Linguistic Modules Research Articles

A formal approach to reanalysis and the Early Semantic Stability Hypothesis: exploring the test case of the negative counterfactual marker ʾilmale in Hebrew and Aramaic

Abstract This study delves into the intricate process of reanalysis, wherein linguistic expressions undergo grammatical or semantic changes, or sometimes both. The primary objective of this study is to explore the theoretical aspects surrounding historical changes of this nature. To facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the topic, we provide a formal description of reanalysis as an analytical tool. Our formal description allows for the differentiation of various change scenarios, enabling us to identify distinct types of shifts from one analysis to another. This approach not only focuses on what has been reanalyzed, be it the morphology, syntax, or the semantics, but also emphasizes the interplay between all three linguistic modules (Form, Grammar, and Meaning) and their relationships. This holistic perspective enables a systematic examination of the significance of what remains constant at both points in time during the reanalysis process. The key insight arising from this analysis leads us to propose and substantiate the Early Semantic Stability Hypothesis. This hypothesis posits that the truth-conditional semantics of the original proposition remain unchanged throughout reanalysis, either in all contexts or in specific “bridging contexts” where the reanalysis occurs. To demonstrate these phenomena, we present a compelling test case, focusing on the development of the counterfactual conditional marker ʾilmale in Hebrew and Aramaic. Through a detailed examination of the syntactic and semantic reanalyses it underwent, we observe the emergence of unique semantic features. By adopting a formal semantic perspective, we address fundamental questions such as the level of ambiguity required for reanalysis to take place, the potential existence of universal constraints on reanalysis, and potential motivations driving these linguistic changes. This investigation provides valuable insights into the intricate mechanisms at play during reanalysis and contributes to the broader understanding of linguistic evolution and development.

Methodological solutions for researching the variation of partitives in languages with rich nominal morphology

Abstract This article examines methodologies for studying variation in partitives. It focuses on the challenges for languages with rich nominal morphology. Translation questionnaires have been widely and efficiently applied for discovering variation in Germanic and Romance partitives. We set up a mini questionnaire and provide its answers for Estonian to test the method. The current research situation of the Estonian morphological partitive case variation allows us to spot some inadequacies of this research instrument. We show the complexity of partitive variation across linguistic modules and discuss how the works presented in this volume as well as other related recent research may provide ancillary instruments to mitigate the shortcomings of a translation questionnaire. We close the discussion with some methodological alternatives open to morphologically complex languages in their typical research situations, applied to Beserman pseudo partitives and Ukrainian partitive genitives, and some synergies in recently applied methods.

What Formal Approaches to Syntactic Interfaces Can Tell Us about the Syntax of Preverbal and Prenominal Constituents in Galician

An important line of research within a generative, formal approach to syntax in the early 21st century has centered on exploring phenomena related to the interface between syntax and other linguistic modules in human language. In this paper, we review the notion of interfaces and how they have been viewed within formal theoretical approaches to monolingual and bilignual competence and language acquistion, noting their relevance as they relate to language acquisition and bilingualism in the context of Galicia (Spain). We review a selection of Noun Phrase (NP) structures that implicate a syntactic interface: subject position, clitic directionality, and determiner clitic allomorphy. We provide a review of the relevant literature and the theoretical issues of interest as they relate to our understanding of these syntactic interfaces, reporting on our current theoretical understandings, persistent questions, and our view of the path forward as it relates to linguistic research on the Galician language.

Creation and importance of language corps in Uzbekistan

The article discusses the transformation of language into the language of the Internet, computer technology, mathematical linguistics, its continuation and the formation and development of computer linguistics, in particular the question of modeling natural languages for artificial intelligence. The Uzbek National Corps plays an important role in enhancing the international status of the Uzbek language. The work carried out in the field of computer linguistics plays an important role in resolving existing problems in the Uzbek language. The question of the linguistic and extralinguistic separation of special tags for marking texts and their components is studied in particular.The coding requirements for important text information are defined. The state analyzes the linguistic module and the algorithm and its types from independent components of the linguistic program code. The need for algorithms for phonological, morphological and spelling rules for the formation of the lexical and grammatical code is scientifically substantiated. The importance of such linguistic modules as phonology, morphology and spelling in the formation of the linguistic base of the national corpus of the Uzbek language is emphasized. The article examines the corpus’s primary purpose as a complex linguistic source, as well as the fact that it primarily contains two sorts of information and its types. The key effective capabilities of the corpus, according to the paper, are reducing time spent on the text analysis process and being able to explain the properties of language units in speech with thousands of instances. The national corpus, the educational corpus, and the parallel corpus are all discussed in the subject of computer linguistics. It was stressed that linguistic and extralinguistic tagging of them, the development of corpus formation algorithms, and the establishment of corpus linguistic support are all societal need. It recognizes the urgency of developing the basis for the creation of the Uzbek language corpus, conducting research in the field of computer linguistics as a scientific and theoretical source.

Psycholinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and Text Analytics: Potential for Interaction

This article explores the possibilities of interaction between psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and text mining. When it comes to big data processing, the recent advances in psycholinguistics must be taken into account. In our digital reality, we should no longer view text as a mere sum of individual language units that are assembled based on their similarities in meaning. The insights of psycholinguistics into text have been revised, as in-depth text analysis unravels the new roles of the sender and the recipient, bringing to the fore qualitative methods for processing large data arrays. Without studying the mechanisms of speech generation and perception, it is impossible to improve language neural networks and machine translation engines. Here, the potential of psycholinguistics for training specialists in text analytics is discussed. As an example, the advantages of integrating the disciplines “Psycholinguistics” and “Psycholinguistic Methods for Studying Language and Text” into the psychological and linguistic module of the Master’s program “Text Analytics in Education and Science”, which has been launched at Kazan Federal University (Russia), are shown. The psycholinguistic component of the discipline “Corpus Linguistics” for Master’s students is described.

Learning to Collocate Visual-Linguistic Neural Modules for Image Captioning

Humans tend to decompose a sentence into different parts like sth do sth at someplace and then fill each part with certain content. Inspired by this, we follow the principle of modular design to propose a novel image captioner: learning to Collocate Visual-Linguistic Neural Modules (CVLNM). Unlike the widely used neural module networks in VQA, where the language (i.e., question) is fully observable, the task of collocating visual-linguistic modules is more challenging. This is because the language is only partially observable, for which we need to dynamically collocate the modules during the process of image captioning. To sum up, we make the following technical contributions to design and train our CVLNM: (1) distinguishable module design—four modules in the encoder including one linguistic module for function words and three visual modules for different content words (i.e., noun, adjective, and verb) and another linguistic one in the decoder for commonsense reasoning, (2) a self-attention based module controller for robustifying the visual reasoning, (3) a part-of-speech based syntax loss imposed on the module controller for further regularizing the training of our CVLNM. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show that our CVLNM is more effective, e.g., achieving a new state-of-the-art 129.5 CIDEr-D, and more robust, e.g., being less likely to overfit to dataset bias and suffering less when fewer training samples are available. Codes are available at https://github.com/GCYZSL/CVLMN.

Language Interfaces in Adult Heritage Language Acquisition: A Study on Encoding of Nominal Reference in Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language

According to the Interface Hypothesis in the field of bilingualism, the interface connecting a linguistic module with a language-external domain (e.g., syntax-discourse) will present prolonged difficulties for adult bilingual learners, as compared with the interface connecting language-internal modules (e.g., syntax-semantics). This study tested whether the Interface Hypothesis is applicable to the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language. An internet-based acceptability judgment task (AJT) was administered to 58 advanced and intermediate adult Chinese heritage speakers to collect data in accuracy and reaction time to investigate the adult heritage speakers’ mastery of referential nominal expressions regulated at the syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse interfaces, respectively, in Mandarin Chinese. The target linguistic phenomena involved three nominal expressions (i.e., the bare N(oun), the [Cl(assifier)-N], and the [Num(eral)-Cl-N]) under four interface-regulated referential readings (i.e., type-denoting, quantity-denoting, indefinite individual-denoting, and definite individual-denoting). In terms of accuracy, the results showed that (i) for the N and the [Num-Cl-N], regardless of the interface type, the advanced group acquired the target phenomena to a nativelike level, who significantly outperformed the intermediate group; (ii) for the [Cl-N], the advanced group exhibited nativelike attainment at the syntax-discourse interface but not at the syntax-semantics interface, and performed significantly better than the intermediate group at both interfaces. Regarding reaction time, no significant differences were reported between the advanced group and the native group for the target structures at either the syntax-semantics or the syntax-discourse interface, while the advanced group performed significantly better than the intermediate group, regardless of the interface type and the structure type. The findings suggest that the nature of the language interface, i.e., whether it pertains to language-external domains (i.e., the external interface) or not (i.e., the internal interface), should not be a reliable factor for predicting the (im)possibility of nativelike attainment of bilingual grammar knowledge, contra the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis. The present study provides new empirical evidence to show that language-external interface properties are not necessarily destined for prolonged difficulties in heritage language acquisition, and that it is possible for adult heritage speakers to make developmental progress in both accuracy and processing efficiency at different types of interfaces.

A Cathedral with Disconnected Chapels? Reassessing the Cognitive Capacities of Neanderthals in Light of Recent Archaeological Discoveries

Abstract The reconstruction of hominins’ cognitive evolution has always been a crucial but challenging task. Researchers from various disciplines have tried to approach this issue, among which British archaeologist Steven Mithen’s cathedral model is regarded as one of the earliest and most creative attempts. In this model, he proposed that the Neanderthal’s mind is like a cathedral with disconnected chapels. Specifically, Neanderthals possessed advanced social, natural history, technical, and even linguistic intelligence modules, but the first three modules are isolated from each other, meaning they cannot effectively use the knowledge from one domain to address the issue of another domain. This article challenges his reconstruction of Neanderthals’ cognitive capacities by presenting multiple forms of archaeological evidence bearing on various kinds of cross-domain thinking that has arisen over the past two decades.

Crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition across linguistic modules

ABSTRACT In this study, we investigated crosslinguistic influence (CLI) at developmental stages of third language (L3) acquisition of English by Russian–Norwegian children (N = 31). We tested seven linguistic properties within three linguistic modules (morphology, syntax and syntax-semantics). We compared the L3 learners to Norwegian (N = 90) and Russian (N = 74) second language (L2) learners of English. We predicted simultaneous facilitative and non-facilitative CLI in the L3 group within all modules, as the previously acquired languages offered conflicting options. Our predictions were partly supported. On one property, the L3 learners were different from both L2 groups, which is in line with cumulative CLI from both previously acquired languages. On four conditions, the L3 learners performed like the more accurate L2 group, indicating facilitative influence. On two conditions, all groups performed alike, showing high rates of accuracy. Taken together, the results indicate that CLI obtains on a property-by-property basis, with none of the L1s being the sole or primary source of CLI. Finally, we found CLI in all linguistic domains, but the developmental slopes for the properties were not equal, which suggests that factors such as complexity and saliency needs to be taken into account when we compare CLI.

Development of cultural linguistic module in open education courses

The article deals with the analysis of data and the development of the educational program "In Search of the National Russian Code: Educational Paths". The program is compiled according to the relevant trends in the field of proliferation and strengthening the position of the Russian language and education in Russian in the Commonwealth of Independent States and foreign countries. The authors justify the cultural-linguistic content of the program by the compliance with the modern scientific and methodological trends in studying and teaching Russian as a foreign language: forming the linguistic, communicative and cultural-linguistic competence through addressing such notions and national cultural code, national mentality, cross-cultural dialogue, etc. The materials of the study include the results of the questionnaire taken by the potential students in the open education course within the program "In Search of the National Russian Code: Educational Paths". The article features the analysis of 165 questionnaires by respondents from different student groups: post-graduate students, university and college teachers and schoolteachers in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The authors analyze the answers in three content blocks: motivation for education; the most relevant questions that should be included in the courses; the most efficient ways of presenting material, that is, educational technologies, forms and techniques based on which the interaction between the subjects of open courses should be built. The results of the study allow authors to make conclusions about the potential students' preferences and interests and round up the most relevant issues and popular educational technologies. Based on the study, the authors have designed the content and methodological solutions of the educational module "Man and the world in the mirror of the Russian word" within the curriculum of open education courses.

ASIDES İN TURKISH POLITICAL NEWSPAPER INTERVIEWS

The newspaper genre is generally accepted as one of the most important examples of the persuasive text genre. ‘Asides’ are the short dialogues inserted by journalists to give their personal comments on the subject being reported. They therefore play a crucial role for journalists to persuade their readers and interact with them. Interviews are one of the characteristic features of newspaper discourse. This study examines the usage of asides in political interviews conducted with prominent politicians in Turkey. The data consisted of seventy political interviews published in six elite mainstream newspapers which had different ideologies, three pro-government and three anti-government. In line with the aim of the study, the research uses a descriptive survey design. Quantitative and qualitative methods are applied using the methodologies of both Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. The asides in the interviews are identified using Temmerman’s (2013, 370-371) classification of asides and Hyland’s (2005, 49) taxonomy. Also, the corpus is analysed using the NooJ linguistic engine module. The results show that there are variations in the use and distribution of asides in the data according to the politicians’ and the newspapers’ ideologies.

Convolutional neural network with joint stepwise character/word modeling based system for scene text recognition

Text recognition in the wild is a challenging task in the field of computer vision and machine learning. Existing optical character recognition engines cannot perform well in the natural scene. In this context, deep learning models have emerged as a powerful state-of-the-art technique in the classification and recognition process. This study proposes a new Convolutional Neural Network based system for scene text reading. We investigate how to combine the character recognition module followed by the word recognition module to achieve the overall system goal. The first module analyzes characters within multi-scale images by relaying on the power of the convolutional network and the fully connected network for character recognition. The second module relies on the Viterbi search to find the closest word to a given characters sequence. For the sake of more precision, a bigram based linguistic module is applied. The proposed system achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three standard scene text recognition benchmarks: chars74k, ICDAR 2003 and ICDAR 2013. In particular, this performance is proven on both of character and word recognition accuracy as well as speed aspects via a comparative study between different deep learning architectures.

Processing subject focus across two Spanish varieties

AbstractLinguists have keenly studied the realization of focus – the part of the sentence introducing new information – because it involves the interaction of different linguistic modules. Syntacticians have argued that Spanish uses word order for information-structural purposes, marking focused constituents via rightmost movement. However, recent studies have challenged this claim. To contribute sentence-processing evidence, we conducted a self-paced reading task and a judgment task with Mexican and Catalonian Spanish speakers. We found that movement to final position can signal focus in Spanish, in contrast to the aforementioned work. We contextualize our results within the literature, identifying three basic facts that theories of Spanish focus and theories of language processing should explain, and advance a fourth: that mismatches in information-structural expectations can induce processing delays. Finally, we propose that some differences in the existing experimental results may stem from methodological differences.

Acquisition without evidence: English infinitives and poverty of stimulus in adult second language acquisition

This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the second language (L2) acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (a) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while (b) they are highly infrequent in corpora, (c) they lack visible features that would make them salient, and (d) they are communicatively superfluous. We report on an experiment testing the knowledge of some infinitival constructions by near-native adult first language (L1) Spanish / L2 English speakers. Learners demonstrated a linguistic system that includes contrasts based on subtle restrictions in the L2, including aspect restrictions in Raising to Object. These results provide evidence that frequency and other cognitive or environmental factors are insufficient to account for the acquisition of the full spectrum of English infinitivals. This leads us to the conclusion that a domain-specific linguistic faculty is required.

Тестирование программы морфологического анализатора естественного языка

This article describes the development of integrated linguistic data models and software modules for the morphological analysis of Kyrgyz word forms. The created model and databases can be implemented not only in semantic search technology to enhance the functionality of search engines, but also in other systems for processing Turkic languages.

Image captioning by incorporating affective concepts learned from both visual and textual components

Abstract Automatically generating a natural sentence describing the content of an image has been extensively researched in artificial intelligence recently, and it bridges the gap between computer vision and natural language processing communities. Most of existing captioning frameworks rely heavily on the visual content, while rarely being aware of the sentimental information. In this paper, we introduce the affective concepts to enhance the emotion expressibility of text descriptions. We achieve this goal by composing appropriate emotional concepts to sentences, which is calculated from large-scale visual and textual repositories by learning both content and linguistic modules. We extract visual and textual representations respectively, followed by combining the latent codes of the two components into a low-dimensional subspace. After that, we decode the combined latent representations and finally generate the affective image captions. We evaluate our method on the SentiCap dataset, which was established with sentimental adjective noun pairs, and evaluate the emotional descriptions with several qualitative and human inception metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of our method for analyzing the latent emotion of an image and providing the affective description which caters to human cognition.

Mass-count distinction in Chinese-English bilingual students

There has been increased interest in examining the relationship between different linguistic modules in second language learners’ grammar system. One such interface concerns learners’ ability to map morphosyntax to target-like semantic interpretations, especially in cases where the first and second languages differ in morphosyntax-semantics mapping. We examined this issue by investigating Chinese-English bilingual adolescents’ knowledge regarding the semantic consequences of mass-count morphosyntax in English. 228 Chinese-English bilingual students from Singapore took part in a quantity judgment task. Following previous studies, we tested five noun conditions including count (e.g., shoe), substance mass (e.g., ketchup), object mass (e.g., furniture) and two conditions involving items that can occur flexibly in both mass and count contexts (e.g., string/strings). The last two conditions specifically probe learners’ ability to make use of morphosyntax in deriving semantics. The representation of quantity for objects/substance was manipulated for number or combined volume (e.g., two large shoes/portions of ketchup versus six tiny shoes/portions of ketchup). Participants were asked to make judgments on the quantity of items, in response to questions presented in a count and/or mass frame (Who has more shoes/ketchup/furniture/string/strings?). Results show that our bilingual participants were able to make appropriate semantic judgments of quantity in response to manipulation of morphosyntax. We compare our findings with previous research in first and second language contexts and discuss the differences in terms of the quantity and quality of input in shaping learners’ grammar system.

Capturing EMI teachers’ linguistic needs: a usage-based perspective

ABSTRACT Drawing on usage-based approaches this paper addresses the challenge of capturing EMI teachers’ linguistic needs for the purposes of teacher training in international Medical Education. The focus is on EMI medical teachers in various instructional formats. Each format requires a specific linguistic repertoire resulting dynamic interactions of linguistic, didactic, and intercultural competence, which is difficult to define in linguistic modules such as syntax and lexicon. Moreover, a generic native speaker standard of language proficiency is questionable in this ELF context. Capturing the relevant EMI competence as linguistic units that can be taught in teacher training programs is therefore a challenge. The paper builds on central tenets shared by a number of usage-based approaches to propose that linguistic units of EMI competence can be conceptualized as highly specific language functions arising from a specific EMI instructional context and mapping onto suitable formulations in ELF. This conceptualization was applied in a local teacher training initiative. First, subject-specific language functions were identified through a combined analysis of the EMI instructional context and the teachers’ instructional practices. Second, the identification procedure formed a starting point for a collaborative teacher training program. Third, a policy document was drafted, taking into account institutional limitations. Abbreviations: CDFs: Cognitive Discourse Functions; CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning; ELF: English as a lingua franca; EMI: English-Medium Instruction; IBMG: International Bachelor Medicine Groningen; PBL: Problem-Based Learning

Second language acquisition of pragmatic inferences: Evidence from the Frenchc'est-cleft

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the extent to which second language (L2) speakers of French acquire the semantic and pragmatic (or interpretive) properties associated with thec'est-cleft, specifically the exhaustive inference. This phenomenon is relevant to theories of language acquisition because it is situated at the interface of syntax and pragmatics. The results from a forced-choice task challenge the empirical adequacy of the interface hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006), which claims that external interfaces between a linguistic module and a cognitive module remain problematic even at the highest levels of L2 acquisition. The results from 40 L2 learners at three proficiency levels reveal development from nontargetlike to nativelike behavior. In particular, the high-proficiency group interprets thec'est-cleft, as well as canonical subject–verb–object sentences and sentences with exclusives (i.e.,seul(ement)“only”), in a statistically identical way to the French native speaker control group.

Exploring writing apprehension amongst Afrikaans-speaking first-year students

Writing apprehension relates to a reluctance to write or even fear of writing and little research has been done on this phenomenon in the South African context, especially in terms of compulsory academic literacy and academic linguistic modules. This article aimed at determining the nature of writing apprehension in these two modules in terms of the Daly and Miller’s Writing Apprehension Test (DM-WAT), essay marks and gender at a South African university. The DM-WAT was conducted with two groups of first-year students. An exploratory factor analysis was administered and this led to the identification of four distinct factors which are also associated with related aspects in the literature: positivity towards writing, negativity towards writing, evaluation apprehension and selfefficacy and writing. It is evident that in the context of this study, the chosen instrument could not be used to measure writing apprehension, rather the four identified factors. No linear relationships between essay marks and the identified constructs were clear. Also a practical significant difference between genders was found in terms of the identified constructs. Significantly, students in the compulsory academic literacy module showed a greater tendency towards apprehension in terms of the four identified factors than students from the linguistics module. The chosen instrument could be used to gauge the identified factors. Writing in compulsory academic literacy modules should be taught through individualised student-centred methods, affective support and reflective instruction, positive personal feedback, with additional support through counselling as well as effective modelled writing behaviour from lecturers.