#the sentence with the OVS subordinate clause is

[coquelicoq]

hugo's sentence structure is so much easier on me than that of dumas. sure he will also include behemoths that make me forget what we were talking about by the time i get to the period, but usually those are just lists. in the first 80 pages i've only noticed one OVS subordinate clause (and it was very short). this comes as a pleasant surprise, because the author's note on the very first page of the book is the following single sentence:

Tant qu'il existera, par le fait des lois et des moeurs, une damnation sociale créant artificiellement, en pleine civilisation, des enfers, et compliquant d'une fatalité humaine la destinée qui est divine ; tant que les trois problèmes du siècle, la dégradation de l'homme par le prolétariat, la déchéance de la femme par la faim, l'atrophie de l'enfant par la nuit, ne seront pas résolus ; tant que, dans de certaines régions, l'asphyxie sociale sera possible ; en d'autres termes, et à un point de vue plus étendu encore, tant qu'il y aura sur la terre ignorance et misère, des livres de la nature de celui-ci pourront ne pas être inutiles.

bit of a mouthful.

[the-8237th-whitt]

Lontwarktam Chotam Baçkt

Lontish Word Order

Lontish word order is primarily OSV, but the case system allows for the main clause to be very flexible in word order, which provides emphasis. All accusative and dative nouns (direct and indirect objects) are to come at the beginning of the sentence (the first position). The subjects of the clause come in the second position, and the predicate of the clause will come in the third position. This order can of course be swapped, with important information coming first. This changes in a relative clause, which will always be in the order of OVS or SVO, with the object or subject in the third position being either a relative pronoun, or a noun in the relative case corresponding to its role in the main clause. Subordinate clauses and dependent clauses do not follow this rule, and are instead forced into the standard OSV order.

Example: Dewma kitand æ an chamkötç w, pærszkalkan chollaud mol an cheuça nysz nek.

Gloss: Even though record-PAST it ACC camera with, president-ACC kill-PAST who-REL ACC we-NOM is-NEG know.

Translation: Even though (we) caught it on camera, we don't know who killed the president.

[yuk-tepat]

Typology

You know what analytical/isolating, agglutinative, and fusional languages are, I presume. You’ve heard about heads and dependents and word-orders, you can tell the difference between head-initial and head-final. You know what SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV mean, and which ones like prepositions and which ones like postpositions. Maybe you know what an ergative language is. Is that all? What else do you know about your language? Some things to think  about:

Does your language have vowel harmony? OK, but does it have consonant harmony?

What restrictions does it place on the shape of roots? Are they different from restrictions on the shape of words or syllables? Can the same phoneme occur twice in a root? Are phonemes from the same class required, or banned?

Is its prosody stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed?

If it’s tonal, does it have contour tones? Is tone lexically determined? Does each syllable have marked tone?

Does your language mark grammatical relations in clauses? Does it bother to mark them at all?

Is your language accusative, ergative, tripartite, transitive, or neutral?

Is your ergative language totally ergative or split-ergative?

Does it have active-stative alignment? What determines the alignment of intransitive subjects? The semantics of the subject? The semantics of the verb? Something else?

Is it a topic-prominent language?

Does it use some other system, like an Austronesian ‘trigger’ system, or direct-inverse marking? What determines the order / marking of the arguments? An animacy hierarchy?

Does it mark experiencers of experiential verbs like agents or patients or something else?

Does your language have any ditransitive verbs? Is it dechticaetive or secundative?

Can a sentence omit any argument of the verb? Only the subject? No arguments at all?

What is the word order, and what determines it?

Is it consistently head-final or head-initial, or mixed? And where does the split occur?

Is there V2 order, or another unusual order?

Do certain structures, like subordinate clauses or questions, require different orders?

Does something other than syntactic relations determine word order?

Do relative clauses precede their head, or follow their head, or does it have internally-headed relative clauses?

Does it use a relative pronoun, another linking word, a special inflection, or no marking on the relative clause?

Does it allow gaps in a relative clause, or require resumptive pronouns?

Does it use some less common relativization strategy, like correlative constructions?

Is your language highly deranking? Are coordinate or subordinate constructions more marked?

Do you allow serial verbs?

Is your language head-marking or dependent-marking? Or double-marking? Or zero-marking? Or marks relations on something else?

Is your language inconsistent in marking type? Where does the split occur? Is there a pattern? (E.g., head-marked clauses and dependent-marked noun phrases in Bantu.)

Is your language synthetic?

Does your language have derivational morphology, but no inflectional morphology?

Do morphemes tack on to each other like legos, one after the other, in linear order? Or not?

Does it have portmanteau morphemes?

Does it have non-concatenating morphology?

Does it have templatic morphology (e.g., Semitic triliteral roots)

Is there a limit to the number of morphemes you can tack onto a root?

Do the morphemes occur in a fixed order, or can you change the order, say to indicate scope?

Do you allow multiple roots in one word form, or does each complex word have only one root, no matter how many derivations and inflections you apply to it?

Can verbs incorporate multiple verb roots?

Can verbs incorporate nouns?

If a verb incorporates a possessed noun, does the possessor get marked on its person-marking

How many different arguments are indexed in your verbs’ person-marking? None? Only subject? Subject and object? Indirect objects too? Non-core arguments?

How do you construct comparatives?

Do you use a case form or adposition, or a particle like ‘than’?

Do you have ‘exceed’ comparatives, positive-negative comparatives, or topical comparatives?

Are motion events verb-framing or satellite-framing?

For satellite-framing languages, are the motion verbs manner-conflating or figure-conflating? Or even ground-conflating?

Do you mark evidentiality?

Do you distinguish alienable and inalienable possession?

Does your language have a copula? Multiple copulas? Does it have a separate existential verb? Does it have a ‘have’ verb?

Does it have separate words for ‘tree’ and ‘wood’?

[ayearinlanguage]

A Year in Language, Day 201: Concept: Typology Linguistic Typology refers to the ways linguists categorize languages. The most obvious method is genealogy, organizing them by common ancestor. These are the familiar language family trees you can find in the back of a decent dictionary. This may be serviceable for most, but linguists often need to refer to languages grouped by shared grammatical features, and so have devised a number of methods for doing so. One of the most common is to use morphology. Morphology is the study of word structure and linguists have vocabulary to determine how languages use affixes to build words. The simplest method is simply to look at how critical and common affixation is for basic grammar. English and Chinese are both considered "analytic" or "isolating", meaning that they use relatively few affixes. Consider that English verbs commonly change their form only in three ways: adding an -s in the third person singular, adding an -ed or shifting the vowel for the past tense, and of course adding -ing for all kinds of purposes. Chinese is even more restricting. If we move away from analytic languages we get "synthetic" languages. This is the majority of world languages, which make common use of affixes to show things like case, agreement, tense, etc. Going even further you get "polysynthetic", languages with so much robust inflection that a single word can pack meaning that takes sentences in other languages. Because synthetic covers a sizeable majority of all languages we can break it down further on a basis of what kind of information the affixes have. When the affixes each carry a single grammatical element that languages is "agglutinative". The Bantu languages of Africa and Turkish are agglutinative languages. Take for example to Turkish word "evlerden", it consist of "ev" (house), "-ler" (plural), and "-den" (from) aka "from the houses". This contrasts with the other type of synthetic languages called "fusional". Fusional languages have affixes that are packed with lots of information. Most Indo-European languages are fusional, take for example the Latin "of the friends": "amīcōrum" This has a root "amīc-" meaning "friend" and a suffix "-ōrum" which means the word is plural and in the genitive case. You can't break "-ōrum" down into a part that means "plural" and another that means "genitive"; the meaning is fused. Going beyond word structure we have syntactic ways to categorize, i.e. sentence structure. There are two related schools for this. One is by the ordering of the "core arguments" i.e. how the language orders subjects (S), objects (O), and verbs (V). English belongs to the second most common ordering, SVO, which is just a few percents shy of the more common SOV (Japanese, Latin). Those two cover just shy of 90% of languages. Most of the remaining 10% are VSO languages like Hebrew and Gaelic. OSV is the least common, found in only a few Amazonian languages. The other method is "head alignment" or "branching". This refers to where the primary element of a phrase is located in relation to its modifiers i.e. if adjectives, adpositions, and affixes come before or after the word they modify. English is generally "head-initial" or "right branching" language (the main object comes first, so when drawing a diagram all the limbs branch to the right). Objects come after the commanding verb, nouns come after prepositions, subordinate clauses come after main clauses. However English also does a fair amount of "left branching" or "head-final" behavior; adjectives, determiners, and adverbs generally come before the nouns or verbs they modify. Both types of languages come with a host of tendencies; left branching languages normally have postpositions and prefer OV word order to VO, right branching just the opposite. Spanish and Bantu languages are very right branching, Japanese and Turkish are almost exclusively left branching.Edit

[in-hes-wildest-dreams]

33-39

33. Define and illustrate conversion, compounding and blending.

Conversion – Special case of derivational morphology. Instead of adding an affix to the stem, the word takes the zero form, e.g.: a lunch -> to lunch

Compounding – two or more stems are taken and added together to form a new word. E.g.: man-eater, човекоядец

Blending – Special case of conceptual blending. Not only the elements of a word a blended together, but also element form their phonological strings as well, e.g.: lunch + breakfast = brunch

   Parts (which are not morphemes, called splinters) of two already-existing words are put together to form a new word. A blend is any word which is formed by fusing together elements from two other words and whose meaning shares or combines the meanings of the source words. The elements are normally the beginning of one and the end of the other

Examples: motel (motor hotel) brunch (breakfast & lunch), smog (smoke & fog), telethon (television & marathon), modem (modulator & demodulator), Spanglish (Spanish & English).

Conversion

An apparently non-concatenative process of word formation that is very productive in English and German is conversion (or zero derivation, functional transposition). It assigns an already exisiting word to a new syntactic category.

a. V to N: to call > a call, scream, purchase, walk, drive.

b. N to V: a boss > to boss, to shovel, to pile, to skyrocket, to handcuff

c. A to V: yellow > to yellow, narrow, dim, mature, sour.

A very productive version of conversion is what some linguists call superfixation, i.e. the distinction between form/syntactic classes by stress pattern:

                       Noun            Verb cómbine      combíne ímplant         implánt réwrite          rewríte tránsport      transpórt

                       Noun              Adjective cóncrete        concréte ábstract         abstráct

§   Compounding

§   Compound words are those which contain at least two root-morphemes, the number of derivational morphemes being insignificant. There can be both root- and derivational morphemes in compounds as in pen-holder, light-mindedness, or only root-morphemes as in lamp-shade, eye-ball, etc. The former are called synthetic compounds, the latter – root. Some authors call synthetic compounds complex forms.

§   Compounds in English can be written in three different ways – as one word, with a hyphen or as separate words:

                       redskin    good-looking    blue stocking

§   A complex form or derivational compound is a word formed by a simultaneous process of composition and derivation – good-looking.

§   Compound words proper are formed by joining together bases of words already available in the language – white collar.

34. How do borrowing and loan translation differ?

 Borrowing -A word is taken from another language. It may be adapted to the borrowing language's phonological system to varying degrees. Examples: skunk, tomato (from indigenous languages of the Americas), sushi, taboo, wok (from Pacific Rim languages), chic, shmuck, macho, spaghetti, dirndl, psychology, telephone, physician, education (from European languages), hummus, chutzpah, cipher, artichoke (from Semitic languages), yam, tote, banana (from African languages).

 Loan translation -Word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word (Lat. : "verbum pro verbo") or root-for-root translation.For example, the common English phrase “flea market" is a phrase calque that literally translates the French "marché aux puces“ небостъргач from skyscraper

35. How do semantic roles differ from syntactic roles (grammatical functions)?

A semantic role is the underlying relationship that a participant has with the main verb in a clause. Different semantic roles make up different event schemas.

Syntactic roles are the roles that constituents play inside a syntactic structure.

The difference between them is that the entities with different semantic roles may vary in the syntactic order, whereas the syntactic roles cannot be changed without a loss of the original meaning. E.g.: John broke Jack’s nose -> Jack got broken nose because of John. Here we changed the patient form Jack’s nose to his nose only without loss of meaning.

  Semantic roles - A semantic role is the underlying relationship that a participant has with the main verb in a clause.(Peter [Agent] hits Paul [Patient].)

Agent:

–          A participant which the meaning of the verb specifies as doing or causing something, possibly intentionally. Examples: subjects of kill, eat, hit, smash, kick, watch.

Patient:

–          a participant which the verb characterizes as having something happen to it, and as being affected by what happens to it. Examples: objects of kill, eat, smash but not those of watch, hear, love.

Experiencer:

–          A participant who is characterized as aware of something. Examples: subject of love, object of annoy.

Theme:

–          A participant which is characterized as changing its position or condition, or as being in a state or position. Examples: objects of give, hand, subjects of walk, die.

Location:

–          The thematic role associated with the NP expressing the location in a sentence with a verb of location. Examples: subjects of keep, own, retain, know, locative PPs.

                       Source:

–          Object from which motion proceeds. Examples: subjects of buy, promise, objects of deprive, free, cure.

                       Goal:

–          Object to which motion proceeds. Examples: subject of receive, buy, dative objects of tell, give.

Syntactic roles - Every language has a hierarchical grammatical system with two basic types of patterning – morphological and syntactic. In all languages words are divided into form classes sensitive to morphosyntactic categories. A fundamental grammatical LU is the notion of position or order, which is based on the design features of linearity and discreteness: morphemic ordering (derivational affixes are always internal in relation to inflection) and word order (OV vs. VO).

Every language has a bipartite clausal structure – Subject and Predicate. All languages distinguish between one-argument predication (John sleeps) and two-argument predication (John loves Mary). Morphology and syntax interact so as to produce the optimal correlation in the expression of mutually dependent, hierarchically ordered conceptual categories.                                    

36. Define and illustrate the differences between structural and semantic (lexical) ambiguity.

Semantic ambiguity arises in cases with polysemy – when one word has several meanings which can be mistaken. In English there are examples galore of this case. E.g.: There is a mole on his leg means that the person on question does not have a small animal, but a birth mark.

Structural ambiguity arises when a phrase can be parsed in different ways, e.g.: I kill a man with a machine gun can mean that the doer has used a machine gun to kill a man or that he killed a man holding such weapon.

 Ambiguity - A single stretch of speech or writing sometimes has two or more distinct meanings.

I went to the bank. – lexical ambiguity (because the word has a homonym and it is not clear from the scanty context which of the two is meant – river bed or financial institution) Mary saw the man with the telescope. – structural ambiguity (because the telescope could belong to Mary or to the man. If it belongs to the man “with the telescope” will be interpreted linguistically as a postmodifier in an NP headed by man and it well have a dependant function (in terms of rank it will not be a member of the sentence, but a subordinate part of an actual member of the sentence “the man with the telescope – it will be part of the Object); if on the other hand the telescope belongs to Mary then it will be a legitimate member of the sentence and will be a free standing PP with the function of Instrumental circumstantial Adjunct (Adverbial).

 37.   What is essence of the basic properties of syntactic units (linearity, hierarchicity, categoriality)?

Syntatic units are grammatical items showing unified behavior, that behave as indivisible wholes. Word, morphemes and sentences are syntactic units. Units of two intermediate sizes exist between words and sentences: phrases and clauses.

This gives us a hierarchy of units according to increasing size: morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence.

 Syntatic units are grammatical items showing unified behavior, that behave as indivisible wholes. Word, morphemes and sentences are syntactic units. Units of two intermediate sizes exist between words and sentences: phrases and clauses. This gives us a hierarchy of units according to increasing size: morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence.

 Tova e dopylnenie kym 37 vypros,zashtoto bqh zabravila da napisha primerite ot uchebnika

37. What is essence of the basic properties of syntactic units (linearity, hierarchicity, categoriality)?

 Syntatic units  are grammatical items showing unified behavior, that behave as indivisible wholes. Word, morphemes and sentences are syntactic units. Units of two intermediate sizes exist between words and sentences: phrases and clauses. This gives us a hierarchy of units according to increasing size: morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence.

A sting of words that is either a simple sentence , or a modified form of a simple sentence is called a clause.

Groupings of words that do not normally constitute complete clauses, just parts of clauses are called phrases. Phrases can be grouped together into different types according to their initial structure. – Noun or verb phrases.

 38. What is a syllable and what are its basic components?

Syllables are phones combined in larger units. They generally consist of a vowel surrounded by consonants – nucleus, onset and coda.

  39. How does onomasiology differ form semasiology?

Semasiology (from Greek: σημασία (semasia) "signification, meaning" σημαίνω (semaino) "indicate, signify") is a discipline within linguistics concerned with the meaning of a word. It studies the meaning of words regardless of their phonetic expression.] Semasiology departs from a word or lexical expression and asks for its meaning, its different senses, i.e. polysemy. 

Whereas semasiological analysis starts with a word and tries to discover the various senses it may have, onomasiological ( ὀνομάζω) analysis starts form a given concept and investigates the words that are used to name that particular concept. Conceptual domain, semantic field, salience etc.

 Onomasiology is an approach that concentrates on the many different senses of words(different words may express similar meanings), whereas

Semsiology is an approach that concentrates on what is common or different between the various words in capturing the essence of our experience.