Levels Of Linguistic Description Research Articles

Does Japanese/German L1 Metrical and Tonal Structure Constrain the Acquisition of French L2 Morphology?

In different studies dedicated to the acquisition of verbal morphology by bilingual children or by L2 learners, it has been noted that differences in the acquisition process cannot be accounted for by only considering the distance between L1 and L2 morphology. Some forms, such as auxiliaries, may occur in L2 productions without being motivated by L1 morphology. To account for this, the prosodic transfer hypothesis—according to which the acquisition of morphology in the non-dominant language is influenced by the prosody of the dominant language—has been formulated. That prosodic features may influence the acquisition of morphology is interesting as it shows that the acquisition process must be apprehended by considering interfaces and interrelations between the various levels of linguistic description. The aim of this contribution is thus twofold: (i) clarifying to which aspects of prosody prosodic transfer hypothesis refers (specifically, among tonal and metrical prosodic elements, which one comes into play to account for morphological development); and (ii) explaining the importance of considering grammatical interfaces in study on L2 development. To do so, an exploratory study, which relies on the analysis of L2 French narratives produced by two learners with L1 Japanese and two with L1 German, was achieved. This preliminary analysis of the data suggests that metrical structure—more precisely, the nature of the basic metrical unit—may constrain the occurrence of auxiliary and vowel-final forms in the productions of Japanese learners.

Exploring Monological and Dialogical Phases in Naturally Occurring Explanations

Recent approaches to Explainable AI (XAI) promise to satisfy diverse user expectations by allowing them to steer the interaction in order to elicit content relevant to them. However, little is known about how and to what extent the explainee takes part actively in the process of explaining. To tackle this empirical gap, we exploratively examined naturally occurring everyday explanations in doctor–patient interactions (N = 11). Following the social design of XAI, we view explanations as emerging in interactions: first, we identified the verbal behavior of both the explainer and the explainee in the sequential context, which we could assign to phases that were either monological or dialogical; second, we investigated in particular who was responsible for the initiation of the different phases. Finally, we took a closer look at the global conversational structure of explanations by applying a context-sensitive model of organizational jobs, thus adding a third layer of analysis. Results show that in our small sample of conversational explanations, both monological and dialogical phases varied in their length, timing of occurrence (at the early or later stages of the interaction) and their initiation (by the explainer or the explainee). They alternated several times in the course of the interaction. However, we also found some patterns suggesting that all interactions started with a monological phase initiated by the explainer. Both conversational partners contributed to the core organizational job that constitutes an explanation. We interpret the results as an indication for naturally occurring everyday explanations in doctor–patient interactions to be co-constructed on three levels of linguistic description: (1) by switching back and forth between monological to dialogical phases that (2) can be initiated by both partners and (3) by the mutual accomplishment and thus responsibility for an explanation’s core job that is crucial for the success of the explanation. Because of the explorative nature of our study, these results need to be investigated (a) with a larger sample and (b) in other contexts. However, our results suggest that future designs of artificial explainable systems should design the explanatory dialogue in such a way that it includes monological and dialogical phases that can be initiated not only by the explainer but also by the explainee, as both contribute to the core job of explicating procedural, clausal, or conceptual relations in explanations.

Neke odlike francuskog govornog jezika / Some Features of the Spoken French and Their Place in Language Teaching

Considering that this topic is partially neglected in foreign language teaching, which results in a linguistic blockade of students when faced with spoken language, we wanted to facilitate their encounter with spoken French and point out some theoretical problems regarding differences between structures of the spoken and written French. Due to the scope of the paper, we limited ourselves to only some of the most important aspects. The starting hypothesis is that spoken and written French are partly two parallel systems, which, in addition to many overlaps in the structure, show differences at all levels of linguistic description: phonetic and phonological, morpho-syntactic and lexical. We consulted the works of French linguists and sociolinguists and also touched upon the issues of the relationship between the alphabet and the language, registers in language, and variation in French. The fruit of our research is the conclusion that the mentioned structures vary to a sufficient extent, so that French language teaching should deal with this phenomenon also theoretically and not only practically (through lecturer conversations, for example). In the paper, we also used our own examples from the corpus that we collected by working on the doctorate, as well as examples of authors that we consulted.

Integrating phonetics and phonology in the study of linguistic prominence

Since the earliest days of phonetics, researchers have noticed that certain speech units stand out from their environment. This is for example the case of a stressed syllable within a word, or of an accented word within an utterance. These prominent units are usually produced with more effort and perceived with more ease, and they often represent a cornerstone for larger and meaningful structures. The notion of linguistic prominence, however, has received a wide number of contradicting or unspecific definitions. In this article, we present an essentialist definition of prominence, which casts it at the crossroads of linguistic signals, meanings and structures, and of the domain-general functions of highlighting and chunking. The papers in this special issue contribute experimental studies on prominence relations, on their role within and across levels of linguistic description, and on how they shape and further our understanding of language.

The Relationship Between First and Second Language Writing: Investigating the Effects of First Language Complexity on Second Language Complexity in Advanced Stages of Learning

AbstractRecent studies have uncovered substantial individual differences in first language (L1) language attainment across the lifespan and across multiple components of language. The existence of such variability raises the question of its role in second language (L2) learning. The existing body of research on L1–L2 relationships has primarily targeted reading comprehension by means of controlled experimental designs. This study extended existing research by investigating L1–L2 relationships in writing through the automatic analysis of linguistic complexity in paired samples of authentic production data. For each writing sample, a series of measurements of 12 indicators was obtained using a computational tool that implements a sliding‐window approach. Results from mixed‐effects modeling revealed significant relationships between L1 complexity and L2 complexity for all but one measure, indicating that an L1 effect is robust across different levels of linguistic description.

Criticality in Pareto Optimal Grammars?

What are relevant levels of description when investigating human language? How are these levels connected to each other? Does one description yield smoothly into the next one such that different models lie naturally along a hierarchy containing each other? Or, instead, are there sharp transitions between one description and the next, such that to gain a little bit accuracy it is necessary to change our framework radically? Do different levels describe the same linguistic aspects with increasing (or decreasing) accuracy? Historically, answers to these questions were guided by intuition and resulted in subfields of study, from phonetics to syntax and semantics. Need for research at each level is acknowledged, but seldom are these different aspects brought together (with notable exceptions). Here, we propose a methodology to inspect empirical corpora systematically, and to extract from them, blindly, relevant phenomenological scales and interactions between them. Our methodology is rigorously grounded in information theory, multi-objective optimization, and statistical physics. Salient levels of linguistic description are readily interpretable in terms of energies, entropies, phase transitions, or criticality. Our results suggest a critical point in the description of human language, indicating that several complementary models are simultaneously necessary (and unavoidable) to describe it.

A Case for Construction Grammar: Wh-XVPY Constructions

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the issue of implicational constructions. Following Construction Grammar, which argues that constructions are operational at all levels of linguistic description, we advocate the existence of implicational constructions. In contrast with the traditional view of implicature, which differentiates between grammatically guided and contextually guided implicature (conventional vs. conversational implicature), we claim that implicature is grammatically encoded and captured by the construction itself, which has specific morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic and prosodic features. Our claim is supported by the analysis of the formal and semantic properties of a group of implicational constructions used in spoken discourse which can be said to constitute a constructional family: the Wh-XVPY interrogative family.

‘Outdooring’ the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana

Over the last 30 years there has been an upsurge in research and theorising on postcolonial Englishes. Beginning with Kachru's (1985)Three Circlesmodel, more recently the focus has shifted to models focusing on identity construction and historical developments (Schneider, 2007), central and peripheral varieties and their spheres of influence (Mair, 2013), and those aiming to provide a more integrated approach to postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes (Buschfeld & Kautzsch, 2017). Dedicated corpora such as the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum, 1991) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbe; Davies & Fuchs, 2015) have been designed to allow for a synchronic comparison of Englishes around the world and have since been widely used to study variation on the different levels of linguistic description within and across varieties. Recently, ICE corpora have also been used to test assumptions laid out by Schneider (2007), e.g. by comparing data from ICE corpora of varieties which have progressed to different phases (Mukherjee & Gries, 2009) or by taking an apparent-time approach to test developments within one variety (Fuchs & Gut, 2015).

Church-Slavonic Elements as a Source of the Czech Biblical Style in the Period of the Czech National Revival (Unique Attempt of František Novotný from Luže)

The article deals with linguistic aspects of a Czech Biblical text originating in the period of the beginning of the Czech National Revival which has until recently been entirely forgotten. The text is a Tetraevangelion written by a Catholic priest František Novotný from Luže (1768–1826), an almost forgotten contemporary and collaborator of the great representatives of the Czech National Revival Josef Dobrovský and Josef Jungmann. Novotný was an expert on Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic and old and new Czech (he was also the author of the early grammar of Czech that was published in Czech). His four Gospels in Czech, published in 1810–1811, belong to the “learning type” translations. It continues the Czech Biblical translation tradition (at the turn of the 19th century represented primarily by the translation of the New Testament and of the entire Bible by František Faustin Procházka, which followed mainly the baroque Catholic St Wenceslas Bible and the Kralice Bible of the Moravian brethren), but has many specific features. The article focuses on the phenomenon that manifested itself (during the author's research of Novotný's text lasting several years) as its main and most interesting trait, namely, a strong influence of the Church Slavonic Biblical text, which is an absolutely rare phenomenon at the beginning of the Czech National Revival. The author, confronting the previous Biblical translation tradition with Novotný’s, reveals a number of innovations that were materialised in Novotný's translation and whose origin in the Church Slavonic Bible is certain or at least very probable. The innovations concern various levels of linguistic description, mainly syntax and lexicon, but also word formation and morphology. The most interesting of Novotný’s novelties is his usage of the adjectival past participle ending with -(v)ší, since this category was introduced into literary Czech in the period of the Czech Revival. It is also important that Church Slavonic is, with high probability, the only source of the enrichment and “refreshment” of the Czech Biblical style that is written in another Slavonic language (Novotný seems not to use any living Slavonic languages).

The GUM corpus: creating multilayer resources in the classroom

This paper presents the methodology, design principles and detailed evaluation of a new freely available multilayer corpus, collected and edited via classroom annotation using collaborative software. After briefly discussing corpus design for open, extensible corpora, five classroom annotation projects are presented, covering structural markup in TEI XML, multiple part of speech tagging, constituent and dependency parsing, information structural and coreference annotation, and Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis. Layers are inspected for annotation quality and together they coalesce to form a richly annotated corpus that can be used to study the interactions between different levels of linguistic description. The evaluation gives an indication of the expected quality of a corpus created by students with relatively little training. A multifactorial example study on lexical NP coreference likelihood is also presented, which illustrates some applications of the corpus. The results of this project show that high quality, richly annotated resources can be created effectively as part of a linguistics curriculum, opening new possibilities not just for research, but also for corpora in linguistics pedagogy.

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS (Model Baru Kajian Linguistik dalam Perspektif Komputer)

This paper describes a new discipline in applied linguistics studies, computational linguistics. It’s a new model of applied linguistics which is influenced by computer technology. Computational linguistics is a discipline straddling applied linguistics and computer science that is concerned with the computer processing of natural languages on all levels of linguistic description. Traditionally, computational linguistics was usually performed by computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics), language experts (persons with some level of ability in the languages relevant to a given project), and computer scientists. The several areas of computational linguistics study encompasses such practical applications as speech recognition systems, speech synthesis, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text editors, grammar checking, text to speech, corpus linguistics, machine translation, text data mining, and others. This paper presents the definition of computational linguistics, relation between language and computer, and area of computational linguistics studies.

Using Social Information in Language Processing

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Linearization-based word-part ellipsis

This paper addresses a phenomenon in which certain word-parts can be omitted. The evidence shows that the full range of data cannot be captured by a sublexical analysis, since the phenomena can be observed both in phrasal and in lexical environments. It is argued that a form of deletion is involved, and that the phenomena—lexical or otherwise—are subject to the same phonological, semantic, and syntactic constraints. In the formalization that is proposed, all of the above constraints are cast in a parallel and declarative fashion, in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag Head-driven phrase structure grammar, 1994), since the various levels of linguistic description are locally and simultaneously available. Building on recent accounts of ellipsis, this paper proposes a unified and general account of word-part ellipsis and phrasal ellipsis.

The applicability of semantic functions to biblical hebrew

In traditional grammars of Biblical Hebrew semantic relations between the different elements in sentences are either ignored or integrated with syntax. What is presented as syntax (even in the newest reference grammars like Waltke and O'Connor's Biblical Hebrew syntax and Jou on and Muraoka's A grammar of Biblical Hebrew), is in fact a mixture of syntax and semantics. Therefore, it has become necessary to consciously try for a better distinction between these two levels of linguistic description, although they can never be separated completely. One of the ways in which this can be done, is by testing the applicability of a semantic theory to sentences in Biblical Hebrew in order to try to identify the semantic categories more clearly. In this paper S.C. Dik's theory of Functional Grammar is used for this purpose, in particular the sections on semantic functions. Following a short definition of every semantic category which is relevant for the analysis of logical relations in sentences, examples from Biblical Hebrew are given to test the validity of the various categories and their definitions and to show how this theory can be applied to Biblical Hebrew. It is found that the theory of semantic functions in Functional Grammar can be applied very well to Biblical Hebrew and that a semantic analysis of a sentence can be undertaken in addition to the morphological and syntactic analyses.

Second Dialect and Second Language in the Composition Class

In linguistics and in other social sciences there are two kinds of facts for describing data-hard facts, the measurements of external events, and soft facts, the internal responses to these external events. Although these facts exist in all kinds and on all levels of linguistic description, distinguishing between them and defining their boundaries often lead to much confusion. An interesting problem in metatheory would be to take some of the current linguistic oppositions, such as etic-emic, performance-competence, empiricismrationalism, speaker-hearer, and analyze them in terms of this hard-soft distinction. One such pair is treated here: second dialect and second language. When teachers speak of problems with the former they are usually speaking about hard facts, or facts of (external) variation; when speaking of second language, though, they often mean soft facts, or those that have to do with (internal) categories and stereotypes. The two kinds of speakers will thus benefit from different classroom techniques. The rest of the paper reviews some current pedagogical methods for teaching and testing composition-among these, sentence combining, discourse analysis, and cloze testing-and suggests how these can be differently used for the two kinds of speakers. Lately there has been a lot written about teaching English to foreign speakers and teaching it to non-standard English speakers. Some claim that there should be very little difference between the two approaches and that these ap