1,720,987 research outputs found
Distributionally restricted items:Acquisition and beyond
No full textThis paper explores the learnability of English indefinite any, Dutch modal verb hoeven, and Mandarin Chinese (WH-)indefinite/pronoun shenme. These three expressions, belonging to different syntactic categories in different languages, have been referred to as Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in the literature, as they are all restricted to contexts that in some sense count as negative although there are differences in the types of semantic environment that may license them. By investigating the distribution of these three expressions in both child and child-directed speech recorded in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2009), this paper argues that children in their acquisition of these NPIs employ the same conservative widening learning strategy (Berwick and Weinberg 1986; Manzini and Wexler 1987), which prevents them from overgeneration. A two-stage acquisition process is detected for each of the three NPIs. However, distinct learning pathways are found, which we take as evidence indicating different underlying analyses of these expressions at different stages in child language. Taking into consideration the input characteristics, the distributional patterns of the three expressions in adult grammar, and the children’s lexical development, we hypothesize what the analyses of any, hoeven, and shenme at different acquisition stages look like. This provides us with a different view of the nature, or the reason underlying the restricted distribution of these expressions in adult language
Emerging NPIs: The acquisition of Dutch hoeven ‘need’
Full text linkDutch modal verb hoeven ‘need’ is a Negative Polarity Item (NPI) because of its restricted distribution to certain negative contexts only. By investigating the distribution of this NPI in child Dutch, the paper explores a solution to a learnability problem raised by the existence of NPIs: how can a child acquire the limited distribution of an NPI in the absence of both direct and indirect negative evidence? Corpus data collected through CHILDES confirm children’s employment of a conservative widening learning strategy to solve the learnability problem. This strategy entails that children start out with the strictest assumption of hoeven, exhibiting a lexical dependency with the negative marker niet ‘not’, and weaken the assumption down to a less rigid reanalysis of this NPI, associated with an abstract negation in its underlying syntactic representation. The initial learning process turns out to be distribution-based only, i.e., without presuming any innate knowledge of NPIs and their restricted occurrences. However, distributional properties alone are not sufficient for children to reanalyze the NPI. Children’s linguistic knowledge of negative indefinites as exhibiting a decomposable negation plays a crucial role in the subsequent reanalyzing process. The reanalysis emerging shortly after age four signifies exactly how adult speakers analyze the NPI, also explaining hoeven’s strength as a polarity item
Ketelaar rediscovered: The first Dutch grammar of Persian and Hindustani (1698)
Full text linkTo any Indologist, Instructie off Onderwijsinge der Hindoustanse en Persiaanse talen (1698) is instantly recognizable as the iconic ‘first grammar of Hindustani’ – just as the name of its author, Joan Josua Ketelaar, is familiar to scholars of Dutch colonial history. However, the significance of Ketelaar’s work has never been fully appreciated until now. This multifaceted study is a tribute to a rather special Dutch East India Company merchant, and to the exceptional piece of work he created. For the first time, two recently discovered manuscript copies of the text (Utrecht MS and Paris MS) have been examined and compared with the one previously known (Den Haag MS). One of the most significant findings is the identification of models for both the grammatical part and the thematic vocabulary. The origin and purpose of Ketelaar’s work is reflected even in his choice of metalinguistic terminology. From the seemingly random lexical elements, a more complete picture emerges of the socio-cultural landscape in which Ketelaar wrote his introduction to Hindustani and Persian languages. This study aims to put more history into linguistics, and more linguistics into history. It does so by situating the Instructie in the historical context of other linguistic productions created by employees of the Dutch East India Company in Asia, to demonstrate how Ketelaar can be regarded as a link between the academic Latin-speaking community in Europe and the less literate merchants working overseas who sought practical knowledge of foreign languages to be used in daily trade dealings
Semantic versus lexical gender: Synchronic and diachronic variation in Germanic gender agreement
Full text linkPronominal gender agreement typically involves agreement between the pronoun and the lexical gender of the noun to which it refers. However, pronouns sometimes behave differently. In Dutch it is possible for the masculine pronoun hij to refer to a neuter noun such as bord ‘plate’ and for the neuter pronoun het to refer to a common noun such as honing ‘honey’. This pronominal agreement is based on the properties of the referent: masculine pronouns are used with referents that have a high degree of individuation and neuter pronouns with referents that have a low degree of individuation. Semantic agreement based on individuation competes with agreement based on lexical gender in Dutch. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the origin of agreement based on individuation, when it has developed and what factors could be involved in its surfacing. This work consists of four studies that address these questions, including a historical corpus study of Middle Dutch and experimental studies with speakers of German and speakers of Dutch. The results of this dissertation show that the semantic agreement observed in Dutch pronouns relates to an existing semantic interpretation of the genders that possibly reflects the semantic roots of the Germanic genders. It appears that the competition between semantic and lexical gender has long existed and that the frequency with which semantic agreement surfaces, over time and in different Germanic varieties, is connected with the visibility of lexical gender in the noun phrase
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
Inflectional economy and politeness : morphology-internal and morphology-external factors in the loss of second person marking in Dutch
Full text linkThe second person singular pronoun in Middle Dutch was du. The pronoun du combined with finite verbs ending in the suffixs. Both the pronoun du and the suffixs are lost in Modern Dutch. The loss of the pronoun and the suffix is related: there is no variant of Dutch that has a suffix s that does not also have the pronoun du or vice versa. The question is how we should understand this combined loss of the pronoun and the suffix. The central claim in this book is that the decrease in the use of the pronoun du (combining with the suffixs) is driven by politeness. The plural and polite pronoun gi (combining with the suffix t) came to be used in an increasing number of contexts. Although we can understand the decrease of the pronoun du and the suffixs as the result of politeness, the loss of both the pronoun and the suffix is driven by inflectional economy. The suffix that the pronoun gi combined with was more economical than the suffix that du combined with. This claim is supported by data on synchronic and diachronic variation in Dutch. This study is of interest to scholars working in the field of historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics and inflectional morphology
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
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