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The songs of many passerine birds consist of notes temporally arranged into vocal sequences following syntactic structures and function both in courtship and territorial defense. Geographic barriers are important drivers of avian speciation and also influence the divergence of song. However, there is relatively little quantitative study of the relationship between geographic barriers and the syntactic structure of vocal sequences. Here, we investigate interspecific divergence in song notes and syntax within the allopatric montane Asian wren-babblers (Spelaeornis). Employing a quantitative analysis of note transitions and co-occurrence using song recordings from publicly accessible databases, we find that Spelaeornis appears to have undergone diversification in song syntax without divergence in note parameters. Broadly, we find three different syntactic structures across the eight species in the genus, each occurring in a different geographic region in Asia, with two species apparently exhibiting intermediate syntax. Species within the genus appear to possess similar song notes, but subgroups confined to different geographic regions (e.g., hills south of the Brahmaputra river) arrange these notes according to different syntactic rules to construct songs. Our computational framework to examine the signal structure and diversification across multiple scales of signal organization may help further our understanding of speciation, signal evolution, and, more broadly, fields such as linguistic diversification.Significance statementIn a genus of birds that live in montane habitats with no geographic overlap, we find that the individual building blocks of song, or notes, have not diverged across species. Instead, we find that species in different geographic regions construct song according to different rules, or syntax. We show that gaps between mountains can thus result in divergence in song syntax independently of divergence in song notes.

Inverse probability adaptation effects (the finding that encountering a verb in an unexpected structure increases long-term priming for that structure) have been observed in both L1 and L2 speakers. However, participants in these studies all had established representations of the syntactic structures to be primed. It therefore remains an open question whether inverse probability adaptation effects could take place with newly encountered L2 structures. In a pre-registered experiment, we exposed participants ( n = 84) to an artificial language with active and passive constructions. Training on Day 1 established expectations for specific co-occurrence patterns between verbs and structures. On Day 2, established patterns were violated for the surprisal group ( n = 42), but not for the control group ( n = 42). We observed no immediate priming effects from exposure to high-surprisal items. On Day 3, however, we observed an effect of input variation on comprehension of verb meaning in an auditory grammaticality judgment task. The surprisal group showed higher accuracy for passive structures in both tasks, suggesting that experiencing variation during learning had promoted the recognition of optionality in the target language.

The paper discusses sentences with coordinating conjunctions and homonymy where it is hard or impossible to build feasible syntactic structures using well-known models: dependency-based parse trees, constituency-based parse trees, and syntactic group models. We suggest an approach to representing syntactic structures with conjunctions. We present features which distinguish our approach from the models under investigation. This paper shows multiple ways of visualization of syntactic structures.

India’s linguistic diversity encompasses twenty-two constitutionally recognized languages, each characterized by rich morphology, extensive inflectional properties, and relatively free word order. Among these, Dogri, an Indo-Aryan language with a Subject–Object–Verb (SOV) structure, stands out for its use of postpositions instead of prepositions to convey spatial relations, a feature that sets it apart from languages like English and Russian. This study explores the syntactic and semantic structures of postpositional locative expressions in Dogri, a language that remains significantly underexplored and underdocumented. The research focuses on two primary objectives: (1) to identify and classify various one-word and two-word locative case markers, both free and bound, that exhibit polysemous relationships in Dogri; and (2) to analyze how these markers semantically and syntactically link nouns or pronouns with locative expressions, enriching sentence meaning. Data were collected through a random survey of 90 native Dogri speakers from Kathua, Jammu, and Reasi districts in Jammu and Kashmir, with 45 participants responding to pictorial questionnaires and 45 participating in interviews. The analysis examines spatial, directional, and temporal locative relations, differentiating static positional references from directional shifts. The findings reveal that Dogri locative markers are predominantly postpositional, with their functions marked through inflectional affixes. This study offers valuable insights into Dogri’s unique linguistic features and contributes to understanding its typological placement within the Indo-Aryan language family.

In this paper, we draw attention to reciprocity in Czech light verb constructions – a language phenomenon, which has not been discussed yet. Reciprocity is contributed to light verb constructions by predictive nouns, as they are the nouns that represent the semantic core of these constructions. Here we focus on reciprocal light verb constructions derived by the syntactic operation of reciprocalization. We show that the complex mapping of semantic participants onto valency complementations, characteristic of reciprocalization, is reflected in reciprocal light verb constructions in the same way as in reciprocal nominal constructions. The main difference between reciprocal nominal constructions and reciprocal light verb constructions lies in the morphosyntactic expression of reciprocalized participants. We demonstrate that surface syntactic changes in reciprocal light verb constructions are regular enough to be described on the rule basis: the rule based generation of reciprocal light verb constructions requires a cooperation of two sets of rules – rules for deep and surface syntactic structure formation of light verb constructions and rules for capturing reciprocity.

This paper investigates how Korean L2 learners of English predict upcoming syntactic structure based on a newly received word during sentence processing Studies like Linzen and Jaeger (2016) suggest that readers use their probabilistic inference developed by their experience of the language to which they have been exposed to predict the most appropriate syntactic structure. This study replicates the experiment for L2ers following Iinzen and Jaeger (ibid.), which investigates the way of predicting syntactic structure by using the subcategorization frame of a verb to understand L1 language processing. We employ the information-complexity metrics such as surprisal, entropy, and entropy reduction to quantify the uncertainty/unexpectedness of a given word that reflects the processing difficulty during sentence processing. The results show that L2ers' tendency to read different regions of a sentence varies. Reading times are longer in the verb and the ambiguous regions of the structurally ambiguous than of the structurally unambiguous sentences. Likewise, reading times are longer in the disambiguating region of the unambiguous than of the ambiguous sentences. Reading times are also longer when the surprisal increases in the disambiguating region. Overall, the findings reveal that such information-complexity metrics as entropy reduction and surprisal play an instrumental role in accounting for the aspects of sentence processing by Korean L2 learners of English.

Ce travail a pour but de présenter une analyse des emplois dits enchérissants de même . Nous tenterons de montrer, dans un premier temps, et dans une démarche antichronologique puisque répondant aux analyses de Culioli (2002) et Leroux (2012) en mobilisant celles d’Anscombre (1973), que ces emplois sont fondamentalement argumentatifs. A l’aide de la Théorie des Blocs Sémantiques, nous montrerons dans un second temps que les mêmes enchérissants peuvent agir de différentes façons, se distinguant par la manière dont le sens de l’énoncé modifié par même se construit. L’objectif sera de décrire ces actions, et de souligner le caractère graduel des mêmes enchérissants . Dans cette perspective, nous nous questionnerons également sur l’origine du sentiment d’inattendu introduit par même . The unexpected, graduality and meaning’s construction. The case of even . In this article we will examine the “outbidding” uses of even . The aim is, in the first place, and in an antichronological process that will oppose Culioli’s (2002) and Leroux’ (2012) analyses to Asncombre’s (1973), to show that the “outbidding” uses of even are fundamentally argumentative. Using the Semantical blocs’ theory, we will show that these uses of even can act in different ways, based on the meaning’s construction of the modified sentence. We aim to describe these actions and underline the gradual nature of the “outbidding” uses of even . In this perspective, we will also discuss the origin of the feeling of “unexpected” that even carries.

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.