Syntactic Representation Research Articles

Reflections on the study of language

Abstract This article reports an interview with Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., which was held on March 2, 2023, with follow-up e-mail exchanges. Robert Van Valin is the primary developer of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a syntactic theory whose principles and commitments intersect with those of Cognitive Linguistics (CL). The article discusses RRG vis-à-vis CL and other approaches to the study of language. It aims to raise awareness about the shared principles of RRG and CL, to enhance cross-fertilization between the two approaches and ultimately inspire new research directions in linguistic theory. The paper is organized into three main parts: (i) background information on the birth and development of RRG, (ii) general principles and commitments of RRG and CL, and (iii) specific issues in the study of language.

Cº realizations along the left edge across English and Spanish

This paper investigates the lexicalization of the complementizer that/que in English and Spanish varieties in different contexts along the left edge of the clause. This is performed through discussion of a range of constructions traditionally attributed to the CP domain/left periphery, primarily (but not only) in certain embedded clauses. The ubiquity of that/que, that is, the lexical realization of that/que in subordinating environments, exclamative clauses, interrogative contexts, and subjunctive clauses, amongst others, sheds light not only on the characterization of the relevant constructions but also on the make-up of the left edge of the clause. The fact that such realizations can be obligatory, optional, or, on occasion, impossible, sometimes depending on the variety in question, furthers our understanding of head lexicalizations while contributing to macro and microvariation studies in syntactic theory. In so doing, this paper paves the way for holistic investigations devoted to complementizer realization in the head position of different left-edge-related constructions and in different linguistic varieties.

Analysing Students’ Translation Work on Indonesian Prepositional Phrases into English

This research is entitled Analyzing Students’Translation Works on Indonesian Prepositional Phrases into English. Prepositional phrases are phrases that contain prepositions with nouns or nominal phrases, or prepositional phrases. The aims of this research are (1) to describe prepositional phrases in Indonesian as the Source Language and their translation into English, and (2) to analyze the types of translation procedure applied by the students of Bachelor of English Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University. This research is included in qualitative descriptive research, the data were taken from the translation of folk tales by fourth semester students of Bachelor of English Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University, using observation methods and recording techniques. The data were then analyzed by applying translation procedure theory, and Indonesian and English syntactic theories. The data is presented formally and informally in the form tree diagrams followed by elaborations. The results show that the types of prepositional phrases in Indonesian have head elements in the form of prepositions with modifiers; nouns or nominal phrases, or prepositional phrases. The translation procedures applied are literal, transposition, borrowing, and modulation.

Word frequency has similar effects in picture naming and gender decision: A failure to replicate Jescheniak and Levelt (1994)

Word frequency plays a key role in theories of lexical access, which assume that the word frequency effect (WFE, faster access to high-frequency than low-frequency words) occurs as a result of differences in the representation and processing of the words. In a seminal paper, Jescheniak and Levelt (1994) proposed that the WFE arises during the retrieval of word forms, rather than the retrieval of their syntactic representations (their lemmas) or articulatory commands. An important part of Jescheniak and Levelt's argument was that they found a stable WFE in a picture naming task, which requires complete lexical access, but not in a gender decision task, which only requires access to the words' lemmas and not their word forms. We report two attempts to replicate this pattern, one with new materials, and one with Jescheniak and Levelt's orginal pictures. In both studies we found a strong WFE when the pictures were shown for the first time, but much weaker effects on their second and third presentation. Importantly these patterns were seen in both the picture naming and the gender decision tasks, suggesting that either word frequency does not exclusively affect word form retrieval, or that the gender decision task does not exclusively tap lemma access.

Three conceptual clarifications about syntax and the brain

Linguistic theories offer empirical hypotheses about the architecture of human language, which provide the basis for neurobiological investigations into the study of language use. Unfortunately, progress in linking the two fields of inquiry is hampered because core concepts and ideas from linguistics are not seldom misunderstood, making them controversial and seemingly irrelevant to the neurobiology of language. Here we identify three such proposals: the distinction between competence and performance, the autonomy of syntax, and the abstract nature of syntactic representations. In our view, confusion about these concepts stems from the fact that they are interpreted at a level of analysis different from the level at which they were originally described. We clarify the intended interpretation of these concepts and discuss how they might be contextualized in the cognitive neuroscience of language. By doing so, the discussion about the integration of linguistics and neurobiology of language can move toward a fruitful exploration of linking hypotheses within a multi-level theory of syntax in the brain.

The analytical and corpus-based study on Semantic and Syntactic Representations of Persian Motion-Directional Verbs [In English

The analytical and corpus-based study on Semantic and Syntactic Representations of Persian Motion-Directional Verbs [In English

The interconnection between syntax and the theory of eloquence in the Russian linguistic tradition: rhetorical devices in grammars of the 18th–19th centuries

The idea that until the beginning of the nineteenth century the sentence theory was considered in writings about the theory of eloquence has long been a locus communis in works on the history of Russian linguistics. Russian grammars contained «slovosochinenie» (i. e. syntax) as a syntactic section which stated the rules for connecting different parts of speech into combinations built according to the type of agreement and government. This «commonplace» of syntax historiography deserves a new addition. It is necessary to study the reverse influence issue and answer the question what role the first Russian grammars played in the development of rhetorical theory. The article analyses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammatical writings using the methods of extracting, commenting on, and interpreting fragments concerning rhetorical devices. As a result, the study has revealed a close connection between the Russian grammars by M. V. Lomonosov, A. A. Barsov, N. I. Grech, F. I. Buslaev and the theory of elocution. It is particularly true in terms of considering figures of speech, as well as in the sections on the rhetorical period types and the sequence order of the sentence parts. For instance, M. V. Lomonosov in his «Russian Grammar» analyses the examples of «transfer» and «omission», that is, inversion and ellipsis (omission) of sentence «parts». A. A. Barsov, who lists and defines nine «syntactic figures», developed this tradition further. N. I. Grech in his «Practical Russian Grammar» considers reverse word order, ellipsis, «tozhdeslovie» / tautology (intensifying lexical repetition) and «deviation» from strict grammatical agreement of names and verb forms (syllepsis). F. I. Buslaev, enlarging the syntactic section in his «Experience of Historical Grammar» with lexicological topics, gives close attention to tropes that demonstrate different ways of meaning transfer, i. e. metaphor and metonymy (for instance, synecdoche). The paper concludes that Russian linguists of the mid-tolate eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries aspired to add a section on the expressive use of grammatical language resources to the syntactic theory.

The development of abstract syntactic representations in beginning L2 learners of Dutch

The development of abstract syntactic representations in beginning L2 learners of Dutch

The source of the <em>de re</em> blocking effect

This paper presents novel empirical data from English in which the de re blocking effect – that an obligatorily de se anaphor cannot be c-commanded by its de re counterpart – is attested. I argue that at least some instances of the de re blocking effect cannot be accounted for via syntactic accounts, contra Percus & Sauerland (2003b) and Anand (2006). Via experimental evidence, it is shown that the de re blocking effect takes place with passives and across clause boundaries with certain predicates but not with others. I argue that a novel thematic theory of the de re blocking effect together with the aforementioned syntactic theories would be able to account for the full range of facts.

Verb placement in L3 French and L3 German

Abstract This article explores cross-linguistic influence and the relationship between surface structure and underlying syntactic structure in L3 acquisition of verb placement in L1 Norwegian L2 English learners of L3 German or French, respectively. In these languages, verb placement varies systematically. Previous research has found transfer from both L1 and L2 in similar language combinations. Using an acceptability judgment task, we tested verb placement in non-subject-initial and subject-initial sentences. Findings indicate that L3 French learners performed better on non-subject-initial sentences compared to subject-initial sentences, whereas the opposite was the case in L3 German. We argue that our findings can be explained by a generative account of verb movement and are compatible with an analysis where verbs do not move, or do not move far enough, in the L3 learners’ underlying syntactic representation. Following the assumption that verb movement is a costly operation, we argue that the syntactic operation verb movement is constrained by principles of economy in L3 acquisition, and that economy plays a role in determining cross-linguistic influence in multilingual acquisition. Our account is compatible with a uniform analysis of the acquisition of verb movement in L1, L2 and L3, and underlines the qualitative similarities in different acquisition processes.

Shared syntax and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children

AbstractThis paper investigates the role of structural priming in cross-linguistic influence, a well-established yet poorly understood characteristic of bilingual language development. More specifically, we test the proposal that cross-linguistic influence may be conceptualized as between-language priming, that is, as the result of prior linguistic exposure (Serratrice, 2016) and shared syntactic representations between languages (Hartsuiker et al., 2004). In Experiment 1, we primed bilingual English-Dutch children between languages using possessive structures (e.g.,the astronaut’s dog, the dog of the astronaut). In Experiment 2, we compared the same group of children with bilingual Spanish-Dutch and monolingual Dutch children using within-language priming. Within-language priming was stronger than between-language priming. In both experiments, we examined the relation between priming behaviour and individual differences in language exposure, use and proficiency. Experiment 1 found between-language priming with long-lasting effects modulated by proficiency. The results of Experiment 2 were consistent with inverse priming effects in within-language priming modulated – to a degree – by properties of the bilingual children’s other language. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the proposal that between-language priming is a plausible mechanism underpinning cross-linguistic influence and that bilingual children develop shared syntactic representations for structures which are similar across their two languages.

Knowledge Graph Augmented Network Towards Multiview Representation Learning for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained task of sentiment analysis. To better comprehend long complicated sentences and obtain accurate aspect-specific information, linguistic and commonsense knowledge are generally required in this task. However, most current methods employ complicated and inefficient approaches to incorporate external knowledge, e.g., directly searching the graph nodes. Additionally, the complementarity between external knowledge and linguistic information has not been thoroughly studied. To this end, we propose a knowledge graph augmented network KGAN, which aims to effectively incorporate external knowledge with explicitly syntactic and contextual information. In particular, KGAN captures the sentiment feature representations from multiple different perspectives, i.e., context-, syntax- and knowledge-based. First, KGAN learns the contextual and syntactic representations in parallel to fully extract the semantic features. Then, KGAN integrates the knowledge graphs into the embedding space, based on which the aspect-specific knowledge representations are further obtained via an attention mechanism. Last, we propose a hierarchical fusion module to complement these multi-view representations in a local-to-global manner. Extensive experiments on five popular ABSA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our KGAN. Notably, with the help of the pretrained model of RoBERTa, KGAN achieves a new record of state-of-the-art performance among all datasets.

The many facets of inhibitory control and their role in syntactic selection

AbstractThere is accumulating evidence that distinct forms of domain-general inhibition underlie the selection of lexical candidates from among co-activated representations in single-word production. It is less clear whether similar control processes are engaged in the resolution of syntactic conflict in sentence production. This study assessed the relative contribution of three types of inhibitory control operating at different stages of information processing to syntactic interference resolution in an active-passive voice production task. Inhibition of response execution (the anti-saccade effect) and resolution of representational conflict (the flanker effect) were related to the occurrence of repairs and sentence onset latencies in passive voice trials. The results suggest not only that general-purpose mechanisms may be in place that resolve conflict regardless of whether it stems from syntactic or non-syntactic (non-verbal) representations, but also that they operate at dissociable processing stages.

On the Relation Between Cross-Linguistic Influence, Between-Language Priming and Language Proficiency: Priming of Ungrammatical Adjective Placement in Bilingual Spanish-Dutch and French-Dutch Children.

After hearing a structure in one language, bilinguals are more likely to produce the same structure in their other language. Such between-language priming is often interpreted as evidence for shared syntactic representations between a bilingual's two languages and is positively related to proficiency. Recently, shared syntactic structures and structural priming have been invoked to explain cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children. This paper examines the relation between cross-linguistic influence, between-language priming and language proficiency. Almost all studies on between-language priming have focussed on grammatical structures. However, cross-linguistic influence has also been found to result in ungrammatical structures. In this study, we investigated whether ungrammatical adjective placement can be primed from a Germanic language to a Romance language and vice versa, and how to best account for any such priming. Furthermore, we examined the role of proficiency in explaining priming effects and whether this fits with an error-based learning account. Our results show that it is possible to prime ungrammatical structures, that this is lexically constrained, and that it is more likely to occur at lower levels of proficiency. We argue that the same mechanisms underlying grammatical priming can also explain our findings of ungrammatical priming.

An interpretable wide and deep model for online disinformation detection

The advent of the internet has facilitated the wide spread of online disinformation and thus poses severe threats to the trustworthiness of cyberspace. Two types of methods are proposed to detect online disinformation: traditional machine learning-based and deep learning-based, where the former is limited due to the shallow representation and the latter is hindered by its lack of interpretability. In this study, we develop a novel model named interpretable wide and deep model for text (IWDMT) for disinformation detection which incorporates the interpretability benefits of traditional machine learning and the representation advantages of deep learning. Furthermore, we advance the interpretability of existing models by utilizing neural topic models to capture topical semantic representations and the attention mechanism to extract sequential syntactic representations. The proposed IWDMT is a mixture of a generative model and a discriminative model, and we devise a novel learning algorithm for it. Experiments on deceptive reviews and fraudulent emails demonstrated the proposed IWDMT not only outperformed baselines but was also able to provide a rich set of angles of interpretation for management insights. The higher accuracy and improved interpretability in detecting online disinformation will benefit four stakeholder groups: internet users, managers, researchers, and the government.

Thematic interpretation of aerial photographs of forest areas based on conceptual modeling

Earth remote sensing (ERS) is one of the main sources of information about the earth's surface. With the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it became possible to take aerial photographs with high spatial resolution, which can be used to more accurately identify objects. The purpose of the study is to increase the reliability of aerial imagery interpretation by developing a methodology for automated image processing based on conceptual modeling. An analysis of the methods for thematic interpretation of images showed that none of them provides sufficient quality of segmentation without additional adjustment to the subject area. The technique of conceptual modeling of subject tasks is applied, which ensures the adequacy of syntactic representations (including various images) and makes it possible to control the logic of solving problems and reduce the number of errors at the stage of its software implementation. The description of the information system for thematic interpretation of images, which implements the developed methodology, is given. An assessment was made of the reliability of thematic interpretation of images of forest areas. It is shown that the developed technique allowed to improve the identification of forest objects on aerial photographs by 18.6%. The development of this technique can be carried out to determine the characteristics of identifiable trees: age, species, height, and wood stock.

On Disambiguating baa sentences in Heyuan Hakka

As a rarely researched Chinese dialect, some interesting phenomena in Heyuan Hakka have not been well investigated. Although previous studies have researched some idiosyncractic markers or constructions in Heyuan Hakka, e.g., the grammaticalised baa, current interpretations of the linguistic phenomena in this Chinese diaclect are superficial. To introduce more up-to-date syntactic theories to the research of Heyuan Hakka, the multifunctional word baa is an ideal window into the combination of theories and concrete examples. Based on previous studies, this paper aims to give a further explanation of how native speakers decipher ambiguous baa sentences, i.e., to identify whether baa is a disposal marker or a passive marker, based on the more recent data collected from 8 native speakers. To achieve this foremost goal, this study investigates the effect of the animacy hieararchy and plausibility on producing baa sentences. For future research, this paper would inspire researchers to study Heyuan Hakka in virture of different theories and even to study other under-researched dialects in China.

Structural semiology, Peirce, and biolinguistics

Abstract Peirce’s sign model is introduced as incompatible with structural semiology in the majority of semiotics textbooks. In this paper, I would like to argue against this general polarization of the semiotic discipline. I focus on compatibilities between Lucien Tesnière’s syntactic theory (verbal valency) and Peirce’s logic of relatives. My main argument is that structural linguistics is not necessarily dyadic, and that Peirce’s sign doctrine is perfectly structural. To define the structural approach in Peirce, I analyze the notions of form (structure) and substance in Hjelmslev and Peirce. The aim of my argument is to contribute to attempts to introduce Peirce’s theory to the field of linguistics in the hope that such an integration will be beneficiary for general linguistics. To extend and support my argument, I provide some examples from biology where Peirce’s theory has been applied. I demonstrate an analogy between the biological structures of proteins and the structure of a sentence with Peirce’s own writings. I consequently introduce Peirce as the first structural semiologist and as the first biolinguist.

중국어권 한국어 학습자의 이동사건 구문 습득 연구

This paper aims to shed light on the characteristics of Chinese learners' acquisition of motion constructions by examining the motion constructions that Chinese learners choose to express motion events. To this end, the constructions 'kada' and 'ota' were analyzed in the learners' corpus. The semantic elements that consist of motion events were divided into [source], [goal], [goal, purpose of action], [path], [purpose], [manner], and [source, goal], and the syntactic representation of these elements by Chinese learners was examined. The results showed that the more frequent a typical construction is in Korean, the stronger the mapping between the meaning and the the constructions is for Chinese learners. In particular, when representing [goal], the construction 'NP-에 가다/오다' was used overwhelmingly more than the phrases 'NP-을 가다/오다' and 'NP-로 가다/오다', and this strong association led to miscoding errors due to the 'NP-에 가다/오 다' construction. However, many of these errors occurred at the beginner level and were eliminated at the intermediate and advanced levels, suggesting a developmental aspect of constructions acquisition. One pedagogical implication is that focus on form instruction is needed to help students map the cognitive elements of motion events in appropriate constructions.

Syntax-enhanced aspect-based sentiment analysis with multi-layer attention

As a key task of fine-grained sentiment analysis, aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to analyse people’s opinions at the aspect level from user-generated texts. Various sub-tasks have been defined according to different scenarios, extracting aspect terms, opinion terms, and the corresponding sentiment. However, most existing studies merely focus on a specific sub-task or a subset of sub-tasks, having many complicated models designed and developed. This hinders the practical applications of aspect-based sentiment analysis. Therefore, some unified frameworks are proposed to handle all the subtasks, but most of them suffer from two limitations. First, the syntactic features are neglected, but such features have been proven effective for aspect-based sentiment analysis. Second, very few efficient mechanisms are developed to leverage important syntactic features, e.g., dependency relations, dependency relation types, and part-of-speech tags. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel unified framework to handle all defined sub-tasks for aspect-based sentiment analysis. Specifically, based on the graph convolutional network, a multi-layer semantic model is designed to capture the semantic relations between aspect and opinion terms. Moreover, a multi-layer syntax model is proposed to learn explicit dependency relations from different layers. To facilitate the sub-tasks, the learned semantic features are propagated to the syntax model with better semantic guidance to learn the syntactic representations comprehensively. Different from the conventional syntactic model, the proposed framework introduces two attention mechanisms. One is to model dependency relation and type, and the other is to encode part-of-speech tags for detecting aspect and opinion term boundaries. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed novel unified framework, and the experimental results on four groups of real-world datasets explicitly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over a range of baselines.