Animacy in Grammar and Discourse

Dahl, Östen; Fraurud, Kari

doi:10.1075/pbns.38.04dah

Cited by 110 publications

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“…For further discussion of the intricate connections between animacy, givenness, topichood, and even semantic roles, see Comrie (1989: 198f. ), Dahl & Fraurud (1996), and Givó n (1984b: 364).…”

Section: A C C O U N T I N G F O R T H E a S Y M M E T R I E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

The English dative alternation: The case for verb sensitivity

2008

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We challenge the predominant view of the English dative alternation, which takes all alternating verbs to have two meanings : a caused possession meaning realized by the double object variant and a caused motion meaning realized by the to variant. Instead, we argue that verbs like give and sell only have a caused possession meaning, while verbs like throw and send have both caused motion and caused possession meanings. We show that the caused possession meaning may be realized by both variants. Concomitantly, we argue that verbs like give, even in the to variant, lack a conceptual path constituent, and instead have a caused possession meaning which can be understood as the bringing about of a ' have' relation. We reassess evidence for alternative approaches adduced from inference patterns and verb-argument combinations and demonstrate how our verb-sensitive analysis, when combined with an account of variant choice, provides a more insightful explanation of this data, while having wider coverage. Our investigation affirms proposals that a verb's own meaning plays a key role in determining its argument realization options. To conclude, we consider the crosslinguistic implications of our study, attempting to explain why so many languages lack a true dative alternation. A V E R B -S E N S I T I V E A P P R O A C H T O T H E D A T I V E A L T E R N A T I O NAny analysis of the English dative alternation must address the question of what gives rise to this alternation, particularly as it is not found in all languages. This alternation involves verbs that show two realizations of apparently the same arguments, as illustrated with give and throw in (1) and (2), respectively. We refer to these two argument realization patterns as [1] We have had many opportunities to present this material, and we are grateful to the audiences for their comments and questions. We thank all those who have discussed this paper with us or provided extensive comments on earlier versions, including

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Section: A C C O U N T I N G F O R T H E a S Y M M E T R I E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

The English dative alternation: The case for verb sensitivity

2008

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“…It is not surprising then that animacy affects how people communicate about the world. Animacy expresses itself in some form or another in the majority of the world's languages (e.g., Dahl & Fraurud, 1996). In English, for example, animate entities are usually produced as subjects and in early sentence positions (e.g., Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000), mirrored by processing costs for sentence-initial inanimate objects during comprehension (e.g., Weckerly & Kutas, 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

2013

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a b s t r a c tThe animacy distinction is deeply rooted in the language faculty. A key example is differential object marking, the phenomenon where animate sentential objects receive specific marking. We used eventrelated potentials to examine the neural processing consequences of case-marking violations on animate and inanimate direct objects in Spanish. Inanimate objects with incorrect prepositional case marker 'a' ('al suelo') elicited a P600 effect compared to unmarked objects, consistent with previous literature. However, animate objects without the required prepositional case marker ('el obispo') only elicited an N400 effect compared to marked objects. This novel finding, an exclusive N400 modulation by a straightforward grammatical rule violation, does not follow from extant neurocognitive models of sentence processing, and mirrors unexpected ''semantic P600'' effects for thematically problematic sentences. These results may reflect animacy asymmetry in competition for argument prominence: following the article, thematic interpretation difficulties are elicited only by unexpectedly animate objects.

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“…The importance of these scales in linguistics has been discussed (among others) in relation to the choice between the Saxon genitive and the of -genitive (Rosenbach 2002), between active and passive voice (Rosenbach 2003) and between pronominal and full noun reference (Dahl and Fraurud 1996). Aissen (2003) has convincingly shown that prominence hierarchies play a role in the markedness of overt subject/object case marking.…”

Section: Prototypical Properties Of Subjects and Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of prominence scales for the disambiguation of grammatical functions in Russian

Lobanova

2011

Russ Linguist

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Recent studies on Norwegian, German, and English show that the ordering of constituents in transitive sentences depends on their animacy, definiteness, pronominalization and length. It has further been suggested that these properties can be used to predict grammatical functions of NPs. We examine whether these properties play the same role in Russian, a language with a rather free word order and a rich morphologically-marked case system.In a corpus-based study, we analyzed 300 SVO and 300 OVS sentences taken from a novel and a newspaper. The results suggest that animacy and pronominalization can be used to predict the position of constituents, but not their grammatical functions. When the preverbal position coincided with the subject position (SVO), the probability of animate NP to be the subject was the same as its probability to be initialized. Pronominalization was a reliable indicator of subjecthood in SVO sentences but a strong predictor of objecthood in OVS sentences. Thus, when case-marking distinguishes between grammatical functions, word order primarily indicates information structure allowing marked constituents in a marked OVS order. This is not taken into account by approaches that use such properties for the disambiguation of grammatical functions.Аннотация Недавние исследования в норвежском, немецком и английском языках показали, что порядок слов в переходных предложениях зависит от одушевленно-сти, определенности и длины составляющих их фразовых групп. Более того, было предложено, что эти признаки можно использовать для определения грамматических функций именных групп. Данная статья посвящена анализу этих признаков и их влия-нию на порядок слов в русском языке, характеризующимся относительно свободным порядком слов и богатой морфологической системой падежей.I am deeply grateful to Henk Zeevat for bringing up this topic to my attention and patiently waiting for the results. I am also thankful to Gerlof Bouma, Peter de Swart and Jennifer Spenader for reading earlier versions of the paper and providing extensive comments and to Maria Filiouchkina-Krave and Elena Tribushinina for giving useful comments on a short notice. Finally, I am sincerely thankful to the anonymous reviewers.A. Lobanova ( ) Artificial Intelligence Department, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: a.lobanova@ai.rug.nl 126 A. Lobanova В корпусном исследовании были рассмотрены 300 SVO и 300 OVS предложений из нарратива и газеты. Результаты исследования продемонстрировали, что в русском языке одушевленность и прономинализация указывают позицию именных групп, но не определяют их грамматические функции. Так, только когда предглагольная позиция совпадает с позицией подлежащего (SVO предложения), одушевленность может быть использована для определения грамматических функций именной группы. Прономи-нализация оказалась существенным индикатором подлежащего в SVO предложениях, но еще более значимым индикатором дополнения в OVS предложениях. Данные ре-зультаты подчеркивают, что в языках, в которых падежи различаю...

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Animacy in Grammar and Discourse

Cited by 110 publications

References 0 publications

The English dative alternation: The case for verb sensitivity

The English dative alternation: The case for verb sensitivity

Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

The role of prominence scales for the disambiguation of grammatical functions in Russian

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