Head (linguistics)

About: Head (linguistics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2540 publications have been published within this topic receiving 29023 citations. The topic is also known as: nucleus.

Case and NP licensing

Abstract: This paper considers the theory of Case proposed in Pesetsky (1982) and adopted in Chomsky (1986a) and compares it to that proposed in Burzio (1986). Pesetsky's proposal is that a lexical feature of the verb determines whether or not it assigns accusative Case, and that possessing the feature [+Case] is what allows a head to c-select NP complements. I show that this proposal is empirically inadequate since (i) some heads that can assign Case are predicted by Pesetsky to be marked [−Case] and (ii) [+N] heads which do not assign Case differ as to whether they c-select NP complements. Furthermore, Pesetsky's proposal is stipulatory since there is no general way of predicting which V is marked [+Case]. Burzio's proposal that Case is a structural property of all verbs with specific theta properties is more adequate, both empirically and explanatorily. An additional conclusion is that Grimshaw's (1979, 1981) claim that heads subcategorize as well as select semantically is vindicated.

Inclusory Pronominals 1

Abstract: Many Austronesian (and other) languages contain one or more syntactic constructions of the following basic kinds: PETER WE(DUAL) WENT FISHING and/ or PETER WE(DUAL)-WENT FISHING, which can be glossed as 'Peter and I went fishing' or 'I went fishing with Peter'. The independent pronoun or the dependent pronominal (such as an affix) identifies a set of participants that includes the one or those referred to by the lexical noun phrase. Pronominal forms with this function are "inclusory." Constructions with inclusory pronominals have usually been analyzed as coordinate or comitative. The purpose of the paper is a detailed investigation of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the two types of inclusory-pronominal construction found in Toqabaqita, arguing that they are neither coordinate nor comitative. One type is a noun phrase with the inclusory pronoun as its head and the lexical noun phrase as its modifier. In the other type, the inclusory function is borne by a dependent pronominal. It is misma tch in the values of morphosyntactic features that identifies constructions of the latter type as inclusory. This also shows that dependent pronominals may be independently meaningful rather than merely agreement phenomena. 1. INTRODUCTION. Quite a few languages--Austronesian as well as others-- have constructions that are analogous to that found in Toqabaqita, exemplified (in boldface) in (1): [2] (1) Kamareqa doqora-ku meki lae ma-i qusungadi. IDU(EXCL) brother-ISG.PERS IDU(EXCL).FUT go VENIT-at tomorrow 'I and my brother will come tomorrow.' Although the Toqabaqita sentence is best translated as 'I and my brother will come tomorrow', and although it contains a direct counterpart of 'my brother' (doqoraku), it does not contain a first-person singular pronoun. Instead, it contains the first-person dual exclusive independent pronoun kamareqa (and also the first-person dual exclusive future tense subject marker meki, which agrees with the independent pronoun). Importantly, sentence (I) makes a statement about two and only two individuals: the speaker and his/her brother. The independent pronoun identifies the total set of participants (two), and the following lexical noun phrase identifies a subset (the speaker's brother). That is, the referent of the lexical NP is included in the set identified by the pronoun. In the discussion that follows, a pronominal form that identifies a total set of participants, a subset of which is identified by a lexical NP, will be referred to as an "inclusory pronominal." The term "pronominal" is a convenient cover term for independent personal pronouns and various dependent forms that exhibit distinctions that are the same as, or similar to, those found with the independent pronouns, such as subject and object markers; see meki in (I) above. Inclusory pronominals are not special forms distinct from noninclusory pronominals (and "inclusory" is not the same as "inclusive"). The term "inclusory pronoun" will be used to refer specifically to independent personal pronouns that are inclusory. The lexical noun phrase that identifies a subset of the set encoded by an inclusory pronominal will be referred to as the "included noun phrase." The central concern of this study is an investigation of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of constructions with inclusory pronominals, or inclusory constructions for short, in Toqabaqita, an Oceanic language spoken on Malaita, Solomon Islands. [3] I leave it to experts on other languages that have constructions with inclusory pronominals to decide which, if any, of the conclusions reached here are applicable to those languages as well. The structure of the paper is as follows: in section 2, I exemplify and discuss basic types of constructions with inclusory pronominals, two of which are found in Toqabaqita. Section 3 briefly considers some earlier studies of inclusory constructions. …

Morphological processing of Chinese compounds from a grammatical view

Abstract: In the present study, morphological structure processing of Chinese compounds was explored using a visual priming lexical decision task among 21 Hong Kong college students. Two compounding structures were compared. The first type was the subordinate, in which one morpheme modifies the other (e.g., 籃 球 [laam4 kau4, basket-ball, basketball]), similar to most English compounds (e.g., a snowman is a man made of snow and toothpaste is a paste for teeth; the second morpheme is the “head,” modified morpheme). The second type was the coordinative, in which both morphemes contribute equally to the meaning of the word. An example in Chinese is 花 草 (faa1 cou2, flower grass, i.e., plant). There are virtually no examples of this type in English, but an approximate equivalent phrase might be in and out, in which neither in nor out is more important than the other in comprising the expression. For the subordinate Chinese compound words, the same structure in prime and target facilitated the semantic priming effect, whereas for coordinative Chinese compound words, the same structure across prime and target inhibited the semantic priming effect. Results suggest that lexical processing of Chinese compounds is influenced by compounding structure processing.

Prosody-Driven Head-Gesture Animation

Abstract: We present a new framework for joint analysis of head gesture and speech prosody patterns of a speaker towards automatic realistic synthesis of head gestures from speech prosody. The proposed two-stage analysis aims to "learn" both elementary prosody and head gesture patterns for a particular speaker, as well as the correlations between these head gesture and prosody patterns from a training video sequence. The resulting audio-visual mapping model is then employed to synthesize natural head gestures from arbitrary input test speech given a head model for the speaker. Objective and subjective evaluations indicate that the proposed synthesis by analysis scheme provides natural looking head gestures for the speaker with any input test speech.

The Acquisition of Nominal Compounding in Swedish

Abstract: In Swedish, as in other North Germanic languages, compounds are very common and a majority of the novel words in Swedish are compounds. This thesis aims at a presentation of compounding in Swedish and the problems involved in describing compounding, but mainly at an empirically founded description of children's creation and use of novel compounds and developing comprehension of compounds, especially nominal compounds. A Swedish compound contains two ore more word roots that elsewhere may function as independent words. The rightmost word is the head, which means that it determines the compound's gender and is declined for number, definiteness and case, and that the whole word is an instance (typically a hyponym) of the head. The compound is written as one word, and is pronounced with a particular intonation contour, characterized by two peaks. A noun that functions as modifier in a compound sometimes appears in a particular "liaison form". The empirical findings concerning children's acquisition of compounding are based on the following sources: (a) a corpus of around 340 spontaneous novel compounds collected from two children; (b) analysis of 258 novel nominal compounds produced by 10 children (aged between 3;5 and 6;8), who were encouraged to label picture cards.; (c) the results of a pictureidentification experiment where 60 children (aged between 2;0 and 5;4) were asked to interpret 24 novel nominal compounds; and (d) the paraphrases of 18 novel compounds that 70 children were asked to give, 4 years in succession. Some observations and results are that the compound stress pattern is established before my period of investigation, i.e. before age 2; that proper identification of the head is established around age 3; that the deletion of a final -a in a modifying noun is the first liaison form mastered by children; and that many different semantic relationships are attributed by the children to hold between the head noun and the modifying noun.