Temporal Phrases Research Articles

Syntactic priming in the classroom: using narratives to prime L2 arabic speakers

A robust finding in psycholinguistics is that prior language experience influences subsequent language processing. This phenomenon is known as syntactic priming. Most of the empirical support for L2 syntactic priming comes from lab-based experiments. However, this evidence might not reflect how priming occurs in typical language activities in the L2 classroom. As such, we conducted a classroom-based priming study. Using a between-subject design, 52 L2 Arabic speakers read and listened to eight story-reading sessions over two weeks that either included a high proportion of the fronted temporal phrase (TP) structure (experimental group) or included no fronted TPs (controls). The effect of L2 proficiency was also investigated. Results revealed that the experimental group did not significantly increase their use of fronted TPs in the immediate posttest or the one-week delayed posttest relative to the baseline. A null effect of Arabic L2 proficiency was also observed. We discuss our findings in light of related priming theories and previous findings. This study highlights the need for more research on syntactic priming via common language tasks in the L2 classroom.

Innovations in Time Related Expression Recognition Using LSTM Networks

The proposed architecture leverages the strengths of both Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term (BLSTM) to create a robust model for temporal expression recognition in clinical texts. The CNN component effectively captures morphological and orthographic features at the character level, which enriches the semantic understanding of complex medical terminologies that are often abbreviated or have unique suffixes and prefixes. The BLSTM component excels in capturing long-range dependencies in text, which is crucial for understanding the context in which temporal expressions occur. By integrating these models with a CRF layer, the system not only predicts discrete labels but also ensures that the sequence of predicted labels is coherent and contextually appropriate, addressing the limitations of models that predict labels independently. The integration of pre-trained biomedical word vectors provides significant contextual grounding tailored to the medical domain, enhancing the model's ability to discern and interpret the nuances of medical language. This is crucial in clinical contexts where accurate interpretation of temporal phrases can be critical for patient management and treatment timelines. Further, experiments conducted on the dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, demonstrating a notable improvement over traditional methods that rely heavily on hand-crafted features and rule-based approaches. Future work could explore the adaptability of this model to other subdomains of the medical field and its efficacy in processing multilingual texts, potentially increasing its applicability in global healthcare settings, with further refinement of the neural architecture and optimization of training strategies potentially yielding even better performance and faster processing times essential for real-time clinical decision support systems.

What is the next structure? Guessing enhances L2 syntactic learning in a syntactic priming task.

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that Second Language (L2) speakers could learn from engaging in prediction. Few works have directly examined the relationship between prediction and L2 syntactic learning. Further, relatively limited attention has been paid to the effects of two linguistic factors in this area: structure type and L2 proficiency. Using a mixed experimental design, 147 L2 Arabic speakers with varying L2 proficiency levels completed two syntactic priming experiments, each targeting a different structure: (a) the dative and (b) Temporal Phrases (TP). The experimental conditions required participants to predict what the upcoming sentence's structure would be. The experimental conditions differed in the degree of engagement in prediction error. Results suggested that Arabic L2 speakers at different proficiency levels showed enhanced priming and short-term learning for two syntactic structures (PO, fronted TP) when (a) instructed to guess only (constrained condition) as well as when (b) instructed to guess and compute the prediction error (unconstrained condition), relative to the controls. These results imply a guessing benefit for priming and short-term learning. Participants also experienced different priming effects by structure type, but there was no significant effect for proficiency. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Relativized temporal phrases: Language variation and change in contemporary Portuguese

This paper discusses the use of relativized temporal phrases as a domain of particularly intense variation and change in contemporary Portuguese. Various phenomena indicative of competition among linguistic forms (with a special focus on the standard variety of European Portuguese, as documented in newspaper texts) are highlighted and examined. Two main sets of constructions take centre stage in the paper. In one, the much-discussed tendency to omit the preposition em (‘in’) in relativized constituents expressing simple temporal location is assessed, using large corpora. In the other, the relativization of duration phrases (or comparable locating phrases, containing predicates of amounts of time) is scrutinized. These latter structures – very poorly studied in the literature – reveal intriguing restrictions, and associate with various types of anomalies, viz., non-standard suppression, addition or change of prepositions. Furthermore, one remarkable innovation is documented in Portuguese newspaper texts: the relativization of time-anchored duration adjuncts with the (preposition-like) connective há (a verb form equivalent to ‘there is’, currently undergoing a grammaticalization process, and shifting into a preposition) – 31: são os anos há que não ganhamos uma medalha (‘31: this is the number of years {we haven’t won a medal/since we last won a medal}’).

Language Control and Intra-Sentential Codeswitching among Bilingual Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

The present study investigated bilingual language control among preschool children in a sentence repetition task containing unilingual stimuli and codeswitched stimuli within prepositional phrases (PPs). Cross-language errors, that is, codeswitches that were not part of the stimulus sentences, were taken as evidence of difficulties in language control. Specifically, we investigated cross-language errors as a function of stimulus sentence type (codeswitched or unilingual), CS site within the PP, directionality (English or Hebrew stimulus sentences), and group status (children with typical language development (TLD), and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)). We also examined cross-language errors in terms of word class and locus in the sentence. The participants were 65 English (home language)–Hebrew (societal language) bilinguals with TLD and 13 with DLD, ages 5;5–6;10 (M = 5;11). Stimulus sentences contained five codeswitch conditions within prepositional phrases, for example, a codeswitched preposition (P) or a codeswitched preposition, determiner and noun (P+DET+N), and a ‘no switch’ condition. The stimuli were 36 English and 36 Hebrew sentences (+24 fillers) matched for semantic content and syntax. English sentences contained switches to Hebrew, and Hebrew sentences contained switches to English. The results showed more cross-language errors for codeswitched than unilingual sentence stimuli. The children with TLD showed a directionality effect, producing more cross-language errors in Hebrew sentence stimuli than in English, but the children with DLD did not. The children with DLD had more cross-language errors than their peers with TLD for English stimuli. Most cross-language errors appeared in the sentence-final, adverbial temporal phrase. Findings are discussed in terms of language co-activation and competition in order to account for the difference in performance on unilingual versus codeswitched stimuli and in light of sociopragmatic and psycholinguistic factors to account for the directionality effect among children with TLD and the lack thereof among children with DLD.

The linguistic impairment of the perfect aspect in Alzheimer’s disease and logopenic primary progressive aphasia

Taking into account that neuropsychological studies with subjects with language pathologies can contribute to the investigation of the organization of syntactic knowledge, the objective of this work is to investigate the syntactic representation of the perfect aspect based on data from subjects with pathologies that affect their language. More specifically, we aimed to investigate the possible phrases associated with the types of the perfect aspect and the hierarchy among them. This work aims to investigate the syntactic representation of the perfect aspect. Therefore, we sought to verify a possible linguistic impairment of this aspect in individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Primary Progressive Logopenic Aphasia (LPPA). A double case study was carried out with one patient with AD and another with LPPA. The methodology consisted of applying functionality tests, neuropsychological tests, and linguistic tests. The results indicated that both the AD patient and the LPPA patient present functional decline and cognitive impairment, with the degree of impairment of the first patient being more extensive than that of the second one in both cases. Regarding language, the patient with AD showed impairment with all four types of perfect, present tense, and imperfective aspect, whereas the LPPA patient has shown impairment only in perfect of recent past and present tense. Based on the results we propose the existence of a phrase to perfect of recent past and the dominance of the temporal phrase over the perfect phrases in the syntactic hierarchy.

When a cross-linguistic tendency marries incomplete acquisition: Preposition drop in Russian spoken in Daghestan

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: The purpose of the study is to figure out what factors condition the phenomenon of preposition drop (P-drop) in locative, directional and temporal phrases. Specifically, we investigate what kind of phrases allow P-drop in Russian spoken in Highland Daghestan and aim at understanding the rationale for this phenomenon. Design/Methodology/Approach: We conduct a quantitative analysis of data extracted from the Corpus of Russian spoken in Daghestan, which includes interviews with 53 native speakers of 15 Daghestanian and Turkic languages, amounting to 228 thousand tokens. Data and Analysis: Data from 47 (29 male; 18 female) consultants speaking Russian as a second language (L2) who produced a sufficient number of prepositional phrases (PPs) were included in the analysis. 50 PPs were collected from each speaker, resulting in a data set of 2350 PPs. Each PP was annotated for P-drop and several sociolinguistic and linguistic parameters. We fitted a logistic mixed-effects regression model to determine which parameters are significant predictors of P-drop. Findings/Conclusions: We show that the probability of P-drop depends on preposition type, phonetic context and the speaker’s fluency in Russian. We propose that the prominence of P-drop in the speech of Daghestanian highlanders results from an interplay of two factors: a typological tendency for certain spatial and temporal locations to be formally unmarked, and incomplete acquisition of the Russian prepositional system. Originality: This is the first detailed quantitative study of P-drop based on an inferential statistical analysis of data from a large number of L2 Russian speakers from Daghestan. Significance/Implications: The results show that the apparently contact-induced phenomena such as P-drop may be explained both by typological tendencies and incomplete acquisition of L2. This paper is thus important both for the typological study of this phenomenon and for L2 acquisition research.

Quantifying the speech-gesture relation with massive multimodal datasets: Informativity in time expressions.

The development of large-scale corpora has led to a quantum leap in our understanding of speech in recent years. By contrast, the analysis of massive datasets has so far had a limited impact on the study of gesture and other visual communicative behaviors. We utilized the UCLA-Red Hen Lab multi-billion-word repository of video recordings, all of them showing communicative behavior that was not elicited in a lab, to quantify speech-gesture co-occurrence frequency for a subset of linguistic expressions in American English. First, we objectively establish a systematic relationship in the high degree of co-occurrence between gesture and speech in our subset of expressions, which consists of temporal phrases. Second, we show that there is a systematic alignment between the informativity of co-speech gestures and that of the verbal expressions with which they co-occur. By exposing deep, systematic relations between the modalities of gesture and speech, our results pave the way for the data-driven integration of multimodal behavior into our understanding of human communication.

Domain Restriction in Generic Statements

ABSTRACT Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., everyone) and noun phrases (e.g., the girls). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces a topic situation, is the preferred context for interpreting the domain of subject noun phrases in the same sentence or a subsequent sentence. In this research, the sentences and minidiscourses were about concrete nongeneric situations. The present article reports three experiments designed to explore domain restriction in generic statements. Experiment 1 shows that indefinite determiners and the presence of a modal (would) favor generic interpretations. In Experiments 2 and 3 a sentence initial (vs. sentence final) PP increased interpretation of the subject as being restricted to the topic situation as well as increasing the frequency of generic interpretations. We propose that in sentences with modals (would) the initial PP acts as the antecedent of a conditional. Furthermore, based on differences in responses depending on whether the genericity of the subject or the temporal restriction on the subject are posed, we suggest that domain restriction is an inference from the representation constructed during discourse comprehension while a decision about genericity is a part of core sentence interpretation.

Prediction error and implicit learning in L1 and L2 syntactic priming

Aims and Objectives: This study examines the syntactic priming of adverb-first word order among 27 first language (L1) English, 33 L1 German, and 32 L1 German-second language (L2) English speakers to investigate the relationship between short-term priming and longer-term learning across different speaker groups. Design/Methodology: Participants completed a syntactic priming task in either English or German, in which they heard sentences containing fronted (i.e. adverb-first) or non-fronted adverbial phrases and described pictures containing similar adverbial phrases. Immediately before and after the priming task, participants completed picture description tasks containing similar sentence types to measure their baseline production of fronted adverbials, and whether subsequent production of fronted adverbials was modulated by the priming task. Data Analysis: We used mixed-effects logistic regression to compare participants’ production of fronted sentences during the priming task according to prime type (fronted vs. non-fronted) and their production of fronted sentences before versus after the priming task, including the additional factors of adverbial phrase (temporal phrase vs. locative phrase) and speaker group (L1 English vs. L1 German vs. L2 English). Findings/Conclusion: Participants exhibited greater short-term priming during the priming task for temporal versus locative phrases, with the L2 English speakers exhibiting the greatest short-term priming. There was a significant increase in the production of fronted sentences from baseline to post-test, with the L1 English speakers exhibiting the greatest gains. Originality: This study uses systematic between- and within-language comparisons to examine: (a) whether the extent of syntactic priming depends on the frequency of a construction in a speaker’s L1 or L2 (i.e. prediction error); and (b) whether prediction error and short-term priming lead to longer-term learning. Significance: Our findings show that the magnitude of prediction error influences both short-term adaptation and longer-term priming. However, the ability to harness prediction error for longer-term learning versus short-term adaptation may vary between L1 and L2 speakers.

“People are people to me”: The interpretation of tautologies with frame-setters

This paper explores ‘framed tautologies’, occurring with (i) expressions that overtly introduce individuals to which the asserted content is related, (ii) spatiotemporal adjuncts, and (iii) universal quantifiers. Drawing on data from COCA and other web-based sources, we examine the contribution of the frame-setters and the strategies used to build a consistent interpretation.When the frame-setter restricts the validity of tautologies to a specific individual, we distinguish between judge for/to-phrases indicating the opinion-holder, and functional standard for-phrases indicating the specific individual to whom the tautology applies. Tautologies with spatiotemporal frames pattern with other stative propositions, in that the scope of locative and temporal phrases has to be fixed inferentially: it can be (i) the whole sentence as an abstract object; (ii) a discourse-salient implicit topic, identified as the attitude-holder or the source of the belief expressed, and (iii) the subject of the tautology. Universal quantifiers guide the addressee towards the literal, non-vague interpretation of the tautology.Interpreting a framed tautology is a matter of reconciling the semantics of an analytic proposition with that of a non-matching frame – either too restrictive or redundant. Hence, their analysis is relevant to understanding how interpretive processes deal with constructions containing mismatches.

The silent argument of broad focus: Typology and predictions

It is a commonly held view that, in the absence of an overt locative or temporal phrase, broad focus subject inversion in Romance requires a null locative in preverbal position, thus being comparable to locative inversion (Benincà 1988 and subsequent work). The (in)compatibility of a number of verbs and verb classes with this construction, however, has not yet received a principled explanation. Analysing the event structure of the predicates that occur in bare broad focus subject inversion in Italian, we argue that this construction requires a covert Subject of Predication, and this requirement can be satisfied by a thematic goal argument of the verb or a non-thematic situational argument that is inferred when a bounded eventuality is predicated. We explain which predicates take which type of Subject of Predication, and we make falsifiable predictions on the relative compatibility of different verb classes with the construction under investigation. Our predictions are cogent in the null-subject SVO languages that allow broad focus in VS order and rule it out in VOS/VSO order (Leonetti 2017). With our study, we shed light on the lexical-semantic underpinnings of this restriction. Following Bianchi (1993) and Bianchi & Chesi (2014), we propose that this is a thetic construction, in which the postverbal DP remains in its first-merged thematic position. In our analysis, the silent Subject of Predication takes Cardinaletti’s (2004) SubjP position, satisfying Rizzi’s (2005) Subject Criterion.

After asylum

AbstractIn this study I examine a corpus of former refugee narratives published by the nonprofit Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) on their website in 2011. In order to investigate the relationship between the constituent parts and the narrative as a whole, I use critical discourse analysis to examine the strategic use of person, quantified temporal phrases, broader thematic elements, and the constitution of “former refugee narrative” as a genre. I conclude that the RCOA dominates temporality and maintains authority over the narratives through specifically applied quantification yet captures the necessary subjective and emotional material of the refugee experience to achieve the authenticity the co-narratives need to be well-received by the public. Thus, by manipulating hermeneutic composability, the RCOA evidences an objective, authoritative portrayal yet captures a subjective experience worth telling, and by manipulating intertextual gaps they appeal to the Australian nationalism implicit in the contemporary political climate.

Topic situations: Coherence by inclusion

Topic situations have been studied in the linguistic literature but for the most part have not been studied psycholinguistically. Five experiments tested predictions of the hypothesis that a sentence-initial prepositional phrase (PP) in English introduces a Topic Situation, which by default restricts the interpretation of the following discourse. Participants in judgment experiments interpreted later discourse events as being more likely to take place in the location specified by a PP when that PP had appeared sentence-initially compared to other sentence positions, and they rated such sentences as less natural when the discourse event was implausible in the specified location. Participants in two additional experiments made naturalness judgments of sentences containing an initial PP that introduced a situation that has a usual range of durations. Sentences with a final temporal phrase that fell outside this range were judged to be unnatural, suggesting that this temporal phrase was (implausibly) interpreted as being included in the Topic Situation introduced by the PP. We suggest that these findings can advance understanding of discourse phenomena such as presupposition and domain restriction.

The Sumerian Discourse Markers u4-ba and u4-bi-a

In Old Babylonian Sumerian literature, the temporal phrases u4-ba and u4-bi-a typically occur in complementary distribution. Previous analyses have focused on morphological disparity to differentiate the two. The present paper considers pragmatic functions within a larger discourse structure, analyzing them as discourse markers, specifically temporal connectives. In this study based on a corpus analysis of Old Babylonian literary compositions, I argue that in Sumerian discourse, u4-ba primarily marks perspectival shifts and refocusing, and u4-bi-a indexes sequential and consequential action.

That’s how it is there

Recent sociolinguistic research on narrative has underlined the understanding of place as being both spatially defined and socially constituted through shared experience as well as contestation. Drawing on studies on the philosophy of place and the ‘small stories’ perspective, this study approaches place as an abstract concept in which spatial environment, people, objects, and activity come together as a unified, complex structure. Two Indonesian narratives are examined to illustrate the connectedness between the different elements that make up that structure. Ambiguous uses of temporal phrases and person references suggest that these elements (e.g., people and objects) are often undifferentiated. It is argued that the narratives are not simply stories about place but are stories enabled by place, that is, by presence in a spatial environment, encounter with people and objects, and engagement in shared activities through time, and which highlight self-identity as being deeply embedded in the identities of others.

The priming of word order in second language German

ABSTRACTThe present study investigates the priming and subsequent production of word order variation (adverb–verb–subject vs. subject–verb–adverb order) with temporal phrases (Experiment 1) and locative phrases (Experiment 2) among intermediate English–German second language learners. Participants exhibited comparable short-term priming for adverb-first word order in both experiments. In the initial baseline phase, participants produced adverb-first sentences with temporal phrases but not locative phrases, and only temporal phrases led to significant long-term priming, as measured in a postpriming phase. This suggests that at lower proficiency levels, long-term, but not short-term, priming may depend on the stability of specific semantically constrained constructions rather than more generalized syntactic representations and that such cumulative effects may be shaped by preferences for a particular construction in the native language.

Degrees of Propositionality in Construals of Time Quantities

The paper investigates the possible conceptual bases of differences between seemingly synonymous and easily definable temporal expressions. Looking at the usage patterns of nominal temporal phrases in reference corpora of English and Polish we attempt to relate these subtleties to the different granularity of the cognitive scales on which construals of time quantities in general are based. More specifically, we focus on a subset of nominal temporal expressions which adhere to the “number + time unit” pattern, matching what Haspelmath (1997: 26) describes as “culture-bound artificial time units”. Using the British National Corpus (BNC) and the National Corpus of Polish (NCP), we first analyse both the variation and the regularity found in naturally-occurring samples of Polish and English. Finally, we compare the patterns of use emerging from the two corpora and arrive at cross-linguistic generalisations about the conceptualisation of time quantities.

Exploring the influence of temporal discontinuities in narrative text using eye tracking

One prominent question in the field of language comprehension concerns the dynamics of constructing and updating mental models while reading narratives, especially with respect to dealing with sudden event boundaries that often occur after encountering temporal changes. The present study investigated the influence of introducing temporal discontinuities of different length within short stories using eye tracking. It compared participants' reading times and several eye-movement parameters associated with reading narratives in which either a short or long time shift was presented. The obtained results indicated longer reading times for stories containing a long time shift, which were also characterized by a larger number of fixations. Processing the encountered temporal discontinuities and the text presented prior to the temporal adverbial phrase was more demanding than processing the remaining part of the text. Furthermore, this effect was more pronounced for stories containing a long time shift than those incorporating a short time shift.

A Visualized Framework for Representing Uncertain and Incomplete Temporal Knowledge

This thesis presents a visualized framework, called Visual Time, for representing and reasoning about incomplete and uncertain temporal information. It is both expressive and versatile, allowing logical conjunctions and disjunctions of both absolute and relative temporal relations, such as “Before”, “Meets”, “Overlaps”, “Starts”, “During”, and “Finishes”, etc. In terms of a visualized framework, Visual Time provides a user-friendly environment for describing scenarios with rich temporal structure in natural language, which can be formatted as structured temporal phrases and modelled in terms of Time Relationship Diagrams (TRD). A TRD can be automatically and visually transformed into a corresponding Time Graph, supported by automatic consistency checker that derives a verdict to confirm if a given scenario is temporally consistent or inconsistent. The thesis provides the following contributions: 1. Extended graphical representation for uncertain and incomplete temporal knowledge: An extended graphical representation for uncertain and incomplete temporal knowledge based on [KM1992] is proposed, supporting both logical connectives ‘∧’ and ‘∨’. In Chapter 3, it is shown all the other logical connectives can be derively defined. 2. Time relation diagram (TRD): A time relation diagram (TRD) is designed for representing temporal relations between time elements which could be both point and interval. Each time element is denoted as a box consisting of three components: Name, Duration and Property. Temporal relations are denoted in terms of directed arcs. TRD allows expressions of both absolute and relative temporal relations, supporting both logical conjunctions and disjunctions. 3. A semi-automatic temporal information extractor: SUTime is a very useful tool for extracting verbs and temporal information [CM2012]. However, the extracted verbs and temporal information may play different roles when modelled by TRD. For example, in He to the car, start is an event while starts means the action start happens. An improved algorithm called Temporal Extractor algorithm (TE) is introduced in Section 4.2. Based on Stanford SUTime, TE can semi-automatically extract time elements and temporal relations from any arbitrary text to create a TRD. 4. Four algorithms: The first algorithm, Temporal Relation Algorithm (TRM), is designed to extract temporal relations from TRD. The second algorithm, Meets Table Algorithm (MTM) is introduced to convert all the extracted temporal relations into a Meets table. The third algorithm, Time Graph Algorithm (TGM) is described to draw the corresponding time graph of a given TRD. The fourth algorithm, Consistency Checking Algorithm (CCM), is designed to check the consistency of TRD. If the TRD is inconsistent, an audio verdict will alert and the corresponding time element(s) and natural texts will be marked in red colour.