Grammatical Relations Research Articles

Textual Analysis of Acceptance and Declaration Speeches of Selected 2023 Presidential Candidates in Nigeria

Language remains a great asset to its users; its indispensability in politics is quite remarkable. This study examined how the English language has been utilized by 2023 presidential candidates in Nigeria. The researcher examined the acceptance and declaration speeches of selected 2023 presidential candidates-Ahmed Tinubu of All Progressive Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), and Peter Obi of Labour Party (LP). The study was anchored on the theoretical framework of cohesion. However, the approach adopted was a comparative study. The researcher compared how the three candidates used the English language in the presentation of their acceptance and declaration speeches to find out the cohesive devices that were employed to assure the people that their multifarious problems would be solved. The researcher identified the grammatical, lexical and clausal relations in consonance with their functions/roles in the political speeches examined. The present research was deemed necessary as the researcher discovered that nobody (as of the time of this study) has done a textual analysis of the acceptance speeches of these presidential candidates. It was found that the three candidates used cohesive devices as their campaign tools. The researcher also found out that clausal relations employed in the texts were internal procedures and interpretations which helped the speakers in achieving both registeral and generic coherence.

Грамматические структуры и метафорическое содержание в китайских идиомах

The aim of this research is to clarify the typology and relationship of grammatical structures and metaphorical expressions within Chinese idioms. In this study, a corpus of 30,000 Chinese idioms was compiled from various idiom dictionaries, and 1,000 idioms were randomly selected, annotated, and categorized based on their internal syntactic structures, grammatical functions in sentences, metaphor types, and metaphorical content for statistical analysis. The innovation of the research lies in employing a corpus to conduct a quantitative analysis of the prevalent syntactic structures and the most common types of metaphorical usage found in Chinese idioms, as well as to explore the quantified relationships between them. The findings reveal that Parallel Structure, Attributive Structure, and Subject-Predicate Structure are the most prevalent internal syntactic structures of Chinese idioms, while the structural metaphor is the most widely used conceptual metaphor. However, no significant correlation was observed between the internal syntactic structure of Chinese idioms and metaphorical content, grammatical function in sentences.

Supplementing the Involvement Load Hypothesis with vocabulary-use knowledge improves mobile-assisted language learners’ productive vocabulary

Over the past two decades, the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) has become a popular buzzword in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Although applications of the ILH can improve students’ learning of productive vocabulary, this effect appears to be transitory. Students’ learning of productive vocabulary often fades over time, as shown in delayed productive vocabulary tests. To address this problem, the present study investigated the effect of supplementing the ILH with vocabulary-use knowledge on students’ productive vocabulary performance. We designed two WeChat applets, namely Applet 0.0 and Applet 1.0. The design of Applet 0.0 was based solely on the ILH, whereas Applet 1.0 was guided by the ILH supplemented with vocabulary-use knowledge, with the latter consisting of grammatical functions (the grammatical patterns that a word can fit into), collocations (other words that appear together with a word), and constraints on use (the situations in which a word is used). Fifty-one English foreign language undergraduates were assigned to a control group (CG) or an experimental group (EG). Both groups completed a weekly paragraph-writing task as they learned vocabulary with the applets (the CG used Applet 0.0 and the EG used Applet 1.0). The results suggested an advantage for the ILH supplemented with vocabulary-use knowledge over the ILH alone for productive vocabulary performance. Moreover, mobile-assisted language learners’ language proficiency levels did not influence the effectiveness of the ILH (with or without vocabulary-use knowledge) on productive vocabulary performance. The EG students’ perceptions of the WeChat-mediated Mobile-Assisted Language Learning approach are also discussed.

The Effects of Post-Encoding Emotion on Second Language Vocabulary Learning

There is evidence that emotion induced in the process of encoding impairs associative memory, yet the effect of post-encoding emotion on second language vocabulary learning remains largely unclear. An experiment was carried out to examine the effects of post-encoding emotion (positive, negative, and neutral) on learning of multidimensional vocabulary knowledge, that is, productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge in five aspects: orthography, meaning and form, grammatical function, syntagmatic association, and paradigmatic association. To carry out the study, 106 Chinese students voluntarily took part in the present study and they were randomly divided into positive group, negative group, and control group. After completing the vocabulary learning task and undergoing emotion manipulation by three video clips (positive, negative, and neutral), all participants sequentially took a multidimensional vocabulary test containing 10 subtests in a immediate, delayed, and post-delayed tests. The result showed a significant impairing effect of post-encoding emotion, especially positive one, on both item memory and associative memory under a longer retention interval, and no significant effect of post-encoding emotion upon semantic memory was found. Both theoretical and practical implications for second language vocabulary learning was put forward.

Face cachée des fonctions syntaxiques en classe de FLE

The essential objective of this study is to show the importance of creating a good, effective and common strategy to make familiar the syntactic structures of the most difficult expressions of French grammar while respecting its fundamental rules given for a long time. Studying French and its structure and functioning requires a lot of effort on the part of a foreigner. The structure of the French language is based on several fundamental components, without which we would completely lose any tool allowing us to ensure the coherence of the different parts of any sentence; for this reason, we absolutely must put in place a good learning strategy. Our goal is to offer an easy and attractive method to better learn syntactic functions in FFL (French as a Foreign Language) class. The learning of French as a foreign language is guided by a teacher during French language lessons. You learn everything there, starting with the words, learning their forms and meaning, their structures and functions. Finding a syntactic function is not an impossible task. What makes it difficult is that you have to learn to remember it, and this requires great effort for Kosovar students and especially for those whose level of French is not at the highest point, so they need a good strategy resulting from new pedagogies aimed at activating the learner by making him want to learn a syntactic function with a modular representation. To learn a syntactic function well, the learner must already be able to master French perfectly, and this is a key skill. The sole purpose of this article is to provide students with tips to facilitate learning by allowing them to better learn syntactic functions and to recognize, without particular difficulty, their different nuances. This work is mainly based on useful and productive activities that allow students to know exactly what it takes to learn well.

Linguistic features of stuttering during spontaneous speech

PurposePrevious work shows that linguistic features (e.g., word length, word frequency) impact the predictability of stuttering events. Most of this work has been conducted using reading tasks. Our study examined how linguistic features impact the predictability of stuttering events during spontaneous speech. MethodsThe data were sourced from the FluencyBank database and consisted of interviews with 35 adult stutterers (27,009 words). Three logistic regression mixed models were fit as the primary analyses: one model with four features (i.e., initial phoneme, grammatical function, word length, and word position within a sentence), a second model with six features (i.e., the features from the previous model plus word frequency and neighborhood density), and a third model with nine features (i.e., the features from the previous model plus bigram frequency, word concreteness, and typical age of word acquisition). We compared our models using the Area Under the Curve statistic. ResultsThe four-feature model revealed that initial phoneme, grammatical function, and word length were predictive of stuttering events. The six-feature model revealed that initial phoneme, word length, word frequency, and neighborhood density were predictive of stuttering events. The nine-feature model was not more predictive than the six-feature model. ConclusionLinguistic features that were previously found to be predictive of stuttering during reading were predictive of stuttering during spontaneous speech. The results indicate the influence of linguistic processes on the predictability of stuttering events such that words associated with increased planning demands (e.g., longer words, low frequency words) were more likely to be stuttered.

Pinning down the interaction between animacy and syntactic function in the interpretation of German and Italian personal and demonstrative pronouns

ABSTRACT This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent’s antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a strong tendency to refer to a preceding subject, but only if its referent is animate. With inanimate subjects, both forms tend to refer to the animate referent in object position, showing that animacy enhances a referent’s accessibility more than the syntactic function of its previous mention. Demonstratives in German and Italian generally tend to refer to object antecedents, a tendency that is also influenced by the animacy of the referent, especially in German. The cross-linguistic comparison reveals that the effect of animacy is overall stronger in German than in Italian, suggesting that across languages, different forms may show a different sensitivity to syntactic function and animacy.

The Syntactic Functions of Prepositional Phrases in English Language

The aim of this paper is to present a better understanding of how the prepositional phrases in the English language function syntactically, since there are different functions of prepositional phrases in sentences. The study is a qualitative approach that analyzes examples that are taken randomly from different sources as data; this is called probability sampling. The study will seek a suitable, academic, plausible, and credible answer to the question of "what are the syntactic functions of prepositional phrases in English language". As a result, the conclusion is reached, which shows that the syntactic functions are post-modifier, adverbial, nominal, and complement.

영어시험 학습서에 나타난 문법 분류 체계와 용어에 대한 고찰

This paper examines the grammar classification of the TOEIC textbooks, which classify grammar based on five types of sentence patterns and eight word classes according to traditional grammar, and proposes to analyze sentences by introducing 'complement' for essential elements and 'adjunct' for optional elements in the grammatical function category, and to classify determinative as an independent word class. This has the advantage of improving learners' understanding of sentences by making it easier to analyze sentences for obligatory and optional elements, and reducing the confusion of describing grammatical function categories with terms from word classes such as adverbs (phrases) for optional elements. In addition, by categorizing determinative as an independent word class, it is possible to explain the definite and quantitative features of determinative and indicate the finiteness and indefiniteness of noun phrases. Through the study of determinative, learners can understand the finiteness of nouns and avoid grammatical errors. Also, the grammatical explanations in the TOEIC textbooks have explanatory validity through their congruence with modern descriptive and theoretical grammars.

Expressive Language Profiles in a Clinical Screening Sample of Mandarin-Speaking Preschool Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This cross-sectional study aimed to depict expressive language profiles and clarify lexical-grammatical interrelationships in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during the administration of the simplified Chinese Psychoeducational Profile-Third Edition screening. We collected naturalistic language samples from 81 (74 boys, seven girls) 2- to 7-year-old (Mage = 55.6 months, SD = 15.17) Mandarin-speaking children with ASD in clinician-child interactions. The child participants were divided into five age subgroups with 12-month intervals according to their chronological age. Computer-assisted part-of-speech tagging, constituency analysis, and dependency analysis addressed the developmental trajectories of early lexical and grammatical growth in each age subgroup. Significant within-ASD differences were observed in content words, function words, and lexical categories. Nouns and verbs were the predominant lexical categories, while noun types overwhelmed verb types in children over 3 years old. The grammatical development of 5- to 6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with ASD was better than that of 3- to 4-year-old children. The trends of syntactic structures, grammatical relations, and grammatical complexity in each age group were similar. Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with ASD produce more lexicons with increasing age. They preserve the noun bias as a universal mechanism in early lexical learning. Moreover, their developmental trajectories of grammatical growth were comparable in each age subgroup. In addition, their lexicons and grammar were synchronically developed during early language acquisition.

Design of knowledge incorporated VQA based on spatial GCNN with structured sentence embedding and linking algorithm

Visual question Answering (VQA) is a computer vision task that requires a system to infer an answer to a text-based question about an image. Prior approaches did not take into account an image’s positional information or the questions’ grammatical and semantic relationships during image and question processing. Featurization, which leads to the false answering of the question. Hence to overcome this issue CNN –Graph based LSTM with optimized BP Featurization technique is introduced for feature extraction of image as well as question. The position of the subjects in the image has been determined using CNN with a dropout layer and the optimized momentum backpropagation during the extraction of image features without losing any image data. Then, using a graph-based LSTM with loopy backpropagation, the questions’ syntactic and semantic dependencies are retrieved. However, due to their lack of external knowledge about the input image, the existing approaches are unable to respond to common sense knowledge-based questions (open domain). As a result, the proposed Spatial GCNN knowledge retrieval with PDB Model and Spatial Graph Convolutional Neural Network, which recovers external data from Wikidata, have been used to address the open domain problems. Then the Probabilistic Discriminative Bayesian model, based Attention mechanism predicts the answer by referring to all concepts in question. Thus, the proposed method answers the open domain question with high accuracy of 88.30% .

How is The Grammatical Relation of Batak Toba Wedding Ceremony?

This article discusses grammatical relations in Toba Batak language. Toba Batak language has formal markings, both predicates and arguments that show the relationship between clause elements, and the coding of words in the language. arguments are integrated syntactically. This research uses descriptive qualitative research. Qualitative is used to investigate an issue in order to gain a clear understanding of a particular phenomenon. The main data of this research are sentences. Sentence data in this study were obtained through traditional Toba Batak documents, namely 'marhata sinamot' which is commonly used Grammatical relations have an important role and function to identify the correctness of the syntactic process because they are considered to connect arguments with clauses. The grammatical relationship and the semantic role of the Toba Batak language are S = A/P and S = P/A. That is, the Toba Batak language treats S as A and S as P. A language is said to be of ergative type if the patient (P) of a transitive verb is treated with or coreferential with the subject (S) in an intransitive clause and different from the agent (A) of the verb transitive.

Meaning creation in novel noun-noun compounds: humans and language models

ABSTRACT The interpretation of novel noun-noun compounds (NNCs, e.g. “devil salary”) requires the combination of nouns in the absence of syntactic cues, an interesting facet of complex meaning creation. Here we examine unconstrained interpretations of a large set of novel NNCs, to investigate how NNC constituents are combined into novel complex meanings. The data show that words’ lexical-semantic features (e.g. material, agentivity, imageability, semantic similarity) differentially contribute to the grammatical relations and the semantics of NNC interpretations. Further, we demonstrate that passive interpretations incur higher processing cost (longer interpretation times and more eye-movements) than active interpretations. Finally, we show that large language models (GPT-2, BERT, RoBERTa) can predict whether a NNC is interpretable by human participants and estimate differences in processing cost, but do not exhibit sensitivity to more subtle grammatical differences. The experiments illuminate how humans can use lexical-semantic features to interpret NNCs in the absence of explicit syntactic information.

The Role of Animacy in Turkish Relative Clause Production and Distribution.

Relative clause (RC) production has been a major tool used for understanding language production mechanism in experimental linguistics. The present study analyzes language production mechanisms in Turkish by utilizing animacy effect on RC production. A picture description task was applied to two participant groups. The data were combined and analyzed to see how animacy influenced RC formation. The outcomes were also compared to the distributions of RC use in corpus data. Both participant and corpus data demonstrated significant level of passivization for RCs with animate heads, strongly affirming the grammatical function assignment proposal by Bock and Warren (Cognition 21(1):47-67, 1985) as well as the premise of Production-Distribution-Comprehension account (MacDonald in Front Psychol 4:226, 2013), emphasizing the relationship between language production mechanisms and typology. However, the corpus data were observed to have higher numbers of passivization with animate condition. Accordingly, a coarse comparison of the participant RC production proportions in the current study with some other crosslinguistic research suggests that some language-specific or discourse-related interventions can also compete with the animacy accessibility during the sentence planning procedure, which needs an extra inquiry especially in Turkish language.

Comparing zero and referential choice in eight languages with a focus on Mandarin Chinese

Abstract Mandarin has a low rate of overtly expressed arguments in all syntactic functions without agreement marking on the verb. It has been claimed that Mandarin exhibits higher rates of zero arguments than other languages. Most previous work has compared Mandarin with English, while comparison with other languages remains a desideratum. This study compares Mandarin with seven languages (Cypriot Greek, English, Northern Kurdish, Sanzhi, Teop, Tondano, Vera’a) taken from Multi-CAST (Haig & Schnell 2019). Results suggest that while Mandarin exhibits more zero arguments than pronouns, this is not unique, with e.g. Cypriot Greek having a higher rate of zero arguments. In addition, a relatively stable rate of lexical expressions can be found across languages, relativising Mandarin’s unique position with regard to referential choice even further.

A comparison between syntactical functions of Participle II in the German language and participle in standard Albanian language

Abstract In verb system of different languages there is a distinction of finite and nonfinite form of verbs. Finite verbs have morphological categories of tense, mood, person and number. These categories cannot be found in nonfinite form of the verbs (Bech, 1955). Nonfinite form of verbs do not give evidence for mood, person and number (Hentchel & Weydt, 1994). Comparing nonfinite form of verbs has been the object of different studies. The purpose of these studies is identifying the differences and similarities of nonfinite form of verbs in different languages. In one language a nonfinite form might be missing, whereas in another language a nonfinite verb is present. These changes make a big difference in morphology and syntax. Every language has its own feature based on grammatical rules. The purpose of this study is an analysis of syntactical functions of Participle II in German language and participle in standard Albanian language by finding the difference and similarities between them. Participle II of German language or as it is different named past participle coincide with nonfinite form participle of Albanian language. The participle of Albanian language and Participle II of German language have many similar uses in terms of verbs and adjective features. Participles have similar syntactical functions but there are also a lot of differences.

Tone Morphemes in Sinitic: Where Prosody Meets Morphology

Tone morphemes are used in the coding of a variety of grammatical functions in Sinitic languages: These include plural formation of personal pronouns, the diminutive forms of nouns, as well as different kinds of perfective and completive aspect marking, reported for dialects located in non-contiguous areas of China in the north and the south. With respect to verbal morphology, we first examine the different processes and stages of morphologization between the Yue and Hakka dialects, on the one hand, and Northern Sinitic on the other. Second, we propose the pathway of evolution that leads to the pluralization of Sinitic pronouns by tone morphemes, as well as the pathway that leads to tone morphemes coding perfective aspect in Yue and Hakka.

Establishing the Standards and Categories in Distinguishing Diacritics from Letters in Arabic and English

A diacritical mark is a mark which is put above or below the letter. That is to say, diacritical marks are seeming letters that play a vital role in attributing words to different classes. According, they can change the syntactic function as well as the part of speech of the words they are used with. Thus, they are dealt with by different fields of linguistics, such as phonetics, syntax, and so forth. However, the current study aims at investigating the importance of these marks in English and Arabic to show how important these marks are and how similar universally each language with the other(s). In addition, the study comes against the long-adopted view of the importance of these marks in language.

Acquisition of English relative clauses by native speakers of Kurdish Sorani

AbstractThe present study investigates several linguistic factors that might be determinants of differences in the ease of acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in L2 contexts, using the acquisition of English relative clauses by Kurdish Sorani native speakers. The analysis of 1440 subject and object RCs formed by Kurdish Sorani-speaking learners of English in a sentence combination task and a sentence translation task indicates that the syntactic functions of the noun phrase (NP) relativized in the RC, the position of the RC in the matrix clause (whether centre- or right-embedded), and the properties of RCs in L1 affect the acquisition and the formation of RCs in L2. The study also provides evidence that the syntactic functions of the relativized NP in the matrix clause, and the consistency/inconsistency of word orders in L1 and L2 do not influence the acquisition of RCs in L2.

Adjectival Phrases in English and Kurdish A Contrastive Study

This research is an attempt to show the similarities and differences of adjectival phrases in both English and Kurdish languages and to present how the two languages are rich in using adjectival phrases. English and Kurdish adjectives have some similar and different properties which affect language learning/teaching and translation. Adjectival phrases in both languages have the same syntactic and predicative functions. Moreover, in both languages superlative adjectives are dealt with morphologically.Throughout this contrastive study, we will be able to recognize the mistakes and differentiate between the adjectival phrases in these two languages. As a result, researchers will know how to use adjectival phrases correctly without any confusion.This study is of four sections. The first one deals with a brief