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Object and subject Heavy-NP shift in Arabic
Mohamed, Emad
Mohamed, Emad
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2014-12-31
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Abstract
In order to examine whether Arabic has Heavy Noun Phrase Shifting (HNPS), I have extracted from the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank a data set in which a verb governs either an object NP and an Adjunct Phrase (PP or AdvP) or a subject NP and an Adjunct Phrase. I have used binary logistic regression where the criterion variable is whether the subject/object NP shifts, and used as predictor variables heaviness (the number of tokens per NP, adjunct), part of speech tag, verb disposition (ie. whether the verb has a history of taking double objects or sentential objects), NP number, NP definiteness, and the presence of referring pronouns in either the NP or the adjunct. The results show that only object heaviness and adjunct heaviness are useful predictors of object HNPS, while subject heaviness, adjunct heaviness, subject part of speech tag, definiteness, and adjunct head POS tags are active predictors of subject HNPS. I also show that HNPS can in principle be predicted from sentence structure.
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Mohamed, E. (2014) Object and subject Heavy-NP shift in Arabic. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 2, pp. 23-33. Retrieved from https://ricl.aelinco.es/index.php/ricl/article/view/27
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Journal article
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en
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© 2014 The Author. Published by Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics AELINCO. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence.
The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.02.03
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2243-4712
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2243-4712