Hierarchical Phrase Structure Research Articles

Hierarchical syntax model of music predicts theta power during music listening

Linguistic research showed that the depth of syntactic embedding is reflected in brain theta power. Here, we test whether this also extends to non-linguistic stimuli, specifically music. We used a hierarchical model of musical syntax to continuously quantify two types of expert-annotated harmonic dependencies throughout a piece of Western classical music: prolongation and preparation. Prolongations can roughly be understood as a musical analogue to linguistic coordination between constituents that share the same function (e.g., ‘pizza’ and ‘pasta’ in ‘I ate pizza and pasta’). Preparation refers to the dependency between two harmonies whereby the first implies a resolution towards the second (e.g., dominant towards tonic; similar to how the adjective implies the presence of a noun in ‘I like spicy … ’). Source reconstructed MEG data of sixty-five participants listening to the musical piece was then analysed. We used Bayesian Mixed Effects models to predict theta envelope in the brain, using the number of open prolongation and preparation dependencies as predictors whilst controlling for audio envelope. We observed that prolongation and preparation both carry independent and distinguishable predictive value for theta band fluctuation in key linguistic areas such as the Angular, Superior Temporal, and Heschl's Gyri, or their right-lateralised homologues, with preparation showing additional predictive value for areas associated with the reward system and prediction. Musical expertise further mediated these effects in language-related brain areas. Results show that predictions of precisely formalised music-theoretical models are reflected in the brain activity of listeners which furthers our understanding of the perception and cognition of musical structure.

Unsupervised Paraphrasing under Syntax Knowledge

The soundness of syntax is an important issue for the paraphrase generation task. Most methods control the syntax of paraphrases by embedding the syntax and semantics in the generation process, which cannot guarantee the syntactical correctness of the results. Different from them, in this paper we investigate the structural patterns of word usages termed as the word composable knowledge and integrate it into the paraphrase generation to control the syntax in an explicit way. This syntax knowledge is pretrained on a large corpus with the dependency relationships and formed as the probabilistic functions on the word-level syntactical soundness. For the sentence-level correctness, we design a hierarchical syntax structure loss to quantitatively verify the syntactical soundness of the paraphrase against the given dependency template. Thus, the generation process can select the appropriate words with consideration on both semantics and syntax. The proposed method is evaluated on a few paraphrase datasets. The experimental results show that the quality of paraphrases by our proposed method outperforms the compared methods, especially in terms of syntax correctness.

Music Beat Generation through AI

Music Plays a significant role in our mental health, but composing a song is difficult for composers. While listening to music, Humans can quickly detect and move to beats. Similarly to Language, Music can be represented as a sequence of discrete symbols that form a hierarchical syntax, with notes being roughly like characters and motifs of notes like a word. Several Theoretical and algorithmic approaches have been proposed to account for this ability. Related to, but different from the issue of how we perceive a beat is a question of how we learn to generate and hold a beat. In this paper, we introduce a Music Beat Generator that will interpolate music rhythms and notes that can be used by music artists, Using Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. In the context of this project, rhythms are one long measure sequence of notes and rest occurring on natural pulse subdivisions of a beat. Music generation using machine learning techniques has been a topic of interest for the past two decades. Music proves to be a different challenge compared to images, among three main dimensions: Firstly, music is temporal, with a hierarchical structure with dependencies across time. Secondly, music consists of interdependent instruments that unfold across time. Thirdly, music is grouped into chords, arpeggios, and melodies – hence each time -step may have multiple outputs. Keywords – Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Music Beats; Algorithm; Chords; Interpolate; Rhythms.

Brahmsian Articulation

The analysis of the structural repercussions of musicians’ strategies has traditionally focused on their handling of timing and dynamics, not only because of the correlation found in performances between hierarchical phrase structure and coordinated decreases in both parameters—usually referred to as phrase arching (".fn_cite($gabrielsson_1988).") or phrase-final lengthening (".fn_cite($todd_1985).

The Done‐State Derived Stative: A Case Study in Building Complex Eventualities in Syntax

AbstractA basic question for theories of the syntax–semantics interface is whether the relationship between the form and meaning of complex aspectual expressions is mediated by the pieces that make up hierarchical syntax or whether complex forms and their meanings can pair directly, in templatic or constructional representations, for example. This paper examines the string I’m done writing chapter 3 with this issue in mind. The (be) done V‐ing structure does not seem to have been analyzed before, and I refer to it as the done state. The done state expresses a complex stative eventuality. Notably, the transitive object of the done state can hold a target state, an unexpected interpretation given the ‐ing verb (contrast I’ve been writing chapter 3). Apparent form–meaning mismatches of this type are regularly taken as evidence for listed, constructional mappings. I show, however, that the done state has the syntactic pieces of a stative passive of a present participle, and I argue that the done state is a previously unnoticed type of derived stative. The analysis provides a compositional account of the structure’s semantics and morphology. I further argue that the syntactic items that make up the done state have the same properties that they have elsewhere in the grammar; there is no need to postulate new grammatical objects. The predictable properties of the done state find explanation in models in which complex eventualities are built up out of the minimal units that make up complex phrases.

Human language evolution: a view from theoretical linguistics on how syntax and the lexicon first came into being

Human language is a multi-componential function comprising several sub-functions each of which may have evolved in other species independently of language. Among them, two sub-functions, or modules, have been claimed to be truly unique to the humans, namely hierarchical syntax (known as “Merge” in linguistics) and the “lexicon.” This kind of species-specificity stands as a hindrance to our natural understanding of human language evolution. Here we challenge this issue and advance our hypotheses on how human syntax and lexicon may have evolved from pre-existing cognitive capacities in our ancestors and other species including but not limited to nonhuman primates. Specifically, we argue that Merge evolved from motor action planning, and that the human lexicon with the distinction between lexical and functional categories evolved from its predecessors found in animal cognition through a process we call “disintegration.” We build our arguments on recent developments in generative grammar but crucially depart from some of its core ideas by borrowing insights from other relevant disciplines. Most importantly, we maintain that every sub-function of human language keeps evolutionary continuity with other species’ cognitive capacities and reject a saltational emergence of language in favor of its gradual evolution. By doing so, we aim to offer a firm theoretical background on which a promising scenario of language evolution can be constructed.

Grammar in the brain: Two grammar subsystems and two agrammatic types of aphasia

Grammar includes not only the ability to use verbs but also the ability to express and understand the relationships existing among the words in a sentence. Since the initial description of agrammatism (Kussmaul, 1877) it was proposed that there are two different types of agrammatism: Aktaphasie and Agrammatismus . The first one has been extensively studied, while the second one has been mostly overlooked. To analyze the brain areas involved in understanding the relationships existing among the words in a sentence. Its disturbances would correspond to the second type of agrammatism. Prepositions, adverbs, and grammatical cases are used to indicate the relationships among sentence words. This is a quasi-spatial ability supported by the left posterior parietal lobe. Almost one century ago a type of aphasia referred to as “semantic aphasia”, associated with left posterior parietal damage and characterized by the inability to use and understand the relationships among the language words, was described. Excepting a few papers, this type of aphasia has been usually ignored in the contemporary neuroscience literature. From the historical perspective, it has been proposed that grammar evolved in two steps: (1) proto-grammar, consisting of flat verb-noun compounds, and (2) hierarchical syntax or complex grammar. The first one is associated with the ability to use and understand verbs. The second one can be related to the ability to use verbally mediate spatial concepts. Some recently published cases of semantic aphasia corroborate its clinical manifestations and the locus of pathology. Functional studies support the participation of the left posterior parietal lobe in grammar. It is concluded that evidence suggests that semantic aphasia is a real type of aphasia and indeed there are two grammatical subsystems in the brain and two agrammatic types of aphasia. • Grammar contains the use of action and function words to express the relationship of elements in a sentence. • Action words (verbs) are supported by the Broca's area, while function words by the left posterior parietal lobe. • Left parietal lobe is specialized in understanding and using verbally mediated spatial information. • Damage in the left posterior parietal lobe results in so-called semantic aphasia. • Several pathways interconnect both grammatical subsystems.

Reflections on Protolanguage: Evidence from Studies on Animal Communication

The paper is a critique of the existence of protolanguage based on some personal reasoning given the findings of previous research. This paper focuses on the nature of semantic compositionality and its existence (and therefore manifestations) in animal communication systems as evidence of the existence of protolanguage. This compositional state that started to color human language has paved the way to hierarchical syntax and thus has helped in the emergence of a recursive, fully complex language. On the other hand, non-human animal communication systems, including those examined in this paper, have not managed to progress beyond the holophrastic state, and thus remained highly confined and unproductive. This is explicated by the observation that these systems do not employ discrete meaningful units that can be used recursively in different linguistic contexts, a necessary condition for a system of communication to be compositional. This is interesting in the study of language evolution as it could suggest that human language could not have evolved from a rudimentary, intermediate stage called protolanguage. Speculating about the existence of protolanguage subsumes convergent evolution (e.g. songbirds). The lack of semantic compositionality in non-human communication system suggests that convergent evolution is hard to prove, which puts the existence of protolanguage on the line. This thesis is, however, far from being established and requires a lot of further research to prove its validity.
 
 Received: 21 September 2020 / Accepted: 3 November 2020 / Published: 17 January 2021

Hierarchical clause structure as a tool for cognitive advances in early childhood

Humans have non-verbal means for various types of mental computations, particularly those that involve concrete objects and events accessible to direct sensory experience. Unlike other species, however, (adult) humans are also capable of reasoning about abstract or psychologically distant (i.e., beyond one's direct sensory access) concepts and events, such as hidden causes, other people's beliefs and desires, counterfactual situations, and distant past and future. While reasoning about such constructs may be possible without language, it is at best inefficient (slow, imprecise, and inconsistent).We present an argument that the development of clausal structure in children between the ages of 2–5 provides a representational tool for stage-like cognitive advancements of early childhood, previously documented in developmental research. In our view, this influence goes beyond the conceptual domain, but involves layers of syntactic hierarchy, which augment non-verbal representations and allow children to go beyond their primary, core non-linguistic (sensory-perceptual and affective), systems in reasoning about psychologically distant phenomena. We present the Gradual Emergence theory of syntax acquisition, in which the layers of sentence structure emerge in child language in a universal progression, beginning from the least complex, Small Clause, structure, progressing first to the development of transitivity, then finiteness, and finally to full clause. We review a broad swath of evidence from developmental psychology and detail our proposal that the acquisition of hierarchical syntax in the first few years of life provides the foundation for learning about the spatially, temporally and socially distant objects and events.

Toddlers track hierarchical structure dependence

ABSTRACT Previous research suggests that toddlers can rely on distributional cues in the input to track adjacent and nonadjacent grammatical dependencies. It remains unclear whether toddlers understand the hierarchical phrase structures that determine the corresponding grammatical dependencies. We addressed this question by testing toddlers on two different phrase structures in French that govern distinct patterns of grammatical gender feature agreement. We first show that the two structures are in fact extremely infrequent in children’s input. Then we report on a preferential looking experiment in which French-learning 30-month-olds were presented with French sentences in the two structures, and the grammaticality of the feature agreement was manipulated. Crucially, the contrasting structures contained the same sequentially ordered feature-bearing words in our design (e.g., correct agreement: La banane FEMININE dans le chapeau MASCLINE, elle FEMININE … ‘The banana in the hat, it …’; incorrect agreement: *La banane FEMININE et le chapeau MASCLINE, elles FEMININE … ‘The banana and the hat, they …’). Thus, children must go beyond those words and distinguish the structures hierarchically in order to determine the grammaticality of the different agreement patterns. We predicted that if toddlers rely solely on input support to acquire the structures and the agreement, they should show no discrimination of feature grammaticality. If, however, they can rely on mechanisms beyond linear input, such as the principle of structure dependence in the universal grammar (UG), they should show a grammaticality effect. The results confirmed the latter prediction, demonstrating the possible influence of the learner’s internal system, suggesting that UG knowledge might guide early language development.

A JAVA Code Generation Method based on XUML

In order to solve the problem that the semantic of UML is not precise enough to generate a complete program, an extensible language xUML is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the activity diagram of xUML is analyzed to obtain the Hierarchical Syntax Chart of the system, and then the JAVA program is obtained according to the Hierarchical Syntax Chart. The results show that the xUML language can generate a complete JAVA program.

Subject-Aux Inversion in Children with SLI.

An elicited production study investigated subject-aux inversion in 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 control groups, typically-developing 5-year-old children and 3-year-old children matched by mean length of utterance. The experimental findings showed that children with specific language impairment produced subject-aux inversion in yes/no questions significantly less often than either of the control groups. However, the fact that lack of inversion is reflected in the input led to the proposal that children with specific language impairment choose the most economical grammatical option. For main clause wh-questions, children with SLI carried out subject-aux inversion at a rate that was not significantly different from the control groups. This finding suggests that these children have access to hierarchical phrase structure representations for questions and the relevant movement operations. In embedded wh-questions, where subject-aux inversion is not permitted, children with SLI implemented SAI more frequently than the control groups. Our interpretation of this finding is that once children with SLI acquire the subject-aux inversion rule, that they are slower to learn that embedded clauses present an exception to the rule.

Lessons from the English auxiliary system

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the featureaux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstresseddo, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.

Lexical representation explains cortical entrainment during speech comprehension.

Results from a recent neuroimaging study on spoken sentence comprehension have been interpreted as evidence for cortical entrainment to hierarchical syntactic structure. We present a simple computational model that predicts the power spectra from this study, even though the model’s linguistic knowledge is restricted to the lexical level, and word-level representations are not combined into higher-level units (phrases or sentences). Hence, the cortical entrainment results can also be explained from the lexical properties of the stimuli, without recourse to hierarchical syntax.

A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF SURAH AL QIYAMAH USING TREE DIAGRAMS

In this research, the researcher analyzed syntactical patterns of the whole verses (ayah) in the English translation of surah Al Qiyamah, which has 40 ayah, using tree diagrams theory to be able drawing and seeing hierarchical syntax structure of the verses in the surah. After analyzing the data, the researcher finally found twenty four syntactic patterns of the surah: there are sixteen patterns of sentence and eight patterns of phrases. The phrases patterns are : a) the pattern of noun phrase appears in one position, b) the patterns of verb phrase appear in three position, c) the patterns of adjective phrase appear in two position, d) the pattern of prepositional phrase appears in one position, and e) the pattern of complement phrase appears in one position

Mastering algebra retrains the visual system to perceive hierarchical structure in equations.

Formal mathematics is a paragon of abstractness. It thus seems natural to assume that the mathematical expert should rely more on symbolic or conceptual processes, and less on perception and action. We argue instead that mathematical proficiency relies on perceptual systems that have been retrained to implement mathematical skills. Specifically, we investigated whether the visual system—in particular, object-based attention—is retrained so that parsing algebraic expressions and evaluating algebraic validity are accomplished by visual processing. Object-based attention occurs when the visual system organizes the world into discrete objects, which then guide the deployment of attention. One classic signature of object-based attention is better perceptual discrimination within, rather than between, visual objects. The current study reports that object-based attention occurs not only for simple shapes but also for symbolic mathematical elements within algebraic expressions—but only among individuals who have mastered the hierarchical syntax of algebra. Moreover, among these individuals, increased object-based attention within algebraic expressions is associated with a better ability to evaluate algebraic validity. These results suggest that, in mastering the rules of algebra, people retrain their visual system to represent and evaluate abstract mathematical structure. We thus argue that algebraic expertise involves the regimentation and reuse of evolutionarily ancient perceptual processes. Our findings implicate the visual system as central to learning and reasoning in mathematics, leading us to favor educational approaches to mathematics and related STEM fields that encourage students to adapt, not abandon, their use of perception.

A Gradualist Scenario for Language Evolution: Precise Linguistic Reconstruction of Early Human (and Neandertal) Grammars.

In making an argument for the antiquity of language, based on comparative evidence, Dediu and Levinson (2013) express hope that some combinations of structural features will prove so conservative that they will allow deep linguistic reconstruction. I propose that the earliest stages of syntax/grammar as reconstructed in Progovac (2015a), based on a theoretical and data-driven linguistic analysis, provide just such a conservative platform, which would have been commanded also by Neandertals and the common ancestor. I provide a fragment of this proto-grammar, which includes flat verb-noun compounds used for naming and insult (e.g., rattle-snake, cry-baby, scatter-brain), and paratactic (loose) combinations of such flat structures (e.g., Come one, come all; You seek, you find). This flat, binary, paratactic platform is found in all languages, and can be shown to serve as foundation for any further structure building. However, given the degree and nature of variation across languages in elaborating syntax beyond this proto-stage, I propose that hierarchical syntax did not emerge once and uniformly in all its complexity, but rather multiple times, either within Africa, or after dispersion from Africa. If so, then, under the uniregional hypothesis, our common ancestor with Neandertals, H. heidelbergensis, could not have commanded hierarchical syntax, but “only” the proto-grammar. Linguistic reconstructions of this kind are necessary for formulating precise and testable hypotheses regarding language evolution. In addition to the hominin timeline, this reconstruction can also engage, and negotiate between, the fields of neuroscience and genetics, as I illustrate with one specific scenario involving FOXP2 gene.

Learning a generative syntax from transparent syntactic atoms in the linguistic input

We examined parents' two-word utterances expressing core syntactic relations in order to test the hypothesis that they may enable children to derive the atoms of hierarchical syntax, namely, the asymmetrical Merge/Dependency relation between pairs of words, and, in addition, to identify variables serving generative syntactic rules. Using a large English-language parental corpus, we located all two-word utterances containing a verb and its subject, object, or indirect object. Analysis showed that parental two-word sentences contain transparent information on the binary dependency/merge relation responsible for syntactic connectivity. The syntactic atoms modelled in the two-word input contain natural variables for dependents, making generalization to other contexts an immediate possibility. In a second study, a large sample of children were found to use the same verbs in the great majority of their early sentences expressing the same core grammatical relations. The results support a learning model according to which children learn the basics of syntax from parental two-word sentences.

How hierarchical is language use?

It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show that sequential sentence structure has considerable explanatory power and that hierarchical processing is often not involved. In this paper, we review evidence from the recent literature supporting the hypothesis that sequential structure may be fundamental to the comprehension, production and acquisition of human language. Moreover, we provide a preliminary sketch outlining a non-hierarchical model of language use and discuss its implications and testable predictions. If linguistic phenomena can be explained by sequential rather than hierarchical structure, this will have considerable impact in a wide range of fields, such as linguistics, ethology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology and computer science.

Children's knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure: quantifier floating in Japanese

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not obvious in the input or do they employ a sentence comprehension strategy based on the available input? Two experiments examined four- to six-year-old Japanese-speaking children for their interpretations of floating quantifiers in SOV and OSV sentences. The results revealed that no child employed a comprehension strategy in terms of the linear ordering of constituents, and most five- and six-year-olds correctly interpreted floating quantifiers when word-order difficulty was reduced. These facts indicate that children's interpretation of floating quantifiers is structurally dependent on hierarchical phrase structure, suggesting that this knowledge is a part of children's grammar despite the insufficient input available to them.