Grammatical Operations Research Articles

Forming inflection and word-formation operations in preschoolers with mental retardation

Introduction. At the present stage of societal development, great attention is paid to issues affecting the psychological and pedagogical support in the educational process of children with disabilities. One general pattern of dysontogenetic development is violation of speech mediation. The most important areas of assistance to children with special educational needs are: identifying speech defect specifics and creating additional special conditions that will facilitate assimilation of educational programs and the social development of each student’s personality. The study aims to develop and test a program for forming inflection and word-formation operations in preschoolers with mental retardation. Materials and methods. The study involved 92 preschoolers aged 6-7 with mental retardation. The research methods were: Methodology of psycholinguistic study of oral speech disorders in children by R.I. Lalaeva, Diagnostics of oral speech of children aged 4-7 by N.V. Nishcheva; mathematical statistics: χ2-Pearson criterion. Results. The ascertaining experiment showed that preschoolers with mental retardation are characterized by predominantly low level of formation of inflection and word-formation operations. Specific difficulties were identified: omission or incorrect use of prepositions in speech; errors in changing nouns in indirect cases; deficiencies in the agreement of an adjective with a noun in the neuter gender; lexical substitutions of nouns, verbs when forming new words using suffixes and prefixes; replacement and incorrect use of suffixes while forming relative and possessive adjectives, etc. After the formative experiment, significant shifts occurred both in the level of noun inflection operations (χ2 = 19.739; p ≤ 0.05) where the number of children at a low level decreased from 64% to 32%, and in the level of verb word-formation operations (χ2 = 30.61; p ≤ 0.05) where the number of children at an average level increased from 39% to 58%. Conclusion. Preschoolers with mental retardation experience difficulties in grammatically designing speech utterances. The data obtained in the experiment show that speech difficulties are due to the delayed development of inflection and word-formation operations and the qualitative peculiarity of the manifestation of the defect. Studying grammatical operations in young children with mental retardation and the specifics of the manifestation of this disorder in written speech is a promising further direction.

A Review of the Collection of commented Metarules of Pāṇini's Sanskrit Grammar — "Paribhāṣāvṛtti" by Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita

A while after the compilation of the Sanskrit grammar called "Aṣṭādhyāyī" (≈ V century BC) by the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, commentators of this treatise began to formulate numerous metarules guiding to the correct interpretation of grammatical rules. The object of our study are these post-Pāṇinian metarules, also known as paribhāṣās. They describe the metalanguage developed by Panini, varieties of technical use of language’s expressive means in the "Aṣṭādhyāyī", they also help resolve contradictions that arise when reading grammatical rules and settle priorities in the execution sequence of grammatical operations. The material of the study are metarules collected and commented on by the Sanskrit grammarian of the XVII century AD Nīlakaṇṭhadīkṣita in his work "Commentary on paribhāṣās" (Paribhāṣāvṛtti). The purpose of our work is to expose the content of the "Commentary on the paribhāṣās", to classify the metarules collected in this work, to indicate their purpose. The method of the work is a structural and hermeneutical study of the text. For the first time, a detailed analysis of the Nīlakaṇṭhadīkṣita's "Commentary on the paribhāṣās" and the classification of the metarules collected in this work were carried out. For the first time in Russian-language literature, the content of a large number of post-Pāṇinian metarules of Sanskrit grammar "Aṣṭādhyāyī" is exhibited, as well as biographical data about the grammarian Nīlakaṇṭhadīkṣita is revealed.

A fuzzy structure processing mechanism for graph grammar

Abstract A strict graph-matching mechanism brings normativeness to graph grammar but leads to graph grammar insufficiency when processing fuzzy grammatical structures. To address this issue, the current paper proposes an improved formal framework for graph grammar that enables it to effectively specify the ambiguity of graph models while maintaining normativeness and intuition. First, the improved framework defines the connection probability for edges and classifies the edges based on the connection probability, which is used as the quantitative and qualitative description of the graph grammar structure’s ambiguity. Second, the concepts of credibility threshold, credible subgraphs and candidate subgraphs are defined, and the constraints on the redex are adjusted to increase the fault tolerance of the graph-matching process. Finally, the grammatical operation is redesigned, with a matching weight defined for each redex based on the connection probability and the credibility threshold, thereby providing a theoretical basis and practical guidance for the selection of multiple redexes.

On the subject-orientation of the dispositional middle construction

Abstract This article argues against the claim that the dispositional middle construction is always subject-oriented, by discussing dispositional constructions in Japanese and impersonal middle constructions formed with the causative verb lassen ‘let’ in German. In Japanese, the disposition is ascribed not to the nominative subject, but to an object. In German, nominative subjects are not required. This suggests that subject orientedness is not inherent but arises from the properties of independently existing constructions that are interpeted as dispositional. In English and German, an intransitive or a reflexive construction derived from its transitive variant is employed as a canonical middle construction. In these cases, the accusative argument becomes a nominative subject by applying specific grammatical operations; thus, the expression of a subject becomes obligatory. In contrast, a potential construction is interpreted as dispositional in Japanese in which case the disposition is typically ascribed to the object with nominative case, which is almost obligatory in Japanese. It follows that the target of the disposition in middle constructions is a grammatically “highlighted” event participant, as in the case of root modals.

French Predicate Anaphora, Comparatives, and Ellipsis

Abstract While French does not display the kind of VP-ellipsis found in languages like English, it effects verbal anaphora by means of two constructions that have received relatively little attention in the literature. Both of these combine the generic ‘action verb’ faire ‘do’ with what appears to be a pronoun. The first one, which I call le-faire anaphora (LFA), uses the clitic le, whereas the second one, which I call faire-ça anaphora (FCA), brings into play the strong pronoun ça ‘it/that’. Taking such pronouns to be substitutive pro-forms devoid of inner structure cannot, however, explain why LFA, but not FCA, can appear in the standard of a comparative, a property that distinguishes English VP-ellipsis from VP-pro-forms like do it/that/so, which behave like FCA. On the other hand, LFA, unlike English VP-ellipsis, does not allow wh-extraction from a VP-internal position outside the realm of comparatives, which leads to a paradox left unresolved in the literature. In this article, I argue that LFA involves ellipsis of a whole vP phase. Specifically, I argue that faire in LFA, but not in FCA, is a (semi)auxiliary verb that takes a vP complement and bears an E-feature lexicalized by the clitic le. I show that this correctly predicts that A-movement out of the ellipsis site is possible and that A-bar movement of a degree wh-phrase out of vP in comparatives is made possible by the fact that French licenses Quantification at a Distance, a grammatical operation that allows degree quantifiers to escape vP before the next phasal head (C) is merged and triggers ellipsis. Other wh-quantifiers that do not benefit from the Quantification at a Distance option are then expected to not be able to escape vP prior to ellipsis, hence run-of-the-mill wh-extraction out of VP is correctly predicted to be incompatible with LFA. I then turn to what appears to be a related anaphoric phenomenon, which consists of the predicational copula être ‘be’ and the clitic le, which I call l’être anaphora (LEA), and show that it too is an instance of ellipsis in that it allows the full range of extraction phenomena out of the missing constituent introduced by the copula. I assume that in those cases in which the copula takes a small clause, it participates in an asymmetric structure where it lexicalizes Pred, a head that mediates between subject and predicate. In those cases in which the copula introduces a passivized VP, on the other hand, I assume that it lexicalizes v, an assumption in line with theories that posit multiple instantiations of predicate mediators (so-called ‘flavors of v’). In both cases, the copula in LEA heads a phase, bears an E-feature lexicalized by le, and is argued to license ellipsis of its phasal complement. Thus, elements are allowed to escape ellipsis by moving to the edge of the phase headed by the copula, and this correctly predicts that LEA permits a wider range of extractions out of the ellipsis site than LFA does.

On the main metarule of the Sanskrit grammar of Pāṇini

The subject of this study is the most famous and most frequently used metarule of the Sanskrit grammar "Aṣṭādhyāyī" compiled by the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini. This metarule is called "bahiraṅgaparibhāṣā" and serves to determine the correct sequence of grammatical operations prescribed in the "Aṣṭādhyāyī". The material of the study are various interpretation of the bahiraṅgaparibhāṣā in Sanskrit commentaries on the "Aṣṭādhyāyī", as well as in the collections of metarules compiled by Sanskrit grammarians. The purpose of the work is to acquaint the Russian-speaking reader with the most important interpretative tool of the grammar of Panini — bahiraṅgaparibhāṣā, as well as with the history of the interpretation of this metarule in Sanskrit grammatical literature. The research method is a comparative analysis of Sanskrit primary sources containing interpretations of the bahiraṅgaparibhāṣā. For the first time in the Russian-language literature, a detailed analysis of the bahiraṅgaparibhāṣā has been made. The history of the origin of this metarule and its interpretation by Sanskrit grammarians has been studied. The signs of acquaintance of Panini with bahiraṅgaparibhāṣā are investigated. It is shown that, despite the widespread use of this metarule, the mechanism of its application was not explicitly described until the XVIII century AD, when this problem was completely solved by the grammarian Nāgojībhaṭṭa in his work "Paribhāṣenduśekhara". It is established that one of the main achievements of Nāgojībhaṭṭa was the strict definition of the concepts of antaraṅga and bahiraṅga — the most important elements of the statement of bahiraṅgaparibhāṣā.

Brazilian and English bare nouns: Language variation, experiments, and L2s

This paper proposes to connect research areas with the aim of understanding bare nominals across languages. It focuses on Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) and English. The BrP nominal system challenges the parametric models in Chierchia (1998a, 2010), and two proposals have been raised to explain it within Chierchia’s model: the Bare Singular (BS) is a plural count noun (Schmitt and Munn 1999, 2002; Müller 2002) or it is mass (Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein 2011). Experimental research (Bevilaqua 2019) does not support either of these theories because BrP speakers oscillate between mass and count when interpreting the BS. In contrast, BSs are ungrammatical in English and speakers massify them; they are never counted. Motivated by the experimental studies, Pires de Oliveira (2020, 2021, to appear) presents a new approach: although BrP and English are number marking languages (Chierchia 2010, 2015), atomicity, a grammatical operation (Rothstein 2010, 2017), is activated at different points in the derivation. In English, the first nominal layer projects atomicity, while in BrP, the determiner carries this information; thus, plural inflection is optional on the noun. This paper suggests that language processing and second language acquisition are areas of investigation that may provide new evidence for a better understanding of the semantics of noun phrases.

The Enigma of Mehri and Southern Peninsular Arabic Existential śī and šī

Abstract The Modern South Arabian languages and the many varieties of Arabic share in the functions of a particle, realised in the largest extant MSA language, Mehri, as si and variously in Arabic as šay(y), še, ši and ši. In the Modern South Arabian languages and in the Arabic varieties of southern Arabian Peninsula, si and reflexes of ši serve as existential particles with a meaning analogous to English ‘there is/was’. The doublet si/ši also performs other grammatical operations in both sets of languages, functioning as partitives, polar interrogatives and as expressing the various meanings of ‘thing’. This similarity of form and function in Arabic and MSA suggests borrowing from one language to the other, although shared inheritance cannot be discounted completely. The assumption about Arabic reflexes of ši is that their grammatical functions derive originally from that word for ‘thing’ (of which there are others in both languages). Similarly, the assumption has been that MSA si is borrowed from the same Arabic word. Nevertheless, the analogous usages between Mehri and Arabic give cause to reassess such assumptions, leading to the opposite conclusion: The borrowing proceeded from MSA to Arabic and the substantive meaning is the end form, not the origin.

The neural dynamics associated with lexicality effect in reading single Chinese words, pseudo-words and non-words.

In previous word reading studies, lexicality has been used as a variable to examine the impacts of word form and meaning information on themany stages of word recognition process. Yet the neural dynamics associated with lexicality effect of various information processing for Chinese visual word recognition has not been well elucidated. In this study, Chinese native speakers were instructed to read Chinese disyllabic compound words, morphological legal (pseudo-words) and illegal non-words with their brain potentials recorded. Event-related potentials (ERP) results showed that N200 was related to Chinese orthographic processing, where three lexical conditions elicited comparable patterns. A semantic discrimination was found for N400 between pseudo-words/non-words and real words, which is in favor of the lexical view of the N400 effect. Further, a later ERP component P600 exhibited the difference between the non-words and pseudo-words, reflecting a re-analysis of word meaning or grammatical operation on Chinese morphological legality. Therefore, we argue that Chinese morphological information might have an independent representation (the P600 effect) in mental lexicon.

GRAMMATICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE SERBIAN TRANSLATION OF HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

The aim of this paper is to determine the specific translation transformations and the idiosyncrasies in translating grammatical categories from English into Serbian. The paper focuses on the concept of translation transformations and distinguishes types of grammatical transformations and their functional load in the Serbian translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It also offers the classification of translation transformations and the reasons for their use in the novel. Different types of grammatical operations are singled out and analyzed: inversion and replacement of grammatical structures, elliptical and added constructions, sentence integration and fragmentation. The analysis of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone translation into Serbian shows that substitutions (both lexical and grammatical) are the most frequent type of transformations. Such system of transformations is used to preserve and transfer the general content of the source text into the target language.

Проста реченица - Fjalia e thjeshtë (The Simple Sentence)

Macedonian Abstract: Во овие сложени реченици именката е многу важен дел на исказот, односно ако може така да се каже дека именката е главен дел, член на реченицата. Ако се отсрани именката од горедадените реченици, тогаш толку многу ќе се осиромашуваат истите, што можеби и нема да имаме реченица, односно нема смисла тоа натрупување на зборови. Граматиката се дели на морфологија и синтакса. Синтаксата е дел од граматиката што ги проучува способностите на зборовите да се поврзуваат меѓу себе, но пред сe целините што се добиваат како резултат на таквите поврзувања. English Abstract: Syntax is the study of the way in which phrases and sentences are structured out of words, and so addresses question like “What’s the president doing? And what is the nature of the grammatical operation by which is component words are combined together to form the overall sentence structure.

The effect of English Non-Modal Operators on Proficiency and Performance of Undergraduate Students

This study focuses on the problems posed by the English non-modal operators to the undergraduate level students of Hazara University, Mansehra, Pakistan. The data was collected from hundred students selected through non-random and convenience sampling technique. A proficiency test was used as a tool for data collection. The test was focused on all the uses of non-modal operators. The results show that some of these problems were caused by the intervention of some of grammatical concepts like tense, aspect, back shifting and voice. While some grammatical operations like negation, interrogation and insertion/omission had no role and so were found comparatively easy. These operators when used after wh-word such as when, while, before and if posed difficulty for the subjects. Similarly, different forms such as non-tensed form and uses such as dynamic and non-dynamic of non-modal operators were also problematic for the subjects. The highest frequency of error was found in the use of non-model operator for emphasis and surprise. However, the degree of difficulty posed by non-modal operators in idiomatic expressions was not significant.

Konstruktionsgrammatik: Konstruktionen ohne Grammatik?

AbstractStarting out from a critical questioning of Construction Grammar’s basic tenets I am advocating a version of Construction Grammar that should be primarily understood as based on the patterns evinced by grammatical operations. This approach aims for a theory of rule-governed operations over constructions and not for a theory of idiomaticity and non-(or restricted) compositionality.

On some problems of rule ordering in Finnish grammar

AbstractFinnish wh-movement exhibits internal roll-up movement with pied-piping and is therefore overtly successive-cyclic. On the other hand, its morphosyntax is nonlocal, suggesting countercyclic behavior. The existence of overtly cyclic computations and nonlocal agreement penetrating nearly every cyclic domain constitutes a near contradiction in this language. A solution is proposed which partially resurrects the notion of d-structure: grammatical operations are cyclic and operate in small phases (as indicated by Finnish successive cyclic wh-movement), but some operations, Agree in particular, access leftover copies of elements in situ and are not restricted by the phase impenetrability condition (PIC). PIC restricts operator/A-bar movement, not morphosyntax.

Morphosyntactic weaknesses in Developmental Language Disorder: the role of structure and agreement configurations.

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more 'fragile' than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the Fragile Computation of Agreement Hypothesis. Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference

This paper presents a framework for how the multifaceted nature of “gender” (human and linguistic) interacts with grammatical operations such as coreference dependency formation. It frames the question through the lens of English, in which it focuses on how personal names and referents who identify as nonbinary can provide insight into the conceptual representations of gender. Additional data from a variety of modern languages supports a model of how gender might be cognitively represented such that the observed linguistic patterns are available. I propose a three-tiered model of gender that unites grammatical, cognitive, social, and biological aspects and describes how implications of this model might be tested in future work.

Rapports de la ponctuation avec la construction grammaticale

Antiquity it was treated sometimes in generic terms (for distinctio is a grammatical operation), sometimes and more often in a rhetorical context. During the Middle Ages, more and more theorists appeal to grammar and use syntactic terminology to explain their own conception of punctuation. From the XIIth century onwards, difficulties in combining stylistics with grammatical analysis led these theorists to rely more on syntax to understand punctuation terms and to structure the texts. Conversely, in stylistics, defining punctuation pauses as marks of dependance, sufficiency and finitude leads to codify the rules of dictamen according to principles that are almost as grammatical as they are stylistic, with a dominant threefold rhythm in agreement with the triads of punctuation.

Whither head movement?

We argue that head movement, as an operation that builds head-adjunction structures in the syntax, has been used to model two empirically distinct classes of phenomena. One class has to do with displacement of heads (fully formed morphological words) to higher syntactic positions, and includes phenomena like verb second and verb initiality. The other class has to do with the construction of complex morphological words and is involved in various types of word formation. Based on the very different clusters of properties associated with these two classes of phenomena, we argue that they each should be accounted for by distinct grammatical operations, applying in distinct modules of the grammar, rather than by the one traditional syntactic head movement operation. We propose that the operation responsible for upward displacement of heads is genuine syntactic movement (Internal Merge) and has the properties of syntactic phrasal movement, including the ability to affect word order, the potential to give rise to interpretive effects, and the locality associated with Internal Merge. On the other hand, word formation is the result of postsyntactic amalgamation, realized as either Lowering (Embick and Noyer 2001) or its upward counterpart, Raising. This operation, we argue, has properties that are not associated with narrow syntax: it is morphologically driven, it results in word formation, it does not exhibit interpretive effects, and it has stricter locality conditions (the Head Movement Constraint). The result is a view of head movement that not only accounts for the empirical differences between the two classes of head movement phenomena, but also lays to rest numerous perennial theoretical problems that have heretofore been associated with the syntactic head adjunction view of head movement. In addition, the framework developed here yields interesting new predictions with respect to the expected typology of head movement patterns.

Linguistic pathway to multiplication

Whereas it is a well-established fact that young children can perform intuitive addition and subtraction, it is an open question whether they are capable of multiplicative operations on sets before receiving formal training. Earlier studies devoted to the study of intuitive arithmetic sought for evidence of intuitive multiplication in children’s ability to distinguish proportional relations between quantities and numerosities. This paper claims that multiplication operations are present in children’s everyday communication, in their understanding and producing sentences with two numerical quantifiers and a distributivity marker such as the Hungarian Mindhárom gyerek két autóval játszik ’Every one of three kids is playing with two cars’, and Három gyerek két-két autóval játszik ’Three kids are playing with two cars apiece’. The paper gives account of an experiment testing how 5–7-year-old Hungarian children with no training in arithmetic operations interpret such sentences. The experiment shows that they have access to the multiplicative readings of distributive constructions; they not only accept them as true but at the age of 6–7 they can also actively compute the product of multiplication. The results also outline the acquisition path of multiplication, showing that children first multiply sets of concrete objects, then they represent the objects by their fingers, before they learn to manipulate sets mentally. Our results highlight the fact that language and mathematics are intertwined not only on the lexical level. Grammatical operations involving quantified expressions, among others, encode logical or mathematical operations on sets. Even if linguistic encoding is often ambiguous, grammatically encoded mathematical operations pave the way for abstract mathematics.

A Framework for the Description and Analysis of Modality in Standard Arabic

Modality has so far received scant attention in theoretical and pedagogical grammars of Standard Arabic. The meager literature available on this grammatical operation often consists of unpublished dissertations alternating between a prevailing traditional grammar, which has reduced speaker visibility in language to emphatic markers and styles of corroboration, and contemporary approaches formulated from introspective and artificial data investigated in the light of current research on modality in European languages. This lacuna has induced cohorts of frustrated learners and translation trainees to automatically engage the metalanguage deployed and the analysis given to elucidate the working of foreign languages' modal markers in order to account for the working of the Arabic ones. The paper aims to reveal that modality is not only richly exteriorized at the surface of Arabic, but also describable in a systematic, teachable and learnable method. This richness is discernible in eight forms, morpho-grammatical and rhetorical, approached from an utterer-centered perspective and derived from naturally-occurring written discourse. Driven by a pressing pedagogical concern, the study calls for updating a prevailing pedagogical grammar of Arabic dating back to many centuries ago and still adhering to prescriptivism, taxonomy, semanticity and insensitivity to context.