Syntactic Form Research Articles

Code-Switching Patterns in the Writing-Related Talk of Young Emergent Bilinguals

This qualitative study examined code-switching patterns in the writing-related talk of 6 emergent Spanish-English bilingual first-grade children. Audio recordings, field notes, and writing artifacts documenting participant activities and language use in Spanish and English writing workshops were gathered over the course of 6 months and analyzed for code-switching prevalence, form, content, and purpose in relation to the writing process. The percentage distribution of oral code switching across the two linguistic contexts suggests a sociolinguistic imbalance between the two languages, wherein English played a prevalent role in the creation of Spanish texts, but Spanish did not appear to have the same utility in the development of English texts. Four general categories of code-switching functions emerged, indicating emergent bilingual writers’ (a) evaluation and self-regulation skills, (b) sociolinguistic and sociocultural competence, (c) metalinguistic insights, and (d) use of code switching to indicate a shift in topic, person, or syntactic form. These findings intimate children’s capacity to exploit their developing bilingual linguistic repertoire for a variety of academic and social purposes and illuminate the potential of code switching as a cognitive and linguistic resource in the process of writing.

A KANTIAN REPLY TO BOLZANO’S CRITIQUE OF KANT’S ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION

One of Bolzano’s objections to Kant’s way of drawing the analytic-synthetic distinction is that it only applies to judgments within a narrow range of syntactic forms, namely, universal affi rmative judgments. According to Bolzano, Kant cannot account for judgments of other syntactic forms that, intuitively, are analytic. A recent paper by Ian Proops also attributes to Kant the view that analytic judgments beyond a limited range of syntactic forms are impossible. I argue that, correctly understood, Kant’s conception of analyticity allows for analytic judgments of a wider range of syntactic forms.

Correlaciones entre forma y función en las construcciones interrogativas parciales del español de Puerto Rico

Los trabajos anteriores sobre las construcciones interrogativas del español, centrados en estudiar la diversidad de patrones sintácticos y su multifuncionalidad comunicativa, rompen con la relación isomórfica entre forma (interrogativa) y función (buscar información) que se estableció en la gramática tradicional. En este artículo, a través de un análisis basado en la frecuencia de todas las preguntas parciales directas en 27 horas de conversación natural puertorriqueña (N = 1210), establecemos la existencia de correlaciones significativas entre la función pragmática de la pregunta y la forma sintáctica que adquiere la construcción interrogativa. Las formas canónicas (interrogativas Verbo-Sujeto y sin sujeto expreso) se corresponden con la función de buscar información, mientras que las formas no canónicas (interrogativas hendidas e interrogativas Sujeto-Verbo) típicamente cumplen otras funciones discursivas. Los resultados de los análisis de la regla variable (Varbrul) exponen con detalle los factores lingüísticos que restringen de manera significativa el uso de estas formas no canónicas.

The Comment Clause — the Modificator of the Speaker`s Responsibility

The present paper concentrates on the first person-oriented comment clauses based on verbs of communication such as I say, let`s say, I dare say, would say, should say, might say. The feature they have in common is that they are used parenthetically; that is to say, they can occur at various places in an utterance without being syntactically integrated. The aim of this work is to analyze the pragmatics of comment clauses with the English verb say and their translation into the English-Lithuanian Translation Corpus, completed by the VDU Computer Linguistics Center (http://donelaitis.vdu.lt). A review of a research on comment clauses in Lithuanian and English languages shows that despite these structural differences between syntactic forms, it is a common feature of these parenthetical structures to perform pragmatic functions, relying on the speaker’s attitude or position. There are two ways in which the downgrading of the speaker‘s commitment can be accomplished: by alleviating responsibility or by sharing it between the speaker and the adressee. Comment clauses I say perform functions of revising, explanation, cohesion or one example being distinguished from the others; comment clauses I dare say have a "comment" feature, which is broadly understood as the speaker's approach or beliefs. They are mostly found in the parallel corpus sentences, i. e. respectively 37 % and 26 %. Lithuanian equivalents directly convey pragmatic meanings of the comment clauses and shift pragmatic meanings of the comment clauses using grammatical and lexical replacements.http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.19.941

Semantic - Based Querying Using Ontology in Relational Database of Library Management System

The traditional Web stores huge amount of data in the form of Relational Databases (RDB) as it is good at storing objects and relationships between them. Relational Databases are dynamic in nature which allows bringing tables together helping user to search for related material across multiple tables. RDB are scalable to expand as the data grows. The RDB uses a Structured Query Language called SQL to access the databases for several data retrieval purposes. As the world is moving today from the Syntactic form to Semantic form and the Web is also taking its new form of Semantic Web. The Structured Query of the RDB on web can be a Semantic Query on Semantic Web. The SPARQL is the Query Language recommended by W3C for the RDF(Resource Description Framework). RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web and is a very important layer of the Semantic Web Architecture. In this paper we consider the Library Management System (LMS) database, taking some tuples of the LMS Relational Schema. We discuss how the RDF code is scripted and validated using RDF Validator and how RDF Triples are generated. Later we give the graphical representation of the RDF triples and see the process of extracting ontology from the RDF Schema and application of the Semantic Query.

Continued access to syntactic information in reading

Reliable access to syntactic information beyond its use in first-pass reading was probed using a task labeled syntactic reading task. This task draws on an orthographic marker for syntactic structure, the capitalization of nouns in German. Subjects read written text strings containing a unit that could be taken as a noun or as a verb. The strings were disambiguated by the unit being capitalized or not. Thus subjects could interpret the text only when taking the capitalization marker into account. Data were collected from 231 German-speaking secondary school students. The results show that even subjects who were capable of reliably using capitalization markers in writing varied considerably in their use of these markers to identify syntactic structure in reading. High-achieving subjects profited more than others in situations where they could tie syntactic information to a prominent capitalization marker. This suggests that focus on syntactic form alone does not guarantee reliable access to syntactic information.

The linguistic argument for intellectualism

A central argument against Ryle’s (The concept of mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949) distinction between propositional and non propositional knowledge has relied on linguistic evidence. Stanley and Williamson (J Philos 98:411–444, 2001) have claimed that knowing-how ascriptions do not differ in any relevant syntactic or semantic respect from ascriptions of propositional knowledge, concluding thereby that knowing-how ascriptions attribute propositional knowledge, or a kind thereof. In this paper I examine the cross-linguistic basis of this argument. I focus on the linguistic analysis of practical knowledge ascriptions in Modern Greek, although the issues raised are not restricted to one language. It is relatively straightforward to show that none of the three types of practical knowledge ascriptions in Modern Greek is an embedded question configuration, and hence Stanley and Williamson original claim is confined to certain languages only. This is not the end of the matter, however, since Stanley (Nous 45:207–238, 2011) argues that the equivalents of ‘knowing-how’ ascriptions in certain languages should be semantically analyzed as embedded questions despite their syntactic form. I argue that this fallback position faces a host of empirical and theoretical problems, in view of which it cannot bear the weight Stanley puts on it, supporting a conclusion about the kind of knowledge thereby attributed.

Beyond syntactic priming: Evidence for activation of alternative syntactic structures

Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we utilize priming methodology to explore whether exposure to passive primes may increase children's production of sentences that have a different structure but share a similar purpose in discourse. We report three studies, two involving English- and Russian-speaking children, and a third involving Russian-speaking adults. Unlike English, Russian offers a variety of syntactic forms that emphasize the patient of a transitive action, thus fulfilling the discourse function of the passive. We found that English speakers increased the use of the particular syntactic form presented in the prime, whereas Russian speakers increased their production of several different syntactic forms used to emphasize the patient of the action.

Do Differences in Grammatical Form between Languages Explain Differences in Ontology between Different Philosophical Traditions?: A Critique of the Mass-Noun Hypothesis

It is an assumed view in Chinese philosophy that the grammatical differences between English or Indo-European languages and classical Chinese explain some of the differences between the Western and Chinese philosophical discourses. Although some philosophers have expressed doubts about the general link between classical Chinese philosophy and syntactic form of classical Chinese, I discuss a specific hypothesis, i.e., the mass-noun hypothesis, in this essay. The mass-noun hypothesis assumes that a linguistic distinction such as between the singular terms and the predicates is sufficient to justify or necessarily leads to a specific ontological distinction such as the distinction between the particular and the universal. I argue that one cannot read off semantic properties simply from syntactic ones and hence the syntactic differences do not automatically translate into the semantic differences between languages, that the syntactic features of Chinese nouns do not have explanatory significance in explaining why the particular-universal problem does not arise in the classical period of Chinese philosophy, and that the part-whole ontology allegedly informed by the mass-noun-like semantics does not provide a natural or intuitive picture of the language-world relation.

Understanding economical outcomes with the mental number line

With this study we provide evidence that the cognitive processes involved in addition/subtraction, mapped along the mental number line, seem to mediate our understanding of trading verbs. When left-to-right culture participants read "loss" verbs, cognitive activation moves "leftward" as in arithmetical subtraction, while reading "gain" verbs activates a mental rightward space as in addition.We test this hypothesis by asking to a group of participants to use their left and right hand in judging (as correct of not) the syntactic form of several verbs meaning financial outcomes. Results show that processing “gain verbs” was associated with shorter latencies when responding with the right hand similarly when performing an addition task, while processing “loss verbs” was associated with shorter latencies when responding with the left, similarly when performing a subtraction task. This finding suggests that understanding language denoting economics outcomes covertly engages the arithmetical system in a spatially left-right dimension.

Understanding economical outcomes with the mental number line

AbstractWith this study we provide evidence that the cognitive processes involved in addition/subtraction, mapped along the mental number line, seem to mediate our understanding of trading verbs. When left-to-right culture participants read "loss" verbs, cognitive activation moves "leftward" as in arithmetical subtraction, while reading "gain" verbs activates a mental rightward space as in addition.We test this hypothesis by asking to a group of participants to use their left and right hand in judging (as correct of not) the syntactic form of several verbs meaning financial outcomes. Results show that processing “gain verbs” was associated with shorter latencies when responding with the right hand similarly when performing an addition task, while processing “loss verbs” was associated with shorter latencies when responding with the left, similarly when performing a subtraction task. This finding suggests that understanding language denoting economics outcomes covertly engages the arithmetical system in a spatially left-right dimension.

Context Strengthens Initial Misinterpretations of Text

Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not support the preferred, incorrect “NP and NP” interpretation. Online reading times and offline comprehension question responses were the dependent variables. Results suggest that when propositional content of incoming text is consistent with propositional content of the context, readers often hang on to the resulting coherent interpretation even when subsequent input contradicts it. Results also suggest that (a) context affects reading times and final interpretation; (b) when context and comprehension questions bias readers toward the incorrect interpretation, even unambiguous sentences are regularly misinterpreted; and (c) both semantic content and syntactic form of context influence how the context and subsequent text are integrated in memory.

Automated Search for Impossibility Theorems in Social Choice Theory: Ranking Sets of Objects

We present a method for using standard techniques from satisfiability checking to automatically verify and discover theorems in an area of economic theory known as ranking sets of objects. The key question in this area, which has important applications in social choice theory and decision making under uncertainty, is how to extend an agent's preferences over a number of objects to a preference relation over nonempty sets of such objects. Certain combinations of seemingly natural principles for this kind of preference extension can result in logical inconsistencies, which has led to a number of important impossibility theorems. We first prove a general result that shows that for a wide range of such principles, characterised by their syntactic form when expressed in a many-sorted first-order logic, any impossibility exhibited at a fixed (small) domain size will necessarily extend to the general case. We then show how to formulate candidates for impossibility theorems at a fixed domain size in propositional logic, which in turn enables us to automatically search for (general) impossibility theorems using a SAT solver. When applied to a space of 20 principles for preference extension familiar from the literature, this method yields a total of 84 impossibility theorems, including both known and nontrivial new results.

Situationally independent prosodic phrasing

AbstractA series of speech production and categorization experiments demonstrates that naïve speakers and listeners reliably use correspondences between prosodic phrasing and syntactic constituent structure to resolve standing and temporary ambiguity. Materials obtained from a co-operative gameboard task show that prosodic phrasing effects (e.g., the location of the strongest break in an utterance) are independent of discourse factors that might be expected to influence the impact of syntactic ambiguity, including the availability of visual referents for the meanings of ambiguous utterances and the use of utterances as instructions versus confirmations of instructions. These effects hold across two dialects of English, spoken in the American Midwest, and New Zealand. Results from PP-attachment and verb transitivity ambiguities indicate clearly that the production of prosody-syntax correspondences is not conditional upon situational disambiguation of syntactic structure, but is rather more directly tied to grammatical constraints on the production of prosodic and syntactic form. Differences between our results and those reported elsewhere are best explained in terms of differences in task demands.

Phonological advance planning in sentence production

Our study addresses the scope of phonological advance planning during sentence production using a novel experimental procedure. The production of German sentences in various syntactic formats (SVO, SOV, and VSO) was cued by presenting pictures of the agents of previously memorized agent–action–patient scenes. To tap the phonological activation of the agent (encoded as sentence subject) and the patient (encoded as sentence object), auditory distractor words, which were either phonologically related to the subject, or to the object, or were unrelated to both, were used. Compared with the unrelated control condition, distractors related to the subject in the utterance-initial phrase facilitated the response, while distractors related to the subject or to the object appearing in a non-initial phrase interfered with the response. Because some automatic phonological activation resulting from the perceptual processing of the visual stimulus cannot be responsible for the object-related interference effects, our results suggest that phonological advance planning exceeds a single syntactic phrase and may even span a whole simple sentence. The data are discussed in the context of current models of phonological encoding.

A Concordance-based Study of the Use of Reporting Verbs as Rhetorical Devices in Academic Papers

This research examines the use of concordancing to create materials for teaching about the role of reporting verbs in academic papers. The appropriate use of reporting verbs is crucial both in establishing the writer’s own claims and situating these claims within previously published research. The paper uses a sample of articles from Science, a leading journal in the scientific community, to create two small corpora. Based on the frequency ranking of 27 examples of reporting verbs, a sample of 540 sentences was chosen for more careful analysis. For each reporting verb in this sample, a randomized sample of sentences was drawn. In addition, a third corpus was created from student papers to compare the student use of reporting verbs to that of published writers. Each sentence in the randomized sample was coded into six possible categories that were based on syntactic form and rhetorical purpose. An analysis of these categories is presented in the second part of this paper. The results of this research were used to design a database of sentences that could be used to create teaching materials for an academic writing course and also be accessed through the Internet (Bloch, 2009).

Input and first language acquisition: Evaluating the role of frequency

This paper addresses the relationship between the frequency of morphological, lexical and syntactic forms in the input and children's language acquisition. The problem of obtaining reliable frequency measures under different sampling regimes is discussed. Since children are not simple associationist processors onto which the frequency of hearing or producing a string maps directly, a number of factors that interact with frequency are reviewed: form-function mappings, neighbourhood relations and multiple cues. These factors raise the problem of the level of granularity at which we test for a frequency-based explanation which can only be established through empirical research. Studies showing a relationship between the relative frequency of forms in the input and children's errors, including morphological errors, optional infinitive errors and accusative-for-nominative errors in English are discussed. The final section of the paper deals more briefly with some counter-arguments to the importance of frequency effects in the learning of grammar.

L’écriture des interventions narratoriales dans Melyador*

The narrative voice of Jean Froissart’s romance Melyador is characterized by its omnipresence and by the originality and the delicacy of its manifestations. In order to ascertain how Froissart handles this repertoire reputedly limited by tradition, the object of this study is to examine his interventions on the microstructural level, taking into account the various functions they perform in the text. It appears that the formulas and the syntactic forms employed originate from the verse romance, from the epic poem, from the narrative but also the historiographic prose. Is thus exposed a tension between the writing and the oral modes that could be defined as orality founded on solemn writing. Despite some borrowings from tradition, the writing of narratorial interventions is not set. Concerned about variety and lexical as well as syntactic research, the author combined ancient formulas, at times of prosodic function, with less stereotypical, not to say openly personal, expressions. It emerges that the narrator is deeply involved in his story, nearly present physically and engaged in a constant dialogue with the audience, on a conversational mode that is lively, elegant and not devoid of humour.

Assertion and false-belief attribution

The ability to attribute false-beliefs to others — the hallmark of a representational theory of mind — has been shown to be reliant on linguistic ability, specifically on competence in sentential complementation after verbs of communication and cognition such as ‘say that’ and ‘think that’. The reason commonly put forward for this is that these structures provide a representational format which enables the child to think about another’s thoughts. The paper offers an alternative explanation. Drawing on the work of the philosophers Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom, it argues that the available data better fits an account that grounds the notion of representation in the commitments undertaken by asserters. The competence in sentential complementation that precedes false-belief attribution is viewed as a result of the child developing a meta-awareness of the syntactic forms employed in assertion. This meta-awareness gives the child access to discourse about the commitments undertaken by speakers and the consequences of these for their behaviour. This understanding constitutes the child’s grasp of the representational nature of discourse and thought. The paper thus offers an illocutionary account of theory-of-mind development.

Information processing during simultaneous interpretation: a three-tier approach

This article offers a general overview of a wider experimental research project on simultaneous interpretation (SI). Contrary to previous assumptions, the results suggest that when working from English to Spanish, both lexical and syntactical forms, as well as automaticity, play a more than substantial role in the choices made by interpreters, rather than being systematically dictated by the underlying meaning of the original utterances. The experimental data appear to corroborate several intuitions already put forward by other researchers, further allowing for the identification of a series of highly specific and previously unknown interpreters' strategies, as well as flows of interferences. These results led to the formulation of a tentative model of information processing during SI, suggesting the concurrent interplay of three complementary and overlapping systems: literalness, automatic responses and meaning construction. This new proposal is not without consequences for many of the pillars of the profession, by re-opening the debate surrounding aspects such as language specificity and directionality, literalness, issues related to interpreting to or from one's first language, etc. This proposal may therefore have implications for interpreter training and for the future developments of the profession.