Arbitrary structure, cognitive grammar, and the partes orationis. A study in Polish paradigms (original) (raw)
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Between nouns and adjectives: A constructional view
Lingua, 2008
Tungus proprietives, regularly derived from nouns by affixation, demonstrate a mixed behaviour. As adnominal modifiers, they have the full syntactic and morphological distribution of an adjective. Yet, the base noun retains some nominal properties: it can head its own syntactic phrase, control agreement on its modifier, trigger various anaphoric processes, pluralize, and take derivational affixes. These forms present a problem for the traditional view of syntactic categories, as they have the morphosyntactic properties of more than one part of speech. They are also important for the syntax/morphology interface, because the word structure and the phrase structure do not match: although the base noun selects modifiers as if it were an independent phrasal head, it is not an independent word in morphology. The paper shows that syntactic affixation analyses cannot adequately capture the Tungus data. Instead, I propose a constructional analysis based on the idea that relationships among classes of words are expressed in the lexicon by means of cross-cutting hierarchical types, where more specific types inherit information from more general types. The idiosyncratic behaviour of proprietives is lexically specified by the crossclassification of head values. Categorial information is inherited from adjectives and determines the external distribution of the phrase. At the same time, proprietives inherit the underlying noun's semantics (referentiality) and selectional properties. This analysis raises further questions about the nature of the traditional syntactic labels such as nouns or adjectives, namely, whether we are dealing with a new category type in each case of mixed categories.
Further on simultaneous effects of inflectional paradigms and classes: a case of Serbian adjectives
We report a study that continues the series of experiments demonstrating the simultaneous influence of paradigms and classes on processing of inflected words (Milin, Filipović Đurđević, & Moscoso del Prado Martin, 2009; Baayen, Milin, Filipović Đurđević, Hendrix, & Marreli, 2011). The simultaneous influence was observed in the effect of divergence of the noun's local probability distribution of inflected forms from the probability distribution of inflected forms of all the nouns belonging to the same inflectional class. The divergence was operationalized as relative entropy (i.e., Kullback-Leibler divergence), an Information theory measure of the distance between two probability distributions. The larger the deviation of the noun's local distribution from that of the class, the slower the processing was. The present research goal was to generalize previously reported findings to adjectives as another grammatical category of words that undergo nominal inflection. We targeted ...
Evelien Keizer, The English Noun Phrase. The Nature of Linguistic Categorization
Lingua, 2009
Evelien Keizer's new book explores different aspects of the syntax of the English noun phrase (NP) from a structural-functional perspective. Even though the title might suggest that the book presents a general examination of the structure of the NP within one of the existing theoretical approaches, the volume is in fact a collection of insightful analyses of different types of nominal constructions. What gives unity to the work is the functional-cognitive orientation and the attempt at showing that linguistic categories are not discrete but gradual and have a cognitive basis (hence the subtitle). The book is divided into two parts. The first one deals with aspects of the internal structure of NPs, with particular reference to appositive constructions, whereas part II treats pragmatic and cognitive aspects of the production and interpretation of NPs. Part I is preceded by an introduction in which the author explains the aims of the study as well as the methodological orientation employed. She ascribes herself to the 'communication-and-cognition' paradigm (Van Valin and LaPolla, 1997), which includes theories such as Role and Reference Grammar, Functional Grammar or Systemic-Functional Grammar, among others. However, it is important to emphasize that the author does not state her analyses in the formalisms of any particular theoretical option. The reasons for this choice relate to the flexibility this offers to freely incorporate ideas from any linguistic model and because, in Keizer's view, even the formalisms of functional models have been constructed on the basis of an idealized and restricted corpus of data which does not adequately represent the way language is used. Underlying representations in the volume, therefore, should be seen as a mere 'notational tool' and no claims are made as to their being psychologically real. Moreover, as the book tries to demonstrate, a strict classification of linguistic phenomena in terms of formal categories is not adequate as the analyses are based on semantic, syntactic and pragmatic factors which are not amenable to representation in rigid categories or constructions. Underlying structures are thus considered representations of the prototypical function of units. In order to solve the data problem in functional models Keizer extracts most of her examples from the International Corpus of English. It is worth mentioning, though, that the study does not make use of statistical frequencies, which the author considers of minor importance for her purposes. I will come back to this question in the closing paragraphs of this review. Let me now move on to examine in more detail each of the chapters of the book. Given the detailed discussion that the author offers, sometimes for individual examples, it would seem too tedious and unpractical for this review to discuss specific analyses and I will therefore present the contents of the volume in a more general manner. Part I, The Structural Approach: Possibilities and Limitations, opens with a short chapter devoted to headedness within the NP, with particular reference to noun phrases containing two nominals (e.g. a bottle of wine). Keizer reviews the semantic, syntactic, and phonological criteria employed in the literature and concludes that headedness should be regarded a matter of degree because the tests available tend to offer conflicting results. Consequently, she argues, it is best to treat headedness as a cluster notion, the head of a given construction being thus the element which complies with more criteria. The tests for headedness introduced in this chapter will be employed in the rest of part one to identify heads of particular constructions. This chapter, then, serves an anticipatory function and offers the necessary background for later discussions. Chapter 3 is devoted to 'close appositions', constructions containing two nominals with no intervening relator between them and usually referring to the same entity (e.g. the actor Orson Wells).
“Categorial ambiguities within the noun phrase: relational adjectives in Polish” (PartI)
Abstract In this paper I discuss noun-like properties of relational adjectives in Polish, in view of the recent proposals couched within the framework of Distributed Morphology that certain denominal adjectives (e.g., in Spanish and in Greek) contain nominal projections in their syntactic representations. Special attention is given to group adjectives, which are derived from names of countries, regions, professions and titles (e.g., dyrektorski ‘managerial’ or chiński ‘Chinese’). I also consider the occurrence of such adjectives as thematic adjectives (which can be treated as bearing theta-roles assigned by head nouns, e.g. the adjective chiński ‘Chinese’ in chińskie zwycięstwo ‘Chinese victory’) and as classificatory adjectives (e.g., chińskie samochody ‘Chinese cars’). I show that Polish relational adjectives in question pattern like nouns both in their thematic and classificatory usage, as is indicated, among others, by their behaviour under coordination and by their combinability with derivational affixes. The Polish data discussed here provide support for the hypothesis put forward for Spanish by Fábregas (2007), which states that both thematic and classificatory relational adjectives (and not only thematic ones, as proposed in Alexiadou and Stavrou 2011 for Greek) contain nouns in their syntactic representations.
A position on classifiicatory adjectives in Polish
Studies in Polish Linguistics, 2013
Th e paper is constructed as a response to Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman's (2011a) paper on classifi catory adjectives in Polish. Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman (CPT) argue in it against Rutkowski and Progovac's (2005) and Rutkowski's (2007) account of classifi catory adjectives in Polish and instead propose an alternative analysis, based on Bouchard's (2002) representational model. In the present paper it is claimed that the controversy between those two approaches actually stems from diff erences in the understanding of the term 'classifi catory adjective': Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman (2011b) seem to deem as 'classifi catory' adjectives "restricting the denotation of the noun they modify, " while Rutkowski (2007) seems to consider 'classifi catory' only those adjectives that establish at least two contrasting classes of possible referents. Crucially, for Rutkowski and Progovac only post-nominal adjectives are deemed classifi catory, while Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman postulate a class of 'migrating classifi catory adjectives' that can appear both pre-and postnominally. Th is paper presents some arguments that CPT's view is better suited to Polish phenomena, but also suggests that neither the derivational model proposed by Rutkowski and Progovac nor the representational model is capable of fully accounting for syntacticsemantic phenomena involved in Polish nominal phrases with post-nominal adjectives.
birmingham.ac.uk
Some restrictions on the order of English premodifying adjectives were already pointed out by Whorf (1956). The first manual corpus studies of the order of premodifying adjectives were carried out by Goyvaerts (1968), Vendler (1968), Quirk and Greenbaum (1973), and Dixon (1982). In all, I have encountered over a hundred of studies concerning the ordering of premodifying adjectives. As a result of such studies, linguists agree that in case of the need to premodify a noun with more than one adjective, each of them representing one of the semantic categories: 1. "opinion", 2. "size", 3. "shape", 4. "age", 5. "colour", 6. "origin", 7. "religion", 8. "material", the adjectives must follow the order above mentioned. Interestingly, similar types of restrictions have been reported in numerous unrelated languages such as Hungarian, German, French (where the order of modifying adjectives is a mirror reflection of that in English), Chinese, and many others, which indicates a universal character of the phenomenon. Polish grammar books claim, however, that there are no similar restrictions in Polish. Below, in section one, I report on a contrastive Polish-English study, which shows that in Polish restrictions on the order of the semantic classes of premodifying adjectives similar to those in English are clearly visible statistically, while in English they are not as strict as it is commonly believed. In a very short section two, I mention some classical explanations of the phenomenon. In section three, I account for the phenomenon studied based on the procedural model of language introduced by Zielinska (2007a, 2007b), an approach, which explains the issue better than the previous research known to me has done.