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Extended Projection Principle
The extended projection principle (EPP) is a linguistic hypothesis about subjects. It was proposed by Noam Chomsky as an addendum to the projection principle. The basic idea of the EPP is that clauses must contain a noun phrase or determiner phrase in the subject position (i.e. in the specifier of a tense phrase or inflectional phrase or in the specifier of a verb phrase in languages in which subjects don't raise to TP/IP, e.g. Welsh). Details Most verbs require meaningful subjects—for example, "kick" in "Tom kicked the ball" takes the subject "Tom". However, other verbs do not require (and in fact, do not permit) meaningful subjects—for example, one can say "it rains" but not "the sky rains". The EPP states that regardless of whether the main predicate assigns a meaningful theta role to a subject, a subject must be present syntactically. As a result, verbs that do not assign external theta roles will appear with subjects that are either dummy pronoun A dummy pronoun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguistics is concerned with both the cognitive and social aspects of language. It is considered a scientific field as well as an academic discipline; it has been classified as a social science, natural science, cognitive science,Thagard, PaulCognitive Science, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). or part of the humanities. Traditional areas of linguistic analysis correspond to phenomena found in human linguistic systems, such as syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences); semantics (meaning); morphology (structure of words); phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages); phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language); and pragmatics (how soc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Theta Role
In generative grammar, a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb ''put'' requires three arguments (i.e., it is trivalent). The formal mechanism for implementing a verb's argument structure is codified as theta roles. The verb ''put'' is said to "assign" three theta roles. This is coded in a theta grid associated with the lexical entry for the verb. The correspondence between the theta grid and the actual sentence is accomplished by means of a bijective filter on the grammar known as the theta criterion. Early conceptions of theta roles include (Fillmore called theta roles "cases") and . Theta roles are prominent in government and binding theory and the standard theory of transformational grammar. Thematic relations The term "theta role" is often used interchangeably with the term thematic relations (particularly in main ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Pro-sentence
A pro-sentence is a sentence where the subject pronoun has been dropped and therefore the sentence has a null subject. Overview Languages differ within this parameter, some languages such as Italian and Spanish have constant pro-drop, Finnish and Hebrew for example are partial pro-drop languages and Japanese and Tamil fall into the category of discourse or radical pro-drop languages. There are also languages such as English, German and Swedish that only allow pro-drop within very strict stylistic conditions. A pro-sentence is a kind of pro-form and is therefore anaphoric. In English, ''yes'', ''no'' and ''okay'' are common pro-sentences. In response to the question "Does Mars have two moons?", the sentence "Yes" can be understood to abbreviate "Mars does have two moons." Pro-sentences are sometimes seen as grammatical interjections, since they are capable of very limited syntactical relations. But they can also be classified as a distinct part of speech, given that (othe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Null-subject Language
In linguistic typology, a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject; such a clause is then said to have a null subject. In the principles and parameters framework, the null subject is controlled by the pro-drop parameter, which is either on or off for a particular language. Typically, null-subject languages express person, number, and/or gender agreement with the referent on the verb, rendering a subject noun phrase redundant. For example, in Italian the subject "she" can be either explicit or implicit: The subject "(s)he" of the second sentence is only implied in Italian. English and French, on the other hand, require an explicit subject in this sentence. Of the thousands of languages in the world, a considerable number are null-subject languages, from a wide diversity of unrelated language families. They include Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Berber, Bengali, Catalan/Valencian, Chinese, Estonian, F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Syntactic Movement
Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of ''discontinuous constituents'' or ''displacement''. Some constituents appear to have been displaced from the position in which they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial and is associated with so-called ''transformational'' or ''derivational'' theories of syntax (such as transformational grammar, government and binding theory, minimalist program). Representational theories (such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, construction grammar, and most dependency grammars), in contrast, reject the notion of movement and often instead address discontinuities with other mechanisms including graph reentrancies, feature passing, and type shifters. Illustration Movement is the traditional means of explaining discontinuities such as wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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PRO (linguistics)
In generative linguistics, PRO (called "big PRO", distinct from ''pro'', "small pro" or "little pro") is a pronominal determiner phrase (DP) without phonological content. As such, it is part of the set of empty categories. The null pronoun PRO is postulated in the subject position of non-finite clauses. One property of PRO is that, when it occurs in a non-finite complement clause, it can be bound by the main clause subject ("subject control") or the main clause object ("object control"). The presence of PRO in non-finite clauses lacking overt subjects allows a principled solution for problems relating to binding theory. Within government and binding theory, the existence and distribution of PRO followed from the PRO theorem, which states that PRO may not be governed. More recent analyses have abandoned the PRO theorem. Instead, PRO is taken to be in complementary distribution with overt subjects because it is the only item that is able to carry ''null case'' which is checked for b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Empty Category
In linguistics, an empty category, which may also be referred to as a covert category, is an element in the study of syntax that does not have any phonological content and is therefore unpronounced.Kosta, Peter, and Krivochen, Diego Gabriel. ''Eliminating Empty Categories: A Radically Minimalist View on Their Ontology and Justification''. Frankfurt: Peter Lang GmbH, 2013. Print. Empty categories exist in contrast to overt categories which are pronounced. When representing empty categories in tree structures, linguists use a null symbol (∅) to depict the idea that there is a mental category at the level being represented, even if the word(s) are being left out of overt speech. The phenomenon was named and outlined by Noam Chomsky in his 1981 Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures, LGB framework, and serves to address apparent violations of Locality (linguistics), locality of selection — there are different types of empty categories that each appear to account for lo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Pro-drop
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of zero or null anaphora. The connection between pro-drop languages, and null anaphora relates to the fact that a dropped pronoun has referential properties, and so is crucially not a null dummy pronoun. Pro-drop is licensed only in languages that have a positive setting of the pro-drop parameter, which allows the null element to be identified by its governor. Pro-drop is a problem when translating to a non-pro-drop language such as English, which requires the pronoun to be added, especially noticeable in machine translation. Amongst other reasons, it can also pose a problem with respect to transfer errors and second language acquisition. Non-pro-drop is an areal f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Dummy Pronoun
A dummy pronoun is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora. Dummy pronouns are used in many Germanic languages, including German and English. Pronoun-dropping languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Turkish do not require dummy pronouns. A dummy pronoun is used when a particular verb argument (or preposition) is nonexistent (it could also be unknown, irrelevant, already understood, or otherwise "not to be spoken of directly") but when a reference to the argument (a pronoun) is nevertheless syntactically required. For example, in the phrase "It is obvious that the violence will continue", ''it'' is a dummy pronoun, not referring to any agent. Unlike a regular pronoun of English, it cannot be replaced by any noun phrase. The term ''dummy pronoun'' refers to the function of a word in a particular sentence, not a property of individual ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Welsh Language
Welsh ( or ) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales, by some in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). Historically, it has also been known in English as "British", "Cambrian", "Cambric" and "Cymric". The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 gave the Welsh language official status in Wales. Both the Welsh and English languages are ''de jure'' official languages of the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd. According to the 2021 census, the Welsh-speaking population of Wales aged three or older was 17.8% (538,300 people) and nearly three quarters of the population in Wales said they had no Welsh language skills. Other estimates suggest that 29.7% (899,500) of people aged three or older in Wales could speak Welsh in June 2022. Almost half of all Welsh speakers consider themselves fluent Welsh speakers and 21 per cent are able to speak a fair amount of Welsh. The Welsh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Subject (grammar)
The subject in a simple English sentence such as ''John runs'', ''John is a teacher'', or ''John drives a car'', is the person or thing about whom the statement is made, in this case ''John''. Traditionally the subject is the word or phrase which controls the verb in the clause, that is to say with which the verb agrees (''John is'' but ''John and Mary are''). If there is no verb, as in ''John what an idiot!'', or if the verb has a different subject, as in ''John I can't stand him!'', then 'John' is not considered to be the grammatical subject, but can be described as the ''topic'' of the sentence. While these definitions apply to simple English sentences, defining the subject is more difficult in more complex sentences and in languages other than English. For example, in the sentence ''It is difficult to learn French'', the subject seems to be the word ''it'', and yet arguably the real subject (the thing that is difficult) is ''to learn French''. A sentence such as ''It was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |