Current Grammar Research Articles

O caráter performativo das ocupações estudantis

O artigo analisa as ocupações secundaristas que ocorreram no ano de 2015 no estado de São Paulo, como reação à proposta de reorganização escolar que previa o fechamento de 94 escolas e a transferência compulsória de 311 mil alunos e 74 mil professores. Foi realizada uma pesquisa bibliográfica e uma análise teórica das ocupações destacando sua dimensão performativa. Esta chave de análise é sustentada a partir de autores como Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe e Judith Butler, que enfatizam o caráter relacional e contingente das identidades, e a importância do corpo na gramática atual dos conflitos sociais. As conclusões indicam que as ocupações dos secundaristas foram atos performativos em três dimensões: na emergência dos sujeitos (a identidade secundarista que emergiu com a ocupação); no modo de apresentar algumas demandas educacionais (a produção de novas práticas escolares que materializavam as mudanças desejadas); na inversão do assujeitamento administrativo pela criação de outro “corpo estudantil” visível, vibrante e atuante. As ocupações extravasaram os canais tradicionais e consagrados de reivindicação previstos pela democracia representativa, tornando-se um movimento disruptivo, com forte teor transgressivo dos poderes instituídos e que, por isso, desencadearam forte repressão por parte do Estado. Ao mesmo tempo, foram espaços de produção de novas formas de educação e de uma vida escolar com mais liberdade, autonomia e sentido, corporificando críticas que os jovens vêm fazendo há muitos anos a respeito das políticas públicas e dos modelos de escolarização que lhes são oferecidos.

Le cercle pédagogique : pour développer les savoirs et les pratiques d’enseignement en grammaire actuelle

Cette étude porte sur les effets de la mise en œuvre d’un dispositif de développement professionnel appelé « cercle pédagogique » sur les pratiques effec-tives des enseignants participants. Des observations sur vidéo, réalisées dans la classe des participants, avant et après la formation d’une durée d’un an ont permis de constater que la majorité des enseignants a développé, d’une part, des savoirs grammaticaux acquis lors de la formation, soit un métalangage et un raisonnement grammatical et, d’autre part, des pratiques pédagogiques liées au cadre con-ceptuel de la didactique de la grammaire actuelle. La discussion porte sur les caractéristiques du cercle pédagogique qui contribuent au développement des pratiques pédagogiques et des savoirs liés à la grammaire actuelle et à son enseignement.

Reproducing the Properties of Harms that Matter: The Normative Life of the Damage Concept in Negligence

The overarching theme of this work is the extent to which the damage concept within the law of negligence reflects our human and social experience of personal harm and injury – and critically, the extent to which the current grammar of negligence law permits it to. My claim is that if the concept of damage is a normative one – one itself imbued with ideals of social justice and equality, directed towards treating like cases alike – then the law of negligence will treat the human experiences that accompany different forms of putative damage as stuff central to the damage enquiry. As I seek to argue here, that notion that the damage concept is a normative one, open to new situations in which it can be shown that individuals are left ‘appreciably worse off’, is the stuff of legal myth. Centralising the reproductive tort cases which have proved dominant in the theorisation of harm I illustrate how traditional understandings of damage as physical hurts and mediated through ‘common sense’ understandings of loss have rendered irrelevant the psycho-social and practical factors which prove crucial to an enquiry in assessing whether individuals are left appreciably worse off. The thrust of the argument is that because the very grammar of the damage concept fails to engage with individuals’ biographies – the “stuff” that gives meaning to the harms they have sustained – it impacts hard not only on the ‘damage’ question as to whether particular harms should be embraced within negligence on normative grounds but on the extent to which negligence itself can be said to have normative traction capable of delivering results that are fair, capable of producing horizontal justice and treating like cases alike.

Learning obscure and obvious properties of language

Some aspects of an account of successful native language learning are nonnegotiable. First, learners are unlikely to succeed if they cannot analyze the input correctly. Second, learners need to recognize discrepancies between their current grammar and the target language to progress to the appropriate endstate. Both requirements depend on an understanding of how learners process the language around them. In order to understand why other learner groups are less successful, it is useful to scrutinize the most successful learners, i.e., children: when and how do they succeed, and with what cognitive resources? We can then ask which of those mechanisms fall short in the less successful learners. These two connections are the main motivations for our target article (Phillips & Ehrenhofer, 2015). We are grateful to the authors of the 17 commentaries for engaging seriously with our arguments. In attempting to draw connections across fields we inevitably exposed gaps in our own knowledge, and we are glad to have these filled in by the commentators. In our response we aim to clarify some key steps in the argument that are engaged by a number of the commentaries. In particular, we ask:

A memetic grammar inference algorithm for language learning

An unsupervised incremental algorithm for grammar inference and its application to domain-specific language development are described. Grammatical inference is the process of learning a grammar from the set of positive and optionally negative sentences. Learning general context-free grammars is still considered a hard problem in machine learning and is not completely solved yet. The main contribution of the paper is a newly developed memetic algorithm, which is a population-based evolutionary algorithm enhanced with local search and a generalization process. The learning process is incremental since a new grammar is obtained from the current grammar and false negative samples, which are not parsed by the current grammar. Despite being incremental, the learning process is not sensitive to the order of samples. All important parts of this algorithm are explained and discussed. Finally, a case study of a domain specific language for rendering graphical objects is used to show the applicability of this approach.

Pragmatics and grammar (review)

Reviewed by: Pragmatics and grammar Robyn Carston Pragmatics and grammar. By Mira Ariel . (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii, 343. ISBN 9780521559942.$50.99. Pragmatics and grammar is published in the well-known and long-lasting series 'Cambridge textbooks in linguistics', known in the discipline as 'the red series'. Neither original monographs nor coursebooks, the success of this series has shown that there is a place for quite high-level compendia of thought on a particular domain of linguistics with presentation of the author's own views. This volume by Mira Ariel fits the bill admirably, as it brings together a wide range of different positions on the grammar/pragmatics interface (much of it cutting-edge research), employs a wealth of pertinent utterance examples (virtually all attested), and presents A's own position on the interface. At the outset, A claims 'The fact is our current grammar is often our pragmatics (of the past) turned grammatical' (xiii), and her aim is both to explain how this happens, how aspects of usage can penetrate language systems and change them, and to ensure that, nonetheless, a clear synchronic distinction between grammar and pragmatics is maintained. Two essential components of her view are that: (i) a key mechanism in language change is that of the 'salient discourse profile' of a linguistic form, that is, (roughly) a pattern of usage or discourse function of the form that has become routine and dominant among a community of language users; and (ii) the main locus for the grammar/pragmatics interface is a particular representational level of utterance content in which they both take part—'what is said' or 'what is explicated'—and so the pragmatic inferences that contribute to this content are the ones most likely to lead to semantic/grammatical change. In Ch. 1, 'Introduction: Grammar, pragmatics and what's between them', A establishes her position on the semantics/pragmatics distinction as a distinction between the meaning delivered by the linguistic code (expression-type meaning) and the meaning derived by defeasible inferential processes guided by presumptions about rational communicative behavior (the code/inference distinction, in brief). A takes the (now fairly standard) view that communication, no matter how linguistically explicit, always requires pragmatic inference. She discusses the distinguishing properties of codes and pragmatic inferences, and outlines several different kinds of pragmatically inferred meanings and some of the mechanisms proposed for generating them. She ends by setting out the two big issues that centrally concern her: (i) how to draw the code/inference distinction, and (ii) how inferences can become coded. Part 1 (Chs. 2 and 3), 'Drawing the grammar/pragmatics divide', focuses on the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics, and the kinds of arguments and evidence that indicate for any given phenomenon of utterance meaning whether it is a matter of grammar (linguistic encoding) or of pragmatic inference, and, if pragmatic, whether it contributes to the proposition explicitly expressed (explicature) or is an implicature. A makes clear that it is often no easy matter to establish a sure answer to these questions. She presents three specific case studies in their full complexity: (i) referring expressions, in particular, definite descriptions; (ii) temporal and causal interpretations of and-conjunctions; and (iii) upper-bounded interpretations of scalar terms, with a specific analysis of most. In Ch. 2, 'Distinguishing the grammatical and the extragrammatical: Referential expressions', A discusses a number of issues concerning the meaning, function, and distribution of referring expressions (names, definite descriptions, pronouns, demonstratives, clitics, and zero forms). She presents her own take on the much disputed semantic/pragmatic status of the existential presupposition associated with definite descriptions. She argues that there is an encoded (hence context-invariant) component, namely 'givenness' (of the referent), and a pragmatically inferred (hence cancelable) component, namely speaker commitment to the existence of the referent. While the [End Page 625] details of this analysis (33-44) and of several other analyses in this chapter are intrinsically interesting, more important for the theme of the book is the theoretical point they illustrate: for any regularly occurring form-function correlation, whether it is a stable feature of the code or a recurrent pragmatic inference is something that...

Trajectories of faithfulness in child-specific phonology

AbstractThis paper provides new evidence and analysis of gradual and U-shaped phonological learning. Using a rich longitudinal corpus from Trevor (Compton & Streeter 1977, Pater 1997b) we demonstrate that some of Trevor's consonant harmony follows a statistically significant U-shaped trajectory, in contrast to the more typical S-shaped progression of his complex onsets. We then analyse these two developmental paths using an OT model of phonological acquisition (Hayes 2004, Prince & Tesar 2004, Tessier 2007, 2009), in which the learner's variation within and across stages is the effect of stored old productions rather than a variable grammar. The decrease in Trevor's faithfulness to place of articulation due to consonant harmony is attributed to the induction of a new constraint during the course of learning. Our analysis is paired with a computational implementation, showing how competition between old forms and the current grammar allows the model to derive both S-shaped and U-shaped patterns.

국어 높임법의 올바른 교육을 위한 몇 가지 제언

This study started from the current situation that students could not accept 'honorific forms' in <Grammar> textbooks. For analyzing these reasons and making alternatives, questionnaires were made up to the high school and college students in GwangjuㆍJeonnam area. The term of honorific in Grammar is defined as 'a linguistic method/system to distinguish the level of the targeted person in dialogue both higher and lower'. But most students thought the term 'honorific' as 'the system of expressing speaker's respect to the higher-level person', not to the lower-level. For this reason, this article suggests 'treatment' system as an alternative. Current Grammar indicates the targeted person in three ways, 'subjectㆍobjectㆍhearer', but the system does not make agreement with learners. Treatment system is a grammatical process that consists of speaker and hearer. The existing terms, object and subject, are the same meaning of grammatical terms of subject, object and adverb. This is very confusing situation and it is difficult for learners to use these terms in real conversation so this article suggests 'person of topic' which means each person as 'subject' and 'object'. In the current Grammar, when treating hearer, formality form has four level of styles, 'hashipsioh-haoh-hage-hara', and informality form has two level of styles, haeyo-hae'. But learners almost do not use 'haoh' style so this is eliminated from the level in this study. In addition, when dividing the level of treating hearer, [±respect] should be the base of the level, not [±formality].

A formal treatment of the causative constructions in Chinese

There are at least five kinds of causative constructions in Chinese, the constructions of the collocation of verbs and prepositional phrases, verb-copying constructions, “ba” constructions with an object ahead, verb-copying constructions with their complements, and pivotal constructions with commands. But the current type-logical grammar has no tools representing the meanings of causative constructions. It would be neither intuitive nor simple to describe these constructions by means of the current type-logical grammar. So we intend to improve the type-logical grammar by adding CAUSE as a logical constant, complementing the structure rules about the movement and addition or deletion of some components of causative constructions, assigning categories to Chinese nouns and prepositions; then we give an intuitive as well as simple analysis on these causative constructions. Based on this work we shall extend the multimodal system of type-logical grammar, increase structure postulates, make constraints on frame semantics, and then prove the soundness and completeness of that system.

Parsing to Learn

Learning a language by parameter setting is almost certainly less onerous than composing a grammar from scratch. But recent computational modeling of how parameters are set has shown that it is not at all the simple mechanical process sometimes imagined. Sentences must be parsed to discover the properties that select between parameter values. But the sentences that drive learning cannot be parsed with the learner's current grammar. And there is not much point in parsing them with just one new grammar. They must apparently be parsed with all possible grammars, in order to find out which one is most successful at licensing the language. The research task is to reconcile this with the fact that the human sentence parsing mechanism, even in adults, has only very limited parallel parsing capacity. I have proposed that all possible grammars can be folded into one, if parameter values are fragments of sentential tree structures that the parser can make use of where necessary to assign a structure to an input sentence. However, the problem of capacity limitations remains. The combined grammar will afford multiple analyses for some sentences, too many to be computed on-line. I propose that the parser computes only one analysis per sentence but can detect ambiguity, and that the learner makes use of unambiguous input only. This provides secure information but relatively little of it, particularly at early stages of learning where few grammars have been excluded and ambiguity is rife. I consider three solutions: improving the parser's ability to extract unambiguous information from partially ambiguous sentences, assuming default parameter values to temporarily eliminate ambiguity, reconfiguring the parameters so that some are subordinate to others and do not present themselves to the learner until the others have been set. A more radical alternative is to give up the quest for error-free learning and permit parameters to be set without regard for whether the parser may have overlooked an alternative analysis of the sentence. If it can be assumed that the human parser keeps a running tally of the parameter values it has accessed, then the learner would do nothing other than parse sentences for comprehension, as adults do. The most useful parameter values would become more and more easily accessed; the noncontributors would drop out of the running. There would be no learning mechanism at all, over and above the parser. But how accurate this system would be remains to be established.

The grammatical doctrine of the Real Acadedemia Española (1854)

Summary The Grammar of the Real Academia Española (1713) constitutes one of the fundamental chapters of Spanish linguistic thought. It is a required point of reference for all grammarians and has decisively influenced the evolution of grammatical thought. Therefore, the continuing importance of theoretical contributions of Academic bodies is stressed precisely at the present historical moment, in which the most significant progress in linguistic theory may accrue from the process of permanent critical revision of the past. The Grammatical doctrine of 1854 has been chosen as the object of this study for two reasons, both of which derive from the fact that this doctrine constitutes a modification of that of 1771. On the one hand, two periods in the history of linguistics (the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th) can be compared. On the other hand, we may discover to what extent theoretical and practical aspects concur in the two texts. This factor is of great importance since the instrumental nature of all grammar depends on the adaptation of these two aspects. An attempt is made to illustrate both publications by locating historical-cultural points of reference of the period in order to arrive at an objective evaluation of the significance of this doctrine. However, to attain such a goal, the work is analyzed in terms of the work’s original setting, its nature and its aims. The formal structure of the grammar is analyzed and the contents corresponding to the theory are carefully examined. We may deduce from this study that the doctrine of 1854 may be considered ‘traditional grammar’, due to the normativism and logical-grammatical parallelism which underlie its contents as well as the rational method advocated as the criterion which determines the majority of the definitions. For these reasons, the doctrine of 1854 is far removed from the earlier theoretical position stated in the 1771 grammar; it can be inscribed in the category of philosophical grammars of the 19th century. Furthermore, it is argued that the complete edifice of current Spanish grammar is built upon these foundations. Then, the present state of grammar cannot be understood by a simple face-lifting. The grammatical mould is made of many centuries of reflection on the same subjects. To ignore it would be foolhardy. Therefore it is argued that we must return to the foundations where we will find the indelible data which will assist us in interpreting the ever ephemeral present on which future grammars will inevitably be erected, erected.