Subject Of Sentence Research Articles

Conceptualisation of event roles in L1 and L2 by Japanese learners of English: a cross-linguistic comparison of perspectives of event construal

Abstract Events can be perceived from different perspectives. Langacker, Ronald W. (1990. Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics 1. 5–38) typologically categorised the perspectives in event construal as subjective construal and objective construal based on how egocentric a perspective is. Compared with Western languages, such as English, Japanese is argued to be a language that favours subjective construal. However, little empirical work has tested this assumption directly. We investigated whether Japanese and English construe events from different perspectives by focusing on the linguistic encodings of event roles “agent” and “patient”. Our findings show that when selecting event roles as sentence subjects, Japanese speakers prioritised animacy over agency whereas English speakers emphasised agency (while also considering animacy). This can be attributed to the different preferences of the two languages for the degree of egocentricity in event construal. Furthermore, we explored how L1-based conceptualisation of event roles influences the linguistic expressions of event roles in L2. Our results demonstrate that Japanese learners of English had difficulty reconceptualising event roles in L2 English. This study adds a piece of quantitative evidence to the cognitive linguistics theory on subjective construal in Japanese and questions the universality of the agent-first hypothesis in the Thematic Hierarchy.

Scaffolding Learners’ Comprehension in Extensive Reading

The present study serves as an insightful teaching summary that focuses on students’ reading comprehension, through investigating the effectiveness and application of a teacher’s scaffolding in a one-semester extensive reading course. The teacher provides scaffolding throughout an entire semester of the extensive reading course. Students’ performance on multiple-choice questions of the first as well as the last unit has been collected and analyzed to determine whether they have enhanced their reading comprehension abilities or not. Based on the both qualitative and quantitative data, the findings reveal that students’ comprehension competence of extensive reading materials has notably increased after a semester of the teacher’s scaffolding. The result suggests that reading skills such as guessing, outlining, identifying topic sentence of each paragraph and determining the main idea of a passage can be applied as effective scaffolding techniques in extensive reading courses.

N400 or P600?—A Systematic Review of ERP Studies on Gender Stereotype Violations

ABSTRACTPsycholinguistic studies using the event‐related brain potential (ERP) technique have found both N400 and P600 effects for gender stereotype violations. The finding of a P600 effect for this type of world knowledge violation is surprizing given that this component is traditionally associated with syntactic violations. In this paper, we set out to systematically analyse design‐ and task patterns of ERP studies investigating gender stereotype violations. Based on our review, we propose a scheme that predicts a P600 effect for gender stereotype violations for stimuli comprising entire sentences, and specifically when the gender stereotype serves to establish coherence in inferences (i.e., expecting a specific referent gender or a stereotype‐appropriate behaviour of the sentence subject based on the gender stereotype information). We predict an N400 effect for gender stereotype information that does not serve to establish coherence in inferences, as well as in priming paradigms. By extension, our predictive scheme suggests that the N400 may reflect a hybrid process of semantic retrieval and integration, while the P600 may reflect a cognitive process of error monitoring, and mental revision. Our study can aid in the interpretation of previous findings and inform future studies investigating gender stereotyping.

Multi-Grained Radiology Report Generation With Sentence-Level Image-Language Contrastive Learning.

The automatic generation of accurate radiology reports is of great clinical importance and has drawn growing research interest. However, it is still a challenging task due to the imbalance between normal and abnormal descriptions and the multi-sentence and multi-topic nature of radiology reports. These features result in significant challenges to generating accurate descriptions for medical images, especially the important abnormal findings. Previous methods to tackle these problems rely heavily on extra manual annotations, which are expensive to acquire. We propose a multi-grained report generation framework incorporating sentence-level image-sentence contrastive learning, which does not require any extra labeling but effectively learns knowledge from the image-report pairs. We first introduce contrastive learning as an auxiliary task for image feature learning. Different from previous contrastive methods, we exploit the multi-topic nature of imaging reports and perform fine-grained contrastive learning by extracting sentence topics and contents and contrasting between sentence contents and refined image contents guided by sentence topics. This forces the model to learn distinct abnormal image features for each specific topic. During generation, we use two decoders to first generate coarse sentence topics and then the fine-grained text of each sentence. We directly supervise the intermediate topics using sentence topics learned by our contrastive objective. This strengthens the generation constraint and enables independent fine-tuning of the decoders using reinforcement learning, which further boosts model performance. Experiments on two large-scale datasets MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, evaluated by both language generation metrics and clinical accuracy.

Cohesion and Coherence Problems Among Non-Native English Students’ Writing Essays

In order to properly organize ideas and express significant information, non-native students sometimes struggle with cohesion and coherence in their essays. This study examines the body of literature to pinpoint frequent problems non-native writers have while trying to make their writing coherent and cohesive. This study aims to assess the literature on cohesion and coherence issues in essays written by non-native students, with a particular focus on a number of components, including referential and relational coherence, theme and rheme, and grammatical and lexical cohesion. The literature study looks at papers that address problems with coherence and cohesiveness in student writing. It groups the results according to several coherence and cohesion criteria, such as referential and relational coherence, theme and rheme, and grammatical and lexical cohesion. An analysis of the essays shows common problems that non-native students face. Accompanying difficulties with collocation and diction are lexical cohesion faults, like as repetition and restricted vocabulary utilization. Issues with conjunction usage and text arrangement are examples of grammatical cohesion issues. Coherence is an issue that students struggle with; they have trouble coming up with thesis statements, topic sentences, introductions, and conclusion that are all coherent. Recognizing these difficulties emphasizes the necessity of focused interventions to improve non-native students' writing abilities. The development of instruments such as Tool for Automatic Cohesion Analysis (TAACO) presents encouraging paths for methodically evaluating and resolving cohesion concerns. These insights can be used by educators to create coherence and cohesiveness-enhancing tactics for non-native essay writers, which will ultimately result in clearer, more coherent writing.

Reflexives and politeness: possessive pronouns in Russian imperative sentences

In Russian, a specialized reflexive possessive pronoun must be used to indicate coreference between the possessor and the subject. However, it has been observed that in the first and second person plural, the reflexivization rule is often violated, and a non-reflexive possessive is used for subject coreference. Existing studies do not distinguish between singular formal and plural informal readings in the second person, assuming no difference between the two contexts. Furthermore, there is limited knowledge regarding the use of possessives in imperative contexts, as previous research has primarily focused on indicatives.This article aims to investigate the use of possessive pronouns in both formal and informal imperative contexts by addressing two questions. First, how often is a non-reflexive possessive used to indicate coreference with the subject in Russian imperative sentences? Second, what combination of semantic and pragmatic factors allows its use? Apart from the semantic factors that are well documented in the existing literature (referentiality, animacy and alienability of the possessum), we will consider three pragmatic dimensions of politeness that have not been considered so far: form or address (informal ty\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$ty$\\end{document} / formal Vy\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$Vy$\\end{document}), type of imperative (speaker- / hearer-oriented) and verbal aspect (perfective / imperfective).The study analyzed the use of possessive pronouns in imperatives in the spoken subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus using generalized linear mixed models and random forests. The findings suggest that the choice of possessive is strongly influenced by the form of address (ty\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$ty$\\end{document} / Vy\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$Vy$\\end{document}). When addressing the listener with the informal ty\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$ty$\\end{document}, a reflexive possessive is almost exclusively used. When addressing the listener with the formal Vy\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$Vy$\\end{document}, both possessives are used equally often. The choice between them depends on several factors, including the referentiality and alienability of the possessum, the type of imperative, and the verbal aspect. The non-reflexive form is preferred when the possessum is referential, the imperative is speaker-oriented, and, to a lesser extent, when the possessum is alienable and the verb is in the perfective aspect. Additionally, some verbs such as ‘give’ and ‘show’ strongly prefer a non-reflexive possessive.The results suggest that a reflexive possessive has become the default for subject coreference in Russian second person singular informal contexts. In formal contexts, however, the change is still ongoing, and a non-reflexive possessive is used to express the referential uniqueness of the possessum and to convey negative politeness towards the addressee.

The Flexibility of Placing the Subject in Arabic Sentences: A Study of Syntactic Word Order Restrictions and their Application to Arabic Grammar

This research addresses the possibility of placing the subject in a pre-verb position in verbal sentences in Arabic, without necessarily stipulating that if the subject is preposed before the verb, it becomes a topic. In this way, the subject is a non-overt pronoun positioned within or after the verb, because the subject is conventionally acknowledged by grammarians to move freely to various post-verbal positions, but never pre-verbally. The research considers the views and opinions of linguists and grammarians who have dealt with this issue in detail, presenting a discussion of these views to reveal the strict restrictions imposed on the movement of the subject. It is hoped that this will contribute to the facilitation of teaching and learning Arabic grammar. It will also revitalize the discussion of views in Arabic grammatical traditions to try to establish new grammatical principles that contemporary linguists may adopt when reformulating the rules of Arabic grammar. This endeavor may simplify the task of learning rules and contribute to presenting them more flexibly and plausibly.

German demonstrative pronouns differ in their sensitivity to discourse and sentence topics

German has two demonstrative pronoun series: the short form der, die, das, and the long form dieser, diese, dieses. Both forms can be used anaphorically, and they contrast with the personal pronouns er, sie, es in that they refer to an antecedent that is less prominent at that point in the discourse when the discourse provides different potential antecedents. Demonstrative pronouns are typically used in the preverbal position in a German sentence, i.e., the topic position. Thus, they are assumed to be topic shifters (from a non-topical antecedent to the topical argument in the current sentence). However, der can be repeated, yielding topic chains, thus referring back to a topical antecedent, while this is not the case for dieser. In this article, we argue that der and dieser both contribute to topic management, but they do this in different ways: der is a marker of a sentence topic, while dieser is a marker of discourse topic shift. We present the results of two experiments that compare the use of personal pronouns with either demonstrative pronoun manipulating sentence topic or discourse topic. First, both experiments show that the personal pronoun is not sensitive to either type of topichood of its antecedent. Second, Experiment 1 shows that both demonstrative pronouns prefer a context where discourse topic and sentence topic are shifted. Third, Experiment 2 shows that only dieser prefers a context with a shifted discourse topic, but der is not sensitive to discourse topichood alone. We take the results as supporting our claim that the two demonstratives have different discourse functions: der marks a sentence topic, while dieser is a shifter (and marker) of the discourse topic.

ANALYZING THE PRE-WRITING PROCESSES OF STUDENT-AUTHORED WRITINGS PUBLISHED IN MASS PRINT MEDIA

This research was motivated by students writing published in mass print media. The researcher wants to find ways the students apply the pre-writing process in student publication in print media such as newspapers. This research is qualitative research with a case study method that aims to analyze and discover how the students apply the pre-writing process before publication. The researcher found two students had applied all the stages and one student had not fully applied all the stages in pre-writing. The stages that have been taken are choosing a topic and gathering ideas. Meanwhile, the steps that have not been applied are organizing ideas, defining a topic sentence, and outlining. The conclusion is the students applied all the stages and the students not fully apply the stages in pre-writing can both publish their writing in print media

Lead News Coverage of Buddhist Monks in The Nation Online Newspaper: A Syntactic Analysis

This research conducts Lead News Coverage of Buddhist Monks in The Nation Online Newspaper: A Syntactic Analysis. It delves into syntactic sentence types, phrase-level structures in subjects and predicates, and word-level structures within the same context. The qualitative study utilizes data collected from The Nation's website over a decade (2013–2023) to analyze sentence types categorized into simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex, revealing a preference for simple (51.79%) and complex sentences (39.29%), indicating a journalistic inclination towards clarity and in-depth information presentation. Phrase-level analysis highlights a dominance of Noun Phrases (43.26%) and Prepositional Phrases (32.01%), underscoring their role in establishing relational context and subjects in sentences. Word-level analysis uncovers a significant use of determiners (44.07%) and nouns (38.45%), emphasizing their essential roles in conveying meaning and specifying noun phrases. The study's findings suggest a strategic balance in The Nation's syntactic choices, reflecting a nuanced approach to ensuring readability while providing comprehensive information, aligning with broader trends in digital journalism. This research contributes to understanding the syntactic strategies in journalism, particularly in the context of online media and its representation of religious figures.

On the Absence of Certain Island Effects in Mende

The distinction between weak and strong islands has been extensively explored in the literature from both a descriptive and analytical perspective. In this paper, I document and analyze island constructions and constraints in Mende, an understudied Mande language spoken in Sierra Leone. Mende has both weak islands (left branch and wh-islands) and strong islands (adjunct clauses, sentential subjects, and coordinate structures). Intriguingly, it has a third class of islands, that I call mixed islands which show a subject–non-subject asymmetry in allowing for movement out of relative clauses, only when they modify the subject. As such, subject-modifying RCs cannot be classified as (strong/weak) islands in Mende. This is the first systematic work on islands and island constraints in the Mande language family, and, as such, it brings novel data from an understudied language family to bear on our understanding of A-bar dependencies and the study of island escape in African languages. It also calls into question a neat paradigm of cross-linguistic island constraints. Importantly, this work also lays down a baseline for future research on island constraints in the broader Mande language family. In order to discuss island constraints, this paper also lays out the first analysis of relative clauses in Mende, while integrating new research on the left periphery, focus constructions, and wh-constructions.

Ecuadorian Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions of the Challenges Faced When Writing Persuasive Essays

Objective: This study aimed to identify undergraduate polytechnic students’ perceptions of the challenges they face when writing persuasive essays in their English classes. Methods: This research followed a quantitative design utilizing SPSS V.20 to conduct factor and descriptive analysis to answer the three research questions established. One hundred and thirteen students who enrolled in one of the last English courses taught at the university participated in the study. Data were collected using a researcher-designed five-point Likert-scale survey. Results: Data were treated with Factor Analysis to determine the challenges students face when writing persuasive essays. Principal component analysis was used for data reduction, and five dimensions were identified, “Introduction”, “Body Paragraphs”, “Conclusion”, “Sentence Structure”, and “Communicative Achievement”. The top five issues that polytechnic undergraduate students deal with are issues with word order, forgetting to write the call-to-action, not using adequate formality all the time in their sentences, failing to write the claim in the thesis statement, and writing topic sentences that are not related to the thesis statement. Also, the dimension that causes more challenges overall is “Body paragraphs”. Conclusion: This paper contributes to the literature in the following senses. Students recognized that writing their topic sentences usually takes a long time. Also, participants claimed that forgetting to write the call-to-action is a challenge they face when writing their essays. Another issue determined in this paper that contributes to the existing literature regards the poor skills students have in summarizing the essay’s contents when they write the conclusion of their papers. The last addition this paper makes to the literature is that “Body Paragraphs” has been established as the factor that learners believe is the hardest for them to cope with when writing a persuasive essay.

The Effect of Cognitive Feedback on Improving Unity of Essays in Peer Review of English Expository Writing

Drawing upon the peer scaffolding theory and the monitoring hypothesis, this study investigates how cognitive feedback during peer review sessions on the Peerceptiv platform affects the coherence of English expository essays. Specifically, it examines the impact of cognitive feedback on enhancing the integration of essays and the alignment between topic sentences and both the overarching topic and supporting examples. The findings reveal that cognitive feedback significantly contributes to the revision process by fostering greater unity within essays. It also enhances the connection between topic sentences and their respective topics and examples, thereby improving the overall relevance and quality of the essays.

AN INVESTIGATING OF YEMEN EFL LEARNERS’ WRITING PROPLEMS

This study attempts to investigate the writing problems encountered by Yemeni EFL learners. The sample of the study comprised 70 undergraduate students from Sana’a University. The data were collected using a questionnaire to identify Yemeni EFL Learners’ Writing Problems. The results of the study indicated that students have some crucial problems when writing a paragraph or an essay. The results showed that the participants faced difficulty in planning or outlining the points before writing a paragraph or an essay. Furthermore, they faced difficulties in developing a good topic sentence for a paragraph and a thesis statement for an essay, writing supporting sentences to support the topic sentence, organizing ideas together in a unified and coherent manner, and writing a concluding sentence/concluding paragraph that summarizes the points of a paragraph or an essay. The study proposed some recommendations and suggestions to help Yemeni EFL learners to overcome their writing problems.

명시적 중심 문장의 유무에 따른 글 내용 이해의 차이

명시적 중심 문장의 유무에 따른 글 내용 이해의 차이

The inconsistency of sentential subjects’ analysis in English

The article presents a critical analysis of approaches to defining sentential subjects as non-canonical syntactic units consisting of a finite or a non-finite clause. The major issue discussed is the position of the sentential subject in the tree structure debating whether it lands in subject position as a result of movement or it is base-generated in the subject position. Additionally, a claim is made that sentential subjects are not true subjects, but rather topics, suggesting that a different constituent occupies the canonical subject position. Therefore, sentential subjects appear to behave akin to both topics and regular subjects. They cannot generally occur in subject positions in embedded clauses, subject-auxiliary inversions and after topicalised units, yet they trigger subject-verb agreement. When considering these two alternatives, the author finds it important to distinguish between the pragmatic function and the syntactic position. Though subjects have been studied in various linguistic schools, a common consistent opinion on the sentential subject status has not been reached. The discrepancies in existing views are revealed in similar examples analyzed as grammatical or ungrammatical within different scientific frameworks. Distributional and transformational tests, along with the study of the information structure of the utterance aimed at proving the acceptability / unacceptability of sentential subjects show mixed results and sometimes contradictory analyses. The research suggests that ungrammatical sentential units are normally neutralised by alternative structures that function as syntactic blockers. To address the complexity in exploring sentential subject,the author advocates for a multifactor approach, which takes into account structural, distributional, weight ratio, semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic characteristics of subjects in a variety of configurations to ensure understanding the degree of subjecthood of syntactic structures and their systemic arrangement from the core to the periphery. In conclusion, the article emphasizes the need for a comprehensive approach to studying sentential subjects, acknowledging their multifaceted nature and aiming for a systemic understanding of subjecthood within linguistic frameworks.

Differentiation of the Subject and the Complement in French Sentences: Difficulties of Translation

This article deals with the problem of the non-prepositional members of the French narrative sentence. The main goal is to clarify the basic principles of the positioning of the subject and the complement, their interchangeability, the principles of localization in written speech. Within the framework of the work, descriptive, comparativehistorical, comparative and semantic-stylistic methods of language research were used. The results of the analysis of grammatical reference books and fiction of the XVIII-XX centuries made it possible to prove the connection of the position of the subject and the complement with their syntactic function. The semantic component in the expression of syntactic relations is analyzed. Advanced hypothesis were verified with the examples of four translations of the classic Russian novel of the XIX century. The research will expand the comprehension of subject and complement in the French narrative sentence and, perhaps, encourage linguists to further study this phenomenon not only in analytical, but also in inflectional languages.

Image paragraph captioning with topic clustering and topic shift prediction

Image paragraph captioning involves generating a semantically coherent paragraph describing an image’s visual content. The selection and shifting of sentence topics are critical when a human describes an image. However, previous hierarchical image paragraph captioning methods have not fully explored or utilized sentence topics. In particular, the continuous and implicit modeling of topics in these methods makes it difficult to supervise the topic prediction process explicitly. We propose a new method called topic clustering and topic shift prediction (TCTSP) to solve this problem. Topic clustering (TC) in the sentence embedding space generates semantically explicit and discrete topic labels that can be directly used to supervise topic prediction. By introducing a topic shift probability matrix that characterizes human topic shift patterns, topic shift prediction (TSP) predicts subsequent topics that are both logical and consistent with human habits based on visual features and language context. TCTSP can be combined with various image paragraph captioning model structures to improve performance. Extensive experiments were conducted on the Stanford image paragraph dataset, and superior results were reported compared with previous state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, TCTSP improved the consensus-based image description evaluation (CIDEr) performance of image paragraph captioning to 41.67%. The codes are available at https://github.com/tt0059/TCTSP.

On the rapid use of verb-control information in sentence processing.

A central topic in psycholinguistics is the study of how and when the parser assigns an antecedent to referentially-dependent elements. One such referentially-dependent element is the null subject of non-finite clauses. The aim of the present study was to examine the role of verb control information in the assignment of an antecedent to such a null subject. The results so far are inconclusive. Some authors argue that verb control information has a late influence, whereas others argue that such verb-specific information has a very rapid influence. We report a self-paced reading study in Spanish in which verb type (subject vs. object control) and grammaticality (grammatical vs. ungrammatical) were manipulated. The grammaticality manipulation was carried out by introducing a person anomaly at the infinitive itself, and not at a later word (e.g., "Te prometí/aconsejé adelgazarme/adelgazarte cinco quilos en un mes." Literal translation, "I to you promised/advised to losemyself/yourself five kilos in a month"). With such a manipulation we can examine whether at the first possible point (i.e., the infinitive) verb control information was used to assign the correct antecedent (i.e., the subject in sentences with a subject-control verb, and the object in sentences with an object-control verb) to PRO. The results showed that at the infinitive there was a main effect of grammaticality, meaning that the correct antecedent has already been assigned to PRO. The present findings are consistent with models that assume that verb-specific information plays an important role in the initial stages of sentence processing.

Specifične teličke konstrukcije sa predlogom do u srpskom

This paper examines the specifics of the Serbian preposition do [to] in so-called telic constructions, which express the involvement of the sentence subject in collective activities related to a location (ground). The authors demonstrate that, unlike the prototypical prepositions u [in], na [on], and kod [at], the Serbian preposition do indicates, due to its reinterpretation as expressing dynamic spatial relations, that the subject has reached a particular location (or area of the ground) with the intention of achieving a specific goal, but that their presence at this location will be relatively brief. This characteristic suggests that the subject's intention can be connected to a telic interpretation. If the intention cannot be associated with this interpretation, the reasons for the subject's behavior can be inferred from the context or explicitly stated.