Basic Sentence Structure Research Articles

Machine Translation Testing via Syntactic Tree Pruning

Machine translation systems have been widely adopted in our daily life, making life easier and more convenient. Unfortunately, erroneous translations may result in severe consequences, such as financial losses. This requires to improve the accuracy and the reliability of machine translation systems. However, it is challenging to test machine translation systems because of the complexity and intractability of the underlying neural models. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel metamorphic testing approach by syntactic tree pruning (STP) to validate machine translation systems. Our key insight is that a pruned sentence should have similar crucial semantics compared with the original sentence. Specifically, STP (1) proposes a core semantics-preserving pruning strategy by basic sentence structures and dependency relations on the level of syntactic tree representation, (2) generates source sentence pairs based on the metamorphic relation, and (3) reports suspicious issues whose translations break the consistency property by a bag-of-words model. We further evaluate STP on two state-of-the-art machine translation systems (i.e., Google Translate and Bing Microsoft Translator) with 1,200 source sentences as inputs. The results show that STP accurately finds 5,073 unique erroneous translations in Google Translate and 5,100 unique erroneous translations in Bing Microsoft Translator (400% more than state-of-the-art techniques), with 64.5% and 65.4% precision, respectively. The reported erroneous translations vary in types and more than 90% of them are not found by state-of-the-art techniques. There are 9,393 erroneous translations unique to STP, which is 711.9% more than state-of-the-art techniques. Moreover, STP is quite effective in detecting translation errors for the original sentences with a recall reaching 74.0%, improving state-of-the-art techniques by 55.1% on average.

Analisis kesalahan struktur kalimat dasar pada keterampilan menulis teks wawancara peserta didik kelas iv sekolah dasar

<p class="16"><em><span>This research aims to describe basic sentence structure errors and describe the factors that cause basic sentence structure errors in writing interview text skills. This research is a descriptive qualitative research. The research subjects were fourth grade students, fourth grade teachers, and the principal of SD Negeri Tegalsari. Data collection techniques used interviews, documentation studies, and observation. The data validity test technique uses source triangulation and technical triangulation. The data analysis technique uses an interactive analysis of the Miles and Huberman model which includes four stages: (1) data collection, (2) data reduction, (3) data presentation, and (4) drawing conclusions. The results showed that the analysis of basic sentence structure errors on the subject indicator (19.23%), predicate indicator (13.46%), object indicator (8.65%), description indicator (45.2%), and complementary indicators (13.46%). Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that the analysis of basic sentence structure errors in the description indicator is the indicator that most errors occur in the use of sentences. The theoretical implications can be used as a reference for further research. The practical implications can help educators understand how students understand basic sentence structures and to improve future learning. </span></em><em></em></p>

Impoverished language in early childhood affects the development of complex sentence structure.

The hypothesis that impoverished language experience affects complex sentence structure development around the end of early childhood was tested using a fully randomized, sentence-to-picture matching study in American Sign Language (ASL). The participants were ASL signers who had impoverished or typical access to language in early childhood. Deaf signers whose access to language was highly impoverished in early childhood (N=11) primarily comprehended structures consisting of a single verb and argument (Subject or Object), agreeing verbs, and the spatial relation or path of semantic classifiers. They showed difficulty comprehending more complex sentence structures involving dual lexical arguments or multiple verbs. As predicted, participants with typical language access in early childhood, deaf native signers (N=17) or hearing second-language learners (N=10), comprehended the range of 12 ASL sentence structures, independent of the subjective iconicity or frequency of the stimulus lexical items, or length of ASL experience and performance on non-verbal cognitive tasks. The results show that language experience in early childhood is necessary for the development of complex syntax. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Previous research with deaf signers suggests an inflection point around the end of early childhood for sentence structure development. Deaf signers who experienced impoverished language until the age of 9 or older comprehend several basic sentence structures but few complex structures. Language experience in early childhood is necessary for the development of complex sentence structure.

Implicit Knowledge Acquisition and Potential Challenges for Advanced Chinese and Spanish EFL Learners: A Word Monitoring Test on English Questions.

This study aims to explore whether advanced EFL learners can acquire implicit knowledge of basic sentence structures, such as English questions. We ran a reaction-time experiment, a word monitoring test experiment to test learners' implicit knowledge by checking advanced EFL learners' grammatical sensitivity to English questions with five types of grammatical errors. The study recruited three groups of participants: native English speakers (n = 12), advanced Chinese EFL learners (n = 32), and advanced Spanish EFL learners (n = 37). Our results revealed that advanced EFL learners had not yet attained native-equivalent implicit grammar knowledge in English questions, despite their English proficiency level. The results also indicated that the learners' different L1 languages do not impact advanced learners' overall implicit knowledge acquisition but constitute influential factors for particular morphosyntactic inflections in English question formation.

Development and Validation of a Basic Sentence Structure Worktext

This study aimed to develop, validate and test a basic sentence structure worktext that would help the students to improve their writing ability by developing mastery on basic sentence structures. The study used mixed-method research employing sequential exploratory strategy. It collected and analyzed qualitative and quantitative data in the development and validation of the worktext. It was carried out in a two-phase manner. Phase 1 was the development of the material, and phase two was the validation process. The validated module was tested to grade 8 students in a public high school in the Division of Pampanga, and the results revealed that the activities present on the worktext are varied. The findings also showed that the worktext contributed in the improvement of the students’ writing performance.
 Keywords: basic sentence structure, sentence-level instruction, worktext

Syntax of Standard English and Bangla: A Bilingual Study of Simple Declarative Sentences

This research paper explores much of the basic and background knowledge of English and Bangla sentence patterns or structures as well as tries to compare and contrast between these two very languages, English and Bangla at the sentential levels. As it is known the concept of basic sentence structures is necessary for classroom teaching and learning to perceive the subtleties of language at the highest unit of grammar, this study is expected to facilitate the understanding of bilingual relationships between them (may be as a native or a foreign language) for researchers, teachers, learners and/or speakers of both the languages. The ideas drawn from the findings in this paper will also help one in the field of translating amid these two languages which is pedagogically very significant as well. For a few dissimilarities, we often notice greatly faulty grammatical constructions both in English and Bangla, when learners or users shift from one to another. So, this study of the two types of sentence patterns along with their components will be of considerable use to many, specially to those who teach, learn or use these languages.

When event knowledge overrides word order in sentence comprehension: Learning a first language after childhood.

Limited language experience in childhood is common among deaf individuals, which prior research has shown to lead to low levels of language processing. Although basic structures such as word order have been found to be resilient to conditions of sparse language input in early life, whether they are robust to conditions of extreme language delay is unknown. The sentence comprehension strategies of post-childhood, first-language (L1) learners of American Sign Language (ASL) with at least 9years of language experience were investigated, in comparison to two control groups of learners with full access to language from birth (deaf native signers and hearing L2 learners who were native English speakers). The results of a sentence-to-picture matching experiment show that event knowledge overrides word order for post-childhood L1 learners, regardless of the animacy of the subject, while both deaf native signers and hearing L2 signers consistently rely on word order to comprehend sentences. Language inaccessibility throughout early childhood impedes the acquisition of even basic word order. Similar to the strategies used by very young children prior to the development of basic sentence structure, post-childhood L1 learners rely more on context and event knowledge to comprehend sentences. Language experience during childhood is critical to the development of basic sentence structure.

The Humble Sentence

The Humble Sentence

Derivational affixes in Japanese and Indonesian

Japanese and Indonesian seen from morphological typology is an agglutinative language in which the morphological processes are done by affixation, ie by adding prefixes, suffixes and infixes. While the basic sequence sentence structure has a SOV sequence pattern for Japanese and SVO for Indonesian language. The predicate filled by the verb is capable of binding arguments in constructing the clause structure, so that there are verbs with one, two and three arguments, it depends on the type of verb. This study is a preliminary study of Japanese and Indonesian derivative verbs: the study of linguistic typology. The Theory of Linguistic Typology is used to analyze the formation of Japanese and Indonesian derivative verbs in which the verb serves as the core of the predicate to bind the argument in constructing the clause structure. From the perspective of linguistic typology, the results of the analysis show that (1) the basic form of Japanese derivative verb formers are adjectives (keiyoushi) and noun verbs, whereas Indonesian derivative verbs are derived from adjectives, nouns and pre-categorical. (2) The Japanese derivation affixes joining the adjective (keiyoushi) are -める meru, -まるmaru, -がるgaru’, -むmu and which joins the noun verb is -するsuru. While the derivational affix of the Indonesian language that joined the nouns are meng-, ber-, ter-, ke-an, ber-an, ber-kan, per-, -i, per-i, per-kan, the affix that joins the adjective are meng-, ber-, ter-, ke-an, ber-an, ber-kan, per-, -kan, per-i, dan –i and the affixes that join the pre-categorical are meng-, ter-, ber-, ber-an, -i,-kan.

ESP Classes: Sharing a Report

English for specific purposes, ESP, has been taught in Iran’s higher educational centers for years. For certain reasons, however, these courses have been marginalized and less exposed to expert’s criticism and evaluation. To evaluate the effectiveness of these courses in assisting the students to achieve the desired educational objectives, non-participant observations of ESP classes in two of the country’s institutions of higher education were carried out. Based on our observations, we found that developing the reading skills was the main objective of these classes. Moreover, it was found that the students in their struggle to comprehend the assigned reading texts had problems in recognizing the basic sentence structure, the grammatical functions of gerunds, polysemous words and passive voice. The level of difficulty of the texts was found to be the source of reading problems as well. Considering the findings from the observed classes, the paper offers some practical suggestions for qualitative promotion of the classes.

초등 4학년에 적용한 영어 네 기본문형 패턴 연습에 따른 학습자 변화 양상

초등 4학년에 적용한 영어 네 기본문형 패턴 연습에 따른 학습자 변화 양상

An Analysis of Variability in Acquisition of Basic Sentence Structures among Japanese EFL Beginners

An Analysis of Variability in Acquisition of Basic Sentence Structures among Japanese EFL Beginners

Getting into shape: the effect of Shape Coding on the spoken language production of two men with chronic aphasia

ABSTRACTBackground: Shape Coding is a visual coding system that has been used to teach English syntax and morphology to school-aged children with language impairment but has the potential to support the language output of people with aphasia. While visual coding has been used effectively in a number of studies targeting basic sentence structure, these approaches are difficult to expand to include more than a limited number of arguments or to encourage individuals to produce more complex sentences. Shape Coding allows the user to work with more complex structures and verb morphology and may be valuable in improving awareness of sentence structure in adults with acquired agrammatism.Aims: The aim of the current study is to investigate whether Shape Coding could improve the verbal output of two adult chronically agrammatic speakers.Methods & Procedures: The study involves two men with chronic non-fluent aphasia, one of whom had previously worked with Shape Coding. Repeated baseline measures were collected three times before eight sessions of therapy and once immediately after the programme. These measured single word, sentence and narrative output, as well as communicative effectiveness. Data were analysed by examining the number of verbs used, the number of arguments included in sentences and the thematic completeness of utterances.Outcomes & Results: For the individual introduced to Shape Coding, improvements in verb retrieval and sentence generation were observed particularly in structured tasks, with the number of obligatory arguments increasing. In tasks requiring more spontaneous production, however, marked difficulties with sentence production remained. The second participant (previously exposed to Shape Coding) was able to produce much richer language after intervention, including a greater number of both obligatory and optional arguments post-therapy, including in the unconstrained tasks. Neither participant made a significant change on the measure of functional communication.Conclusions: This small-scale study shows encouraging signs that Shape Coding has the potential to be of real value to adults with agrammatic aphasia. The intervention had a positive impact on both participants’ output. Anecdotal evidence also suggested that the framework could be used as a prosthesis in everyday conversations, with the shapes acting as an “internal prompt” for generating sentences. More research is needed to determine the optimal amount of Shape Coding therapy needed: a higher dosage over a longer period would give individuals more time to increase familiarity with the shapes; extending the sentence structures included would increase relevance to the person’s communication needs.

Language use of patients with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease: An analysis of basic sentences

Alzheimer's disease (AD) which is the most common cause of dementia, has two subtypes: early-onset and late-onset AD. Early-onset AD affects people younger than age 65 and memory dysfunction, cognitive impairment, executive dysfunction and language problems are relatively more common on patients with early-onset AD. Based on the language disturbances, the aim of this study is to examine basic sentences of patients with early-onset AD by using four different language tests and to compare all the results with a control group. Considering the power analyses, 23 patients with early-onset AD from Dokuz Eylul University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Neurology and an age/education-matched control group are included in this study. The data were analyzed using t test and Mann-Whitney U test. It was found that patients with early-onset AD used more basic sentences in Random Speech test compared to the control group. The other finding was about the nominal and the verbal sentences. It was revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between the patients with earlyonset AD and the control group in terms of nominal sentences in the Picnic Picture description test, Cookie Theft Picture description test and the Story Picture Sequencing test. In terms of verbal sentences, it was found that there was a statistically significant difference between the patients with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and the control group in all language tests. In conclusion, the syntactic ability is preserved in AD. However, working memory problems can make the syntactic processing worse. Due to this process, patients with early-onset AD tend to use basic sentence structures more frequently. Keywords: alzheimer, early-onset alzheimer’s disease, basic sentences, nominal sentences, verbal sentences

Haitian Creole: Structure, Variation, Status, Origin by Albert Valdman

Reviewed by: Haitian Creole: Structure, Variation, Status, Origin by Albert Valdman Sibylle Kriegel Haitian Creole: Structure, Variation, Status, Origin. Albert Valdman. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2015. Pp. xviii + 477. $125.00 (hardcover), $35.00 (paper). Even though the title of the book recalls one that Albert Valdman published in 1978 in French, this is a new work that reflects advances in research over the last forty years. Chapter 1 is a substantial introduction. It gives a general account of the differences between pidgin and creole languages, followed by a sketch of the often violent and unstable history of Haiti, from the arrival of Christopher Columbus until the present day; it then briefly discusses the role of French and Creole in Haiti and lists descriptive [End Page 329] studies of Haitian Creole. Section 1.4 gives very valuable information about Atlantic French-based creoles not often discussed in the linguistic literature. In this section, Valdman mentions poorly known French creoles spoken in the Lesser Antilles such as the variety spoken in Trinidad and Tobago, to which the first description of a creole language by Thomas in 1869 is dedicated, the endangered Guïria Creole spoken in Venezuela, and Karipúna Creole, spoken by indigenous peoples in the northeastern Brazilian state of Amapá. Chapter 2, “The Phonological System” (pp. 58–78), points out that the phonological system of Haitian Creole does not differ greatly from that of French. This chapter prepares the reader for the discussion of spelling in chapter 4. Chapter 3, “Variation in the Forms of Words” (pp. 79–95), deals with morphophonological processes—systematic alternations in the forms of words—that are very frequent in Haitian Creole and differ significantly from those of French. As Valdman points out, awareness of these alternations is central for the development of spelling systems. Chapter 4, “Toward a Systematic Autonomous Spelling” (pp. 95–138), starts with general considerations about spelling systems—specifically, the notion of biuniqueness. In section 4.3, Valdman reviews the history of the development of etymologically based orthographies for Haitian Creole; he takes the opportunity to provide excerpts from older texts, starting with La Passion de Notre Seigneur selon Saint-Jean en Langage Negre, probably written between 1720 and 1740. Section 4.4, on phonemic spelling systems presents the three systematic, autonomous orthographies developed in Haiti since the 1940s, one of which was recognized as official. In the last section of the chapter, Valdman addresses the challenges of morphophonological variation for spelling systems. Chapter 5, “The Structure of the Haitian Creole Lexicon” (pp. 139–65), argues vigorously against the common view that Haitian Creole originated in an impoverished pidgin. Its numerous examples illustrate the rich word formation resources of Haitian Creole, as shown by the most comprehensive dictionary (Valdman, Iskrova, and Hebblethwaite 2007). A review of the variety of mechanisms of lexical renewal achieved by derivation and the creation of compounds shows that Haitian Creole is capable of meeting all the communicative needs of a language on its way to literacy. The chapter also discusses contact phenomena with the neighboring languages, Spanish and English, without neglecting the fact that the main source of loanwords remains French. The next three chapters deal with the syntactic structure of Haitian Creole. Chapter 7, “Basic Sentence Structure” (pp. 189–208), discusses some important features of Haitian Creole predicates, starting with the relative lack of inflectional affixes, the multifunctionality of word classes, and the resulting importance of word order. While these features are shared by almost all creoles, the following section on the copula deals with a feature more specific to Haitian Creole, the syntactic operators ye and se. As in numerous other French-based creoles, reflexivity can be marked either by concepts referring to the human body plus the personal pronoun (kò/tèt + pronoun) or by a direct-object pronoun, and there is no overt passive marking. In chapter 8, “The Verbal System” (pp. 209–52), Valdman addresses some issues of typological comparison; he places Haitian Creole near the analytic pole of a synthetic-to-analytic scale, thus continuing an evolution already present in vernacular French. He then discusses the use of the tense-mode-aspect markers Ø, ap, te, and a...

The evolution of functional left peripheries in Hungarian syntax ed. by Katalin É. Kiss

Reviewed by: The evolution of functional left peripheries in Hungarian syntax ed. by Katalin É. Kiss István Kenesei and Anikó Lipták The evolution of functional left peripheries in Hungarian syntax. Ed. by Katalin É. Kiss. (Oxford studies in diachronic & historical linguistics.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 263. ISBN 9780198709855. $110 (Hb). This is the first English language book on Hungarian diachronic syntax in the generative framework. It summarizes the outstanding achievements of a four-year OTKA (Hungarian Scientific Research Fund) project on diachronic syntax of Hungarian, carried out at the Research Institute for Linguistics under the leadership of Katalin É. Kiss. The book is a somewhat more concise version of the Hungarian publication É. Kiss 2014, adapted to an international readership. The book provides an empirical overview of the syntactic changes in Hungarian, covering the following five major areas: basic sentence structure, DP structure, quantification, PP structure, and subordination. The book’s title is slightly misleading since the volume is not explicitly about the functional left periphery in all of the above areas, but rather about the development of functional material (in the left periphery or elsewhere) that is closely linked to historical change and grammaticalization. The diachronic data studied are texts originating between the end of the twelfth century and the end of the sixteenth century, from the second half of the Old Hungarian period (which roughly corresponds to six centuries between c. 900 and 1500) and the beginning of the Middle Hungarian era that followed it. In this period, the most important documents comprise forty-seven hand-written codices (Old Hungarian) and printed books in various genres (Middle Hungarian). These texts were annotated and entered into a corpus built for the project (currently available for the Hungarian-speaking audience at http://oldhungariancorpus.nytud.hu). The building of the corpus itself was a massive undertaking, the details of which (the process of digitalization, problems of character recognition, text encoding, annotation, etc.) are documented by Eszter Simon in the appendix to the volume. The five chapters detailing historical change in Hungarian share a methodology. The reconstruction of the Proto-Hungarian language (with no surviving documents) is based on the S-curve method (Croft 2000): new constructions first spread slowly, then fast, then slowly again, while old constructions are ousted following the reverse pattern. Using the backward extension of these curves, as well as comparisons with the Ob-Ugric sister languages Khanti and Mansi, the research established several features of Proto-Hungarian and Old/Middle Hungarian. The following gives a brief summary of the chapter contents. Ch. 1 by Katalin É. Kiss argues that Hungarian has changed from an SOV to an SVO language, a change that went hand in hand with the disappearance of unmarked objects and the appearance of the modern Hungarian left periphery. Possibly, rightward-dislocated phrases came to be reanalyzed as base-generated arguments, bringing about the reanalysis of preverbal elements as A-bar constituents, resulting in a Topic–Focus–V–X order (rather than, strictly speaking, SVO). The change must have taken place before the start of the Old Hungarian period since the fifty clauses of the first Old Hungarian document already utilize every clausal functional projection that is attested in Modern Hungarian. Although the head-final nature of Proto-Hungarian is argued for on the basis of evidence that VP, TP, and CP were all head-final in that period, the role of Tense is neglected throughout in the change from SOV to the Old Hungarian structure. Note that there is precious little on this topic even in the highly relevant chapter on finite and nonfinite subordination apart from an important, though rather brief, observation, claiming that ‘Old Hungarian was not an OV language any more, yet auxiliaries strictly followed the main verb, which means that VP was not head final, but TP/AspP still was’ (n. 17, p. 182). The paper also provides a detailed account of the development of object agreement, which is descended from topic-verb agreement in Proto-Hungarian, where the subject was a primary topic, and the object a focus or a secondary topic, which triggered agreement only in the latter case (an instance of differential object agreement...

Processing Noncanonical Sentences in Broca's Region: Reflections of Movement Distance and Type

Various noncanonical sentence constructions are derived from basic sentence structures by a phrase displacement called Movement. The moved phrase (filler) leaves a silent copy at the extracted position (gap) and is reactivated when the hearer/reader passes over the gap. Consequently, memory operations are assumed to occur to establish the filler-gap link. For languages that have a relatively free word order like German, a distinct linguistic operation called Scrambling is proposed. Although Movement and Scrambling are assumed to be different linguistic operations, they both involve memory prone filler-gap processes. To clarify whether filler-gap memory processes in Scrambling and Movement differ neuroanatomically, we designed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study and compared the effect of memory load parameterized by filler-gap distance in the 2 sentence types. Here, we show that processing of the 2 sentence types commonly relies on a left hemispheric network consisting of the inferior frontal gyrus, middle part of the middle temporal gyrus, and intraparietal sulcus. However, we found differences for the 2 sentence types in the linearity of filler-gap distance effect. Thus, the present results suggest that the same neural substrate supports the memory processes of sentences constructed by Movement and Scrambling, although differentially modulated by memory load.

Description of Thai as an isolating language

The article illustrates morphosyntactic characteristics of Thai, an isolating language, in contrast to the modern European languages. Thai is characterized as a topic-prominent language, where the voluntary–spontaneous contrast rather than transitive–intransitive one plays significant roles in forming basic sentence constructions. By assuming non-hierarchical serial verb constructions as its basic sentence structures, the author claims that the modern hierarchical view of language structure is not appropriate for Thai. In Thai, verbs are serialized to denote not only successive actions or an action and its objective, but also a cause and its result, an action and its evaluation. Furthermore, causative and passive constructions are analyzed as part of verb serializations which are structurally identical, but antiparallel to each other in the direction of affectedness.

Basic Sentence Structure in Sudanese Arabic

On the basis of notions developed in respect of attribution in Dickins (2009, which readers are recommended to read before looking at this paper in detail), I address basic sentence structure in Sudanese Arabic. I argue that a central feature of Sudanese Arabic is the bipartite predicand-predicate (mubtada'-xabar) structure, pointing out that this has some tantalisingly unexpected features. I also consider monopartite sentences in Sudanese Arabic, arguing for a more inclusive view of what constitutes a non-elliptical sentence than is commonly accepted. I finally look briefly at bipartite sentences with 'scrambled' word order.

Learning of control in a neural architecture of grounded language processing

Human cognition is characterized by three important features: productivity, dynamics and grounding. These features can be integrated in a neural architecture of language processing. The representations in this architecture always remain “in situ”, because they are grounded in perception, action, emotion, associations and (semantic) relations. The neural architecture shows how these representations can be combined in a productive manner, and how dynamics influences this process. The constraints that each of these features impose on each other result in an architecture in which local and global aspects interact in processing and learning. The architecture consists of neural “binding” mechanisms that produce (novel) sentence structures on the fly. Here, we discuss how the control of this binding process can be learned. We trained a feedforward network (FFN) for this task. The results show that information from the architecture is needed as input to learn control of binding. Thus, the control system is recurrent. We show that this recurrent system can learn control of binding for basic (but recursive) sentence structures. After learning, the binding process behaves well on a series of test sentences, including sentences with (unlimited) embeddings. However, for some of these sentences, difficulties arise due to dynamical binding conflicts in the architecture. We also discuss and illustrate the potential influence that the dynamics in the architecture could have on the binding process.