expressed with a noun phrase and / or a personal pronoun. There is no special possession or alienability marking, so possessor NPs are distinguished from e.g. direct object NPs only in syntactic position. Nominal modifiers can: refer to matter, as in p..