Syntactic Constituents Research Articles

Improving Neural Machine Translation by Transferring Knowledge from Syntactic Constituent Alignment Learning

Statistical machine translation (SMT) models rely on word-, phrase-, and syntax-level alignments. But neural machine translation (NMT) models rarely explicitly learn the phrase- and syntax-level alignments. In this article, we propose to improve NMT by explicitly learning the bilingual syntactic constituent alignments. Specifically, we first utilize syntactic parsers to induce syntactic structures of sentences, and then we propose two ways to utilize the syntactic constituents in a perceptual (not adversarial) generator-discriminator training framework. One way is to use them to measure the alignment score of sentence-level training examples, and the other is to directly score the alignments of constituent-level examples generated with an algorithm based on word-level alignments from SMT. In our generator-discriminator framework, the discriminator is pre-trained to learn constituent alignments and distinguish the ground-truth translation from the fake ones, while the generative translation model is fine-tuned to receive the alignment knowledge and to generate translations that best approximate the true ones. Experiments and analysis show that the learned constituent alignments can help improve the translation results.

Perceived naturalness of typical disfluent speech and speech of adults who stutter

Disfluencies in spontaneous speech have been shown to be sensitive to the syntactic constituency (Levelt, 1989): production is restarted at the boundary nearest to the point of interruption. While there is a production-internal account of constituency structure in the speech of both adults who stutter (AWS) and typical speakers (AWNS), there is no evidence of constituency realization in the perceptional account of disfluent speech. The current study explores whether the constituency structure contributes to the perception of disfluent speech of AWS and AWNS. More specifically, the study investigates whether syntactic constituents are a cohesive unit of perception and whether altering the constituency structure impacts the perceived naturalness of disfluent speech. The participants rated the samples of disfluencies produced by AWS and AWNS for naturalness. The stimuli were presented in their original form as well as in a form with an artificially altered disfluency position. The results indicate that the location of the repetition disfluency is one of the correlates of speech naturalness, both in stuttered and typical speech. At the same time, speech naturalness ratings are minimally influenced by the type of speaker, suggesting that stuttering and typical disfluencies follow similar perceptual patterns.

An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a noun complement headed by toyuu ‘that.say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are also complex NPs, and uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands (as expected), and strong evidence that noun complements are not. Our second experiment also found strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, but yielded a small, non-significant, trend toward an effect with noun complements. Based on the sizes of our samples (89 and 90 participants, respectively), the sizes of the effects, and the details of the acceptability patterns, we conclude that noun complements in Japanese are not islands with respect to NP-scrambling. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to scrambling out of (non-island) declarative CPs. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).

A perceptual study of language chunking in Estonian

AbstractTwo studies investigate the production and perception of speech chunks in Estonian. A corpus study examines to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tests to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure, and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of speech chunks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, whilst listening to these utterances (N=47N=47) or reading them (N=40N=40). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and collocations. The results of the perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of clause boundaries on the perception of prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks. Thus, the results indicate that there is no direct relationship between the semantico-syntactic characteristics of utterances and the distribution of prosodic information. The percept of a prosodic break relies on the rapid recognition of constituent structure, i.e. structural information.

The property concepts and the possessive verb Ū ‘Have’ in Taiwan Southern Min

AbstractThis paper delineates an alternative analysis of the property concepts ofū‘have’ in Taiwan Southern Min, claiming that the complements serve syntactically as the nominal gradabilities through three syntactic (constituency) tests, and supported by a crosslinguistic perspective. Additionally, in the vein of Distributed Morphology, the gradability functions as annP (also as a nominalization), in contrast with NP/DP. From a typological perspective, it is not peculiar forūto select a nominalization of property concept to signal a reading of property-denoting. Moreover, I illustrate the semantics of a possessive property concept construction in Taiwan Southern Min, according to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015,2017). I further propose a modal aspectual semantics to interpret the various temporal readings ofū. Finally, I draw a conclusion to my alternative analyses.

Automatic lexical collocate extraction for corpus-based ontology building and refinement

Abstract Traditional corpus-based methods rely on manual inspection and extraction of lexical collocates in the study of selection preferences, which is a very costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming task. Devising automatic methods for lexical collocate extraction becomes necessary to handle this task and the immensity of corpora available. With a view to leveraging the Sketch Engine platform and in-built corpora, we propose a working prototype of a Lexical Collocate Extractor (LeCoExt) command-line tool that mines lexical collocates from all types of verbs according to their syntactic constituents and Collocate Frequency Score (CFS). This might be the first tool that performs comprehensive corpus-based studies of the selection preferences of individual or groups of verbs exploiting the capabilities offered by Sketch Engine. This tool might facilitate the task of extracting rich lexico-semantic knowledge from diverse corpora in a few seconds and at a click away. We test its performance for ontology building and refinement departing from a previous detailed analysis of stealing verbs carried out by Fernández-Martínez & Faber (2020). We show how the proposed tool is used to extract conceptual-cognitive knowledge from the THEFT scenario and implement it into FunGramKB Core Ontology through the creation and modification of theft-related conceptual units.

Function Words at the Interface: A Two-Tier Approach

The distinction between function words and content words poses a challenge to theories of the syntax–prosody interface. On the one hand, function words are “ignored” by the mapping algorithms; that is, function words are not mapped to prosodic words. On the other hand, there are numerous accounts of function words which form prosodic words and can even be analysed as heads of larger prosodic units. Furthermore, function words seem to be a driving factor for the formation of prosodic structures in that they can largely be held accountable for the non-isomorphism between syntactic and prosodic constituency. This paper discusses these challenges with a focus on a particular function word, and the first-person nominative pronoun in Swabian, a Southern German dialect. By means of two corpus studies, it is shown that the pronoun occurs in two forms, the prosodic word [i:] and the enclitic [ə]. Depending on clause position and focus structure, the forms occur in complementary distribution. Occurrences of n-insertion allow for the establishment of a recursive prosodic word structure at the level of the phonological module. The findings support a new proposal in the form of a two-tier mapping approach to the interface between syntax and prosody.

Frequency tagging of syntactic structure or lexical properties; a registered MEG study

A traditional view on sentence comprehension holds that the listener parses linguistic input using hierarchical syntactic rules. Recently, physiological evidence for such a claim has been provided by Ding et al.’s (2016) MEG study that demonstrated, using a frequency-tagging paradigm, that regularly occurring syntactic constituents were spontaneously tracked by listeners. Even more recently, this study's results have been challenged as artifactual by Frank and Yang (2018) who successfully re-created Ding's results using a distributional semantic vector model that relied exclusively on lexical information and did not appeal to any hierarchical syntactic representations. The current MEG study was designed to dissociate the two interpretations of Ding et al.’s results. Taking advantage of the morphological richness of Russian, we constructed two types of sentences of different syntactic structure; critically, this was achieved by manipulating a single affix on one of the words while all other lexical roots and affixes in the sentence were kept the same. In Experiment 1, we successfully verified the intuition that due to almost complete lexical overlap the two types of sentences should yield the same activity pattern according to Frank and Yang’s (2018) lexico-semantic model. In Experiment 2, we recorded Russian listeners' MEG activity while they listened to the two types of sentences. Contradicting the hierarchical syntactic account and consistent with the lexico-semantic one, we observed no difference across the conditions in the way participants tracked the stimuli properties. Corroborated by other recent evidence, our findings show that peaks interpreted by Ding et al. as reflecting higher-level syntactic constituency may stem from non-syntactic factors.

Recursion and the Definition of Universal Prosodic Categories

It is widely agreed that prosodic constituents should mirror syntactic constituents (unless high-ranking prosodic constraints interfere). Because recursion is a feature of syntactic representations, one expects recursion in prosodic representations as well. However, it is of current controversy what kinds of syntactic representation motivate prosodic recursion. In this paper, the use of Phonological Phrase recursion is reviewed in several case studies, chosen because prosodic recursion mostly does not reflect syntactic recursion as defined in current syntactic theory. We provide reanalyses that do not appeal to prosodic recursion (unless syntactically motivated), showing that Phonological Phrase recursion is not necessary to capture the relevant generalizations. The more restrictive use of prosodic recursion we argue for has the following conceptual advantages. It allows for more consistent cross-linguistic generalizations about the syntax–prosody mapping so that prosodic representations more closely reflect syntactic ones. It allows the fundamental syntactic distinctions between clause (and other phases) and phrase to be reflected in the prosodic representation, and it allows cross-linguistic generalizations to be made about the prosodic domain of intonational processes, such as downstep and continuation rise.

Clause chaining and the utterance phrase: Syntax–prosody mapping in Matukar Panau

AbstractClause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically expressing temporal or causal relations between events. Prosodic hierarchy theory proposes that syntactic constituents are systematically mapped to prosodic constituents, but most versions of the theory do not account for clause chain syntax. This article presents original data from Matukar Panau, a clause-chaining Oceanic (Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. The clause chain is a syntactic constituent in which final-clause TAM scopes over preceding clauses. There are also other types of multi-clausal structures, encompassing subordinate adverbial clauses, and verbless copula clauses, and we analyse all these as instances of the “syntactic sentence.” The syntactic sentence maps to a distinct prosodic domain, marked by the scaling of L% boundary tones, and we equate this domain with the “utterance phrase” posited in some versions of prosodic hierarchy theory. The prosodic characteristics of the Matukar Panau utterance phrase are similar to those found in non-chaining languages, but while other languages use this prosody to mark pragmatically related groups of clauses, in Matukar Panau it most commonly maps to a syntactic sentence.

Il costrutto allocutivoa Nando!in romanesco: fonologia, morfologia, sintassi, semantica, pragmatica

AbstractBoth proper names and common nouns, when used as terms of address in Romanesco, can be preceded by the particlea(a Nando!‘Hey, Fernando!’) and undergo truncation of the poststress material ((a) dottó’!‘Hey, doc!’). The article presents a panchronic study of this construction in Romanesco, showing how and when truncation and the vocative particleafirst arose and providing a synchronic analysis of the conditions under which they occur today. Vocative truncation is widespread in Central-Southern Italo-Romance, where it obeys conditions that vary subtly across time and space and that the article will touch upon based on the studies available to date. These conditions will be described in detail for Romanesco, showing that they are hierarchically organized and involve all levels of linguistic analysis: the list includes (a) a part-of-speech condition, (b) a condition referring to the syntactic constituent, (c) a semantic/pragmatic condition, (d) one of prosodic minimality, and finally (e) one of lexical semantics, relative to the animacy/definiteness hierarchy. Also the occurrence of theaparticle is subject to conditions which are syntactic-textual, pragmatic and phonological in nature and which identify preferences rather than clear-cut (un)grammaticality, contrary to those that constrain truncation.

NOUN PHRASES AND THEIR SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS IN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN LANGUAGE

A phrase is a word or a group of words that may stand as a single grammatical unit. It can be part of a clause or a sentence with or without any specific meaning. Phrases are mandatory constituents of simple, complex and compound sentences. The syntax of Albanian language has an early beginning, but its development is still an ongoing process. The main issues faced by the syntax of Albanian language have been the terminology, definition and classification of grammar and syntactic units. In the syntax of Albanian language there is a constant process of codification, i.e., definition of units and syntactic categories. Our interest here is the definition of the terms word-group, syntagm, phrase and syntactic constituent . On the other hand, the term phrase is well defined in English language. Clear and timely classification of different types of phrases has facilitated syntactic analysis of clauses and sentences. Phrases and the types of phrases are different in English and Albanian language. Apart from the type, the number of phrases is also different. The noun phrase is the most important phrase in both English and Albanian language because of its syntactic functions. While other phrases have more limited syntactic functions, noun phrases may function as a subject, object (direct or indirect object), subject complement, object complement, modifier or apposition. Keywords: Phrases, noun phrases, syntactic functions, English, Albanian.

Closed Structure

According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, which involves restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured, so that it does not hold for all propositions whatsoever, but only for those which are expressible using closed sentences of a given formal language. We call this restricted principle Closed Structure, and show that it is consistent in classical higher-order logic. As a schematic principle, the strength of Closed Structure is dependent on the chosen language. For its consistency to be philosophically significant, it also needs to be consistent in every extension of the language which the theorist of structured propositions is apt to accept. But, we go on to show, Closed Structure is in fact inconsistent in a very natural extension of the standard language of higher-order logic, which adds resources for plural talk of propositions. We conclude that this particular strategy of restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured is not a compelling response to the argument based on Russell’s result, though we note that for some applications, for instance to propositional attitudes, a restricted thesis in the vicinity may hold some promise.

Second-Position Clitics and Prosodic Recursion

Recent work suggests that prosodic structure has the capacity to retain significant information about recursive syntactic constituency. This paper presents a novel argument for this view from the domain of second-position clitic linearization. In Mandar (Austronesian, Indonesia), many second-positon elements are linearized in domains which correspond to functional projections along the clausal spine (TP, vP). The process which positions these clitics is irreducibly postsyntactic in nature. This observation suggests that TP, vP, and other 'functional' phrases must remain constituents at a prosodic level of representation. This conclusion provides further evidence for the view that under ideal circumstances, syntactic phrases map to prosodic equivalents in a one-to-one fashion.

Conditional analysis of clausal exceptives

In this paper I argue that English exceptive constructions introduced by except can be derived from full clauses by ellipsis. I offer a compositional analysis for this clausal exceptive construction. I propose that except introduces quantification over possible situations and the clause following it provides the restriction for this quantification. I show how the analysis developed here derives the inferences except contributes to sentences it occurs in and the restrictions on its use. I also show how this approach captures certain cases which traditional approaches to the semantics of exceptives do not, such as cases where an except-phrase contains a PP or multiple syntactic constituents. The approach I propose correctly captures the NPI licensing facts inside except-phrases. In addition, this is the first approach to the semantics of exceptives that correctly captures the contribution of modal phrases such as possibly inside except-phrases.

A novel argument for PF operations: STAMP morphs in Gã

A key question facing piece-based syntactic morphological frameworks is whether morphophonological structure may be read directly from syntactic structure, as in Spanning, or if postsyntactic operations mediate this relationship, as in Distributed Morphology. Additionally, it is necessary to determine whether linear order is relevant for determining locality. This paper brings new data from STAMP portmanteaux in Gã (Kwa, Ghana) to bear on this question. I demonstrate that STAMP portmanteaux are composed of terminal nodes which do not form a syntactic constituent, and thus are incompatible with syntax-only morphological frameworks like Spanning. PF operations which are sensitive to linear locality, like Fusion in DM, are necessary to generate the portmanteaux. Instrumental adjuncts are additionally demonstrated to block portmanteaux formation, confirming that linear locality is crucial for calculating portmanteaux. Gã STAMP portmanteaux thus provide empirical support for PF operations that are sensitive to linear locality.

An Appositive Analysis of Mandarin Distributor GE

This article presents an alternative argument that Mandarin distributor GE (GEDIS) is a pro-form to be merged as an appositive to a plural nominal, verb or adverbial. GEDIS performs a distributive function of matching a set of individuals to a set of predications, thus requiring the obligatory cooccurrence of a distributive host, i.e., an antecedent plural nominal, verbal or adverbial phrase, and a distributive target, i.e., a following syntactic constituent that helps to separate the predication. The canonical syntactic position of GEDIS is immediately to the right of the distributive host. An appositive analysis of GEDIS is proposed to the effect that GEDIS is merged as an appositive to the distributive host. This new analysis improves upon the existing adjunct analysis, which takes GEDIS as a quantificational adverb that adjoins to VP or vP. The appositive analysis is further supported by the convincing view that GEDIS is a pronoun rather than an adverb and can be extended to cover two new facts about GEDIS, where the distributive host is a plural verb phrase or a plural adverbial phrase. The conclusion reached is that GEDIS is a pro-form that is semantically associated with and syntactically apposed to a plural antecedent in the capacity of a nominal, a verb or an adverbial.

Conjunction and additive constructions in the language of the Gavião of Rondônia

Abstract As a contribution to the study of complex structures in native Amazonian languages, this article examines the syntax of additives and conjunctions in the language of the Gavião of Rondônia. In this language the particle k ĩ ´í ‘also, too, and’ is used to form additive (‘also’) constructions with noun phrases and verb phrases, without creating conjoined syntactic constituents. The same particle is also used to form constructions with conjoined constituents, in which two or more verb phrases or two or more noun phrases are conjoined. The different functions of the particle have different and somewhat complicated syntactic structures. A brief description of basic Gavião syntax is provided, to have a basis for understanding the structure of the additives and conjunctions. Examples are given to describe the patterns observed and to provide tests to determine the constituent structure of the conjoined constructions. Composition rules for conjoined and additive constructions are offered when there is sufficient evidence. The semantic difference between participles and conjunctions is noted. Typological properties of Gavião additives and conjunction are discussed. Conjunction is of the postpositive bisyndetic type. Disjunction, ‘or’, which also appears in the language, is briefly described.

<i>Şey</i>-substitution and constituent structure in Turkish

This paper attempts to account for the syntactic distribution of the particle şey in Turkish, in particular its suffixed variant which is a placeholder for expressions that have to be inserted into the discourse later. The paper argues that the distribution of suffixed şey is determined by constituent structure, meaning that şey can only substitute for syntactic constituents. Thus, şey acts as a pro-form, similar, for instance, to pronouns substituting for noun phrases. This has two implications: First, as şey is a quasi-universal pro-form with the ability to substitute for a wide range of constituents, şey-substitution can be used as a constituency test to peek into the constituent structure of virtually any major syntactic domain. Second, the overall şey-substitution pattern across different syntactic domains constitutes evidence for Kayne’s binary branching hypothesis.

Internal structure of oral narrative in Arabic

This qualitative study aims at exploring the internal structure of personal experience oral narrative in Arabic in terms of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical components and Labov (1972) approach of narrative structure, who claimed its presence in all well-formed narratives. Recordings of orally told narratives by five Saudi informants were elicited in informal settings, and were coded and qualitatively analyzed to provide a comprehensive understanding of oral narrative structure in Arabic. The findings of this study confirmed that the Labovian components of the internal structure of oral narrative were exhibited in Arabic oral narratives. The results also seemed to support the idea of the essential role of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical categories. That is, pauses and intonational contours line up to form the structure of the narrative. In addition, adverbial particles can be used as a mechanism to reinforce the internal structure of the narrative which coincide with pause phrasing and intonational contours. With regard to syntactic constituency component, the study found out that each line corresponds to at least one clause or phrase.