Kind Of Grammar Research Articles

A phonotactic-tonotactic grammar for Tokyo Japanese that clusters by lexical strata offers a good trade-off between model size and likelihood

The Japanese lexicon is typically classified into at least three etymological strata: native, Sino-Japanese and foreign words. In Tokyo Japanese, nouns from different strata are known to have different phonotactic as well as tonotactic properties. Should one analyze Tokyo Japanese nouns using a non-clustering grammar that generates all nouns using the same phonological grammar, or should one analyze them using a clustering grammar that generates nouns from different strata using different grammars? In this study, I address this question from a probabilistic and a model selection perspective: the better probabilistic grammar is one that better balances fit to data and the number of parameters in the grammar. Using the UCLA Phonotactic Learner, I train two kinds of MaxEnt grammars that correspond to non-clustering and clustering grammars. I compare the two kinds of grammar using the Bayesian Information Crierion (BIC), and show that the non-clustering grammars make a better trade-off between fit to data and model size than non-clustering grammars. Consequently, different etymological strata of the Tokyo Japanese nominal lexicon are better analyzed as being generated from different MaxEnt grammars than from the same MaxEnt grammar.

Deflection Mechanism #1

Deflection Mechanism #1 Austin Tucker (bio) Yes, come in. I've made risotto.Scallops too, massive onesjust for this occasion. Convention says the secret is fresh mozzarella,spices picked straight from the garden,but I prefer that feeling you get remembering a time too far away for the details to be correct:a view from the porch where the light undoesthe alders like shoelaces, the scrolling end-credits of a movie you'll forget you've seen,names bright like out-of-focus stars,the cedar smell of an antique shop settling in the dust of its old cameras.Really, though, the secret is to notget distracted. You can really burn a risotto when you're distracted.Distractions are, somehow, unforgettable,and they can last for years, much longer than cooking a risotto. So enoughof that. I've pulled out the Princess Houseglasses, the clearest crystal you've ever seen. A toast–and yet we go on. Please,as my mother would say:I've made so much food it's a kind of grammar. [End Page 49] I cut the ham straight from the bone,and I promise the soufflé is like going on holiday.Once I told someone I loved I lived in Arizona, just two streets down from Miami.I haven't thought of her in years and, by the way,the fish is lovely, cooked as if it felt nothing at all. [End Page 50] Austin Tucker Austin Tucker received his MFA in poetry from Rutgers-Camden. His poetry has appeared in The Orange Coast Review, Four Chambers, and Frontier, and was a semifinalist for the 2018 Halifax Ranch Prize and long listed for the 2019 Disquiet International Literary Contest. He lives in Philadelphia. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

The Internal Language of Proteins

The question of whether proteins share a common language across the major branches of life is an intriguing one. Adding to the growing body of evidence that there have been genuine increases in complexity over the course of evolutionary history, Lijia Yu et al. investigated the arrangements of protein domains, considering them as a kind of grammar that orders the internal structure of proteins.

Representation Meaning of Multimodal Discourse in Textbooks: A Case Study of Persian Language-Learning Textbook

Resources such as images, colors, sounds and actions have already been regarded as different types of modes which fulfill the meaning-making. Multimodal discourse refers to two or more modes working together for the meaning-making of the whole discourse. The paper conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of Persian language-learning textbook from ideational aspects. Persian language-learning textbooks give almost equal weight to both their pictures and verbal texts. The study of ideational aspect focuses on factors such as participants, processes (action, reactional, etc.), circumstance, etc. This article has a two-fold objective: (1) to discuss how the system of transitivity in Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (1996) for the analysis of images is related to the system of transitivity in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (2004) and (2) to investigate how multimodal texts combine in meaning production. In terms of a theoretical discussion about visual language, the study of Visual Grammar is relevant, considering the need for investigating the ways this kind of grammar can contribute for language teaching. The analysis reveals the pictures’ functions in meaning interpretation and explains the relations between the pictures and the verbal texts.

Knowing Chinese character grammar

Chinese character structure has often been described as representing a kind of grammar, but the notion of character grammar has hardly been explored. Patterns in character element reduplication are particularly grammar-like, displaying discrete combinatoriality, binarity, phonology-like final prominence, and potentially the need for symbolic rules (X→XX). To test knowledge of these patterns, Chinese readers were asked to judge the acceptability of fake characters varying both in grammaticality (obeying or violating reduplication constraints) and in lexicality (of the reduplicative configurations). While lexical knowledge was important (lexicality improved acceptability and grammatical configurations were accepted more quickly when also lexical), grammatical knowledge was important as well, with grammaticality improving acceptability equally for lexical and nonlexical configurations. Acceptability was also higher for more frequent reduplicative elements, suggesting that the reduplicative configurations were decomposed. Chinese characters present an as-yet untapped resource for exploring fundamental questions about the nature of the human capacity for grammar.

An Evaluation of Grammar and Vocabulary Consciousness-raising Activities in Current ELT Materials

Five current international ELT books used in Iran were scrutinized regarding inclusion of grammar and vocabulary consciousness-raising activities. To this end, a twenty-seven item, five-point Likert-scale questionnaire filled out by 90 Iranian EFL teachers and 170 students, triangulated by a semi-structured interview conducted with 20 EFL teachers and 20 students were adopted. A Chi-square analysis and an independent sample t-test were run to compare teachers and students’ responses. The findings revealed although the five ELT books used different kinds of grammar and vocabulary activities, they did not include some of the major grammar and vocabulary consciousness- raising activities (e.g. making generalizations, cross-referencing, reconstructing, etc). The findings might be beneficial for ELT material developers, syllabus designers and practitioners.

Do Humans Really Learn AnBn Artificial Grammars From Exemplars?

An important topic in the evolution of language is the kinds of grammars that can be computed by humans and other animals. Fitch and Hauser (F&H; 2004) approached this question by assessing the ability of different species to learn 2 grammars, (AB)(n) and A(n) B(n) . A(n) B(n) was taken to indicate a phrase structure grammar, eliciting a center-embedded pattern. (AB)(n) indicates a grammar whose strings entail only local relations between the categories of constituents. F&H's data suggest that humans, but not tamarin monkeys, learn an A(n) B(n) grammar, whereas both learn a simpler (AB)(n) grammar (Fitch & Hauser, 2004). In their experiments, the A constituents were syllables pronounced by a female voice, whereas the B constituents were syllables pronounced by a male voice. This study proposes that what characterizes the A(n) B(n) exemplars is the distributional regularities of the syllables pronounced by either a male or a female rather than the underlying, more abstract patterns. This article replicates F&H's data and reports new controls using either categories similar to those in F&H or less salient ones. This article shows that distributional regularities explain the data better than grammar learning. Indeed, when familiarized with A(n) B(n) exemplars, participants failed to discriminate A(3) B(2) and A(2) B(3) from A(n) B(n) items, missing the crucial feature that the number of As must equal the number of Bs. Therefore, contrary to F&H, this study concludes that no syntactic rules implementing embedded nonadjacent dependencies were learned in these experiments. The difference between human linguistic abilities and the putative precursors in monkeys deserves further exploration.

Varieties of crossing dependencies: structure dependence and mild context sensitivity

Four different kinds of grammars that can define crossing dependencies in human language are compared here: (i) context sensitive rewrite grammars with rules that depend on context, (ii) matching grammars with constraints that filter the generative structure of the language, (iii) copying grammars which can copy structures of unbounded size, and (iv) generating grammars in which crossing dependencies are generated from a finite lexical basis. Context sensitive rewrite grammars are syntactically, semantically and computationally unattractive. Generating grammars have a collection of nice properties that ensure they define only “mildly context sensitive” languages, and Joshi has proposed that human languages have those properties too. But for certain distinctive kinds of crossing dependencies in human languages, copying or matching analyses predominate. Some results relevant to the viability of mildly context sensitive analyses and some open questions are reviewed.

Varieties of crossing dependencies: structure dependence and mild context sensitivity

AbstractFour different kinds of grammars that can define crossing dependencies in human language are compared here: (i) context sensitive rewrite grammars with rules that depend on context, (ii) matching grammars with constraints that filter the generative structure of the language, (iii) copying grammars which can copy structures of unbounded size, and (iv) generating grammars in which crossing dependencies are generated from a finite lexical basis. Context sensitive rewrite grammars are syntactically, semantically and computationally unattractive. Generating grammars have a collection of nice properties that ensure they define only “mildly context sensitive” languages, and Joshi has proposed that human languages have those properties too. But for certain distinctive kinds of crossing dependencies in human languages, copying or matching analyses predominate. Some results relevant to the viability of mildly context sensitive analyses and some open questions are reviewed.

Narrowing grammar: theory, implementation, and applications

This paper describes Narrowing Grammar, a new kind of grammar that combines concepts from logic programming, rewriting, lazy evaluation, and logic grammar formalisms such as Definite Clause Grammar (DCG). A Narrowing Grammar is a finite set of rewrite rules. The semantics of Narrowing Grammar is defined by a specialized kind of outermost rewriting strategy called NU-narrowing. Narrowing Grammar is directly executable, like many logic grammars. In fact, Narrowing Grammar rules can be compiled to Prolog and executed by existing Prolog interpreters as generators or acceptors. Unlike many logic grammars, Narrowing Grammar also permits higher-order specification and modular composition, and it provides lazy evaluation by virtue of its rewriting strategy. Lazy evaluation is important in certain languageacceptance situations, such as in coroutined matching of multiple patterns against a stream. We compare Narrowing Grammar with several established logic grammars: Definite Clause Grammar, Metamorphosis Grammar, Extraposition Grammar and Gapping Grammar, showing how these logic grammars can be transformed to Narrowing Grammar. We also investigate the versatility of Narrowing Grammar in language analysis by applying it to several natural-language examples.

Plex grammars for predicate logic programming and its application to the structural analysis of electronic circuits

AbstractIn the syntactic analysis and recognition of patterns, the grammar to describe the pattern structure is the most basic theoretical problem. In regards to this problem, various kinds of grammars have been proposed, for example, Plex grammar which aimed at a more natural model description of the patterns. It can model a more general structure than graph grammar. On the other hand, the theory of grammar based on the logical programming such as Prolog, has recently been considered. It has advantages in that the grammatical rules can be described in the predicate form and the parsing can easily be performed using the inference mechanism. But in fact, the description by Plex grammars does not match the predicate logic, and there has been no study which combines Plex grammar and logic programming. This paper proposes C‐Plex grammar as another description of Plex grammar by the clauses of predicate logic, as well as the top‐down parsing of context‐free C‐Plex grammar based on logic programming by Prolog. C‐Plex grammar based on predicate logic programming has the advantage of high descriptive ability and easy parsing. The feature of C‐Plex grammar is demonstrated using the structural analysis of the electronic circuit as an example. By this elaboration, not only the hierarchical structure among circuit elements and the macroelements, but also the connection relation among them can be analyzed.

"What's wrong with grammar teaching ?"

After asking this question, "what's wrong with grammar teaching ?", Michael Lewis stresses his point with a few relevant quotations on grammar. He then tries to define and describe grammar : facts or a system. He stresses that according to him there are two kinds of grammar, one which focuses on fact --"well-formedness", and the other on choice. All grammar teaching will be defective unless the central role of the choice of the user is recognized, as choice implies meaning. And grammar as a system is a cylindrical learning process implying the constant reappraisal of old ideas in new depth. He then discusses eight difficulties with grammatical explanation and concludes on the need to move from explanation to exploration.

On the syntactic structures of unrestricted grammars I. Generative grammars and phrase structure grammars

Formal definitions for the syntactic structures of unrestricted grammars are given. The traditional forms for grammar productions give rise to “generative grammars” with “derivation structures” (where productions have the form α → β ), and “phrase structure grammars” with “phrase structures” (where productions have the form A → B / μ - ν ), two distinct notions of grammar and syntactic structure which become indistinguishable in the context free case, where the structures are trees. Parallel theories are developed for both kinds of grammar and structure. We formalize the notion of structural equivalence for derivations, extended to unrestricted grammars, and we prove that two derivations are structurally equivalent if and only if they have the same syntactic structure. Structural equivalence is an equivalence relation over the derivations of a grammar, and we give a simpler proof of a theorem by Griffiths that each equivalence class contains a rightmost derivation. We also give a proof for the uniqueness of the rightmost derivation, following a study of some of the properties of syntactic structures. Next, we investigate the relationship between derivation structures and phrase structures and show that the two concepts are nonisomorphic. There is a natural correspondence between generative productions and phrase structure productions, and, by extension, between the two kinds of grammars and between their derivations. But we show that the correspondence does not necessarily preserve structural equivalence, in either direction. However, if the correspondence from the productions of a phrase structure grammar to the productions of a generative grammar is a bijection, then structural equivalence on the generative derivations refines the image under the correspondence of structural equivalence on the phrase structure derivations.

What Kind of Grammar for Future Teachers?

What Kind of Grammar for Future Teachers?

Background Notes on Syntactic Arrangement

Jespersen was cognizant of a lack of research on the subject word-order when he referred to the latter as the Cinderella of linguistic science.' In the field of Spanish, Rodolfo Lenz was probably the first to call our attention to a lacuna in this aspect of syntax: El orden de las palabras en la oraci6n castellana es un asunto todavia poco estudiado; la mayor parte de las gramiticas no dicen nada al respecto.2 Even Bello's grammar is almost silent on this matter. In his very brief chapter XXII, Estructura de la oracidn, he speaks of sentence elements and affirms that syntax concerns el orden y dependencia en que los colocamos . . .. Then after he asserts that the subject is the dominant word in the sentence, he adds Y en torno al sustantivo sujeto o al verbo se colocan todas las otras palabras. . . .4 This is Bello's only contribution, as far as the writer knows, to the clarification of the phenomenon of syntactic order. Grammars of Spanish, in general, may be categorized into two types, at least with regard to statements concerning syntactic order. Ramsey's grammar and that of the Real Academia are of the first type. These two serve as models, and the latter, especially, as an authority. Their treatment of word placement, while comparatively ample, appears to be based on general observations and a limited sampling, rather than on great masses of examples drawn from the language-in-action. The second type contributes nothing new in the way of descriptions; it is more or less a mimic of the authority. Statements on word-order, in this kind of grammar, often are very categorical.5 The unscientific approach of both types of grammars, to the phenomenon of syntactic arrangement, can hardly be expected to provide descriptions which accurately reflect the speech patterns of natives.

What Kind of Grammar in Upper Grades

What Kind of Grammar in Upper Grades