• Title/Summary/Keyword: sentential subject

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Why Are Sentential Subjects Not Allowed in Seem-type Verbs in English?

  • Jang, Youngjun
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.55 no.6
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    • pp.1245-1261
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    • 2009
  • The purpose of this paper is to show the internal structure of the socalled sentential subject constructions in English. The constructions that we examine in this paper are such as It seems that John failed in the syntax exam vs. *That John failed in the syntax exam seems and It really stinks that the Giants lost the World Series vs. That the Giants lost the World Series really stinks. As seen above, the English verb seem does not tolerate the sentential subject. This is in sharp contrast to other English verbs such as suck, blow, bite, and stink, which do allow the sentential subject. There are several issues regarding these constructions. First, where is the sentential subject located? Second, is the sentential subject assigned structural Case? Third, is the sentential subject extraposed or does it remain in its base-generated complement position? Fourth, is the sentential subject a base-generated topic in the specifier position of CP, as Arlenga (2005) claims? In this paper, we argue that sentential subjects are base-generated in the specifier of the verbal phrase in case of stink-type verbs, while they are licensed as a complement to verbs like seem. We also argue that a sentential subject can be raised in the seem-type verbal constructions, if it were part of the complement small clause.

Anaphoricity Determination of Zero Pronouns for Intra-sentential Zero Anaphora Resolution (문장 내 영 조응어 해석을 위한 영대명사의 조응성 결정)

  • Kim, Kye-Sung;Park, Seong-Bae;Park, Se-Young;Lee, Sang-Jo
    • Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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    • v.37 no.12
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    • pp.928-935
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    • 2010
  • Identifying the referents of omitted elements in a text is an important task to many natural language processing applications such as machine translation, information extraction and so on. These omitted elements are often called zero anaphors or zero pronouns, and are regarded as one of the most common forms of reference. However, since all zero elements do not refer to explicit objects which occur in the same text, recent work on zero anaphora resolution have attempted to identify the anaphoricity of zero pronouns. This paper focuses on intra-sentential anaphoricity determination of subject zero pronouns that frequently occur in Korean. Unlike previous studies on pair-wise comparisons, this study attempts to determine the intra-sentential anaphoricity of zero pronouns by learning directly the structure of clauses in which either non-anaphoric or inter-sentential subject zero pronouns occur. The proposed method outperforms baseline methods, and anaphoricity determination of zero pronouns will play an important role in resolving zero anaphora.

A Pragmatic Approach to Ellipsis in Russian and Polish Colloquial and Informal Texts of the Novel "Exit to the South" (러시아어와 폴란드어 문학텍스트 내 생략의 화용적 분석 - 므로제크의 "남쪽으로의 도주"를 중심으로 -)

  • Chung, Jung Won
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.33
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    • pp.407-459
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    • 2013
  • The paper pragmatically analyzes ellipsis in Russian and Polish colloquial and informal texts. The famous Polish writer Sławomir $Mro{\dot{z}}ek^{\prime}s$ "Exit to the South", written in Polish and Russian is used as a material for the analysis. Russian and Polish ellipsis in colloquial and informal texts have in common that the givenness and subjecthood of the elliptical co-referent play a crucial role. However, the ellipsis in two languages also has differences in many ways. Above all, in the Polish texts of colloquial and informal style, a theme is likely to be elliptical and the coreferential relation reaches to an extra-sentential antecedent, while the ellipsis in analysed Russian texts in most cases requires coordinate, subordinate or relative clauses, and the elliptical co-referent tends to have an intra-sentential antecedent. The ellipsis of the theme-subject is unmarked in Polish, where every verbal form has an ending denoting person. Unlike formal style which often allows explicit noun subject, Polish text of colloquial and informal style prefer null form of the subject in most cases. If Polish sentences have explicit theme-subjects, they disambiguate intervening and main themes, and indicate the contrast, the focus, the introduction of new narratives or the change of speaker's point of view. Sometimes direct speeches and deictic pronouns also need explicit theme-subjects in Polish sentences. On the other hand, the ellipsis of the theme-subject is marked in Russian even in colloquial and informal texts. The theme-subject can be deleted in Russian colloquial and informal texts, if the subject is a form of the first or the second person, or if the aspect and the tense of the antecedent sentence's verb are the same as those of the given sentence's verb and both the antecedent and the coreferential word have the nominative case.

The effect of syntatic and pragmatic Constraints on Sentential Representaition and Memory Accessibility (통사적 제약과 화용적 제약이 문장의 표상과 기억접근에 미치는 효과)

  • Kim, Sung-Il;Lee, Jae-Ho
    • Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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    • v.6 no.2
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    • pp.97-116
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    • 1995
  • This study was conducted to investigate how syntaction and pragmatic constraints influence the sentential representation and memory accessibility. In order to seperate the syntactic constraints from the pragmatic constraint from the pragmatic constraints,the syntactic role of constituent in the sentence (subject or object) and the order of mention(first or second) were manipulted.After each sentence was presented by RSVP procedure,the probe recognition time was measured to investigate memory accessibility.In Experiment 1,in which SOA interval was 255ms,it was found that the subject of a sentece were more accessible than the object and participants first in a sentence were more accessible than participants mentioned later.However, in Experiment 2,in which SOA interval was 1540ms,it was found that participants mentioned first in a sentence were more accessible than participants mentioned later while there was no significant difference between the subject and object of a sentece.These results suggest that the syntactic and pragmatic constraints have an independent effect on the initial senential representation at the early stage of constructing representation,but as time passes only the pragmatic constraints influence sentential representation.These results also support a theoretical position which assumes that sentential representation is constructed through the process of convergent statisfaction of multiple constraints.

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A study of English affixes: Concentrated on the affixes -en and -ing (영어의 접사 연구: 접사 -en, -ing 를 중심으로)

  • Park, Soon-Bong
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.15 no.3
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    • pp.301-314
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    • 2009
  • This study explores the function of the affixes -en and -ing that could influence the theta-roles of verbs to which the affixes are attached. The two affixes often appear in the synthetic compounds in English. The results are as follows. First, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed, which is proposed as Theta-linking Principle: that is, the affixes -en and -ing link the theta-role realized in the subject of the verb to the noun followed. Second, in the synthetic compounds including the affixes -en and -ing, the left element must not be the subject of the verb, which is the Synthetic Compound Constraint. And the affix -er link thematic roles of the sentential subject, such as Agent, Instrument. Thus, this study aims to find out the function of the affixes on the point of lexical functional approach.

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Copy Raising Construction in English: A Usage-based Perspective

  • Kim, Jong-Bok
    • Language and Information
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    • v.16 no.2
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    • pp.1-15
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    • 2012
  • In accounting for the so-called copy raising (CR) in English, the movement perspective has assumed that the embedded subject of the CR verb's sentential complement is raised to the matrix subject, leaving behind its pronominal copy. This kind of movement-based analysis raises both empirical and analytical issues, when considering variations in the pronominal copy constraint. This paper investigates the actual uses of the construction, using online-available corpora. Based on this corpus search, we classify two different types of copy raising predicates (genuine and perception), and discuss their grammatical properties in detail. We suggest that the simple copying rule couched upon movement operations is not enough to capture great variations in the uses of the construction, and show that interpretive constraints, e.g., perceptual characterization condition, play an important role in licensing the construction.

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An Analysis of Complement Structures of a Sentence in Indonesian: Based on the Analyses of Current Studies (인도네시아어 보어 문장구조 분석: 학자들 시각 분석을 토대로)

  • IM, Youngho
    • The Southeast Asian review
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    • v.28 no.4
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    • pp.223-252
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    • 2018
  • The purpose of this paper is to substantially analyse the patterns of complements considering the aspects of not only syntax but also morphology since the concept of complement has been used as a term to analyse the components of a sentence. However, it cannot be denied that there seemed to be limitations due to the partial explanation or different explanations of the same sentence. Thus, this paper aims at dealing with the close relation between sentential components and suffixes to examine the sentence patterns; subject, predicate, object, complement, and adjunct focusing on the terms of complement which has been seen problematic due to incomplete explanations and different interpretations of the same sentence. Finally, this paper synthesises various opinions of many scholars and integrates them to get explicit and practical patterns of complement of a sentence based on not only syntax but also morphology through close relation between sentential components and morphological suffixes.

An English Tough-construction Resolution: A Minimalist Account

  • Hong, Sung-Shim
    • Language and Information
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    • v.13 no.1
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    • pp.127-143
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    • 2009
  • Tough-construction is, undoubtedly, one of the most puzzling syntactic problems in the history of transformational grammar. Various approaches have been proposed including Deletion approaches (Akmajian, 1972; Lasnik and Fiengo, 1974) and movement approaches. Among the movement approaches, Chomsky (1977; 1981) argues for movement of null Operator, and Hornstein (2001) argues for a two-step movement equipped with Sideward movement. Most recently, Schueler (2004) and Hartman (2009) each have also argued for a kind of movement approach. With the development of the Minimalist syntax (Chomsky, 1995; Chomsky, 2000; Chomsky, 2001), tough-construction, an age old problem in the description of grammar, turns into another round toward to a more satisfactory answer. By examining the most recent competing analyses of tough-constructions, this paper defends and extends Schueler's (2004) analysis, rather than Hartman's (2009) two step movement approach. Furthermore, this paper proposes that tough-subject originates from the intermediate CP internal Spec-TopicP position rather than from the iterated CP layer (Authier, 1992). This approach has more descriptive power than it was originally argued for in Schueler (2004) and is a step closer toward Minimalism insofar as the conception of government is no longer utilized.

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The Philosophy and Linguistics of Dao : the Ancient Chinese Philosophy and Language (도의 철학과 도의 언어학 -고대 중국의 철학과 언어-)

  • 정재현
    • Lingua Humanitatis
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    • v.5
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    • pp.109-126
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    • 2003
  • The aim of this paper is to elucidate ancient Chinese philosophy and linguistics through the concept of the Dao. Ancient Chinese thought had developed together with ancient Chinese theories of language and the linguistic features of Classical Chinese. The concept of the Dao served as an intermediary among them. The Dao which ancient Chinese philosophers sought for has several characteristics: ethical normativity, wholeness, dynamicity, non-reducibility. Linguistic studies also revealed them. The following linguistic features of Classical Chinese are the cause and/or the effect of such Dao-based philosophy and linguistics: No explicit subject-predicate sentential structure, no parts of speech, heavy reliance on the word order and context for meaning determination, no explicit distinction between compound words and a sentence, the pictographic or the ideographic features of Chinese graphs, and non-existence of a copula.

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A Constraint-based Approach to English Gerunds

  • Kim, Yong-Beom
    • Language and Information
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    • v.7 no.2
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    • pp.117-137
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    • 2003
  • This paper attempts to provide an alternative analysis involving categorical issues related to English gerunds. Especially, this paper rejects Maulof's approach that creates a new syntactic category gerund by mixing nominal and verbal categories. This paper identifies two syntactic structures in English gerunds: nominal gerunds and verbal gerunds. This distinction is based on syntactic and semantic characteristics of each type and is intended to account for the external distribution and endocentricity of the construction. Treating verbal gerunds syntactically as verbal categories, this paper proposes that English verbal gerunds act like other verbal categories such as infinitives whereas nominal gerunds behaves much like derived nominals. This paper proposes a few lexical rules that can take care of the two types of gerunds. The proposal can be extended to prepositional complements as well as sentential subject positions. This proposal not only resolves the issues involving distributional properties of the gerund construction but also captures syntactic parallelism observable between gerunds and other verbal constructions in English.

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