Choice Of Word Order Research Articles

정보구조 관점에서 본 동량구와 목적어의 어순 제약 — 동량사 ‘次’를 중심으로

The event quantifier phrase can occur either before objects or after objects in Mandarin Chinese, which can be expressed as “V+Q+N” and “V+N+Q”. Using the theory of “the mental representations of discourse referents” proposed by Lambrecht (1994), this paper discusses the mechanism of this kind of word order variation. The category of mental representations of discourse referents involves two important concepts――identifiability and activation states. The continuum from unidentifiable referents to identifiable referents reflects the way mankind perceive the world. I exhaustively extracted all instances containing two word orders of “V+N+Xci” and “V+Xci+N” from the closed corpus. After analyzing the cognitive state of all N in each instance and making statistics, I draw the following conclusions: “V+N+Xci” requires N to be highly identifiable or highly activated, while “V+Xci+N” requires that N is relatively unidentifiable or has a low activation degree. This shows that the mental representation state of N is a key factor affecting word order choice. We believe that human cognition is not discrete, but presents a continuum. Therefore the conclusion of this paper expresses not an absolute standard but only a tendency relating to the choice of word order.

Word order variation in Chinese existential constructions with V-măn

AbstractUnderTalmy’s (2000a)framework of Figure and Ground segregation, this paper examines the word order variation between constructions [NPFigureV-mănNPGround] and [NPGroundV-mănNPFigure] regarding Chinese existential phenomenon, that is,Mìfēng fēi-măn le huāyuán. ‘Bees swarm in the garden.’ andHuāyuán fēi-măn le mìfēng.‘The garden swarms with bees.’In this data-driven study, 263 monosyllabic verbs are investigated and 1456 news texts are collected for a quantitative analysis. This study has successfully identified linguistic factors that can better account for the distributional patterns of the word order alternation in the corpora. Results of the VARBRUL analysis indicate that topicality of the post verbal NP and definiteness of Figure NP play a relatively crucial role in determining the word order choice, while semantic type of verb and animacy of Figure NP are less influential. This paper presents a variationist perspective on the motivations that trigger the use of Chinese existential construction [NPGroundV-mănNPFigure].

The position of object pronouns in the German middlefield

AbstractThis paper presents a corpus study of the position of object pronouns relative to a non-pronominal subject in embedded clauses of German. A total of 4322 embedded clauses from the deWaC corpus (Baroni, Marco, Silvia Bernardini, Adriano Ferraresi & Eros Zanchetta. 2009. The WaCky Wide Web: A collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora.Language Resources and Evaluation Journal23(3). 209–226), a corpus of written German Internet texts, were analyzed. In 67.0% of all clauses, the object pronoun occurred in front of the subject. Several factors that have been proposed in the literature on word order alternations were found to govern the choice between subject–object and object–subject order in the corpus under investigation. The most important findings are: (i) The Extended Animacy Hierarchy and the Semantic Role Hierarchy independently contribute to the choice of word order. (ii) The Definiteness Hierarchy has a strong effect on the position of the object pronoun. (iii) Word order effects of constituent weight, measured as length in number of words, cannot be reduced to effects of grammatical factors, nor can effects of grammatical factors be reduced to effects of weight.

The Beginnings of Word Order Change in the Arabic Dialects of Southern Iran in Contact with Persian: A Preliminary Study of Data from Four Villages in Bushehr and Hormozgan

This preliminary study explores the hypothesis that Arabic dialects spoken on the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf exhibit the beginnings of contact-induced shift in word order from VO to OV. Although the basic VO order is still stable, there is some variation even in this very limited data set. Specifically two phenomena point to a change in progress: clause-final copulae and auxiliaries that are placed after the lexical verb, lending further evidence to the observation that a clause-final copula is an areal feature of western Asia. The study also investigates semantic and pragmatic factors that influence word order choice, pointing to a strong effect of information structure in terms of narrow focus and theme-rheme partition. Furthermore, the study also reveals an effect of semantic role, specifically as far as the preferred placement of goals and recipients in post-verbal position is concerned.

Bridging Strength, Monotonicity, and Word Order Choices in Catalan

ABSTRACT Three experimental studies are presented testing the choice of a left or a right dislocation in Catalan, depending on the bridging relation between the dislocate and its antecedent. We make the hypothesis that the stronger the anaphoric link between the dislocate and its antecedent, the more appropriate a right dislocation is, whereas the opposite is true for left dislocation. The results of two acceptability judgment experiments partially support our hypothesis: Ratings with right dislocation decrease proportionally to the strength of the anaphoric link; however, it is ratings of canonical sentences (without dislocation at all), rather than of left dislocation, that display the opposite direction. For left dislocation, the picture is more complex and reflects the pragmatic function of this construction as a topic shifter or marker of contrast. A third experiment tests the monotonicity hypothesis, according to which a left dislocation is chosen when the anaphoric relation with the antecedent is either downward monotonic or nonmonotonic, whereas a right dislocation is preferred with an upward monotonic relation. The results partially support such a hypothesis but also further support the importance of taking the pragmatic function of left dislocation into account to explain its choice in discourse by speakers.

Using Big Data Experiments in Cognitive and Linguo-Cultural Research in English and Russian

Big data search instruments, Google and Yandex and others, offer new research opportunities, statistically very impressive. The questions arise here as to what extent we can trust the statistical data obtained, what kinds of hypotheses can be verified through Google and Yandex searching. The authors try to experimentally verify the hypothesis relating to the word order in the attributive group of the kind healthy nourishing food vs nourishing healthy food using Google and Yandex and, in this way, test the explanatory potential of the big data sources. The choice of word order is related to the theory of classes which explains cognitive mechanisms that govern the order of adjectives in a noun group. The empirical results obtained via Google and Yandex help to verify this hypothesis and identify cognitive grounds for choosing the order of attributes. The authors claim that data search engines, particularly, Russian Yandex and Google corpora, can help identify linguistically and culturally relevant concepts

The role of word order in bilingual speakers’ representation of their two languages: the case of Spanish–Kaqchikel bilinguals

When bilingual speakers plan to speak in one of their languages, the other language remains active and exerts an influence on the chosen language. However, the factors that modulate this influence, and particularly the extent to which syntactic structures and word order need to be the same in both languages for this influence to occur, are not yet fully understood. In this study, we explore the role of free word order in bilinguals’ representation of their two languages by analyzing the connections of linguistic representations in Spanish–Kaqchikel early bilinguals, two languages that allow word order variation in transitive sentences. In Experiment 1, a structural priming experiment within Kaqchikel was conducted with voice and word order of prime as independent variables. Results showed priming of both structure and word order, independently from each other. In Experiment 2, cross-linguistic structural priming was used from Spanish to Kaqchikel. Results showed priming of voice, regardless of word order, but not priming of word order. Taken together, these results suggest that, in languages with greater flexibility in their basic word orders, structural selection and word order choice seem to be independent processes.

Effects of Visual Priming and Event Orientation on Word Order Choice in Russian Sentence Production.

Existing research shows that distribution of the speaker’s attention among event’s protagonists affects syntactic choice during sentence production. One of the debated issues concerns the extent of the attentional contribution to syntactic choice in languages that put stronger emphasis on word order arrangement rather than the choice of the overall syntactic frame. To address this, the current study used a sentence production task, in which Russian native speakers were asked to verbally describe visually perceived transitive events. Prior to describing the target event, a visual cue directed the participants’ attention to the location of either the agent or the patient of the subsequently presented visual event. In addition, we also manipulated event orientation (agent-left vs. agent-right) as another potential contributor to syntactic choice. The number of patient-initial sentences was the dependent variable compared between conditions. First, the obtained results replicated the effect of visual cueing on the word order in Russian language: more patient-initial sentences in patient cued condition. Second, we registered a novel effect of event orientation: Russian native speakers produced more patient-initial sentences after seeing events developing from right to left as opposed to left-to-right events. Our study provides new evidence about the role of the speaker’s attention and event orientation in syntactic choice in language with flexible word order.

Word Order, Heaviness, and Animacy

In experiments, previous studies have observed that the choice of word order in Japanese is influenced not only by heaviness but also by animacy. To be more concrete, the heavy constituent tends to precede the light one and the animate referent tends to come before the inanimate one. Yet, the present corpus analysis demonstrates that word order changes are not motivated by animacy. This discrepancy can be accounted for by supposing that animacy has an impact on word order only when the effects of other factors are neutralized. It is possible that the effects of animacy are so weak that they work only in psycholinguistic experiments because other factors are controlled. On the other hand, the effects of animacy are not observed in this corpus study probably because other factors are not controlled in actual examples. Thus, I propose that researchers should utilize both naturalistic and experimental evidence in order to draw reasonable conclusions about the grammatical aspects of language.

Four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch

AbstractThis study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children’s use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order.

A Corpus-based Study on Turkish Spoken Productions of Bilingual Adults

The current study investigated whether monolingual adult speakers of Turkish and bilingual adult speakers of Arabic and Turkish significantly differ regarding their spoken productions in Turkish. Accordingly, two groups of undergraduate students studying Turkish Language and Literature at a state university in Turkey were presented two videos on a computer screen, and asked to narrate each film in Turkish as completely as possible, which was videotaped by the researchers. Subsequently, two sets of corpora were compiled from the video transcriptions and analysed through a computer programme. The findings showed that the bilingual group does not significantly differ from the monolingual group in their choice of word order and voice, and that they overused the present progressive tense, and conversational fillers while narrating video-films as opposed to the monolingual group. It might be concluded that both languages are active in their mind, and that their lexical access to their L1 is slightly stronger than that to their L2. The study concludes with a few suggestions for further directions.

A corpus-based analysis of scrambling in Japanese in terms of anaphoric and cataphoric co-referencing

In Japanese, word order changes do not affect the grammatical relations between constituents, allowing both SOV and OSV word order. Although it has been assumed that the choice of word order is determined by information structure, it is unclear how OSV is related to information structure. In order to shed light on this issue, this article investigates the usage of OSV under the framework of the Givónian approach, using a corpus-based method. First, the study demonstrates that the object is informationally older than the subject in OSV while there is a reverse relationship between the object and the subject in SOV. Second, the study reveals that the referents of the subject both in SOV and OSV tend to be carried over to the following sentences. Consequently, I conclude that OSV correlates with the ‘topic shift’ from the referent of the scrambled object to that of the subject. Therefore, OACCSV is selected when the writer intends to start a new discourse and continues writing about the referent of the subject after OACCSV appears.

Ventral and dorsal streams for choosing word order during sentence production

Proficient language use requires speakers to vary word order and choose between different ways of expressing the same meaning. Prior statistical associations between individual verbs and different word orders are known to influence speakers' choices, but the underlying neural mechanisms are unknown. Here we show that distinct neural pathways are used for verbs with different statistical associations. We manipulated statistical experience by training participants in a language containing novel verbs and two alternative word orders (agent-before-patient, AP; patient-before-agent, PA). Some verbs appeared exclusively in AP, others exclusively in PA, and yet others in both orders. Subsequently, we used sparse sampling neuroimaging to examine the neural substrates as participants generated new sentences in the scanner. Behaviorally, participants showed an overall preference for AP order, but also increased PA order for verbs experienced in that order, reflecting statistical learning. Functional activation and connectivity analyses revealed distinct networks underlying the increased PA production. Verbs experienced in both orders during training preferentially recruited a ventral stream, indicating the use of conceptual processing for mapping meaning to word order. In contrast, verbs experienced solely in PA order recruited dorsal pathways, indicating the use of selective attention and sensorimotor integration for choosing words in the right order. These results show that the brain tracks the structural associations of individual verbs and that the same structural output may be achieved via ventral or dorsal streams, depending on the type of regularities in the input.

Word order affects the time course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal

The scope of planning during sentence formulation is known to be flexible, as it can be influenced by speakers' communicative goals and language production pressures (among other factors). Two eye-tracked picture description experiments tested whether the time course of formulation is also modulated by grammatical structure and thus whether differences in linear word order across languages affect the breadth and order of conceptual and linguistic encoding operations. Native speakers of Tzeltal [a primarily verb–object–subject (VOS) language] and Dutch [a subject–verb–object (SVO) language] described pictures of transitive events. Analyses compared speakers' choice of sentence structure across events with more accessible and less accessible characters as well as the time course of formulation for sentences with different word orders. Character accessibility influenced subject selection in both languages in subject-initial and subject-final sentences, ruling against a radically incremental formulation process. In Tzeltal, subject-initial word orders were preferred over verb-initial orders when event characters had matching animacy features, suggesting a possible role for similarity-based interference in influencing word order choice. Time course analyses revealed a strong effect of sentence structure on formulation: In subject-initial sentences, in both Tzeltal and Dutch, event characters were largely fixated sequentially, while in verb-initial sentences in Tzeltal, relational information received priority over encoding of either character during the earliest stages of formulation. The results show a tight parallelism between grammatical structure and the order of encoding operations carried out during sentence formulation.

The Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in Norwegian

The Given-before-New principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the Dative Alternation in Norwegian. In an experimental study, we investigate to what extent Norwegian children's and adults’ sentence production is governed by givenness when the speaker chooses one word order over another. Our results suggest that givenness influences the word-order choices of both children and adults. However, children more often than adults tend to omit given recipients and have a tendency to produce prepositional datives even when the recipient represents given information. The results are discussed in light of previous acquisition findings and syntactic accounts of the phenomenon. We argue that children's behavior is not a result of a pragmatic deficit or an immature syntactic component per se but rather a failure to consistently integrate the two.

GOTHIC WORD ORDER PATTERNS AS ATTESTED IN THE GOTHIC GOSPEL OF LUKE

Gothic is the oldest attested Germanic language that possesses features similar to Proto-Germanic i.e., the parent language of all contemporary Germanic languages. The grammar of the Gothic language not only comprises distinctive features of native origin, but also contains peculiarities inherited from Proto-Germanic as well as traces of non-Germanic impacts. The peculiar nature of Gothic grammar reveals itself in Gothic syntax, and notably in the order of words. The article aims at defining word order patterns in The Gothic Gospel of Luke, Chapter 4 with special reference to word order in a phrase and sentence. Firstly, word order in Gothic phrases is considered, and the most recurrent word order patterns in noun and verb phrases found in Luke 4 are defined. Secondly, word order patterns and peculiar features of simple sentences and principal clauses are discussed. Finally, the article comments upon the choice of word order in those types of subordinate clauses that are represented in the chapter of Luke selected for the analysis as well as compares word order in principal and subordinate clauses. All comments on Gothic word order and syntactic features are provided with examples from Luke 4. The analysis of Gothic word order patterns is performed by fusing two research methods i.e., descriptive and analytic. Being the only attested East Germanic language, Gothic has a great linguistic value. Therefore, the study of Gothic word order and syntax is of great significance for the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, for understanding word order patterns in other Germanic languages as well as for identifying common Germanic features. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.3.6

How language production shapes language form and comprehension.

Language production processes can provide insight into how language comprehension works and language typology—why languages tend to have certain characteristics more often than others. Drawing on work in memory retrieval, motor planning, and serial order in action planning, the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) account links work in the fields of language production, typology, and comprehension: (1) faced with substantial computational burdens of planning and producing utterances, language producers implicitly follow three biases in utterance planning that promote word order choices that reduce these burdens, thereby improving production fluency. (2) These choices, repeated over many utterances and individuals, shape the distributions of utterance forms in language. The claim that language form stems in large degree from producers' attempts to mitigate utterance planning difficulty is contrasted with alternative accounts in which form is driven by language use more broadly, language acquisition processes, or producers' attempts to create language forms that are easily understood by comprehenders. (3) Language perceivers implicitly learn the statistical regularities in their linguistic input, and they use this prior experience to guide comprehension of subsequent language. In particular, they learn to predict the sequential structure of linguistic signals, based on the statistics of previously-encountered input. Thus, key aspects of comprehension behavior are tied to lexico-syntactic statistics in the language, which in turn derive from utterance planning biases promoting production of comparatively easy utterance forms over more difficult ones. This approach contrasts with classic theories in which comprehension behaviors are attributed to innate design features of the language comprehension system and associated working memory. The PDC instead links basic features of comprehension to a different source: production processes that shape language form.

The Dative Alternation in Norwegian Child Language

Research has shown that givenness is one of several factors that influence the choice of word order with the Dative Alternation in languages such as English. This paper investigates to what extent Norwegian children between the ages of 4;2 and 6;0 are sensitive to this factor in production. In order to test this, an experiment was carried out in which the children were prompted to produce structures involving ditransitive verbs when either the Theme or the Recipient was given. The results show that the children are sensitive to the impact of givenness, but while this is expressed through the choice of word order in Theme-given contexts (yielding the prepositional dative), it is expressed by argument omission in the Recipient-given contexts (resulting in one-argument responses with only the Theme overtly produced).

Efficient accurate syntactic direct translation models: one tree at a time

A challenging aspect of Statistical Machine Translation from Arabic to English lies in bringing the Arabic source morpho-syntax to bear on the lexical as well as word-order choices of the English target string. In this article, we extend the feature-rich discriminative Direct Translation Model 2 (DTM2) with a novel linear-time parsing algorithm based on an eager, incremental interpretation of Combinatory Categorial Grammar. This way we can reap the benefits of a target syntactic enhancement that leads to more grammatical output while also enabling dynamic decoding without the risk of blowing up decoding space and time requirements. Our model defines a mix of model parameters, some of which involve DTM2 source morpho-syntactic features, and others are novel target side syntactic features. Alongside translation features extracted from the derived parse tree, we explore syntactic features extracted from the incremental derivation process. Our empirical experiments show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art DTM2 system.

Partial Word Order Freezing in Dutch

Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study.