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Este trabajo ofrece los resultados de un estudio cuantitativo sobre los adjuntos en el corpus Airbus realizado dentro del marco de la Gramática del Papel y la Referencia (GPR) en el que describimos el comportamiento posicional de los constituyentes periféricos en la estructura estratificada de la cláusula y postulamos escalas de preferencias posicionales y de tipos de constituyentes periféricos, basadas en distribución de frecuencias, en el lenguaje natural controlado (LNC) del corpus Airbus. Los resultados obtenidos se comparan con los de un estudio previo sobre preferencias y posiciones de los adjuntos en inglés estándar, con el fin de comprobar si puede haber cambios en estas escalas debido a la naturaleza de los textos escritos en un LNC. También nos proponemos contribuir al desarrollo del análisis de los adverbios en la GPR ofreciendo una tipología semántica y una detallada descripción de la sintaxis de estos constituyentes periféricos sustentada en datos empíricos y cuantitativos que servirán como base para el parseado de los constituyentes adverbiales en el procesamiento computacional de los LNCs. Palabras clave: adjuntos; corpus Airbus; lenguaje natural controlado; lingüística de corpus; periferias; Gramática del Papel y la Referencia 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. Keywords: adjuncts; Airbus corpus; controlled natural languages; corpus linguistics; peripheries; Role and Reference Grammar, A Role and Reference Grammar Account of Adjuncts in the Airbus Corpus: A Quantitative-Based Study I. Introduction The study of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of adverbs in English has [...]

Compositionality is undoubtedly one of the hardest problems in linguistics. In decoding theories, the speaker occupies a leading role, having to carefully choose the form that better encodes the meaning to be communicated. In contrast, in inferential theories, the burden is shifted from speaker to hearer: linguistic information typically underspecifies meaning and the hearer must make a number of inferences to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. In this article, I argue that constructional meaning can aid the process of sentence meaning formation by providing a scaffold that can help the hearer with the construal operations. Constructions, by providing an additional layer of meaning, constrain the range of possible meanings activated by words thereby reducing the combinatorial explosion when several words are joined together. This process is examined here by analysing the meanings associated with the grammatical construction [from X to Y], which is connected to a polysemy network of related senses, using examples extracted from a multimodal corpus. A preliminary analysis of the gesturing behaviour associated with the different senses proposed is also included, which can be seen to contribute to the characterisation of the different senses of the polysemy network. Keywords: construction grammar; polysemy; constructional meaning; multimodality La composicionalidad es sin duda uno de los problemas mas dificiles de la linguistica. En las teorias de decodificacion, el hablante desempena el papel principal, siendo el responsable de la construccion especifica del mensaje y teniendo que elegir con cuidado cual es la forma que mejor codifica el significado que se desea comunicar. En las teorias inferenciales, la carga se desplaza de hablante a oyente y es este ultimo el que debe realizar una serie de inferencias para cruzar la brecha entre lo que se dice y el significado que se pretende comunicar. En este articulo, sostengo que el significado construccional puede servir como un nivel medio util para el establecimiento del significado oracional, proporcionando un andamiaje que puede usarse para seleccionar entre las muchas facetas del significado de las palabras, facilitando de esta manera las operaciones de interpretacion necesarias para la construccion del significado. Presento aqui una red polisemica de los sentidos asociados con la construccion gramatical [from X to Y], que se analiza utilizando ejemplos de un corpus multimodal. Tambien se incluye un analisis preliminar del comportamiento gestual asociado con los diferentes sentidos propuestos, que puede verse como una contribucion a la caracterizacion de los distintos sentidos de la red polisemica Palabras clave: gramatica de construcciones; polisemia; significado construccional; multimodalidad, I. INTRODUCTION The process of meaning construction that takes place during language comprehension is still poorly understood. Prominent among the many riddles to be solved lies the issue of compositionality. [...]

8. THE PROBLEM OF SINGLE VOWELS. There is another problem in connection with the reconstruction of CMs that may involve allomorphy in relation to the canonical form of stems. In [...]

In striking contrast to the voice-marking affixes, for which there is universal agreement, the case-markers of Proto-Austronesian (PAn), and later protolanguages such as Proto-Philippines (PPh), have long resisted detailed reconstruction. [...]

Purpose: This study examined the extent to which children with specific language impairment (SLI) across Germanic languages differ from their typically developing (TD) peers in the use of past tense morphology. Method: A systematic literature search identified empirical studies examining regular and/or irregular past tense production by English and non-English Germanic-speaking children with SLI and their TD peers. Data from qualifying studies were extracted and converted to Hedges's g effect sizes. Results: Seventeen English and 8 non-English Germanic studies met inclusionary criteria. Comparing children with SLI and their TD age-matched (TDA) peers resulted in large combined effect sizes for English and non-English Germanic regular and irregular past tense production. Comparisons between children with SLI and their TD younger (TDY) peers also revealed large combined effect sizes for English and non-English Germanic regular past tense production. Effect sizes for studies comparing SLI and TDY irregular past tense production were large for non-English Germanic-speaking children and moderate for English-speaking children. Conclusions: Results suggest that children with SLI across Germanic languages do indeed have more difficulty marking verbs for past tense than TDA and TDY peers. The findings suggest that the potential value of past tense production as a clinical marker of SLI may well extend beyond English., Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate impaired language abilities in the absence of hearing, cognitive, neurological, and emotional impairments (Leonard, 2014). Many children with SLI have disproportionately more difficulty [...]

Matukar Panau has a multilayered system of directional constructions, with a set of directional morphemes used in simple clauses, as directional suffixes, in clause chains, and in core serial verb [...]

This study focuses on person marking in early Basque and other null subject languages. From very early on, person marking on the verb and quite regular, adult-like, null subject rates [...]

Abstract The aim of this article is to analyse the acquisition of object--verb/verb--object word order in Spanish and Basque by monolinguals (L1), early simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and successive bilinguals, exposed [...]

Purpose: The current study investigated finiteness marking (e.g., he walks, he walked) in boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS); the boys were grouped based on receptive vocabulary(i.e., borderline, impaired). Method: Twenty-one boys with the full mutation of fragile X, between the ages of 8 and 16 years participated. The boys completed probes from the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice & Wexler, 2001), a language sample, a nonverbal IQ test (Leiter-R; Roid & Miller, 1997), a receptive vocabulary test (the Pearson Picture Vocabulary Test--Fourth Edition [PPVT-IV]; Dunn & Dunn, 2007), and a measure of autistic symptoms (the Childhood Autism Rating Scale [CARS]; Schopler, Reichler, & Renner, 2002). Results: There were group differences for finiteness responses on the 3rd person singular probe; the group with impaired vocabulary omitted markers with greater frequency compared to the borderline vocabulary group. There were not significant differences on the past tense probe, with both groups performing lower than expectations based on receptive vocabulary ability. Nonverbal IQ was not correlated with the measures of finiteness marking. Conclusion: Boys with FXS demonstrate delays in finiteness marking, in particular, on past tense verbs. Boys with FXS show a unique profile, unlike children with SLI, in which their use of tense markers may exceed expectations benchmarked to clause length. Key Words: fragile X syndrome, language phenotype, finiteness marking, receptive vocabulary, An objective of present research across various developmental disorders is the comparison of language phenotypes. One goal is to determine the extent to which there are unique profiles of strengths [...]

One of the central concerns in theories of reading skills is the role of phonology in access to word meaning. The present study focused on this issue in Chinese to examine the extent to which phonology affects Chinese character recognition. Two naming experiments were conducted with a phonologically mediated semantic priming paradigm, and the relative frequencies of semantic associates of the targets and their homophones were manipulated systematically. Analyses showed that a semantic associate produced robust priming on target naming at 57- and 250-msec. stimulus onset asynchronies, but only the low frequency homophones of high frequency semantic associates facilitated target naming at a 250msec. stimulus onset asynchrony. These results indicate the role of phonology is neither obligatory nor efficient in access to Chinese character meaning, contradicting the key assumptions of the lexical constituency model. A revised parallel access model that emphasizes visual access to semantics is suggested as a more plausible account. DOI 10.2466/11.22.28.PR0.107.6.899-913

Movement science faces the challenge of reconciling parallel sequences of discrete behavioral goals with observed fluid, context-sensitive motion. This challenge arises with a vengeance in the speech domain, in which gestural primitives play the role of discrete goals. The task dynamic framework has proved effective in modeling the manner in which the gestural primitives of articulatory phonology can result in smooth, biologically plausible, movement of model articulators. We present a variant of the task dynamic model with I significant innovation: Tasks are not abstract and context free but are embodied and tied to specific effectors. An advantage of this approach is that it allows the definition of a parametric cost function that can be optimized. Optimization generates gestural scores in which the relative timing of gestures is fully specified. We demonstrate that movements generated in an optimal manner are phonetically plausible. Highly nuanced movement trajectories are emergent based on relatively simple optimality criteria. This addresses a long-standing need within this theoretical framework and provides a rich modeling foundation for subsequent work. Keywords: task dynamics, articulatory phonology, embodiment, coordination, sequencing DOI: 10.1037/a0020490

Recent functional imaging studies demonstrated that both the left and right supramarginal gyri (SMG) are activated when healthy right-handed subjects make phonological word decisions. However, lesion studies typically report difficulties with phonological processing after left rather than right hemisphere damage. Here, we used a unique dual-site transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) approach to test whether the SMG in the right hemisphere contributes to modality-independent (i.e., auditory and visual) phonological decisions. To test task-specificity, we compared the effect of real or sham TMS during phonological, semantic, and perceptual decisions. To test laterality and anatomical specificity, we compared the effect of TMS over the left, right, or bilateral SMG and angular gyri. The accuracy and reaction times of phonological decisions were selectively disrupted relative to semantic and perceptual decisions when real TMS was applied over the left, right, or bilateral SMG. These effects were not observed for TMS over the angular gyri. A follow-up experiment indicated that the threshold-intensity for inducing a disruptive effect on phonological decisions was identical for unilateral TMS over the right or left SMG. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence that the right SMG contributes to accurate and efficient phonological decisions in the healthy brain, with no evidence that the left and right SMG can compensate for one another during TMS. Our findings motivate detailed studies of phonological processing in patients with acute or long-term damage of the right SMG. human brain | language lateralization | compensation | semantic | transcranial magnetic stimulation doi/ 10.1073/pnas.1008121107

The emergence of a new sign language since the late 1970s in Nicaragua enables us to capture the effects of successive cohorts of learners on an emerging grammar and to observe how elements are reshaped from one form and function to another. Here we document the contrastive use of a device that has been found to be central to the grammars of sign languages: the spatial modulation of signs. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, this device has two primary functions: expressing the participants of events (that is, indicating who), and describing locations and orientations of referents (that is, indicating where). We ask whether the two uses reduce to a single construction type, or if the more abstract who construction derived from the more iconic and concrete where construction. We compare the first two successive cohorts of deaf signers to acquire the language in its first decade. We find that as learners created new constructions to meet the new functions, they did not simply apply an already developed form more broadly, nor did they develop the more abstract application from the more iconic one. Instead, the more abstract who construction appears to have conventionalized first. Thus, the forms either emerged independently, or split very early in the 1980s, before either had developed as a consistently applied form. Key Words Language birth * Language change * Language emergence * Spatial language DOI: 10.1159/000321455

Byline: Frank Seifart Abstract The Amazonian language Bora systematically uses in narratives a special, paragraph-initial anaphoric 'connector pronoun'. This pronoun helps to ensure referential coherence through agreement in noun class and number with an antecedent, whose referent is thematic in the new paragraph. Additional morphology in the connector pronoun specifies temporal, causal, and other relations between events. The connector pronoun is syntactically tightly integrated into the clause, where it may function as an argument of a verb or as the dependent element of a genitive phrase. Certain frequent forms of the connector pronoun are the basis for a number of lexicalized conjunctions. This paragraph-linking strategy parallels in a number of ways tail-head linkage systems, not only in its functionality, but also with respect to its diachronic outcome (discourse conjunctions). The fact that Bora grammaticalized nominal expressions in a paragraph-linking system (whereas verbs are the central components of tail-head linkage) is congruent with the general preference of Bora to use many noun phrases per clause, in contrast to tail-head linkage languages, where noun phrases are rarely used. Article History: Date received: February 21, 2009 Date revision received: July 01, 2009

Byline: Umberto Ansaldo Abstract The Surpass (or Exceed) comparative is a widespread feature of Sinitic languages found in almost all 'dialect' groups. This article investigates the nature of Surpass constructions in Southern Chinese varieties with a focus on Cantonese, and in unrelated languages of Southeast Asia, where Surpass comparatives are also found (Thai, Lao and Vietnamese). I offer possible grammaticalization paths for the Surpass comparative in the history of Chinese grammar, and argue that Surpass constructions are typical of Southern Sinitic but not of Mandarin Chinese (contra Stassen, Comparison and universal grammar, Basil Blackwell, 1985, Stassen, Comparative constructions, Oxford University Press, 2005). I also propose that the Surpass comparative should be added to the shared features of a broadly defined Mainland Southeast Asian region which illustrates the affinity of languages such as Cantonese to their non-Sinitic Southeast Asian neighbors. Finally, in arguing that comparatives in Mandarin Chinese are not Surpass construction, I suggest that it is not Sinitic languages in general that go against robust typological correlations between basic word order and standard-adjective order; rather, it is only Mandarin that provides a counterexample and is, in that respect, typologically rare. Article History: Date received: July 29, 2008 Date revision received: November 03, 2009

Byline: Shu-Ing Shyu Abstract Although contrastive stress in English facilitates context disambiguation, this paper shows that Taiwan Mandarin adult speakers were insensitive to contrastive stress in resolving ambiguity in zhi 'only' associated arguments in triadic constructions. The first experiment, which contained sixteen true/false responses to sentences containing zhi associated arguments inferred from corresponding narrated stories, was conducted to test the judgments of one hundred college students. The results showed that the direct object (DO) focus tended to be interpreted as the most prominent in both the dative and double object constructions, contra to the results attested in the dative construction by English-speaking adults in Gualmini et al. (Children's insensitivity to contrastive stress in sentences with ONLY: University of Pennsylvania, 2003) and Dutch children in Szendrő i (Acquisition evidence for an interface theory of focus: 457-468, LOT, 2003), and the prediction of the VP default focus by Reinhart's (Interface strategies: Optimal and costly computations, MIT Press, 2006) focus interface strategy. The second experiment with a multiple-choice questionnaire of the same sixteen contexts as in the first experiment was designed for a different group of fifty-one participants to identify which element (indirect object (IO), DO or VP focus) was interpreted most prominently. The results again showed the correction rates of the DO focus were higher than those of the IO, and those of the default VP focus was the lowest, contra to Reinhart's prediction. The conspicuous nature of the DO focus in triadic constructions in both experiments is accounted for by its syntactic basicness to the predicate and its preferred thematic prominence over the IO. The DO focus surfaces in Mandarin in which stress is not lexically distinctive; hence prosody is not served as the primary cue for disambiguation. Article History: Date received: November 16, 2007 Date revision received: May 26, 2009

Byline: Mark Baker Abstract While agreeing with Smith that the lexical categories cannot be defined pragmatically, I disagree with his implication that Baker 2003 is a pragmatic theory. Rather, I attempt to clarify my view that the definitional differences between nouns, verbs, and adjectives are primarily syntactic in nature. These syntactic differences stand in a natural correspondence to the pragmatic differences discussed in the literature in many cases, but when syntax and pragmatics go separate ways, category distinctions clearly follow the syntax. Given this, it stands to reason that the accuracy of the definitions can only be assessed if the syntactic structure of relevant examples has been accurately determined. I discuss a few suggestive examples of how this might be done in some 'contentious' cases. Article History: Date received: January 05, 2010

Byline: Hideki Kishimoto Abstract In this article, on the basis of a set of new data that allow us to assess the position of subjects, it is shown that in Japanese, ordinary subjects (which are marked with either nominative or dative case) are moved to Spec of TP, while the subjects of oblique-subject constructions do not undergo subject raising. We argue that subject raising to TP is motivated if the clause is constrained by the nominative-case requirement, which dictates that a clause must have at least one nominative argument. Nevertheless, there are also cases among idioms where nominative subjects remain in vP-internal position; that is, idiom subjects, which are interpreted non-compositionally as part of clausal idioms, do not undergo subject raising. In Japanese, subject raising to TP motivated by the EPP requirement of T is most typically instantiated, owing to the fairly persistent nominative-case requirement, but still, it is not unitarily implemented, since subjects do not undergo raising to TP if they receive oblique marking, which brings out the effect of voiding the nominative-case requirement, or constitute part of idiomatic expressions. Article History: Date received: September 11, 2008 Date revision received: June 05, 2009

This study examines aspects of a morphological inverse construction in Arizona Tewa, a Kiowa-Tanoan language. This inverse is optional for configurations involving third person agents and patients and obligatory when the patient is a speech act participant. It is partially passivelike in that it makes patients subject-topics and demotes agents, as is shown as well in quantitative and qualitative analyses of traditional narratives. This construction forms part of speakers' practical, but not discursive, consciousness.

Byline: Frank Brisard Abstract Most traditional approaches to the French imparfait characterize this tense by combining notions of past reference, imperfective aspect, and/or anaphora. Typically, the imparfait may refer to a past situation, present this situation as unbounded, and, in narratives, as simultaneous to a situation previously reported in the passe simple. This article argues that a unified definition of the imparfait, taking into account all of its uses, cannot be based on these notions alone. It is proposed that the imparfait presents a situation as part of a mentally construed reality which does not coincide with the speaker's, and which is not to be considered as actual for that reason. In particular, it construes the viewpoint (ground) from which a designated situation is conceived as distinct from that of the speaker at the time of speaking. This shift of viewpoint in the meaning of the imparfait, away from the speech event, effectively sets up a virtual locus of viewing that is treated as a given or known reference point in the construction of an alternative conception of reality. This alternative, virtual reality may, but need not, correspond with the conception of an actual situation in the past, depending on contextual licensing. It is the virtual nature of the viewpoint - or, in other words, its modal (epistemic) import - that sets the use of the imparfait apart from that of other French simple tenses, and notably from that of the passe simple. Article History: Date received: July 30, 2004 Date revision received: October 17, 2008

Byline: Freek Van de Velde Abstract This article inquires into the diachrony of the determiner in Dutch. First, it is argued that the determiner is an emergent syntactic category, and that it must be consequently excluded from universal grammar. Second, it is argued that languages that do have a determiner slot in the NP differ considerably with regard to which lexemes they allow in this function. On the basis of these two observations, an in depth usage-based analysis of the emergence of the Dutch determiner is undertaken. It seems that over the centuries, the determiner projection consolidates its position in Dutch. It first cropped up in Old Dutch, and was further elaborated in Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch and Present-day Dutch by the recruitment of ever new slotfillers. Difficulties in the demarcation of the determiner phrase and the notoriously elusive syntax of some adjectives are claimed to be due to diachronic instability: what is e.g., conveniently but somewhat misleadingly called postdeterminers, can be argued to be an instable syntactic category that represents an intermediate stage in the diachronic process. Evidence will be drawn from (quantitative) corpus inquiry. Article History: Date received: July 12, 2006 Date revision received: May 30, 2007

Byline: Kasper Boye Abstract Clausal perception-verb complements are known to show a contrast in meaning between 'object of perception' and 'knowledge acquired'. This contrast has traditionally been analyzed denotationally in terms of a distinction between extra-linguistic entities belonging to two ontologically different types. However, Cognitive Grammar offers an analysis which is based on a distinction between two ways of construing the same conceptual content and does not presuppose the relevant notion of extra-linguistic entities. The present paper argues that both analyses are inadequate. On the basis of a number of relevant crosslinguistic data, it argues that the contrast under scrutiny must be understood in terms of a distinction which turns on a certain link between conceptual contents and extra-linguistic entities: reference. More precisely, it must be understood in terms of a distinction between nonreferring and referring status in the sense of Lyons 1977. A conception of this distinction is outlined, and an analysis is proposed which can bridge the gap between a purely cognitive and a purely denotational approach to clause meaning. Eventually, the paper sketches how the analysis can be adopted within Cognitive Grammar. Article History: Date received: October 18, 2007 Date revision received: March 12, 2008

Byline: Toshiaki Oya Abstract Some recent studies on reflexive constructions have claimed that the socalled weak reflexive always blocks the appearance of the external argument. According to this analysis, the subject of the reflexive predicates corresponds to the internal argument. I argue against this view and show that the subject of reflexive sentences in German corresponds to either the external or internal argument, as Reinhart and Siloni (Linguistic Inquiry 36: 389-436, 2005) claim. However, as opposed to them, I argue that the reflexive with grooming verbs in German bears a thematic role, just as the reflexive with transitive verbs. Consequently reflexive verbs in German are classified into the following three types with respect to argument structure: (i) verbs that have both an external argument and an internal argument; (ii) verbs that have an external argument only; (iii) verbs that have an internal argument only. It is also shown that this classification captures the distribution of reflexives both in English and Dutch. Article History: Date received: August 25, 2006 Date revision received: February 22, 2008

Byline: Regina Morin Abstract Much research establishing phonemic bases for grammatical gender assignment in Spanish nouns relies on straightforward word counts, some of them rather small, and does not examine the characteristics of individual words. No distinction is made between native Spanish words and loanwords, or between terminal letter, terminal phoneme, and terminal morpheme. As a result, some useful generalizations are lost, and others, less useful, have been accepted as true and repeated over and over. When large amounts of data are examined in detail, it becomes clear that in many cases noun ending does not serve to establish a significant statistical pattern with respect to gender assignment. However, some very large groups of words share some very productive terminal morphemes, which are invariably masculine or feminine. Sorting out noun ending from terminal morphemes makes it much easier to identify patterns of gender assignment in a system that is otherwise quite random and arbitrary. Article History: Date received: September 08, 2006 Date revision received: August 22, 2007

Byline: Alice Y. W. Chan Abstract This article discusses the acquisition of English initial consonant clusters by Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong with an aim to examine the explanatory power of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman, Language Learning 27: 315-330, 1977) and the Interlanguage Structural Conformity Hypothesis (ISCH) (Eckman, Moravcsik & Wirth, Language Learning 39: 173-205, 1989) and to gain insights into the interlanguage phonology of the learners. Both hypotheses make predictions about second language learning on the basis of implicational universals, but the former is also premised on the differences between the native and target languages. The study investigated Cantonese ESL learners' acquisition of English obstruent + nasal onsets and obstruent + liquid onsets as well as their acquisition of two-member onsets and three-member onsets. A total of twelve learners participated in the study. They were asked to perform four different speech tasks including the reading of a word list, the description of a series of pictures using isolated words, the reading of three passages, and a conversational interview. The participants' speech was recorded using a high-quality mini-disk recorder and transcribed by two raters. The results of the study show that the implicational relationships which hold between the different categories of onset clusters also hold for the interlanguages of the participants, and the predictions of the MDH and the ISCH are also borne out. Where no universal markedness relationships exist among different onset clusters, the inherent difficulty of a segment resulting from the phonotactic constraints of a learner's mother tongue remains the most important factor contributing to the overall level of difficulty of an onset cluster. It is also argued that, in the interlanguages of the participants, there exists a phonological rule which neutralizes liquids in clusters. Further research is needed to investigate the abilities of Cantonese ESL learners to perceive English speech sounds and the possible effects that their perceptual abilities may have on their production abilities. Article History: Date received: August 24, 2006 Date revision received: June 04, 2007