Subject-verb-object Research Articles

An analytical study of word-order patterns in Standard Arabic simple sentence

The main focus of the study is to analyze the simple sentence structure and its word-order patterns of Standard Arabic syntactically. Main methods concern description and comparison of word-order patterns observed. Primarily the current study deals with some differentiations of the terms on sentence types and word-order patterns described by both medieval grammarians and modern linguists. Moreover, the so called Sībawayhian theory of ʿamil’ also provides some explanations of sentence structures and word-order patterns in Standard Arabic. Simple sentences are highlighted to examine the occasions for using different patterns and where they are commonly found, along with examples to facilitate the explanation and use of these patterns. It is essential to point out that Standard Arabic is considered to be a language with a flexible word-order, which is why there exist word-order patterns of both VOS and SVO languages, though the latter is more frequently used.

Elicitation of particular grammatical structures in speeches for interpreting research: enhancing ecological validity of experimental research in interpreting

ABSTRACT In many experiments with simultaneous interpreting (SI), researchers use source speeches that are not only written and read aloud, but also pre-recorded, reducing their ecological validity. This study proposes a method to obtain speeches that are suited for experimental research, but with lower levels of input control. It examines the effect of written cues in a PowerPoint presentation with varying constituent orders and varying ratios of explicit verbal input. The study analyses to what extent the cues are capable of eliciting SOV (subject – object – verb) constituent orders in Dutch speakers, a well-known trigger of cognitive load in SI. We focus on two types of subordinate clauses: adverbial and content clauses. The results reveal that the extent to which SOV is elicited in speakers is highest when the (S)OV order is present in the written input. However, other types of input, with lower levels of input control, such as verbless structures, are also seen to elicit to 50% of SOV in speeches.

AGRAMMATIC PATIENT’S DUAL CODING PROCESS IN SENTENCE COMPREHENSION

This paper reports on a study on the dual coding process involved in an agrammatic patient when comprehending sentences using a sentence to picture matching test. The test was undertaken at The National Stroke Association of Malaysia (NASAM), Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The current study employs the theory of Paivio’s (1991) Dual Coding Theory (DCT) as an explanation for the agrammatic patient’s ability to comprehend active and passive sentences and adopts an influential hypothesis by Grodzinsky’s (1990) Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) concerning agrammatism that characterises agrammatic patients as a good comprehender of Subject Verb Object (SVO) sentence structure, the active sentence but as bad comprehenders of Object Verb Subject (OVS) sentence structure, the passive sentences. A comprehension test, the Sentence to Picture Matching Test designed by Christensen (2001) has been adopted in this study to examine the suitability of dual coding theory as an explanation for the agrammatic patient’s comprehension ability. The performance of the patient’s comprehension pattern in this study supports the account of TDH and in general, the findings of this study suggest that sentence to picture matching test could be used to investigate the dual coding process of the agrammatic patient.

THE PEOPLE OF KAO AND THEIR LANGUAGE IN THE NORTHERN COAST OF HALMAHERA

There are two major language families existing in Indonesia. Those are Austronesian and Papuan languages. Most of Austronesian language speakers live in all over Indonesia. However, the other one, the Non-Austronesian or Papuan language speakers live in some parts of Eastern Indonesia such as North Maluku, Papua, West Papua and East Nusa Tenggara. The focus of this study will lie on one of the language communities in Halmahera island, North Maluku, namely Kao which is on the northern coast of the island. Based on the researches conducted from 2013 up to 2014, it is shown that Kao language which is categorized as Papuan language has been affected by Austronesian feature. It seems that the environment where Kao people live has influenced their life especially their language. One of the influences is on the structure of their language which has changed and shown the domination of the Austronesian characteristic in the case of word order, that is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). Meanwhile, the existence of lingua franca as an inter-ethnic communication tool such as Ternate Malay which is also Austronesian language has contributed to form the present language of Kao as well. This article aims to explain the Kao people and their language which has started to be influenced by Austronesian feature.

Linguistic system and sociolinguistic environment as competing factors in linguistic variation: A typological approach

AbstractThis paper brings together typological and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation. Its main aim is to evaluate the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the number of cases in the world’s languages. I model word order as a language internal predictor; it is well-known that, for instance, languages with verb-final word order (that is, languages in which both nominal arguments precede the main lexical verb) tend to develop complex case systems more often than languages with SVO word order do. I model population size and the proportion of second language speakers in the speech community as sociolinguistic predictors; these factors have been suggested recently to influence the distribution of the number of cases in the world’s languages. Modelling the data with generalized linear mixed effects modelling suggests an interaction between the number of cases, word order, and the proportion of second language speakers on the one hand, and between the number of cases, word order, and population size, on the other. This kind of complex interactions have not been previously reported in typological research wherefore they call for more complex explanations than previously suggested for cross-linguistic variation.

Exploring Sentence Diversity at the Boundary of Typical and Impaired Language Abilities.

PurposeThis review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment.MethodThe first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and intervention and reviews findings from empirical studies of sentence diversity. In the second half, subject and verb diversity in three simple sentence types are explored in an archival database of toddlers with varying levels of grammatical outcomes at 36 months of age: low average, mild/moderate delay, and severe delay.ResultsDescriptive findings from the archival database replicated previous developmental patterns. All toddlers with low-average language abilities produced diverse simple sentences by 30 months of age and exhibited greater sentence diversity with first-person I-subjects before third-person subjects. Third-person subject diversity emerged in a developmental sequence, increasing in one-argument copula contexts and one-argument subject–verb sentences before two-argument subject–verb–object sentences. This developmental pattern held across all three outcome groups. Third-person subjects were least diverse for children with severe grammatical delays and were absent in all sentence contexts for two children with severe delays at 36 months.ConclusionsSentence diversity increases gradually and expands in predictable patterns. Understanding these developmental patterns may help identify and treat children who display unexpected difficulty combining different subjects and verbs in flexible ways.Supplemental Material and Presentation Video https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12915320

Interactive Text Graph Mining with a Prolog-Based Dialog Engine

AbstractOn top of a neural network-based dependency parser and a graph-based natural language processing module, we design a Prolog-based dialog engine that explores interactively a ranked fact database extracted from a text document. We reorganize dependency graphs to focus on the most relevant content elements of a sentence and integrate sentence identifiers as graph nodes. Additionally, after ranking the graph, we take advantage of the implicit semantic information that dependency links and WordNet bring in the form of subject–verb–object, “is-a” and “part-of” relations. Working on the Prolog facts and their inferred consequences, the dialog engine specializes the text graph with respect to a query and reveals interactively the document’s most relevant content elements. The open-source code of the integrated system is available at https://github.com/ptarau/DeepRank.

Abstractions made of exemplars or ‘You’re all right, and I’ve changed my mind’: Response to commentators

In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b) in the service of language use, re-represent these exemplars at multiple levels of abstraction, as simulated by computational neural-network models such as BERT, ELMo and GPT-3. Whilst I maintain that traditional linguistic abstractions (e.g. a DETERMINER category; SUBJECT VERB OBJECT word order) are no more than human-readable approximations of the type of abstractions formed by both human and artificial multiple-layer networks, I express hope that the abstractions-made-of-exemplars position can point the way towards a truce in the language acquisition wars: We were all right all along, just focusing on different levels of abstraction.

Age of sign language acquisition has lifelong effect on syntactic preferences in sign language users

Acquisition of natural language has been shown to fundamentally impact both one’s ability to use the first language and the ability to learn subsequent languages later in life. Sign languages offer a unique perspective on this issue because Deaf signers receive access to signed input at varying ages. The majority acquires sign language in (early) childhood, but some learn sign language later—a situation that is drastically different from that of spoken language acquisition. To investigate the effect of age of sign language acquisition and its potential interplay with age in signers, we examined grammatical acceptability ratings and reaction time measures in a group of Deaf signers (age range = 28–58 years) with early (0–3 years) or later (4–7 years) acquisition of sign language in childhood. Behavioral responses to grammatical word order variations (subject–object–verb [SOV] vs. object–subject–verb [OSV]) were examined in sentences that included (1) simple sentences, (2) topicalized sentences, and (3) sentences involving manual classifier constructions, uniquely characteristic of sign languages. Overall, older participants responded more slowly. Age of acquisition had subtle effects on acceptability ratings, whereby the direction of the effect depended on the specific linguistic structure.

Word order preferences and the effect of phrasal length in SOV languages: evidence from sentence production in Persian

Heaviness (or phrasal length) has been shown to trigger mirror-image constituent ordering preferences in head-initial and head-final languages (heavy-late vs. heavy-first). These preferences are commonly attributed to a general cognitive pressure for processing efficiency obtained by minimizing the overall head-dependents linear distance – measured as the distance between the verb and the head of its left/right-most complement (Hawkins’s Minimizing Domains) or as the sum of the distances between the verb and its complements (Dependency Length Minimization). The alternative language-specific accessibility-based production account, that considers longer constituents to be conceptually more accessible and views heavy-first as a salient-first preference, is dismissed because it implies differential sentence production in SOV and SVO languages. This paper studies the effect of phrasal length in Persian, a flexible SOV language displaying mixed head direction and differential object marking. We investigated the effect of linear distance as well as the effect of conceptual enrichment in two sentence production experiments. Our results provide clear evidence that support DLM while undermining Hawkins’s MiD. However, they also show that some length effects cannot be captured by a dependency-distance-minimizing model and the conceptual accessibility hypothesis also needs to be taken into account to explain ordering preferences in Persian. Importantly, our findings indicate that distance minimization has a less strong effect in Persian than previously shown for other SOV languages.

The role of animacy in metaphor processing of Mandarin Chinese: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) study

Abstract Many ERP studies have highlighted processing difficulty for animacy violation in language, more so than non-violated sentences. However, all of these findings were for non-figurative language, and studies have rarely looked at the figurative language, such as metaphors involving animacy violation, which could be integrated to make novel and acceptable meaning. The present study aimed at assessing the role of animacy in metaphorical comprehension of Mandarin Chinese. ERPs were recorded as healthy participants read metaphor or literal sentences with animate or inanimate actors as sentence-initial noun, while the target words were measured at the verb and the second argument (object) of the sentences with subject-verb-object (SVO) structure. As expected, the animacy violations elicited a significant N400 effect by the target verb in the metaphor with inanimate initial-nouns. At the objects, the N400 amplitudes associated with metaphors were not regulated by animacy. Subsequently, the analysis revealed a significant difference in the P600 amplitudes between inanimate and animate metaphorical conditions. The metaphors with inanimate actor elicited an attenuated P600 as compared with the animate counterparts and converged to the same level as literal sentences, reflecting the less effortful metaphor-relevant mapping process. These results suggest that animacy violation may facilitate the integration of the reanalysis stage for metaphorical comprehension, and the conflict strength (animacy violation vs. no animacy violation) modulates the time course of metaphor processing in Mandarin Chinese. The present study yields new insights into the role of animacy in the online linguistic comprehension.

A Diagnostic Chomskian View to Arabic Asymmetry

Agreement asymmetry is one of the significant linguistic phenomena that Arab and Western linguists (Ghaly,1995; Parkinson, 1995; Benmamoun,1998; Collins, 2001; Dayf, 1986) and Aoun, 1994) have tried to account for within the framework of the Government and Binding theory. They focused upon the number asymmetry in different varieties in Arabic. Most linguists assert that in different types of Arabic there is always gender agreement between the subject and the verb. This study aims at giving much evidence for the lack of gender agreement in Modern Standard Arabic(MSA), and at accounting this gender asymmetry within the framework of the Minimality Program (Chomsky, 1995). The sample consists of 37 sentences collected from some Arabic textbooks. To analyze the data collected, a qualitative diagnostic research design was adopted. One of the essential findings of this study is that there is no gender agreement in Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) sentences between the post-verbal subject and the verb if the subject is (a) an unreal feminine Noun Phrase (NP), (b) a broken plural NP, (c) an inanimate collective NP, (d) a collective NP, (e) a regular sound feminine plural NP, (f) an irregular sound feminine plural NP, (g) an irregular sound masculine plural NP, and (h) a real feminine NP separated from its verb by any category. This study concludes that the head C in VSO sentences in MSA carries a weak gender feature represented as [-Strong]. Therefore, in VSO sentences, if the verb disagrees with its subject in gender, it will move from V to I and then to C because C is [-Strong]. A final conclusion is that the head I in VSO sentences in MSA carries a strong gender feature, represented as [+Strong]. Therefore, in VSO sentences, if the verb and its subject agree in gender, the verb will move from V to I; it will not move further

The Role of Case Marking and Word Order in Cross‐Linguistic Structural Priming in Late L2 Acquisition

AbstractSeveral studies found cross‐linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order, for transitive and ditransitive structures. We varied these features in an artificial language learning paradigm, using three different artificial language versions in a between‐subjects design. Priming was assessed between Dutch (no overt case marking, SVO word order) and a) an SVO order version, b) a case marking version, and c) an SOV order version. Similar within‐language and cross‐linguistic priming was found in all versions for transitives, indicating that cross‐linguistic structural priming was not hindered. In contrast, for ditransitives we found similar within‐language priming for all versions, but no cross‐linguistic priming. The finding that cross‐linguistic priming is possible between languages that vary in morphological marking or word order, is compatible with studies showing cross‐linguistic priming between natural languages that differ on these dimensions.

The Syntax and Semantics of Clause-Chaining in Toposa

Some languages make extensive use of clause-chaining. According to Payne (1997: 312), clause-chaining has been documented for languages in the highlands of New Guinea, Australia and the Americas. In Africa it is found in Ethiopia (Völlmin et al. 2007), in Kiswahili, a Bantu language (Hopper 1979: 213-215, Mungania 2018), in Anuak, a Western Nilotic language (Longacre 1990: 88-90 and 2007: 418) and in Toposa, a VSO language of South Sudan (Schröder 2011). Clause-chaining is characterized by a long combination of non-finite clauses that have operator dependency on a finite clause, and it usually signals foregrounded information in discourse (see also Dooley 2010: 3). Besides its discourse function, clause-chaining exhibits morpho-syntactic and semantic properties as demonstrated in this paper with examples from Toposa, an Eastern Nilotic language.

Syntax and processing in Seediq: a behavioral study

Syntactic properties such as word orders are a major factor determining the difficulty of a sentence. In SO-type languages where the subject (S) precedes the object (O) in canonical word order, there is clear evidence that the SO word order is preferred over the OS word order. We investigate to what extent this SO bias is maintained even in typologically diverse languages like Truku, an Austronesian language, in which the Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) word order is canonical and a syntactically basic structure, and SVO is the derived word order and a syntactically more complex structure. It is important to investigate word order preferences in Truku because such inquiries allow us to determine to what extent these widely observed processing preferences are grounded in properties of the linguistic system and/or somewhat more general human cognitive properties. The syntactic complexity account predicts that, in Truku, the derived SVO word order should be more costly, while the saliency account predicts that the word orders in which an agent precedes a theme is preferred. Our auditory comprehension experiment showed that the OS word order was preferred by native speakers of Truku. This indicates that the often-observed SO preference is not a universal feature of language. Furthermore, the lack of a clear indication of the agent-before-theme preference suggests a correlation between the voice property of a given language and the importance of the saliency factor.

The Comparative Method in Synchronic Linguistics: The Case of Word Order

In this article I discuss the comparative method in formal linguistics when applied to word order phenomena in Italian, English and German. I argue that the comparison has to rest on sound theoretical basis in order to reach interesting conclusions. These languages might prima facie all look Subject- Verb-Object – SVO – languages, with some puzzling issues arising in German. At a closer look however, I will show that English and Italian pattern together as their basic word order – i.e., SVO – goes, as opposed to German, an SOV language. Conversely, English and German pattern together with respect to a property typical, even if not exclusively so, of Germanic languages, i.e. Verb Second.

The focus function and derivation of object displacement in Standard Arabic

The aim of this paper is to provide a minimalist account of object displacement in terms of its trigger and its landing site in the syntactic tree structure of Standard Arabic (SA) clauses. The account utilizes Chomsky's concept of edge feature (EF) within the Minimalist Program and Rizzi's Split-CP analysis. In terms of its data scope, the paper is limited to a class of data identified as displaying the Verb – Object – Subject (VOS) order wherein the object is a full DP (not a pronominal clitic), and appears in a position preceding the subject. It will be argued that this order is the result of focus displacement of the object from its canonical position inside VP across the subject DP to the outer periphery of vP. The result of this operation is a marked order VOS driven by the vP edge feature (EF) to achieve the pragmatic function of focus.

Narrow-syntax and post-spellout movements: evidence from the syntax of idiomatic expressions in Arabic varieties

This research paper investigates the syntax of idiomatic expressions consisting of the verb and the object/accompanying adjunct (VP idiomatic expressions, henceforth) in two Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA). It shows that in order for VP idiomatic expressions to obtain their idiomatic reading, the predominate pattern of the word order in each variety (i.e., the VSO word order in MSA, but the SVO word order in JA) should be used; otherwise idiomaticity is not possible (with few exceptional cases discussed in the paper). We offer evidence that this restriction on the idiomaticity of VP idiomatic expressions in Arabic varieties follows from a proposed condition that the subject (even if it is not part of the idiomatic expression) and the verb (in addition to the object) should maintain a structurally local relation with each other in the narrow syntax, i.e. they should be included in the vP phase before the spell-out point. The paper shows that the movement of the verb to T0 in MSA and JA or lack thereof does not break idiomaticity, nor does the movement of the subject to Spec,TP in JA. These facts are taken as an indication that a distinction between narrow-syntax and post-spellout movements should be made. This provides evidence for proposals that distinguish between pre- and post-spellout movements (cf. Chomsky 2001, among others).

Word Order Typology Interacts With Linguistic Complexity: A Cross-Linguistic Corpus Study.

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer-i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross-linguistically (Ferrer-i Cancho, 2014; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017). This implies that on average languages avoid inefficient or complex structures for simpler structures. But a number of studies in psycholinguistics (Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Vasishth, Suckow, Lewis, & Kern, 2010) show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb-final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) or Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for "limited adaptability" to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation.

Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension.

Syntactic priming is known to facilitate comprehension of the target sentence if the syntactic structure of the target sentence aligns with the structure of the prime (Branigan et al., 2005; Tooley and Traxler, 2010). Such a processing facilitation is understood to be constrained due to factors such as lexical overlap between the prime and the target, frequency of the prime structure, etc. Syntactic priming in SOV languages is also understood to be influenced by similar constraints (Arai, 2012). Sentence comprehension in SOV languages is known to be incremental and predictive. Such a top-down parsing process involves establishing various syntactic relations based on the linguistic cues of a sentence and the role of preverbal case-markers in achieving this is known to be critical. Given the evidence of syntactic priming during comprehension in these languages, this aspect of the comprehension process and its effect on syntactic priming becomes important. In this work, we show that syntactic priming during comprehension is affected by the probability of using the prime structure while parsing the target sentence. If the prime structure has a low probability given the sentential cues (e.g., nominal case-markers) in the target sentence, then the chances of persisting with the prime structure in the target reduces. Our work demonstrates the role of structural complexity of the target with regard to syntactic priming during comprehension and highlights that syntactic priming is modulated by an overarching preference of the parser to avoid rare structures.