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This study investigates how prepositional phrases within English noun phrases (e.g., the studentof physicsfrom Italy) are represented and processed by advanced Chinese‐speaking learners of English (henceforth L2ers). Using grammaticality judgment tasks and self‐paced reading tasks, we aim to examine the offline performance and the real‐time processing of English NP‐internal PPs in relation to the head nouns. To this end, two groups of participants were instructed to provide judgments of testing materials and to respond on‐line to experimental stimuli containing the proform one. Results indicate that highly proficient L2ers processed English NP‐internal PPs utterly differently from English controls in that they demonstrated almost no sensitivity to the existence of PPs as complements following one, mostly without consciously distinguishing them from PP adjuncts. To account for L2ers' response patterns, we propose a partial representation hypothesis (PRH), claiming that L2ers tend to disregard intermediate categories containing PP‐complements in English NPs, thus only partially representing syntactic constituents of the target language. As a structural explanation, PRH awaits further corroboration and/or falsification from more empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the diachronic behaviour of the non-finite verbal (participial, gerundial) absolute construction (AC) in (pre)classical and modern Spanish translations from Latin, written between the 15th and the 18th centuries. It focuses on the convergence of and divergence between the ACs of the Spanish target texts and those of the Latin source texts, drawing on three types of translations: (i) Latin absolute constructions translated as Spanish absolutes (translated ACs), (ii) Latin absolute constructions translated as Spanish constructions other than absolutes (non-translated ACs) and (iii) Spanish absolute constructions that do not stem from Latin absolutes (ex-novo ACs). The article traces a diachronic evolution of the AC in terms of formal and functional equivalence, or creativity, and links the results to the cultural-historical context. The analysis shows that the nearly extinct, (pre)classical participial AC developed from a 'marked' Latin calque situated at the far end of the Communicative Distance pole to a less formal, gerundial AC, moving in the direction of Communicative Immediacy. This process of syntactic elaboration concurred with the AC's increased frequency and was caused by language-internal mechanisms such as structural priming and form/function overlap with gerundial free adjuncts (FAs). From the 15th century onwards, a growing tendency towards unbounded construals enabled the gerundial AC to become fully entrenched in early modern Spanish, which guaranteed the survival of this construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politeness theory in the light of Austin & Searle's speech act theory as reflected in CMC between students and their lecturers or supervisors. Thus politeness aspects were analyzed as enacted in the five categories such as: Assertives, commisives, directives, expressives, and declaratives. The paper also examined politeness in other language aspects that are usually present in any form of communication, such as: Address phrases, meeting requests, request for reply, and adjunct phrases. The objective of this article was to shed light on the politeness strategies employed by the lecturers and students in their e-communication through Whatsapp and SMS (short messages or text messages) platforms. Fifty communications were downloaded from the lecturers' phones through their permission and the students', which were used as data for this study. Five lecturers and seven postgraduate students made the population of this study. The findings indicated that students seem to be comfortable using this mode of communication, and it is important to understand how students and lecturers make choices and how these choices affect the perception of the cultural appropriateness of CMCs. The results also revealed that elements of politeness greatly decrease in the follow-up messages, that is, messages that require some kind of response. From the study, lecturers adhered to formal language use as compared to the students in their communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on the reading of appositive relative clauses (ARCs) have found that ARCs seem to exhibit less influence in later parsing and decision-making than similar constructions (Dillon et al., 2014; Dillon et al., 2017), a pattern we call discounting. Existing accounts often link discounting to the status of ARCs as independent segments in systems of pragmatic representation. This would predict discounting for other constructions as well. In this study, we test that prediction by investigating the reading of direct discourse speech reports and causal adjuncts in English. Diagnostics supplied by the theoretical literature show that these constructions contribute the same independent segments as ARCs in two different systems of pragmatic organization: direct discourse reports contribute an independent speech act, and causal adjuncts contribute their own discourse units. Nevertheless, in a series of five experiments, we find no evidence of ARClike discounting for either. We conclude that discounting should not be linked to either of these pragmatic representations, and discuss the outlook for other approaches to the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a quantitative study of adjuncts in the Airbus corpus carried out within the theoretical framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). We describe the positional behaviour of these peripheral constituents in the Layered Structure of the Clause and postulate scales of positional and peripheral preferences, based on frequency distribution, in the Airbus controlled natural language (CNL). The results obtained were compared with a previous study on adjunct preferences and positions in Natural English to check for changes in these scales due to the nature of the texts written in this CNL. We also aim to contribute to the development of the RRG analysis of adverbials by offering a detailed semantic typology and a description of the syntax of these peripheral constituents grounded in empirical and quantitatively based data that will serve as a basis for the parsing of adverbials in the computational processing of CNLs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adjunct clauses are traditionally assumed to be strong islands for extraction across languages. However, the universal island status of adjunct clauses has been challenged by studies showing that extraction is possible from finite adjunct clauses in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. The possibility of extraction in these languages appears to be affected by various factors, including the type of adjunct clause, the type of extraction dependency, and the presence of contextual facilitation. These findings call for a re-evaluation of the islandhood of adjunct clauses in English. We conducted an acceptability judgment study on relativization from three types of finite adjunct clauses in English (if-, when-, and because-clauses) in the presence of supporting context. We found that the three clause types showed rather non-uniform acceptability patterns: extraction from when- and because-clauses both yielded significantly lower ratings than extraction from if-clauses, which patterned with non-island that-clauses. Our results suggest that at least for relativization, if- and when-adjuncts are not invariably strong islands in English, and that extra-grammatical factors may be key in understanding island structures traditionally assumed to be purely syntactic in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that island effects may vary as a function of dependency type, potentially challenging accounts that treat island effects as reflecting uniform constraints on all filler-gap dependency formation. Some authors argue that cross-dependency variation is more readily accounted for by discourse-functional constraints that take into account the discourse status of both the filler and the constituent containing the gap. We ran a judgment study that tested the acceptability of wh-extraction and relativization from nominal subjects, embedded questions (EQs), conditional adjuncts, and existential relative clauses (RCs) in Norwegian. The study had two goals: (i) to systematically investigate cross-dependency variation from various constituent types and (ii) to evaluate the results against the predictions of the Focus Background Conflict constraint (FBCC). Overall we find some evidence for cross-dependency differences across extraction environments. Most notably wh-extraction from EQs and conditional adjuncts yields small but statistically significant island effects, but relativization does not. The differential island effects are potentially consistent with the predictions of the FBCC, but we discuss challenges the FBCC faces in explaining finer-grained judgment patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will argue that many of the theoretical approaches to extraction from participle adjunct islands suffer from the fact that the focus of investigation lies on perceived grammaticality differences in interrogative structures. Following approaches which make an explicit connection between extraction asymmetries and properties of the underlying proposition, I will argue that there is good evidence for the existence of similar differences in declarative adjunct constructions which can explain most of the grammaticality patterns observed for interrogatives. A crucial distinction to the majority of previous theories is the focus on acceptability rather than grammaticality, and the assumption that acceptability in declaratives is determined by a variety of semantic and syntactic complexity factors which do not influence how strongly extraction degrades the structure. This line of argumentation is more compatible with approaches to island phenomena that explain the low acceptability of some extractions by independent effects such as processing complexity and discourse function instead of syntactic principles blocking the extraction. I will also discuss a partially weighted, multifactorial model for the acceptability of declarative and interrogative participle adjunct constructions, which explains the judgment patterns in the literature without the need for additional, complex licensing conditions for extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study aims to measure the longitudinal impact of a 60-hour adjunct instruction course, involving L2 content-based teaching with a systematic focus on form, on students' grammatical and lexical knowledge and on their receptive skills (i.e. reading and listening) in a foreign language higher education context. The participants were 52 university students enrolled in two different strands of the same Dentistry degree: an English-Medium Instruction (EMI) group, with no explicit L2 teaching/learning objectives, (n = 25) and an L1 group (n = 27) (Catalan/Spanish). In the L1 group, students had to read articles and teachers' powerpoint presentations in the L2. Quantitative data collected by means of a battery of tests over 16 weeks indicate that adjunct instruction leads to statistically significant improvement in overall L2 language scores for all students alike. Nonetheless, results show that adjunct instruction tends to bring larger L2 grammatical improvement and significantly higher gains in receptive skills to Dentistry students who receive minimal English Foreign Language exposure (i.e. the L1 strand) than to those with massive exposure to English (i.e. the EMI strand). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the English impersonal appearance construction (it seems/appears) and its relationship with the propositions over which it scopes. Attention focuses on four aspects: the presence/absence of explicit personalization via circumstantial element to me; the use of conjunctive, comparative or elided binder; the modal/temporal deicticity of the framed proposition; and the instantiation of these features across written and spoken modes of communication. These features are considered on account of prior studies assigning semantic correlates to their occurrence on the basis of qualitative analysis. The study applies log-linear analysis, a statistical technique that allows exploration of associations between two or more categorical variables, to test the degree of association between the four aspects mentioned. Three significant effects are included in the final model: a three-way interaction between mode of communication, binder choice and personalization, and two two-way associations between personalization and framed clause deicticity, and between binder choice and framed clause deicticity. The identified associations are discussed in the light of relevant literature and qualitative findings. The paper ends with concluding remarks and critical reflections on the use of log-linear analysis for the study of linguistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In English there are a variety of causal adjunct phrases such as because of, as a result of, on account of and in spite of. It was reported recently that a new structure because X is thriving in colloquial registers including conversations and blogs. The complement X is not only restricted to nominals but also includes other lexical categories such as adjectives, adverbs and even verbs. This article delves into the history of this usage and its reasoning, and conducts a survey on other causal adjuncts to determine whether the same kind of innovation is observed with other adjunct phrases. The survey shows that the new usage started from NP complements and has been extended to include complements of other lexical categories, and that the new usage attested in because X is also observed with in case X. The truncation of the final preposition is verified with all the adjunct phrases in the survey, but the category of the complement is basically restricted to nominals in the case of other phrases. We will look into the factors segregating the two groups of adjuncts, namely because/in case X, and other causal adjuncts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of depictive secondary predicates within the Turkish language, particularly surrounding the small clause phenomenon. These constructions function as adjuncts in the matrix clause. However, it may be difficult to distinguish between depictives and adverbial adjuncts in Turkish because of their morphosyntactic shape. Primarily, I will address the distinction between depictives and adverbial adjuncts based on studies founded by Schultze-Berndt & Himmelmann (2004) and Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt (2006) based on a description of the depictive secondary predicates in Turkish. Furthermore, I will specifically focus on the adjectivals as a depictive secondary predicate. These establish a predicative relationship with their controllers, which are the subject or object of the main clause. In this context, I will also analyze this predicative relationship at a semantical, syntactical and morphosyntactical level. I will then analyze the difficulties faced when referring to these structures as constituents in an analysis of the complex sentence as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present contribution is to define how can verb particle constructions in both satellite-framed languages like Germanic, Ancient Greek or Latin and verb-framed languages like Romance (Talmy, 2000) be analyzed in a unified semantic model, which is compatible with the framework of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG: Steedman, 2000; Baldridge and Hoyt, 2015). It is argued that the syntactic-semantic type postulated for local adjuncts as well as the type of semantic modification rule applied to compose such structures can predict not only the combinatorial distribution of motion verbs in Germanic, as opposed to Romance, but also the behaviour of cross-categorial domains like indirect/direct causation, subordination and secondary predication among several lexical classes. Finally, it is explained how it is possible for Romance to assume the syntactic expression of satellite structures, even if this language family does not belong to the satellite-framed typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports a set of experimental studies that support the following set of conclusions: (i) quantifier raising is sensitive to adjunct islands, (ii) wh movement is sensitive to adjunct islands, but (iii) quantifier raising and wh movement are not sensitive to adjunct islands in the same way. The experiments examined quantifier raising and wh‐argument extraction from three types of nontensed adjuncts: bare participial gerunds, after prepositional gerunds, and during PPs. The results provide an interesting puzzle. On the one hand, quantifier raising and wh movement shared a weak sensitivity to adjunct islands. On the other hand, the two operations behaved differently when it came to extraction from bare participial gerunds. I argue that this asymmetry results from the different interface constraints that quantifier raising and wh movement are subject to: Scope Economy and the Single‐Event‐Grouping Condition, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses two types of structure-building operations, Set-Merge and Pair-Merge which are supposed to be subject to the No-Tampering Condition, third factor principle that prohibits counter-cyclic application. Topics include Cyclicity of derivation, however, has been empirically challenged by reconstruction asymmetries: the argument-adjunct asymmetry and the A/A asymmetry; reconstruction effects in intermediate positions; and the disjoint reference of an R-expression with a pronoun.

Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs--domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show 'island effects': they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of 'island-sensitive' languages. To investigate this apparent mismatch between informal and formal judgments, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments testing the acceptability of topicalization from various island domains in Norwegian. We were interested in determining whether we could (i) find evidence for island insensitivity and (ii) pin down the source of qualitatively different island effects. We asked whether such effects are best explained as reflecting violations of a uniform syntactic constraint or extrasyntactic factors. Our results suggest that embedded questions and relative clauses are not uniform syntactic islands for topicalization, but complex NPs are. Unexpectedly, we also found evidence suggesting that conditional adjunct clauses may not be islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ichindali is one of the Ethnic Community Languages spoken by an increasing population of the Ndali people in Mbeya region. The Ndali people live in southern Tanzania, Mbeya Region. Ileje District has 124,451 speakers in 2012. Ileje is bordered to the North by Mbeya rural and Rungwe district, to the East by Kyela district. Ndali people live in an area which crosses the Tanzania Malawi border. This paper investigates the way noun phrases are formed in Ichindali and the order of their formation (constituents) in this particular language. Therefore the main objectives of this paper were: i. To find out the Criteria for categorizing noun phrase elements in Ichindali. ii. To examine the various kinds of dependents in Ichindali noun phrase. In arriving at these objectives, the writer posed the following questions as a guide: i. What are the criteria relevant in categorizing the dependents of the noun in Ichindali? ii. What kinds of dependents form a noun phrase in Ichindali? A conclusion has been drawn from this work is that, the structure of a noun phrase in Ichindali is N-Det-Mod. An NP can function as a subject, direct or primary objects which is normally expressed in the accusative case, indirect or secondary object in dative case as well as an object of preposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being a secondary part of sentence richly expressed in written texts and occurring in a wide range of contexts, the Predicative Adjunct has long been in the linguists'attention. A unanimously accepted fact is that it has a derivational history, being conditioned by the verb and implied in a double subordination type of relation. The Predicative Adjunct is a syntactic position obtained by abbreviation from a two-sentence utterance, expressing either a quality attributed to the Subject or the Object or a state/an action which is simultaneous with that of the main verb (the finite). From the multiple parts of speech it can be represented by, our study focuses mainly on two prepositional contexts, cu/fără + Noun, offering a detailed description of their use in literary texts and discussing the possible confusions generated in different contexts. The examples chosen were excerpted from both poetic and narrative texts, demonstrating that the Predicative Adjunct entails various stylistic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the existing research in the field of functional linguistics. The aim of this paper is to analyze the language and content of written texts of tourism discourse to find out the presence of overt as well as covert means of persuasion employed in them. In the texts of tourism promotion, the use of modality shows that what is expressed by the writer is a personal point of view rather than a bare fact. Selected articles from the specific kinds of travel magazines have been studied in terms of interpersonal metafunction to understand the grammaticalization of mood and comment adjuncts in order to decipher their short as well as long term impact on prospective travellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I demonstrate that antecedent‐contained deletion (ACD) exists in Japanese, thereby supporting the V‐stranding VP‐ellipsis analysis, and that the infinite regress resolution with such ACD cases must be made by overt movement. I suggest that this way of infinite regress resolution is a universal property, demonstrating that English ACD cases can be analyzed along these lines. I also argue that what seems like a case of Japanese ACD involves argument ellipsis, even though it violates the anti‐c‐command requirement, and that the apparent violation is resolved by adopting the late insertion of adjuncts and the derivational definition of c‐command. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss the phrase-structure-theoretic operation of Late Merge proposed in Lebeaux 1991 as it is used in late adjunct merger and wholesale late merger. I show that under current theoretical assumptions about the nature of the Merge and Move operations, Late Merge over-generates in ways that are difficult to overcome. Given that Late Merge is otherwise demonstrably computationally unparsimonious (Kobele and Michaelis 2012), I conclude that it should not be an available operation and suggest Neglect (Sportiche 2016) as an alternative to generate the needed Logical Form representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimizers are a wide kind of expressions that refer to prototypes of minimal values and they point out the lowest step on a pragmatic scale. Partitive ones, such as una gota «a drop» or una pizca «a pinch», can be considered a type of quantifiers; but, since their grammatical status is controversial, the aim of this paper is to analyze their pragmatic and grammatical behavior by using data from CREA to determine their categorization. The application of grammatical criteria permits to demonstrate that these minimizers are lexical items. Although their syntactic behavior is different, they can take part as a head in pseudopartitive constructions (adopting a predicate inversion structure) and they can perform syntactic functions within a sentence (arguments or adjuncts). Because of their minimal scalar value, explicatures that project the speaker's attitude towards the information are generated in negative polarity contexts and, this way, the relevance of the utterance gets increased. These explicatures are obtained by means of different inferential procedures (general or specific), depending on the internal structure and the syntactic behavior of the minimizer expression, whose lexical status is not modified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the previously undocumented focus-sensitiveness of certain scope-bearing expressions in Mandarin, and argues that the syntactic effects of this property should be accommodated by a structure that involves multiple dependencies and inherited dependencies. At the empirical side, it is shown that in Mandarin, certain quantificational expressions as well as typical focusing adverbs have to occur at positions where they (i) c‑command and (ii) be as close as possible to the contrastive foci that they associate with. The similarity to the typical association-with-focus configurations is captured under a unified Agree analysis that incorporated previous variable-adjunction-site analysis for focusing particles in German, while the additional dependencies in these structures are accounted for by multiple Agree and feature inheritance. This analysis is compared with some alternative approaches, which do not have equal empirical coverage or require more complex theoretical assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Vurës, spoken on the island of Vanua Lava in northern Vanuatu, clauses are categorized as either verbal or nonverbal. A verbal clause has as the head of the predicate a verb, which can be preceded by verbal proclitics or particles. Verbs are classified as either active or stative. While stative verbs can occur underived as the head of either a verbal or nonverbal predicate, active verbs can, for the most part, occur only as the head of a verbal predicate. Active verbs can generally only occur as the head of a noun phrase if the verb is nominalized via reduplication, and such noun phrases can be arguments or adjuncts, but cannot be predicates. There is, however, a clause type with a limited distribution—approximately one percent of clauses in a corpus of 7,095 clauses—in which the head of the predicate is an underived active verb, preceded by o. O is the form of the common noun article, suggesting that these are nominalized predicates. This paper examines the form, functions, and distribution of this predicate type in order to confirm that o in these clauses is the common article marking a nominalized predicate and not a homophonous verbal particle with a specific function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012, 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: whether-islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article develops a research direction of corpus-based linguistic analysis suggested in a previous work (Alexe 2015): researching Romanian conditional constructions from the perspective of language registers. The paper will focus on the expression, in legal language (legalese), of the conditional relation at the level of clausal realization illustrated by conditional clauses introduced by simple conjunctions (dacă, când, de, să) and complex conditional connectives (în cazul/situația/măsura/condițiile în care, cu condiția să, etc.). These constructions will be analysed from the point of view of their formal features such as clause order, mood-tense patterns, the marking of the apodosis by means of connective adjuncts as well as from the point of view of their typology and concurrence between connectives. The results of the present analysis of conditional constructions in legalese will be compared with the conclusions of the above-mentioned work (Alexe 2015), which is a general description of conditional constructions in Romanian. This comparison will provide data regarding the way in which conditional constructions used in legal documents abide by the main features of prototypical conditionality and the typological classification identified for the entire category of conditional constructions in Alexe (2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this article, I propose a unified explanation for the argument–adjunct asymmetries that have been observed regarding two seemingly unrelated anti‐c‐command requirements: (i) condition C and (ii) the anti‐c‐command requirement on argument ellipsis, observed in Abe for null arguments in Japanese. I argue that these asymmetries are best explained by the mechanism of late merge of adjuncts proposed by Lebeaux ( ) with a derivational definition of c‐command à la Epstein ( ). Furthermore, I argue that the timing of late merge of adjuncts is regulated by phase theory in the way that adjuncts may be merged no later than completion of relevant operations at the phase domains they belong to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gatekeeping in counselor education is an ethical responsibility and professional best practice. The authors examined gatekeeping perceptions of 9 counselor educators, with equal representation of assistant professors, associate/full professors, and adjuncts/instructors/lecturers. The authors analyzed data using consensual qualitative research methodology (Hill, Thompson, & Williams, ). Findings include commonalities and differences between academic role groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that extraposition from DP is derived differently according to whether a complement or an adjunct is extraposed, with complement extraposition being derived by movement and adjunct extraposition being derived via covert Quantifier Raising ( QR) of the host DP plus Late Merge of the adjunct (Fox & Nissenbaum 1999). We argue that adjunct extraposition is itself derivationally ambiguous and may be derived either by movement of the adjunct or by base generation of the adjunct in extraposed position. Accordingly, we argue for a relaxation of the strictly compositional view that nominal modification is always mediated by syntactic sisterhood. We argue that whereas base-generated extraposition is possible with quantificational host DPs, adjunct extraposition from definites must be derived by movement. This accounts for a number of asymmetries between extraposition from definites and from other types of DP, concerning reconstruction for condition C, scope reconstruction, and information-structural restrictions on extraposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined discourse effects on obligatory and non-obligatory control interpretations. Seventy participants undertook three online forced-choice surveys, which monitored preferred interpretations in complement control, verbal gerund subject control, long-distance control and sentence-final temporal adjunct control. Survey 1 ascertained their baseline interpretations of the empty category in these constructions. Survey 2 primed the critical sentences used in survey 1 with a weakly established topic of discourse and survey 3 primed them with a strongly established one. Reference assignment in complement control remained consistent across all three conditions, illustrating that pragmatics does not infiltrate this structurally regulated and syntactically unambiguous construction. Changes in interpretation were found in the remaining three constructions. An accessibility-motivated scale of influence, combining three independent discourse factors (topichood, competition and linear distance) was created to model reference determination in verbal gerund subject control and long-distance control. The results for temporal adjunct control are novel. They revealed a much stronger susceptibility to pragmatic interference than that reported in the literature yet the construction behaved differently from non-obligatory control under discourse pressure. We propose a structural account for sentence-final temporal adjunct control, which permits the evident interpretation shift while still excluding arbitrary and sentence-external interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine some semantic, syntactic and pragmatic motivations that may influence the preferred order of the Spanish temporal adjuncts antes 'before' and después 'after', when they function as bare adverbs, as adverbial phrases, and as linkage markers in subordinate clauses. The study of narrative texts reveals that these sequential adjuncts respond differently to each of the motivations under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it lacks grammaticalized categories of definite and indefinite articles and its "bare" nouns are (usually) ambiguous between a definite and indefinite interpretation, Serbo-Croatian has appropriate lexical items for marking discourse-old and discourse-new nominal referents. I demonstrate that there are contexts in which use of these discourse markers is obligatory for obtaining the intended reading, as the "bare" nominal phrase would unambiguously be interpreted as definite or indefinite, depending on the context. More importantly, when present, these discourse markers block left branch and adjunct extractions from the rest of the NP, indicating that a determiner phrase might be projected, even in an article less language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies in first language (L1) research support the use of inserted adjunct questions to facilitate L1 reading comprehension. The status of this comprehension technique for second language (L2) readers, however, remains unclear. Given the possibility that adjunct questions augment the cognitive demands of the task, the current study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and text adjuncts, as well as the effect of inserted adjuncts on L2 reading comprehension. Seventy learners of intermediate Spanish read two texts that contained either targeted segment (“what”) questions inserted into both passages, elaborative interrogation (“why”) questions inserted into both passages, or no questions in either of the two passages. Participants were administered an L1 working memory (WM) test—the Reading Span—and three comprehension assessments. Although the “why” questions were slightly more facilitative than the “what” questions and no questions, results indicate no significant effect of adjunct condition. When interactions with WM surfaced as significant, the pattern was apparent: the greater the WMC, the more beneficial the adjunct questions were for L2 readers. These findings suggest that, for intermediate learners of Spanish, there is no advantage to including inserted adjuncts in L2 expository texts, but that WM may explain performance differences in some cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore some of the behaviors observed in Negative Sensitive Items (NSI) in Japanese. In particular, my main focus is placed on sika, which is one of Japanese NSIs. Whether sika can be regarded as an Negative Concord Item (NCI) or not has hitherto been a controversial issue. I argue that sika should be categorized into an NCI. Sika has interesting syntactic asymmetries, i.e. the asymmetries between sika with a hidden Case-marker (i.e. argument) and sika accompanied by a postposition (i.e. adjunct) in multiple NCI constructions. One of my empirical findings with respect to this asymmetry is that sika can co-occur with other NSIs such as wh+mo or 1+Classifier+mo only when the sika phrase is marked with a postposition but not with a hidden Case-marker. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes two different theoretical frameworks, i.e. similarity-based interference and prosody-syntax interaction in sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses evidence for backward control in Greek and Latin participial adjuncts. The data differs from all previously reported cases of backward control in not involving multiple case assignment and from all previous literature except Haddad (2011) in discussing adjunct control rather than complement control. The paper first briefly surveys backward control and how it has been accounted for in the literature. Section 2 brings theoretical background and looks closer at the mechanisms that are typically used in theoretical analysis of control and raising, namely movement/identity and coindexation. Section 3 describes some basic facts about Greek and Latin participles and gives some background on word order, which is crucial to the analysis. Since there is no case assignment in the lower (adjunct) clause, my analysis of the controller's position relies crucially on word order facts. Section 4 offers a corpus study corroborating the principle of clause-bound discontinuity: word order is not so free as to allow scrambling across clauses, including adjunct participle clauses. Section 5 provides an analysis of the Greek and Latin data within Lexical-Functional Grammar and discusses the distribution of backward and forward control. Section 6 gives conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prepositional phrases (PPs) are considered an important feature of mature written expression. However, little is known about the development of PPs during the school years. The study examined the use of PPs in 160 narrative and expository texts, written by Hebrew-users in grades 4, 7, and 11, and adults. PPs were identified, counted, and classified according to their syntactic roles. Statistical analyses were carried out to probe the effects of age and genre on the overall prevalence of PPs, and the prevalence of each role. Results show that PPs become more prevalent and functionally more diversified with age: PP prevalence increased significantly after grade 7 in both genres, and continued to rise after grade 11 in expositories. Grade 4 PPs had a limited set of roles, the majority serving as arguments. In the older age groups the proportion of arguments decreased, concomitantly with an increase in the prevalence of other roles – most markedly verb-adjuncts and noun-modifiers – and the emergence of new PP roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine the understanding of the Argument-Adjunct Distinction within the Polish Semantic Syntax (SS) tradition, associated with the name of Stanisław Karolak and presented in the nominally syntactic volume of the Grammar of contemporary Polish (Pol. Gramatyka współczesnego jezyka polskiego; Topolinska, 1984), especially in Karolak (1984) and Grochowski (1984), as well as in later work. Section 1 reviews the three approaches to determining the number and kind of arguments of a given predicate, as discussed in Karolak (1984), concentrating on the one that is endorsed there. Then, Sections 2-3 show that the key notions used in this approach have not been - and probably cannot be - made operational. Moreover, Section 4 briefly reviews some more recent Semantic Syntax work and shows that this lack of operational AAD in Karolak (1984) extends to the SS programme at large. Finally, Section 5 concludes that this deficiency, while common in linguistic theories, is particularly troublesome in the case of SS, which is founded on the notion of predicate-argument structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work addresses the question of how adnominal appendices in the adjunct right dislocation construction (ADJ-RDC) in Korean resolve their modification relation. The main points made in this paper are: (i) Ko’s (2014, 2015) account in terms of assimilating the ADJ-RDC to a parasitic gap construction does not gain much support; (ii) a proximity based approach more adequately describes the facts; (iii) proximity can be overridden by focus information; and (iv) given a designated default focus position in Korean, the role of proximity can be subsumed under the role of focus. Thus, a unified focus based account is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new analysis of English partitives in which a quantifier is immediately followed by an of-phrase. It has been claimed that a partitive contains a null NP, analyzing the of-phrase as an adjunct. The null noun approach, however, does not adequately account for some important characteristics of English partitives. I argue that in a partitive, a quantifier takes an argument of type e, which is syntactically realized as a PP, and denotes a part-of relation. It is therefore proposed that a quantifier can take either an NP or a PP as its complement. I present diachronic evidence to support this dual-function analysis while explaining why every and no are not used with the partitive of-phrase. The proposed analysis has advantages over previous approaches that treat quantifiers in a uniform way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The interpretation of the reason and purpose denoting wh-adverbials in Turkish, neden, niye, niçin 'why' are always problematic within syntactic islands (Arslan, 1999, Görgülü, 2006, Çakır, 2015; 2016). Reinhart (1998) focuses on the different behaviors of the wh-adverbials 'why e.g.' and which-NP constructions 'which student e.g.' in-situ and proposes a choice-function analysis for them. Following her claims, Arslan (1999) proposes that wh-adverbials niye, neden, niçin 'why' cannot be interpreted within syntactic islands in Turkish while the interpretation of the which-NP constructions like hangi amaçla 'for what reason' or hangi sebeple 'with what purpose' in such structures are possible since they dominate an N-set from which an individual can be selected. These wh-adverbials, in fact, underwent a phonological attrition process and lost some of their phonetic substances: ne + için = niçin, ne+diye = niye, ne+ABL= neden. The full forms of these wh-expressions can be viewed as wh-pronominals within postpositional phrases whose noun sets are empty. Hence, the use of ne için 'for what' instead of niçin 'why' within island structures might produce more acceptable results. In the present study, the characteristics of different types of wh-adjuncts in Turkish are analyzed through a grammaticality judgment test and a missing word completion task. The findings of the study indicate that all wh-adjuncts do not behave similarly: the acceptability of whadverbials, wh-pronominals in postpositional phrases and which-NP constructions differ from one another, which shed light on the adjunct & argument asymmetry observed in Turkish. The syntactic explanations for the variation in the acceptability of different types of wh-adjuncts have been presented in the study as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Linguistic Research / Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of Bogazici University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Avatime is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana. It has a focus construction in which the focused element is placed in clause-initial position and marked with an extra-high tone. In this paper I discuss the functions of this focus construction, mostly based on a corpus of spontaneous discourse. The focus construction can mark focus on subjects, objects, adjuncts and verbs. Focus marking is usually interpreted as narrow focus on the focus-marked element, but the focus may be wider. Focus marking is not obligatory. In answers to questions, it is rarely used, except when the focused element is the subject. In other contexts, the focus construction is mostly used for contrastive purposes, indicating there are alternatives to the focused element or that the focused element is unexpected. These functions can be unified in the definition of focus marking as highlighting the common-ground update. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although research conducted on faculty commitment to their institutions has shown a significant relationship between institutional commitment and leadership style, these findings may not be applicable to online adjunct faculty. This study investigates the relationship between academic department chair leadership styles (transformational, transactional and laissez-faire leadership style) and the affective commitment of adjuncts faculty. Results indicated that there was a significant relationship between transformational leadership and affective commitment, but there was no significant relationship between affective commitment and transactional or laissez-faire leadership styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We asked whether sentence repetition accuracy could be explained by interactions of participant processing limitations with the structures of the sentences. We also tested a prediction of the procedural deficit hypothesis (Ullman & Pierpont, 2005) that adjuncts are more difficult than arguments for individuals with developmental language impairment (DLI). Method: Forty-four young adults participated, 21 with DLI. The sentence repetition task varied sentence length and the use of arguments and adjuncts. We also administered measures of working memory and processing speed. Our regression models focused on these interactions: group and argument status; processing speed, length, and argument status; and working memory capacity, length, and argument status. Results: Language ability group was a significant predictor of sentence repetition accuracy but did not interact with argument status. Processing speed interacted with sentence length and argument status. Working memory capacity and its separate interactions with argument status and sentence length predicted sentence repetition accuracy. Conclusions: Many adults with DLI may have difficulty with adjuncts as a result of their working memory limitations rather than their language ability. Cognitive limitations common to individuals with DLI are revealed more by particular sentence structures, suggesting ways to construct more diagnostically accurate sentence repetition tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a uniform account of a number of locality effects, in particular, the Subject Condition, the Adjunct Condition, Richards's () tucking in effect, and the full Comp-trace paradigm, including (in addition to the basic cases) relative and extraposed clauses, the impossibility of short subject topicalization, French que-qui alternation, and the effect of wh-movement on agreement in languages like Kinande. The account is based on a proposal that there is a difference in the timing of labeling between the basic case where a head and a phrase merge and the case where two phrases merge, as well as a particular labeling-based approach to antilocality, which has rather different empirical effects from the previous approaches to antilocality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to study the way in which the interpretation is determined in the Spanish AL + infinitive construction. The reading of these adjuncts can be temporal or causal. Some previous studies (Rigau 1993; Alonso-Ovalle 2002) have attributed the interpretative disparity to purely semantic reasons, while others (Rigau 1995; Hernanz 1999; Martines 2000) have described the phenomenon without delving too deep in the syntactic details that influence the reading. The aim of this analysis is to approach the problem of the interpretation considering facts of syntactic order. I will claim that the reading is fixed depending basically on two factors: 1) the kind of topological relation that is established in each case - in temporal adjunction, the C head selects an IP as its ground; on the contrary, in the causal adjunction the ground is an XP, a projection between IP and CP that blocks temporal identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]