Construction Grammar holds that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size. In particular, there may be phrases that have particular meanings that are not predictable from the words that they contain, but which are nonetheless not purely idiosyncratic. In addressing this observation, some construction grammarians have not only weakened the word/phrase distinction, but also denied the lexicon/grammar distinction. In this paper, we consider the word/phrase and lexicon/grammar distinction in light of LexicalFunctional Grammar and its Lexical Integrity Principle. We show that it is not necessary to remove the word/phrase distinction or the lexicon/grammar distinction to capture constructional effects, although we agree that there are important generalizations involving constructions of all sizes that must be captured at both syntactic and semantic levels. We use LFG's templates, bundles of grammatical descriptions, to factor out grammatical information in such a way that it can be * The authors contributed equally and are listed in purely alphabetical order. This paper is a revised and expanded version of Asudeh et al. (2008). We gratefully acknowledge the support of the following grants: an Early Researcher Award from the Province of Ontario (Asudeh), Leverhulme Research Fellowship #RF-2012-295 (Dalrymple), NSERC Individual Discovery Grant #371969 (Asudeh), and SSHRC Standard Research Grant #410-2010#410- -1841. For helpful comments, we thank the audience at LFG08, in particular Kersti Börjars, MarieElaine van Egmond, Dag Haug, Helge Lødrup, and Nigel Vincent. We also thank the audience at SE-LFG 5. For comments on earlier drafts of this paper, we are grateful to Elizabeth Christie, Ray Jackendoff, Stefan Müller, and Ivan Sag. Any remaining errors are our own. Lastly, we thank the editors, staff, and reviewers at JLM. Journal of Language Modelling Vol 1, No 1 (2013), pp. 1-54Ash Asudeh et al. invoked either by words or by construction-specific phrase structure rules. Phrase structure rules that invoke specific templates are thus the equivalent of phrasal constructions in our approach, but Lexical Integrity and the separation of word and phrase are preserved. Constructional effects are captured by systematically allowing words and phrases to contribute comparable information to LFG's level of functional structure; this is just a generalization of LFG's usual assumption that "morphology competes with syntax" (Bresnan, 2001). 1 words, constructions, and the lexiconThe observation that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size forms the basis for Construction Grammar (Fillmore, 1988; Fillmore et al., 1988; Kay and Fillmore, 1999; Goldberg, 1995 Goldberg, , 2006 Goldberg and Jackendoff, 2004; Michaelis, 2010;Sag, 2010;Boas and Sag, 2012). 1A meaning that is associated with a word or a part of a word may also be associated with a phrasal structure in the same language, or in another language. Construction Grammar takes the structure and organization of the collecti...
Animacy influences the patterns of subject-verb agreement marking in many languages, including Persian and Inari Saami. In Persian, animate plural subjects trigger plural agreement on the verb, whereas inanimate subjects may or may not trigger agreement. The variation is governed by factors such as personification, agency and distributivity. In Inari Saami, verbs fully agree with human subjects and verbs partially agree with inanimate subjects. Verbs may or may not agree with subjects referring to animals. We argue that the intricate interaction between biological animacy and grammatical agreement in these two languages warrants careful consideration of the tripartite distinction between biological animacy in the world, our conceptualization of animacy and formal animacy features in the grammar.
Aims and Objectives: This study investigates the effects of code-switching on vowel quality, pitch and duration among English–French bilinguals. Code-switching has been claimed to influence the morphology, syntax and lexicon, but not the phonology of the switched language. However, studies on voice-onset time have found subtle phonetic effects of code-switching, even though there are no categorical phonological effects. We investigate this further through the following three questions: (1) Are F1 and F2 influenced in the process of code-switching? (2) Are code-switched words hyper-articulated? (3) Does code-switching have an effect on vowel duration before voiced and voiceless consonants? Methodology: To address our research questions we relied on an insertional switching method where words from one language were inserted into carrier phrases of the other to simulate English–French code-switching environments. Bilingual speakers were recorded while they read code-switched sentences as well as sentences that did not involve code-switching, that is, monolingual sentences. Data and Analysis: The vowels of target words in the recorded utterances were compared – code-switched contexts against monolingual contexts – for vocalic duration, F0, F1 and F2. Findings/Conclusions: Like previous voice-onset time studies, our results indicate that code-switching does not shift the phonology to that of the embedded language. We did, however, find subtle lower level phonetic effects, especially in the French target words; we also found evidence of hyper-articulation in code-switched words. At the prosodic level, target switch-words approached the prosodic contours of the carrier phrases they are embedded in. Originality: The approach taken in this study is novel for its investigation of vowel properties instead of voice-onset time. Significance: This new approach to investigating code-switching adds to our understanding of how code-switching affects pronunciation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.