Syntactic Flexibility Research Articles

Testing the interplay of structure and meaning in aphasic sentence production

Background: Improving aphasic sentence production is a challenging endeavour, both for the speaker who must recover the linguistic skill and for the therapist who attempts to guide the process. Studies have demonstrated that treatment can often improve the sentence production ability of aphasic speakers, but with limited generalisation to new lexical content and untrained sentence structure. One factor that limits the outcome of production therapy may be the complexity of the relationship between the form and the meaning of a sentence. This is confounded by a limited array of diagnostic approaches for revealing what linguistic resources remain available to the aphasic speaker. Aims: In this study we tested a new format for eliciting sentence production in aphasia. Our goal was to reveal whether or not individual aphasic speakers were sensitive to certain semantic and syntactic elements of sentences that are believed to influence the sentence production process. Methods & Procedures: Using a modified sentence repetition format we explored the sentence production abilities of five fluent aphasic speakers under different conditions of lexical and/or structural manipulations. Lexical manipulations required substitution of a semantically related verb; structural manipulations required reordering of the post‐verbal arguments in different dative constructions (double object and prepositional) that express essentially the same message. Outcomes & Results: Response patterns obtained from the five aphasic participants revealed individual patterns of skill and sensitivity based on residual language ability. The implications of these results are discussed with reference to the potential for revealing elements of normal production patterns in aphasic speech, and the assumption that such information is important for developing more effective therapy for individuals with aphasia. Conclusions: Patterns of sentence production elicited in a modified sentence repetition task may reveal syntactic flexibility and residual syntactic knowledge in speakers with aphasia.

Functional motivations in the development of nominal and verbal gerunds in Middle and Early Modern English

This article examines the use of three gerund constructions in Middle and Early Modern English on the basis of corpus data covering the period 1250–1640. The constructions examined are verbal gerunds (eating the apple), bare nominal gerunds (eating of the apple), and definite nominal gerunds (the eating of the apple). It is argued that the success of verbal gerunds in the history of English can only be understood against the background of the interaction with their nominal counterparts. An analysis is offered of how the system of gerund constructions is functionally organised, comparing discourse-functional behaviour, distribution, and internal syntax across the three gerund types. It is shown that verbal gerunds closely resemble bare nominal gerunds in terms of discourse-functional behaviour and distribution, but are syntactically more flexible. As a result, verbal gerunds could replace bare nominal gerunds, copying their function but adding syntactic flexibility. By contrast, definite nominal gerunds, being functionally distinct from the other two types, developed a number of specialised uses, which ensured their survival. These conclusions throw light on issues of functional motivation in the development of the English gerund. Historical change is seen to be grounded in synchronic functional organisation. At the same time, it is shown that the only existing explanation for the rise of verbal gerunds (attributing their success to their ability to combine with prepositions) can only be partly correct.

Processing idiomatic expressions: Effects of semantic compositionality.

Three experiments tested the main claims of the idiom decomposition hypothesis: People have clear intuitions on the semantic compositionality of idiomatic expressions, which determines the syntactic behavior of these expressions and how they are recognized. Experiment 1 showed that intuitions are clear only for a very restricted number of expressions, but for the majority of idioms, they are not consistent across speakers. Experiment 2 failed to support the claim that semantic compositionality influences the syntactic flexibility of idioms. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that idioms are more quickly recognized than their literal counterparts, regardless of compositionality and syntactic flexibility. All of the findings were at odds with the tenets of the idiom decomposition hypothesis. The theoretical implications of the results with respect to idiom processing and the notion of compositionality are discussed.

Idioms in Verb-object Constructions

This paper examines the issues of idioms in verb-object constructions in Taiwanese Southern Min and Mandarin. The idioms in question fall into two categories: (1) idioms that express a personal behavior, and (2) idioms that show an interpersonal relationship. The second type can be further divided into two subtypes: (2a) cases where only two parties are involved, and (2b) cases that feature a tripartite relationship. Such a semantic distinction carries its syntactic consequences. There is also a fine-grained distinction among idioms in terms of degree of semantic compositionality: (1) idioms that are characterized by an absolute non-compositionality, and (2) idioms in which the meanings of some constituents are calculatable in terms of the mechanism of metaphor. Some idioms of the former type can be analyed vis-a-vis the pivot based upon homophony. Referntiality of the object in the verb-object construction has an intimate relationship with its syntactic flexibility.

Aproximación empírica a la interacción de verbos y esquemas construccionales, ejemplificada con los verbos de percepción

Para el estudio de la interacción entre léxico verbal y sintaxis se propone una aproximación basada en Corpus, utilizando los datos provisionales del proyecto ADESSE. El examen de los datos muestra la alta flexibilidad sintáctica de cualquier verbo, pero también cómo cada verbo o cada clase semántica de verbos tiende a organizarse siguiendo un conjunto más o menos limitado de patrones sintácticos más frecuentes. Tomando como ejemplo las principales variaciones construccionales de los verbos de percepción del español, se muestra cómo los esquemas sintácticos más frecuentes con los verbos de percepción representan asociaciones semánticamente coherentes entre el significado del verbo y el significado del esquema, cómo los esquemas alternantes proporcionan conceptualizaciones alternativas de situaciones similares, y cómo los verbos más frecuentes con un esquema sintáctico sirven de modelo o punto de atracción para la producción o interpretación de construcciones similares con otros verbos.

Regularities in the Behaviour of Russian Phrasal Idioms

It has been customary for linguists investigating the behaviour of idioms to focus primarily on their irregularities. The present work, which examines the idiom in the context of recent developments in syntactic theory, aims to uncover the regularities of idiom behaviour which underlie their superficial idiosyncrasies. The behaviour of Russian phrasal idioms offers a valuable testing ground for demonstrating the striking interconnections between the inflectional morphology of the Russian verb and idiomatic interpretation. Starting from the hypothesis that idioms are compositional with respect to the morphosyntactically driven features of their components, the analysis shows that the idioms under discussion reflect the feature values of their constituents transparently. The approach thus reveals a strong correlation between the semantic complexity and syntactic flexibility of idioms. The central hypothesis of this book, more technically, is that the degree of idiomatic frozenness can be defined in terms of X-bar projection levels and can be set out in terms of a 'frozenness hierarchy'. The frozenness hierarchy is seen to be a hierarchy of specifications for a lexical entry on the assumption that lexical specifications of phrasal idioms cannot be overriden by syntactic specifications.

The syntactic flexibility of adverbs: French degree adverbs

While French degree words in French have been assigned several syntactic categories, we show that they are rather highy polymorphic adverbs (they occur in all syntactic domains), which select the expression they modify on a purely semantic basis. Like French adverbs in general, they occur both to the left and to the right of the head they modify. Following previous work (a.o. van Noord and Bouma 1994, Abeillé and Godard 1997, Bouma et al. 2000), we assign them two different grammatical functions, adjuncts and complements. Semantically, they differ from quantifiers. We follow Kennedy (2000) who analyzes them as scalar predicate modifiers. Finally, the specific syntactic constraints that characterize a subset of them can be shown to follow from, or be related to, their weight properties (Abeillé and Godard 2000). We conclude that their apparently idiosyncratic properties fit into a more general theory of grammar.

Verbes de sentiment « figurés » de la classe N0 V N1sujet_intentionnel

Summary This paper accounts for French and Italian figurative verbs of emotion. These verbs are ambiguous in so far as they have a “physical » and a “psychological » meaning. French verbs are extracted from LG Table 4. I will consider the idea put forward by Lamiroy that the psychological use a of given verb can be determined by a reduction of syntactical flexibility in comparison to the physical use. Evidence will be given that at least as far as Table 4 verbs are concerned this is not the case. The approaches of Bouchard and Van Voorst who propose general semantic rules concerning the relation of physical and psychological meaning also fail to account for the data. This will be illustrated by a closer look on French and Italian verbs of anger. Although the devices of metaphorical interpretation can be explained, these devices are not general rules that permit the derivation of a psychological use from a physical use in a given context. Lexicalization seems to be idiosynchratic. Hence, LG has to provide separate lexical entries for the two constructions of any existing ambiguous verb.

Meaning in Interaction: The Case of actually

Meaning in Interaction: The Case of actually Rebecca Clift One aspect of the relationship between meaning and interaction is explored here by taking the English particle actually, which is characterized by flexibility of syntactic position, and investigating its use in a range of interactional contexts. Syntactic alternatives in the form of clause-initial or clause-final placement are found to be selected by reference to interactional exigencies. The temporally situated, contingent accomplishment of utterances in turns and their component turn-constructional units shows the emergence of meaning across a conversational sequence; it reveals syntactic flexibility as both a resource to be exploited for interactional ends and a constraint on that interaction.* 1. Grammar and interaction The meaning of any single grammatical construction is interactionally contingent, built over interactional time in accordance with interactional actualities. Meaning lies not with the speaker nor the addressee nor the utterance alone . . . but rather with the interactional past, current and projected next moment. (Schegloff et al. 1996:40) In their introduction to a collection of papers entitled Interaction and Grammar (Ochs et al. 1996), Schegloff, Ochs and Thompson set a powerful agenda for students of language use in proposing that the study of linguistic structures could be richly informed by consideration of their place in the wider context of social interaction. They develop a line of inquiry launched in the pages of Language in 1974 by Sacks et al. with their foundational paper on turn-taking in conversation, a work that established the turn-at-talk as a primary unit of analysis for the study of talk-in-interaction.1 By identifying components of the turn—the turn-constructional units (henceforth TCUs; Sacks et al. 1974:702–4)—as sentential, clausal, phrasal, and lexical in type,2 Sacks et al. anchored their work firmly at the intersection of grammar and interaction; however, the potential for work thus adumbrated remained largely unexploited until the studies in Ochs et al. 1996. In an introduction marking a significant reengagement of interactional research with grammatical considerations, Schegloff et al. claim that ‘an important dimension of linguistic structures is their moment-by-moment evolving interactionalproduction’ (Schegloff et al. 1996:39, emphasis added). In what follows I explore the theoretical and methodological implications of this claim by taking the turn and its component TCUs as the frame of reference in examining a single lexical item in English talk: actually. This choice is grounded in two related factors. First, previous treatments of actually are revealing of the two main analytical [End Page 245] perspectives to which items of this type have traditionally been subject; second, and crucially, actually is characterized by a striking feature—flexibility of syntactic position—hitherto analytically neglected in studies of its use. This flexibility is a valuable resource for anyone seeking an analytical payoff for taking the TCU as the object of attention.3 After examining studies of the function of actually in either the sentence or utterance, I examine naturally occurring talk, analysis of which necessitates reference to the turn as the object of investigation. Actually is deployed in four different positions in the turn. Extended analysis of the distinctions in placement in British English data reveals that this syntactic flexibility is exploited by interactional exigencies.4 2. Actually: sentences, utterances and turns-at-talk Actually has hitherto been characterized in both grammatical and pragmatic terms.5 Grammatically identified as an adverbial emphasizer, Quirk et al. propose that it ‘has a reinforcing effect on the truth value of the clause or part of the clause to which it applies’ (1985:583) and classify it with the other modal subjuncts certainly, clearly, definitely, indeed, obviously, plainly, really, surely, for certain, for sure, and of course as also functioning as a disjunct, clause-initially or -finally, commenting on the form or content of the clause and ‘expressing the comment that what is being said is true’ (1985:583).6 Pragmatic characterizations range in emphasis and scope. Watts (1988) and Smith and Jucker (2000), proposing a relevance-theoretic account, focus on the modification of propositional attitudes achieved by actually. Goldberg (1982) and Lenk (1998) discuss actually as part of a group of discourse markers or particles for their...

Representational flexibility in children's drawings: Effects of age and verbal instructions

This study aims to investigate representational and syntactical flexibility in children's drawing behaviour, and the extent to which changes introduced at both representational and syntactical levels are related to age or can be induced by contextual manipulations. A Deletion task required three age groups of 5‐, 7‐ and 9‐year‐old children to draw objects that had been rendered partially invisible, thanks to magic transformations. Two different verbal instructions about what was to remain visible in the objects, and two different objects, one regularly and one non‐regularly drawn, were designed to investigate contextual sensitivity in children's representational and syntactical behaviour respectively. The results provided evidence for sequential‐like developments with regard to both representational and syntactical flexibility in children. The extent to which the procedural constraints of drawing prevented representational flexibility to be expressed was investigated in a second experiment, in which the deletions were performed by means of an eraser on pre‐printed 2D line drawings. The results showed that the expression of representational flexibility across ages did not fundamentally change as a function of the load imposed by the procedural constraints.

Three important determinants of user performance for database retrieval

Three important factors that determine user performance during database retrieval are representation realism, expressive ease, and task complexity. Representation realism is the level of abstraction used when formulating queries. Expressive ease is the syntactic flexibility permitted when formulating queries. Task complexity is the level of difficulty of queries. A controlled laboratory experiment was conducted to assess the effects of these three factors on user productivity during database retrieval. The independent variables were representation realism (high versus low), expressive ease (high versus low), and query complexity (simple versus complex). The dependent variables were query accuracy and query time. Results show that all these three factors significantly affected user performance during database retrieval. However, their relative impact on query accuracy and query time differed. Moreover, these factors interacted in unique ways to moderate query accuracy and query time. Besides verifying prior empirical findings, these results offer several suggestions for future research and development work in the area of database retrieval.

Is It Better to Give Than to Donate? Syntactic Flexibility in Language Production

This article compares the predictions of two models of grammatical encoding in language production. The basis of one model is that alternative syntactic structures compete to determine which structure is eventually used. The second model is incremental: Utterances are gradually built up, and the structure emerges from the construction process itself. If grammatical encoding is competitive, syntactic choices should pose difficulties; if incremental, syntactic choices should ease the creation of speech. These predictions were tested in three experiments where speakers created utterances which sometimes required a syntactic decision. When constructing a sentence allowed a syntactic choice, speakers generally constructed that utterance with fewer errors and more quickly. This finding supports the notion that language production operates incrementally.

Trois Classes de Groupes Nominaux N À N

This article focuses on the subset of French N à N compounds which denote concrete objects, which can be analyzed in terms of headnoun (Na) and specifier (à Nb), and in which the specifier subclassifies the head. Our study shows that the various semantic functions of an à Nb specifier with respect to its head (e.g. part of, destination of, etc.) correspond to a) distinct relational properties between the two components, b) specific distributional properties of either Na, Nb, or both components, as well as c) particular configurations of general properties that account for the greater or lesser syntactic flexibility of complex nominals. Surprisingly enough, most of the compounds we examined fall into one of three main classes thus defined.

IDIOMS, NON-LITERAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

There are two pertinent themes in the study of idioms in the area of natural language processing. Firstly, idioms should be defined and located in the space of non-literal expressions. This will be the first aim of this paper. Secondly, a processing model should be developed. In this paper, the application of knowledge representation techniques in three different models for the representation and processing of idioms are discussed. The first, a symbolic procedural model extends the two-level model which was originally developed in computational morphology. The second is a simple localist connectionist model. The third, a symbolic hierarchical model, represents idioms as part of a lexicon conceived as an inheritance hierarchy. A comparison between the models is made in which the focus lies on the resolution of the ambiguity of idioms, the relation between the literal and non-literal interpretation and the syntactic flexibility of idiomatic expressions.

Flexibility of standard software packages for production/inventory control

Abstract This paper investigates first why flexibility is needed. Continuous organizational change appears to be a major driving force for changing information systems. Two main types of flexibility requirements are identified, namely, changes in operational procedures and changes in decision making. Three types of flexibility requirements are discussed, namely, syntactical, semantical and pragmatical flexibility. The following conclusions are drawn: •Syntactical flexibility is in principle obtainable by available software engineering principles. •Semantical flexibility is difficult to obtain and is constrained by the investment in application software. •Pragmatical flexibility is in practice constrained by investments in existing data and in organizational learning, and not by application software. This holds especially for changes in decision making.

Cov, the Underspecified Noun, and Syntactic Flexibility in Hmong

Hmong (Miao) is a Southeast Asian language characterized by classifier constructions. As a rule, there can be only one classifier per noun phrase. There exists a class of seeming exceptions to this rule, however: when the collective classifier cov is used with a semantically underspecified noun, the unit classifier is retained. I argue that these are not truly exceptions, but that the unit classifier in this environment must be analyzed as the first member of a nominal compound. Syntactic flexibility is characteristic of the language as a whole, and is better supported than any of the following alternative analyses: (a) reformulation of the phrase structure rule for NPs, (b) the consistent analysis of unit-classifier/underspecified-noun collocations as nominal compounds, (c) the analysis of cov as a quantifier, or (d) the analysis of the classifiers that pattern with underspecified nouns as representing two homophonous lexical items, one a classifier and the other a noun, which are related through a process of synchronic derivation.

A system for processing bilingual Arabic/English text

The production of high-quality Arabic/English text poses technical problems that are caused mainly by the high degree of syntactical flexibility which characterizes the Arabic language. This article describes a system with adequate solutions to the problems encountered in processing bilingual Arabic/English text. © 1986 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A system for processing bilingual Arabic/English text

The production of high-quality Arabic/English text poses technical problems that are caused mainly by the high degree of syntactical flexibility which characterizes the Arabic language. This article describes a system with adequate solutions to the problems encountered in processing bilingual Arabic/English text. © 1986 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Use of arabic in computerized information interchange

AbstractThere is a growing demand in the Arab world for the use of Arabic script in inputting and accessing information systems and the establishment of Arab databases. In all Arab countries, Arabic is the working language In management, business, accounting, education, arts, and literature and to a lesser extent in science, medicine, and engineering. Arab member countries in the International Information System for Agricultural Sciences and Technology (AGRIS), whose carrler language is English, face some difficulties in preparing documents in the Arabic language for AGRIS input. The method of script conversion through transliteration, which is used by AGRIS and the Library of Congress is neither helpful or acceptable to Arab librarians and Information specialists. These and similar complaints have prompted information and computer specialists to address the issues of Arabization of computer terminals and Input/output procedures. This article addresses the problem of Arabic computerized Information exchange and highlights the basic differences between treatment of Arabic and English. It also discusses the various Arab attempts to formulate standards for coding Arabic letters and vowels points and their sorting sequence. Another area that this article explores is the high degree of syntactical flexibility which characterizes the Arabic language and complicates data retrieval, computer aided translation, and human machine interface. A unified standard for the Arab/Latin Computer Code known as CODAR‐UFD based on the ASCII Code was adopted in 1982. This article discusses this new code and describes some of the existing terminals that use other codes.