Syntactic Form Research Articles

Effect of Layer Thickness in Layered Aluminum Matrix Syntactic Foam.

This work experimentally investigates the effect of layered structure on the static and impact response of a new layered syntactic foam developed for impact energy absorption. The layered syntactic foam had the same density of 1.6 g/cm3 and the same components of 50% large spheres (L) and 50% small spheres (S) with different structures from two layers to five layers. The impact response and energy absorption were investigated by drop-weight impact tests. Under static loading, more layers led to higher yield stress and lower energy absorption. There were three types of progressive failures of layered syntactic form under impact loading. The failure propagation was examined and found to be dependent on the layer number and impact energy. Interestingly, layered syntactic foam absorbed more energy than both of its components in terms of ductility. The ductility of layered syntactic foam decreased with the increase in layer number. The peak stress of layered syntactic foam increased with the increase in layer number. Two-layered syntactic foam LS had the highest ductility under 60 J/g impact, as well as an energy absorption of 35 J/g, compared to other layered syntactic foams. Specifically, its component L had a ductility under 70 J/g and an energy absorption of 25 J/g, while component S had a ductility under 10 J/g and an energy absorption of 10 J/g.

Metaphor Competition in the Book of Job by Lance R. Howley

Reviewed by: Metaphor Competition in the Book of Job by Lance R. Howley David A. Bosworth lance r. howley, Metaphor Competition in the Book of Job (JAJSup 26; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). Pp. 256. $113. Scholars have long disagreed about whether the speakers in Job respond to one another or merely advance the speakers’ positions without interacting with prior speeches. Howley brings a clear method and tight focus to this question that advances scholarship and lays foundations that others may build on. He quotes Carol A. Newsom’s remark that the poetic dialogue in Job is “a struggle over metaphors” (Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003] 119). The speakers in Job make extensive use of metaphor, and H. examines whether their use of metaphor responds to prior metaphors. Metaphor competition occurs when a speaker reinterprets the metaphorical mapping introduced by a prior speaker, and this remapping emerges as a clear example of coherence across speeches. H.’s results are mixed but provide a clearer picture of coherence in Job than scholarly discussion has so far produced. In chap. 1, H. presents the scholarly debate about coherence in the Book of Job and lays out a path forward. He draws on cognitive linguistics to clarify the notion of coherence, which exists in the mind of a reader who engages the text. A dialogue may cohere with or [End Page 115] without progressing as long as the participants speak about the same concepts, which need not involve verbal repetition. At the end of chap. 1, H. outlines his method. He systematically analyzes two metaphors in the corpus of Job: speech as a target domain (metaphors about the topic of speech) and animals as a source domain (metaphors involving animals on any topic). Interlocutors in the book frequently critique one another’s speech and often use animal imagery. Furthermore, animals appear in God’s speech at the end, which allows H. to examine the divine speech as a response to the human dialogue. In chap. 2, H. describes conceptual metaphor theory using as a consistent example Job 13:12, “Your reminders are proverbs of ashes.” Metaphors may appear in a variety of syntactical forms (here a construct chain). Conceptual metaphor theory involves investigation of the ideas and views surrounding the terms. In the OT, the term “ashes” ( ) elicits at least four domains: mourning, destruction, humility, and weakness. Almost all OT references to ashes elicit metaphorical mappings that have little to do with literal meanings, making research on the conceptual signification necessary. The mapping between the concepts proverbs and ashes may work in various ways, and the context helps narrow the possibilities. In the verse, Job represents the wisdom of his friends as ephemeral rather than lasting reminders. The next line (“your defenses are defenses of clay”) activates weakness and worthlessness as qualities shared by ashes and clay. H. concludes with three criteria for identifying perceptually coherent metaphors that would indicate interactions between speakers. First, unconventional metaphors are more perceptible to audiences. Second, more specific metaphors are more perceptible than generic metaphors. Generic metaphors like “logical structures are physical structures” appear in many speeches, but the cognitive level of these metaphors is so generic that they pass unnoticed. Third, coherence is more difficult to perceive as the textual distance between metaphors is greater. In chap. 3, H. analyzes coherence in the speech metaphors. He begins with discussion of speech in Job and evaluations of speech (Job evaluates his own and his friends’ speech, and the friends evaluate their own speech). He analyzes metaphors in three categories: speech as destructive, strengthening, and windy words. H. does not see coherence across speeches except in the last category, where windy words cohere throughout the dialogue as a critique of Job’s speech that implicitly places him with the wicked fools. Job initiates the metaphor, asking if his friends think his words are wind (Job 6:26), and they pick up the image and develop it affirmatively (8:2; 15:2–3, 30), and Job finally rejects this characterization of his speech (16:3). In chap. 4, H. examines the several metaphors using animals as a source domain...

Congruence from the operator\u2019s point of view

A basic sanity property of a process semantics is that it constitutes a congruence with respect to standard process operators. This issue has been traditionally addressed by developing, for a specific process semantics, a syntactic format for operational semantics specifications. We suggest a novel, orthogonal approach, which focuses on a specific process operator and determines a class of congruence relations for this operator. To this end, we impose syntactic restrictions on Hennessy–Milner logic, so that a process semantics whose modal characterization satisfies those criteria is guaranteed to be a congruence with respect to the operator in question. We investigate alternative composition, action prefix, projection, encapsulation, renaming, and parallel composition with communication, in the context of both concrete and weak process semantics.

Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing, by Sarah Allison

Reviewed by: Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing by Sarah Allison Daniel Wright (bio) Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing, by Sarah Allison; pp. ix + 172. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, $49.95. To begin with a reductive reading of a book about the promises of reductive reading: Sarah Allison’s Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing is about how to read at the level of the sentence, the line, or the clause for features of the Victorian novel usually mapped at the level of theme, plot, or the developmental arc of character. In other words, what Allison calls reduction many readers of her work will recognize as the sheer closeness of very close reading. And yet the power of the book lies in precisely this defamiliarizing move, by which Allison shows us how digital methods usually associated with distance and data-crunching can also allow a kind of closeness sometimes unavailable to our ordinary reading practices. Allison’s method derives as much from Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970), with its fine-grained sentence-by-sentence parsing of Honoré de Balzac, as it does from the field of computational literary analysis. I would encourage skeptics of the digital humanities above all to pick up Reductive Reading without delay. One of the great pleasures of reading Allison’s work for non-digital scholars who do not know their types from their tokens is that the method is laid out so persuasively, with an eye to the tight relationship between computation and close reading. The book purposefully makes argument and method difficult to disentangle. Its central question as a work of nineteenth-century novel criticism has to do with “how style relates to moralizing.” The question is disarmingly spare, but for that very reason it is “impossibly complicated,” as Allison points out, demanding the kind of reductive reading not merely allowed for, but required by, computational analysis (3). In her introduction, Allison explains how her desire to read for style “at the level of the grammatical clause” requires a rigorous practice of reduction, one that is modeled most effectively by a methodological norm of computational literary analysis: “the practice of beginning each part of the study with a clear justification for reducing a body of texts to specific features.” Deciding on what kinds of syntactical form to use as a “proxy” for the style of a particular author—and indeed the style within which is embedded a particular mode of moralistic argument—is Allison’s challenge, and this problem itself can work as a kind of proxy for debates about close reading writ large (1). Do not all of us, computationally or otherwise, perform such selections and such reductions? What changes when we use a computer program like Microsoft Excel to assist us in our practice of cutting up a text into the parts we need, reassembling them to make our interpretations hum? In chapter 1, Allison mounts a more extended defense of computational methods for literary study, turning more fully to the method debate. It is a cogent and persuasively [End Page 708] argued defense of the idea that “reduction is valuable rhetorically and argumentatively,” and it makes an original argument about the ways in which polemic in particular—in a dazzling array of examples from George Eliot, Bruno Latour, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde—relies upon reductive reading in order to generate new and complex ideas (15). Chapter 2 then turns to an extended reading of the Victorian literary review as a periodical genre characterized by the kind of polemical simplification that Allison theorizes in chapter 1, “a reading practice that is designed to counteract the stylistic complexity of a text and thereby help readers see its morals more clearly” (39). Victorian reviewing shows us the ways in which Victorian readers might have unmoored moralistic argument from plot and character, understanding it as a stylistic feature that is obvious, inscribed for all to see at the level of the sentence. In chapter 3, Allison isolates what she calls the “commentative clause,” “the ‘which’ clause that shifts a sentence from past to present tense,” as a pervasive feature of Eliot’s style (61). This chapter is...

Evolution of Number Names in Modern Russian

The paper deals with the evolution of morphological forms and syntactic relations of numerals which give names to categories of numbers. The ways of formation of a number name тысяча / tysjatscha and its part-of-speech signs are illustrated with the texts taken from the Russian National Corpus. It's the first systematic description of transition of a noun into a number name regarded as a complex grammatical process – morphological unification of case forms (instrumental case тысячью / tysjatschju); substitution of countable noun government by coordination with it in every indirect case; loss of syntactic forms of gender and number (i.e. their ability to correlate with words in gender and number); loss of morphological forms of the plural number and their substitution by forms of the singular number; formation of compound numerals on the bases of the numeral тысяча / tysjatscha; signs of morphological separation of the number name тысяча / tysjatscha and the name of quantity. The development and grammatical adaptation of тысяча / tysjatscha in the line of numerals is reported to have taken long. The article presents a sequence of obtaining new features of the numerals. Evolution of numerals is presented as a relevant grammatical process that implements synthetic potential of the Russian language grammatical system.

A Lexical Feature-based Analysis for the English Dative Alternation

This paper looks into the English dative alternation in which the arguments of a verb can be syntactically realized both in the double object form and in the to-PP form. By adopting the insightful argument for the verb dependency(Jackendoff, 1990; Rappaport & Levin, 2008), it proposes a lexical feature-based analysis by which the lexical feature [P(ossession)] and [M(otion)] give rise to the dative alternation. The features are also argued to feed the underlying structure of the arguments of dative verbs. The analysis uniquely analyzes the dative alternation via a post-syntactic operation Morphological Adjunction. It can also account for the mismatch between syntactic forms and distinct meanings. In brief, it can deal with in a more systematic way seemingly unpredictable distributions of the English dative alternation.

On the Boundary between Designative Subjects and Assertive Subjects: From the Perspective of the Bounded/Unbounded Distinction

Using results of previous studies, this paper attempts to explain why designative subject constructions and assertive subject constructions are a syntactic form of opposition and semantically contrary in a “bounded/unbounded” and “marked/unmarked” theory. This paper argues that, under unmarked designative/assertive subject constructions, the designative subjects are usually represented through the predicative constituents that denote unbounded actions and properties, while the assertive subjects are usually represented through the predicative constituents that denote bounded actions and properties. In marked situations, this pattern admits exceptions. Finally, this paper attempts to addresses the correlation between designative subjects, assertive subjects, and its related sentences within the concept of a continuum.

Question Asking During Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Corpus Study of How Question Type Influences the Linguistic Complexity of Primary School Students’ Responses

AbstractThe authors examined teachers’ (N = 19) use of different question types during small‐group comprehension instruction for 6–11‐year‐olds (N = 115). The authors tagged the corpus of 40 hours of guided reading sessions to enable computer‐based searches for syntactic forms of questions. Teachers frequently asked high‐challenge wh‐ word questions (e.g., “How does that fit in with what you just read?”), and this was more pronounced in schools located in regions of low socioeconomic status, a finding associated with recency of completion of teacher training. Students’ responses were more linguistically complex when teacher questions comprised a high frequency of high‐challenge questions, particularly wh‐ word adverb questions (predominantly why and how). These findings applied across the wide age and ability range of the sample, indicating that high‐challenge questions are effective in small‐group comprehension instruction for students in different age groups and at various levels of reading ability. The authors conclude that teachers benefit from being informed about the effect of various syntactic forms of questions, particularly the nuances of wh‐ word questions. The findings also highlight the advantages of using corpus search methods to examine the influence of teacher question‐asking strategies during classroom interactions.

A representation of proper BC domains based on conjunctive sequent calculi

AbstractWe build a logical system named a conjunctive sequent calculus which is a conjunctive fragment of the classical propositional sequent calculus in the sense of proof theory. We prove that a special class of formulae of a consistent conjunctive sequent calculus forms a bounded complete continuous domain without greatest element (for short, a proper BC domain), and each proper BC domain can be obtained in this way. More generally, we present conjunctive consequence relations as morphisms between consistent conjunctive sequent calculi and build a category which is equivalent to that of proper BC domains with Scott-continuous functions. A logical characterization of purely syntactic form for proper BC domains is obtained.

From action to abstraction: The sensorimotor grounding of metaphor in Parkinson's disease

Embodied cognition theories propose that the semantic representations engaged in during language comprehension are partly supported by perceptual and motor systems, via simulation. Activation in modality-specific regions of cortex is associated with the comprehension of literal language that describes the analogous modalities, but studies addressing the grounding of non-literal or figurative language, such as metaphors, have yielded mixed results. Differences in the psycholinguistic characteristics of sentence stimuli across studies have likely contributed to this lack of consensus. Furthermore, previous studies have been largely correlational, whilst patient studies are a critical way of determining if intact sensorimotor function is necessary to understand language drawing on sensorimotor information. We designed a battery of metaphorical and literal sentence stimuli using action and sound words, with an unprecedented level of control over critical psycholinguistic variables, to test hypotheses about the grounding of metaphorical language. In this Registered Report, we assessed the comprehension of these sentences in 41 patients with Parkinson's disease, who were predicted to be disproportionately affected by the action sentences relative to the sound sentences, and compared their performance to that of 39 healthy age-matched controls who were predicted to show no difference in performance due to sensory modality. Using preregistered Bayesian model comparison methods, we found that PD patients' comprehension of literal action sentences was not impaired, while there was some evidence for a slowing of responses to action metaphors. Follow up exploratory analyses suggest that this response time modality effect was driven by one type of metaphor (predicate) and was absent in another (nominal), despite the fact that the action semantics were similar in both syntactic forms. These results suggest that the conditions under which PD patients demonstrate hypothesized embodiment effects are limited. We offer a critical assessment of the PD action language literature and discuss implications for the embodiment debate. In addition, we suggest how future studies could leverage Bayesian statistical methods to provide more convincing evidence for or against embodied cognition effects.

KONSTRUKSI KALIMAT KESANTUNAN BERBAHASA: KOMUNIKASI MAHASISWA DAN DOSEN STMIK STIKOM INDONESIA

This research aims at analyzing about politeness of STMIK STIKOM Indonesia’s students and lecturers based on their sentence construction in communicating on social media. The data was collected from documentation of their conversation on social media in two semesters of 2017 until 2018. Theory of Pragmatic from Leech and structural theory from Alwi are applied in this research. The research indicates that based on the number of clauses students and lecturers use simple sentence and compound sentence. Based on the syntactic form of the sentence, they use declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamation, and affirmative sentence. Based on the completeness of the sentence element, they use complete and incomplete sentence. Based on the word sequence pattern, they use regular and inversion word sequence pattern

Smart Python Coding through Voice Recognition

In today’s world, many artificial intelligence applications developed using programming languages like Python, R and so on. Each language comes with its own programming structure and syntactical forms. Programmers are broadly classified into three categories namely, novice users, knowledge intermittent and expert one. For novice users, it is always a challenge to write a code without typographic errors though users know theoretical knowledge of Programming language, its structure and syntax as well as logic of program. Therefore, this paper explores use of voice recognition technique in the field of programming, specifically for writing program with Python programming language. In experimental analysis, it found helpful for new Python programmers and provide new learning curve for programmers wherein beginner can experience hassle free program writing. This paper adds new way of creating interest in beginners for judging their coding paradigm understanding and explore one of the area for user experience field for better programming Integrated Development Environment Development (IDE).

Textäquivalenz in der serbischen Übersetzung von Georg Trakls Spätlyrik

Abstract According to functional theories, the translation process is a specific and receiver-dependent action, the Skopos of which, however, does not always have to correspond to that of the source text. According to functionalism, the communicative function of a text can be different in the target culture, and the translation should be adapted accordingly to the new Skopos. In translating, the focus is no longer on equivalence but on the adequacy of the translation, although in the best case equivalence or consistency of function should be sought. Since this is rarely entirely feasible, the translators themselves should decide in the course of the translation process which text dimension they would give priority to: semantic (content), syntactic (form) or pragmatic (meaning). A text grammatical and text semantic analysis of the coherence and isotope in the translation of Georg Trakl’s poems into Serbian aims to determine which dimension the translator Branimir Živojinović preferred. The study has shown that he almost completely achieves text equivalence, with few deviations in favour of form, which, however, do not disturb the coherence of the selected corpus.

Automatic Hybrid Mathematical Word Problem Solver

Math Word Problems (MWPs) are mathematical problems in which significant information is presented in natural language rather than in mathematical notations. Word problems often narrative of some sort, they are also referred to as story problems and may vary in the amount of language used. The proposed system is built as a combination of a verb classification model, an encoder-decoder model, and a regular expression model that takes math word problem as input and generates the corresponding math expression as output. The proposed system also has the ability to categorize whether the given input is an interrogative math word problem or not, it helps to avoid unnecessary non-word problems to the hybrid system. Verb classification model used here is trying to solve some kind of word problems which are in proper syntactic format and the encoder-decoder model can solve all kind of word problems with the help of recurrent neural network. A regular expression model also takes part in the model to identify and solve outlier mathematical expressions. This proposed system only tries to solve math word problems that contain fundamental operators. It provides a way to handle multiple concepts in the same problem while, at the same time, supporting the interpretability of the answer expression. The proposed hybrid system outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

EMOTIONS IN INCIDENTAL LANGUAGE LEARNING

AbstractWe investigated how positive, negative, and neutral mood states influence aspects of second language acquisition, either directly or in interaction with certain personality characteristics (openness, intuition, emotional intelligence, foreign language anxiety, and impulsivity). After completing individual differences questionnaires, 120 participants were randomly assigned to either a Comparison group or one of three emotionally induced treatment groups. They were trained on a semiartificial language under incidental learning conditions. Immediate testing measured participants’ knowledge of the target syntactic forms, while source-attribution data gauged the nature (implicit, explicit, or a combination of both) of their knowledge. Contrary to some previous studies, knowledge gains were chiefly conscious-explicit. Participants exhibited substantial variability in how emotions impacted their learning, with self-reported stress management and premeditation resulting in higher learning in the Negative group. Overall, participants that claimed higher levels of intellect showed the best results.

Faster shift-reduce constituent parsing with a non-binary, bottom-up strategy

An increasingly wide range of artificial intelligence applications rely on syntactic information to process and extract meaning from natural language text or speech, with constituent trees being one of the most widely used syntactic formalisms. To produce these phrase-structure representations from sentences in natural language, shift-reduce constituent parsers have become one of the most efficient approaches. Increasing their accuracy and speed is still one of the main objectives pursued by the research community so that artificial intelligence applications that make use of parsing outputs, such as machine translation or voice assistant services, can improve their performance. With this goal in mind, we propose in this article a novel non-binary shift-reduce algorithm for constituent parsing. Our parser follows a classical bottom-up strategy but, unlike others, it straightforwardly creates non-binary branchings with just one Reduce transition, instead of requiring prior binarization or a sequence of binary transitions, allowing its direct application to any language without the need of further resources such as percolation tables. As a result, it uses fewer transitions per sentence than existing transition-based constituent parsers, becoming the fastest such system and, as a consequence, speeding up downstream applications. Using static oracle training and greedy search, the accuracy of this novel approach is on par with state-of-the-art transition-based constituent parsers and outperforms all top-down and bottom-up greedy shift-reduce systems on the Wall Street Journal section from the English Penn Treebank and the Penn Chinese Treebank. Additionally, we develop a dynamic oracle for training the proposed transition-based algorithm, achieving further improvements in both benchmarks and obtaining the best accuracy to date on the Penn Chinese Treebank among greedy shift-reduce parsers.

Typology of syntactic realization forms of propositional argument (on the example of Russian emotional verbs)

The subject of this article is the syntactic representation of propositional arguments in the sentences with Russian emotional verbs. The opposition of sentential and nominal actants is treated as a gradual one, i.e. represented by a set of syntactic realization forms of propositional arguments: clausal and non-clausal, finite and non-finite, lexical (material) and zero/empty (non-material). All these forms constitute a valence class of a lexical unit. A quantitative analysis of syntactic representations of Russian emotive verbs has shown that the valent characteristics of verbs and the separate subclasses vary in a large range. The most typical forms of filling the position of propositional argument in the class verba sentiendi are predicate and propositional names, and the least typical are clausal actants with the core component in the form of an adjective and infinitive.

ELLIPSIS TYPES IN STEPHENIE MEYER’S “THE SHORT SECOND LIFE OF BREE TANNER” USING A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS

Ellipsis is an omitting part of the sentence that may occur in the English novel. Some authors write a novel tend to use ellipsis in their work. Learners who read English novel are likely to find the author’s writing style which study is aimed to explain the types of the elliptical sentence used by the author in the novel The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. This research applied a qualitative method and employed a source of data from Stephenie Meyer’s Novel and some references to support this study. A further technique of analyzing data in this research is always linked to the theory and methods based on Syntactic Analysis. Subsequently, this research uses the syntactic analysis form, Noam Chomsky. As a result, the researcher found that there are three types of elliptical sentence occurred in the novel. The types of elliptical sentence are a nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, and clausal ellipsis. Therefore, based on the research findings, the researcher concludes that the types of ellipsis the author used in her novel based on the evidence are verbal ellipsis, nominal ellipsis, and clausal ellipsis. As a suggestion, it is essential to learn light on the readers or writers’ ability to employ ellipsis types in their work as it is necessary in more economizing and conceiving sentence.

‘Ces grandes dames, ça ne va pas souvent à l’église’: A corpus-based investigation of dislocation featuring co-referent clitic ça

ABSTRACTAlthough previous research has documented dislocations in which a dislocated noun phrase (NP) occurs with the co-referent pronounça(e.g., Carlier, 1996; Jones, 1996), this study represents the firstcorpus-drivenexamination focused on this syntactic construction. In examining examples identified in both an oral and a written corpus, the investigation serves to nuance the association between dislocation and orality (McLaughlin, 2011). The research also interrogates the relationship between dislocations featuring co-referent cliticçaand genericity. The extent to which this construction more frequently signals a pejorative attitude towards certain groups of animate NPs than others is also explored. Finally, this study advances methodological considerations for research on rare syntactic forms.

Idioms, collocations, and structure

Phrasal idioms have been used as evidence in syntactic theorizing for decades. A common assumption, occasionally made explicit (e.g., Larson 2017), is that non-literal phrasal idioms differ significantly from completely literal collocations in the kinds of syntactic structures they can be built from. I show with a detailed empirical study that this is false. In fact, the syntactic constraints on idioms and collocations are identical. In particular, patterns that are missing from one are missing from the other, most strikingly ditransitives with a fixed first object and open second object (*throw the wolves X). Idioms and collocations should therefore be treated the same, as a broad class of conventionalized expressions. I propose a new analysis of the syntactic forms that conventionalized expressions can take. Unlike most previous analyses, I take the open slots to be part of the expression, and the task then becomes to explain the distribution of the open slots. A structural constraint on open slots accounts for the missing ditransitive pattern. It also explains why expressions with a fixed subject but open object are rare, but also why certain examples of this pattern do exist in English and in other languages.