Noun Combinations Research Articles

MAKNA VERBA MAJEMUK BAHASA JEPANG ~KAESU

(Title: Semantic Meaning of Japanese Compound Verbs ~kaesu). Compound verbs (fukugoudoushi) are compound words formed from a combination of at least two morphemes that have new grammatical meanings and functions as a verb. Compound verbs in Japanese can be formed from the combination of nouns with verbs (N + V), verbs with verbs (V1 + V2), adjectives with verbs (A + V), and adverbs with verbs (AD + V). The results of the combination structure above can produce diverse meanings. One of the causes is the presence of several verbs forming the back of the elements whose characteristics have many meanings. For example in the verb kaesu. Besides acting as an element forming the back, kaesu can also act as an element forming the front. Kaesu can form many compound verbs with different meanings. The aim of this research is to describe the semantic meaning of compound verbs –kaesu. The data being used are obtained from the website and some online news articles. The data were collected by library study, observation and writing technique. Then, the research data were analyzed using distributional method. The results of the analysis are presented by an informal method which is explained with simple words.

Noun valency in isiZulu and Southern isiNdebele

African language scholars have done considerable research on various types of compounding of words in isiZulu. However, there is a paucity of research on compounding in (Southern) isiNdebele when compared with isiZulu. This article examines some noun valency and common features that occur in both isiZulu and isiNdebele. The researcher made a document analysis with respect to the morphological and phonological processes of the noun valency frame with possessive pronouns to identify some similarities and differences. The paper argues that although compounding of possessive pronouns with their co-referent nouns is not a peculiar feature of isiZulu and isiNdebele, it is restricted to certain formatives. There are features that allow for morphological and phonological changes, while others do not. In respect of the formation of possessive pronouns, isiNdebele and isiZulu share a common morphological structure. The slight differences between the morphological and phonological processes in the noun + possessive compound construction of isiZulu and isiNdebele constitute orthographical preferences. The researcher demonstrates that the noun + possessive pronoun compounding in isiZulu is confined to the combination of nouns denoting kinship, while in isiNdebele this is not always the case.

Building words and phrases in the left temporal lobe

A central part of knowing a language is the ability to combine basic linguistic units to form complex representations. While our neurobiological understanding of how words combine into larger structures has significantly advanced in recent years, the combinatory operations that build words themselves remain unknown. Are complex words such as tombstone and starlet built with the same mechanisms that construct phrases from words, such as grey stone or bright star? Here we addressed this with two magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments, which simultaneously varied demands associated with phrasal composition, and the processing of morphological complexity in compound and suffixed nouns. Replicating previous findings, we show that portions of the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) are engaged in the combination of modifiers and monomorphemic nouns in phrases (e.g., brown rabbit). As regards compounding, we show that semantically transparent compounds (e.g., tombstone) also engage left anterior temporal cortex, though the spatiotemporal details of this effect differed from phrasal composition. Further, when a phrase was constructed from a modifier and a transparent compound (e.g., granite tombstone), the typical LATL phrasal composition response appeared at a delayed latency, which follows if an initial within-word operation (tomb + stone) must take place before the combination of the compound with the preceding modifier (granite + tombstone). In contrast to compounding, suffixation (i.e., star + let) did not engage the LATL in any consistent way, suggesting a distinct processing route. Finally, our results suggest an intriguing generalization that morpho-orthographic complexity that does not recruit the LATL may block the engagement of the LATL in subsequent phrase building. In sum, our findings offer a detailed spatiotemporal characterization of the lowest level combinatory operations that ultimately feed the composition of full sentences.

A direct comparison of metonymic and metaphoric relations in adjective–noun pairs

Theories on metaphor and metonymy make different claims about the nature of the underlying processes in the computation of these two types of language use, i.e., whether they differ or not. Experimental investigations of metonymy and metaphor have generally not compared these two phenomena in a straightforward manner among others due to structural variability. To overcome this shortcoming, we conducted a study in German that used adjective–noun combinations to contrast metaphor and metonymy directly in an ERP-study during reading for comprehension. By combining three different nouns with one adjective in predicative position we construed adjective–noun pairs with literal (the baby was lively), metonymic (the eyes were lively) or metaphoric (the speed was lively) relations. The data revealed a more pronounced N400 for the metaphoric relations in comparison to the literal controls. We argue that the enhanced cost for metaphors reflects the activation process of two unrelated domains via mapping or extended predication. The metonymic adjective–noun pairs only showed a small trend to differ from the other two conditions. This might indicate that metonymies require mapping processes or shifts only within a single domain or domain matrix. Moreover, in contrast to previous studies, we did not find a Late Positivity. We explain this result with regard to different discourse representational consequences arising during combinatorial processing.

What you use, not what you do: Automatic classification and similarity detection of recipes

Social media data is notoriously noisy and unclean. Recipe collections and their manual categorization built by users are no exception. However, a consistent and transparent categorization is vital to users who search for a specific entry. Similarly, curators are faced with the same challenge given a large collection of existing recipes: They first need to understand the data to be able to build a clean system of categories. This paper presents an empirical study using machine learning classifiers (logistic regression and decision trees) for the automatic classification of recipes on the German cooking website Chefkoch.de. The central question we aim at answering is: Which information is necessary to perform well at this task? In particular, we compare features extracted from the free text instructions of the recipe to those taken from the list of ingredients. On a sample of 5000 recipes with 87 classes, our feature analysis shows that a combination of nouns from the textual description of the recipe with ingredient features performs best in the logistic regression model (48% F1). Nouns alone achieve 45% F1 and ingredients alone 46% F1. However, other word classes do not complement the information from nouns. Decision trees constantly underperform the logistic regression, however, lead to an interpretable model. On a bigger training set of 50,000 instances, the best configuration shows an improvement to 57% highlighting the importance of a sizeable data set. In addition, we report on the use of these feature vectors for similarity search and ranking of recipes and evaluate on the task of (near) duplicate detection. We show that our method can reduce the manual curation with precision@3 = 0.52.

Teaching English Pronunciation of Suprasegmental Features on Students of English Education

The objective of this research is to know the technique and activity in teaching English pronunciation on suprasegmental features (intonation and stress). This research uses qualitative approach with descriptive method. The subject of this research is 6 students from English education department. Technique of collecting data by doing observation, interview and documentation. The results showed In teaching English pronunciation for suprasegmental features is very concerned about the how to teach students, give materials and do exercises. There are some materials that are taught to improve students' ability in stress words of English sentences. Students learnt combination of words adjectives and nouns are generally stressed is in the first, students are taught about the prefix, learnt about words with suffixes and students were also given exercise with compound words. Furthermore, in teaching intonation, students are also given understanding and practicing the reading text, analyzing and pronouncing the English word in accordance with the correct intonation. The impact, students understand how to use rising and falling intonation.

South African students’ use of delexical multiword units: The trouble with high-frequency verbs

This article describes a corpus-linguistic investigation of undergraduates’ production of delexical multiword units (MWUs) comprising high-frequency verb + noun combinations. The aim was to shed more light on the difficulties these deceptively simple combinations pose for writers in a multilingual South African context. Two corpora of learner writing from different areas of English studies (literature and communication for law) and a reference corpus of scholarly writing were compared, focusing on the frequency of MWUs in the student corpora and errors in these combinations. That these MWUs and the common verbs they feature are “error-prone” (Altenberg and Granger 2001:179) in learner language is well attested in current research. This study found that student writers did indeed have difficulty producing error-free delexical MWUs. A detailed analysis of their errors found that these were caused mainly by the verb in the combination, particularly verb collocation. These findings highlight the difficulties these combinations pose for South African learners. Such combinations are common in everyday language and academic writing, and the findings underline the importance of a sound knowledge of high-frequency verbs and their collocations for students writing in an academic milieu.

The nature of variation in the tone Sandhi patterns of Wuxi Wu

The Northern Wu Chinese dialect of Wuxi has two different tone patterns in disyllables—a pattern with tone sandhi that involves a synchronic chain-shift and a no sandhi pattern, and the two patterns apply variably. This study investigates the nature of this variation. Seventy-one native speakers participated in three rating experiments that investigated disyllables “subjective frequency, semantic transparency, and the variant forms” perceptual goodness. Results show that modifier + noun combinations prefer the sandhi form more than verb + noun combinations. Lexical frequency has a positive effect on sandhi application in both modifier + noun and verb + noun items. Semantically transparent items are less likely to undergo tone sandhi, but only for verb + noun combinations. These results are interpreted with respect to the properties of wordhood in Wuxi and Chinese dialects in general and the productivity of the chain-shift tone sandhi pattern observed in an earlier production study.

Complement or adjunct? The syntactic principle English-speaking children learn when producing determiner–noun combinations in their early speech

In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the common nouns their complements. This article aims to find out which of the two basic syntactic operations, complementation or adjunct attribution, children learn when they master determiner–noun combinations in their early speech. Pearson correlations of determiner–nominal combinations with verb–noun combinations and attributive adjective–noun combinations were computed in early two-word-long sentences of a large sample of young English-speaking children. Determiner–nominal combinations were very highly correlated with verb–noun sentences, whereas the correlation with adjective–noun combinations was much lower. It appears that determiner–noun combinations are a type of complementation. When children learn them early, they apparently learn the syntactic principle underlying such combinations which then can be transferred to other syntactic constructions.

GERMAN LANGUAGE COMPOSITES IN HERMAN HESSE’S NOVEL SIDDHARTA AND THEIR CORRESPONDENCES IN THE INDONESIAN LANGUAGE

This study aims to describe forms and meanings of German language composites and their correspondences in the Indonesian language. This was a qualitative descriptive study. The data were in the form of composites in German sentences in Herman Hesse’s novel Siddharta and its Indonesian translation by Hedy Holzwarth.The data were collected through the reading and writing technique. They were analyzed by the comparison and distribution techniques. The results of the study are as follows. First, there are 268 forms of composites, consisting of the Nullkonfix form, comprising a combination of noun+noun with a total of 161, a combination of adjective+noun with a total of 5, Konfixbeteiligung /-s/ (22 words), Konfixbeteiligung /-n/ (49 words), Konfix beteiligung /-en/ (6 words), Konfixbeteiligung /-er/ (17 words), and Konfixbeteiligung /-r/ (5 words). Second, German language composites are formed through the derivational and inflectional processes. A word formation functions as an attribute in a composite. In the Indonesian language, it is formed through an affixation process. Therefore, it can be concluded that German and Indonesian language composites have similar processes and meaning correspondences.Keywords: German and Indonesian language composites, correspondences

English

Collocations are among the pervasive features of languages, and English seems to be particularly rich in such multi-word lexemes. Since they have not received due attention pedagogically, this research aimed at identifying problems facing advanced Iranian learners of English in producing collocations. Over 100 pages of materials written by 30 participants were carefully studied and a list of lexical collocations was extracted. The list was then analyzed and different types of correct and incorrect lexical collocations were determined. Results showed that Iranian advanced learners of English do have serious problems with English collocations. The problematic collocations were identified and assigned to six types of collocations. The most problematic type was Adjective + Noun combinations and the least problematic ones were those of Adverb + Adjective and Noun +of + Noun. The results of the study can have theoretical and pedagogical implications for syllabus designers, translators, material writers and, of course, teachers of the English language. Key words: Lexical collocations, collocational errors, lexical combinations, Iranian EFL learners.

A Proof-Theoretic Semantics for Adjectival Modification

The paper introduces a proof-theoretic semantics (PTS) for adjectival modification (adjective---noun combination) as an alternative to the traditional model-theoretic semantics basing meaning on truth-conditions. The paper considers the proof-theoretic meaning of modification by means of the three traditional adjective classes: intersective, subsective and privative. It does so by introducing a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof system for such modification. The PTS theory of meaning is not polluted by ontological commitments, for example, a scale for beauty and a yardstick for being beautiful. It only uses syntactic artefacts of the proof language. The paper also defines, by suitable rules, iterated modification, shedding light on the relationship between iteration and adjectival classes. Modification via coordinated adjectives is covered too. An appendix delineates briefly the main ingredients of PTS.

Extracting features from online software reviews to aid requirements reuse

Sets of common features are essential assets to be reused in fulfilling specific needs in software product line methodology. In Requirements Reuse (RR), the extraction of software features from Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) is viable only to practitioners who have access to these software artefacts. Due to organisational privacy, SRS are always kept confidential and not easily available to the public. As alternatives, researchers opted to use the publicly available software descriptions such as product brochures and online software descriptions to identify potential software features to initiate the RR process. The aim of this paper is to propose a semi-automated approach, known as Feature Extraction for Reuse of Natural Language requirements (FENL), to extract phrases that can represent software features from software reviews in the absence of SRS as a way to initiate the RR process. FENL is composed of four stages, which depend on keyword occurrences from several combinations of nouns, verbs, and/or adjectives. In the experiment conducted, phrases that could reflect software features, which reside within online software reviews were extracted by utilising the techniques from information retrieval (IR) area. As a way to demonstrate the feature groupings phase, a semi-automated approach to group the extracted features were then conducted with the assistance of a modified word overlap algorithm. As for the evaluation, the proposed extraction approach is evaluated through experiments against the truth data set created manually. The performance results obtained from the feature extraction phase indicates that the proposed approach performed comparably with related works in terms of recall, precision, and F-Measure.

Evolutionary Syntax, by Ljiljana Progovac

Evolutionary syntax , by Ljiljana Progovac, OUP (2015) 280 pp, £24.99. In this monograph, Progovac argues for an incremental evolution of cognitive capacities underpinning syntactic structure, with Conjoin (a binary, non-recursive operation immune to movement and embedding) anteceding recursive Merge. This distinction plays out over four stages, described in Chapters 1–4, with Merge only visible in stage 4. 1. Single words; 2. Two-word combinations, for example, Case closed ; 3. ‘Proto-coordination’, where linkers like English as or Mandarin de mark binary predicate–argument relations; 4. Specific functional categories, permitting recursive syntactic structures. Progovac’s primary evidence comes from syntactic analysis of constructions, such as those above, identified as linguistic fossils (Jackendoff 1999). However, most chapters contain sections on ‘corroborating evidence’, summarizing findings from acquisition, imaging studies, and other related fields, although the interpretation of such evidence is often inconclusive (Boeckx 2016). There are several innovations in the details. For example, the stage 2 grammar, which creates binary verb–noun (VN) combinations, is claimed to have no subject–object distinction (resulting in ‘absolutive’ grammar in Progovac’s terms). This is reflected in English and Serbian VN compounds, where a rattlesnake is a snake that rattles, while rotgut is alcohol that rots guts. Similar indeterminacy is demonstrated in Tongan and Riau Indonesian. A second novel claim is that the capacity for binary protosyntactic combination within a ‘clause’ (stage 2) is linked to binary combination of clauses (stage 2a), giving a strictly finite device which can mimic subordination to a limited extent. Likewise, linkers at stage 3 may appear between predicate and argument, or between clauses. Many of these novel accounts of individual constructions are genuinely insightful and thought-provoking. Progovac argues that constructions which look quirky and cussed from the perspective of modern syntactic theory may be elegantly analysed within the terms of less expressive models of syntax. As … rob.truswell{at}ed.ac.uk

A Study on the Syntactic Characteristics of the Combination of a Proper Noun for a Person’s name and a Reference/Address Noun Phrase

A Study on the Syntactic Characteristics of the Combination of a Proper Noun for a Person’s name and a Reference/Address Noun Phrase

Meaning in Context.

People often encounter language in contexts that provide meanings that go beyond previous experience. For example, people recover metaphorical meanings that displace literal meanings for the same words. For such cases, researchers have addressed the question of whether contextual support allows people to truncate or eliminate consideration of meanings that precede specific contexts. The article reviews 3 domains in which this question has prompted research: recovery of metaphorical meanings, understanding of noun-noun combinations, and assimilation of actions within fantastic narrative worlds.

Contrastive Analysis of Stretched Collocations with <i>Get</i> and <i>Take</i>: Their use and Pedagogical Implications

Abstract: This paper explores the pedagogical implications of contrastive analyses of light verb constructions containing get and take in English and Spanish based on electronic corpora, the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA). The main tenets of collocations from a contrastive perspective-and the points of contact and departure between both languages-are discussed prior to examining the commonest types of verb+ noun combinations (i.e., take a bath, take advantage of), verb+ adjective (i.e. get ready, get worse, get angry), verb+ participle (i.e., get married, get dressed) as significant cases of so-called light, empty, thin, or verbs. A quantitative and qualitative-oriented case study is accordingly conducted, determining the weight of get and take in stretched collocations in the BNC and of the Spanish equivalent verbs constructions within the CREA. Based on empirical data obtained this way, this paper provides relevant insights for more accurate translations, helping to enhance the collocational competence of L2 students, who tend to avoid constructions including empty verbs in favour of full verb forms. The findings in this study shed light on the potential of corpora resources for improving the collocational usage of foreign-language learners, as quantitative and qualitative comparisons of collocations serve to highlight the similarities and, more importantly, the lexical, cognitive and typological differences between these phraseological constructions in the two languages, thereby substantiating the very useful role that analysis may play for teaching in general and for collocational knowledge and proficiency in particular.Keywords: Collocations, Light Verb Constructions, Translation, Teaching PhraseologyIntroductionStretched Collocations at the Crossroads in English and Spanish PhraseologyPhraseology is definitely concerned with the study of those chunks which, be they collocations or idioms, constitute some crucial cognitive, textual and pragmatic tools to be mastered by the learner. As Sokolik (2001: 487) underlines in her overview of Computer- Assisted Language Learning (CALL), corpus linguistics and concordancing can help provide the data and tools that students and instructors need to make sense out of usage. CALL applications and phraseology may thus provide invaluable resources for the student's knowledge of multiword units such as delexicalized verb constructions. These semi-compositional verb-noun constructions have been investigated under various labels in the different linguistic traditions. Other terms that are in use to denominate such constructions, parts of them, or a superset of semi-compositional expressions which will be used in this study are light verbs, operator verbs, complex predicates, support verb constructions and others. There is no consensus among the authors about what structures are admissible and different studies investigate non-identical structures. Despite this proviso, in English linguistics, the common ground is that the structures should be non-compositional and consist of a semantically low-content, inflected verb and a predicate noun (Nickel, 1968; Wierzbicka, 1982).Prior to undertaking a detailed case study exploring this phenomenon and its implications for learning, some remarks will be made on CALL, phraseology and their interface.CALL and its Role in Improving L2 LearningCALL has become a new, but well-established, scholarly domain researching the pedagogical possibilities provided by computers and the Internet for increasing learners' communicative skills (Warschauer and Kern, 2000; Warschauer, 2001; Blake, 2001; Davies, 2002; Godwin-Jones, 2005; Oster et al., 2006). CALL may be broadly defined as any process in which a learner uses a computer and, as a result, improves his or her language (Beatty, 2003: 248). …

Sentiment classification of Chinese online reviews: a comparison of factors influencing performances

With the growing availability and popularity of online consumer reviews, people have been trying to seek sentiment-aware applications to gather and understand these opinion-rich texts. Thus, sentiment classification arises in response to analyse opinions of others automatically. In this paper, experiments of sentiment classification of Chinese online reviews across different domains are conducted by considering a couple of factors which potentially influence the sentiment classification performance. Experimental results indicate that the size of training sets and the number of features have certain influence on classification accuracy. In addition, there is no significant difference in classification accuracy when using Document Frequency, Chi-square Statistic and Information Gain, respectively, to reduce dimensionality. Low-order n-grams outperforms high-order n-grams in terms of accuracy if n-grams is taken as features. Furthermore, when words and combination of words are selected as features, the accuracy of adjectives is much close to that of NVAA (the combination of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), and is better than others as well.

Variables and Values in Children’s Early Word-Combinations

Abstract A model of syntactic development proposes that children’s very first word-combinations are already generated via productive rules that express in syntactic form the relation between a predicate word and its semantic argument. An alternative hypothesis is that they learn frozen chunks. In Study 1 we analyzed a large sample of young children’s early two-word sentences comprising of verbs with direct objects. A majority of objects were generated by pronouns but a third of children’s sentences used bare common nouns as objects. We checked parents’ twoword long sentences of verbs with objects and found almost no bare common nouns. Children cannot have copied sentences with bare noun objects from parents’ two-word long sentences as frozen chunks. In Study 2 we raised the possibility that children’s early sentences with bare nouns are rote-learned ‘telegraphic speech’, acquired as unanalyzed frozen chunks from longer input sentences due to perceptual problem to hear the unstressed determiners. To test this explanation, we tested the children’s speech corpus for evidence that they avoid determiners in their word-combinations. The results showed that they do not; in fact they generate very many determiner-common noun combinations as two-word utterances. The findings suggest that children produce their early word-combinations of the core-grammar type by a productive rule that maps the predicate-argument relations of verbs and their semantic arguments to headdependent syntax, and not as frozen word-combinations. Children mostly learn to use indexical expressions such as pronouns to express the variable semantic arguments of verbs as context dependent; they also employ bare common nouns to express specific values of the arguments. The earliest word-combinations demonstrate that children understand that syntax is built on the predicate-argument relations of words and use this insight to produce their early sentences.

Teachability of collocations: The role of word frequency counts

This study aims to gain insights into which collocations to teach at which proficiency levels by answering the following questions: (i) Of the Verb+Noun and Adjective+Noun types of collocations, which one is more difficult (and should therefore come at a later stage of learning)? (ii) What is the size of collocations of the types Verb+Noun and Adjective+Noun mastered across proficiency levels? In addition, the study suggests an approach to collocation teaching that should be trialled in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching context. Two collocation tests (modelled after Laufer and Nation 1999)1 with words selected from Nation's (2006)2 word list and Coxhead's (2000)3 Academic Word List were administered to two groups of English majors, at different stages of learning, from the University of Antwerp and the University of Burundi. Results showed that Adjective+Noun combinations are more difficult than Verb+Noun combinations. However, in both collocations types, only upper-intermediate and low-advanced students mastered the 2 000-word band. We therefore suggest teaching collocations from the 2 000-word band to beginner/low-intermediate students and only exceed the 2 000-word band from the upper-intermediate learning stage onwards, a suggestion in line with Nation's (2006) discussion on how to teach vocabulary.