Lexical Triggers Research Articles

The effect of lexical triggers on Spanish-English code-switched judgment tasks.

It has been argued that certain words can "trigger" intrasentential code-switching. While some researchers suggest that cognates establish triggering at the lexical level, others have argued that words that lack direct translations are more natural stories switch. Yet to be tested experimentally is to what extent different types of lexical items influence the acceptability of mixed utterances. The current study investigates this methodological consideration for code-switching research by having early US Spanish-English bilinguals (i.e., heritage speakers of Spanish) complete an acceptability judgment task with a 7-point Likert scale directly comparing cognates (e.g., sopa "soup") and culturally specific items (e.g., pozole "traditional Mexican soup") in otherwise identical grammatical switched sentences (N = 24). The results showed that there was no significant effect of condition (p = 0.623) suggesting that cognates and language-specific items are equally acceptable in code-switched sentences. Indeed all conditions were rated on average above 6. These findings show that in this context, judgment tasks are not affected differently by these types of lexical items.

Shared Lexical Items as Triggers of Code Switching

Abstract Why do bilingual speakers code-switch (mix their two languages)? Among the several theories that attempt to explain this natural and ubiquitous phenomenon, the triggering hypothesis relates code-switching to the presence of lexical triggers, specifically cognates and proper names, adjacent to the switch point. We provide a fuller, more nuanced and refined exploration of the triggering hypothesis, based on five large datasets in three language pairs, reflecting both spoken and written bilingual interactions. Our results show that words that are assumed to reside in a mental lexicon shared by both languages indeed trigger code-switching, that the tendency to switch depends on the distance of the trigger from the switch point and on whether the trigger precedes or succeeds the switch, but not on the etymology of the trigger words. We thus provide strong, robust, evidence-based confirmation to several hypotheses on the relationships between lexical triggers and code-switching.

The Legitimization of Gender Bias in Selected English Proverbs

The study of language and gender reveals how language works as a symbolic tool to construct and preserve personal, social, and cultural aspects and identities, going beyond merely documenting the distinctions between men's and women's linguistic patterns. Thus, it is better to tackle proverbs as data for being loaded with important themes, mainly, gender inequality and prejudiced views.The paper is achieved from the thesis of Ideologies behind Gender Bias in Selected English and Arabic Proverbs: A Pragma-Critical Discourse Analysis, as a requirement to be proposed to the Examining Committee.The study attempts to examine sexist proverbs pragmatically to prove the legitimation of the ideological aspects of gender bias in terms of speech act. This leads to a major aim the study sets in advance, which is to refute the concept of gender neutrality.The research hypothesizes: 1. Proverbs are performative speech acts. Proverbial speech acts both constitute and instigate gender discrimination. 2. Gender bias is legitimized in the proverbial discourse that blocks the way towards gender neutrality.The analysis concludes: (1) Proverbs provide insight into gender dynamics in terms of locutions and lexical triggers (father, mother, etc.). Proverbs are discriminatory speech acts in which hate, and discrimination are promoted and instigated by the social and traditional authorities. (2) Gender bias and the ideologies behind it are legitimized in proverbs by the social authority like, the personal and model authority of father; and the traditionality where it is generally not opposed.

Variability in speaker expectations of morphosyntactic mutation in Welsh

Like all modern Celtic languages Welsh exhibits initial consonant mutation with both lexical and morphosyntactic triggers. Owing to the complexity of the system and the sociolinguistic situation of Welsh, change and variation in the system seems inevitable, and evidence for change has been observed in production. Less work, however, has focused on speakers’ attitudes and expectations in perception. We used an online auditory acceptability judgement survey to investigate expectations for different morphosyntactic soft-mutation triggers. Respondents listened to sentences with canonical and non-canonical mutation patterns and used Likert scales to indicate for each sentence whether they would use the same pattern themselves and whether they would expect it from others. Almost all respondents expected some variation, even in their own production, but two main clusters of respondents could be identified: “Conservative” respondents whose expectations were close to canonical mutation patterns and “Variable” respondents whose expectations were considerably more flexible. First-language status was the only demographic variable to predict respondent attitudes, suggesting that L2 Welsh speakers accept noncanonical mutation to a greater extent than L1 Welsh speakers. We also compared different mutation triggers, with the tentative conclusion that apparently identical triggers may not in fact be identical for all speakers, and that trigger transparency may be an important factor in predicting variability.

Lexically triggered uniquenes in wh-questions: An argument from Brazilian Portuguese

Recent discussion on the source of uniqueness in English singular which-question has debated whether this is due to a general requirement that questions have a maximally informative true answer (Dayal 1996), or whether uniqueness islexically triggered by which (Hirsch & Schwarz 2020). We present novel data from Brazilian Portuguese which argue that at least some wh-interrogatives are lexical triggers for uniqueness.

An Analysis of Presupposition Triggers in Minny Jackson and Hilly Holbrook Speeches in Kathryn Stockett's Novel “The Help"

Presupposition is a linguistic tool that can be used in utterances. The aim of using presupposition in utterance is to enhance the comprehension of what is being communicated. The purpose of the current study is to identify the presupposition triggers types used by two characters in Kathryn Stockett’s novel “The Help" Minny Jackson and Hilly Holbrook. Furthermore, the study aims at conducting a comparison between the two characters based on the types of presupposition triggers and the purpose they employed these triggers for. The data of the study are carefully selected scenes that involve the two characters. The scenes are anaylsed using the proposed model of Yule's (1996) and Levinson's (1983) classification of presupposition triggers. The analysis of the data reveals that the most dominant type of presupposition triggers that have been used by both of the characters is the existential presupposition triggers. The results show that this type occurred (70) times, which constitutes (69.3%) of the total used types of presupposition triggers. Moreover, it has been found that the second frequently used type of presupposition triggers is the lexical triggers with (18.75%) percentage of occurrence. The two characters have used these types in different contexts to deliver various communicative goals. In other words, the presupposition triggers are used as a linguistic tool for the characters to deliver their thoughts and to communicate more smoothly.

High and low uniqueness in singular wh-interrogatives

While simple singular wh-interrogatives carry a uniqueness presupposition, this is not so when they contain possibility modals. Hirsch & Schwarz (2019) account for this contrast by assuming (i) that questions can have multiple maximally informative true answers and (ii) that uniqueness is triggered lexically inside the scope of interrogative. We show that their proposal overgenerates on two accounts. Firstly, it predicts too weak a presupposition for modalized interrogatives. Secondly, it predicts unattested interpretations for interrogatives containing negation. We show that both issues can be solved using exhaustification operators. On the one hand, we obtain the desired presupposition for modalized interrogatives by assuming the lexical trigger for uniqueness to be a presuppositional variant of an exhaustification operator (Bassi, Del Pinal & Sauerland 2019). On the other, we show that unattested readings of negation can be blocked by assuming that questions presuppose that the pointwise exhaustification of their answers partitions the context of evaluation (Fox 2019). We argue that proper empirical coverage for singular wh-interrogatives requires the interaction of both exhaustification operations.

Lexical and Syntactic Presupposition Triggers in Selected Online English and Kurdish Political News Texts: A comparative Study

This paper intends to analyze the presupposition triggers at both lexical and syntactic levels in selected online English and Kurdish political news texts. This is for the purpose of figuring out how texts in political news are achieving their political intentions via the use of presupposition triggers. Presupposition as a feature of language use is commonly exploited by language users. Expressions and constructions carrying presuppositions are called “presupposition triggers”. Its role in the news text is of specific importance in that writers of text tend to make use of this property so as to create either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text this is to manipulate readers’ view. A descriptive analytic method has been used in this study. The data of this study is the political news texts in online English and Kurdish news channels, then 18 political news texts, which are released in the first half of the year 2020, have been selected randomly. Based on Levinson (1983), Yule (2010), and He’s (2003) classification of presupposition triggers the data have been analyzed and compared. The result of this study has shown that both English and Kurdish political news texts basically use both lexical and syntactic items of presupposition triggers. As for the lexical triggers, English political news texts constituted 530 times of occurring and Kurdish political news texts constituted 361 times. Regarding the syntactic level, the frequency of occurrence has been 185 times in the English news texts while it is 99 times in the Kurdish texts. All the syntactic items were more frequently used in the English texts except for the counter-factual conditionals which was the same as the Kurdish texts occurring 11 times. Adverbial clauses have recurred 23 times in the Kurdish texts and therefore ranking first among the other structural triggers. Finally, in the English texts, implicative verbs were noted only 1times while 11 occurrences were noted in the Kurdish texts.

Presuppositions and Assertions: A Case Study on Acquisition of Most Common Presupposition Triggers in Early Childhood

This research aims to find out the acquisition of lexical presupposition triggers in early childhood. Children acquire semantic knowledge later than acquiring phonemes and uttering words. At what age the acquisition of lexical presupposition triggers is acquired is the question answered through this research. I also identify the incorrect and sensible usage along with the acquisitional challenge. In order to do so, Brown corpus is utilised. Out of three children Adam, Sara and Eve, Adam’s speech is analysed for the presence of lexical presupposition triggers. Again, a lexical presupposition trigger occurred 189 times in Adam’s speech. The methodology involved two phases. In the first phase, I sifted each utterance carrying again according to age, context, and the status of the utterance. The findings are presented in the form of a table. The next phase involves analysis of the instances collected. Examples are analysed in terms of mere repetitions, frequent use and acquiring a sensible usage of the lexical trigger again. I used comparison tool to analyse the examples further making clear distinction between the phenomenon of assertion and presupposition. The results show that the phenomenon of presupposition is acquired by the age of three and half years. By year four, Adam starts acquiring different syntactic structures involving the usage of the lexical trigger again and shows sensible usage by age five. The acquisitional challenge is the age and lack of interaction with the outer environment. The implications of this research would be that it will prompt to make further research on other children and other lexical triggers in future.

Kashaya Foot Extrametricality as Post-Accentuation

Kashaya, an endangered Pomoan language of northern California, has an iambic stress pattern, assigned within words and phrases. Accent regularly shifts rightward from a (CV:) foot onto the following foot, including opaque contexts when length is lost or moved by other processes. This paper brings into the analysis a class of lexical triggers of accent shift: specific stems with no long vowels on the surface that nonetheless also trigger this shift. I propose an analysis of all varieties of accent shift as alignment of constituents, requiring the head foot to follow the triggering foot. Particular evidence for alignment comes from the fact that it is blocked by phrasal resyllabification of a word-final consonant. I argue for a unified analysis of all cases that employs a diacritic at the level of the foot, which also provides an account for opacity.

Rhetoric, Narrative, and the Remembrance of Death in ʿAttār's Mosibat-nāmeh

This paper examines the anecdotes of ʿAttār’s Mosibat-nāmeh as temporal phenomena from the perspective of a reader moving progressively through the text; it is argued that that these anecdotes do not function primarily as carriers of dogmatic information, but as dynamic rhetorical performances designed to prod their audiences into recommitting to a pious mode of life. First, the article shows how the poem’s frame-tale influences a reader’s experience of the embedded anecdotes by encouraging a sequential mode of consumption and contextualizing the work’s pedagogical aims. Next, it is demonstrated that these anecdotes are bound together through formulae and lexical triggers, producing a paratactic structure reminiscent of oral homiletics. Individual anecdotes aim to unsettle readers’ ossified religious understandings, and together they offer a flexible set of heuristics for pious living. Finally, it is argued that ʿAttār’s intended readers were likely familiar with the mystical principles that underlie his poems; he therefore did not use narratives to provide completely new teachings, but rather to persuade his audience to more fully embody those pious principles to which they were already committed.

Inflections on pre-nominal adjectives in Germanic: Main types, subtypes, and subset relations

In order to contribute to the understanding of the nature of inflection, this paper investigates the endings on pre-nominal adjectives in four Germanic languages: Dutch, Norwegian, German, and Yiddish. Incorporating detailed observations about Yiddish in general and non-canonical nominals in particular, this study confirms Harbert’s (The Germanic languages, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007) classification of the Mainland Scandinavian languages as semantically determining their inflections but of German as encoding case, number, and gender on its endings. The latter is shown to be regulated by lexical factors. Dutch is grouped with Norwegian and Yiddish with German. While all four languages differ in their details, the paper proposes that compared to Dutch, the Norwegian weak inflections require a subset of definiteness (sub-)components and that in comparison to German, the Yiddish weak inflections require a subset of lexical triggers. Whereas weak endings only surface inside DPs, which are necessarily definite in Dutch and Norwegian, strong endings are shown to appear in more diverse contexts. Given the language-specific conditions on the distribution of the weak inflections, the strong endings are interpreted as the elsewhere case in all languages.

Knowledge-based question answering using the semantic embedding space

Semantic transformation of a natural language question into its corresponding logical form is crucial for knowledge-based question answering systems. Most previous methods have tried to achieve this goal by using syntax-based grammar formalisms and rule-based logical inference. However, these approaches are usually limited in terms of the coverage of the lexical trigger, which performs a mapping task from words to the logical properties of the knowledge base, and thus it is easy to ignore implicit and broken relations between properties by not interpreting the full knowledge base. In this study, our goal is to answer questions in any domains by using the semantic embedding space in which the embeddings encode the semantics of words and logical properties. In the latent space, the semantic associations between existing features can be exploited based on their embeddings without using a manually produced lexicon and rules. This embedding-based inference approach for question answering allows the mapping of factoid questions posed in a natural language onto logical representations of the correct answers guided by the knowledge base. In terms of the overall question answering performance, our experimental results and examples demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous knowledge-based question answering baseline methods with a publicly released question answering evaluation dataset: WebQuestions.

Switch cost modulations in bilingual sentence processing: evidence from shadowing

In bilingual processing, cognates are associated with facilitatory processing, while switching between languages is associated with a processing cost. This study investigates whether co-activation of cognates affects the magnitude of switch costs in sentence context. A shadowing task was conducted to examine whether verb cognates reduce switch costs in sentences that switched between participants' L1 and L2. In addition, we considered whether these effects were influenced by L2 proficiency, switching direction and cross-linguistic overlap in syntactic structure. Bilinguals were presented with L1 and L2 sentences that contained a language switch preceded by a cognate. Shadowing latencies showed that switching to L2 was more costly than switching to L1. Switch costs in both directions were not modulated by the presence of a verb cognate, and this effect was not affected by syntactic structure or L2 proficiency. The results are informative for the field of bilingual processing and the lexical trigger hypothesis.

A dynamic account of clitic positioning in Cypriot Greek

In this paper, a full account of clitic positioning in Cypriot Greek is attempted within the framework of Dynamic Syntax. Firstly, it is shown that the existing approaches dealing with CG clitic positioning are inadequate to deal with the full range of clitic positioning phenomena as these are described by Pappas (2010) and Chatzikyriakidis (2010). Then it is argued that this complex system can be effectively captured assuming a lexical entry where three generalized parsing strategies, i.e. ways of structure building, function as lexical triggers for parsing CG clitics. Variation in positioning with the non-factive complementizer oti as well as the causal subordinator epidi are accounted for assuming that these elements can be parsed as either subordinators or coordinators. Furthermore, the challenge of providing an account for complex markers/subordinators formed with the coordinator tze is provided, arguing that the unexpected enclisis caused in these cases is due to the fact that these elements provide two separate linked domains where the first acts as the context in which the second is parsed (e.g. a negative context). Lastly, the account proposed will be shown to be grounded in historical considerations as well, arguing that the transition from a descriptively simpler system (that of Medieval Cypriot Greek, MCG) to a more complex one (CG) is only epiphenomenal, showing that the transition from MCG to CG involves simplification of the lexical entry for clitics.

Negotiation for Meaning in Synchronous EFL Chat

This study examined the nature of the negotiations for meaning that took place in a series of up to twelve online chat sessions between eleven pairs of adult Thai learners of English and English speakers. The study implemented a triangulation approach for data analysis; data was drawn from chat scripts, interviews, and reflective notes written by the Thai speakers after each chat session. The chat scripts were analyzed for (a) triggers that caused comprehension difficulties, and (b) strategies used by the Thai speakers to solve communication problems. The findings suggested the potential benefit of reflective note writing for morphosyntactic improvement. Themorphosyntactic errors were often ignored in the original conversations because they had less effect than lexical triggers on comprehension. However, the Thai speakers reflected on their own interlanguage forms in the saved written conversations while writing their reflective notes and tried to correct them or requested help from other sources. In addition, the Thai speakers used strategies to solve communication problems that did not constitute negotiations of meaning in the classical sense, that is, dictionary consultation, word substitution and avoidance. Pedagogical implications are also included.

Legitimizing the “War on Terror”: Political Myth in Official-Level Rhetoric

This paper argues that mythical discourse affects political practice by imbuing language with power, shaping what people consider to be legitimate, and driving the determination to act. Drawing on Bottici's (2007) philosophical understanding of political myth as a process of work on a common narrative that answers the human need to ground events in significance, it contributes to the study of legitimization in political discourse by examining the role of political myth in official-level U.S. war rhetoric. It explores how two ubiquitous yet largely invisible political myths, American Exceptionalism and Civilization vs. Barbarism, which have long defined America's ideal image of itself and its place in the world, have become staples in the language of the “War on Terror.” Through a qualitative analysis of the content of over 50 official texts containing lexical triggers of the two myths, this paper shows that senior officials of the Bush Administration have rhetorically accessed these mythical representations of the world in ways that legitimize and normalize the practices of the “War on Terror.”

On the syntax of verb‐initial exclamatives*

Abstract. This article discusses exclamative utterances that have the form of Y/N questions with no wh‐phrase present but only the finite verb in initial position. It will be shown that they cannot be captured by a purely pragmatic ‘reinterpretation’ of Y/N questions. This result implies that verb‐initial structures are syntactically ambiguous. An alternative to the traditional view on clause types as features/operators in the C‐domain, triggering V–C movement, will be suggested. V–C movement marks syntactically all those structures that correspond to non‐assertive speech acts. The structures are disambiguated by non‐syntactic means like intonation and/or lexical triggers.

Negotiation and Intercultural Learning in Italian Native Speaker Chat Rooms

Foreign language learners purportedly demonstrate intercultural communicative competence in NS chat rooms through self‐initiated negotiation sequences, including those triggered by pragmatic issues and cultural content. This study identified and classified one‐to‐one NS–learner negotiations between intermediate learners and NS of Italian in Web‐based chat rooms. Classifications included (a) self‐initiated negotiation moves (Shehadeh, 2001), such as questions concerning the target culture, and (b) indicators of skills of discovery and interaction required by the “intercultural speaker” in informal face‐to‐face contexts (Byram, 1997). The study also presents an intercultural model of negotiation that facilitates identifying cultural and pragmatic triggers by taking account of possible overlap with lexical triggers. The findings indicate that with minor pedagogical intervention, learner‐initiated negotiation sequences are indeed a feature of one‐to‐one NS–learner chat interactions conducted in a noninstructed setting, with many learners actively seeking clarification on the target language and culture from their NS partners. In this way they avoid dysfunction and demonstrate intercultural communicative competence. These data have pedagogical implications for informal immersion experiences, such as residence abroad, for which learners are not always adequately prepared through standard classroom interaction patterns. They also suggest that negotiation strategies, as defined in this study, could be practiced before departure, with NS chat room experiences providing a form of virtual immersion and socialization experience in preparation for in‐country “experience[s] of otherness” (Byram, 1997, p. 70).

Lexical triggers and latent semantic analysis for cross-lingual language model adaptation

In-domain texts for estimating statistical language models are not easily found for most languages of the world. We present two techniques to take advantage of in-domain text resources in other languages. First, we extend the notion of <i>lexical triggers</i>, which have been used monolingually for language model adaptation, to the cross-lingual problem, permitting the construction of sharper language models for a target-language document by drawing statistics from related documents in a resource-rich language. Next, we show that <i>cross-lingual latent semantic analysis</i> is similarly capable of extracting useful statistics for language modeling. Neither technique requires explicit translation capabilities between the two languages! We demonstrate significant reductions in both perplexity and word error rate on a Mandarin speech recognition task by using these techniques.