Syntactic Categories in Tukang Besi

Structure is not syntax: passive functions in Tukang Besi

Structure Is Not Syntax: Passive Functions in Tukang Besi

The passive construction in Tukang Besi demonstrates a striking break between the morphosyntactically coded properties of its argument and the syntactic privileges that are displayed (or, rather, not displayed) by that argument. An analysis in terms of very simple predicate logic is advanced that not only accounts for the passive data very simply, but makes a number of other surprising predicti...

POc *ma- and the Adjectives: Oceanic as Seen through Possibly Productive Morphology in Tukang Besi

An article in volume 40 of this journal discusses the history of the suf2x *main Oceanic languages, and compares the functions found in these languages with those attested in some non-Oceanic Austronesian languages. The current article adds some re2nements based on a careful consideration of data from Tukang Besi, and provides a basis for questioning the simple bipartite divisions employed in c...

Reading behavior predicts syntactic categories

It is well-known that readers are less likely to fixate their gaze on closed class syntactic categories such as prepositions and pronouns. This paper investigates to what extent the syntactic category of a word in context can be predicted from gaze features obtained using eye-tracking equipment. If syntax can be reliably predicted from eye movements of readers, it can speed up linguistic annota...

Early Acquisition of Syntactic Categories Page 1 Early Acquisition of Syntactic Categories: A Formal Model

We propose an explicit, incremental strategy by which children could group words with similar syntactic privileges into discrete, unlabeled categories. This strategy, which can discover lexical ambiguity, is based in part on a generalization of the idea of sentential minimal pairs. As a result, it makes minimal assumptions about the availability of syntactic knowledge at the onset of categoriza...