Common Noun Phrases Research Articles

Lexical prediction does not rationally adapt to prediction error: ERP evidence from pre-nominal articles

People sometimes predict upcoming words during language comprehension, but debate remains on when and to what extent such predictions indeed occur. The rational adaptation hypothesis holds that predictions develop with expected utility: people predict more strongly when predictions are frequently confirmed (low prediction error) rather than disconfirmed. However, supporting evidence is mixed thus far and has only involved measuring responses to supposedly predicted nouns, not to preceding articles that may also be predicted. The current, large-sample (N = 200) ERP study on written discourse comprehension in Dutch therefore employs the well-known ‘pre-nominal prediction effect’: enhanced N400-like ERPs for articles that are unexpected given a likely upcoming noun’s gender (i.e., the neuter gender article ‘het’ when people expect the common gender noun phrase ‘de krant’, the newspaper) compared to expected articles. We investigated whether the pre-nominal prediction effect is larger when most of the presented stories contain predictable article-noun combinations (75% predictable, 25% unpredictable) compared to when most stories contain unpredictable combinations (25% predictable, 75% unpredictable). Our results show the pre-nominal prediction effect in both contexts, with little evidence to suggest that this effect depended on the percentage of predictable combinations. Moreover, the little evidence suggesting such a dependence was primarily observed for unexpected, neuter-gender articles (‘het’), which is inconsistent with the rational adaptation hypothesis. In line with recent demonstrations (Nieuwland, 2021a,b), our results suggest that linguistic prediction is less ‘rational’ or Bayes optimal than is often suggested.

A Syntactic Analysis of Noun Phrase through “Hansel and Gretel” Short Story To 1st Semester of Accounting Students at University of Bina Sarana Informatika

Languages all over the world have their own grammar for constructing words and their components. The aim of the research is to recognize, classify and analyze noun phrases by reading Hansel and Gretel short story. A noun phrase is a part of the syntax. The syntax is a part of Linguistics. It has meaningful elements together to form words, words together to form phrases, phrases together to form clauses, clauses together to form sentences, and sentences together to form texts. Noun phrase has some aspects; they are identifier, adjective, noun modifier, quantifier, preposition phrase, participle clause, conjunctions, and indefinite clause. Hansel and Gretel short story was used as the research instrument about noun phrases. The method used to do the research was descriptive qualitative. The participants of this research are the 1st semester of accounting students at the University of Bina Sarana Informatika. The results of this research are: there are 25 noun phrases, 16 noun phrases are about rules 1, determiner + headword, meanwhile 9 other noun phrases are about common noun phrase, found in Hansel and Gretel short story.

Deriving Object Relatives in Kiswahili Determiner Phrases

Abstract Generally one finds there are shortages in the array of technical resources available to penetrate the morphology of Kiswahili and its similarities to, as well as its departures from, morphemic structures in other Bantu languages. The introduction of a new approach employed here is an attempt to contribute to correcting that deficit. Object relative Determiner Phrases (DPs) in Kiswahili are common noun phrases with the noun head called the object relative appearing in the initial position of the DP. The phrases also have relative words and clitics introducing relative clauses. In Kiswahili these phrases are formed via DP internal movements of the object noun to the highest position coupled with movements of the subject and verb complex. The suggestion here that the object relative moves to the highest position in DP configuration marks a significant departure from other studies. This analysis provides theoretical insights about how these constructions are mapped in the minds of Kiswahili speakers. Refinement of the morpho-syntactic display which is specific to Kiswahili is essential for helping learners of the language to master it correctly. Further research will reveal whether the analysis of the object relative adopted DP can be used to derive similar phrases in other Bantu languages, such as Sesotho, Chishona, Ikalanga, and ciNsenga.

Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution

Chinese zero pronoun (ZP) resolution plays a critical role in discourse analysis. Different from traditional mention-to-mention approaches, this article proposes a chain-to-chain approach to improve the performance of ZP resolution in three aspects. First, consecutive ZPs are clustered into coreferential chains, each working as one independent anaphor as a whole. In this way, those ZPs far away from their overt antecedents can be bridged via other consecutive ZPs in the same coreferential chains and thus better resolved. Second, common noun phrases (NPs) are automatically grouped into coreferential chains using traditional approaches, each working as one independent antecedent candidate as a whole. That is, those NPs occurring in the same coreferential chain are viewed as one antecedent candidate as a whole, and ZP resolution is made between ZP coreferential chains and common NP coreferential chains. In this way, the performance can be much improved due to the effective reduction of the search space by pruning singletons and negative instances. Third and finally, additional features from ZP and common NP coreferential chains are employed to better represent anaphors and their antecedent candidates, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on the OntoNotes V5.0 corpus show that our chain-to-chain approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art mention-to-mention approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first work to resolve zero pronouns in a chain-to-chain way.

Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution

Semantic information that has been proven to be necessary to the resolution of common noun phrases is typically ignored by most existing Chinese zero pronoun resolvers. This is because that zero pronouns convey no descriptive information, which makes it almost impossible to calculate semantic similarities between the zero pronoun and its candidate antecedents. Moreover, most of traditional approaches are based on the single-candidate model, which considers the candidate antecedents of a zero pronoun in isolation and thus overlooks their reciprocities. To address these problems, we first propose a neural-network-based zero pronoun resolver ( NZR ) that is capable of generating vector-space semantics of zero pronouns and candidate antecedents. On the basis of NZR , we develop the collaborative filtering-based framework for Chinese zero pronoun resolution task, exploring the reciprocities between the candidate antecedents of a zero pronoun to more rationally re-estimate their importance. Experimental results on the Chinese portion of the OntoNotes 5.0 corpus are encouraging: Our proposed model substantially surpasses the Chinese zero pronoun resolution baseline systems.

Effects of frequency and morphosyntactic structure on error detection, correction, and repetition in Swedish-speaking children

ABSTRACTGrammatical error detection and correction are often used to test explicit language knowledge. This study investigated effects of token frequency and error type in error detection, correction, and repetition, and performance on the three tasks were compared and related to models of metalinguistic awareness and development. Thirty Swedish-speaking 10-year-olds with typical language development participated in the study, which focused on four morphosyntactic errors: the infinitive instead of past tense for regular and irregular verbs, and the omission of the obligatory indefinite article in common and neuter gender noun phrases. Target verbs and nouns were of high or low frequency. Results showed significant effects of verb frequency in all tasks, and effects of noun gender for error detection, but not for correction and repetition. Children detected significantly more past-tense errors than they accurately corrected, but the opposite result was seen for noun phrase errors. The patterns of results both within and across tasks imply that implicit language knowledge affects performance, and that lexical frequency, even of familiar words, needs to be controlled when designing tasks for measuring grammatical knowledge. The particular challenge of the Swedish neuter noun phrase in language development and language processing needs to be further investigated.

Chinese Common Noun Phrase Resolution: An Unsupervised Probabilistic Model Rivaling Supervised Resolvers

Pronoun resolution and common noun phrase resolution are the two most challenging subtasks of coreference resolution. While a lot of work has focused on pronoun resolution, common noun phrase resolution has almost always been tackled in the context of the larger coreference resolution task. In fact, to our knowledge, there has been no attempt to address Chinese common noun phrase resolution as a standalone task. In this paper, we propose a generative model for unsupervised Chinese common noun phrase resolution that not only allows easy incorporation of linguistic constraints on coreference but also performs joint resolution and anaphoricity determination. When evaluated on the Chinese portion of the OntoNotes 5.0 corpus, our model rivals its supervised counterpart in performance.

Proper noun anomia in conversation: A description of how a man with chronic anomia constructed referencing turns

Background: Proper noun anomia has received significant attention as a source of evidence for the organisation of the lexicon, and the neuroanatomical bases of language. There is also some evidence that people with aphasia and related disorders may have particular difficulty producing proper nouns. However, very few studies have examined how proper noun anomia manifests in everyday conversation. Aims: This study uses conversation analysis (CA) to describe how a man with chronic anomia constructed turns that referred to people, places, and other entities that can be named with proper nouns. Methods & Procedures: A man with chronic anomia following a closed head injury (Paul) was recorded during everyday conversations involving two friends and the researcher. Approximately 2½ hours of recordings were collected and transcribed. A collection of referencing turns was assembled from this dataset and analysed. Outcomes & Results: Two design features of Paul's referencing turns are identified and described. First, Paul recurrently delayed the production of reference forms in referencing turns. It is speculated that these practices generated extra time for Paul to produce proper nouns. Second, Paul recurrently utilised common noun phrases (e.g., that young bloke) as reference forms in place of proper nouns. These references were easier to produce than proper nouns, and solicited proper nouns from his conversation partners. Securing the involvement of conversation partners allowed Paul to partially distribute the productive and moral responsibility for proper noun generation. Conclusions: It is argued that these turn construction practices represent adaptations to proper noun anomia in conversation. These findings may contribute to the development of interaction-focused interventions targeting referencing by people with anomia. Future investigation should focus on how the referencing turns of people with anomia change over time.

The sentence-composition effect: Processing of complex sentences depends on the configuration of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases.

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was reduced when the head NP was unusual relative to the embedded NP, as manipulated by lexical frequency. When both NPs were common or both were unusual, results showed strong effects of both commonness and sentence structure, but no interaction. In contrast, when 1 NP was common and the other was unusual, results showed the critical interaction. These results provide evidence for a sentence-composition effect analogous to the list-composition effect that has been well documented in memory research, in which the pattern of recall for common versus unusual items is different, depending on whether items are studied in a pure or mixed list context. This work represents an important step in integrating the list-memory and sentence-processing literatures and provides additional support for the usefulness of studying complex sentence processing from the perspective of memory-based models.

Potentialités dialogiques du déterminant possessif

In this paper, Jean-Marc Sarale describes various occurrences of possessive noun phrases which take a dialogical meaning in context, such as “your N” meaning “the N you spoke of” or “the thing you call N “. This kind of enunciative splitting can happen in proper noun as well as in common noun phrases, at all persons (my/your/his...), regardless of syntactic function. It is suggested that the personal indicator implied in the possessive adjective may contextually point at another source than the main speaker, when interacting with a subjective indicator or a dialogical marker. The possessive adjective doesn’t seem to be a marker of dialogism in itself, but rather a dialogical signal in context – some of his contextual interactions are described.

The Form and Use of Names in Seri

This paper describes the form and use of names in the Seri language. Names are distinguishable from common nouns by some tests. Some names are simple, but others are complex, often constructed from common noun phrases. It is shown how the patterns described are attested in names of people, places, months, etc. Names may be embellished by certain common nouns and they may be used as appositive modifiers. Finally, the use of names and other words in vocative function is described.

Complex Demonstratives, QI Uses, and Direct Reference

Complex demonstratives (in the singular) are noun phrases that result from combining the determiners `this' or `that' with syntactically simple or complex common noun phrases such as `woman' or `woman who is taking her skis off'. Thus, `this woman', and `that woman who is taking her skis off' are complex demonstratives. There are also plural complex demonstratives such as `these skis' and `those snowboarders smoking by the gondola'.My book Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account argues against what I call the direct reference account of complex demonstratives (henceforth DRCD) and defends a quantificational account of complex demonstratives. In two recent papers, Nathan Salmon has criticized one of the book's arguments against DRCD. In this essay I show that Salmon's criticism fails. I also show that the version of DRCD that Salmon ends up endorsing is false.

Another Look at the Marking of Plural Personal Noun Constructions in Austronesian Languages

In a recent note in this journal, Robert Blust, using data from Philippine and Formosan languages, proposes a functional difference for Proto-Austronesian between the forms of genitive common noun phrase markers, such that PAN *nu marked 'genitive of common nouns', while PAN *na marked 'genitive of plural personal nouns'. This paper examines the Philippine and Formosan evidence for these reconstructions and concludes that the evidence provided is the result of convergent development in the languages cited, and cannot be considered evidence for the proposed reconstructions. Alternate reconstructions that better account for the Philippine evidence are proposed.

On the Origin of Philippine Vowel Grades

The concept of vowel grade by which morphological features in some Indo- European languages are signaled by change in the quality of the vowel of a given form has long been recognized. More recently, the term has also been applied to the variation in vowels that occur in some case-marking prepositional forms in Austronesian languages. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate some of the processes by which vowel grades developed in some Philippine languages. These processes include what has been referred to elsewhere as vowel-grade harmony, an assimilatory process by which the vowel of one case-marking preposition copies that of another. Noun phrases in many Philippine languages are commonly described as being introduced by "phrase markers" that specify certain syntactic and semantic features of the noun phrase they introduce. These are typically unstressed clitic forms having a CV or CVC shape. However, the quality of the vowel varies from language to language. Thus, in Ivatan, the forms that introduce common noun phrases all have an u vowel, while those that introduce personal noun phrases all have an i vowel; in Tagalog the forms that introduce common noun phrases all have an a vowel, while those that introduce personal noun phrases all have an i vowel, like Ivatan. Recognizing that the similarity in vowel quality of "phrase markers " in these languages is commonly the result of vowel-grade harmony and not necessarily the result of regular phonological change provides an explanation for the multiple irregularities that are found in attempting to reconstruct the protoforms of "phrase markers."

Automated Web issue analysis: A nurse prescribing case study

Web issue analysis, a new automated technique designed to rapidly give timely management intelligence about a topic from an automated large-scale analysis of relevant pages from the Web, is introduced and demonstrated. The technique includes hyperlink and URL analysis to identify common direct and indirect sources of Web information. In addition, text analysis through natural language processing techniques is used identify relevant common nouns and noun phrases. A case study approach is taken, applying Web issue analysis to the topic of nurse prescribing. The results are presented in descriptive form and a qualitative analysis is used to argue that new information has been found. The nurse prescribing results demonstrate interesting new findings, such as the parochial nature of the topic in the UK, an apparent absence of similar concepts internationally, at least in the English-speaking world, and a significant concern with mental health issues. These demonstrate that automated Web issue analysis is capable of quickly delivering new insights into a problem. General limitations are that the success of Web issue analysis is dependant upon the particular topic chosen and the ability to find a phrase that accurately captures the topic and is not used in other contexts, as well as being language-specific.

NP-anaphora and focused possessors in parallel architecture

The Persian counterparts to English noun phrases like John's and mine involve the anaphoric element mal (lit. ‘property’). This element can form a possessive construction in combination with common noun phrases, proper names, or pronouns but can never co-occur with the otherwise ubiquitous pronominal enclitics in its anaphoric function. In this article an account of this co-occurrence restriction is given in terms of information structure. Specifically, mal, as an anaphoric element, is argued to be “topical” while its possessor constitutes the focus of the larger possessive construction. The non-occurrence of the pronominal enclitics with mal is proposed to be the consequence of a broader constraint that prohibits these elements from occurring in focused positions. The article presents a lexical entry for mal capturing its syntactic and semantic properties within the parallel architecture framework of Jackendoff (1997, 2002).

Bare Nominals and Number in Brazilian and European Portuguese

This paper investigates the semantics of bare nominals (BNs) in Brazilian and in European Portuguese. More specifically, it addresses the constraints regarding their occurrence and interpretation in these languages, and evaluates their implications for the Nominal Mapping Parameter as proposed in Chierchia 1998. Chierchia's typology provides the theoretical background against which we investigate the matter. The paper claims – contra Chierchia – that count BNs may be argumental without denoting kinds. We also claim that the denotation of common nouns and Noun Phrases may vary from one language to the other and that this variation can explain typological differences across languages.

Determiners, Nouns, or What? Problems in the Analysis of Some Commonly Occurring Forms in Philippine Languages

This paper deals with the problems inherent in determining the syntactic word class of the initial word in many common noun phrases in Philippine languages such as Tagalog ang, Ilokano ti, and Bontok nan. These forms have been variously called case-marking particles, construction markers, common noun markers, articles, determiners, specifiers, or simply proclitics. However, a good syntactic typology of the languages requires that a decision be made as to their word class, based not simply on functional characteristics, semantic features, or translation equivalents, but on their syntactic distribution. Under certain assumptions, these words would be determiners, with the immediately following word being the head noun of its phrase. However, the words that follow appear to be verbal, having the same form as in the predicate of a sentence, and this paper thus considers an alternative solution in which the words in question are specifying-nouns meaning 'the one' and are the heads of their phrases. Under this analysis, the immediately following words are verbal constructions that constitute relative clauses dependent on the specifying nouns. Corroborating evidence is found in the Talubin dialect of Bontok, in which the words in question require genitive clitics to be attached to them, rather than to an immediately following content word. Historical evidence showing that the forms in question were originally demonstrative nouns (and still function as such) supports their synchronic analysis as nouns.

SPECIFICITY OPERATORS IN SpecDP

Abstract. In this paper I argue that a common noun phrase DP contains a small clause, including both a predicate (headed by the common noun) and an abstract subject position. DPs that are specific (in the sense of EnG 1991) are argued to have an operator in SpecDP, which A‐bar binds the abstract subject position of the DP‐internal small clause. This analysis forms the basis of an account of the Specificity Effect on extraction from DP, as well as some other facts concerning the internal structure of DP. The analysis also predicts that while specific nominal predicates are DPs, non‐specific nominal predicates are not. The two kinds of nominal predicate differ distributionally, and it is shown that these differences follow from the proposed analysis.

Proper names and definite descriptions with the same reference: A pragmatic choice for language users

The variety of types of noun phrase that languages provide for referring to individual persons, places and things means that the speaker often has a choice between proper noun phrases and descriptive definite common noun phrases, and sometimes additionally a hybrid of the two. The form chosen depends not only on the standpoint of the speaker but also on that of the addressee. When these are different, the speaker may be faced with a conflict, which can be resolved in different ways: in situations where a choice has to be made between a more socially distant form (e.g. Mrs. Jones) and a solidary one (e.g. Mary), a compromise form is sometimes possible ( Mary Jones); when referring to a fellow family member, however, the choice (between, say Mary, Auntie Mary and ( your) Mum(my) for the same person) is often made conventionally by reference to principles involving the relative generations of speaker, addressee and referent person. Reference to persons in families, companies and other social organizations also depends on the relative insider/outsider status of the speaker and addressee. This factor seems to play a further role in the selection between proper names and definite noun phrases referring to local places, such as towns and rivers, with insiders in some communities showing local solidarity by repeatedly using the local place name (e.g. the Rhine), and in the others using insider knowledge to permit implicit reference (e.g. The river). Which of these two modes of reference is usual in a given community seems to be a matter of sociolinguistic norm or traditional usage.