Clause Boundaries Research Articles

A Model for Defining the Boundaries of Complex Sentences and Clauses in English Translation Based on the Huffman Tree and Objective Function

To address the issues of high redundancy in sentence features and poor semantic similarity analysis in English translation, a boundary definition model for complex sentence clauses in English translation based on the Huffman tree and objective function is proposed. This model analyzes the boundary structure of complex sentences and clauses in English translation, determines the mathematical expected value of the probability distribution of boundary features, introduces the maximum entropy model to assess the key degree of different features, and utilizes conditional random fields to mine hidden features. Additionally, by employing a hierarchical clustering algorithm to analyze the distance between boundary features of complex sentences and clauses in English translation, similar images are merged based on the minimum distance between data points. Feature redundancy scores are obtained through an attention mechanism, and the weight of boundary features of complex sentences and clauses in English translation is calculated. By using the edit distance in semantic similarity to determine the boundary distance of clauses, and then using cosine similarity to calculate the similarity between the boundary features of complex clauses in English translation, a Huffman tree and objective function are introduced to construct a model for defining the boundary of complex clauses in English translation. Input the boundary feature values of complex sentences and clauses in English translation to complete the final definition. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in the task of defining the boundaries of complex sentences and clauses in English translation, with semantic similarity analysis results remaining above 95% and reaching up to 99%, significantly better than the comparative methods. Meanwhile, the recall curve obtained by the proposed method is closest to the ideal curve and has a small fluctuation range, stable between 90% and 98%, further verifying its accuracy and robustness in boundary delineation. In addition, when the sample data size is 1000, the confidence level of the proposed method is as high as 99.6%, which is higher than the 95.6% and 95.1% of the comparison methods. As the sample size increased to 2500, the confidence level of the proposed method remained at a high level of 99.4%, while the confidence level of the comparative method decreased to 94.2% and 94.1%, respectively. These data results fully demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing redundant interference and improving confidence. In summary, the proposed method has improved the performance of defining the boundaries of complex sentences and clauses in English translation.

Long extraction in German: banned, but still alive

Long extraction, that is, the displacement of a constituent across a clause boundary, is considered a process of broad applicability. This view is challenged by the claim that extracting a phrase from a that-clause into a relative clause is ungrammatical in German. Since the evidence for this claim is extremely limited, we ran three acceptability experiments investigating long extraction in German. As expected from a large range of studies on long extraction in German, long extraction was judged as less acceptable than corresponding sentences without long extraction. Importantly, long extraction was equally acceptable across the three contexts that were tested—relative clauses, embedded questions and main clause questions. Our experiments, thus, show that long extraction applies across different structural contexts in German, as expected if long extraction is a general syntactic process. In addition, this paper presents new evidence concerning the sources of individual variation with regard to the acceptability of long extraction. First, we confirm that long extraction gets less acceptable when going from the South to the North of the German speaking area. Second, we tested whether individual participants differ with regard to how easily they accept non-standard constructions. To this end, we ran an additional experiment on verb-cluster formation, including sentences that are ungrammatical according to prescriptive grammar but that are, nevertheless, accepted by many speakers of German. The acceptability of long extraction correlates with the acceptability of non-standard verb clusters even when regional background is controlled for.

Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations

Abstract In this study, we look at the distribution of silent pauses within existing multi-language corpora to see whether their location and duration correlate with clause boundaries. Our study is based on data of seven languages from Multi-CAST. We supplemented the original clause boundary annotations with information about silent pauses in order to investigate the alignment of clause boundaries and pausing. We find a gradient association between clause boundary strength and the probability of a pause and a two-way distinction for pause duration within clauses and at clause boundaries.

A diachronic study determining syntactic and semantic features of Urdu-English neural machine translation

Machine translation produces marginal accuracy rates for low-resource languages, but its deep learning model expects to yield improved accuracy with time. This longitudinal study investigates how Google Translate's Urdu-to-English translated output has evolved between 2018 and 2021. Accuracy and acceptability of the translations have been determined by, a) an interlinear gloss that identifies core semantic units and grammatical functions to be translated and, b) a descriptive comparison of the translated text's syntactic and semantic properties with those of the source text. Overall, despite a 50 % error rate that persists over the three-year interval, the research reports significant improvement in the overall intelligibility of the translations, in contrast to initial results from 2018, which exhibited rampant non-localized errors. Working backwards from instances of errors to morphosyntactic and semantic patterns underlying them, the study concludes that the pro-drop feature of Urdu, Urdu's case-marking system, identification of clause boundaries, polysemous terms, and orthographically similar words pose the greatest difficulty in neural machine translation. These results point to the need for incorporating syntactic information in training data.

The source of the <em>de re</em> blocking effect

This paper presents novel empirical data from English in which the de re blocking effect – that an obligatorily de se anaphor cannot be c-commanded by its de re counterpart – is attested. I argue that at least some instances of the de re blocking effect cannot be accounted for via syntactic accounts, contra Percus & Sauerland (2003b) and Anand (2006). Via experimental evidence, it is shown that the de re blocking effect takes place with passives and across clause boundaries with certain predicates but not with others. I argue that a novel thematic theory of the de re blocking effect together with the aforementioned syntactic theories would be able to account for the full range of facts.

Identifying Taxis and Logico-Semantic Relations in Chinese EFL Writing Samples

In the context of EFL writing in China, there is a prevalent tendency among students to heavily rely on the provided model essays from teachers, leading to a phenomenon known as sameness. This overreliance often results in confusion when it comes to expressing ideas effectively in sentences. To address this issue, this paper adopts an analytical framework based on the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL is a linguistic theory that emphasizes language’s social context and meaning (Halliday, 1985; 1994). Notably, SFL prioritizes meaning over form and examines the organization of texts as well as individual sentences. The theory has been widely applied in discourse analysis and language teaching. This paper offers a brief literature review on key SFL terms, such as language rank, clause, clause complex, taxis, and logico-semantic relation. Additionally, the paper presents examples of identifying taxis and logico-semantic relations using two types of EFL writing samples from SFL perspective. The analysis reveals that the first text, a comparison and contrast essay, predominantly employs the relation of extension, whereas the second text, an argumentative piece, prominently exhibits the logico-semantic relation of enhancement. The paper provides insight into the use of SFL as an analytical tool for analyzing variable text types. Students learning from these analytical tools may have more grammatical awareness in identifying clause boundaries and logico-semantic relations across different writing genres.

Effect of speech rate and complexity on sentence comprehension in Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT Previous research has not shown a benefit of slowed speech on the comprehension of sentences by persons with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The objective of this study was to replicate and extend the findings from previous research by employing a novel speech rate manipulation that inserted strategic pauses at phrase and clause boundaries in sentences. Fourteen participants with AD were instructed to match auditorily presented sentences to one of several pictures that corresponded to the correct meaning of each sentence. The sentences varied in their speech rate and grammatical complexity. The results show that participants’ comprehension did not significantly benefit from the altered speech rate, though participants did demonstrate better comprehension of simpler than more complex sentences. The findings extend previous research by showing that even when employing a more natural method of slowing the speech signal it did not benefit AD participants’ comprehension. The results also contribute to evidence-based clinical recommendations concerning speech modifications to facilitate verbal comprehension in Alzheimer’s disease.

Mismatch between syntax and prosody and complex sentence structure in Hittite

Abstract Hittite attests a set of complex sentences in which (mostly) relative clauses (other subordinate clauses are also attested) appear in linear syntax to be within another subordinate (usually conditional, rarely temporal) clause or main clause. The relative clause can be preceded by a very limited array of constituents from the matrix clause, e.g., mān ‘if’ or the quotative particle ⸗wa(r). There are also examples which attest the conditional subordinator and the irrealis particle in two positions simultaneously, at the left edge of the whole sentence and in the conditional clause (= main clause for the relative clause). I provide a fine-grained descriptive and structural analysis of the structure and show that the type cannot be explained as bare indefinites, embedded relative clauses or parenthetic clauses. It is shown that, structurally, the sentences containing subordinate (mostly relative) clauses within other clauses are heterogenous and of three types. The difference lies in the elements that precede the relative clause and in the structure of the sentences, whereby a standard Hittite relative clause adjoins at different heights. All three types display the same mismatch between prosodic domains and syntax/semantics—the constituent that is part of the main clause from the semantic and syntactic perspective is prosodically part of the relative clause. Since there is a clause boundary delimiting the end of the subordinate clause within the main clause, it makes sense to treat the surface structure as a distinct taxonomic unit, which is correspondingly labelled a mismatch sentence. The new evidence allows us to obtain a fuller understanding of the Hittite left periphery than was previously possible. It thus offers an important window into hitherto unrecognized aspects of the underlying structure of the complex sentence in Hittite.

Acoustic cues to phrase and clause boundaries in infant-directed speech: Evidence from LENA recordings.

Infant-directed speech (IDS) produced in laboratory settings contains acoustic cues, such as pauses, pitch changes, and vowel-lengthening that could facilitate breaking speech into smaller units, such as syntactically well-formed utterances, and the noun- and verb-phrases within them. It is unclear whether these cues are present in speech produced in more natural contexts outside the lab. We captured LENA recordings of caregiver speech to 12-month-old infants in daylong interactions (N = 49) to address this question. We found that the final positions of syntactically well-formed utterances contained greater vowel lengthening and pitch changes, and were followed by longer pauses, relative to non-final positions. However, we found no evidence that these cues were present at utterance-internal phrase boundaries. Results suggest that acoustic cues marking the boundaries of well-formed utterances are salient in everyday speech to infants and highlight the importance of characterizing IDS in a large sample of naturally-produced speech to infants.

Quantifier Raising out of Mandarin relative clauses

Quantifier Raising usually exhibits finite-clause boundedness due to the syntactic and semantic constraints it is subject to (Fox 1995, 2000, Cecchetto 2004, a.o.). In this paper, I argue that QR out of a Mandarin prenominal pre-determiner RC is not only properly licensed, obeying both syntactic and semantic constraints, but also needed to account for the exceptional-scope effects observed across relative clause boundaries (Huang 1982, Aoun and Li 1993, a.o.). I further consider constructions where the exceptional-scope effects are not present, including relative clauses containing the focus-sensitive operator dou and full-sized subject RCs, and show that the absence of the exceptional-scope effects in these constructions follows directly from the proposed analysis.

Code Switching in Digital Communication

This research examines Codeswitching (CS) from Hebrew into Arabic as used by Arabs from Iksal and Um Al-Fahm, in Israel, in the context of Arabic used in Digital communication (WhatsApp and Viber), specifically the written colloquial rural Palestinian Arabic dialect of Arabs in Israel. The study focuses on topics that motivate uses of code switching, the syntactic characteristics of these code switches, phonological aspects, Categories of CS. The expectations were that switches by bilinguals are largely limited to greeting phrases and are restricted to clause boundaries with one-word switching into Hebrew. Moreover, there is an adaptation of L2 to L1 phonology. The results show that the most frequent topics evolve around education and employment. Moreover, code switches can still be code switches even if they have been adapted to Arabic phonology. The results also reinforce previous findings, such as Paolillo (2011) and Lee (2007), on how synchronicity affects the usage of CS.

Effects of syntactic structure on the processing of lexical repetition during sentence reading.

Previous research has demonstrated that the ease or difficulty of processing complex semantic expressions depends on sentence structure: Processing difficulty emerges when the constituents that create the complex meaning appear in the same clause, whereas difficulty is reduced when the constituents appear in separate clauses. The goal of the current eye-tracking-while-reading experiments was to determine how changes to sentence structure affect the processing of lexical repetition, as this manipulation enabled us to isolate processes involved in word recognition (repetition priming) from those involved in sentence interpretation (felicity of the repetition). When repetition of the target word was felicitous (Experiment 1), we observed robust effects of repetition priming with some evidence that these effects were weaker when repetition occurred within a clause versus across a clause boundary. In contrast, when repetition of the target word was infelicitous (Experiment 2), readers experienced an immediate repetition cost when repetition occurred within a clause, but this cost was eliminated entirely when repetition occurred across clause boundaries. The results have implications for word recognition during reading, processes of semantic integration, and the role of sentence structure in guiding these linguistic representations.

Event plurality & quantifier scope across clause boundaries

Legend has it that quantifiers cannot scope out of finite clauses. But whileislands for quantifier raising might exist, finite clauses are not that: We identifya novel environment which productively facilitates scoping universal quantifiersout of embedded clauses, involving the manipulation of event structure. With thehelp of the perfect on an embedding verb and certain adverbials that presuppose abuildup towards a result state (by noon, eventually, at long last), embedded universalquantifiers can more readily take extrawide scope. We describe, account for, anddiscuss restrictions to this effect, and conclude that scoping quantifiers out of finiteclauses is not banned by syntactic constraints, although context or processing mightfavor narrow scope readings.

A Cognitive Semantic Study of Causal Interaction of Acts in Narrative

Causality is one of the main prominent schematic components in language and cognition. In cognitive semantics, causality has received especial interest because of its significance as a basic element in our cognition. Langacker's (1990 and 1991) causal chain and Talmy's (2000) force dynamics are the most important models of causal structure in language and cognition. Talmy considers force dynamics as one of the schematic systems that structure events. His model is directed to the causal relation between clause components; while the current study investigates the causal relation out of the clause boundaries. It studies how a scene affects another one. The interaction between acts in terms of causality is part of the narrative structuring system in which causality is only one schematic component among others. The current study involves a new treatment of causality in narrative within the framework of cognitive semantics. It aims to answer the following three questions: first, how is causality formulated in narrative? Second, what are the causality forms in narrative? What is the role of causality in narrative? In order to answer these questions, the researcher builds a model on the basis of Talmy's force dynamics. It formulates the way in which related acts interact in terms of causality. The acts are selected and modified by the processes of extraction and conversion which pull out the schematic features of scenes. The model is applied to three events selected randomly from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novel.

Music training is associated with better clause segmentation during spoken language processing.

Musical expertise is known to affect speech perception at units below clause/sentence. This study investigated whether the musician's advantage extends to a higher and more central level of speech processing (i.e., clause segmentation). Two groups of participants (musician vs. nonmusician) were presented with sentences that contain an internal clause boundary. The acoustic correlates of the boundary were manipulated in six conditions: all-cue, pause-only, final-lengthening-only, pitch-reset-only, pause-and-final-lengthening-in-combination, and no-cue conditions. Participants were asked to judge whether the sentence they heard had an internal boundary. Results showed that the musicians detected more boundaries than the nonmusicians in the all-cue and the pause-only conditions, but fewer boundaries in the no-cue condition. Further analyses of cue weight showed that both musicians and nonmusicians placed more importance on pause than the other two cues, but this weighting bias was more pronounced for the musicians. These results suggest that music training is associated with increased perceptual acuity not only to the acoustic markings of speech boundaries but also to the weighting of the cues. Our findings extend the role of musical expertise to sentence-level speech processing.

From Prolepsis to Hyperraising

Case, agreement, and A-movement dependencies across finite clause boundaries, such as Hyperraising (to subject or object) or Long-Distance Case or Agreement [LDA], are available in many typologically diverse languages. The research on such dependencies typically distinguishes between cross-linguistically restricted true A-dependencies across finite clauses, and generally available binding-like A′-dependencies as found in Prolepsis. In this paper, we investigate both types of configurations in parallel and refer to this as the A-domain. Since the diagnostics to distinguish A-configurations vary across languages and often cannot be compared directly, we define four characteristic properties: (A) whether the construction is restricted by matrix predicate selection, (B) whether movement in the embedded clause is involved, (C) whether the dependency shows locality restrictions (in particular, A-Minimality), and (D) whether there are semantic restrictions on the relevant DP. By combining different values of the characteristic properties, we show, differently from previous approaches, that the A-domain does not simply consist of two types of configurations, but that the empirical landscape represents a continuum of five A-constructions. We suggest a theoretical implementation of our empirical findings, which is built on a predicational relator phrase above the embedded CP and propose that, in some of the constructions, these two projections fuse into one. We employ a minimalist probing approach which relies on differences in the base-generated position of the relevant DP (matrix clause, high in the embedded clause, argument position in the embedded clause), differences in the feature composition of the embedded C (a plain A′-head, or a bundled predicational C head involving composite A/A′ probes), a composite probe hierarchy yielding three types of feature-dependencies of composite probes, and, resulting from that, different probing mechanisms (conjunctive satisfaction, dependent satisfaction, and independent satisfaction). Lastly, this paper also contributes methodological tools for disentangling constructions of the A-domain.

A perceptual study of language chunking in Estonian

AbstractTwo studies investigate the production and perception of speech chunks in Estonian. A corpus study examines to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tests to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure, and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of speech chunks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, whilst listening to these utterances (N=47N=47) or reading them (N=40N=40). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and collocations. The results of the perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of clause boundaries on the perception of prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks. Thus, the results indicate that there is no direct relationship between the semantico-syntactic characteristics of utterances and the distribution of prosodic information. The percept of a prosodic break relies on the rapid recognition of constituent structure, i.e. structural information.

Syntactic Configuration of Code-Switching between Indonesian and English: Another Perspective on Code-Switching Phenomena

Code-switching, an alternation or mixing one language with another, has been an unmarked phenomenon for a multilingual society. In Indonesia, this phenomenon nowadays lives and thrives among the people. This study discusses the syntactic configuration of code-switching between Indonesian and English in terms of switched segments, points, and changing types. The study is descriptive qualitative in nature. The data comprise 25 recording hours of natural speech produced by 119 Indonesians in 4 types of interaction: seminars, meetings, TV dialogues, and chitchats conducted in six metropolitan cities—Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Makassar. The sample drawn purposively comprises 550 switching discourses consisting of 666 switching corpora. It is found that nouns serving as subjects, predicators, objects of verbs, and prepositions to be the most dominant switched segments. A switch between Indonesian noun phrases and English noun phrases, Indonesian verbs or prepositions, and English objective noun phrases, Indonesian conjunctions, and English conjoined noun phrases or clauses is the most popular switched points, and intercausal switching including intraporal and interlexical switching is the most frequent switching type of code-switching between Indonesian and English. ANOVA Friedman’s test confirms that these patterns are the same among the four types of discourses, implying that such a syntactic configuration of Indonesia-English code-switching is universally applicable to any situation and type of interaction. In conclusion, the domination of nouns indicates that the syntactic configuration of Indonesian-English code-switching mainly occurs at minor constituents such as within a clause, phrase, and word boundaries. This demonstrates that code-switching between Indonesian and English is more likely to occur intrasentential rather than intersentential, which is the most popular anywhere in literature.

Adults with cochlear implants can use prosody to determine the clausal structure of spoken sentences.

Speech prosody, including pitch contour, word stress, pauses, and vowel lengthening, can aid the detection of the clausal structure of a multi-clause sentence and this, in turn, can help listeners determine the meaning. However, for cochlear implant (CI) users, the reduced acoustic richness of the signal raises the question of whether CI users may have difficulty using sentence prosody to detect syntactic clause boundaries within sentences or whether this ability is rescued by the redundancy of the prosodic features that normally co-occur at clause boundaries. Twenty-two CI users, ranging in age from 19 to 77 years old, recalled three types of sentences: sentences in which the prosodic pattern was appropriate to the location of a clause boundary within the sentence (congruent prosody), sentences with reduced prosodic information, or sentences in which the location of the clause boundary and the prosodic marking of a clause boundary were placed in conflict. The results showed the presence of congruent prosody to be associated with superior sentence recall and a reduced processing effort as indexed by the pupil dilation. The individual differences in a standard test of word recognition (consonant-nucleus-consonant score) were related to the recall accuracy as well as the processing effort. The outcomes are discussed in terms of the redundancy of the prosodic features, which normally accompany a clause boundary and processing effort.

Complex Items and Units in Extra-Sentential Code Switching. Spanish and English in Gibraltar

Abstract As is well-known, code-mixing is particularly frequent at clause boundaries and with elements expressing pragmatic meaning. However, most of the literature has focussed on switching of simple elements such as conjunctions and discourse markers. This paper, in contrast, analyses clause peripheral switching involving two complex constructions: left dislocations and pseudo-clefts. The data are from English-Spanish bilingual conversations recorded in Gibraltar. A great majority of the bilingual constructions in the corpus belong to a few types occurring with a restricted set of lexical items. A vast amount of such highly recurrent strings in the data confirm the hypothesis that complex multi word strings that are switched together constitute units in code-mixing, i.e. they are processed as single lexical items.