Syntactic Class Research Articles

The Effect of Defining Model on the Accuracy of Syntactic Class Identification in When-Definitions in Digital Dictionaries

The Effect of Defining Model on the Accuracy of Syntactic Class Identification in When-Definitions in Digital Dictionaries

Analysis of Shift in Translation on The Usage Instruction of Skincare Products

This research examines the translation of instructions for using skin care products from English into Indonesian, focusing on translation shifts as defined by Catford (1965). These shifts include level shifts and category shifts (structure, class, unit and intra-system shifts). This research analyzes how these shifts occur and adapt to the Indonesian linguistic and cultural context. Data from brands including Wardah, Avoskin, and Garnier were collected and analyzed using a qualitative descriptive method. The findings highlight common shifts, like structural changes due to syntactic differences and word class shifts to maintain meaning. Understanding these shifts can improve translation strategies, ensuring that bilingual packaging is clear, accurate, and culturally appropriate, thus increasing consumer understanding and satisfaction.

Investigating the Extent to which Distributional Semantic Models Capture a Broad Range of Semantic Relations.

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) are a primary method for distilling semantic information from corpora. However, a key question remains: What types of semantic relations among words do DSMs detect? Prior work typically has addressed this question using limited human data that are restricted to semantic similarity and/or general semantic relatedness. We tested eight DSMs that are popular in current cognitive and psycholinguistic research (positive pointwise mutual information; global vectors; and three variations each of Skip-gram and continuous bag of words (CBOW) using word, context, and mean embeddings) on a theoretically motivated, rich set of semantic relations involving words from multiple syntactic classes and spanning the abstract-concrete continuum (19 sets of ratings). We found that, overall, the DSMs are best at capturing overall semantic similarity and also can capture verb-noun thematic role relations and noun-noun event-based relations that play important roles in sentence comprehension. Interestingly, Skip-gram and CBOW performed the best in terms of capturing similarity, whereas GloVe dominated the thematic role and event-based relations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results, make recommendations for users of these models, and demonstrate significant differences in model performance on event-based relations.

Extending sticky-Datalog[formula omitted] via finite-position selection functions: Tractability, algorithms, and optimization

Weakly-Sticky (WS) Datalog± is an expressive member of the family of Datalog± program classes that is defined on the basis of the conditions of stickiness and weak-acyclicity. Conjunctive query answering (QA) over the WS programs has been investigated, and its tractability in data complexity has been established. However, the design and implementation of practical QA algorithms and their optimizations have been open. In order to fill this gap, we first study Sticky and WS programs from the point of view of the behavior of the chase procedure. We extend the stickiness property of the chase to that of generalized stickiness of the chase (GSCh) modulo an oracle that selects (and provides) the predicate positions where finitely many values appear during the chase. Stickiness modulo a selection functionS that provides only a subset of those positions defines sch(S), a semantic subclass of GSCh. Program classes with selection functions include Sticky and WS, and another syntactic class that we introduce and characterize, namely JWS, of jointly-weakly-sticky programs, which contains WS. The selection functions for these three classes are computable, and no external, possibly non-computable oracle is needed. We propose a bottom-up QA algorithm for programs in the class sch(S), for a general selection function S. As a particular case, we obtain a polynomial-time QA algorithm for JWS and weakly-sticky programs (in data complexity). Unlike WS, JWS turns out to be closed under magic-sets query optimization. As a consequence, both the generic polynomial-time QA algorithm and its magic-set optimization can be particularized and applied to WS.

Decoding syntactic class from EEG during spoken word recognition

A fundamental issue in spoken language comprehension involves understanding the interaction of linguistic representations across different levels of organization (e.g., phonological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic). In particular, there is debate about when different levels are accessed during spoken word recognition. Under serial processing models, comprehension is sequential. In contrast, under parallel processing models, simultaneous activation of representations at multiple levels can occur. The current study investigates this issue by isolating neural responses to syntactic class distinctions from acoustic and phonological responses. EEG data were collected in an event-related potential (ERP) experiment in which participants (N = 26) listened to words varying in syntactic class (nouns versus adjectives) that were controlled for low-level acoustic differences via cross-splicing. Machine learning techniques were used to decode syntactic class from ERP responses over time. Results showed that syntactic class is decodable approximately 160–190 ms after the average syntactic point of disambiguation in the words, during which listeners are still processing acoustic information. This supports the prediction that different levels of representation have overlapping timecourses. Overall, these results are consistent with a parallel, interactive processing model of spoken word recognition, in which higher-level information—such as syntactic class—is accessed while acoustic analysis is still occurring.

On the notion of the subordinate clause in German linguistics

In traditional linguistic research on German syntax the term “subordinate clause” is defined on the basis of its two distinguishing features, namely its syntactic-functional integration into the matrix, as well as its formal exponents (the presence of introductory elements and the placement of the finite verb at the end of the clause). However, this classical approach to subordination is in fact a descriptive simplification which leads to the exclusion of all reference to the scalar character of this category from syntactic description. In this paper, an alternative approach to subordination is presented through defining the dependent clause as a scalar category, encompassing a wide range of representatives differing in the degree of prototypicality. The proposed model consists of four interrelated components: a precisely defined set of integration features, type-independent general principles, a description of the type-specific clusters of integration features and the differences in the degree of integration between representatives of the same syntactic class, as well as construction-specific restrictions.

Prosody drives Paraguayan Guaraní suffix order

In Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupian, ISO 639-3: gug), suffix order is determined by several factors, including syntactic scope, morphotactic restrictions, free variation, and prosody.Paraguayan Guaraní suffixes form two syntactic classes: predicate-level suffixes and clause-level suffixes. Both syntactic classes include stressable and stressless suffixes. Predicate-level suffixes typically precede clause-level suffixes. However, stressable suffixes always precede stressless ones. Furthermore, within both groups (stressable or stressless), the order of suffixes is largely free.I propose that stressable suffixes are independently prosodified phonological words and stressless suffixes are non-prosodified. I analyze the Paraguayan Guaraní suffix order as an interaction of mirroring between the order of suffixes and the order of syntactic operations, on the one hand, and prosodic subcategorization and demands on phonological well-formedness, on the other. Thus, I document and analyze an unusual agglutinating system, whose highly non-prototypical prosodified and freely-ordered suffixes challenge the notion of a phonological word, contributing to ongoing research on phonological and syntactic domains as well as the interfaces of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

A Cross-Modal and Cross-lingual Study of Iconicity in Language: Insights From Deep Learning.

The present paper addresses the study of non‐arbitrariness in language within a deep learning framework. We present a set of experiments aimed at assessing the pervasiveness of different forms of non‐arbitrary phonological patterns across a set of typologically distant languages. Different sequence‐processing neural networks are trained in a set of languages to associate the phonetic vectorization of a set of words to their sensory (Experiment 1), semantic (Experiment 2), and word‐class representations (Experiment 3). The models are then tested, without further training, in a set of novel instances in a language belonging to a different language family, and their performance is compared with a randomized baseline. We show that the three cross‐domain mappings can be successfully transferred across languages and language families, suggesting that the phonological structure of the lexicon is pervaded with language‐invariant cues about the words' meaning and their syntactic classes.

Constructions relatives : développer un point de vue fonctionnaliste

This article aims to define the relative constructions according to essential principles of functional syntax as developed in the wake of André Martinet’s work, namely: syntax between syntactic classes (not between “clauses”); decisive importance of the hierarchy between syntactic classes with a predicative vocation (“verbs”, for example) and other classes; definition of functions as a subtype of syntactic relations between classes. We consider that relative constructions are intended to subordinate a verbal or non-verbal predicate to a relativized term which usually is a predicate determiner (case of nouns and pronouns assuming a syntactic function) or a simple determiner (definite, cardinal, adverb, etc.). Furthermore, in relative constructions, a syntactic function is established between the relativized term and the nucleus of the relative. The application of these analytical principles results in the rejection of the notion of “gap strategy” and of the distinction between “noun-headed relative clauses” and “light-headed relative clauses”.

„Path‟ and „Manner‟ in The Serialization of Motion Verbs

Verbs are one of the most basic vocabulary elements of the language. These words express the being, manners and movements of beings in the universe. However, in order to express the movements of living and non-living beings in the universe, the verb category creates syntactic and semantic situations by performing some combinations within itself. Because the many movements of many beings in the universe cause endless combinations to appear. In order to express this, the verb category creates various combinations within itself. The most typical example of this is seen between motion verbs, which is a semantic class, and serial verb structures, which are a syntactic and semantic class. Although there have been various studies on motion verbs, the limits of these verbs have not been determined in Turkish studies. Motion verbs, which can be considered as verbs expressing the displacement of beings in the universe, are closely related to serial verb structures, which is a syntactic and semantic category. Serial verb structures contain at least one motion verb in surface or deep structure. According to Talmy's typology, these verbs of motion mark the "way" where the movement takes place, or the "style", which is the way it takes place. In this study, the roles of "path" and "manner" in the serialization process of motion verbs are discussed in the Turkish context.

An investigation of iconic language development in four datasets.

Iconic words imitate their meanings. Previous work has demonstrated that iconic words are more common in infants' early speech, and in adults' child-directed speech (e.g., Perry et al., 2015; 2018). This is consistent with the proposal that iconicity provides a benefit to word learning. Here we explored iconicity in four diverse language development datasets: a production corpus for infants and preschoolers (MacWhinney, 2000), comprehension data for school-aged children to young adults (Dale & O'Rourke, 1981), word frequency norms from educational texts for school aged children to young adults (Zeno et al., 1995), and a database of parent-reported infant word production (Frank et al., 2017). In all four analyses, we found that iconic words were more common at younger ages. We also explored how this relationship differed by syntactic class, finding only modest evidence for differences. Overall, the results suggest that, beyond infancy, iconicity is an important factor in language acquisition.

Information about word class is both semantically and lexically represented: evidence from an advantage for verbs in two speakers with aphasia

ABSTRACT Background: There has been a debate over how a word’s syntactic class is represented in the mind. One model claims that information is represented solely at the semantic level while another account holds that syntactic class information could be represented both at a semantic and an independent lexical level. Methods: Two aphasic participants with a significant advantage for naming verbs in comparison to nouns took part in the investigation. They were assessed with several picture naming tests, two comprehension tests as well as an object naming test comparing animate and inanimate objects. Results: In one participant, the pronounced deficit for nouns resulted from a semantic impairment: there was a comparable dissociation in comprehension of words, a nonverbal semantic deficit, and performance was mainly affected by semantic variables (imageability; animacy). In the other participant, the difference between nouns and verbs arose from a lexical impairment since no comparable comprehension deficit was observed. In addition, performance was affected, mainly, by lexical variables (word frequency). Discussion: Results from one participant suggest a semantic locus of noun–verb differences and provide empirical support for a specific model of objects’ and actions’ semantic representations. In contrast, the other participant’s performance strongly suggests the word class effect to arise from a lexical impairment. Thus, the study provides support for two independent loci of noun–verb differences thereby contradicting one account’s strong claim that noun–verb differences arise solely from semantic impairments. The results also speak against recent cognitive accounts rejecting the idea of independent lexical representations.

Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction: Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm.

People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all. Here we report four findings regarding satiation effects in wh-questions across German and English. First, the effects pertain to zone of well-formedness rather than syntactic class: all intermediate ratings, including calibrated fillers, increase at the beginning of the experimental session regardless of syntactic construction. Second, though there is satiation, ratings asymptote below maximum acceptability. Third, these effects are consistent across judgments of superiority effects in English and German. Fourth, wh-questions appear to show similar profiles in English and German, despite these languages being traditionally considered to differ strongly in whether they show effects on movement: violations of the superiority condition can be modulated to a similar degree in both languages by manipulating subject-object initiality and animacy congruency of the wh-phrase. We improve on classic satiation methods by distinguishing between two crucial tests, namely whether exposure selectively targets certain grammatical constructions or whether there is a general repeated exposure effect. We conclude that exposure effects can be reliably induced in rating experiments but exposure does not appear to selectively target certain grammatical constructions. Instead, they appear to be a phenomenon of intermediate gradient judgments.

Strategy Logic with Imperfect Information

We introduce an extension of Strategy Logic for the imperfect-information setting, called SL ii and study its model-checking problem. As this logic naturally captures multi-player games with imperfect information, this problem is undecidable; but we introduce a syntactical class of “hierarchical instances” for which, intuitively, as one goes down the syntactic tree of the formula, strategy quantifications are concerned with finer observations of the model, and we prove that model-checking SL ii restricted to hierarchical instances is decidable. This result, because it allows for complex patterns of existential and universal quantification on strategies, greatly generalises the decidability of distributed synthesis for systems with hierarchical information. It allows us to easily derive new decidability results concerning strategic problems under imperfect information such as the existence of Nash equilibria or rational synthesis. To establish this result, we go through an intermediary, “low-level” logic much more adapted to automata techniques. QCTL * is an extension of CTL * with second-order quantification over atomic propositions that has been used to study strategic logics with perfect information. We extend it to the imperfect information setting by parameterising second-order quantifiers with observations. The simple syntax of the resulting logic, QCTL * ii , allows us to provide a conceptually neat reduction of SL ii to QCTL * ii that separates concerns, allowing one to forget about strategies and players and focus solely on second-order quantification. While the model-checking problem of QCTL * ii is, in general, undecidable, we identify a syntactic fragment of hierarchical formulas and prove, using an automata-theoretic approach, that it is decidable.

Learning the boundary of inductive invariants

We study the complexity of invariant inference and its connections to exact concept learning. We define a condition on invariants and their geometry, called the fence condition, which permits applying theoretical results from exact concept learning to answer open problems in invariant inference theory. The condition requires the invariant's boundary---the states whose Hamming distance from the invariant is one---to be backwards reachable from the bad states in a small number of steps. Using this condition, we obtain the first polynomial complexity result for an interpolation-based invariant inference algorithm, efficiently inferring monotone DNF invariants with access to a SAT solver as an oracle. We further harness Bshouty's seminal result in concept learning to efficiently infer invariants of a larger syntactic class of invariants beyond monotone DNF. Lastly, we consider the robustness of inference under program transformations. We show that some simple transformations preserve the fence condition, and that it is sensitive to more complex transformations.

Category-specific verb-semantic deficits in Alzheimer’s disease: Evidence from static and dynamic action naming

ABSTRACT We investigated the representation and breakdown of verb knowledge employing different syntactic and semantic classes of verbs in a group of individuals with probable Alzheimer’s Disease (pAD). In an action naming task with coloured photographs (Fiez & Tranel, 1997. Standardized stimuli and procedures for investigating the retrieval of lexical and conceptual knowledge for action. Memory and Cognition, 25(4), 543–569. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201129), pAD individuals were impaired for naming actions compared to objects. Verb tense was also affected, with simple-past (e.g., chopped) being more difficult to name than the gerundial form (e.g., chopping). Employing action-naming with short movies depicting events and states, we contrasted three verb classes based on their hypothetical structural and semantic/conceptual properties: argument structure, thematic structure, and conceptual templates. The three classes were: causatives (peel), verbs of perception (hear), and verbs of motion (run) Overall, results suggest that individuals with pAD are selectively impaired for verb tense and thematic assignment, but not conceptual-template complexity. Methodologically, we also show that dynamic scenes are more ecologically valid than static scenes to probe verb knowledge in AD.

Canonical Segmentation and Syntactic Morpheme Tagging of Four Resource- scarce Nguni Languages

Morphological analysis involves investigating the syntactic class of a word but can also extend to the decomposition and syntactic analysis of its underlying morpheme composition. This is especially relevant to languages with an agglutinative writing system where multiple linguistic words are expressed as a single orthographic word. In this paper, we propose a memory-based approach to canonical segmentation using a windowing approach to recover the uncondensed morphemes that differ from the surface form of a word. Additionally, we propose treating the syntactic labelling of morphemes as a sequence labelling task, similar to part of speech tagging. This approach leverages the internal morpheme composition of a word as local context in much the same way that the surrounding sentence of word serves in the disambiguation of its part-of-speech. Both tasks are modelled separately but performed sequentially by cascading the decomposed morphemes of a word into the task of syntactic labelling. When evaluated on four resource-scarce, conjunctively written Nguni languages, the proposed approach achieves an overall accuracy ranging between 82% and 92% which outperforms previously developed rule-based analysers for the same languages.

Single-clause when-defining models in English monolingual pedagogical dictionaries

Abstract The paper is concerned with the single-clause when-definition, which is a common folk-defining style that has been established by lexicographers in English monolingual learners’ dictionaries (the Big Five), especially the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. In brief, the single-clause when-definition format can be applied to explain the meaning of abstract nouns and it closely resembles the double-clause (full-sentence) definition, which can also begin with a subordinating conjunction such as when or if. However, the when-definition does not include the word which is being defined (definiendum) and it is formed out of a single, subordinate clause. This definition-type has received metalexicographers’ attention as it appears to, in general, limit the effectiveness of correct extraction of word class information from abstract noun entries in contrast to the traditional defining model – the analytical definition. In this paper, an attempt is made to investigate two types of single-clause when-defining models: (1) when + personal pronoun; and (2) when + indefinite pronoun (someone/something).1 The collected evidence from the Linear Mixed-effects Modelling analysis indicates that the effect of when-definition type on syntactic class identification accuracy is statistically significant at the 8% level of significance, with the when + personal pronoun defining style being the superior defining model.

Capitalization interacts with syntactic complexity.

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative clause's overt argument was a proper noun (e.g., The tall lanky guard who alerted Charlie/Charlie alerted to the danger was young) across three experiments. In Experiment 1 these sentences were presented in normal sentence casing or entirely in upper case. In Experiment 2 participants received either valid or invalid parafoveal previews of the relative clause. In Experiment 3 participants viewed relative clauses in only normal conditions. We hypothesized that we would observe relative clause effects (i.e., inflated fixation times for object relative clauses) while readers were still fixated on the word who, if readers use capitalization to infer a parafoveal word's syntactic class. This would constitute a syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Furthermore, we hypothesized that this effect should be influenced by sentence casing in Experiment 1 (with no cue for syntactic category being available in upper case sentences) but not by parafoveal preview validity of the target words. We observed syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Experiment 1 and 3, and a Bayesian analysis of the combined data from all three experiments. These effects seemed to be influenced more by noun capitalization than lexical processing. We discuss our findings in relation to models of eye movement control and sentence processing theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Which Defining Model Contributes to More Successful Extraction of Syntactic Class Information and Translation Accuracy?

Definitions in English monolingual learners' dictionaries are the central focus of the paper. Metalexicographers have had a consuming interest in the following three types of definitions: analytical definitions (or classical definitions), full-sentence definitions (also called contextual definitions) and single-clause when -definitions. The use of when -definitions, the role of which is to define abstract nouns, has raised questions and doubts as to their efficacy on correct part of speech recognition of the definiendum , or item being defined, in light of the problems related to the substitutability of headwords and parts of definitions (lack of general category words in this definition format). By and large, existing research has substantiated the superiority of the classical definition-type over single-clause when -definitions with respect to the accuracy of word class identification. The current experiment attempts to further delve into the subject of part of speech recognition with regard to the three aforementioned defining formats — in previous studies only data from analytical and single-clause when -definitions were collated, since contextual definitions were not included in the study design. The study was conducted on a group of 120 advanced-level Polish university students of English. The subjects were tested on their ability of correct extraction of syntactic class information and translation accuracy of abstract noun headwords as regards the three predominant definition-types in English lexicographic practice.