Grammatical Role Research Articles

Referential choice in spoken and written stories: A comparative study based on the corpus “Funny life stories”

The study is concerned with referential choice in spoken and written discourse in the Russian language. I consider referential choice to consist in a threefold opposition between full noun phrases, pronouns, and zero noun phrases. The study is based on discourses each of which was presented by its narrator twice, namely in the spoken and written forms. In each story, all the noun phrases were identified and described according to 29 parameters. I trained logistic regression models and decision trees on the collected samples and analyzed factor importance diagrams built on the basis of the decision trees. The interpretation of the models and diagrams shows that some factors have different impact on referential choice in spoken and written discourses, for instance, grammatical role, semantic hyperrole and sloppy identity between the anaphor and the antecedent. Besides, the models also demonstrate that the sets of significant factors for the two samples are not identical: in particular, the referent’s animacy and the anaphor’s semantic hyperrole are present solely in the decision tree for written discourse.

Examining focus and alternative priming: Effects of grammatical role and breadth of the alternative set

Recent work has shown that contrastive accenting plays a crucial role in discourse processing, causing listeners to activate alternatives to focused words and/or suppress non-contrastive semantic associates. However, key theoretical questions remain, relating to how lexical activation, sentence and discourse processing interact. These include the breadth of the alternative set, which could span from a small contextually-relevant set to a large, ‘permissive’ one; and whether these processes are best characterised as activation or suppression mechanisms. There is also little research on whether activation of alternatives differs by the grammatical role of the prime, despite differences in the focus-related properties of subjects versus objects. We present two cross-modal lexical decision experiments showing activation of non-contrastive associates is suppressed with contrastive focus, consistent with a suppression mechanism, at least for objects. Alternatives both semantically related, and unrelated, to the prime, were primed, consistent with a broad, ‘permissive’, alternative set. There were crucial differences in priming patterns for subjects versus objects. The study makes important contributions to our theoretical understanding of the role of focus in discourse processing.

Autistic Traits, Communicative Efficiency, and Social Biases Shape Language Learning in Autistic and Allistic Learners.

There is ample evidence that individual-level cognitive mechanisms active during language learning and use can contribute to the evolution of language. For example, experimental work suggests that learners will reduce case marking in a language where grammatical roles are reliably indicated by fixed word order, a correlation found robustly in the languages of the world. However, such research often assumes homogeneity among language learners and users, or at least does not dig into individual differences in behavior. Yet, it is increasingly clear that language users vary in a large number of ways: in culture, in demographics, and-critically for present purposes-in terms of cognitive diversity. Here, we explore how neurodiversity impacts behavior in an experimental task similar to the one summarized above, and how this behavior interacts with social pressures. We find both similarities and differences between autistic and nonautistic English-speaking individuals, suggesting that neurodiversity can impact language change in the lab. This, in turn, highlights the potential for future research on the role of neurodivergent populations in language evolution more generally.

Argumentative Grammatical Conjunction "even": (An Applied Study in Surat Al-Baqarah)

This study seeks to examine the conjunction "even" (ḥattā) in Surah Al-Baqarah. In aiming to do so, it will attempt to highlight its grammatical and argumentative role. To achieve its goal, the study is divided into two contexts: theoretical and applied. The theoretical context includes three main points: the first is a theoretical introduction on the importance of conjunctions and their role in structural construction, the second is an introduction on "even" according to grammarians and its types, and the third is a detailed discussion of its argumentative role. The applied context is based on three main points: the first is "even" in verses of stubbornness and disbelief, the second is "even" in verses of killing and its philosophy, and the third is "even" in verses of permissibility and change of rulings.

교착어적 특성을 활용한 한국어문법교육 연구 - 서울대 한국어 초·중급 교재를 중심으로

This study is developed by proceeding with the contents of “A Study on the Composition and Content Analysis of Korean Textbooks” (2021). Previous studies have shown that the characteristics of the structure of textbooks centered on oral language have led to a lack of linkage with the system of grammar education, and this study is linked to the fact that the problem of grammar education is found in the characteristics of Korean language called agglutinative language. The reason we paid attention to the agglutinative language characteristics was that it was sometimes pointed out as a major type of error by foreign learners, and it was considered suitable for understanding the basic principles. Therefore, by analyzing the target grammar for each level 1 to 4 in units of grammatical morpheme, a grammar category that revealed agglutinative language characteristics was set and classified. The classification items are grammar in which postpositions are combined, grammar in which endings are combined, and other vocabulary, which is based on the grammatical role of the ending or postposition, which is the minimum unit that constitutes grammar. Additionally, the grammar content was investigated by dividing the postposition combination grammar and the ending combination grammar into elementary and intermediate levels. The grammar related to ending combination occupied the highest proportion in the entire levels, confirming that Korean is predicate-oriented and the importance of the ending. The grammar content required for basic sentence composition at the beginner level was a final ending, a connection ending, prefinal ending, and some of transformative ending and auxiliary connective ending, In intermediate level, transformative ending that organizes sentences, auxillary connective ending that adds meaning, and various subordinate connective ending were required as grammar content. For grammar related to postposition combination, a case-marking postpositional particle that constitutes a basic sentence at the beginner level and a auxiliary postpositional particle that adds special meaning at the intermediate level were required as grammar content. It is hoped that the agglutinative language, typological characteristics of the Korean language, will help to select and organize the contents of Korean grammar education.

Al-Nakirah wa al-Ma'rifah fi Surati al-Naba'/النكرة والمعرفة في سورة النبأ

Surah An-Naba' in the Holy Qur'an is one of the chapters rich in message and meaning. This surah employs both nakirah (indefinite) and ma'rifah (definite) nouns, which play a crucial role in conveying the message and enriching the structure of the Arabic language. To date, studies specifically addressing the types of nakirah and ma'rifah nouns and their grammatical analysis in Surah An-Naba' are limited. Therefore, this research aims to provide an understanding of the "Types of Nakirah and Ma'rifah Nouns and Their Grammatical Analysis in Surah An-Naba'." The objectives of this study are: (1) To identify the types of nakirah nouns and analyze their grammatical roles in Surah An-Naba'. (2) To identify the types of ma'rifah nouns and analyze their grammatical roles in Surah An-Naba'. The research methodology employed by the author in this study is qualitative descriptive research. The method used for data collection is the library research method. The sources of the materials investigated in this study are divided into two types: primary sources and secondary sources. The findings of the research include several key points obtained through the author's procedures, such as: (1) The number of nakirah nouns in Surah An-Naba' is found in thirty-four (34) verses. (2) The number of ma'rifah nouns in Surah An-Naba' is found in thirty-two (32) verses. It can be concluded that the study of nakirah and ma'rifah nouns is essential for understanding the Qur'an. The purpose of this learning is to prevent errors in the interpretation of the Qur'an, the Hadith of the Prophet, and other texts.

The Importance of Linguistic Factors: He Likes Subject Referents.

We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns er and der in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality, as well as order of mention have been linked to an increased probability of certain referents being selected as the pronoun's antecedent and described as increasing this referent's prominence, salience, or accessibility. The goal of this study was to find out whether pronoun processing is primarily guided by linguistic factors (e.g., grammatical role) or nonlinguistic factors (e.g., first-mention), and whether pronoun interpretation can be described in terms of referents' "prominence"/"accessibility"/"salience." The results showed an overall subject preference for er, whereas der was affected by the object role and focus marking. While focus increases the attentional load and enhances memory representation for the focused referent making the focused referent more available, ultimately it did not affect the final interpretation of er, suggesting that "prominence" or the related concepts do not explain referent selection preferences. Overall, the results suggest a primacy of linguistic factors in determining pronounresolution.

Boosting or inhibiting - how semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German.

In this exploratory study, we investigate the influence of several semantic-pragmatic and syntactic factors on prosodic prominence production in German, namely referential and lexical newness/givenness, grammatical role, and position of a referential target word within a sentence. Especially in terms of the probabilistic distribution of accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, deaccentuation) we find evidence for an additive influence of the discourse-related and syntactic cues, with lexical newness and initial sentence position showing the strongest boosting effects on a target word's prosodic prominence. The relative strength of the initial position is found in nearly all prosodic factors investigated, both discrete (such as the choice of accent type) and gradient (e.g., scaling of the Tonal Center of Gravity and intensity). Nevertheless, the differentiation of prominence relations is information-structurally less important in the beginning of an utterance than near the end: The prominence of the final object relative to the surrounding elements, especially the verbal component, is decisive for the interpretation of the sentence. Thus, it seems that a speaker adjusts locally important prominence relations (object vs. verb in sentence-final position) in addition to a more global, rhythmically determined distribution of prosodic prominences across an utterance.

Semantic and syntactic processing of emojis in sentential intermediate positions.

The current study investigated the neuro mechanisms of emoji processing as sentence predicate in written context. In the hybrid textuality which is more cognitively engaging, emojis in sentential intermediate positions were designed as either congruent or incongruent to the context. The results showed that incongruent words led to a robust N400 effect, while incongruent emojis only elicited the P600 effect. It implies that semantics and syntax of words can be separated while those of emojis seem to be integrated together. That is, when the meaning of the emoji is violated to the sentential context, its grammatical role cannot be well interpreted, especially when it is used as a key grammatical component in a sentence, such as the predicate. Thus, it shows that even though the meaning of emojis can be interpreted by readers, their syntactic and semantic functions cannot be clearly separated. In comparison with word processing, the larger amplitude with emojis in the time window of 350-500ms shows more cognitive efforts in emoji semantic processing, possibly arising from the switch of modalities within the visual channel, that is, the multimodal cognitive load.

A corpus study of grammatical case forms in written and spoken Estonian: Frequency, distribution and grammatical role

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study investigating the distribution of the three grammatical cases in Estonian (nominative, genitive, partitive) and the factors affecting the interpretation of syntactic role for nouns marked in these cases. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed on the properties of grammatical relations, we take the perspective of morphological case, and investigate the relative frequency of each case in both written and spoken corpora, according to the encoded grammatical roles, referential properties (animacy, number, countability) and syntactic context (word order, transitivity), as well as probing the differences according to register. We find that each case is prototypically, but not reliably, associated with a particular grammatical role, and that a cluster of features are available to assist speakers in identifying the function of a case-marked noun. Kokkuvõte. Merilin Miljan, Virve Vihman: Eesti keele grammatilised käänded kirjalikus ja suulises korpuses: sagedus, jaotumus ning süntaktilised rollid. Artiklis esitatakse tulemused korpusuuringust, mille eesmärgiks oli välja selgitada eesti keele grammatiliste käänete (nominatiiv, partitiiv, genitiiv) jaotumus ning tegurid, mis mõjutavad nende käänetega markeeritud nimisõnade süntaktiliste rollide tõlgendamist. Erinevalt varasematest töödest, mis keskenduvad grammatilistele suhetele ja (seejärel) nende käändetähistusele, lähtub selle uurimuse fookus eelkõige morfoloogiast, st käändest endast. N-ö käände perspektiivist vaatleme iga grammatilise käände esinemise sagedust kirjalikus ja suulises korpuses: milliseid süntaktilisi funktsioone see markeerib, markeeritava nimisõna omadusi (elusus, arv, loendatavus), süntaktilist konteksti (sõnajärg, transitiivsus) ning registri erinevusi. Leiame, et kuigi üldpildina eristub iga grammatilise käände puhul sagedaim süntaktiline põhiroll, toob detailsem analüüs välja nimisõna omaduste ja süntaktilise konteksti olulisuse nende rollide jaotumuses.

Guided to Guider: the “∼ed” and “∼er” roles in professional development materials for guided Reading

ABSTRACT This paper takes a social semiotic, Bernsteinian, view of the language used to describe the Guided Reading teaching strategy in Professional Development session materials for in-service teachers in Australia. We use categories from Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar and Ruqaiya Hasan’s stylistics to demonstrate a radical discontinuity between content and form. While the content of the professional development materials makes the case for greater child dynamism in reading, the grammatical roles assigned to the children by the language forms are generally less dynamic than those assigned to the teacher. We propose two changes. First, classroom language should aim at increasing child “∼er” roles. Secondly, the language of professional development materials ought to reflect, and if possible, appropriate and speak through that classroom language.

Investigating Writer's Stance in University Academic Group Discussions

Online group discussion is a typical learning activity in academic English lessons at universities. Students exchange research ideas and evaluate each other's work. However, many non-English major undergraduates experience challenges in expressing their opinions and developing arguments during this discussion process. Stance analysis is a crucial linguistic tool for obtaining an understanding of how participants express their ideas. Using the stance framework proposed by Biber (2006), the aim of this study was to examine the main grammatical markers and relevant semantic categories found in written online group discussions. We intended to investigate the expressions of the writer's stance (such as stance adverbials, stance nouns, stance adjectives, and stance verbs) in academic group discussions by analyzing a corpus of texts from an online discussion within a university setting from a forum. A total of 34 online group discussions with a combined word count of 199,559 contributed by 187 Hong Kong Chinese undergraduate students comprised the dataset. To pinpoint stance lexical items that appeared in particular grammatical frames, the frequencies and roles of stance expressions were calculated and thoroughly examined. The results demonstrated that the most widely used grammatical stance expressions in these academic discourses to convey attitudes and opinions were stance adverbials and stance verbs. By examining the linguistic resources used by non-English major students to express their perspectives and attitudes, as well as how stance is manifested in the context of academic online discussions, this study provides insights for both linguistics and education.

The influence of discourse continuity on referential form choice.

Much research in the functional linguistics literature suggests that the use of zero pronouns is driven by the degree of interclausal connection. Kim (1990, 1992) claims that in clause chain languages such as Korean and Japanese, zero pronouns are primarily used following an interclausal connective with a tight interclausal connection that maintains subject continuity (whether the subject referent is maintained or changed in the following clause) and action continuity (temporal sequence or action sequence is continued or interrupted in the following clause). Consistent with the claim, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that Korean speakers used more zero pronouns following a connective with higher subject continuity (Experiment 1) and action continuity (Experiments 1 and 2). The effect of connectives was observed when grammatical role, referential predictability, and coherence relation were controlled for (Experiment 2). These results are best explained by assuming the role of discourse continuity on referential form choice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of prior knowledge on explicit rule formation among L2 Spanish learners receiving structured input through guided-inductive instruction

Based on qualitative analyses, recent research hypothesizes that the information structure of an explicitly declared grammatical rule is related to an L2 learner's processing and accurate interpretation of the respective target structure Malovrh and Lee (2022). The present study tests that hypothesis by quantitatively analyzing a more robust data set. It examines L2 Spanish learners' (N = 63) formulation of explicit grammar rules regarding the Spanish true passive after exposure to input containing eight exemplars of the target structure, each followed by a picture-matching interpretation task, and then followed by corrective feedback. Using structured guided-inductive prompts, participants were instructed to write a rule explaining the appropriate assignment of semantic to grammatical roles in true-passive sentences, and first were prompted to consider the grammatical marker ‘por’, and then the gender marking of the verb participle. Logistic regression analyses revealed that participants' prior knowledge of the target structure predicted the information structure of their grammatical rules in terms of rule completeness and the order in which linguistic structure was mentioned (p = .001); as prior knowledge increased, so did the number of features included in a rule. Results are discussed in terms of the effect of prior knowledge on variable information structure and its relationship with subsequent learning outcomes.

Processing Referentially Ambiguous Pronouns by Adult Learners of English as a Foreign Language

Introduction: Processing ambiguous pronouns by L1 speakers of English has been the subject of a great bulk of research. Only a few studies, however, have investigated the ambiguity resolution of pronouns by people for whom English is a second or foreign language. In this study, the researchers employed a picture selection task to explore how adult Iranian EFL learners treated ambiguous pronouns.
 Methodology: The materials were 20 experimental items in four different conditions (i.e., manipulation of neither noun phrases [NP1] nor NP2, NP1 manipulation, both NPs manipulation and NP2 manipulation) plus 30 filler items. The principal purpose of this study was to investigate whether the manipulation of NPs by attaching extra content/semantic information to them had any impact on their accessibility and how the participants associated ambiguous pronouns with NPs when attempting to choose an antecedent.
 Results: The results confirmed the idea that increasing the length of an NP is an important mechanism employed by EFL learners in the process of ambiguity resolution of pronouns. The results also indicated that the NP length mechanism was a better predictor of accessibility in comparison with other mechanisms, such as the primacy effect, the subject rule, and the grammatical role.
 Conclusion: The findings demonstrated that when an NP carries extra-linguistic information compared to other NPs, it might have a better chance of being selected as the referent of an ambiguous pronoun.

Preferred argument structure in the oral narratives of adolescents with and without SLI

ABSTRACT According to the theory of ‘Preferred Argument Structure’ (PAS), the realisation and distribution of core arguments including the subject of a transitive verb (A), the direct object of a transitive verb (O) or the subject of an intransitive verb (S) in spoken discourse are subject to both grammatical and pragmatic constraints. However, previous studies on the formulation of argument structure have largely focused on the syntactic difficulties of children with SLI. In addition, little is known about the developmental outcomes in argument structure for adolescents with SLI. In this study, we compared PAS in the narratives of 19 adolescents with SLI (Mean age = 14.3; SD = 0.64) and 19 adolescents with typical language development (TLD; Mean age = 14.5; SD = 0.84). The core arguments of the predicate in each narrative based on the wordless picture storybook ‘Frog, where are you?’ were coded for grammatical roles (A, O and S), referential forms (lexical forms and non-lexical form including null and pronominal forms) and information status (given, accessible and new information). The data were then analysed for conformity to the grammatical and pragmatic constraints of the PAS theory. The two groups were found to be similar in their conformity to the pragmatic constraints but differed in how they conform to the syntactic constraints. In particular, the adolescents with SLI were more likely to produce clauses with two lexical arguments, and the lexical arguments occurred significantly more frequently at the subject role of a transitive verb than the TLD groups. Our results provide further evidence that it is a persistent grammatical deficit, rather than a pragmatic deficit, which poses a special challenge for adolescents with SLI in their formulation of argument structure in narratives.

Evaluating syntactic comprehension during awake intraoperative cortical stimulation mapping.

Electrocortical stimulation mapping (ECS) is widely used to identify essential language areas, but sentence-level processing has rarely been investigated. While undergoing awake surgery in the dominant left hemisphere, 6 subjects were asked to comprehend sentences varying in their demands on syntactic processing. In all 6 subjects, stimulation of the inferior frontal gyrus disrupted comprehension of passive sentences, which critically depend on syntactic processing to correctly assign grammatical roles, without disrupting comprehension of simpler tasks. In 4 of the 6 subjects, these sites were localized to the pars opercularis. Sentence comprehension was also disrupted by stimulation of other perisylvian sites, but in a more variable manner. These findings suggest that there may be language regions that differentially contribute to sentence processing and which therefore are best identified using sentence-level tasks. The functional consequences of resecting these sites remain to be investigated.

The ordering of relative clauses and determiner phrases in Chinese interlanguage: a multifactorial study

In English, a relative clause (rc) follows the head noun phrase (np). Conversely, the rc in Chinese precedes the head np directly before it or is separated by a determiner phrase (dp). This is uncommon in the subject-verb-object order language and results in two types of constructions. For Chinese as foreign language (cfl) learners, this construction alternation is complex to acquire and is dependent on many factors. This study aims to explore the underlying factors influencing cfl learners’ outer modifier nominal (omn)/inner modifier nominal (imn) alternation and whether they have multiple interactions. A multifactorial exploration of the significant predictors of the omn/imn alternation in Chinese interlanguage data, taken from the International Chinese Interlanguage Corpus, was conducted. Conditional inference trees and random forests were used to analyse the data. The predictors studied consist of head np animacy (HeadNPAnimacy), head np length (HeadNPLength), grammatical roles of head nps in matrix clauses (HeadNPMatRole), grammatical roles of head nps in rcs (HeadNPRelRole), length of rcs (RCLength), types of native languages (NLType), and learners’ Chinese proficiency (CHProficiency). Examinations of omn/imn alternation show predictors’ significant effects in descending order of their effect size: HeadNPRelRole, HeadNPMatRole, RCLength, NLType, and HeadNPAnimacy.

The role of grammatical role and thematic role predictability in reference form production in Mandarin Chinese.

Evidence suggests that English speakers use pronouns when referring to the grammatical subject and predictable thematic role. We tested how grammatical role and thematic role predictability affect different types of referential forms, namely, overt pronouns and null pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. We found that both overt and null pronouns were sensitive to grammatical role. However, we did not find any evidence that overt and null pronouns were sensitive to thematic role predictability. Although null pronouns were influenced by grammatical role, the rate of null pronouns for subject reference was very low compared to that of overt pronouns. Given the frequent occurrence of null pronouns in Mandarin, our results suggest that the use of null pronouns may not be explained by a simple grammatical role mechanism.

ПАНДЕМИЯТА ОТ COVID-19 ВЪВ ВАЛЕНТНОСТТА НА СВОИТЕ ПРЕДИКАТИ: НАБЛЮДЕНИЯ ВЪРХУ СЪВРЕМЕНЕН КОРПУС ОТ ПАРЛАМЕНТАРНА РЕЧ

This corpus-based survey presents the grammatical roles that the names for COVID-19 occupy in the valence frames of the respective predicates. A contemporary corpus of Bulgarian parliamentary speech was used from which the contexts of these names were extracted with the help of a concordancer. Only metaphorical usages are considered in the paper. Two profiles of valence frames are presented: a syntactic one, which takes into account the classification of arguments according to Pustejovsky (1995), and a lexical-semantic one, which considers the classification of predicates ac-cording to the lexicographic classes adopted in the lexical network Wordnet. Keywords: names for COVID-19, grammatical roles, valence, predicates, Bulgarian language, parliamentary corpus