Development Of Linguistic Theory Research Articles

Grammatical Parallelism in Aphasia: A Lesion-Symptom Mapping Study.

Sentence structure, or syntax, is potentially a uniquely creative aspect of the human mind. Neuropsychological experiments in the 1970s suggested parallel syntactic production and comprehension deficits in agrammatic Broca's aphasia, thought to result from damage to syntactic mechanisms in Broca's area in the left frontal lobe. This hypothesis was sometimes termed overarching agrammatism, converging with developments in linguistic theory concerning central syntactic mechanisms supporting language production and comprehension. However, the evidence supporting an association among receptive syntactic deficits, expressive agrammatism, and damage to frontal cortex is equivocal. In addition, the relationship among a distinct grammatical production deficit in aphasia, paragrammatism, and receptive syntax has not been assessed. We used lesion-symptom mapping in three partially overlapping groups of left-hemisphere stroke patients to investigate these issues: grammatical production deficits in a primary group of 53 subjects and syntactic comprehension in larger sample sizes (N = 130, 218) that overlapped with the primary group. Paragrammatic production deficits were significantly associated with multiple analyses of syntactic comprehension, particularly when incorporating lesion volume as a covariate, but agrammatic production deficits were not. The lesion correlates of impaired performance of syntactic comprehension were significantly associated with damage to temporal lobe regions, which were also implicated in paragrammatism, but not with the inferior and middle frontal regions implicated in expressive agrammatism. Our results provide strong evidence against the overarching agrammatism hypothesis. By contrast, our results suggest the possibility of an alternative grammatical parallelism hypothesis rooted in paragrammatism and a central syntactic system in the posterior temporal lobe.

Definições de homossexuais masculinos em dicionários escolares

Com o desenvolvimento das teorias linguísticas e da própria Lexicografia, várias pesquisas e abordagens diferentes foram propostas para dar conta da produção e da recepção das definições lexicográficas. Nessa pesquisa, tomando como base as discussões sobre a definição no âmbito da Metalexicografia (BOLINGER, [1985] 2008; BUGUEÑO MIRANDA, 2009; PONTES, 2009; PORTO DAPENA, 2002; WELKER, 2004), investigamos os recursos linguísticos empregados nos dicionários escolares tipo 3 para significar os homossexuais masculinos. A partir de um recorte de dados de Santos (2016), analisamos as entradas ‘gay’, ‘homossexual’, ‘maricas’ e ‘pederasta’ dos cinco dicionários selecionados, totalizando uma amostra de vinte verbetes. As definições foram analisadas com base nas categorias de definição propostas por Porto Dapena (2002), e os resultados apresentam a seguinte distribuição: 16 definições relacionais (44,5%), 12 definições hiperonímicas (33,3%), 6 definições sinonímicas (16,7%) e 2 definições pseudoperifrásticas (5,5%). Foi constatada uma tendência, na amostra, à utilização de definições relacionais, destacando o caráter metalinguístico dos dicionários. Outro aspecto relevante diz respeito aos traços semânticos utilizados nas definições que trazem à tona discussões sobre gênero social e sexualidade.

What would it mean for natural language to be the language of thought?

Traditional arguments against the identification of the language of thought with natural language assume a picture of natural language which is largely inconsistent with that suggested by contemporary linguistic theory. This has led certain philosophers and linguists to suggest that this identification is not as implausible as it once seemed. In this paper, I discuss the prospects for such an identification in light of these developments in linguistic theory. I raise a new challenge against the identification thesis: the existence of ungrammatical but acceptable expressions seems to require a gap between thought and language. I consider what must be the case in order for this objection to be dealt with.

Research on statistical machine translation model based on deep neural network

With the increase of translation demand, the advancement of information technology, the development of linguistic theories and the progress of natural language understanding models in artificial intelligence research, machine translation has gradually gained worldwide attention. However, at present, machine translation research still has problems such as insufficient bilingual data and lack of effective feature representation, which affects the further improvement of key modules of machine translation such as word alignment, sequence adjustment and translation modelling. The effect of machine translation is still unsatisfactory. As a new machine learning method, deep neural network can automatically learn abstract feature representation and establish a complex mapping relationship between input and output signals, which provides a new idea for statistical machine translation research. Firstly, the multi-layer neural network and the undirected probability graph model are combined, and the similarity and context information of vocabulary are effectively utilized to model the word alignment more fully, and the word alignment model named NNWAM is constructed. Secondly, the low dimension will be used. The feature representation is combined with other features into a linearly ordered pre-ordering model to construct the pre-ordering model named NNPR. Finally, the word alignment model and the pre-ordering model are combined in the same deep neural network framework to form DNNAPM, a statistical machine translation model based on deep neural networks. The experimental results show that the statistical machine translation model based on deep neural network has better effect, faster convergence and better reliability than the comparison model algorithm.

Brain and Language Specialty: Insights from Aphasiology and Neuroimaging

Scientific interest in the investigation of language and its neural correlates has always centered on the possibility of pinpointing the location of language in the brain with the assumption that specific areas of the brain could be dedicated to specific language components and processes. A central question in current neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic research that has been thoroughly discussed over the last few decades is whether certain linguistic abilities result from dedicated brain areas each specialized for specific kinds of linguistic representations and processes or whether these abilities are more accurately described in terms of interactions among different linguistic levels distributed across multiple brain regions. An outlook on language derived from current research suggests that language specialty as a distinctly human cognitive faculty lies in being supported by distributed neural structures that interact efficiently with so many domain-general abilities, functions, and information sources rather than in being located in a dedicated set of cognitive neural structures. This paper is a reflection of the insights into language in the brain based on findings obtained from neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies that support this perspective. The paper goes on plead that with current developments in linguistic theory, as a model of human knowledge of language, and some powerful methodological advances in cognitive neuroscience may lead to a new and more precise image of the functional organization of language in the brain.

The Correspondence between Syntax and Semantics

<p>The issue of Interfaces is central to linguistic studies. Modern linguistics, especially semantic studies, has given a special interest to this topic. However, up till very recently, the issue has been dealt with mainly from a syntactico-centric point of view. Throughout the development of linguistic theories, there has been a rooted idea in generative grammar that meaning is generated from syntactic structure. In fact, although we adopt the Conceptual Semantics framework, which considers meaning to be too rich and multidimensional to be encoded in purely syntactic mechanisms, we shall deal with the correspondence between syntax and semantics where these two components directly correlate with one another. In other words, we will deal with the topic from the angle where syntax bears <em>all</em> semantic relations.</p>

Approaches to Effective Connection Between Linguistics Theory and the Chinese Teaching

The relationship between linguistics theory and the practice of basic Chinese teaching is very close. Linguistic theory provides theoretical guidance for the practice of basic Chinese teaching, and the practice of basic language teaching provides the source of language materials for the enrichment and development of linguistic theory. However, there have been serious problems on the incomplete connection between linguistics theory and the basic Chinese teaching in the teaching practice for a long time. Recently, our team has done a survey on the basic Chinese teaching, and has made an analysis on the approaches to effective connection between linguistics theory and the basic Chinese teaching. The purpose is to make Chinese teaching adhere to the basic principle originate from language and then return to the language, and to guarantee the scientific development of basic Chinese teaching along with the right direction.

How suitable is the macro-micro parametric distinction in acquisition?

It is easy to agree with Tsimpli that debates on language acquisition need to be informed by developments in linguistic theory (Minimalism in this case). I also fully agree that revisiting standing issues in bilingual acquisition, such as input and age of onset, following a formal, linguistic perspective is necessary. However, in this commentary Tsimpli has not helped her case by linking early acquisition with macroparameters (perhaps the most contested concept in current Minimalist theory), nor by maintaining the view that the distinction between narrow-syntactic and interface-based phenomena can be used to reliably predict problems in acquisition.

Computations and interfaces: Some notes on the relation between the language and the music faculties

Developments in linguistic theory over the last 20 years have led to a view of the different components of language as a whole that consists in a computational system whose syntactically structured output is interpreted by (mind internal) external systems. This paper suggests that music and language share the computational system and differ in the nature of external systems and the basic units of the lexicon of each system. Furthermore it is suggested that so-called formal meaning in music should be considered (along with syntactically created meaning in language) as nonconceptual representational content.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Africa’s Linguistic Diversity

African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four-family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser-known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four-family model.

Agile corpus creation

In the past decades language corpora have become indispensable tools for linguistic research and the development of linguistic theory. However, it is not yet widely acknowledged that the quality of corpus-based research and theories depends crucially on the quality of the corpora, not only in terms of their content and size but especially as far as the accuracy and richness of the annotations are concerned. Neither has much systematic thought gone into the effectiveness of the traditional corpus creation process regarding this problem. This paper proposes a novel approach to corpus creation – agile corpus creation – that addresses the problem of simultaneously maximizing corpus size as well as the quality and quantity of manual and automatic annotations while minimizing the time and cost involved in corpus creation. The central aspects of agile corpus creation lie in the reorganization of the traditional linear and separate phases of corpus design, data collection, data annotation and corpus analysis and in the recognition of potential sources of errors during corpus creation.

Gauging the Scholarly Value of Connecting Research to Teaching

The field of second language studies crosses many disciplines, each with its own history, focus, and community of researchers. Considering between research and language pedagogy, I will focus here on the fields of linguistics, second language studies or second language acquisition, and foreign language education. Grabe (2002) traces the origins of the broadest of these three disciplines, linguistics, to the first issue of Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics 1948. Offering a definition that conceives the field as much larger than language learning, VanPatten (1999) says that applied linguistics is essence any use of linguistic . . . for any domain other than the development of linguistic theory (p. 51). This definition fits the broad scope of the journal Applied Linguistics, which, according to its editorial policy, publishes research into language with relevance to realworld problems with its primary interest making connections between fields, theories, research methods, and scholarly discourses, and less interest in the ad hoc solution of particular problems (see Aims the front matter of any issue). Given the local nature of many teaching problems, as Han points out, pedagogical applications might not receive high scholarly value for this journal, a reflection of their nonnecessity for the broad nature of the field.

Conversational ethics in psychological dialogues: Discursive and collaborative considerations.

Abstract With the linguistic turn in the social sciences have come increased sensitivities to language use. In this paper, we examine such sensitivities as they relate to the practices of psychologists seeking collaborative relationships with clients. In particular, we link ethical practice with developments in discourse theory and research, presenting arguments and evidence for enhanced forms of collaboration and client-centred practice. We conclude with considerations for what we consider conversational in psychological practice. The social constructionist movement in psychology is now a generation old. Premised primarily on developments in linguistic theory, the key insight spurring on this movement has been the notion that language is incapable of correctly representing experience in any absolute sense. For some, the movement seemed to invite linguistic anarchy; for others, it ushered in a new era of critical reflection and potentials for reauthoring understanding. Regardless, there has been a recent proliferation of research methods, therapeutic practices, pedagogies, and critically inspired reflections within psychology derived from ideas and practices associated with social constructionism. Attempts to reconcile these developments within mainstream psychology have been occurring for over 30 years now (Gergen, 1985; Shotter, 1975). For us, a social constructionist epistemology refers to a view of meaning as the product of human interaction in relational and broader cultural circumstances; that is, meaning owes something to its use in social contexts. The Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists (the Code hereafter; Canadian Psychological Association [CPA], 2000) offers one such example of socially constructed meaning. It also shows a function of meaning we feel merits particular consideration: how meaning is consequentially interpreted and put to use. With social constructionist practice in psychology has come a concern for meanings and practices used without critical reflection (i.e., taken for granted; e.g., Parker, 1999). Psychological practice itself can be seen as a socially constructive activity (McNamee & Gergen, 1992), shaped and reshaped over time. Our focus here is on how social constructionist perspective can further inform ethical practice, particularly in discussions psychologists want to see as collaborative with clients. Recent developments in social constructionist practice (e.g., Gubrium & Holstein, in press; Strong & Pare, 2004) emphasize a premise highly compatible with some aspects of ethical practice, as promoted by the Code (CPA, 2000): respect for the dignity and preferences of clients. This respect can be shown in how client-psychologist interactions occur in a collaborative manner when that is the aim of the psychologist. Specifically, the ethics to which we refer focus on how differences are worked out between clients and psychologists. They also refer to how issues of power and dominance are collaboratively resolved in the manner by which such psychological dialogues are conducted. That clients consult psychologists for their expert knowledge, of course, does not extend to psychologists' expertise overriding the understandings or preferences of clients. Instead, the first principle of the Code (CPA, 2000), particularly the first ethical standard, asks psychologists to demonstrate respect for the knowledge, experience, and expertise of others. For social constructionists, since there is no correct meaning made possible by language, a primary issue is the fit or appropriateness of meanings for those with whom psychologists interact. Meanings not taken up by clients serve neither client nor psychologist in addressing concerns that clients present. Arguably, psychologists have developed a more refined discourse than others from which to discuss clients' concerns and what can be done about them (Danziger, 1997). …

Language evolution: What linguists can contribute

Three factors contribute to the evolutionary development of an organism: (i) historical accident (the genetic raw material available for natural selection to work on); (ii) adaptation through natural selection; (iii) nonbiological (especially physical) constraints. The same factors apply in principle to characteristics of an organism, such as the biological basis of the capacity for language in humans. From the point of view of these three factors, the author discusses recent contributions from linguists to language evolution research, including the contributions in this volume. He emphasises the importance of language evolution research for the development of linguistic theory, and the consequent need for more linguists to get involved in language evolution research.

Why can you hit someone on the arm but not break someone on the arm?—a neuropsychological investigation of the English body-part possessor ascension construction

Recent developments in linguistic theory suggest that many grammatical constructions (e.g. datives, passives, locatives, resultatives, etc.) impose semantic restrictions on which verbs can occur in them. This has led to the ‘grammatically relevant semantic subsystem hypothesis’, which maintains that features of meaning that determine the interaction between verbs and constructions are segregated from other features of meaning that are irrelevant to grammar. This paper focuses on the English body-part possessor ascension construction—e.g. Sam hit Bill on the arm vs. ∗ Sam broke Bill on the arm. Previous research suggests that only verbs that include the general notion of ‘contact’ as an invariant part of their semantic structure can occur in this construction; other idiosyncratic features of verb meaning, such as the specific types of contact encoded by tap, slap, and pat, are effectively invisible to the construction. In a series of experiments, two brain-damaged patients with left perisylvian lesions (out of a total of five tested) manifested the following dissociation: they passed a verb–picture matching test that required them to discriminate between subtle aspects of verb meaning that are irrelevant to the construction, but they failed a grammaticality judgment test that required them to determine whether the same verbs satisfy the semantic conditions of the construction. Their poor performance on the judgment test could not be attributed to a purely syntactic impairment, since they had no trouble with a separate test that evaluated their knowledge of the basic syntactic structure of the construction. Overall, the results suggest that the patients have a disorder that selectively affects their appreciation of grammatically relevant aspects of meaning.

Nature, Nurture and Universal Grammar

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the ‘cues’ that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens skills in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The ‘nature versus nurture’ debate continues, as various “poverty of stimulus” arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language.

Syntax facit saltum: Computation and the genotype and phenotype of language

Human language has long captured the imagination of biological researchers. However, the gulf separating ‘computation’, ‘biology’, and ‘language’ has been equally long-standing-in large measure resulting from the gap between linguistic and biological description: we do not expect to literally find a ‘passive grammar rule’ inside a person’s head. Similarly, we evidently do not find a corresponding passive rule-specific ‘dysphasia’ that destroys one’s ability to say, “This problem was solved by the student” while sparing, along with the rest of the grammar, the ability to say “The student solved this problem”. The puzzle is a classic biological one: how to bridge between a ‘genotype’ and a ‘phenotype’, in this case perhaps the most complex behavioral phenotype we know. Linguistics has cast natural languages’s intricate and ultimately behavioral ‘outer form’ or ‘phenotype’ at an abstract level far removed form language’s computational and biological ‘inner form’ or ‘genotype’. Thus, even though linguistic science’s successful program the past 40 years has resulted in perhaps the richest description of a human ‘genotype to phenotype’ mapping that we know of-the initial substrate for human language and how language develops in an individual-until recently, progress at a more ‘reductionist’ level has been far more halting. The aim of this article is to show how recent developments in linguistic theory dubbed the “minimalist program” (MP) [l, 21 might help bridge the biology-language ‘abstraction gap’, because the minimalist program shows that despite its apparent surface complexity, language’s core might in fact be much simpler than has previously been supposed. For neuroscientists pursuing clues left by the linguistic phenotypes’s ‘fault lines’ down to the level of the real genotype, as exemplified in the work of Gopnik and colleagues [3, 4, 51, or even the so-called ‘candidate gene approach’, this is a promising development. The minimalist program is eliminative in exactly the right sort of way, since it boils down all syntactic relations and rules, including transformations, to feature matching-thus tying linguistic theory more tightly than ever to accounts such as Gopnik’s model of Specific Language Impairment. More generally, the minimalist program serves as a case study for how a complex behavioral phenotype can emerge from the interactions of a much simpler ‘genotype’. In particular, the minimalist program posits that the human ‘syntactic engine’consists of just three components: (1) words, that is, word semantics and word morpho-phonology; (2) word features; and (3) a simple operation that glues together or merges words and word complexes. This article demonstrates how just these three components interact to yield many, perhaps all, of the ‘special design features’ of human syntax. By ‘design features’ we simply mean

Issues in Prolongational Theory: A Response to Larson

ions and Transformations Citing Cohn and Dempster (1992), Larson distinguishes between representational and inclusional hierarchies. In the former, the leaves of the tree persist as leaves at underlying levels; in the latter, nonsurface structures are abstractions from the leaves. As he points out, the hierarchies in GTTM are representational. Thus a 13 chord at the musical surface persists in being a 13 chord at the underlying levels for which it continues to function. In contrast, underlying events in Schenkerian theory are in some sense abstractions, even though they are represented by musical notation. It is easy to say that underlying events are somehow abstract, and it is only somewhat harder to discuss how events might be abstract. The really difficult task is to develop a formal theory that assigns specific abstract structure to underlying events, and in a way that corresponds to the listener's presumed internal representations. Jackendoff and I chose to avoid this morass. GTTM is concerned with derivation of prolongational structure rather than with underlying abstractions of already assigned prolongations. Our strategy reflects developments in linguistic theory, Larson's asseverations to the contrary. Early generative grammar (Chomsky 1957) relied heavily on transformations, but by the 1970s the difficulty in constraining the application of became clear, and alternative formalisms were developed, some of which resemble GTTM's preference rule system (see the second Preface to the 1996 printing of GTTM). Larson conflates phrase-structure rules (in the technical linguistic sense) with two kinds of transformational rules, those that reorder elements in a string and those that alter the internal content of an element. Early generative grammar employed phrase structure rules, specifically the hierarchical rewriting of syntactic categories, and reordering transformational rules, such as the one that converts active into passive sentences. Recent phonological theory is often concerned with underlying cyclic derivations that transform the inner sound structure of words (Halle and Vergnaud 1987). It is interesting to catalogue Schenkerian transformations accord-

The role of functional categories in bilingual children's language mixing and differentiation

ABSTRACT: The present paper examines the simultaneous development of the two linguistic competences of the bilingual child. It has been observed that language mixing, defined as the indiscriminate combinations of elements from each of the component languages, is most frequent during a very early phase of language acquisition. However, as the child acquires greater competence in the two languages, the language contact which is in evidence (if any at all) increasingly takes the form of code‐switching, defined as language alternations which are constrained by syntactic principles. In the present study, special attention is devoted to the role of functional categories in the development patterns attested, and we defend a position intermediate between the strong continuity and weak continuity hypotheses. Thus, our overview of childhood bilingualism may be viewed as reflecting the convergence of developments in linguistic theory, language acquisition, and language contact.

A passage to anthropology: between experience and theory

The postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique and turning it into a vital part of the anthropological debate, A Passage to Anthropology provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology that will find a readership in the social sciences and the humanities. It makes the case for a renewed and invigorated scholarly anthropology with extensive reference to recent anthropological debates in Europe and the US, as well as to new developments in linguistic theory and, especially, newer American philosophy. Although the style of the work is mainly theoretical, the author illustrates the points by referring to her own fieldwork conducted in Iceland. A Passage to Anthropology will be of interest to students in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.