Specific Syntactic Structures Research Articles

Information structure in Makhuwa: Electrophysiological evidence for a universal processing account

There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order to test this universalist hypothesis, we need to go beyond the more familiar linguistic strategies for marking focus, such as by means of intonation or specific syntactic structures (e.g., it-clefts). Therefore, in this study, we examine Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in northern Mozambique, which uniquely marks focus through verbal conjugation. The participants were presented with sentences that consisted of either a semantically anomalous constituent or a semantically nonanomalous constituent. Moreover, focus on this particular constituent could be either present or absent. We observed a consistent pattern: Focused information generated a more negative N400 response than the same information in nonfocus position. This demonstrates that regardless of how focus is marked, its consequence seems to result in an upregulation of processing of information that is in focus.

고등학교 영어 교과서 속 칭찬과 칭찬응답

Objectives The purpose of the paper was to analyze two speech acts (compliment and compliment response) in high school English textbooks and to find whether they were presented authentically and accurately according to L2 pragmatic norms.
 Methods Compliments in 8 differing textbooks were analyzed in terms of three aspects of compliment (syntactic structures, lexicals and topics), and compliment responses in textbooks were categorized according to four types of response (acceptance, amendment, rejection and non-acknowledgement). Then the analyzed compliments and compliment responses were compared with those acts made by English native speakers.
 Results Compliments in textbooks heavily relied on specific syntactic structures, used a variety of adjectives rather than a limited set of adjectives, and focused more on personality than physical appearance as compliment topics, which showed clear differences from what English native speakers do in their performance of compliments. Also unlike native speakers who prefer acceptance by responding positively to compliments, compliment responses in textbooks over-used non-acceptance strategies through refusal or non-acknowledgement.
 Conclusions Given these results, English textbooks should be developed based only on pragmatic norms of target language speakers, not intuitions or L1 knowledge of textbook developers.

The Syntactic Formulas Used in Food and Eating Proverbs in Jordanian Arabic: A Linguistic Analysis

The present study focuses on studying colloquial Jordanian proverbs and sayings, particularly food and saying proverbs. It employs a descriptive research design to examine the syntactic aspects of those proverbs and sayings. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather the data from the informants. The current study came up with a set of conclusions. Proverbs related to food and eating are similar to other kinds of proverbs regarding the utilization of syntactic aspects. Furthermore, it appears that these proverbs are limited to specific syntactic structures, namely, imperative, interrogative and verbless clauses in terms of their syntactic structures. To be more accurate, the verbless clause is the most 51 prominent structure (11 proverbs), then the imperative form (8 proverbs) and the interrogative (5 proverbs) one respectively.

Semejanzas y contrastes en los sistemas de puntuación y en el uso de la coma en las oraciones subordinadas sustantivas y de relativo en español y polaco

Similarities and contrasts in punctuation systems and in the use of commas in subordinate nouns and relative clauses in Spanish and Polish The objective of the article is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to briefly compare the definitions of punctuation marks in Spanish and Polish, to justify their syntactic-logical function from a diachronic point of view, and to compare the graphic representations of punctuation marks in both languages. On the other hand, it attempts to compare, in more detail, the use of the comma in subordinate substantive clauses and in relative clauses in both languages, starting from the Spanish syntax and based on the corpus from literary works. The conclusion shows that, between both languages, there are more similarities when it comes to defining punctuation marks than when comparing the use of commas in specific syntactic structures.

Relation Extraction of Domain Knowledge Entities for Safety Risk Management in Metro Construction Projects

Gathering experience and organizing knowledge from a large number of engineering construction projects is conducive to more effective and efficient safety risk management in construction projects. Metro construction practitioners often find it difficult to determine what professional knowledge is needed to establish better management. By constructing the knowledge structure of safety risk management, which is composed of domain knowledge entities (DKEs) and their hierarchical relations, practitioners can systematically master the knowledge of safety management, enhance safety management levels, and reduce the occurrence of accidents. Traditionally, domain knowledge structure was determined by experts, the mistakes occur due to the limitations of individual knowledge, and high time costs are unavoidable due to the massive amount of data. Therefore, in this study, we used a rule-based Chinese-language natural language processing (C-NLP) method to automatically extract the hierarchical relations between DKEs from a large dataset of unstructured text documents; we aimed to clarify the affiliation relationship and parallel relationship between DKEs. First, 68,817 sources of literature written in Chinese were collected. Next, the specific syntactic structures of relations of the DKEs were analyzed. Hierarchical extraction rules, including 16 hyponymic indicators and 8 appositive indicators, were revealed based on the linguistic characteristics. Then, the relations were extracted from test dataset. The precision and recall values were used to verify the model. Finally, the hierarchical relations of all the DKEs were extracted, and the knowledge structure was formed. The proposed method of hierarchical relation extraction contributes to the quick automatic construction of knowledge structures and minimizes expert bias. The knowledge structures can be used to guide safety training and can assist practitioners in safety risk management.

Licensing null arguments in recipes across languages

While much of the literature on recipe contexts has focused on English and the availability of null definite patients, this paper shows that both null agents and null patients are possible in recipes in a range of typologically and genetically diverse languages. It is proposed that null agents in recipes arise due to a variety of syntactic strategies, but null patients are uniformly licensed via a null topic in the left periphery in all the languages considered. These results indicate that while the recipe register does not directly dictate specific syntactic structures such as imperatives or null objects, the register can provide the pragmatic context necessary for certain syntactic processes, such as null topicalization.

Morfoskładnia w Słowniku właściwych użyć języka

This article outlines the theoretical basis of describing morphosyntactic problems in The Dictionary of Proper Uses of Language. The main point was to 1) show the principles of the reference grammatical model and 2) to describe the main phases of the procedure of language facts evaluation. In the first case, we refer to the dependency syntax model, which reflects the relationships between the elements of syntactic structures through assigning them to a specific type of binding. In the second case, in contrast to the traditional nor-mative model, the importance of the frequency of the specific syntactic structures is much more underlined. Ultimately, the combination of prevalence and frequency of language elements allows for constructing an objective assessment procedure.

Strategies and Tactics of Brand Formation (Based on the Material of Advertising Slogans in French, English, and Russian)

This article describes communicative strategies and tactics used by companies to build a brand. The diachronic method made it possible to observe brand development strategies. The analysis featured 104 advertising slogans of 11 companies. Strategies and tactics of communicative influence were identified according to Yu. Pirogova’s classification of communicative strategies. The authors see strategies as the goals of creating a company's image, while tactics depend on specific vocabulary, syntactic structures, and means of involving the addressee in the advertising discourse. The list of prevailing strategies included those implemented by the following tactics: Compliance with the needs of the addressee, Increasing brand value in the eyes of the consumer, Informing about brand products, Intimization, Product metaphorization and Influence on the senses. The strategy of rationality was embodied by the tactics of Popularization of a healthy lifestyle and Demonstration of practical benefits. The value-oriented strategy was characterized by the tactic of Informing about brand products. The research results contribute to a better understanding of strategies and tactics in business communication and can be used as demonstration and evidentiary material in teaching cultural linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as for copywriting purposes.

Translation of Slang

The object of analysis in this article is the Macedonian translation of Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. It is considered to be one of the most controversial novels of the last century due to the themes the author elaborates, but also due to the use of mid-twentieth-century slang then common to young Americans. For that reason, our study will be conducted through the prism of Berman’s theory of text deformation systems, and special attention will be paid to the destruction of vernacular networks and tendency towards ennoblement. We will also take into consideration Eco’s views on translation as an act of negotiation, being aware that when translating slang the translator is obliged to negotiate between domestication and foreignisation. In order to analyse the offered equivalents, we will also examine the use of different translation techniques and, in certain contexts, offer more appropriate solutions from a translatological point of view. The research will be done on phonological, lexical, idiomatic and syntactic levels. On a phonological level, we will examine the solutions offered for deletion of phonemes and word contraction. On a lexical level, the focus will be placed on the slang vocabulary, but the study will also include interjections, particles as well as the use of augmentatives and diminutives in the target text. We will also analyse different translation solutions offered for idioms and some specific syntactic structures. The analysis reveals both successful solutions and also, certain inadequacies, thus preparing the way for improved translations in the future.

Relaciones de complementación en toba del este de Formosa (Argentina): hacia un enfoque funcional de la subordinación

The aim of this paper is to analyze the complement relations in Toba of eastern Formosa (Argentina). We compare complement clauses with constructions which are called “symmetrical serial verbs”. They are two very close types of complex clauses since both share arguments, has two or more finite verbs and the simple juxtaposition of non-embedded clauses without any subordinators. This shows that the notion of embedding is inappropriate in a cross-linguistic perspective. We proposed functional definition of subordination that frees the notion of any specific syntactic correlate structure. In accordance with Cristófaro (2003) it will be argued that these phenomena should be explained instead in terms of the cognitive status of dependent SoAs, as defined by the Asymmetry Assumption. This research is based on a corpus composed of five hours of oral narrative texts and fifty elicited clauses collected by fieldwork carried out in Toba communities from eastern Formosa (Argentina).

What Limits Our Capacity to Process Nested Long-Range Dependencies in Sentence Comprehension?

Sentence comprehension requires inferring, from a sequence of words, the structure of syntactic relationships that bind these words into a semantic representation. Our limited ability to build some specific syntactic structures, such as nested center-embedded clauses (e.g., “The dog that the cat that the mouse bit chased ran away”), suggests a striking capacity limitation of sentence processing, and thus offers a window to understand how the human brain processes sentences. Here, we review the main hypotheses proposed in psycholinguistics to explain such capacity limitation. We then introduce an alternative approach, derived from our recent work on artificial neural networks optimized for language modeling, and predict that capacity limitation derives from the emergence of sparse and feature-specific syntactic units. Unlike psycholinguistic theories, our neural network-based framework provides precise capacity-limit predictions without making any a priori assumptions about the form of the grammar or parser. Finally, we discuss how our framework may clarify the mechanistic underpinning of language processing and its limitations in the human brain.

Modulating "Surprise" with Syntax: A Study on Negative Sentences and Eye-Movement Recording.

This work focuses on a particular case of negative sentences, the Surprise Negation sentences (SNEGs). SNEGs belong to the class of expletive negation sentences, i.e., they are affirmative in meaning but involve a clausal negation. A clear example is offered by Italian: 'Enonmi è scesa dal treno Maria?!' (let. 'and not CLITIC.to_me is got off-the train Mary' = 'The surprise was that Maria got off the train!'). From a theoretical point of view, the interpretation of SNEGs as affirmative can be derived from their specific syntactic and semantic structure. Here we offer an implementation of the visual world paradigm to test how SNEGs are interpreted. Participants listened to affirmative, negative or expletive negative clauses while four objects (two relevant-either expected or unexpected-and two unrelated) were shown on the screen and their eye movements were recorded. Growth Curve Analysis showed that the fixation patterns to the relevant objects were very similar for affirmative and expletive negative sentences, while striking differences were observed between negative and affirmative sentences. These results showed that negation does play a different role in the mental representation of a sentence, depending on its syntactic derivation. Moreover, we also found that, compared to affirmative sentences, SNEGs require higher processing efforts due to both their syntactic complexity and pragmatic integration, with slower response time and lower accuracy.

Existential Sentences as a Characteristic Syntactic Feature of I. A. Bunin’s Poetic Texts

In this article, existential sentences are examined as a syntactic dominant of I. A. Bunin’s lyrical poetry. The interest in the originality of the syntax of Nobel laureate’s literary texts is due to the lack of research on this issue, linguists’ focus on the aesthetic salience of the vocabulary, its expressive properties and combination potential, as well as stylistic figures and tropes. Meanwhile, it is the writer’s selection of specific syntactic structures for the implementation of the idea, the representation of key ideas and concepts that reflect his personality and the peculiarities of his perception of the surrounding world. The author refers to Bunin’s poems from 1886–1917 and 1918–1953 published in Bunin’s collected works in 9 volumes. In the writer’s poetic oeuvre, existential sentences are regularly used. Despite the traditional structure that underlies them and is represented by three meanings (‘the object of being’, ‘being’, and ‘area of being’), the richness of the lexical content of each of the main components stands out. As a result, existential sentences become a universal form used to represent completely different situations in the author’s individual worldview: the existence of natural objects in space, meteorological phenomena, events, time periods, artifacts, etc.; physical states of the surrounding world; psychological states of the subject. Acting as a semantic core of a poetic text, existential sentences do not have a fixed place in it, and are used as a lyrical beginning, an interposed element, or an ending in its structure. In each position, their use is conceptually significant. It is established that the peculiarity of existential sentences in Bunin’s lyrical poetry is their syntactic unconditionality (attachment to three registers of speech, i.e. reproductive, informative, and generative) and polyfunctionality (performing the pictorial, characterising and concluding, and generalising functions).

Visual Skeleton and Reparative Attention for Part-of-Speech image captioning system

In this paper, we propose a novel system for image caption generation that can adapt the language models for word generation to specific syntactic structure of sentences and visual skeleton of image. Moreover, it is capable of capturing the attentive regions of image corresponding to the predicting words. Our system consists of three modules: Visual Skeleton Vector (VSV) generation module, Visual Reparative Attention (VRA) mechanism and Part-of-Speech (POS) language model. We adopt Faster R-CNN to generate an objective sentence, which can reflect the visual skeleton (the salient objects and their relations) of an image. And we propose an encode–decode model to the procedure of generating VSV for each image, which is used to initialize our language model. VRA is a two-step strategy to analyze what and where our visual perception system should attend to. Besides, we first adopt the Stanford Parser to work out the syntactic structure of sentences, and explicitly utilize this syntactic information to our POS language model. Each of these modules can enhance the relationships between textual and visual information. The effectiveness of our entire system is verified on two classical datasets (MSCOCO and Flickr30k). Our system is on par with or better than compared state-of-the-art published methods and achieve superior performance on COCO captioning Leaderboard.

Nominal Constructions in Modern Standard Arabic With Reference to English

The aim of this study is to investigate nominal constructions of modern standard Arabic in terms of their types, their patterns and selectional restrictions and compare them with their counterparts in English so as to arrive at points that will be productive for pedagogical and translation purposes. The analysis of the data focuses on morphsyntactic processes to see in order to show the constructions morphologically as one word nominal or syntactically as a group of nouns in nominal positions. The objective of this study is to provide an account on a specific syntactic structure with special reference to English, in efforts to promote the importance of modern standard Arabic studies as an appropriate mean to better understand the standard and formal form of a language. The study concludes with the investigation as well as the main conclusions reached and offers a suggestion for further studies.

Resultative constructions in Uyghur as verbal adjunction

This paper analyzes resultative constructions in Uyghur as an adjunction relationship between two verbal projections. Uyghur resultatives differ from previously analyzed resultatives, including those in typologically related Altaic languages (see Shibagaki 2011), in that both predicates must match share a subject. One verb encodes a resultative meaning while the other elaborates the manner of achieving the result state, but the ordering is flexible. The only ordering requirement is that the final verb and the object form a telic verb constellation. The unique structure of this construction points to the conclusion that the notion of ‘resultative construction’ does not correspond to any specific syntactic structure crosslinguistically.

Female voices in the context of Irish emigration: A linguistic analysis of gender differences in private correspondence

The past few decades have witnessed an increasing interest in private correspondence as a source of information for linguistic analysis. Letter collections represent an invaluable source of evidence at a historical and sociological level and, it has been argued, they are also unique sources for the documentation of language development. Recent research has shown how this type of written data can help in analyzing the correlation between social status/gender and language change. Other uses of personal letters have served to document the presence and development of specific syntactic structures. Within the realm of this genre, the value of emigrant letters is enormous, given that they reflect language features that were transported away from the environments in which they initially emerged. This paper takes a bottom-up approach to the analysis of the language of Irish emigrants and concentrates specifically on gender differences in the use of certain linguistic devices. By applying the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics, this study analyses the expression of closeness, spontaneity and solidarity in the use of a few significant features such as pragmatic markers and pronominal forms. The data under investigation is a corpus of letters written between 1844 and 1886 by members of two families who emigrated from Ireland to Argentina. The paper also argues that, given that letter writing is often at the intersection between spoken and written discourse, this type of approach can help us reconstruct the most characteristic properties of spoken discourse in the past.

Kein Sprichwort ohne Strukturformel? Vorgeprägte syntaktische Schemata in aktuell gebräuchlichen bulgarischen Sprichwörtern

Abstract In general, the majority of native or near-native speakers of a certain language can easily identify a sentence as a proverb. They are able to do this due to different structural features, among others. These specific syntactic structures appear quite frequently in proverbs and serve as a warning sign that the particular text is deviant from the surrounding discourse and is, most probably, a proverb. The so-called proverbial formulae, e.g. Better X, than Y; When you X (you) Y; No X, no Y etc., are considered to be one of the most easily recognizable proverbial characteristics. They often serve as basic syntactic models and lend themselves readily for the insertion of new contents (cf. Taylor 1985: 16). In his study Structural Aspects of Proverbs, Mac Coinnigh has shown that proverbs from different languages, for instance English, Estonian, Finnish, German and Swedish, share the same or a very similar syntactic architecture (Mac Coinnigh 2015: 117–120). The Irish linguist, however, did not consider examples from the Bulgarian language. Therefore, one of the main aims of the present paper is to investigate which of the structural models recorded in previous paremiological works (Kuusi 1987 (1966); Röhrich and Mieder 1977; Permjakov 1979; Mieder 2006a and 2012 etc.) can be identified in traditional Bulgarian proverbs and in what frequency. Moreover, the study intends to test the widespread hypothesis that humorous proverb innovations and variations (anti-proverbs) are often created based on proverbial formulae (Litovkina 2015: 333). For the purposes of the study, two corpora of 649 proverbs and 370 anti-proverbs were analyzed. The corpora have been previously built by Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Gotthardt (Hrisztova-Gotthardt 2006 and 2010b; Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Gotthardt 2011 and 2012). The qualitative analysis has shown that 14 out of the 16 structural formulae listed by Röhrich and Mieder (1977) and Mieder (2006a and 2012) can be found in Bulgarian proverbs. The most common formula was He who Xs, Ys, serving as a syntactic model for 48 different commonly used proverbs. In case of anti-proverbs, the present structural model could be clearly identified in 30 out of 370 texts. The most prominent formulae were He who Xs, Ys, X is Y and Better X than Y.

Nominal vs. Verbal -ing Constructions and the Development of the English Progressive

In this paper, I examine nominal and verbal - ing forms in English and discuss aspects of their historical development. In particular, I investigate certain differences between verbal and nominal gerunds in comparison with the present participle with respect to what I call here gradience in verbal traits . I put forward the following hypothesis. Diachronically, the nominal component of both nominal and verbal gerunds relates to the nominal origin of both forms, namely an Old English derived nominal in - ung/-ing . The 'more verbal' component of the verbal gerund relates to certain aspects of the diachronic development of the English progressive. The changes in the development of the progressive in fact resulted in the emergence of the verbal gerund with parallel continuation of the Old English nominal in - ung/-ing and the Old English participle. After reviewing the development of English progressive, I will present diachronic and synchronic evidence that the original nominal pattern of the progressive acquired verbal traits. I will then show how this influenced the development of the two gerund types. I will then turn to a structural analysis of the constructions under investigation, which can be summarized as follows: synchronically, the gradience in verbal traits is accounted for on the basis of variation in the internal functional structure of the elements under investigation. On this view, the presence of verbal characteristics is linked to the presence of certain structural layers standardly associated with verbal clauses. Deverbal formations split into several subtypes depending on the number and the type of the layers these contain. This is expressed within a system that views word/category formation as a result of processes operating in specific syntactic structures, which contain the root as the minimal element that enters word formation (Alexiadou 2001, Alexiadou, Iordachioaia & Soare 2010, Borer 2013, Embick 2010, Marantz 1997, and others).

A Bamana Commentary on Sūrat al-Wāqiʿa (Q. 56): A Linguistic and Stylistic Analysis

Among the Manding and other long-Islamised peoples of West Africa, advanced religious instruction is based on the oral translation of Arabic books into a local language; the Qur'an may, furthermore, be interpreted in a ceremonial setting in Ramaḍān. This article discusses some of the most important linguistic, stylistic and content features of West African oral tafsīr as exemplified by a Bamana commentary collected near Segu, Mali, in 1998 (Bamana being one of the several closely related Manding languages). The Qur'anic text is parsed into meaningful segments as it is read aloud, each segment being immediately followed by its rendering in Bamana, and in some instances, also by ampler explanations in this language. Manding scholarly language is characterised both by specific syntactic structures and a specialised, technical vocabulary – constituted in part by Arabic loanwords and a set of key technical terms drawn from and shared by several African languages, but primarily of words created from Manding roots through compounding and/or derivation, or through attribution of specialised meanings to existing terms. The Bamana discourse transcribed and translated here is remarkable for its style, which draws on several of the rhetorical resources of this language, including culturally meaningful images, onomatopoeia and a high incidence of derived terms. Its substantive content is largely based on the Tafsīr al-Jalālayn and its meta-commentary by Aḥmad al-Ṣāwī (d. 1825).