Sentence Elements Research Articles

Beckett and Coetzee: The aesthetics of insularity

The permutations of sentence elements in Beckett's Watt have the impersonality (almost) of mathematics. The variations of combinations of the same elements in certain sections of the book could have been performed by a computer. It is noteworthy that J.M. Coetzee indeed subjects Beckett’s work to computer analysis, as if he responds to aspects of it by mirroring in his approach to it the essence of its automatism/autism/insularity. Coetzee’s own insularity, though, takes its bearing primarily from the socio-political state; Beckett’s, if linked to this, primarily from the individual estranged by the contemporary world. But Beckett shares with Coetzee the informing thrift necessary for the establishment of an aesthetics of insularity.

Communicative dynamism and word order in Mandarin Chinese

The controversy in categorizing Mandarin Chinese according to Greenberg's word order typology is well known (Greenberg, 1966): Some writers maintain that Chinese exhibits the SOV order, some believe that it is a SVO language, while others hold that it has been undergoing a change from SVO to SOV. This study uses Firbas' theory of Communicative Dynamism (Firbas, 1966a) to analyse the ordering of the subject, the verb, and the object in Mandarin Chinese. It will be demonstrated that the word order of Chinese is not so much determined by syntactic considerations as by information structuring constraints. In other words, Chinese arranges the ordering of major elements according to the amount of CD each element carries: The less CD a sentence element has, the more toward the left of the sentence it will be positioned. This pragmatic constraint is so strong that some aspects of it have been grammaticalized.

Examinations of self-generation effect

When asked to generate any self-related information, subjects generally produce a higher recall score than when asked to recall experimenter-given information. This is known as the self-generation effect. To explain this effect, Itsukushima et al. (1992) proposed network theory of memory. In this theory, it is hypothesized that in the self-generation condition the subject can create necessay nodes and connect these nodes strongly to old and well established self-networks. The level of activation in the network is strong enough to make the spreading of activation. In the given-information condition, subjects might not fully create the necessary nodes, resulting in a weak connection to the self node. As a result, the level of activation itself might be weak.To test this hypothesis two experiments were conducted. In experiment 1, subjects were asked to add adjectives to the objects in a different sentence completion tasks. In experiment 2, subjects were asked to add adjectives not only to the object but also to the subject (that is, the name). In both experiments the newly added modifiers in the self-generation condition showed higher recall results than those in the name-given condition. This suggests that new nodes which represent sentence elements such as subject modifiers and object modifiers are formed during their sentence completion. These results are interpreted by the sperading activation from the self node to the relevant nodes. In addition, the relationship between self and memory was discussed.

The effect of passage topical structure types on ESL reading comprehension difficulty

This study investigated the effect of five types of topical structure on the item difficulty of reading comprehension questions. A topical structure includes the initial sentence element which is the initially placed discourse material in a sentence; a mood (surface structure) subject; and a topical subject which is a surface subject relating to the discourse topic of a text. The results indicated that there was a difference in the item difficulty of the questions according to the type of topical structure on which the questions were based. The questions derived from sentences in which given information occurred before new information and from sentences in which topical information occurred in subject position tended to be easier than questions derived from sentences manifesting other types of topical structure. The article concludes with a suggestion that topical structure types be included as a variable in future models of ESL reading comprehension difficulty.

Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children

Why do young children leave out sentential subjects? Two competence-deficit hypothesis and a performance-limitation account are evaluated in the present set of studies. American children appear to understand that English requires subjects before mean length of utterance (MLU) 2.0. On balance, performance factors account for the data best. Natural conversations between 21 American children (ranging in age from 1;10 to 2;8 and in MLU from 1.53 to 4.38) and their mothers were taped, transcribed, and analyzed to determine when American children understand that English requires subjects. We measured the frequency of subjects (Study 1); types of pronominal subjects, including expletives (Study 2); frequency of modals and semi-auxiliaries (Study 3); frequency of infinitival to, past tense, third person singular, and subordinate clauses (Study 4); length of verb phrase, frequency of different types of verbs, and frequency of direct objects (Study 5). For Studies 1 and 3 we also used, for comparative purposes, transcripts of 5 Italian children, taped monthly for a year. Even our lowest-MLU American group (5 children between 1.5 and 1.99) used subjects and pronominal subjects more than twice as often as the Italian children, and correctly case-marked their subjects. The American children also produced examples of all the sentence elements measured.

Differential Sensitivity to Errors of Agreement and Word Order in Broca's Aphasia

Abstract We investigated the effect of morphosyntactic violation type on accuracy and processing time in Broca's aphasics engaged in an on-line error detection task. Five agrammatic Broca's aphasic subjects and 15 age-matched control subjects performed grammaticality judgments on auditorily presented grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Both judgment accuracy and decision time were measured, so that the data revealed not only whether aphasics detected violations, but when they noticed them. The ungrammatical sentences were created by changing quantifiers and auxiliary verbs in one of two ways: substituting one quantifier or auxiliary for another to create agreement errors, or moving the quantifier or auxiliary "downstream" from its proper site to create word order errors. Also, the position of the violation in the sentence (early versus late) as well as the distance relationships among sentence elements involved in the violation (local versus global) were manipulated. Results suggest that aphasic subjects retain some sensitivity to grammaticality, knowledge that they are able to use "online." Performance was also affected by type of violation. Aphasic subjects were less sensitive to agreement violations than they were to violations created by moving the same elements to an illegal position-and this tended to be reflected in decision times as well as accuracy. These results support two conclusions. First, although the performance of aphasic subjects was degraded relative to control subjects, the findings of overall grammaticality sensitivity and relatively rapid decision times suggest that the locus of grammatical impairment in these patients has more to do with the accessing of linguistic information than with loss of linguistic knowledge. Second, the difference between agreement and movement violations provides further evidence that morphological marking is relatively vulnerable in aphasia, compared with the principles that govern word and morpheme ordering.

Unmarked and marked instances of topicalization in Hebrew

An analysis of Hebrew topicalization looks at the normal or unmarked function of topicalization in narrative discourse and considers tha additional contextual effects that marked or apparently redundant instances of topicalization are intended to achieve. Focus is on the fronting of elements in sentences with topic-comment articulation. It is argued that while earlier characterization of topicalization as bieirectional is appropriate, it is also the case that topicalization provides the basis for linking the communication to its context. Topicalization and discontinuities in storyline are then considered. A proposal that all topicalized sentences in Hebrew are backgrounded is then refuted, and examples of marked topicalization (i.e., passages in which there is no evidence of a discontinuity in the story yet topicalization occurs) are examined. IC. is concluded that the intended effect of marked topicalization is to highlight a key event to follow. Thirteen notes and a 19-item bibliography are included. (MSE)

La Coreference et L'aspect

COREFERENCE AND ASPECT We present some of the complex non-local dependencies between the elements of sentences in French, and especially their effect on coreference. Some of the parameters involved in these aspectual dependencies are listed and analysed. We then show that a more precise analysis including a simultaneous study of noun and verbal phrases is required.

The semantic functions of object deletion in classical Arabic

As is the case with the deletion of other sentence elements in Classical Arabic, object deletion is semantically marked on two levels: (I) dropping the object deliberately but functionally, (II) emptying the object slot and focusing on the verbal action. Among the functions of object deletion on the first level are: (a) brevity, (b) degradation or insult, (c) generalization, (d) ruling out a misleading interpretation which the presence of the object might cause. The second level of object deletion stresses the verbal action. In the latter, the object is not intended and the transitive verb acts as intransitive.

Closed-class immanence in sentence production

The closed-class hypothesis asserts that function words play a privileged role in syntactic processes. In language production, the claim is that such words are intrinsic to, identified with, or immanent in phrasal skeletons. Two experiments tested this hypothesis with a syntactic priming procedure. In both, subjects tended to produce utterances in the same syntactic forms as priming sentences, with the structures of the self-generated sentences varying as a function of differences in the structures of the primes. Changes in the closed-class elements of the priming sentences had no effect on this tendency over and above the impact of the structural changes. These results suggest that free-standing closed-class morphemes are not inherent components of the structural frames of English sentences.

A linguistic deficit resulting from right-hemisphere damage

The ability of right-brain-damaged (RBD) subjects to correctly insert a word into a well-formed stimulus sentence was tested. Subjects also performed three evaluative tasks designed to establish their degree of general cognitive impairment. The performance of RBD subjects on these tasks was compared to that of left-brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) subjects. Although RBD subjects outperformed LBD subjects on the language-related evaluative tasks, the RBD group was significantly more impaired on a subset of the insertion task. This subset included items which required reassignment of the syntactic status of elements in the stimulus sentence in order for the insertion to be carried out. The results of this study permit refinement of the common characterization of RBD individuals as rigid in their interpretation of meaning and indicate right-hemisphere involvement in aspects of the grammar previously thought to be inaccessible to it.

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION RETRIEVAL USING A GRAPH MODEL OF A SENTENCE AND ROUGH SETS

Abstract A uniform data structure is defined to represent sentence components (words) for a parallel processor of the natural language. The basic notation of rough sets is used for the representation of sentence elements in the computer, to exhibit their context and to select proper meanings. An approximation space reflecting the context of any word in a sentence is defined by induction from the most general meanings of words adjoining that word in the graph model of the sentence and from a contextual knowledge base. The contextual knowledge base specifies the meaning of each word with respect to the most general words expected to adjoin that word in the graph model of the sentence.

Severe stuttering associated with right hemisphere lesion

Following a right hemisphere stroke, a right-handed, 50-year-old male experienced a permanent dysfluency characterized by phoneme and syllable reiterations and, to a lesser extent, word and phrase reiterations. The reiterations occurred in initial, medial, and final positions and for all sentence elements (e.g., subject nouns, object nouns, verbs, modifiers). There was a notable loss of verbal automatisms (poems, songs, etc.). The patient's symptoms conform to the acquired stuttering syndrome described by A. Helm, R. Butler, and D. F. Benson (1978, Neurology, 28, 1159–1165).

Learning disabled children's comprehension and production of syntactic devices for marking given versus new information

ABSTRACTThis study examined learning disabled children's ability to understand and use syntactic devices for marking given versus new information in discourse, a skill where syntactic and pragmatic knowledge intersect. Using a modification of Hornby's (1971) paradigm, learning disabled and nondisabled children in grades 1 through 6 selected pictures on the basis of varying sentence types, such that their choices revealed their identification of the given information in each sentence. The production of syntactic structures for marking new elements in sentences was also assessed. Multivariate analyses revealed grade and sex effects on the comprehension task, but the only effect involving group status indicated that learning disabled girls were less able to comprehend cleft sentences than the other children. On the production task, learning disabled children relied on less complex sentence types; however, their strategies for marking given versus new information were as effective as those of nondisabled children. Implications of these findings for the relations between syntactic repertoire and the ability to integrate given and new information in oral and written discourse are discussed.

Topic, Antitopic and Verb Agreement in Non-Standard French

The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous, ces Romains , which, in spite of their frequent occurrence, have so far received little attention among linguists and grammarians. He argues that far from having the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly, the cooccurrence in the same clause of coreferential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an important functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. The pronouns in sentences such as the ones mentioned are interpreted as agreement markers. The syntactic and semantic differences between topics and anti-topics are analyzed.

Verifying the assertions and implications of language

The paper describes a process model that addresses several issues not examined in previous treatments of sentence verification, including the verification of sentences expressing the implications of their antecedents. The distinctive features of the model are (1) it is assumed that verification is based upon a focal element in the test sentence; and (2) the focal element is compared only with information that fills the corresponding semantic case in the antecedent representation. Experiment 1 provides support for the predictions of the model for a true—false—don't know task, and Experiment 2 permits the identification of the appropriate version of the model for a true—false—implied task. The model is evaluated with reference to previous work on sentence verification.

Cherchez Les Valences

One of the aims of every linguistic theory is to provide an exact and systematic description of the meaning of any sentence. The notion of "valence" is widely used in West- and East-European linguistics (Tesnière, Helbig/Schenkel, Apresjan, Mel'cuk, etc.) in order to account for the connection between syntactic structures and word meanings. So, in John saw the children it is due to the inherent valences of SEE that John is under-stood as 'seeing' and the children as 'seen': the referents of these two sentence elements carry specific meaning aspects of the verb. They only function in this way if they meet the formal characteristics set by the verb. In this paper I furnish a definition of "valence" and a corresponding discovery procedure. This procedure yields an explicit set of valences of any particular word. Valences are considered aspects of the meaning of a (set of) word(s) X, carried by the referent of a (set of) word(s) Y; as a corrolary, the meaning of this Y cannot be completely understood without taking into account the functioning of its referent as the carrier of the valence meaning. The discovery procedure does not assign a specific valence meaning to a verb if the functioning of the corresponding sentence element can be (completely) accounted for on the grounds of its own form. To illustrate this point, a valence labelled "price" which is claimed by Apresjan for the Russian verb ARENDOVAT' (='to lease'), would be rejected by the procedure because the corresponding sentence element has a form and a meaning which are not in function of its being dependent to ARENDOVAT', but would have the same form and meaning in other contexts. An analysis of the syntax and semantics of the Dutch verb WACHTEN (='to wait') illustrates the procedure. A short contrastive analysis of Russian and Dutch 'wait' shows some interesting differences in their comparable valences and in the syntactic peculiarities of adjuncts to these verbs.

Language, Thought, and Information Processing

There is no doubt that some of the information-bearing states of the central nervous system are not a species of sentential attitude; that is, they are not describable in terms of the person's being in a certain functional state whose structure and elements are isomorphic to the structure and elements of sentences.1 Obviously, for example, the results of information processing in the retina cannot be described as the person's believing that p, or thinking that p, or thinking that he sees an x, or anything of that sort. At the other extreme, there is also no doubt that some intelligent creatures talk, and indeed, sometimes talk silently to themselves. Between the obviously non-linguistic information processing and the obviously linguistic behaviour, there appears to be much of a cognitive sort going on in the brain-mind in virtue of which the intelligent behaviour is intelligent. The nature and form of these intermediate processes are the source of profound perplexity and the cause of much speculation. As yet, the perplexity and speculation have not sired anything that could justly be called a theory of information processing in intelligent beings, though the search for information-processing models appears to be providing an impressive bounty of inspired guesses concerning at least some parts of what must be an awesome organization. In this paper I mean to focus on a very general and fundamental question concerning the character of information-processing models for humans; to what extent-how far down-can the processing be described in terms of operations amongst sentential attitudes such as beliefs, desires, thoughts, and so on? My answer is that we had best abandon the sentential attitude for all but rather superfi-

Focal Words and the Recovery of Sentence Meaning

Abstract In listening and reading, the foreign language learner must be able to process a tremendous amount of information in a short time. In order to do this, he must develop a strategy for choosing those items that help in recovering that information. One way of doing this is to concentrate on focal words: words containing key elements of meaning in the sentence. These words may then be used - in speech and writing - to reconstruct the original message. This paper explores the relationship of focel words to other sentence elements and describes various focal word exercises for listening and reading.

Topic Marking in Haida

0. Ongoing analysis of the role of some postpositional particles in Haida indicates that marking and prominence are important in the organization of this language. Topicalization refers to a process whereby sentence elements are placed at the front of the sentence for the purpose of focus or contrast. Some languages employ topicalization more than others and are said to be topic-prominent languages.' Chinese is the time-honored example of a topic-prominent language. The topic in Haida will be assumed to be any sentence-initial element (a word or phrase) marked with a topic-marking particle. Initial elements without such particles will be said to be foregrounded. Sentence elements in Haida are fore-