Lexical Phrases Research Articles

‘Someone to Open Each and Every Door’: Construction Grammar as a Learner Grammar: The Case of English Indefinite Pronouns

Abstract: This paper sets out an applied model of Cognitive Construction Grammar along three dimensions: Compositionality, form as a vehicle for promoting the emergence of grammatical meaning from lexical meaning and construal. The model of Cognitive Construction Grammar put forward here implies that the Applied Linguist may have to collect and explain a wider repertoire of grammatical forms than were considered previously. This extended repertoire may have the advantage of giving the learner a deeper understanding of semantic constraints on how we use a particular construction. It also means that forms once considered idiomatic are now being studied as productive and hence grammatical on some sense. The disadvantage is that we have to deal with a larger number of forms and have no clear principle as to where grammar learning ends and lexical or idiom learning begins. This paper discusses the question of what to include under the rubric of grammatical description and how to include it in relation to the SOME-and-ANY-SERIES (somebody/anyone, etc.) indefinite pronouns. It asks how this applied model of construction grammar affects what we present to learners by looking first at the formal attributes of the English SOME- and ANY-SERIES indefinite pronouns themselves and then at some of the types of clause in which the SOME-SERIES appears.Keywords: Construction Grammar, Learner Grammars, English Indefinite PronounsIntroductionWith his 'fundamental difference hypothesis', Bley-Vroman (1990) claimed that the inability of second language users to wean themselves off a quite limited array of chunked forms was due to their having passed the critical age of access to their Universal Grammar. Second language learners depended on prefabricated lexical phrases because they were unable to develop the natural syntax that first language speakers could naturally access. However, others have pointed out how the learner problem may in fact lie not in a failure to use a productive grammar but in a failure to establish the repertoire of 'lexical phrases' that native speakers seem to command (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992). Forms such as 'as it were, take lightly, wishful thinking' or 'it goes without saying' are treated as essential to the production of a native-like discourse. From this perspective, the problem for learners is not so much an overuse of fixed forms or chunks but a failure to acquire enough of these lexical phrases to achieve a native-like expressivity.Holme (2013) has argued that a failure to understand the cause of many second language errors lies in a larger failure of linguistic description. A crude dichotomy between what is lexical and what is grammatical means that the true nature of the learner problem is misunderstood. Examples 1-2, taken from a corpus of Hong Kong students' academic writing illustrate the type of problem over which the intermediate or advanced learner often stumbles:(1) The enthusiastic behaviour which teacher performs (author's data, 2010-2011)Some might call Example 1 a collocational error, or one that relates to failure to find the right lexical phrase for 'performs'. In a Cognitive Construction Grammar (CCG), correlations should be rationalised by an understanding of the semantics of words and of the forms into which they do or do not fit. Generally the complementation of this verb 'perform' profiles 'a role' or 'play'. The error in Example 1, therefore, seems to be one we would categorise as lexical because it is finally about a failure to grasp the semantics of 'perform'. In construction grammar, however, grammaticality is finally always about finding the right fit between words. The decision as to whether Example 1 is a grammatical or lexical error is therefore more difficult to make.To understand the problem of how to categorise Example 1, let us consider an imaginary type of error that is similar in some ways. Thus, we hear a learner say 'I go the car' instead of 'I start the car'. …

4. Manual didáctico para el uso del diccionario bilingüe inglés-español / español-inglés

En el aprendizaje de una lengua extranjera el diccionario bilingüe es una herramienta valiosa; más, si se sabe emplear. El presente estudio tiene como objetivo principal reportar los hallazgos de la Fase de Diagnóstico de un Trabajo de Investigación bajo la modalidad de un proyecto especial. Este proyecto tuvo como propósito proponer un manual para el uso del diccionario bilingüe español-inglés / inglés- español. El trabajo se enmarca en la línea de investigación Metodología de la Enseñanza-Aprendizaje del Inglés bajo un enfoque cuantitativo y se ubica dentro de la modalidad de Proyecto Especial, apoyado en un estudio de campo. La población está conformada por 40 estudiantes de cuarto año a quienes se les aplicó una prueba de habilidad sobre el uso del diccionario. Los resultados arrojaron que los participantes presentan muchas dificultades al momento de localizar el adecuado equivalente en español de palabras con cambios morfológicos, polisémicas y de frases lexicales, lo que refleja el poco dominio de los estudiantes del diccionario bilingüe y que justifica la propuesta de un manual para guiar el uso del mismo.

TEACHING COLLOCATION USING LEXICAL APPROACH AS USED IN MADE FRIDA YULIA’S VOCABULARY: LEXICALLY-BASED SECOND THOUSANDS WORDS OF GENERAL SERVICE LIST BOOK

This research was to give insight to English teachers and practitioners who had the same problem faced by the writer and his students especially dealing with the lack of collocation. Moreover, this research inspired particularly those who involved in teaching practices for how to improve their professionalism by implementing Lexical-Based Approach in class activities and to find the solution and hindrances for a better teaching technique in the future. For students who had problems in collocation, this Lexical-Based Approach as used in Made Frida Yulia’s Vocabulary: Lexically-Based Second Thousand Words of General Service List book might improve the awareness toward lexical phrases, chunks and collocations. For teachers and practitioners who want to use this Lexical-Based Approach in the future could use bilingual explanation that is needed for Indonesian students rather than monolingual explanation in English, try to create a good note taking habit for lexical phrases as soon as possible, and use vivid pictures or audio visuals to kill the boredom of the students.

A novel framework for teaching academic writing

This study represents an attempt to create a new framework for teaching academic writing. The new concept of the ‘Lexical Cohesive Trio’, LCT, combines elements of textual reference: anaphora, cataphora, and transitional signals (lexical repetition, bundles, and phrases). 30 English majors from the Gulf University for Science and Technology, GUST, in Kuwait were selected to write a pre-framework and a post-framework essay. The results were analysed using an SPSS package t-test. A pairwise t-test confirmed that more transitional signals were produced after the framework was used: t(1,29) = –4.938, p-value < 0.001. Similarly, a pairwise t-test confirmed that more lexical repetitions were produced after the framework was used: t(1,29) = –5.218, p-value < 0.001. Finally, a pairwise t-test confirmed that significantly more lexical phrases were produced after the framework was used: t(1,29) = –10.672, p-value < 0.001. These tests present strong evidence in favour of using LCT, and confirm that using this new framework enhances students’ ability to write coherent essays.

Asian Professional Discourse Communities: Pedagogical Focus on Speech Forms for Oral Performance

The aim of this paper is to introduce four areas of pedagogical importance for English for Specific Purposes (ESP), particularly in terms of training for oral performances. These are: 1) transitional phrases 2) opening / closing gambits 3) strategic competence in dynamic speech events and 4) academic and formulaic lexical phrases. These four areas were selected after comparing discrete features of both effective and less effective English performances by non-native Englishspeaking medical professionals observed at international medical conferences held in Asia. The results of this field study suggest that specialist terminology is not an area that demands explicit pedagogical addressing and that absolute formal accuracy in English speech is not a decisive factor in performance efficacy for professionals within the Asian region. The resulting suggestions should help ESP teachers prioritize lesson contents to enable learners to deliver more effective oral performances within their respective professional and academic discourse communities.

Hybrid Model of Automated Anaphora Resolution

Anaphora resolution has proven to be a very difficult problem of natural language processing, and it is useful in discourse analysis, language understanding and processing, information exaction, machine translation and many more. This paper represents a system that instead of using a monolithic architecture for resolving anaphora, use the hybrid model which combines the constraint-based and preferences-based architectures, each uses a different source of knowledge, and proves effective on theoretical and computational basis. An algorithm identifies both inter-sentential and intra-sentential antecedents of “Third person pronoun anaphors”, “Pleonastic it”, and “Lexical noun phrase anaphora”. The algorithm use Charniak parser (parser05Aug16) as an associated tool, and it relays on the output generated by it. Salience measures derived from parse tree, in order to find out accurate antecedents from the list of potential antecedents. We have tested the system extensively on 'Reuters Newspaper corpus'.

Further Evidence of the Comparative Memorability of Alliterative Expressions in Second Language Learning

Previous research has furnished evidence that alliterative expressions (e.g. a slippery slope) are comparatively memorable for second language learners, at least when these expressions are attended to as decontextualized items (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008a; Boers et al., 2012). The present study investigates whether alliteration renders lexical phrases comparatively memorable also when these phrases are encountered in texts read primarily with a focus on content. Fifty-four EFL students read a text adapted so as to include five instances of 12 idiomatic expressions. The results of surprise post-tests suggest that the alliterative phrases among these target expressions left significantly stronger memory traces than the non-alliterative ones, especially regarding the form or composition of the phrases.

Building a Language-Independent Discourse Parser using Universal Networking Language

Discourse parsing has become an inevitable task to process information in the natural language processing arena. Parsing complex discourse structures beyond the sentence level is a significant challenge. This article proposes a discourse parser that constructs rhetorical structure RS trees to identify such complex discourse structures. Unlike previous parsers that construct RS trees using lexical features, syntactic features and cue phrases, the proposed discourse parser constructs RS trees using high-level semantic features inherited from the Universal Networking Language UNL. The UNL also adds a language-independent quality to the parser, because the UNL represents texts in a language-independent manner. The parser uses a naive Bayes probabilistic classifier to label discourse relations. It has been tested using 500 Tamil-language documents and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank, which comprises 21 English-language documents. The performance of the naive Bayes classifier has been compared with that of the support vector machine SVM classifier, which has been used in the earlier approaches to build a discourse parser. It is seen that the naive Bayes probabilistic classifier is better suited for discourse relation labeling when compared with the SVM classifier, in terms of training time, testing time, and accuracy.

Lexical Phrases as Pathways to Academic Genres: A Report on Two Cases in an EAP Writing Classroom

In the E SP(English for Specific Purposes) tradition of genre-based approaches to academic literacy, one of the most noteworthy language features lies in lexical phrases. The lexical phrases investigated in the current study consist of both general lexical phrases(i.e., lexical bundles/clusters/formulaic sequences in vocabulary and linguistic studies) and movespecific lexical phrases(i.e., lexical phrases specific to the move/steps) as both are necessary for students to master in the construction of academic texts. Studies on either type have, however, tended to neglect the importance of the other and few studies have looked at students' acquisition of these phrases within the genre-based framework.This study reports on the process of acquisition of lexical phrases in two cases with distinct starting levels over a period of one semester in an EAP genre-based academic writing classroom. The study was part of a larger project conducted in a tertiary level institution in southern China for instructing disciplinary-specific academic writing. From the analysis of rewritings, genre analysis assignments, in conjunction with a weekly interview and learning journals, it was found that both students' awareness of lexical phrases was raised noticeably and a favorable number of phrases were used throughout the instructional period. Different patterns in the use of both general and move-specific lexical phrases were also found in their rewriting tasks, in terms of source of acquisition, perceived usefulness, number and appropriateness of use. This study is expected to offer pedagogical insights into the teaching and learning of academic lexical phrases for tertiary contexts.

Motivation and Etymology of Phraseological Units in English and Albanian Language

“The notion of phraseology implies much more than inventories of idioms and systems of lexical patterns. Phraseology is a dimension of language use in which patterns of wording (lexicons- grammatical patterns) encode semantic views of the world, and at a higher level idioms and lexical phrases have rhetorical and textual roles within a specific discourse. Phraseology is at once a pragmatic dimension of linguistic analysis, and a system of organization which encompasses more local lexical relationships, namely collocation and lexicon grammar” (Gledhill 2000, p.202). The reason why I decided to write this paper is the fact that apart from investigating the phraseological units thoroughly, of a great challenge would be the discovery of their meaning, their etymology and their motivation, specifically in the Albanian language, a language which according to the “Fjalorit te sotem te gjuhes shqipe” – “The Dictionary of the today’s Albanian language”, over 50% of the word have more than one meaning, i.e. they are poly-semantic words. On the other hand we have the English language which is spoken by 400 million people as a mother tongue and it is a worldwide international language where phraseological units play an integral part of the language .In this paper we aim to see the similarities and the differences between the two languages. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n1p189

ROUTINE SEQUENCES IN PRE-UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ DISCUSSIONS

L2 learners tend to resort to the use of formulaic language or lexical phrases to ease communication when deciding on what to say and how to say it while speaking. Frequent exposure to a contextualized L2 discourse enables L2 learners to develop familiarity towards typical patterns that occur in speaking activities such as in a discussion and speech. Although predictable, these routines are essential in communication. In an oral test context such as MUET (Malaysia University English Test), the knowledge of expressions or phrases is essential for the formulation of ideas since the spontaneity aspect of a discussion causes the L2 learners to structure the utterance using certain routines to convey information. This paper reports part of an on-going study on the of routines in pre-university students’ discussions based on three case studies. The paper focuses on routine sequences in organizing and presenting information in discussions.

Comprehending Multiple Documents on Scientific Controversies: Effects of Reading Goals and Signaling Rhetorical Relationships

Understanding conflicts between sources is an inherent part of science text comprehension. We examined whether readers' memories for conflicts and their situational interpretation of conflicts would be affected by reading goals and lexical cue phrases that signal rhetorical relationships. To this end, 198 undergraduates read multiple documents on a medical controversy either with signals or without, following one of three reading goals (argument, summary, keyword list). Readers' memories for conflicting information were measured with a conflict verification task, and their situational interpretation of conflicts was analyzed from written essays. Results reveal that both argument and summary tasks as well as signaling facilitated verification of conflicts. In their essays, however, summary goal readers reported conflicts more often in a one-sided fashion. In contrast, argument goal readers and those who read texts with signals reported conflicts in a balanced fashion that included source information. Both theoretical and practical implications of the findings for reading about controversial scientific issues are discussed.

“Pronombres clíticos, dislocaciones y doblados en tres dialectos del español”

Fecha de recepción: 3 de mayo de 2011.Fecha de aceptación: 22 de marzo de 2012. A partir de datos espontáneos de los dialectos de España, México y Argentina, analizados en su contexto discursivo, en este trabajo se argumenta que: 1) en relación con los pronombres clíticos, sus características y comportamiento exhiben una evidente y reveladora diversidad morfofonológica y morfosintáctica, tanto en función delclítico, que se analiza (dativo vs. acusativo), como del dialecto del que se toman los datos; 2) que al contrario de lo que se asume tradicionalmente,los doblados de objetos directos no pronominales también ocurren en los dialectos de España y México; 3) que hay cuatro tipos básicos de “doblado”, diferenciados por sus características formales y sus funciones comunicativas; 4) que la productividad de cada subtipo se relaciona con el grado de gramaticalización alcanzado por los pronombres clíticos en cada una de las variedades dialectales analizadasy, por último, 5) que el nivel de accesibilidad cognitiva que cadavariedad requiere del referente implicado en la construcción sirvec omo principio unificador que permite capturar el avance de estas construcciones en las distintas variedades.

A Cross-Lingual Pattern Retrieval Framework

We introduce a method for learning to grammatically categorize and organize the contexts of a given query. In our approach, grammatical descriptions, from general word groups to specific lexical phrases, are imposed on the query's contexts aimed at accelerating lexicographers' and language learners' navigation through and GRASP upon the word usages. The method involves lemmatizing, part-of-speech tagging and shallowly parsing a general corpus and constructing its inverted files for monolingual queries, and word-aligning parallel texts and extracting and pruning translation equivalents for cross-lingual ones. At run-time, grammar-like patterns are generated, organized to form a thesaurus index structure on query words' contexts, and presented to users along with their instantiations. Experimental results show that the extracted predominant patterns resemble phrases in grammar books and that the abstract-to-concrete context hierarchy of querying words effectively assists the process of language learning, especially in sentence translation or composition.

Corpus linguistics and the study of literature

The present paper introduces corpus-based analytical techniques and surveys some of the specific ways in which corpus analysis has been applied to the study of literature. In recent years, those research efforts have been mostly carried out under the umbrella of ‘corpus stylistics’. Most of these studies focus on the distribution of words (analyzing keywords, extended lexical phrases, or collocations) to identify textual features that are especially characteristic of an author or particular text. Corpus-based grammatical and pragmatic analyses of literary language are also briefly considered. Then, in the concluding part of the paper, I briefly survey earlier computational and statistical research on authorship attribution and literary style. While that research tradition is in some ways the precursor to more recent work in corpus stylistics, it is also complementary to recent research in its application of sophisticated statistical and computational methods.

Bringing languages and cultures into contact: why lexical phrases may build bridges between native and foreign/second languages in the classroom, and between native/heritage and other cultures

This paper explores the role of lexical phrases in language education in general (native language or L1; and second/foreign language or L2) and more specifically, in the education of English learners in US and European contexts as well as in other English-speaking countries worldwide. Even though this topic has been addressed by researchers and linguists for over 30 years now, it does not seem to be a prominent one among classroom teachers, teacher educators, reading specialists, and others directly involved in the practicalities of classroom life. I suggest here that lexical phrases can contribute to serving the interests of these learners in the early years, primary, middle and elementary schools. I argue that these phrases can serve not only their linguistic concerns, but also their literacy in general, identity, personal, and socio-cultural concerns while simultaneously attending those of native English-speaking children in these areas too. On this basis I propose that lexical phrases are an ideal unit for teaching children in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. I conclude the paper with a discussion of some pedagogic implications which are directly relevant to everyday classroom life.

Construction grammars

Constructions are the central unit of grammatical analysis in cognitive linguistics. In formal linguistics ‘construction’ referred to forms that were projected from lexical items rather than from an autonomous syntax. Thus, an expression, ‘I danced the night away’ requires an intransitive verb in a transitive construction provided ‘away’ is present. In cognitive linguistics, constructions comprise any grouping of words or morphemes that in combination possess meanings that cannot be predicted from the parts in isolation. This meaning belongs to the construction itself and is not necessarily dependent upon the presence of a given item of lexis. If this definition is accepted by second language teachers the fundamental interest is that language learning is about learning lexis, constructions, and the text types by which constructions are combined. This article first distills a concept of a construction useful to a pedagogical grammar and considers the relationship of this concept of form to better known language content ‘packets’ such as the structure and the lexical phrase. Last, it discusses how a CL concept of construction does and does not propose different pedagogical methods.

An Empirical Study of the Role of Output in Promoting the Acquisition of Linguistic Forms

This study examines the effectiveness of an output practice, i.e., Chinese-to-English translation, on promoting noticing and acquisition of a type of grammatical form, i.e., lexical phrases. It is confirmed that output is vital in facilitating learners’ noticing and acquisition of the targeted linguistic forms.

Lexical noun phrases in texts written by deaf children and adults with different proficiency levels in sign language

We report an analysis of lexical noun phrases (NPs) in narrative and expository texts written by Dutch deaf individuals from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who are either proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) or low-proficient in SLN were compared on structures that either overlap in Dutch and SLN (presence of overt subject and object NPs, NP modifiers, and NP-internal agreement), or are absent in SLN (articles). We found that deaf participants experienced significant difficulty with lexical NPs. Further, deaf proficiently signing children (but not adults) more often omitted obligate articles than deaf low-proficiently signing children. Deaf proficiently signing children and adults did not differ from low-proficiently signing children and adults, however, in the use of NP modifiers, NP-agreement errors and omissions of obligatory NPs. We conclude that proficiency in sign language seems to affect particularly those aspects that differ substantially across sign language and oral language, in this case, articles. We argue that adopting a bimodal bilingual approach is important to understand the writing of deaf children.

Possessive Nominalization in Kove

Kove, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, has both direct and indirect possessive constructions. Indirect possession is expressed with two different possessive markers, a and le , depending upon the relation between the possessor and the possessee. These morphemes mark a distinction between active and passive possession. Active possession, where a possessor is the agent in the event or the notional subject of a nominalized verb, is expressed by le- type, while passive possession, where a possessor is the patient in the event or the notional direct object of a nominalized verb, is expressed by a . The le- type and the a- type markers cannot stand next to one another. However, they can cooccur at different structural levels if the erstwhile direct object is a lexical noun phrase, and the le- type marker has in its scope the possessive construction that contains the a- type marker.