Conditional Sentences Research Articles

The Impact of Explicit Corrective Feedback on Learning English Conditional Sentences

This study investigates the impact of corrective feedback on enhancing the student's ability to correctly use English conditional sentences. The study used a quasi-experimental design for data analysis. The data was collected from a sample of hundred students selected through a convenient sampling technique studying English in 9th class in English medium schools in Upper Dir. The homogeneous results of the control and experimental group in the pre-test before intervention and better performance in the post-test by the experimental group confirmed through t-tests showed a positive impact of explicit corrective feedback on learning English conditional sentences. A significant effect was seen on the experimental group suggesting that explicit corrective feedback is required for students at secondary to learn the complex structure of English. In light of the findings, it is suggested that explicit corrective feedback focuses on students' deficiencies and might increase their drive to learn more about their mistakes and correct themselves in time.

The frequency of using conditional sentences in drama, based on the analysis of three drama texts: Flour in the veins by Igor Štiks, Crocodile Lacoste by Zlatko Topčić and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

This paper deals with the frequency of use of conditional sentences in contemporary dramas that were not originally written in English but were translated into it. The hypothesis that the paper tries to prove here, states that conditional sentences are not used so frequently in modern dramas, unlike classical plays, which is tried to be proved by analyzing three plays, one of which was written in Croatian (Flour in the veins by author Igor Štiks), and the other in Bosnian (Silvertown / Crocodile Lacoste, by author Zlatko Topčić), both translated into English. Finally, the third drama, Romeo and Juliet, is a classic drama by William Shakespeare. Since the two plays that served as a basis for this analysis, were not originally written in English, the first part of the paper provides a theoretical background on conditional sentences and types of conditional sentences in Croatian, then in English, listing potential translational equivalents of conditional sentences in both languages. The results of the analysis conducted on three dramas, clearly show that the hypothesis was successfully confirmed. However, although only three plays were analyzed, it is expected that the results would be similar in case there were more plays.

Ramsey's Lost Counterfactual

In contemporary works on conditionals, the Ramsey test is a procedure for the evaluation of conditional sentences. There are several versions of the test, all inspired by a footnote by the British philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey, in his General Propositions and Causality. However, no study on Ramsey's own account of conditionals has been put forth so far. Furthermore, the footnote seems to cover indicative conditionals only, and this has led to the belief that no account of counterfactuals can be found in Ramsey's work. In this paper, I recover Ramsey's account of counterfactuals and show that it is sketched in the footnote too. The result is a well-developed account of counterfactuals that resembles many contemporary ones. But Ramsey uses the same approach also for other types of conditionals, and this casts doubts on the current criteria for the classification of this type of sentences.

The Analysis of the Soldier from Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspectives

The Soldier is a sonnet written in 1914 by Rupert Brook, a British war poet. The paper aims at analyzing the poem by applying M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework. The study mainly adopts a qualitative methodology to analyze the text by text linguistics. However, the quantitative methodology is also used to calculate the proportions of each metafunctional process in this poem. The main findings of this paper are: 1) Topic theme: the themes of the poem are I, dust, England, this heart, et., which show the soldie'’s love and gratefulness for England; 2) The focus of tense: The Soldier starts with a conditional clause and then uses present and past tense to create a context as if he was depicting a real external world instead of an imagination from the inner world. 3) Patterning and re-patterning: The patterning analysis shows the soldier in the poem emphasizes his motivation for sacrificing and spreading the precious things in England who had brought him up. The paper concludes that The Soldier shows a strong sense of patriotism, which might be an approval for the former literary studies of this poem from linguistic aspects.

Multioperational Style, Eccentricity, and Valeria Luiselli's Aesthetics of Education

Multioperational Style, Eccentricity, and Valeria Luiselli's Aesthetics of Education Alexandra Kingston-Reese (bio) Is there such a thing as speculative novel form? In the afterword to the English translation of her second novel La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth, 2015 ), VALERIA LUISELLI proposed a formula. "The formula, if there was one," she muses, "would be something like Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG."1 Perhaps, maybe, kind of: this formula appears as hindsight, almost as a throwaway comment. The conditional clause weighs heavily: if, if, if. But where flippancy denotes narrative, affective, and political uncertainty, Luiselli's subjunctive grammar is more speculative than specious.2 In 2016, Luiselli adapted the formula, but this time in a short piece for the Financial Times on the twenty-firstcentury novel and the internet: "Dickens + MP3 ÷ Cervantes − Wikipedia = 21st-century novel."3 In solving x for y, y is no longer a specific novel but any novel from this century. For the readers of the Financial Times [End Page 551] (paywalled), Dickens is retained, Balzac is removed, Cervantes added, and Wikipedia makes an appearance in an ambivalent subtracted position. Any such formula is attuned not only to the values included within it (the Dickens, the Balzac, the MP3, and the JPEG) but also to the grammar of the operation: the addition, division, and subtraction signs. Like in mathematics, where operationality describes a process by which values are transformed, so too are Luiselli's so-called values transformed. The three mathematical signs are also grammatical: the + comes to mean adding, listing, accumulating; the ÷ comes to mean bisecting one category with another; and the − comes to mean peeling away parts of the whole. The original site for Luiselli's play with speculation, reification, and abstraction, however, is not her formula but the novel itself. The Story of My Teeth is a story of class mobility in which its central figure and narrator, Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez Sánchez, in his role as an auctioneer, uses financial speculation and stylistic hyperbole to turn dead objects (his own teeth, among others') into commodities to provide access to art. At once a financial and aesthetic speculator, Highway, perhaps a reader of the Financial Times, is eccentrically invested in the pursuit of garnering knowledge in exchange for audacious lies. By dialing up the friction between artistic and financial value, The Story of My Teeth presents itself as an allegory of eccentric aesthetic education, whereby aesthetic education provides the working class access to wealth at the moderate expense of one's moral license. The contention that the more value art has, the less it needs to defend itself, impels not only the novel's style and plot but its material conditions. In 2012, [End Page 552] Luiselli was approached by Magalí Arriola and Juan Gaitán, curators of the private contemporary art collection Galería Jumex in Mexico, to write an entry for the catalog of the exhibition El Cazador y la Fábrica (The Hunter and the Factory).4 Part of the commission instructed Luiselli "to reflect upon the bridges—or the lack thereof—between the featured artwork, the gallery, and the larger context of which the gallery formed part," fictionally.5 Housing the large private Colección Jumex, Galería Jumex was located in 2012 in Ecatepec, just outside Mexico City on the grounds of Grupo Jumex's headquarters and factory. Despite being within the estate, Luiselli notes, there was, "naturally, a gap between the two worlds: gallery and factory, artists and workers, artwork and juice."6 The path that took this commission to the novel La historia de mis dientes was largely a dialogical one: to establish how literature can "play a mediating role" between two opposing but materially entwined worlds must first require acknowledging, in a Bakhtinian fashion, the novel form's discursive role in public life.7 To properly enact this function, Luiselli sent short installments of the novel from New York to a reading group made up of the Grupo Jumex factory workers in Mexico across that year. The factory workers then recorded their conversations and stories for Luiselli to parse over and incorporate into the novel.8 From these discussions...

The difference between the optative and the “modal” indicative in Homeric Greek: four case studies. Part 1: The optative

In epic Greek both the optative and the indicative (the so-called “modal indicative”) can be used in contexts where the degree of realization is uncertain or even impossible, while in Attic Greek only the indicative is used. In these two articles I discuss whether there is a difference between the optative and the modal indicative in these contexts and/or if it can be determined which was the original mood. As there are about 1500 optatives and 250 modal indicatives in Homer, it is not possible to discuss them all and, therefore, I focus on the passages in which aorist forms of γιγνώσκω, βάλλω and of ἴδον appear, and those conditional constructions in the Odyssey in which the postposed conditional clause is introduced by εἰ μή with either a “modal” indicative or optative. The corpus comprises 100 forms (80 optatives and 20 indicatives), but in each example I also address the other modal indicatives and optatives in the passages, which adds another 50 forms to the corpus. In this part (part 1) I address the optative. First, I provide an overview of the research on the optative in Homeric Greek, discuss the different suggestions for the co-existence of the optative and indicative in these uncertain and/or unreal contexts, explanations which can be summarized into two categories, those assuming that the indicative replaced the optative and those arguing that both moods were original, but had different meanings. Then I explain why this corpus was chosen, prior to the analysis that focuses on two elements, namely the temporal reference (does the mood refer to the past or not) and the degree of possibility (is the action described likely, possible, remotely possible or unlikely/impossible). Initially I consider the optatives with a past reference, then the optatives that could be interpreted as remotely possible or unlikely/impossible (“irrealis” in the terminology of Classical Philology) and conclude by discussing two passages that have been reused in the epics in different contexts with different protagonists and, consequently, with different modal meanings for the same forms. The conclusion of the first part of the article is that the optative was at the most unreal extreme of the irrealis-continuum and could initially refer to the present and future, as well as the past, but that the instances in which there was an exclusive past reference were (very) rare.

Conditional Markers of Legal Texts: A Comparative Study of Civil Code and Its English Version

Conditionals have always been hot topics in linguistics. Biber (1995) analyzes the logical cohesion of 22 Korean registers, Yao (2017) analyzes the differences in the use of 22 conditional markers in Chinese from 8 registers, and they find that legal texts use the least connectives. However, their researches only focus on the comparison of registers from the same language, and do not carry out the comparison of the same register from different languages. From a cross-linguistic perspective, taking Civil Code of the People's Republic of China (‘CC’) and its English version (‘ECC’) as an example, this paper makes study of the conditional markers of legal texts, and finds that: First, the preconditions in CC are always expressed by de constructions, and the Chinese character de is the conditional marker. Second, the postconditions in CC are always expressed by danshu, and the words danshi (but/however) are the conditional markers. Third, the conditions in ECC are expressed by conditional clauses (i.e. initiated by where/if), relative clauses (initiated by who, that, whose, etc.) and other phrases etc., and they function as the conditional markers thereof. Fourth, the provisos in ECC are always introduced by unless, provided that, except, etc., which are the conditional markers thereof. Fifth, as for the use of conditional markers in legislative texts, Chinese is more stylized and rigid compared to those of English, which may have been influenced by the Plain English Movement.

Гендерные особенности передачи экспертного мнения при оказании речевого воздействия в англоязычной интернет-коммуникации в период пандемии

The article is devoted to the identification of gender peculiarities in applying the strategy of expert opinion demonstration as one of the ways to manipulate recipients on the Internet. On the basis of linguistic analysis of English blogs with expert content selected by the method of continuous sampling, specific speech tactics which express gender identity in the process of expert opinion presentation are characterized. The interdependence between the functional load of the blogs and the speech tools used by the bloggers is established and analyzed. It was revealed that female experts implemented the tactics of uncertainty, justification and intimacy expressed in conditional sentences, just to convey hesitation, means of semantic hyperbolization of speech, appeal to another person's opinion and the results of other people's research, quotes, dialogicity of utterances in the blogs. The blogs created by male experts featured implementation of the tactics of we-community, knowledge demonstration, intimidation, beliefs with high degree of textual cohesion, description of negative scenario in case of the expert's recommendations ignoring, rhetorical questions and adverb instead embedding, negative constructions and verbs in the imperative mood. The identified tactics and speech means used for these tactics implementation are qualified as gender markers of manipulative influence on the user through the expression of expert opinion.

Functional and stylistic features of C. S. Lewis' sermons

The relevance of the article is due to the relatively small study of the issue of assessing the functional and stylistic features of C. S. Lewis' sermons in modern Russian science. The purpose of this article is to study the preaching addresses of C. S. Lewis from the standpoint of functional stylistics. The object of this work is the sermons of C. S. Lewis, delivered in various churches and at religious meetings, published subsequently as an essay in 1949, the subject is their features from the point of view of functional stylistics, manifested through various techniques. Such methods of work as analytical and descriptive were used in the study. The scientific novelty lies in the consideration of the functional and stylistic features of the texts of C. S. Lewis on the example of sermons, as well as the search for elements of appeal in these works. The conducted research indicates that the sermons of C. S. Lewis are characterized by certain functional and stylistic features expressed by a variety of techniques. Among them are various quotations (from Holy Scripture and fiction), allusions to the above-mentioned works, outdated and high-style forms of words, borrowings, various kinds of analogies and comparisons, as well as various rhetorical techniques (diacopes, hypophores), rhetorical questions, repetitions. In addition, these are various appellative constructions, including various verbs with imperative modality, the so-called "we-constructions", various types of complex conditional sentences. The analysis of these functional and stylistic features allows us to illustrate the position of C. S. Lewis and his understanding of the Christian faith in the context of contemporary life.

Use, Errors, and Self-Perceptions of Thai EFL Learners with Conditional Sentences

Conditional sentences are difficult for EFL students to understand because of their complexity in both form and function. By analyzing the performances and opinions among EFL learners, the pedagogical contribution may be beneficial for both EFL students and teachers. The use, errors, and perceptions of Thai EFL students regarding conditional sentences were explored in this study. Instruments of the study included a chapter test, writing assignments, and an online survey. Data were analyzied by means of Google Form and AntConc software. The results of the test revealed that the participants performed best on the zero conditional type, while the first conditionals were used the most in their writing. Findings of the error analysis revealed that some difficulties in the use of tense were widely occurring such as using present progressive instead of present simple tense on the if-clause for zero type. Following that, the participants believed that the second conditionals were the most difficult, while the zero conditionals were the easiest. 

The Efficacy of Using Round Table Technique in Teaching Writing Descriptive Text to Indonesian English as Foreign Language (EFL) Students

This research aims at finding out the efficacy of using round table technique in teaching writing especially descriptive text to Indonesian English as Foreign Language (EFL) students. The main question of this research: Is the use of Round Table technique effective in teaching conditional sentences to Indonesian EFL students?. The research can be an addition to the persisting teaching writing in English particularly the descriptive text through the use of Round Table technique. This research was conducted at First semester students of the English Study Program of Nusa Cendana University, Kupang. The population of this research was First semester students of the English Study Program of Nusa Cendana University, Kupang. The research used a pre-experimental method with a pre-test and post-test design. The pre-test was given to find out the basic ability of the students in mastering writing descriptive text and the post-test given to find out the students’ improvement in mastering writing descriptive text after giving the treatment by using round table technique. The findings show that using round table technique is effective in teaching writing descriptive text to Indonesian EFL students. It is supported by the result of the significance test through SPSS 20 program that the P was 0.00. Therefore, it is recommended to use the round table technique in developing students’ writing descriptive of Indonesian EFL students.

Еxpression of conditionality in compound sentences of the Udmurt language (semantic and structural features)

Introduction. In the Udmurt language, compound sentences with subordinate clauses are very productive. The means of communication in such syntactic constructions are conjunctions, allied combinations and, in some cases, correlates. The same conjunctions help convey different semantics. The purpose of this paper is to identify conditional, conditional-temporal, conditionally causal semantic relations expressed with the help of conjunctions, allied combinations, and other linguistic means, as well as the structural features of such syntactic constructions on the material of the Udmurt language. Materials and Methods. The research was based on the examples borrowed from Udmurt fiction. The author employed a set of research methods, such as descriptive; partial and continuous sampling; contextual analysis; transformation. The use of these methods made it possible to consider the specifics of the units under consideration on specific linguistic material. Results and Discussion. The article deals with the widely represented compound sentences with conditional, conditional-temporal and conditionally causal clauses in the Udmurt language. It has been established that sentences of a repeating real condition and consequence often combine the properties of conditional and temporary sentences; constructions with a single condition or consequence in the form of the present tense combine conditional and causal sentences, in the form of the future tense combine both conditional-temporal and conditional; in the form of the past tense combine sentences that have only the meaning of time or reason, the meaning of the condition is erased. The type of specific semantic relationships at the level of the deep structure of the sentence can be determined by the conjunction, the marker of recurrence, as well as the form of the multiple aspect of the verb. Conclusion. In the Udmurt language, the conditional-temporal meaning, as a rule, is expressed in complex sentences of a repeating real condition with the help of conjunctions ke, kuke ‘if (when)’; conditionally causal meaning is expressed in sentences of a single real condition with the conjunctions bere, dyrja ‘if (as)’, in which the connection between two non-repeating phenomena is expressed. The semantics of a compound sentence may depend not only on the conjunction used, but also on the type-time form of the verb-predicate, the semes of singleness or repeatability, additional lexical markers of singleness and multiplicity. The exact definition of meaning and contamination is possible only at the level of the deep structure of the sentence.

The law review paper between the Kingdom of the law and the realms of academia: A systemic functional analysis of adverbial clauses

Legal discourse has long been classified among those genres that defy generic changes the most (Gocić 2012). Recently, however, hybrid legal genres have been challenging this generic stability by imposing their own norms to coin a novel kind of ‘legal culture’ (Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011: 11). The law review article is a case in point for it combines both legal and academic standards of writing which make it “far richer in intertextuality and interdiscursivity” (Bhatia 2006: 6) than the traditional set of legal genres. This generic subversion can be traced in the lexico-grammatical choices made by the authors to turn their papers into influential legal sources rather than mere descriptions of the law. In this context, this study aspires to scrutinize the use of adverbial clauses as one specific lexico-grammatical choice in a corpus of 44 accredited law review papers with the aim of showing how this hybrid genre strives to evolve beyond the stagnation of what is termed ‘language of the law’. Specifically, a Systemic Functional Linguistics analysis of the semantic, structural and thematic uses of these structures is conducted to demonstrate how the hybridity of contexts in a single genre can make for unprecedented generic breaches. The quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed an uneven distribution of adverbial patterns in favor of non-finite purpose and finite condition, concession and reason clauses. Additionally, the positional distribution of these patterns is manipulated whenever the need arises to hedge claims as a form of allegiance to the communal demands of the law and academia. These choices are found to comply with the authors’ needs to balance both legal and academic rituals of writing while observing at the same time their personal needs to be highly acclaimed as legal scholars and to “publish or perish” (Christensen & Oseid 2008: 1).

A Critical Evaluation of Google Translation: The Case of English-Sorani Kurdish Translation

Google Translate is one of the most frequently and actively used machine translation services worldwide. Sorani Kurdish, otherwise known as Central Kurdish, was officially added to Google Translate in May 2022. At the onset of the launch of Sorani Kurdish translation services, it is crucial to evaluate the quality of the translation and pave way for improvements, if necessary. Taking into consideration both linguistic and cultural aspects, this paper aims to critically investigate the accuracy of English-Sorani Kurdish translations produced by Google Translate. For this purposes, the paper has adopted a textual analysis approach based on the notion of equivalence to critically analyze samples of translations generated by Google Translate. The results suggest that Google Translate is largely accurate at morphological and syntactic levels but improvements are needed to improve minor deficiencies detected in rendering ‘future perfect tense’, ‘third conditional sentences’ and passive tenses, especially in the case of ‘present progressive’ and ‘past progressive’ tenses. With regard to the semantic level, Google Translate has proved accurate in processing polysemous words, but it has assumed a total failure in translating idioms and proverbs. At the cultural level, in over third-fourths of instances Google Translate renders English cultural terms into Sorani Kurdish accurately, whereas in nearly one-fourth of instances it offers inappropriate translation. As far as English into Sorani Kurdish translation is concerned, Google Translate can be deemed effective as a supportive translation tool but it is far from being perfect, and continuous improvements will be needed to respond to the deficiencies unearthed in this study.

Conditional clauses in German Sign Language (DGS) and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras)

Conditional clauses in German Sign Language (DGS) and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras)

‘관련성’의 의미: 한국어 모어 화자의 직관 판단과 관련성 조건문의 의미 해석

This paper mainly aims to investigate the interpretation of relevance conditionals in Korean. To this end, an acceptability judgment test was conducted on Korean native speakers, and the results show that Korean speakers accept relevance conditionals only when the consequent clause provides relevant information with respect to the action-relevant decision problem derived from the antecedent clause. Given this finding, this paper suggests the interpretation of Korean relevance conditionals based on the Kratzerian interpretation method of ordinary indicative conditionals with some modifications for Korean relevance conditionals. Under the current analysis, it is assumed that the antecedent clause functions as a restrictor of a modal base, just like ordinary conditional clauses. Also, it is claimed that a (potential) action-relevant decision problem is derived from the antecedent clause, and as a result, the addressee’s desire to solve the decision problem by deciding which action should be performed ranks at the top of the addressee’s effective preference; then the consequent clause provides information that helps the addressee to choose the best action among the possible actions that compose the decision problem.

LEXICAL AND STYLISTIC MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS IN MODERN INTERNET COMMUNICATION

The objective of the article is to find out the specifics of using multilevel means of communication to indicate the emotional states of users in English-language social networks. Methods. The main scientific results were obtained using a set of general scientific and special research methods, namely: analysis, generalization and systematization of scientific and educational literature on literary studies, psychology, and linguistics; theoretical generalization, analysis and synthesis, as well as comparative, descriptive and analytical. Results. The authors note that the features of virtual communication are: dialogic, emotional, special authorial nature, the ratio of categories reader-author or speaker-listener, removal of restrictions in time and space, the status of participants is usually equal, the general picture of the world, unlimited choice of language. Emotionality is a linguistic characteristic of the text that can cause an emotional effect. It is the result of the transmission of human emotions through language. Accordingly, any verbal means of expression either convey neutral emotions, or positively or negatively colored. The study found that emotions could be expressed at any level of language. If the sentence has a neutral emotional tone, it can be enhanced by the use of lexical items with a positive meaning. The best indicator of positive emotions in statements is the words. Investigated that common language means of expressing positive emotions are tokens. Among the vocabulary that expresses positive emotions, a special place is occupied by exclamations. The study of utterances found that all exclamations were used in sentences with a positive emotional tone. Positive emotions are also reflected using vocabulary, the meaning of which has a pleasant effect on the audience. At the stylistic level, the authors of Internet texts used anaphora, epiphora, antithesis, gradation, alliteration, etc. Grammatical and syntactic means such as adverbs, exclamatory sentences are often used to express positive emotions in Internet discourse. Speaking of the negative tone of emotionality, it should be noted that the linguistic means of expression of negative emotions are often lexical items. The most common indicator is obscene language, which helps to express the feelings of the speaker. The syntactic level is important for expressing negative emotions. Authors often use the second or third type of conditional sentences to convey feelings of sadness, emphasizing the unreality of the situation and the inability to change circumstances.

КОНКЛУЗИВНИ УПОТРЕБИ В ПРЕДИКАТИ НА УСЛОВНИ ИЗРЕЧЕНИЯ / USE OF CONCLUSIVE FORMS IN CONDITIONAL SENTENCES

The Bulgarian еvidential system has drawn a lot of attention in recent years. The approaches to interpreting its semantics, however, differ significantly. Even so, most scholars agree that the Bulgarian conclusive is a modal category. The differences between the available definitions of the Bulgarian conclusive may be ascribed in part to a very particular grammatical phenomenon in Bulgarian – the coincidence of the forms of the conclusive aorist and the perfect indicative. This coincidence makes it difficult to identify and explore unambiguously the conclusive. So far there has been no comprehensive study of the uses of the conclusive, but some of them have been explored in various works by Georgi Gerdzhikov, Ruselina Nitsolova, Zlatka Guentcheva-Desclés, Krasimira Aleksova, Ekaterina Tarpomanova, Senem Konedareva, among others. The goal of this study is to identify the conclusive in conditional sentences. These are the least studied uses of the conclusive so far, partly because they are associated with various difficulties concerning the systematization of the conditional sentences, the conditions for realization of the grammatical forms in the main and subordinate clauses in Bulgarian, as well as the coincidence of the conclusive aorist and the perfect indicative forms. The exploration of the different combinations of other verb forms with the conclusive found in this type of complex sentences will allow for drawing conclusions on how these particular uses extend the semantic scope of the conclusive. Keywords: evidentiality, conclusive, grammatical homonymy, conditional sentences

Structure, Usage, and Meaning of Japanese Conditional Sentences “to”, “tara”, “ba”, and “nara” in Japanese Spoken Language: A Study Case of Dr. Stone Animation

This study aims to analyze the structure, usage, and meaning of Japanese conditional sentences (jouken hyougen) with the patterns of “to”, “tara”, “ba”, “nara” in the Japanese spoken language. By using qualitative methods, this study is collecting conversational data taken from Japanese Animation Dr. Stone. The data in the form of sentences were analyzed based on their structure, usage, and meaning. The results of this study found that Japanese conditional sentences with the patterns of “to”, “tara”, “ba”, and “nara” in Dr. Stone animation have a structure that tends to be attached to verb and noun predicates. In the spoken languages in Japanese Animation Dr. Stone, there were also found that some conditional sentences have different structures and change of predicate structure other than the usual structure mentioned in Japanese textbooks. Further, the conditional sentence “to” in Dr. Stone’s animation tends to be used to express general conditions or knowledge known by speakers, speech partners, and the general public. On the other hand, the conditional sentences “tara”, “ba”, and “nara” in Dr. Stone animation tends to be used to express conditions that may occur or the conditions that are assumed will occur by the speaker. Regarding the meaning of the conditional sentence “to” in Dr. Stone’s animation, “to” has the meaning of naturally occurring phenomena such as chemical reactions and physics, while the conditional sentences “tara”, “ba”, and “nara” in Dr. Stone animation have the meaning of conjecture or assumption, awareness or perception, and suggestion.

Model architecture can transform catastrophic forgetting into positive transfer

The work of McCloskey and Cohen popularized the concept of catastrophic interference. They used a neural network that tried to learn addition using two groups of examples as two different tasks. In their case, learning the second task rapidly deteriorated the acquired knowledge about the previous one. We hypothesize that this could be a symptom of a fundamental problem: addition is an algorithmic task that should not be learned through pattern recognition. Therefore, other model architectures better suited for this task would avoid catastrophic forgetting. We use a neural network with a different architecture that can be trained to recover the correct algorithm for the addition of binary numbers. This neural network includes conditional clauses that are naturally treated within the back-propagation algorithm. We test it in the setting proposed by McCloskey and Cohen and training on random additions one by one. The neural network not only does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting but it improves its predictive power on unseen pairs of numbers as training progresses. We also show that this is a robust effect, also present when averaging many simulations. This work emphasizes the importance that neural network architecture has for the emergence of catastrophic forgetting and introduces a neural network that is able to learn an algorithm.