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Word Order in Paraguayan Guaraní
Full text linkMy honors research project examines word order in Paraguayan Guaraní, i.e. the order in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence are realized. No study of word order has been conducted on Paraguayan Guaraní, and my quantitative study brings Guaraní to bear on cross-linguistic studies of word order. The main research questions I am pursuing are: What word orders are possible in Guaraní and is there a basic word order? Do the factors of grammatical function, animacy, and discourse status affect the placement of arguments? If so, how?
Knowledge of the basic word order of a language is important because it has been found to correlate with other grammatical properties of the language. For example, linguists have observed that there is a relation between basic word order and other properties like the position of adjectives relative to the noun and the type of adposition a language will have: verb-initial languages generally have prepositions, while verb-final languages generally have post-positions.
Grammatical function, animacy, and discourse status have been shown in previous studies to influence the realization of word order. English word order, for example, is strongly constrained by grammatical function; the subject typically comes before the verb, while the object normally follows. In Tojolobal, a Mayan language, word order is influenced by animacy. Of the six possible word orders, there are several that are possible only if certain arguments have a certain type of animacy, such as human or animal. Discourse status, which we measure by looking at definiteness, has also been found to constrain word order. Cayuga, an Iroquoian language, has been shown to realize indefinite noun phrases before definite noun phrases.
This quantitative study overall finds Subject-Verb-Object to be the basic word order of Paraguayan Guaraní, based on the criteria of frequency and disambiguation. I also find that grammatical function and discourse status affect the placement of arguments, while animacy by itself is not much of an influence. When paired together, however, discourse status and animacy do affect the realization of subjects in Paraguayan Guaraní.The Ohio State University Colleges of the Arts and Sciences Honors Committe
Differential Object Marking in Paraguayan Guaraní
Full text linkDifferential Object Marking (DOM), the appearance of a direct object marker on some but not all direct objects in a language, has been the focus of a substantial body of literature. This study analyzes DOM in Paraguayan Guaraní, a language that has not yet been discussed in the DOM literature. I show that object-marking in Guaraní is differential. I then apply two analyses of the distribution of DOM to a corpus of textual Guaraní data, testing the effectiveness of their predictions against the actual distribution of DOM in Guaraní and comparing the success of each analysis. The first analysis is that of Aissen (2003), who proposes prominence as a condition on DOM, where the prominence of an object is how “subject-like” that object is in terms of animacy and definiteness. This prominence-based analysis predicts that highly prominent (subject-like) objects will be object-marked, while low-prominence objects will be unmarked. The second analysis is similar to that of Gerner (2008), who argues that in Yongren Lolo object-marking occurs in clauses in which ambiguity exists as to which NPs fill which grammatical functions. Under this analysis, DOM serves the purpose of disambiguating object from subject. I put both of these analyses to the test against the corpus. I find that both are supported, in that neither of their predictions fail for Guaraní. However, I argue that the ambiguity-based analysis is superior to the prominence-based analysis for Guaraní in terms of coverage, testability, and simplicity, and that an ambiguity-based analysis of DOM is therefore
preferable in the case of Guaraní.No embarg
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Defining crosslinguistic categories : The case of nominal tense (Reply to Nordlinger and Sadler)
No full textThe Semantics and Pragmatics of Right Dislocation: Odd thing, that.
Full text linkThe sentence "She's a smart one, that Diana" is a so-called right dislocation construction: the noun phrase "that Diana" occurs at the right edge of the sentence and the sentence itself only realizes a pronoun ("she") to refer to Diana. This construction is particularly common among British English speakers. Whereas prior research has focused on the structure and interpretation of the construction, my research explores the hypothesis that speakers use the construction when they expect their interlocutors to agree with them about the propositional content of the utterance (e.g., that Diana is a smart person, in the aforementioned example). In summer 2017 I ran an experiment with 38 native British English speakers, administering a survey in which each participant rated the acceptability of a target sentence in context on a 6-point Likert scale. Target sentences varied minimally between right dislocated and non-dislocated variants, and contexts were either such that the speaker would expect the listener to agree with the propositional content of the utterance, or such that the speaker would expect the listener to disagree. Each target sentence was judged within both contexts. While no significant difference was found between the agree and disagree contexts among the right dislocated target sentences as a whole, the variation in response patterns both between participants and between items reveal potential routes for further exploration of right dislocation constructions' social meaning in the future.Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research ScholarshipArts & Sciences International Research GrantNo embargoAcademic Major: ChineseAcademic Major: Linguistic
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Contrastive topics in Paraguayan Guaraní discourse
Full text linkThe empirical basis of current formal semantic/pragmatic analyses of utterances containing contrastive topics are languages in which the expression that denotes the contrastive topic is marked prosodically, morphologically or syntactically, such as English, German, Korean, Japanese or Hungarian (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Szabolcsi 1981; Roberts 1998; Büring 1997, 2003; Lee 1999). Such analyses do not extend to Paraguayan Guaraní, a language in which neither prosody, nor word order, nor the contrastive topic clitic =katu identify the contrastive topic. This article develops a formal pragmatic analysis of contrastive topic utterances in Paraguayan Guaraní and explores cross-linguistic similarities and differences in contrastive topic utterances
Prosodic cues to presupposition projection
Full text linkIn English utterances with factive predicates, the content of the clausal complement of the predicate may project, i.e., taken to be a commitment of the speaker, even when the factive predicate is embedded under an entailment canceling operator (e.g., Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1971; Karttunen 1971). Based on impressionistic judgments, Beaver (2010) and Simons, Beaver, Roberts & Tonhauser (to appear) suggested that whether the content of the complement of an utterance with a factive predicate projects depends on the information structure of the utterance and, since information structure is prosodically marked, on the prosodic realization of the utterance. This paper describes the results of three perception experiments designed to explore the influence of the prosodic realization of an utterance with a factive predicate on the projection of the content of the complement. The results of the experiments suggest that the prosodic realization of such utterances provides a cue to the projectivity of the content of the complement. These findings provide empirical support for the question-based analysis of projection advanced in Simons et al. to appear
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