Subject-verb-object Research Articles

Comparing the Order of Multi-Layered Modifiers in English, Chinese and Vietnamese in Language Teaching

From the cross-linguistic perspective and cognitive linguistic theory, this study has analysed the rules of multi-layered modifiers in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese, pointing out their common points and differences. Although all three languages belong to the SVO (subject-verb-object) type but modifiers in English and Chinese are in front of the core words, which shows that English and Chinese belong to the language in the left branch, but modifiers in Vietnamese, they are behind the core words which shows that Vietnamese belongs to the right branch. All the three languages have one thing in common, whether they are on the left or on the right branch, in which modifiers have the closest relationship with the core words that will stand nearest to them. Other modifiers that have a non-intimate relationship with the core words will stand further away from them. Thus, mastering this feature of the three types of languages will help in language teaching and learning.

A Rose by Any Other Verb: The Effect of Expectations and Word Category on Processing Effort in Situated Sentence Comprehension.

Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a (more or less) expected critical word. According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word (e.g., a verb or an adjective), which then reduces processing effort on the critical word (e.g., a referential noun). Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the reduction of uncertainty (i.e., the generation of expectations) simply does not modulate processing effort-or whether the particular subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure used in these studies (which emphasizes the referential nature of the noun as direct pointer to visually co-present objects) accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment 1 (a Visual World Paradigm study) and Experiment 2 (a Grammaticality Maze study) both replicate the effect found in previous work (i.e., the effect of visually-situated context on the word which uniquely identifies the referent), albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word—whether it be a noun or a verb—reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations.

Gender dissimilarity between subject and object facilitates online-comprehension of agent–patient–relations in German: An eye-tracking study with 6- to 10-year-old monolingual children

In this eye-tracking study, we examined whether gender dissimilarity between the case-marked subject and object noun phrases in a subject-verb-object (SVO) or object-verb-subject sentence (OVS) was used to predict thematic roles (agent and patient) and facilitate the grammatical analyses needed for thematic role assignment. Forty-two German-speaking 6- to 10-year-old children looked at two drawings depicting an action between two figures while listening to a sentence. One drawing matched the sentence, but the other showed the figures’ thematic roles reversed. For half of the sentences, each figure's thematic role could be predicted shortly after stimulus onset from the gender of the first word (an article) due to gender dissimilarity between the subject and the object. For the other sentences, children had to wait at least until they heard the first noun of the sentence. Our results confirmed that the children shifted their looks earlier and more confidently to the target in SVO sentences with gender-dissimilar noun phrases. Results for OVS sentences were not so clear-cut: a sentence-final facilitation effect of gender dissimilarity was only visible subsequently when agent and patient were analyzed separately. Our findings are discussed with respect to different approaches to the role of gender processing in sentence comprehension.

Reciprocality in Papuan Malay

Reciprocality, also known as reciprocal situation or reciprocal constructions, constitutes an expression which describes both the forms and meaning of an activity embodying a mutual relation. Papuan Malay, a pidginized lingua franca in Western New Guinea, has three types of constructions expressing reciprocality: lexical reciprocals, prototypical syntactic reciprocals with the baku construction, and syntactic reciprocals with the discontinuous satu ... satu construction. Some additional constructions are considered to be reciprocal-like. These reciprocal constructions vary in their argument structure and valence operations. In argument structure, most constructions allow two kinds of argument structure: Type 1, which takes only a subject argument, and Type 2, which takes both a subject and object, and follows the basic SVO word order. However, the object in the Type 2 construction becomes oblique-like, indicating reduced transitivity in order to accommodate the concept of mutual relation. In valence operations, reciprocals can undergo both valence decreasing and valence increasing operations. In addition, some reciprocal constructions require subject and object to be syntactically retained, even though semantically they represent the same agent-patient/goal mutual relation.

Inversion and word order in English: A functional perspective

English is an SVO (Subject, Verb, Object) word order language. This canonical SVO pattern is the default unmarked word-order configuration typical of English, which makes this language to be classified under the typology of SVO languages. However, driven by the major purpose of language as an instrument of human communication and social interaction, and as a semantic system for making meanings, addressors sometimes depart in their discourse from this basic canonical order of constituents where a grammaticalized system like inversion takes place, resulting in inverted constructions. Through testing and developing the Degree of Focus Hypothesis, proposed by Huffman (1993), this study, which employed a mixed methods research design, sought to explore the communicative and semantic values of inversion; and the pragmalinguistc functions of preposing, i.e., clause-initial adjuncts, to the pragmatic process of communication. The study confirmed the Degree of Focus Hypothesis where the hypothesized notion of concentration of attention stemming from inversion was found to be applicable. The paper stressed that what triggers inversion or non-inversion is a certain communicative effect such as focus rather than a relation of formal determination where one element determines mechanically the form or appearance of another. A contribution to linguistic and educational research, the paper, therefore, highlighted the importance of a human factor in the functioning of language and emphasized the need to break away from grammar-based teaching (traditional grammar) to discourse-based language teaching (communicative grammar) where languaging rather than language should be the focus of language teaching and learning.

Machine translation using deep learning for universal networking language based on their structure

This paper presents a deep learning-based machine translation (MT) system that translates a sentence of subject-object-verb (SOV) structured language into subject-verb-object (SVO) structured language. This system uses recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and Encodings. Encode embedded RNNs generate a set of numbers from the input sentence, where the second RNNs generate the output from these sets of numbers. Three popular datasets of SOV structured language i.e., EMILLE corpus, Prothom-Alo corpus and Punjabi Monolingual Text Corpus ILCI-II are used as two different case-study to validate. In our experimental case-study 1, for the EMILLE corpus and Prothom-Alo corpus dataset, we have achieved 0.742, 4.11 and 0.18, respectively as Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU), NIST (metric) and tertiary entrance rank scores. Another case-study for Punjabi Monolingual Text Corpus ILCI-II dataset achieved a BLEU score of 0.75. Our results can be compared with the state-of-the-art results.

THE ANALYSIS OF NOUN DERIVED FROM ADJECTIVE FOUND IN BARACK OBAMA’S SPEECH AND THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR

The study is qualitative research. This research deals with noun derived from adjective found in Barack Obama’s speech. The objectives of the research are to find out the position of the noun derived from adjectives in the sentence pattern found in Barack Obama’s speech and to describe the application of noun derived from adjective to teach grammar. In collecting the data, the researchers read the script, identified noun derived from adjectives, analysed the data related to the theory of noun derived from the adjective, analyzing the data quantitatively and qualitatively, applied the finding to teach the grammar at eleventh grade student of Senior High School. The result shows that there are three positions of the noun derived from adjectives based on sentence pattern. They are 30 SVO (Subject + Verb + Object) (50%), 18 SVA ( Subject + Verb + Adverb ) (30%), 12 SVC ( Subject + Verb + Complement ) (20%). The teacher could apply in pre teaching by giving description of Barrack Obama’s characters, whilst teaching by giving the explanation about part of speech and post teaching by strengthening the use of noun derived from adjective as one of part of speech in which it becomes the most important piece in a sentence.

Deriving preverbal position in a verb-final language: the case of Hittite

The paper presents an analysis of clause structure in Hittite, a coherently head-final language with SOV word order and an elaborated preverbal position hosting various functional elements of the clause. We argue that the best approach to capturing these phenomena is to assume a universally right-branching structure coupled with phrasal movement driven by selectional feature checking under adjacency of relevant heads.

On the Syntax of ʔanna and ʔan in Modern Standard Arabic: A Phase-based Approach

This study seeks to identify the syntactic motivation and problems of the associations of the complementizers ʔanna and ʔan with word order and case marking in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) with reference to the Minimalist Program (MP), the updated version of MP Phase Theory, and the split CP hypothesis of Rizzi (1997. “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery.” In Elements of Grammar, edited by Liliane Haegeman, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. “On the Position ‘Int(Errogative)’ in the Left Periphery of the Clause.” In Current Studies in Italian Syntax, edited by Guglielmo Cinque, and Giampaolo Salvi, 287–296. Amsterdam: Elsevier). The clause following ʔanna must take SVO word order, while ʔan requires VSO word order. This study analyzes not only the syntactic motivation for the word order governed by ʔanna and ʔan but also related syntactic [issues and reasons for ʔanna and ʔan complementizers in both SVO and VSO word order] based on a minimalist approach and Rizzi's approach, especially for the problem of double case marking; a generative approach is needed to solve certain syntactic problems (e.g., assigning accusative case and subjunctive mood). Finally, this study argues that in MSA, ʔan sits in a non-phasal phrase, whereas ʔanna occurs in ʔannaP and FinitenessP (FinP). Furthermore, case marking assignment is based on ECM for ʔanna and on locality for ʔan.

Case Role in the Urhobo Language

This paper examines case role in the Urhobo language. Case theory is used as theoretical frame work, the specific objectives is to investigate type of cases and to relate cases roles to argument structures in Urhobo. The study reveals that in the Urhobo language every lexically headed NP must receive case from a case assigner. The Case theory requires that the case assigner govern the NP to which its assigns case. Tense, verb and preposition are case assigners. The infinitive ‘to’ and the passive participles are not case assigners. Case assignment can take place only when the case assigner and the NP to which it assigns case bear a structural relation to one another. It also reveals that irrespective of the theory and its arguments, Urhobo verbs are the basses and centre of its expansion of its constructions. This research also finds out, that the argument structures identified in universal grammar (UG) align with the argument structure of the Urhobo language; the verb assigns arguments to the noun phrases in a sentence. This is traced to the structure of the Urhobo language which is subject-verb-object (SVO). Finally, the study reveals that the function of the nominative case is to mark the subject of the sentence; the vocative is the case of address; the accusative is used to mark the object of a transitive verb; the genitive is the case of possession, ablative case is to mark the instrument with which something is done and the dative case marks the indirect object in the Urhobo language.

Old English Syntax and Its Relation to German

At first glance, the syntax of ancient Old English appears reminiscent of the syntax of the Present-Day German language. A number of shared syntactic traits such as Subject Object Verb constituent order, Verb Second, and a complicated inflectional system have caused the two languages to be compared by scholars, who often have referred to German as simply a present-day version of the now far-gone Old English. Exploring both similarities and dissimilarities of the two languages, this article examines the relationship between the two languages’ syntax to show that although structurally similar once, modern-day English has lost most of the syntactic traits linking it to the German language and their common Proto-Germanic roots. These syntactical differences not only show that Old English was never just a modern-day variant of German but also show that the two languages are developing in separate directions – or at least in separate paces.

Betrayal through obedience: on the history of the unusual inflectional chain in Siyuewu Khroskyabs

AbstractThis paper focuses on the verbal inflection chain of Siyuewu Khroskyabs, a Gyalrongic language (Trans-Himalayan). Siyuewu Khroskyabs goes against two general typological tendencies: first, as an SOV language, it shows an overwhelming preference for prefixes, which is rarely reported typologically; second, the inflectional prefixes in the outer slots are older than those in the inner slots, which is the reverse case of most languages. In this paper, I will first identify distinct historical layers within the inflectional prefixes, and then focus on two of the prefixes,də-‘even’ andɕə-‘q’ whose evolutionary pathways are relatively clear. The essential part of the hypotheses is that the prefixes originate from enclitics which could be attached to the end of a preverbal chain, originally loosely attached to the verb stem. The preverbal chain later became tightly attached to the verbal stem and eventually became a part of it as a chain of prefixes. As a result, the original enclitics are reanalysed as prefixes. The integration of preverbal morphemes is responsible for the prefixing preference in Modern Siyuewu Khroskyabs. However, despite this superficial prefixing preference, Siyuewu Khroskyabs underlyingly favours postposed morphemes. By following the general suffixing tendency, this language finally managed to create a typologically rare, overwhelmingly prefixing verbal template.

Number Dissimilarity Effects in Object-Initial Sentence Comprehension by German-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of the structural intervention account for German, number agreement should assist the correct interpretation of object-initial sentences. Method This study examines German-speaking children with SLI and a control group of age-matched typically developing children on their sentence comprehension skills for auditory presented subject-verb-object and object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences. The sentences were manipulated with respect to the number properties of the noun phrases (e.g., one plural and one singular, or both singular) and the number agreement of the verb. Results The group of children with SLI demonstrated poorer comprehension accuracy in comparison to controls. Comprehension difficulty was limited to OVS sentences among children with SLI. In addition, children with SLI comprehended OVS sentences in which number agreement (with plural subject and verb inflection) indicated the noncanonical word order more accurately than OVS sentences with two singular noun phrases and therein did not differ from controls. Conclusion The study suggests that number agreement helps alleviate the difficulty with OVS sentences and enhances comprehension accuracy, despite the finding that children with SLI exhibit lower comprehension accuracy and more heterogeneous interindividual differences, relative to controls. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13718029.

A Concept-based Approach to the Instruction of the Chinese ba-construction

This study explores a concept-based instruction approach to promoting second languagedevelopment of the ba-construction, a known difficult area, by six collegelevelEnglish learners of Chinese in a two-month enrichment program. We developedSCOBAs to explain the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic constraints of the baconstruction,as well as its similarities and differences from the canonical Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and topicalization Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) word orders. Theparticipants’ productive use of the construction was assessed with two translations(one on paper and one on the computer) and a cartoon description task followinga pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest format. Semi-structured interviews and theparticipants’ verbalization data were also collected. By comparing the participants’gain scores in relation to maximum possible scores, we found that the participants had made large gains throughout the study and retained much of the gain two weeks after the posttest. The microgenetic analyses of the participants’ production data showed improvement in the use of resultative verb compound, perfective marker–le, and the placement of directional particles. Finally, the verbalizations data indicated improvement in conceptual understanding of the ba-construction in terms of its scope, i.e., not just the physical placement of objects, but the accentuation of the results of the verbal action.

The role of discourse in long-distance dependency formation

ABSTRACT Sentences with filler-gap dependency are more difficult to process than those without, as reflected by event-related brain potentials (ERPs) such as sustained left anterior negativity (SLAN). The cognitive processes underlying SLAN may support associating a filler with a temporally distant gap in syntactic representation. Alternatively, processing filler-gap dependencies in the absence of a supportive context involves additional discourse processing. The present study conducted an ERP experiment that manipulated syntactic complexity (subject–object–verb [SOV] and object–subject–verb [OSV]) and discourse (the supportive and non-supportive context) in Japanese. The result showed a SLAN in OSV relative to SOV in the non-supportive but not the supportive context, which suggests that the difficulty involved in processing OSV in Japanese is largely due to a pragmatic factor. The present study contributes to a better understanding of how the language-processing system builds long-distance dependency by interacting with the memory system.

Use of Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy to Assess Syntactic Processing by Monolingual and Bilingual Adults and Children.

This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing.

Shared syntactic representations in bilinguals

Abstract The current study explores the nature of constituent-structure-independent structural priming across the two languages of bilinguals. Specifically, this study tests whether such cross-linguistic priming involves the priming of functional-level syntactic representations shared between the languages, which can be distinguished from the priming of mainly non-syntactic information (e.g., information structure, thematic-role order). Critical prime sentences consisted of Cantonese actives in the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) order and passives where the patient was grammatically topicalized with the same topic particle. Target responses were produced in English actives or passives. The results show that robust priming from Cantonese Topic-Passives to English passives occurred, but no cross-linguistic priming was observed for Cantonese Topic-OSV active primes. The Topic-OSV active and Topic-Passive constructions share information structure, and are formed in different constituent structures from English actives and passives. Therefore, the robust cross-linguistic passive priming by Topic-Passive primes should in large part be ascribed to functional-level syntactic representations of passive constructions shared by Cantonese and English.

Pegah Faghiri, Pollet Samvelian. “Word order preferences and the effect of phrasal length in SOV languages: evidence from sentence production in Persian”

This study contributes to our understanding of the role of phrasal length in constituent ordering preferences by studying the relative order of verbal complements in Persian, a flexible SOV language displaying mixed head direction. To meet this objective, Faghiri and Samvelian have conducted two sentence production experiments in which they investigate the effect of the linear distance between the verb and its dependents, as well as factors that are related to conceptual accessibility includi...

Who is kissing whom? Two-year-olds’ comprehension of pronouns, case and word order

Abstract Two-year olds’ comprehension of pronouns in transitive sentences was examined. Previously, children at this age have been shown to comprehend transitive sentences containing full nouns and pronouns in subject position (Gertner et. al. 2006; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996;), but little is known about when children begin to comprehend the nominative and accusative case in pronouns. Using a preferential looking task, we found that 27-month-old children were able to comprehend transitive, grammatical sentences that had subject-verb-object (SVO) word order and nominative pronouns in subject position or accusative pronouns in object position, but 19-month-old children did not demonstrate this comprehension. Furthermore, neither group showed a consistent interpretation for ungrammatical sentences containing pronouns, in contrast to adult participants. Our results suggest that the ability to use pronouns as an aid to understanding transitive sentences develops by 27 months, before children are capable of producing these pronouns in their own speech.

Https://iupress.istanbul.edu.tr/journal/tuded/article/divan-siirinde-gecen-musiki-istilahlarina-dair-genel-bir-tasnif-denemesi

This study investigates prosodic marking of sentence initial aboutness topics and contrastive topics in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order in Turkish under six different conditions within experimental and theoretical perspectives. Fundamental frequency (F0 ) and duration values are the evaluation criteria of the study. The conditions illustrate aboutness and contrastive topics - discourse-new or discourse given - in different information packaging options. These conditions are compared with focus phrases under broad focus conditions. The data were collected from native speakers with the help of dialogues including the target sentences. The sentences, extracted from the recordings, were annotated via Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2020). The results indicate that F0 values at the right edge of the prenuclear domain and the nuclear domain are higher with topic phrases. Aboutness topics have higher values than contrastive topics. However, the statistical analysis indicates that this is not a categorical property when all six conditions are analyzed. Duration measurements of prenuclear, nuclear and postnuclear domains also do not differ under these six conditions. To conclude, Turkish aboutness and contrastive topics are marked with different syntactic and semantic tools, but they are not marked with a distinctive prosodic strategy and they do not differ from broad focus sentences.