Sequence Of Clauses Research Articles

Quantifying clause chains in Nungon texts

Abstract Clause chains are sequences of clauses with under-specified verbal predicates, plus a single clause with a fully-specified verbal predicate. Clause chains represent the morpho-syntactic demarcation of a speech unit greater than a single clause, but the precise length of this unit is rarely assessed. Clause chain length, distribution, bridging linkage, and non-canonical forms are evaluated in a sample of 64 texts, containing over 1742 clause chains, in the Papuan language Nungon. In the 49 narrative texts, unlike in other genres, total clause chains per text increases as text duration increases. The average clause chain in the sample is 3–4 clauses long; the longest has 22 clauses. Average clause chain length decreases as text length increases. The longest narrative texts have similar average clause chain length, proportion of bridging clauses, and proportion of non-canonical clause chains, and feature a leisurely rhythm: half of their clause chains are minimal, two-clause chains.

Generating clause sequences of a CNF formula

Given a CNF formula Φ with clauses C1,…,Cm and variables V={x1,…,xn}, a truth assignment a:V→{0,1} of Φ leads to a clause sequence σΦ(a)=(C1(a),…,Cm(a))∈{0,1}m where Ci(a)=1 if clause Ci evaluates to 1 under assignment a, otherwise Ci(a)=0. The set of all possible clause sequences carries a lot of information on the formula, e.g. SAT, MAX-SAT and MIN-SAT can be encoded in terms of finding a clause sequence with extremal properties.We consider a problem posed at Dagstuhl Seminar 19211 “Enumeration in Data Management” (2019) about the generation of all possible clause sequences of a given CNF with bounded dimension. We prove that the problem can be solved in incremental polynomial time. We further give an algorithm with polynomial delay for the class of tractable CNF formulas. We also consider the generation of maximal and minimal clause sequences, and show that generating maximal clause sequences is NP-hard, while minimal clause sequences can be generated with polynomial delay.

Positioning Selves in Narrative Accounts of Military Trauma

Abstract Linguistic and narrative strategies employed in two dyadic interviews of male veterans of the war in Afghanistan were analysed and compared. Each interviewee told chains of connected stories that positioned them in relation to catastrophic events and their effects. These incidents were framed as being linked to decisions that the teller had taken in perilous circumstances. Sequences of generic clauses in sections of orientation were used to manage knowledge asymmetries, to establish story world norms, to display professional, soldierly and veteran identities and to present danger, serious injury, and death as normative in the context of military work in a conflict zone. Resolutions to narratives involving death or injury resided not in specific narrative event clauses but in sections of evaluation that framed the outcome of a preceding story chain in terms of its personal, current significance to the speaker. Our exploration of contrasting accounts of similarly catastrophic events by two storytellers, one of whom was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, offers insights into ways in which trauma is represented that could be useful in psychotherapeutic contexts.

THEME PATTERNS IN INTRODUCTION SECTIONS OF RESEARCH ARTICLES WRITTEN BY UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

This study analyzed theme patterns of 41 introduction sections of research articles written by undergraduate students of Indonesia, especially students of the English department in Universitas Negeri Padang. The sources of data are from e-journal archives of E-journal English Language and Literature (JELL) and Journal of English Language Teaching (JELT) of Universitas Negeri Padang. The data were analyzed by classifying the theme and rheme structure of clause sequences and then determining the patterns. This research is a descriptive study with a qualitative approach. The result of the findings shows that a simple linear pattern (42,70%) found to be the most dominant pattern of the theme found in the data. In addition, new patterns (27,35%) are also frequently used in the data. These findings indicate that most students tend to write their ideas more cohesive than coherent as the lack of using an interpersonal theme and derived hyper-theme pattern found in the data.

‘Hot news’ and perfect change: mirativity and the semantics/pragmatics interface

This paper proposes an analysis of the hot news Present Perfect (PP) building on Nishiyama & Koenig’s (2010) analysis of the perfect as denoting a perfect state introduced by a variable that needs to be pragmatically enriched. Pragmatic meaning is analysed extending Rett & Murray’s (2013) representation of mirative meaning as the target state of a learning event, which I take to be the speaker’s reaction of surprise more generally. The analysis is considered in the light of noncanonical uses of the PP in Australian English narratives and police media reports. I argue that hot news usage is at the basis of such extensions and propose representations for uses in sequences of clauses expressing temporal progression and in clauses containing a definite past time adverbial. The paper concludes by discussing the present analysis in the light of previous research and its implication to our understanding of the grammaticalization of perfects.

Exploring Neural Methods for Parsing Discourse Representation Structures

Neural methods have had several recent successes in semantic parsing, though they have yet to face the challenge of producing meaning representations based on formal semantics. We present a sequence-to-sequence neural semantic parser that is able to produce Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) for English sentences with high accuracy, outperforming traditional DRS parsers. To facilitate the learning of the output, we represent DRSs as a sequence of flat clauses and introduce a method to verify that produced DRSs are well-formed and interpretable. We compare models using characters and words as input and see (somewhat surprisingly) that the former performs better than the latter. We show that eliminating variable names from the output using De Bruijn indices increases parser performance. Adding silver training data boosts performance even further.

NEGOTIATING HEALTH: patients\u2019 and guardians\u2019 perspective on \u201cfailed\u201d patient-professional interactions in the context of the Swedish health care system

BackgroundSweden has a largely tax-funded health care system that aims at providing equal access for everyone. However, the individual’s perception and experience of the health care system remains a relevant topic for researchers. The aim of this study is to learn the patient’s perspective on how patients and professionals negotiate in the social context of the Swedish health care system.MethodsEight essays that had spontaneously been contributed to a medical writing contest were analyzed using narrative methods. Narratives were defined as a sequence of clauses that correspond to an order of events in the narrator’s biography. The analysis comprised a three-step process. First, the essays were read and narratives were extracted. Second, an agency analysis was performed. Third, an analysis of social positioning was employed.ResultsThe Swedish health care system provides the social context and background for negotiations between patients and professionals. The narrators position the protagonists of the illness narratives as either patients or guardians of underage patients. The protagonists meet health care representatives in negotiation situations. Due to the lack of emotional connection between the negotiating parties, impossible situations arise. False promises are made which ultimately result in the patients’ suffering. Thus, all negotiations failed from the narrators’ perspective.ConclusionThe narrators invited their audience to solve negotiation situations differently. This study discusses some actions that may help navigate negotiation situations: Health care providers should acknowledge the patient’s or guardian’s social position and dilemma, allow emotions, involve all parties in the decision-making process and manage expectations. Writing competitions may provide a tool for experience-based assessment of health care systems.

Semantically-Guided Goal-Sensitive Reasoning: Model Representation

SGGS (Semantically-Guided Goal-Sensitive reasoning) is a clausal theorem-proving method, which generalizes to first-order logic the Davis-Putnam-Loveland-Logemann procedure with conflict-driven clause learning (DPLL-CDCL). SGGS starts from an initial interpretation, and works towards modifying it into a model of a given set of clauses, reporting unsatisfiability if there is no model. The state of the search for a model is described by a structure, called SGGS clause sequence. We present SGGS clause sequences as a formalism to represent models; and we prove their properties related to the mechanisms of SGGS for clausal propagation, conflict solving, and conflict-driven model repair at the first-order level.

Ingush Grammar by Johanna Nichols (review)

Reviewed by: Ingush Grammar by Johanna Nichols John Colarusso Ingush Grammar. Johanna Nichols. University of California Publications in Linguistics 143. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. xviii + 806. $70.00 (paper). Ingush, spoken in the North Caucasus (a region within the Russian Federation), and among a small diaspora in the European Union and the United States, is a member of the Vai-Nakh subbranch of the Northeast Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family, and is closely related to Chechen. Johanna Nichols is the greatest authority on the Vai-Nakh languages of any scholar outside of Russia and this book, as she says, is a life’s work. It draws on a digitized data base, the Berkeley Ingush Corpus. This makes for authenticity, but also for some examples that are complex and difficult to follow. It is fair, indeed necessary, to characterize this work as massive. It covers every aspect of grammar, in most cases using numerous examples to illustrate points. The purpose of the grammar is twofold: to describe the Ingush language and to promote its maintenance. To this end, Nichols has devised a Latin-based orthography that has enabled her to record certain sound changes not represented by the traditional Cyrillic-based one. In spirit, the grammar is thoroughly descriptive. There are no rules within it and few efforts to discuss phenomena in an extended way. The material is therefore organized in a topical manner that is informed entirely by various descriptive categories. This has the advantage of freeing the grammar from the ebb and flow of theoretical fads, but [End Page 222] also casts it in a form that often overwhelms the reader with pure data or that hides interesting phenomena (or their absence) in areas where they are coherently placed, certainly, but are also somewhat unexpected. For example, instead of an analysis of transitivity in terms of syntactic processes, such effects are presented in terms of verbal valence and the case-marking of arguments (chapter 21, pp. 459–98). We are told there (p. 496) that Ingush has neither a passive nor an antipassive (“antiergative” would be better since this language is morphologically ergative). Ambitransitives and other mechanisms seem to fulfill such roles, but we must assume that the database was elicited in such a way as to preclude any oversights in such matters. The reader is left nonetheless with a sense of puzzlement about the evident lack of such familiar processes in a language. This is just one of numerous unusual features that should attract the attention of the curious theoretical linguist or typologist. The emphasis upon valence and case-marking may have a more profound justification than mere expository style. In “chaining” (a sequence of clauses in which only the last verb bears tense), the noun that controls subject deletion appears to be the one in nominative case (unglossed throughout the book). One can see this in her example (66) (p. 535), given here as (1). 1. Peat’mat–aa axcha=’a danna, aara–vealar Muusaa Peat’mat-dat money=& d.give.cv.ant out-v.go.witnessed.past Muusaa.nom ‘Musa gave money to Peat’mat and left.’ (Nonfinal clauses of the chaining construction are marked by the enclitic =’a, glossed here as ‘&’, and by one of several “converb” suffixes on the verb, in this case the anterior converb [cv.ant] form that denotes that the verb’s action precedes the action coded by the following verb. The glosses dat and nom denote dative and nominative case forms; d and v mark gender agreement of verbs with nominative arguments [see below].) Example (1) is a chaining of two phrases, something like that in (2). 2. Muusaa–z Peat’mat–aa axcha danna —Muusaa aara–vealar M-erg P-dat money.nom d.give.cv.ant — M.nom out-v.go.wp One might have expected the left-hand ergative subject (Muusaa–z, with choice of ergative suffix uncertain) to control deletion of the following nominative subject (Muusaa) once the two were joined, subject to subject control, but this is not the case, as it appears that (3) would be unacceptable. 3. *Muusaa–z Peat’mat–aa axcha=’a danna, ∅ aara–vealar...

Third Person Anaphoric Reference by Turkish Speakers of French

Rather than being a random sequence of unrelated sentences and clauses, a text must have solid sense relations between its units to be logically and semantically consistent for the reader-hearer. This logical and semantic consistency relating to the construction and configuration of sense in a text is called coherence by text linguists. Coherence is vital for a complete meaning and understanding of a text. As a cohesive device, reference, especially anaphoric reference, has been examined in many studies in recent years. This study aims to investigate anaphoric expressions by Turkish speakers of French in their spontaneous speech. 29 undergraduate students (23 females and 6 males) with 22-25 age range studying at a French language department in Turkey as well as five native speakers of French (three females and two males) with 35-55 age range participated in the study. French dubbed version of an animated cartoon, A Christmas Carol (Mickey et la Magie de Noël), was used as material in this study. The participants were asked to watch and then comment on various themes in the cartoon. Results revealed an overuse of third person pronouns, almost cumulative, in students. Possible reasons of this aggregate usage were then discussed in light of other studies in literature.

Exuberant Complexity: The Interplay of Morphology, Syntax, and Prosody in Central Alaskan Yup'ik

Exuberant Complexity: The Interplay of Morphology, Syntax, and Prosody in Central Alaskan Yup'ik

Tiden ødelægger alt. Om episodisk bagvendte fortællinger illustreret ved hjælp af Gaspar Noés Irréversible

TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING | This article focuses on what Seymour Chatman calls ‘sustained episodic reversal’ of narrative progressionR– that is, narratives in which the sequential, chronological order of the events is reversed and thereby ‘de-’ or ‘unnaturalized’. The article opens with a short discussion of the project of ‘unnatural narratology,’ and it is claimed that if our experience of a given narrative as ‘natural’ is grounded on its confirmation of the conventions for the mode or genre the narrative belongs to, then the task for an ‘unnatural narratology’ is to investigate the exceptions, that is, cases where conventions are broken and perhaps reformulated. Sustained episodic reversals of event sequences belong to this field of interest insofar as one of the basic features of ‘natural narrative’ is that the sequence of clauses (or more generally, the sjuzhet or discourse) is typically matched to the sequence of the events being narrated (the fabulaor story). The denaturalizing function and effect of the sustained reversal is illustrated through analysis of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002). It is shown that the reversal has radical consequencesfor the spectator’s (re)construction of the narrative’s fabula, and that it engages the reader in a game of post hoc ergo propter hoc and of narrative construction and deconstruction.

Typology of clausal boundary marking devices

An important executive function in “language design” is marking the boundaries of embedded clauses, and of clauses (and clause sequences) in the scopal domain of operators such as conditional ‘if’ and negation. Crosslinguistic comparison reveals a range of devices that have this effect, facilitating parsing by listeners. These include (i) prosody, (ii) constituent ordering, (iii) coordination, (iv) boundary-marking morphemes, and (v) continuous morphological indexation. The last two are emphasized in this article, with data from Australian and West African languages. Such boundary-marking functions deserve greater recognition in grammatical typology, especially since acoustic analogues have been well-studied by phoneticians.

A unified account of causal clause sequences in Mandarin Chinese and its implications

Causal clauses introduced by yīnwèi in Chinese can have either an initial position or a final position with regard to the main clause. While traditional grammars have treated the initial sequence as the default form, numerous discourse-based studies have shown just the opposite. However, few have attempted to explain why both sequence orders exist and why they have skewed distribution patterns across discourse registers. In this paper we use a telephone conversation corpus and a written Chinese corpus as data and provide a comprehensive analysis of the usage patterns. Our main findings are that final and initial causal clause sequences are ostensibly two different linguistic constructions, functioning as an interactional device and an information-sharing device, respectively. Quantitative distributional disparities are seen as a function of the discourse utilities of the linguistic devices in question and the communicative demands of different registers. From a cross-linguistic perspective, our findings raise questions about the ways in which universal and language-specific properties of clause sequencing can be better understood.

The NP-hardness of finding a directed acyclic graph for regular resolution

Let R be a resolution refutation, given as a sequence of clauses without explicit description of the underlying dag. Then, it is NP-complete to decide whether R is a regular resolution refutation.

“Vivid narrative use” and the meaning of the present perfect in spoken Australian English

This article examines the use of the present perfect (PP) in Australian English using a corpus of stories told during radio chat-show programs and news reports. We find that the PP is used (i) as a narrative tense in spoken texts both with and without narrative present (NarPres); (ii) in sequences of clauses expressing temporal progression; and (iii) with some definite temporal adverbials denoting past time. Such uses are either unusual or unacceptable in other English varieties. A systematic comparison of contexts where NarPres and narrative PP are used in oral narratives reveals that the PP replaces the NarPres predominantly with verbs denoting events. Usage in news reports, where the narrative interpretation is not possible, suggests that a temporal ambiguity exists in the current interpretation of PP sentences. Analysis of lexical aspect shows that the majority of verbs used in the narrative PP are both durative and contain a process part, a fact that helps explain the sense of vividness achieved. At the discourse level, use of the PP enables the speaker to present situations as tightly connected. Such extensions in usage show a possible path for change for a category that is known to be historically unstable in its meaning.

Satisfiability Decay along Conjunctions of Pseudo-Random Clauses

k-SAT is a fundamental constraint satisfaction problem. It involves S(m), the satisfaction set of the conjunction of m clauses, each clause a disjunction of k literals. The problem has many theoretical, algorithmic and practical aspects.When the clauses are chosen at random it is anticipated (but not fully proven) that, as the density parameter m/n (n the number of variables) grows, the transition of S(m) to being empty, is abrupt: It has a “sharp threshold”, with probability 1 − o(1).In this article we replace the random ensemble analysis by a pseudo-random one: Derive the decay rule for individual sequences of clauses, subject to combinatorial conditions, which in turn hold with probability 1 − o(1).This is carried out under the big relaxation that k is not constant but k = γ log n , or even r log log n . Then the decay of S is slow, “near-perfect” (like a radioactive decay), which entails sharp thresholds for the transition-time of S below any given level, down to S = ∅.

Narrative pre-construction

Before a narrative can be constructed, it must be pre-constructed by a cognitive process that begins with a decision that a given event is reportable. Pre-construction begins with this most reportable event and proceeds backwards in time to locate events that are linked causally each to the following one, a recursive process that ends with the location of the unreportable event — one that is not reportable in itself and needs no explanation. Comparison of such event chains with the sequence of narrative clauses actually produced will help to understand how the narrator re-organizes and transforms the events of real time in the finished narrative.

La „paraipotassi" conmain italiano antico: verso una tipologia sintattica della correlazione

“Parahypotaxis” is the name traditionally assigned to Old Italian sequences of dependent clauses with following main clauses introduced by e (“and”) or si (“thus”). Si is not a coordinating conjunction like e but an adverbial element, and for this reason the relevant examples should be taken away from the category; instead I would suggest also taking into account parahypotactic structures with main clauses introduced by the adversative coordinating conjunction ma (“but”), a kind of combination which in my opinion was underestimated in the traditional literature.

The Rhetorical Parsing of Unrestricted Texts: A Surface-based Approach

Coherent texts are not just simple sequences of clauses and sentences, but rather complex artifacts that have highly elaborate rhetorical structure. This paper explores the extent to which well-formed rhetorical structures can be automatically derived by means of surface-form-based algorithms. These algorithms identify discourse usages of cue phrases and break sentences into clauses, hypothesize rhetorical relations that hold among textual units, and produce valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms are empirically grounded in a corpus analysis of cue phrases and rely on a first-order formalization of rhetorical structure trees. The algorithms are evaluated both intrinsically and extrinsically. The intrinsic evaluation assesses the resemblance between automatically and manually constructed rhetorical structure trees. The extrinsic evaluation shows that automatically derived rhetorical structures can be successfully exploited in the context of text summarization.