Grammatical Structure Research Articles

Code Mixing Analysis in the Movie Bulan Terbelah di Langit Amerika 2

This study aims: 1) to reveal types of code mixing that appeared in the Bulan Terbelah di Langit Amerika 2 movie and 2) to find out factors that cause code mixing in this movie. This study employed a descriptive qualitative method. In collecting data, this research applied note-taking as an instrument. To obtain data, the dialogues of the characters were analyzed thoroughly. Researchers implemented the theory of code-mixing by Muysken (2000) to find the types and the view of code-mixing factors from Hoffman (1991) for the analysis. The research results revealed three types of code mixing contained in this movie. They are insertion type (7 data or 29.17%), alternation type (12 data or 50%), and congruent lexicalization type (5 data or 20.83%). In addition, factors of code-mixing are also found in this movie. They are the lexical needs factor (9 data or 37.5%), emphasize something factor (3 data or 12.5%), talking about a particular topic factor (5 data or 20.83%), repetition used for clarification factor (2 data or 16.64%), soften or strengthen request or command factor (2 data or 8.33%, and expressing group identity factor (1 data or 4.16%). The most common form of code-mixing in this film is alternation when one language is used to fill in for another's lexical gaps throughout a conversation. They spoke in turn, and researchers found that a single sentence may be expressed in two languages with vastly different grammatical structures.

Assessing multiple-choice questions based on language precision and best practices to promote equity in the Dental Physiology course

Student assessment in professional schools is conducted mainly through examinations based on multiple-choice questions (MCQs). Although grading this type of assessments saves time, questions that are not well-written may impact students’ performance. Technical flaws in MCQs include those that provide irrelevant difficulty and those that provide an advantage to test-wise examinees. In addition, MCQs with these flaws may disproportionately affect students with weaker undergraduate science backgrounds and those from underrepresented groups including English Language Learners and first-generation college students. Inclusive teaching practices aim to create a level field by removing barriers and providing equal access to students regardless of their background.It is hypothesized that technical flaws in MCQs increase their difficulty. The objectives of this study are: 1) to rate the quality of the MCQs used in a Dental Physiology course at Boston University and 2) to examine the effect of questions with technical flaws on item performance. To measure the performance of specific items, two analyses will be conducted: item difficulty, defined as the percentage of students who choose an item correctly, and item discrimination which refers to the correlation of how well a test taker does on a particular item and their performance on the whole test.An evaluation instrument based on the one developed and validated by Breakall et al. (2019) was employed to identify item writing flaws that add irrelevant difficulty. Examples of item flaws that provide irrelevant difficulty based on the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) guidelines are: (a) items with complicated stems and lead-ins that include negative forms, (b) item options that are not written succinctly or include vague terms, (c) numerical data not presented consistently, (d) items that include nonparallel options, or (e) that include “none of the above.” This instrument was used to assess MCQs from a Dental School Physiology exam.The frequency of item flaws indicated that of all items analyzed, 56% items contained at least one flaw. The most common item flaws identified were those where the answer choices were not of approximately the same length (32%), did not have parallel grammatical form and structure (24%) or those that included negative phrasing (16%). In conclusion, this assessment indicates that the MCQs used in this Dental Physiology course have room for improvement. To better understand if the identified flaws affect item performance, exam data provided by Exam Soft Analytics will be analyzed. Based on those results, decisions could be made about modifying MCQs to better serve the needs of our diverse student population.

Паремии как источник экземплификации в испанской грамматической традиции XVI-XVIII веков

The study aims to present a description of the functioning of paroemias as grammatical examples in the Spanish linguistic tradition of the XVI-XVIII centuries. The analysis of the texts of the most notable works of the said period (works by J. de Valdés, C. de Villalón, A. del Corro, G. Correas, J. Villar, B. Martínez Gómez Gayoso, B. de San Pedro) is carried out. The paper provides examples of proverbs and sayings and their equivalents in Russian and specifies the grammatical provisions that they illustrate. The historical conditions of publication of the analysed works are briefly described. The study is novel in that it is the first in Russian philology to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the approach to the use of paroemias in the process of exemplification in Spanish grammars of the period in question. As a result of the study, it has been found that almost all Spanish grammarians of the period under consideration resort to paroemias as a source of exemplification, however, the approach to their use changes over time. Their function shifts from serving as a model of ethical norms or authentic folk speech and later as an element that adorns speech, to illustrating the entire richness of the grammatical structure of the Spanish language.

The Analysis of the Students’ English Achievement (A Case Study on the Students of Islamic Early Childhood Education of Islamic College of Auliaurrasyidin)

Today, mastery of more than one language becomes a phenomenon that attracts the attention of people, especially young people as the nation’s successor. However, the results of learning English for most students, including university students, are still very poor. This article aims to analyze students’ learning achievement, and provide an overview of the problems they faced in learning English. This study is qualitative research. This is focused on the English learning achievement of 1st semester students of the Islamic Early Childhood Education (PIAUD) Study Program of STAI Auliaurrasyidin. Data were collected using in-depth interview and documentation. They were analyzed using the Miles and Huberman model which consists of data reduction, data display, and conclusions. The results showed that the students’ low English learning achievement were caused by the English sentence and grammatical structure that often confusing, poor of vocabulary knowledge that impacts on the difficulty in translating English sentences. In addition, lack of self-confidence also triggered students’ low learning achievements.

Broca’s Aphasia Caused by Hemorrhagic Stroke in a Young Patient: A Case Report

Broca aphasia is a non-fluent aphasia in which the output of spontaneous speech is markedly diminished and there is a loss of normal grammatical structure. We report a case of aphasia presenting different features of aphasia following cerebral hemorrhage in the left frontoparietal lobe, which includes Broca's area. A 25-year-old man presented to our emergency department with a headache, Broca aphasia, and difficulty in vision that started two days ago. Bilateral hemorrhagic areas were seen in dilated fundus examination. A CT scan was performed and showed multiple intracranial hemorrhages. Although stroke is considered a disease of the elderly, it can also be present among young people. An underlying malignancy may be the trigger for hemorrhagic ischemia. Injury to the frontal regions of the left hemisphere impacts how words are strung together to form complete sentences. This can lead to Broca's Aphasia.

“WHAT ARE THE GRAMMATICAL POINTS STUDENTS NEED TO DEVELOP?”: NEED ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH-MAJORED UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The importance of grammar in L2 learners’ development of language skills has anchored for the necessity of teaching grammar to learners of English. However, it is observed that there has been insufficient formal data relevant to the needs of L2 learners for learning grammar, particularly in the context of Vietnam. These two mentioned reasons motivate this current study into the needs of students at a university in Vietnam for learning English grammar with a hope to help teachers and curriculum designers make more informed decisions on their teaching methods and the content of the grammar course, respectively. In the study, students had difficulties with certain English grammatical points such as Linking words and phrases, Tenses to describe events in the past, Articles, determiners and pronouns. Students also expected their grammar lessons to be more interactive with writing and speaking practice included, while formal explanations of grammatical structures be maintained.

Book Review: Teaching Turkish Grammar to Foreigners

In this study, Prof. Dr. Fatma Bölükbaş Kaya's work titled "Teaching Turkish Grammar to Foreigners" is aimed to introduce. This book consists of three main parts. In the first part of the book, information about the concept and types of grammar is given and the place of grammar in teaching Turkish to foreigners is explained. The reason why the author included this section is "Should grammar be taught in classes?" is to answer the question. In the second part of the book, the answer to the question of which grammar subject should be taught at what level is sought. Here, the author is based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and the typological features of Turkish. In the third part of the book, how to teach grammar subjects of all levels is given. Here, examples are presented by giving information about the meaning of grammatical structures, how to teach, which techniques to apply and points to be considered.

Linguistic Contact in Perspective: Lateral Coda in Principense Portuguese

Abstract This paper discusses the lateral /l/ in coda in Principense Portuguese (PP). Based on an elicited corpus recorded in situ, composed of 852 occurrences of 78 lexical items, we found that the lateral /l/ in coda can be vocalized or deleted. For instance, bolso ‘pocket’ can be pronounced as [ˈbow.sʊ] or [ˈbo.sʊ], as reported in some Brazilian Portuguese varieties. In PP, vocalization and deletion are phenomena that arise from a confluence of factors. It gathers characteristic features of the formative grammatical structure of Portuguese. At the same time, it reflects the linguistic contact scenario in which PP is inserted, since the lenition of consonants in semivowels, as well as strategies to avoid codas, are also reported in Lung’Ie (LI), a language in synchronic contact and present in the constitution of the PP (Agostinho, Ana Lívia. 2015. Fonologia e método pedagógico do lung’Ie [Phonology and pedagogical method of Lung’Ie]. São Paulo: University of São Paulo dissertation). Both Portuguese and Lung’Ie support vocalization and deletion in their grammars, fostering a relevant overlap of features to the alternation [ɫ] ∼ [w] ∼ ∅ in PP. We conclude that, in addition to specific features of Portuguese grammatical structure, PP’s linguistic contact situation must be considered as a relevant factor for the deletion and vocalization of laterals in coda in PP.

RESEARCH ON THE SEMANTICS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF UKRAINIAN AND ENGLISH

This article explores the translation of English phraseological units, paying attention to their specific characteristics. Phraseological units are inseparable language units that denote a specific concept and have a modified meaning. Their important characteristics include the invariance of meaning, structure and grammar, as well as imagery. Translating English phraseological units can be difficult due to their complex semantic structure, figurative nature, and national-cultural specificity of meanings. Phraseological units can be divided into equivalent and non-equivalent ones, with the meanings of the latter depending on the national-cultural context. To translate equivalent phraseological units, full or partial phraseological equivalents or phraseological analogues can be used. The most effective way to translate phraseological units is to use a full phraseological equivalent that fully corresponds to the original phraseological unit in meaning, lexical composition, grammatical structure, and imagery in both languages. In translation, there are partial equivalents that contain some discrepancies with the original phraseological units, and phraseological analogues that have the same meaning and style but differ in imagery from the original. Many English phraseological units are non-equivalent, so they are translated into Ukrainian using calques or descriptions. Descriptive translation allows conveying the general meaning of phraseological units as succinctly and clearly as possible, but does not preserve the figurative meaning.

The pervasiveness of language contact: Evidence from negative existentials in Romeyka/Turkish code-switching

This paper investigates the morpho-syntactic features of language contact in the endangered Greek dialect Romeyka with Turkish. We analyze the use of the borrowed negative existential jok to (a) determine its role in Romeyka’s negation patterns (b) examine the effects of contact in Romeyka through cross-linguistic comparisons of jok with Turkish and forms of the dialect as spoken in Greece and (c) apply the identified grammatical patterns of jok to Myers-Scotton’s linguistic explanations for the code switching phenomena in the Matrix Language Turnover Hypothesis. The analysis demonstrates the pervasive influence of Turkish on the morpho-syntax of Romeyka through the incorporation of Turkish grammatical structures. We observe changes in the fundamental predicate grammar that are aligned with Turkish and that are inconsistent with Pontic’s existential constructions where the verb indicating existence is used. The patterns of contact confirm the Matrix Language hypothesis and provide evidence that indicate that Romeyka may be undergoing language turnover. Our findings are relevant to further understanding code switching among speakers of minority languages and assessing the vitality of Romeyka in Turkey.

GRAMMATICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE PROCESS OF POLISH-UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION

Text translation often requires to preserve the author’s style, originality, and communicative intention. Preservation of the content of the work consists of the correct translation of the lexical part, which mainly does not cause difficulties since the appropriate lexemes are chosen based on the topic and need. Meanwhile, the syntactic structure is mostly dynamic and often can be different from the original, what is caused by the grammatical structure of each language. The article is devoted to the study of the transformation peculiarities in order to translate texts from the Polish language into Ukrainian as accurately as possible. In particular, different types of grammatical transformations of the Polish and Ukrainian languages have been analyzed using the example of the original and the translated version of the novel «Loneliness on the Web» by Y. Vishnevsky. Due to the peculiarities of the syntactic structure of the Polish language, inversion plays a significant part, which can be caused either by the structure of the language or by the requirement to convey the expressiveness of speech. The change in the syntactic structure of a sentence is especially productive: the main and secondary parts of the sentence are transformed within a simple sentence, and therefore the structure of the sentence is complete/incomplete, one-member/ two-member. Complex sentences, compound sentences, and complex syntactic constructions in the process of translation can, of course, preserve their structure and typology, but a large number still differ from the structure in the target language. One of the features of the Polish language is the absence of subject pronouns along with predicates expressed by past tense verbs, while they are present in the Ukrainian version, what predetermined a significant decompression of the target text. At the same time, we record many one-word concepts, which in the Ukrainian language are conveyed by word combinations, causing compressions. The zero transformation turned out to be unproductive since it is mostly impossible to convey the content of the artistic text, its emotional and expressive shades in the target language by word-for-word translation. We should note that the Polish and Ukrainian languages have several differences in the punctuation of sentences: in the Polish language, the optionality of punctuation marks often comes to the forefront when designing complex sentences and direct speech. The artistic translation is a kind of challenge for the translator since the final result must preserve the unique style of the writer, and his originality, taking into account the sociocultural and ethnolinguistic contexts of both the original language and the target language. Therefore we can claim that the author of the translation of the novel «Loneliness on the Web» by Y. Vishnevsky managed to do it at such a high level.

“Does this make sense?”: The effect of matching guise in regional accent on grammatical acceptability judgments

Syntax and sociophonetics are typically treated as wildly disjointed (possibly even incompatible) theoretical pursuits. This paper seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with matching or mismatching social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgment task. Place is the unifying social association between guise and structure. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a matching place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgment of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

ANALYSIS OF RESOURCES FOR TEACHING ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN THE CONDITIONS OF BLENDED AND DISTANCE LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

The article deals with online services and tools as resources for teaching English grammar in a blended and distance format in synchronous and asynchronous modes. Online resources are systematised by their purpose: for presentation, practice and testing of grammatical structures. The main tools for presentation of grammar in a blended and distance format are various forms of visualisation of learning material, as the use of different forms of structuring and visualisation contributes to a more effective perception and memorisation of information. Such forms are divided into static images and video explanations. Online resources in the category of English grammar practice include various types of exercises, activities, tests and text tasks for controlled practice and automation that students can complete online in synchronous and asynchronous mode. The category of resources for testing grammar knowledge includes synchronous and asynchronous testing and/or control tasks also in an online format. The online resources for teaching English grammar are also categorised by their origin and the role of the teacher. According to this criterion, online resources for teaching grammar can be divided into the following groups: ready-made, where the teacher acts as a user of a suitable online resource; adapted, where the teacher uses already created online resources, but changes them to some extent in accordance with his/her educational context; original, where the teacher is the author of the resource, independently develops and creates it, chooses the appropriate format, platform, control methods, evaluation criteria, etc. For each category, the advantages and disadvantages of use are indicated, as well as examples. The main factors for choosing a particular resource are its relevance to the needs of the educational context and ease of use

Teaching Grammar in Iraqi Secondary Schools by Using the Communicative Approach

The aim of the present paper is to describe the teaching grammar process in Iraqi secondary schools based on the Communicative Approach (CA) with reference to teacher’s experience and the difficulties that the teachers face during teaching the class. Teaching grammar in Iraqi secondary schools is the dominant content in the syllabus and is preferred to other skills. Additionally, teaching grammar in Iraqi secondary schools using other methods, such as: Grammar-Translation method (GTM) which is considered as the principal method, ‘Direct method’ (DM) and ‘Indirect method’ (IM) enable teachers to meet what learners need during learning the grammatical structures.

Grammaticality Judgments of Tense and Agreement by Child Speakers of African American English: Effects of Clinical Status, Surface Form, and Grammatical Structure.

We examined the grammaticality judgments of tense and agreement (T/A) structures by children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) within African American English (AAE). The children's judgments of T/A forms were also compared to their judgments of two control forms and, for some analyses, examined by surface form (i.e., overt, zero) and type of structure (i.e., BE, past tense, verbal -s). The judgments were from 91 AAE-speaking kindergartners (DLD = 34; typically developing = 57), elicited using items from the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. The data were analyzed twice, once using General American English as the reference and A' scores and once using AAE as the reference and percentages of acceptability. Although the groups differed using both metrics, the percentages of acceptability tied the DLD T/A deficit to judgments of the overt forms, while also revealing a general DLD weakness judging sentences that are ungrammatical in AAE. Judgments of the overt T/A forms by both groups correlated with their productions of these forms and their language test scores, and both groups showed structure-specific form preferences ("is": overt > zero vs. verbal -s: overt = zero). The findings demonstrate the utility of grammaticality judgment tasks for revealing weaknesses in T/A within AAE-speaking children with DLD, while also calling for more studies using AAE as the dialect reference when designing stimuli and coding systems. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22534588.

A Chinese Short Text Classification Method for Tax Audit Reports based on Word Importance and Syntactic Enhancement BERT

Tax audit is an important part of the tax collection and management system, which directly affects the economic interests of the country and taxpayers. Therefore, reducing the enforcement risk in tax audit is crucial to continuously improve the tax collection and management system. Recently, the research of using deep learning to classify Chinese tax audit data to achieve this goal has attracted much attention. Inspired by BERT, this paper proposes a syntactic enhancement BERT (SE-BERT). It can improve BERT’s text understanding ability by learning input features and grammatical structure of text from text content and location embeddings. In addition, we weight the word importance calculated by TF-IDF with SE-BERT to improve the ability of recognizing local salient features. Through comparative experiments on our Chinese tax audit dataset, our method achieves better performance.

An Analysis Of Grammatical Errors In Writing Descriptive Text

Grammar error is one of the difficulties experienced by students in the writing process. This study conducted in order to investigate the grammatical errors in writing descriptive text made by the students of English Department of FKIP USI. This research aimed to know the grammatical errors that happen in writing class made by students of the second semester. In this study, the writer used Qualitative analysis, while the general pattern or the research design used by the researcher is a case study. This study found that the students make the grammatical error in writing descriptive text. Population taken in second semester of English student department. Purposive sampling is used in taking sample from the population. The researcher uses document papers as the instrument. The finding of this study showed that there are 6 types of grammatical error found namely: tenses, preposition, articles, voices, morphological, and verbs errors; the dominant grammatical error found is tense errors which has total occurrences of 75 (26.31%) specifically the use of past tense; the reason why students‟ made dominant error in using specifically past tense is the students‟ are lack of understanding the linguistic features of descriptive text. Based on the result, it is figured out that the students still have difficulties in applying grammatical structures in writing. In order to avoid the students in making another grammatical error, the researcher has suggested taking out remediation based on each problematic area of grammatical error categories

The development of a digital story-retell elicitation and analysis tool through citizen science data collection, software development and machine learning.

In order to leverage the potential benefits of technology to speech and language therapy language assessment processes, large samples of naturalistic language data must be collected and analysed. These samples enable the development and testing of novel software applications with data relevant to their intended clinical application. However, the collection and analysis of such data can be costly and time-consuming. This paper describes the development of a novel application designed to elicit and analyse young children's story retell narratives to provide metrics regarding the child's use of grammatical structures (micro-structure) and story grammar (macro-structure elements). Key aspects for development were (1) methods to collect story retells, ensure accurate transcription and segmentation of utterances; (2) testing the reliability of the application to analyse micro-structure elements in children's story retells and (3) development of an algorithm to analyse narrative macro-structure elements. A co-design process was used to design an app which would be used to gather story retell samples from children using mobile technology. A citizen science approach using mainstream marketing via online channels, the media and billboard ads was used to encourage participation from children across the United Kingdom. A stratified sampling framework was used to ensure a representative sample was obtained across age, gender and five bands of socio-economic disadvantage using partial postcodes and the relevant indices of deprivation. Trained Research Associates (RA) completed transcription and micro and macro-structure analysis of the language samples. Methods to improve transcriptions produced by automated speech recognition were developed to enable reliable analysis. RA micro-structure analyses were compared to those generated by the digital application to test its reliability using intra-class correlation (ICC). RA macro-structure analyses were used to train an algorithm to produce macro-structure metrics. Finally, results from the macro-structure algorithm were compared against a subset of RA macro-structure analyses not used in training to test its reliability using ICC. A total of 4,517 profiles were made in the app used in data collection and from these participants a final set of 599 were drawn which fulfilled the stratified sampling criteria. The story retells ranged from 35.66 s to 251.4 s in length and had word counts ranging from 37 to 496, with a mean of 148.29 words. ICC between the RA and application micro-structure analyses ranged from 0.213 to 1.0 with 41 out of a total of 44 comparisons reaching 'good' (0.70-0.90) or 'excellent' (>0.90) levels of reliability. ICC between the RA and application macro-structure features were completed for 85 samples not used in training the algorithm. ICC ranged from 0.5577 to 0.939 with 5 out of 7 metrics being 'good' or better. Work to date has demonstrated the potential of semi-automated transcription and linguistic analyses to provide reliable, detailed and informative narrative language analysis for young children and for the use of citizen science based approaches using mobile technologies to collect representative and informative research data. Clinical evaluation of this new app is ongoing, so we do not yet have data documenting its developmental or clinical sensitivity and specificity.

Reading Comprehension Difficulties Among English Majored Sophomores at A University in Vietnam

Reading comprehension is undoubtedly a fundamental skill, serving as a precursor to academic success, professional achievement, and lifelong learning as it enables language learners to acquire new knowledge and expand their worldview (Frey, Fisher, & Lapp, 2012) [11]. It is also considered the cornerstone of enhancing other productive skills, including speaking and writing skills, by facilitating the acquisition of vocabulary, syntax, and critical thinking abilities, all of which are crucial to effective communication and written expression. However, a significant number of learners encounter formidable challenges in comprehending written texts. This study endeavors to investigate the reading comprehension difficulties of English majored sophomores at Hanoi University of Industry (HaUI) as well as identify the factors behind them using a mixed-method approach. The research participants consisted of 186 sophomores, using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that the bulk of the participants have difficulties in reading comprehension, particularly with regard to certain aspects such as vocabulary, background knowledge, grammatical structures, and reading strategies. The study also uncovers several contributory factors that impede reading comprehension, mainly a lack of reading habits and a shortage of interest and motivation for reading.

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable