“Modal flip” and partial verb phrase fronting in German

Baker, Kathryn

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511554421.005

Cited by 2 publications

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“…That is, a verb which depends on a `clause-final' verb precedes it in German, but can follow it in Dutch. (The facts are presented helpfully, with interesting analytical suggestions, in Baker 1994 andvan Noord &Bouma 1995; for discussion of the WG analysis, see Hudson 1995b.) For example:…”

Section: Dependency Direction: Head-final Structuresmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Here `the children, which is the object of `help', is also positioned as a dependent of `saw'. The obvious way to handle these word order facts is to introduce `universal raising' triggered by verbs such as `see' and auxiliaries (Baker 1994, Hudson 1995b). This allows the parser to attach all the initial NPs to the same anticipated verb, with a view to sorting out the extra dependencies later.…”

Section: Dependency Direction: Head-final Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Predicting syntactic choice in Mandarin Chinese: a corpus-based analysis ofbasentences and SVO sentences

Fang

Liu

2021

Cognitive Linguistics

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This paper investigates the effects of 10 factors on the choice between alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese. These factors are givenness, definiteness, animacy and pronominality of NP2s, NP2 length, VP length, verb sense, syntactic parallelism, dependency distance, and surprisal. Using corpus data and mixed-effects logistic regression modeling, we find that on the one hand, givenness, syntactic parallelism, and the log-transformed ratio of NP2 length and VP length are significant predictors of the choice between ba sentences and SVO sentences. A new NP2, a large length ratio and a parallel construction predict an SVO sentence rather than a ba sentence. On the other hand, dependency distance and surprisal estimated by the trigram model are effective in predicting the choice between naturally occurring ba/SVO sentences and their alternatives. Naturally occurring sentences are more likely to have shorter dependency distances and smaller surprisal values than the converted sentences. The effects of these five factors on syntactic choice are congruent with results of previous studies, which suggests that some determinants of syntactic choice are shared among languages.

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Section: Dependency Direction: Head-final Structuresmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Dependency Direction: Head-final Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%