Order Of Phrases Research Articles

Versatility and Stereotypy of Free-Tailed Bat Songs

In mammals, complex songs are uncommon and few studies have examined song composition or the order of elements in songs, particularly with respect to regional and individual variation. In this study we examine how syllables and phrases are ordered and combined, ie “syntax”, of the song of Tadarida brasiliensis, the Brazilian free-tailed bat. Specifically, we test whether phrase and song composition differ among individuals and between two regions, we determine variability across renditions within individuals, and test whether phrases are randomly ordered and combined. We report three major findings. First, song phrases were highly stereotyped across two regions, so much so that some songs from the two colonies were almost indistinguishable. All males produced songs with the same four types of syllables and the same three types of phrases. Second, we found that although song construction was similar across regions, the number of syllables within phrases, and the number and order of phrases in songs varied greatly within and among individuals. Last, we determined that phrase order, although diverse, deviated from random models. We found broad scale phrase-order rules and certain higher order combinations that were highly preferred. We conclude that free-tailed bat songs are composed of highly stereotyped phrases hierarchically organized by a common set of syntactical rules. However, within global species-specific patterns, songs male free-tailed bats dynamically vary syllable number, phrase order, and phrase repetitions across song renditions.

Joyce and Company (review)

Reviewed by: Joyce and Company Victor Luftig (bio) Joyce and Company, by David Pierce. London and New York: Continuum Press, 2006. 180 pp. £60.00. Years ago, I knew a musician who in her youth had picked up a copy of Ulysses and had read it on her own, taking great pleasure in its sounds and cadences; she spoke wistfully of the moment, some years later, when an academic told her that since she had not made recourse to any scholarly materials she could not have gleaned very much. At around the same time, I had another friend, a graduate student, who told me about his having read Finnegans Wake with no aid other than selected hallucinogens. Those are the only two people I can think of who might disagree with the assertion that “Joyce is best understood in the company of others,” the ostensible thesis of David Pierce’s nevertheless very worthwhile collection of essays. The “others” in whose company Pierce reads Joyce here are mostly writers, ranging from Laurence Sterne to Jamie O’Neill. Yet a great virtue of Joyce and Company is its implicit indication of the variety of communities that have influenced Pierce in his engagement with Joyce’s works. And, in fact, the book’s greatest merit is the way it suggests what good company Pierce himself is as a fellow reader of Joyce. He gives a sense of how he has come to produce a certain kind of Joyce criticism and of the capacities of that strain of scholarship; he is more interested in informing us than in persuading us. Like a good edition or set of annotations, the chapters offer a wealth of material that could be the stuff of interesting continued work. Pierce typically assembles a set of quotations, analogues, or allusions, then gestures towards the multiplicity of Joyce’s achievement and towards some claim about that multiplicity. But he readily and repeatedly confesses to being inconclusive and even vague. “How we interpret this,” he writes at the end of the Sterne chapter, which lists various examples of tactility, “returns us to ‘all that’” (27)—”all that” turning out to be the many different associations prompted by Stephen’s recollection of the sensation of Cranly’s arm in “Telemachus.” “Like Rabelais,” Pierce writes, “Joyce is a gatherer, an orderer” (34). The same could be said about the Pierce of Joyce and Company. His second section begins with a three-and-a-half page numbered inventory of “Examples of Reading Matter in ‘Wandering Rocks’” (57–60); his fourth and final section begins with a three-page “Overture on Walls in Ulysses” that lists instances ranging from Stephen’s sojourn near the south wall in “Proteus” to Molly’s “promiscuous wall” (139). The discussion immediately preceding on “Sirens” mentions what “a strong reading” of nationalism in the episode might argue, “[b]ut,” Pierce writes, “I wouldn’t go that far” (132). His procedure is epitomized by the conclusion of his chapter “The Issue of Translation,” in which he offers multiple translations of [End Page 363] particular phrases in order to generate a series of questions. “I raise all these issues here without resolving them but as my remarks above suggest I am clearer in my own mind how I would go about resolving them” (115). Such inconclusiveness might be frustrating, even irritating, if the book did not demonstrate, in two very different ways, that we should care a great deal about Pierce’s resolutions. First, Joyce and Company includes autobiographical passages that are, at their best, delightful and illuminating. In the introduction, Pierce remembers his teenage resistance to “the fallen, apostate writer” who threatened to come between “my soul and my creator”: Joyce was at that time “company I could do without. So I left Joyce on one side and read other writers who allowed me space to enter the world on my own terms” (4). (This is not really such a different response from those of my two friends who chose to read Joyce on their own terms.) Later, in the essay “On Reading Ulysses After the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” his reminiscences about visits to the former German Democratic Republic include...

Four Bible Translation Types and Some Criteria to Distinguish Them

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the classification of Bible translation types. This paper proposes four types instead of the traditional two: literal and idiomatic or dynamic equivalent. The four types are Type 1) close (or literal) resemblance, Type 2) open resemblance, Type 3) close (or limited) interpretative, and Type 4) open interpretative. There are several continua of criteria: the degree of resemblance to the original semantic content, the degree of explicitness, and the type of adjustments needed to unpack the meaning. Eight criteria of adjustments are proposed to distinguish these four types: 1) order of clauses and phrases, 2) sentence length, 3) reference disambiguation and tracking, 4) concordance of lexical items, 5) key terms and unknown terms, 6) figurative usage and idioms, 7) transition marking, and 8) information structure.

Using SVM to construct a Chinese dependency parser

In Chinese, dependency analysis has been shown to be a powerful syntactic parser because the order of phrases in a sentence is relatively free compared with English. Conventional dependency parsers require a number of sophisticated rules that have to be handcrafted by linguists, and are too cumbersome to maintain. To solve the problem, a parser using SVM (Support Vector Machine) is introduced. First, a new strategy of dependency analysis is proposed. Then some chosen feature types are used for learning and for creating the modification matrix using SVM. Finally, the dependency of phrases in the sentence is generated. Experiments conducted to analyze how each type of feature affects parsing accuracy, showed that the model can increase accuracy of the dependency parser by 9.2%.

La funzione delle lettere alfabetiche nella glossa interlineare alla Regula Sancti Benedicti del manoscritto London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.III

MS London, Cotton Tiberius, A.III transmits the Benedictine Rule with a composite interlinear gloss in Old English, which includes the alphabetic letters from a to z. These letters help understand the Latin text showing both the logical order of phrases in a clause, or the logical order of the clauses in a sentence, and the logical function specific to each element. The glossator has chosen the letter a to mark the beginning of a sentence and for the verb of main clauses; while b is the letter of the subject, closely linked to the verb. The other letters underline the different elements that characterize the different clauses and their relationship. The function of the syntactic letters and the result given to the chapters of the Rule devoted to lauds and psalms – the richest in those letters – lead the interlinear gloss to a monastic centre acquainted with AEthelwold’s learning and religious plans.

Representation Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Representation theory by Edwin Williams Norbert Hornstein and Andrew Nevins Representation theory. By Edwin Williams. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. 281. ISBN 0262731509. $28. This provocative and original book covers much interesting territory. Our allotted space requires us (sadly) to restrict our attention to two themes that representation theory (RT) explores: shape conservation and embedding. [End Page 757] Shape conservation. RT divides syntax into multiple levels of representation which map to each other according to global principles, some of which may conflict. Many theories share the view of syntax as a set of interrelated levels: witness lexical functional grammar, which maps f-structure and c-structure (with some optimality-theoretic variants); government and binding theory, which maps d-structure and s-structure; Ray Jackendoff’s recent theories, which map syntax, semantics, and phonology onto one another with global matching principles; and minimalism, which maps syntax to both PF (phonetic form) and LF (logical form) through a locally deterministic set of operations on lexical items. These views assume that each level of representation has different principles and constitutes a distinct ‘sublanguage’ that codes specific kinds of information. RT differs from these in a few important respects: There are seven levels (theta structure, case structure, predicate structure, surface structure, quantifier structure, focus structure, and accent structure), and in principle ‘the limiting case is an RT with exactly the same number of levels as there are functional elements in the structure of the clause in the corresponding Checking Theory’ (58). The levels are not related to one another by transformations of movement but rather by mapping principles, whose central principle is shape conservation. Global shape conservation requires that two levels within a representation relation maximally correspond, modulo the introduction of functional material. Thus, the grammar privileges mappings that conserve the linear and hierarchical relations between 1 and 2, and hence, exceptional case-marking constructions 3 and 4 constitute a bracketing paradox. (1) Theta structure: [Agent [Predicate Theme]] (2) Case structure: [Nominative [Case-Assigner Accusative]] (3) Theta structure: [believe [Mary to be alive]] (4) Case structure: [believe Mary [to be alive]] Shape conservation is global in nature. One instance can be seen in Anders Holmberg’s (1985, 1999) generalization, where the order of phrases within the verb phrase (including verb, one or more objects, and particles) must be preserved if scrambled or head-moved within the middle-field. For RT, Holmberg’s generalization results from a single principle of shape conservation rather than as the conspiracy of different independent movements as occurs with localist theories such as minimalism. In the latter, when more than one dependency occurs for a single lexical item, the transformation is modeled as movement subject to principles of locality or relativized minimality. In RT, only wh-movement is so analyzed (though at certain points, e.g. p. 31, English topicalization is suggested to be as well). All other apparent cases of displacement (e.g. heavy NP shift, topicalization, scrambling, passivization, raising, object-shift) result from a mismapping between two independently generated levels of representation, not transformationally. RT has no movement for passives: Case and theta structures simply happen to be nonisomorphic. One reason for this is that surface structure must map faithfully onto both topic structure and case structure, creating a conflict resolved by ranking. Shape conservation is thus a violable principle. Crosslinguistic variation results from different ranking of relative representational faithfulness: for example, English surface order allows ambiguous quantifier scope, but disallows scrambling because for s-structure to map case structure is more important than for s-structure to map quantifier structure. German has the reverse ranking. Though the global formulation of shape conservation captures generalizations about ‘conspiracies’ of independent movements that preserve linear order, we believe (pace Edwin Williams) that a principle like shape conservation need not imply a new architecture, one that employs RT-like sublanguages (1). For example, Fox and Pesetsky (2003) propose a derivational mechanism of phrase structure building, with intermediate levels of representation (‘phases’) that require consistent linear orderings across the derivation. Here, intermediate levels of representation are governed by a consistency principle and do not assume autonomous sublanguages at each stage. Consider one particularly interesting effect of RT’s...

Priority Information Used for the Processing of Japanese Sentences: Thematic Roles, Case Particles or Grammatical Functions?

The present study investigated scrambling effects on the processing of Japanese sentences and priority information used among thematic roles, case particles and grammatical functions. Reaction times for correct sentence decisions were significantly prolonged for scrambled active sentences with transitive verbs in the first experiment and with ditransitive verbs in the second experiment. Errors were made with scrambled sentences more than canonical sentences in both experiments, which suggested that scrambling effects were apparent in active sentences. Passive sentences in the third experiment indicated that canonical order defined based on case particles, not thematic roles, was more quickly and accurately identified than scrambled order. Potential sentences in the fourth experiment and causative sentences in the fifth experiment indicated that the processing of scrambled sentences based on grammatical functions, but not on case particles, required longer reaction times and resulted in higher error rates than canonical sentences. Consequently, scrambling effects in the present study indicated that neither thematic roles nor case particles can provide fully-satisfactory information for canonical phrase order, and that only grammatical functions offer satisfactory information in all types of sentences.

Generalized formulation of quantum and classical crystallography using Green's functions

AbstractQuantum crystallography is a methodology by which structural information about a crystalline material obtained from X‐ray crystallography is combined with quantum mechanical methods. The objective is to enhance the data obtained from the X‐ray diffraction experiment, which are related to the atomic structure of the crystal, and to predict the properties and efficacy of those chemical compounds from which the crystals are derived. One approach in quantum crystallography is to use a projector matrix with a normalized trace. In this approach, quantum mechanical parameters in the projector matrix are fit into crystallographic data. During this fitting, the properties of the projector matrix called idempotency and normalization are used. Throughout this implementation procedure, Clinton's iteration scheme has been used in addition to the least‐squares technique. The purpose of the present study is to generalize Clinton's iterative equations in quantum crystallography by means of single‐particle Green's functions with the aid of the equal atoms model in the theory of direct methods. Convergency characters of the novel iterative equations are discussed by the steepest descent procedure. Furthermore, whether the calculations are valid in nonorthogonal bases was also examined. The iteration schemes widely used in quantum crystallography have been generalized but, in addition, the generalized expressions relating to the phase determination procedure and the probabilities of the sign relations between the structure factors are obtained and discussed comprehensively. The phrase order of crystallography has been put forward as a new concept. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2005

Species-typical songs in white-crowned sparrows tutored with only phrase pairs

Modern theories of learned vocal behaviours, such as human speech and singing in songbirds, posit that acoustic communication signals are reproduced from memory, using auditory feedback. The nature of these memories, however, is unclear. Here we propose and test a model for how complex song structure can emerge from sparse sequence information acquired during tutoring. In this conceptual model, a population of combination-sensitive (phrase-pair) detectors is shaped by early exposure to song and serves as the minimal representation of the template necessary for generating complete song. As predicted by the model, birds that were tutored with only pairs of normally adjacent song phrases were able to assemble full songs in which phrases were placed in the correct order; birds that were tutored with reverse-ordered phrase pairs sang songs with reversed phrase order. Birds that were tutored with all song phrases, but presented singly, failed to produce normal, full songs. These findings provide the first evidence for a minimal requirement of sequence information in the acoustic model that can give rise to correct song structure.

Perception of geographical variation in song by male Puget Sound white-crowned sparrows, Zonotrichia leucophrys pugetensis

The songs of male Puget Sound white-crowned sparrows form about 13 dialects along the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. In his original description of dialects in this subspecies, Baptista (1977, Condor, 79, 356–370) defined dialects by the terminal trill portion of the song because most males at a given location sing the same trill. Complex syllables in the introductory part of the song vary between males at a sample location and occur over a wider geographical range than trills. Baptista also recognized two superdialects or ‘themes’ based on differences in the phrase order within songs. We performed three playback experiments to territorial male white-crowned sparrows using both natural and computer-modified stimuli to test which acoustic features of song these birds attend to. Two of the experiments were conducted in nine dialect areas spanning nearly the entire geographical range of the subspecies. The results of the first such experiment indicate that across dialect areas, males give stronger responses (increased song rate and a shorter approach distance) to natural songs from the local dialect than they do to songs from a neighbouring dialect, a different theme, or another subspecies of white-crowned sparrow. Two experiments using modified stimuli conducted either across nine dialects or in one dialect led to the same conclusion: substitution of the trill from a neighbouring dialect into a song elicited weaker responses relative to the local control than did substitution of a neighbouring dialect's introduction. We conclude that the response of male Puget Sound white-crowned sparrows to playback is influenced most by variation in the song's trill. We found no evidence that the birds recognize ‘superdialects’ as do humans.

The Cues That Children Use in Acquiring Adjectival Phrases and Compound Nouns: Evidence from Bilingual Children

This study explores the cues used in acquisition of two semantically similar structures that are ordered differently in French and English: adjectival phrases and compound nouns. One possible prediction is that children attend primarily to meaning, so they should order both structures similarly. Another is that children attend primarily to structure, so they should learn these structures independently. Two kinds of data were obtained from eight 4-year old bilinguals: (1) spontaneous production and (2) experimental elicitation. The children were nearly perfect in their ordering of adjectival phrases, but less so in compounds. These results conform to neither prediction, leaving open the question of which cues children use in acquisition.

On the Instruction in English Word Order in Production : Phrase Order and Intra-phrasal Word Order

On the Instruction in English Word Order in Production : Phrase Order and Intra-phrasal Word Order

The relative order of prepositional phrases in English: Going beyond Manner–Place–Time

This article argues against Manner–Place–Time and other proposed grammatical principles of ordering for prepositional phrases (PPs) in postverbal position in English. Instead, greater empirical adequacy can be achieved by a theory of processing efficiency that defines a preference for minimal domains in the recognition of syntactic phrase structure and in the processing of lexical–semantic dependencies between verbs and prepositions. Some new entailment tests are proposed on the basis of which these dependencies can be defined. The data come from 500 pages of written English. For 300 pages, an additional analysis is given in terms of structural ambiguity avoidance and pragmatic information status. Syntactic complexity is the biggest single predictor of PP sequences, whereas lexical–semantic factors predominate when syntactic preferences are weak. Manner–Place–Time is not the correct semantic generalization, however. Ambiguity avoidance had no clear impact on these orderings. Pragmatic effects were not visible when syntactic weight made no predictions and were correlated with weight when it did but were less strongly supported.

Implicit and explicit syntactic knowledge and reading in pre‐adolescents

This aim of this paper is to analyse the links between syntactic awareness and reading, in its recoding and comprehension aspects, in pre‐adolescent readers. The study, conducted with 83 sixth grade pupils, examined the relation between (1) seven syntactic and morpho‐syntactic tasks (repetition, judgment, correction, localization, explanation, replication and identification) and (2) several indicators of recoding and comprehension in reading. Regression analyses revealed differential contributions as a function of syntactic task, type of agrammaticality, and the aspect of reading tested, after we had controlled for the influence of reasoning, memory, and linguistic competences. Contributions resulting from the morpho‐syntactic tasks were observed more frequently for recoding, whereas those involving the inversion of word or phrase orders operated more frequently as indicators of reading comprehension. The more explicit the syntactic awareness tasks, the more frequent and greater their contribution to reading performances. Comparisons of syntactic performances as a function of three levels of reading comprehension (good, average, poor) revealed a syntactic deficit in the poor comprehenders. The poor comprehenders exhibited a deficit in the majority of the syntactic tasks. The average comprehenders achieved lower performances than the good comprehenders in the tasks assessing explicit knowledge of syntax but not in those assessing implicit knowledge.

Affective and Coherence Responses to Russian Laments

We investigated the effects of formal characteristics (musical phrase structure) and nonverbal vocal gestures (gasps characteristic of crying) on affective and coherence responses to Russian laments by listeners who were familiar or unfamiliar with Russian village music. Laments were presented in semantically compatible or incompatible phrase orders with gasps present or absent. Listeners rated laments on an affective response scale (sad/happy) and a musical coherence scale (phrases follow well/phrases follow poorly). All listeners judged laments as sadder when gasps were present than absent, but effects of phrase order on affective responses were dependent on listeners' musical background. Listeners familiar with Russian laments judged all excerpts as coherent, but listeners unfamiliar with laments judged the excerpts as less coherent when gasps were present than absent. Listeners' emotional and cognitive responses to music were affected by both culture-transcendent factors (gasps characteristic of crying) and culture-specific factors (phrase structure).

Organisation and Recall in Verbal Tasks and in Subject-performed Tasks

In memory for subject-performed tasks (SPTs), subjects encode a list of simple action phrases (e.g. lift the pen, open the book) by performing these actions during learning. Performing tasks has proved to be a much more efficient type of encoding than verbal tasks (VTs), in which subjects only listen to the action phrases in order to memorise them. It is assumed that good item-specific encoding after SPTs plays an important role in the SPT effect. The role of relational encoding for the SPT effect is less clear, as is the question of whether SPT encoding is automatic or controlled. Two experiments were conducted to address these issues. Subjects learned lists which were categorically structured in VTs and SPTs, under focal attention or divided attention. The results indicated that relational encoding does not differ between VTs and SPTs, and that free recall is impaired in both cases by divided attention, more so in VTs than in SPTs. It is concluded that the SPT effect is primarily based on item-speci...

Trois remarques sur l'ordre des mots dans la langue parlée

Claire Blanche-Benveniste : « Three remarks on word order in spoken French » To study word order in spoken French, it is necessary to distinguish between two levels : 1° word order as actualised in the process of enunciation, with its repetitions and hesitations, 2° the grammatical order of phrases, which is an abstract reconstruction. Some types of phrase order are more frequent in spoken than in written French ; this is the case of the structure in which a complement comes before its verb, which is particularly frequent in French in spite of what traditional French grammarians lead us to believe. In this position, the complement is strongly focalised and has particular semantic and syntactic properties which bring about a contrast with the phrase coming after the verb. French speakers often use this double possibility in the form of structural chiasmus.

Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction II

Reviews Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction II by Talmy Givon. Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1990. Reviewed by Howard Williams University of California, Los Angeles Syntax: Volume II volume morphological and the second book in Givon's two- syntactic survey of language from a functional perspective. (For a review of the first volume, see Heath, is 1986) As a functionally-oriented grammarian, Givon concerns himself not with formal syntax but with the systematic uses to which constructions are put. Syntax is for him functional in a strong sense: the form of language is claimed to be a direct reflection of users' communicative needs at all levels of analysis. While the heavily English-oriented second volume may be read independently of the first, some grounding is in order. For Givon, the levels of analysis appropriate to syntax are the discourse-pragmatic, the propositional-semantic, the lexical-semantic and the phrasal- semantic; the four have individual requirements which occasionally conflict. To understand syntax is to understand these levels and the conflicts among them. Knowledge of diachronic change is also essential to a proper understanding of structure. Chapter 12, the opening chapter, deals with the coherence of noun phrases (NPs). The order of pre- and post-nominal modifiers is held to be determined on a scale of relevance as in Bybee (1985); there is a partial parallel to the placement of complements and adjuncts in formal approaches. Elements of NPs tend to be contiguous rather than scattered through a clause for iconic reasons, to preserve functional unity. Conjunction of NPs is limited to NPs of equal thematic status with similar case roles. Separate events will tend to be encoded by separate clauses (p. 488); a fairly detailed section illustrates the pragmatic-cognitive difficulties of this phenomenon. In a section on nominalization of clauses, a scalar order of nominal-like phrases is presented, with/ clauses at the bottom and the enemy's destruction of the c/fy-type nominals at the top. Exactly what this would mean in syntactic terms (e.g., the inability of infinitives to serve well as the subjects of yes-no questions) is not addressed. Chapter 13 deals with verbal complementation, investigating the semantic nature of the relationship between main and embedded

Transitivity and Agency in Georg Biichner's Lenz: A Contribution to a Stylistic Analysis

Modern stylistics, drawing on recent work in descriptive language study, has developed analytical techniques to demonstrate how structural choices exercised at various linguistic levels indicate the semantic organization of reality in literary texts. This essay considers the contribution of one such principle of organization, that of transitivity and agency, to the conceptualization of experience in Georg Büchner's narrative Lenz. The discussion seeks to identify consistent structural selections made by Büchner at the level of the verb phrase in order to reveal the interaction of syntactic form and literary meaning.

Noun phrase interpretation and conceptual combination

Four experiments investigated the process by which people understand adjective-noun and noun-noun phrases in order to evaluate competing models of concept representation and conceptual combination. In three experiments, subjects judged whether noun phrases (NPs) were sensible. The results showed that when modifiers were conceptually complex (nouns and nonpredicating adjectives), the NPs took longer to interpret than when simpler modifiers (predicating adjectives) were used. Also, when an adjective modified part of a noun's schema, it was understood more quickly than when it modified nonschematic aspects of the noun. The results were interpreted as supporting a schema-modification view of comprehending NPs. A final experiment investigated this view by measuring the reading times of sentences containing NPs. The results showed that when the context activated relevant conceptual structures, all NPs were equally easy to comprehend, as predicted by the schema modification view. Without a helpful context, noun-noun phrases were considerably slower than adjective-noun phrases.