Syntactic Form Research Articles

Structural priming in Spanish as evidence of implicit learning

This study uses a structural priming technique with young Spanish speakers to test whether exposure to a rare syntactic form in Spanish (fue-passive) would increase the production and comprehension of that form. In Study 1, 14 six-year-old Spanish speakers described pictures of transitive scenes. This baseline study revealed that fue-passives were virtually non-existent in children's spontaneous speech. Using the priming technique in Study 2, an additional 56 Spanish-speaking children were exposed to fue-passive or active picture descriptions; we varied whether children repeated the modeled form. With repetition, production of fue-passives increased past baseline usage. When not asked to repeat, comprehension and production of fue-passives was no different than chance. Results extend the existing literature by experimentally testing input effects on the production and comprehension of infrequently used constructions, further corroborating the relation between input frequency and language skill. Findings are consistent with the view that an implicit learning mechanism guides language learning.

Developing linguistic flexibility across the school years

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template; Hebrew-specific morpho-syntactic abilities were tested by alternating between bound inflected and free syntactic forms of verbs and nouns; syntactic tasks involved shifting between direct and indirect speech, between single-clause and bi-clausal sentences with subordinate or coordinate clauses, and construction of well-formed sentences from scrambled groups of words. Across the board, participants encountered more difficulty in shifting from low frequency, high-register, structurally more fused constructions typical of written usage to their everyday, more transparent options than vice versa. High-school adolescents responded like the adults on most tasks, differing significantly from grade-school and junior-high-school students. These results are interpreted in terms of linguistic and developmental variables underlying the protracted path to acquisition of high-level linguistic flexibility.

Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: Putting the worse option last

In a corpus of c. 250h of recorded interactions between young children and adults in USA and UK households, we found that children could be directed to change their course of action by three syntactic formats that offered alternatives: an imperative, or a modal declarative, plus a consequential alternative to non-compliance (e.g. come down at once or I shall send you straight to bed; you’ve got to stand here with it or it goes back in the cupboard), or an interrogative requiring a preference (e.g. do you want to put them neatly in the corner for mummy please or do you wanna go to bed). Formatted syntactically as or-alternatives, these can perform the actions both of warning and threatening. But they make a ‘bad’ course of action contiguous to the child's turn. We argue that adults choose this format because the interactional preference for contiguity makes the negative alternative the more salient one. This implies that adults attribute to children the ability to appreciate the flouting of preference organisation for deontic effect.

Perceptions of different syntactic forms of generics: an experimental study

Perceptions of different syntactic forms of generics: an experimental study

Constructions do not cross Languages

In research on bilingualism it is often assumed that linguistic structures can be shared across languages. The emphasis on generalization and categorization in construction grammar also seems to imply that speakers can develop cross-linguistic representations. This contribution argues that generalizations can occur only on the semantic level. Data from typologically distinct languages shows that generalizations over form are not likely to play a role in language processing. It is further argued that neither syntactical nor grammatical form is needed in order to explain syntactic transfer.

Without his shirt off he saved the child from almost drowning: interpreting an uncertain input

Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expressing a message. As a result comprehenders are faced with decisions about what the speaker may have intended, which may not be the same as the grammatically-licensed compositional interpretation of what was said. Two experiments investigated the comprehension of inputs that may have resulted from blending two syntactic forms. The results of the experiments suggest that readers and listeners tend to repair such utterances, restoring them to the presumed intended structure, and they assign the interpretation of the corrected utterance. Utterances that are repaired are expected to also be acceptable when they are easy to diagnose/repair and they are ‘familiar’, i.e., they correspond to natural speech errors. The results of the experiments established a continuum ranging from outright linguistic illusions with no indication that listeners and readers detected the error (the inclusion of almost in A passerby rescued a child from almost being run over by a bus.), to a majority of unblended interpretations for doubled quantifier sentences (Many students often turn in their assignments late) to only a third undoubled implicit negation (I just like the way the president looks without his shirt off.) The repair or speech error reversal account offered here is contrasted with the noisy channel approach and the good enough processing approach.

Preface

This volume contains selected papers from the workshop ‘Concepts and Meaning’ held on 2–5 May 2012 at the Vienna University of Technology in honour of the 60th birthday of Alexander Leitsch. Alexander Leitsch made substantial contributions to a variety of different research areas including automated deduction, computability theory, proof theory and formal mathematics. The broad scope of his research interests is reflected in the contents of this special issue that features the following papers (in alphabetic order): ... A common thread that runs through Alexander Leitsch' scientific work is his mastery of syntactic precision rooted in the conviction that the syntactic form not only captures but even determines the semantic meaning of concepts, hence also the title of this special issue. In addition to his scientific activities he is also an inspiring colleague and a dedicated and enthusiastic teacher as witnessed by generations of his students who are now successful in academia as well as in industry, some of which are represented in this volume.

Two interpretive systems for natural language?

It is proposed that humans have available to them two systems for interpreting natural language. One system is familiar from formal semantics. It is a type based system that pairs a syntactic form with its interpretation using grammatical rules of composition. This system delivers both plausible and implausible meanings. The other proposed system is one that uses the grammar together with knowledge of how the human production system works. It is token based and only delivers plausible meanings, including meanings based on a repaired input when the input might have been produced as a speech error.

Irish Existentials in Context

AbstractThis paper aims to contribute to the comparative typology of existential constructions by examining Irish existentials in detail. It goes on to engage some of the central theoretical issues raised in that investigation and provides support for the bifurcated analysis of the definiteness restriction proposed by McNally (1992). It identifies what is argued to be a true existential predicate and argues that there is no common syntactic form for existentials crosslinguistically; rather, the observed commonalities among existentials across languages reflect semantic primitives out of which they are constructed. Diversity in the expression of existential propositions principally reflects different patterns of lexicalization.

Teaching the Nature of Science with Scientific Narratives

The aim of this paper is to discuss the use of short science stories based on the history of science for science teacher education. Such stories are implemented to acquaint prospective and practicing science teachers in all educational levels with a conceptualisation of the nature of science (NOS) drawing from recent and contemporary developments in the philosophy of science (namely, the lines of new experimentalism and semantic conception of scientific theories). Science stories are here understood as narratives combining different ‘rationalities’, i.e. ways of presenting the scientific content in different stages of production and under different syntactic formats. In our work with teachers, the scientific enterprise is depicted as an aim-driven, value-laden transformation of the natural world mediated by conceptual and material tools; in such depiction, theoretical models are given a central role. The paper presents a didactical (i.e. instructional) unit with such conceptualisation of NOS; this conceptualisation is set against the backdrop of some scientific narratives on the history of the atomic theory that are embedded in the unit.

Collaborative reversing of input formats and program data structures for security applications

Reversing the syntactic format of program inputs and data structures in binaries plays a vital role for understanding program behaviors in many security applications. In this paper, we propose a collaborative reversing technique by capturing the mapping relationship between input fields and program data structures. The key insight behind our paper is that program uses corresponding data structures as references to parse and access different input fields, and every field could be identified by reversing its corresponding data structure. In details, we use a finegrained dynamic taint analysis to monitor the propagation of inputs. By identifying base pointers for each input byte, we could reverse data structures and conversely identify fields based on their referencing data structures. We construct several experiments to evaluate the effectiveness. Experiment results show that our approach could effectively reverse precise input formats, and provide unique benefits to two representative security applications, exploit diagnosis and malware analysis.

Definite Discourse–New Reference in L1 and L2: A Study of Bridging in Mandarin, Korean, and English

Definite expressions may be used to introduce a referent into discourse when their familiarity between speaker and listener can be inferred, a strategy known as bridging. However, for a number of reasons, bridging may be difficult to acquire compared to the acquisition of indefinite introductions for noninferable referent types, with the native language of the second language (L2) learners suggested to be a major factor influencing L2 acquisition. Two experiments were conducted into the use of bridging, using a controlled picture sequence where neutral, weakly, or strongly inferable referents were to be introduced. The first study investigated native speaker data from English, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean, and the second study focused on a cross‐section of learner data from Mandarin and Korean L2 English learners from six proficiency levels ranging from A1 (Basic user) to C2 (Proficient user) of the Common European Framework. The native results show that the three languages introduce inferable referents in markedly different ways: definite articles for English, omission of numeral + classifiers before the noun for Mandarin, and with Korean making no apparent distinction for inferability in terms of noun‐phrase form. The L2 results show that the acquisition of the definite article + noun construction to introduce inferable referents in L2 English occurs at lower Common European Framework levels for the Mandarin group than the Korean group. Therefore, it is claimed that Mandarin L2 English learners may have less difficulty mapping L2 syntactic form to pragmatic function in their L2 narrative production than their Korean counterparts, as a possible consequence of positive transfer from their native language.

Variables and Values in Children’s Early Word-Combinations

Abstract A model of syntactic development proposes that children’s very first word-combinations are already generated via productive rules that express in syntactic form the relation between a predicate word and its semantic argument. An alternative hypothesis is that they learn frozen chunks. In Study 1 we analyzed a large sample of young children’s early two-word sentences comprising of verbs with direct objects. A majority of objects were generated by pronouns but a third of children’s sentences used bare common nouns as objects. We checked parents’ twoword long sentences of verbs with objects and found almost no bare common nouns. Children cannot have copied sentences with bare noun objects from parents’ two-word long sentences as frozen chunks. In Study 2 we raised the possibility that children’s early sentences with bare nouns are rote-learned ‘telegraphic speech’, acquired as unanalyzed frozen chunks from longer input sentences due to perceptual problem to hear the unstressed determiners. To test this explanation, we tested the children’s speech corpus for evidence that they avoid determiners in their word-combinations. The results showed that they do not; in fact they generate very many determiner-common noun combinations as two-word utterances. The findings suggest that children produce their early word-combinations of the core-grammar type by a productive rule that maps the predicate-argument relations of verbs and their semantic arguments to headdependent syntax, and not as frozen word-combinations. Children mostly learn to use indexical expressions such as pronouns to express the variable semantic arguments of verbs as context dependent; they also employ bare common nouns to express specific values of the arguments. The earliest word-combinations demonstrate that children understand that syntax is built on the predicate-argument relations of words and use this insight to produce their early sentences.

Nociones sintácticas básicas del Latín para acceder a textos clásicos

El presente estudio trata de formular en forma clara las nociones sintácticas necesarias para poder comprender e interpretar textos clásicos latinos, filosóficos, históricos o literarios, indispensables en los estudios universitarios humanísticos. El estudio de la lengua latina supone la conjunción de los dos aspectos esenciales del lenguaje: su morfología (en el caso de la lengua latina, con sus declinaciones nominales, adjetivales y pronominales, así como los paradigmas de las conjugaciones verbales) y la sintaxis, es decir, las reglas características de su estructura, sus giros y sus posibilidades. En este estudio obviamos lo referente a las reglas morfológicas por considerarlas ya conocidas, y formulamos las combinaciones sintácticas de las cuatro categorías gramaticales esenciales: sustantivo, adjetivo, verbo y adverbio. Profundizamos en la función peculiar de cada una de ellas, así como sobre otras modalidades sintácticas que pueden también cumplir dichas funciones.

Teaching Native Language to Primary School Pupils with Severe Speech Disorders under Conditions of Inclusive Group

The article deals with gaining theoretical knowledge of language by younger students with severe speech disorders (SSD) under conditions of inclusive group. Curriculum requirements for knowledge of the native language gained by students in the system of linguistic concepts are analyzed. Keywords: special education, teaching native language, primary school, speech disorders, inclusive group. Introduction. The problem of educating children with severe speech disorders under conditions of inclusive group is important for the theory and practice of modern speech therapy. According to domestic and overseas scholars (L.Bartenev, V.Kondratenko, R.Levin, I.Marchenko, L.Spirova, E.Sobotovych, V.Tarasun, V.Tyschenko, L.Trofymenko, N.Cherednichenko, M.Sheremetand), serious disorders of speech (SSD) include alalia, aphasia, dysarthria, rynolaliya, and stuttering. The main features that combine all of these speech disorders are normal biological hearing, sight, sharp ability of intellectual development with severe scarcity of communication. Severely underdeveloped speech, deficiencies in pronunciation of sounds, lack of clarity in perception of word image, limited vocabulary, incorrect grammar, and break of syntactic form of expression, changing tempo and rhythm of speech, violation of communicative and cognitive functions of speech affect the level of mental and physical development of children with SSD. Due to the low developed speech of younger students belonging to this category, there are considerable difficulties in their gaining knowledge of native language and getting speaking skills. Thus, the problem of gaining theoretical knowledge of language by younger students with severe speech disorders is extremely important because the level of knowledge assimilation affects the quality of mastering other academic disciplines, expanding knowledge about the environment, enhances personal development of students. Teaching primary school children with severe speech disorders is conducted according to the programs developed by M.Sheremet and V.Tarasun. (2005). Therefore, we consider it necessary to determine guidelines for the development of knowledge of the native language by primary school pupils with severe speech disorders based on the analysis of proposed programs. To solve these tasks, we used the method of theoretical analysis and synthesis of the literature on the study issue. Results. Younger pupils' speech development and their successful learning at primarily school are dependent on properly organized process of mastering knowledge of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. Phonetic knowledge makes it possible not only to master reading and writing during the literacy, but also, in conjunction with morphology (word formation in particular), forms the basis for the formation of spelling skills. According to the curriculum at an early stage of learning the native language (preparatory class) SSD children learn to operate with such terms from the section of phonetics as syllable, word, sentence, letter, loud sound, hard consonant, soft consonant and stress. In order to prepare students with the SSD to master grammar, much attention is paid to the skills of sound analysis and synthesis component analysis of speech, correct pronunciation of words with light component structure. Presentation of the material takes place systematically gradually becoming more and more difficult throughout the study period. The level of complexity is based on the current level of mental and physical development of children of this category and their zone of proximal development. As for the lexical system, the formation of lexical representations and concepts is a means of enrichment, refinement and revitalization of dictionary. The initial stage of language learning has the most important lexical concept of a word. By familiarizing children with the term word, a teacher emphasizes that a combination of sounds (a child's attention is drawn to the sound of the word), which is always associated with

A multi-focused proof system isomorphic to expansion proofs

The sequent calculus is often criticized for requiring proofs to contain large amounts of low-level syntactic details that can obscure the essence of a given proof. Because each inference rule introduces only a single connective, sequent proofs can separate closely related steps---such as instantiating a block of quantifiers---by irrelevant noise. Moreover, the sequential nature of sequent proofs forces proof steps that are syntactically non-interfering and permutable to nevertheless be written in some arbitrary order. The sequent calculus thus lacks a notion of canonicity: proofs that should be considered essentially the same may not have a common syntactic form. To fix this problem, many researchers have proposed replacing the sequent calculus with proof structures that are more parallel or geometric. Proof-nets, matings, and atomic flows are examples of such revolutionary formalisms. We propose, instead, an evolutionary approach to recover canonicity within the sequent calculus, which we illustrate for classical first-order logic. The essential element of our approach is the use of a multi-focused sequent calculus as the means for abstracting away low-level details from classical cut-free sequent proofs. We show that, among the multi-focused proofs, the maximally multi-focused proofs that collect together all possible parallel foci are canonical. Moreover, if we start with a certain focused sequent proof system, such proofs are isomorphic to expansion proofs---a well known, minimalistic, and parallel generalization of Herbrand disjunctions---for classical first-order logic. This technique appears to be a systematic way to recover the "essence of proof" from within sequent calculus proofs.

Identifying ISI‐indexed articles by their lexical usage: A text analysis approach

This research creates an architecture for investigating the existence of probable lexical divergences between articles, categorized as Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and non‐ISI, and consequently, if such a difference is discovered, to propose the best available classification method. Based on a collection of ISI‐ and non‐ISI‐indexed articles in the areas of business and computer science, three classification models are trained. A sensitivity analysis is applied to demonstrate the impact of words in different syntactical forms on the classification decision. The results demonstrate that the lexical domains of ISI and non‐ISI articles are distinguishable by machine learning techniques. Our findings indicate that the support vector machine identifies ISI‐indexed articles in both disciplines with higher precision than do the Naïve Bayesian and K‐Nearest Neighbors techniques.

Increasing Second Language Learners’ Production and Comprehension of Developmentally Advanced Syntactic Forms

This investigation extended the use of the priming methodology to 5- and 6-year-olds at the beginning stages of learning English as a second language (L2). In Study 1, 14 L2 children described transitive scenes without an experimenter’s input. They produced no passives and minimal actives; most of their utterances were incomplete. In Study 2, 56 additional L2 children were exposed to an experimenter’s transitives (actives or passives) to determine whether and how it affected their English production and comprehension of these forms. Results showed that exposure to passives increased children’s production of passives. Repetition of the experimenter’s sentences increased both production and comprehension of passives and actives. Further, exposure to passives increased children’s use of complete sentences (transitives, nontransitives), primarily those with a focus on the putative patient of the transitive scene. Findings suggest that exposure to developmentally advanced forms activates the relevant transitive conceptual structure which facilitates the acquisition of syntactic forms.

“Meng? It Just Means Cute”: A Chinese Online Vernacular Term in Context

“Meng? It Just Means Cute”: A Chinese Online Vernacular Term in Context

The surface-compositional semantics of English intonation

This article proposes a syntax and a semantics for intonation in English and some related languages. The semantics is ‘surface-compositional’, in the sense that syntactic derivation constructs information-structural logical form monotonically, without rules of structural revision, and without autonomous rules of ‘focus projection’. This is made possible by the generalized notion of syntactic constituency afforded by combinatory categorial grammar (CCG)—in particular, the fact that its rules are restricted to string-adjacent type-driven combination. In this way, the grammar unites intonation structure and information structure with surface-syntactic derivational structure and Montague-style compositional semantics, even when they deviate radically from traditional surface structure. The article revises and extends earlier CCG-based accounts of intonational semantics, grounding hitherto informal notions like ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ (a.k.a. ‘topic’ and ‘comment’, ‘presupposition’ and ‘focus’, etc.) and ‘background’ and ‘contrast’ (a.k.a. ‘given’ and ‘new’, ‘focus’, etc.) in a logic of speaker/hearer supposition and update, using a version of Rooth’s alternative semantics. A CCG grammar fragment is defined that constrains language-specific intonation and its interpretation more narrowly than previous attempts.