Subject Of Sentence Research Articles

Szeregi wieloczłonowe w funkcji podmiotu w staropolszczyźnie

This article contains a description of Old Polish series functioning as subjects in sentences, e.g A tako sta-ła jest pod krzyżem matka Jezukrystowa, Maryja magdalena i święty Jan Ewanjelista. In terms of structure, semantic and grammatical features of their elements, as well as types of compound indicators, they resem-ble typical three-argument series (child and mother), however, they differ in the number of noun elements, which usually range from three to seven. Two types of lists are distinguished: homogenous, are organized around a single type of linking element or its equivalent in the form of a delimitation pause (e.g., aby mię od ciebie ani śmierć, ani żywot, ani żadna szczęsność od ciebie oddaliła), and heterogeneous, which may be linked more loosely or more closely (e.g., Gdyby raćce z przysiężniki i z pospólstwem uczynili wielkierz). List syntax was also described; very rarely it was exclusively ad sensum, more frequently, exclusively ad formam or in some cases, ad formam/ad sensum. The lists extracted here resemble modern serial subjects in terms of structure and syntax and, according to quantitative analyses, have a similar frequency in the oldest known Polish sentences.

CONDITIONAL CONVERB IN FOREST ENETS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF ITS SYSTEM OF USES

This corpus-based study examines the functions of the conditional converb in Forest Enets and investigates the differences in its use between two generations of Enets speakers. In line with the previous descriptions, independent clauses with conditional converbs are used as self-addressed questions (yes/no, special, and alternative questions). The conditional converb of the verb ɛ ‘be’ when used with numerals is developing into a marker of approximation. Dependent clauses with conditional converbs include protases of conditional and concessive conditional constructions as well as complement clauses. This study discusses the diachronic relation between independent clauses with conditional converbs and the protasis of conditional constructions and concludes that either of the two directions of development is possible. Complement clauses with conditional converbs include, first, irrealis complements to negative propositional attitude predicates (dʲɔxara ‘not know’, dʲurta ‘forget’), which, showing signs of relatively recent grammaticalization, have hitherto received scant attention by scholars, and, second, sentential subjects in modal constructions with such predicates as sɔjza ‘good’, bɔɔ ‘bad’ etc. To compare the use of the Enets conditional converb across types of clauses and generations of speakers, this paper analyses the occurrence of the future tense marker on the converb, the order of clauses in multi-clause constructions, the range of verbs in the main and in the dependent clauses. Many of these parameters can be interpreted as the signs of the growing level of clause integration in the process of grammaticalization of polypredicative constructions.

How it all ends: A model for teaching paragraph ending sentences to L2 students

Although topic sentences have been widely researched, similar consideration for paragraph endings has been less forthcoming. This discrepancy may be problematic as research suggests that instruction on textual endings can positively impact student writing.  With this issue in mind, the current study establishes a model for paragraph endings and discusses pedagogical and computational implications. The model stems from the categorization of the varieties of paragraph endings observed in a corpus of papers written by advanced ESL college-students in the Arabian Peninsula. We identified the varieties of paragraph endings to form a multi-dimensional model featuring the categories of ‘goal,’ ‘type,’ and ‘cue.’ ‘Goal’ refers to the function of the sentence (e.g., summarizing). ‘Type’ refers to whether the sentence is a claim or a support statement. ‘Cue’ refers to explicit language indicating the goal. The model was assessed quantitatively through inter-rater-reliability of expert-judge evaluations. Qualitative analysis was also incorporated to assess possible subjective differences. Quantitative analysis provided validation of the model. Specifically, even with the most conservative analysis, the findings show that 67.5% of the total assessments were in agreement, with 75% agreement for goal and 70% agreement for type. The subsequent qualitative analysis also broadly supported the quantitative findings. We conclude that the validated model has viable implications for pedagogical practices and software development. Thus, the study provides a pathway that may benefit students in the writing of more effective paragraphs. &nbsp

ГРАМАТИЧНІ ФОРМИ СУБ’ЄКТАВ СЕМАНТИКО-СИНТАКСИЧНІЙСТРУКТУРІ РЕЧЕННЯ

The article is devoted to the analysis of case forms that implement the subjective meaning in the semantic structure of a simple sentence. The attention is paid to the noun forms of the nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative and instrumental cases of an agent in the Ukrainian sentence. The grammar functions of an agent in different cases are considered, i.e. of a subject in the nominative and vocative cases, of an object in the genitive, dative, accusative and instrumental cases. Background. The analysis of the sentence semantics involves the study of the interaction between its semantic and formal layout. The interrelation between sentence semantic and syntactic structures reveals formal models of predicative grammar constructions. Purpose. The analysed models with subject syntaxemes denoting an agent, an experiencer, an actor, quantity, quality, and a location enable linguists and language learners to determine the grammatical means of expressing substantive (subject) semantics. Methods. In the study of grammatical forms of subject syntaxemes, the structural method is used, in particular, the methods of sentence model transformation and component analysis. In a number of cases, these techniques helped to reveal that a substantive syntaxeme with subject semantics, expressed in the indirect (genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental) case, is regularly transformed into a subject syntaxeme in the nominative case in the grammatical position of the subject. Results. The grammar models considered in the article demonstrate that the semantic subject of the Ukrainian sentence can be expressed by all case forms without preposition. The variety of forms and means of subject expression allows the noun and its equivalents to realize their agent function in a semantic-syntactic combination with predicates of both verbal and its derivative forms (noun, numeral, adjective, adverbial) nature. Conclusion. The main grammar form of expressing subjectivity is the nominative case combined with a predicate of action, state, process, quantitative, qualitative or locative feature. The vocative case regularly denotes the subject of addressed speech, the other morphological forms of subjects (genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental) have a much narrower application in the Ukrainian sentence.

Are postverbal subjects difficult to eliminate from the L2 English of L1 speakers of Romanian?

"The availability of post-verbal subjects in non-canonical sentences is one of the properties which distinguish between non null-subject languages, like English, and consistent null-subject languages, like Romanian. L2 learning studies provide conflicting results with respect to whether native speakers of a null-subject language can fully eliminate ungrammatical postverbal subjects from their L2 English. The aim of this paper is to investigate if postverbal subjects are difficult to eliminate from the L2 English of L1 speakers of Romanian. The main results show that postverbal subjects are no longer accepted by L1 Romanian advanced and proficient learners of L2 English. However, intermediate learners accept significantly more postverbal subjects with unaccusative verbs than the other two groups. These results are in line with the Interface Hypothesis and the Full Transfer/Full Access Model."

Грамматика учебного текста и предметные знания (пресуппозиция)

The paper describes the expository text as the model of disciplinary knowledge. Consideration is given to the type of epistemic modality associated with presupposition, i.e., knowledge known and relevant to the participants of communication. Text analysis functional methods are used to study expository texts from Russian textbooks on Social Sciences and Physics for secondary school. It has been found that presupposition is most often expressed through modal constructions referring to a reader (personal pronouns) occupying an initial or non-initial position in the text. The didactic function of the expressed presupposition is to actualize the reader’s knowledge necessary for text comprehension. At the same time, the expressed presupposition allows presenting a model of knowledge and a knowledge-building process by mapping a knowledge structure. The expressed presupposition represents the epistemic relations (1) between the familiar and unfamiliar parts of disciplinary knowledge and (2) between familiar parts of everyday life and unfamiliar disciplinary knowledge. The expressed presupposition presents the knowledge-building process by affecting the text deployment. The initial presupposition can occur as a global topic sentence expressing the most significant referents and determining the thematic text structure. Also, the initial presupposition can convey familiar segments of knowledge and set an information context to introduce unfamiliar significant referents in the following sentences. The non-initial presupposition expands the information context and tends to elaborate and detail the topic. To conclude, there is a correlation between the text-deployment potential of the expressed presupposition and the epistemic potential of the familiar knowledge.

Informed Graph Convolution Networks for Multilingual Short Text Understanding

In the open domain environment, the state-of-the-art models cannot process analyze insufficient training data correctly. We propose an adaptive graph convolution network with informed machine learning for multilingual short text understanding to tackle these problems. Specifically, The prior knowledge to guide the graph neural network to extract sentence topics. We construct category anchor words as prior category keywords, prior category keywords and training data as independent information sources, and prior knowledge participates in the training of graph neural network. Moreover, we integrate the attention mechanism in the training process, so that the model can pay attention to task-related information adaptively. We explain the build blocks and present the integrated knowledge representation. The experimental results on the Multilingual Short Text (MST), THUCNews and AGNews datasets show that our method outperforms most of the existing methods.

Asymmetries in two types ofde-related verb-copying constructionsin Mandarin Chinese

AbstractThis article studies Chinese V-desentences from the perspective of verb-copying constructions (VCC) and presents some more evidence in favor of the distinction between descriptive V-deconstructions and resultative V-deconstructions. VCC with descriptive V-desentences (VCCD) and VCC with resultative V-desentences (VCCR) are linearly described as [NP1+ V1+ NP2 + V2 + de +XP]. Five asymmetries, though not very sharp, have been observed between VCCD and VCCR: (a) the movement asymmetry of [V1+NP2], (b) the questioning asymmetry betweenweishenme‘why’ andshenme‘what’, (c) the definiteness asymmetry of NP2, (d) the repetition asymmetry of V1, and (e) the asymmetry of subject-oriented adverbguyi‘intentionally’. To explain these differences, we assume that [V1+NP2] in VCCD is a constituent, acting as an internal topic. While similar analysis cannot be extended to VCCR. We propose instead that [NP1+V1+NP2] is a constituent in VCCR, projecting further into a complex NP and acting as a sentential subject. These structural differences can well explain the five asymmetries from the island effects, and the semantic and pragmatic constraints (on internal topics and subject-oriented adverbs). Meanwhile, based on the restriction of manner adverbial modification, the V2 in VCCD and VCCR is assumed to be externally merged at the morphological level via External Morphological Merger to satisfy the affixal properties ofde. The copying of V1 as V2 is not driven syntactically, but morphologically. This morphosyntactic approach to VCCD and VCCR provides a new perspective to explore V-desentences and VCC, which may shed light on the morphosyntactic studies of Mandarin Chinese from a crosslinguistic perspective.

Sentence topics in Italian: An analysis on the CHROME Corpus

The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guides’ speech. Topical coherence characterizes the communicative strategies that human experts adopt when delivering contents to the visitors of cultural sites. Topical progression, which ensures temporal, spatial, and referential continuity, is frequently expressed by sentence topics as well. The relevant literature generally supports the idea of a topic accent and a rising-falling (or “hat”) contour is described as the most frequent for the unmarked topic in Italian utterance structures, but other realizations are also possible. The hypothesis that we want to test in this work is whether this variability is due to specific factors. Hence, we investigate phonetic realization of sentence topics as a function of syntactic features -structure, function and weight- and textual-pragmatic features -discourse role considering ±aboutness, ±contrastiveness, ±givenness-. Specifically, tonal events, i.e., accents and boundaries, phonetic phrasing, and disfluency phenomena were investigated. Results show that both syntactic and pragmatic factors play a role in the phonetic realization of topics, though they act at different levels. In particular, disfluencies are found to be affected by syntactic weight and givenness, while tonal events seem to depend mainly on the discourse role.

Digital Media Hotspot Mining Algorithm Implementation with Complex Systems in the Mobile Internet Environment

With the development of the Internet, the amount of information present on the network has grown rapidly, leading to increased difficulty in obtaining effective information. Especially for individuals, enterprises, and institutions with a large amount of information, it is an almost impossible task to integrate and analyze Internet information with great difficulty just by human resources. Internet hot events mining and analysis technology can effectively solve the above problems by alleviating information overload, integrating redundant information, and refining core information. In this paper, we address the above problems and research hot event topic sentence generation techniques in the field of hot event mining and design a hybrid event candidate set construction algorithm based on topic core word mapping and event triad selection. The algorithm uses the PAT-Tree technique to extract high-frequency core words in topic hotspots and maps the high-frequency words into sentences to generate a part of event core sentences. The other part of event core sentences is extracted from the topic hotspots by making event triples as candidate elements, and sentences containing event elements are extracted from the topic hotspots. The sets of event core sentences generated by the two methods are mixed and filtered and sorted to obtain the candidate set, which can be used to build a word graph-based main service channel (MSC) model. In this paper, we also propose an improved word graph-based MSC model and use it for the extraction of event topic sentences. Based on the above research, a hot event analysis system is implemented. The system analyzes the existing topic data and uses the event topic sentence generation algorithm studied in this paper to generate the titles of hot spots, that is, hot events. At the same time, the topics are displayed from different dimensions, and data visualization is completed. The visualization includes the trend change of event hotness, trend change of event sentiment polarity, and distribution of event article sources.

Se out of control

Within the framework of a uniform theory of the so-called se constructions in Spanish, I propose to explain a control ban that has received almost no attention in the previous bibliography. Specifically, as long as a subject control sentence has an impersonal SE as controller, the subordinate infinitive clause cannot contain any other instance of the clitic SE, other than the so-called spurious SE. The source of this restriction follows, as I will argue, from a legibility problem at LF produced, specifically, by a failed attempt to apply Agree between PRO and the embedded SE, which, as we shall see, acts as a probe for A-movement. If the explanation that I offer is correct, it also follows a series of theoretical conclusions that directly affect the way in which we must conceive of the design of Agree in the syntax and its effect at the LF interface. In particular, the system tolerates certain Agree failures (Preminger 2014) as long as it does not affect legibility in the semantics. Indeed, the theory of SE constructions that I assume here derives the distinction between paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic SE as the result of successful or unsuccessful Agree applications, respectively. The limit of this tolerance to failed applications of Agree must be found in the type of semantic object that can be deduced at LF. This limit is illustrated with the aforementioned restriction in control and impersonal SE contexts that motivates the present study.

Here come the nouns: Czech two-year-olds use verb number endings to predict sentence subjects

Two-year-old children can use gender or number agreement to predict upcoming words in phrases or sentences. However, most findings showed prediction from freestanding grammatical words, such as articles or copulas. While this shows knowledge of agreement relations, it might be limited to a narrow set of grammatical words. We examined the possibility that children at this age can use grammatical number agreement independently of specific closed-class words, testing whether they predict nouns from bound morphemes on lexical verbs. If this were the case, the emerging grammatical knowledge is unlikely to be lexically specific. Our first experiment replicated existing findings using number-marked copula, while the second experiment marked number on endings of four different verbs. Two-year-old children watched pairs of pictures showing single or multiple items while listening to sentences whose sentence-final subject referred to one of the two pictures. The grammatical Czech sentences contained a copula (Experiment 1: where is/are in the picture car/s?) or one of four number-marked lexical verbs (Experiment 2: Here jump/s the frog/s in the picture). Children in both experiments anticipated the subject from the verb or copula form. Children thus used number agreement predictively in the complex Czech copula system and lexical verbs marked by endings. This suggests that children understand grammatical number independently of specific grammatical words and supports the view that early knowledge of grammar is not lexically specific.

Towards the Question on the Zero Subject in English

Introduction. The article considers the case, when no subject is present in an impersonal English sentence. Many linguists believe that the subject in this case is implicit, because the sentence preserves its predicativity. In addition, the subject “it” is sometimes substituted in impersonal English sentences by the formal particle “there”. However, the question whether this particle performs the function of subject is still open. That is why it is rather pertinent to consider all cases of subject, both explicit and implicit one, including the cases, when the sentence contains the formal particle “there”. The objective of this work is to build a formal logical model of implicit subject in impersonal English sentence. Implicit subject is often named as zero subject.Methodology and sources. The research methodology is based on traditional approaches towards studying the phenomenon of zero subject, as well as on the binomiality idea, having been developed since 1993 at ETU. On the material of English the status of the issue, whether it is eligible to consider the implicit subject as the zero one, is investigated. The examples illustrating the functional features of the implicit subject in English sentence were selected by means of the method of continuous sampling from 7 corpora. To represent the structural features of the implicit subject the method of formal logical modelling is applied.Results and discussion. The article presents the diversity of subject structures in English sentence. There is dealt with the question on the functions of the formal particle “there” in hypothetical comparison with the formal particle “it”. In this regard, a formal logical modelling of English subject is undertaken, for declarative and interrogative sentences. Herewith both independent and dependent sentences are modelled. Questions to the subject are out of the present consideration. The implicit subject has been assumed to be a “trace” of the explicit subject and may not be recognized as the absolute zero subject.Conclusion. Linguistics has elaborated a variety of original views on the reasons, why “incomplete” subjects emerge. Our language models allow, however, to come to more original and, as we hope, objective conclusions. Dependent on its environment the subject in English can be implicit fully or partly. If the subject is fully implicit, it is a strong or weak implicit semifinitive, fixed in the weak specifier. If the subject is partly implicit, it is a weak implicit semifinitive, fixed in the strong specifier. The English subject appears to be fully implicit much less frequent, than partly implicit. Making the subject fully implicit is possible by means of additional elements. Making the subject partly implicit is possible by means of the strong specifier “there”; no additional elements are then needed.

Access to verb bias and plausibility information during syntactic processing in adult Spanish-English bilinguals.

In two experiments, we examine how proficient second language speakers integrate verb bias and plausibility information during online sentence comprehension. Spanish-English speakers and native English speakers read sentences in English in which a post-verbal noun phrase (NP) could be interpreted as a direct object or a sentential subject. To examine the role of verb bias, the post-verbal NP was preceded by a verb that is preferentially followed by a direct object (DO-bias verbs) or a sentential complement (SC-bias verbs). To assess the role of plausibility, the semantic fit between the verb and the post-verbal NP was either congruent or incongruent with the direct object interpretation. The results show that both second language speakers and native speakers used verb bias information to assign a grammatical role to the post-verbal ambiguous NP with small differences. Syntactic revision of an initially incorrect DO interpretation was facilitated by the presence of an implausible NP.

Paragraph Writing Efficacy among Yemeni EFL University Learners

The present study aims to explore the competency of Yemeni English as foreign language (EFL, henceforth) university learners in the construction of well-organised and well-formed paragraphs in which the basic components: the topic sentence, the bridge sentence, the supporting ideas for the topic sentence and the restatement sentence (conclusion) are included in their paragraphs. The study recruited 37 EFL learners who were enrolled in l­­evel two in the B. Ed. programme in the Department of English Language, Faculty of Education, Thamar University Yemen. Paragraph writing test was utilised as an instrument for data collection. The results revealed that the inclusion of paragraph component parts, except for the bridge sentence, by Yemeni EFL learners while developing paragraphs was high. However, those learners encountered a great difficulty in constructing well-formed sentences in all the paragraph component parts. The study offers some remedial procedures that are inferred from the instructors' experience in teaching the course of writing and supported by the results of the study data. These remedies are offered as suggestions that would be applicable and would improve paragraph writing among EFL learners when taught explicitly and comprehensively.
 Keywords: paragraph writing; topic sentence; bridge sentence; supporting ideas; conclusion; Yemeni EFL learners
 

医学英語ライティング教育 8：医学英語の授業におけるパラグラフ・ライティング教育の試み 1トピック・センテンスに関する問題

医学英語ライティング教育 8：医学英語の授業におけるパラグラフ・ライティング教育の試み 1トピック・センテンスに関する問題

The influence of informativeness on the prosody of sentence topics

In a production experiment on German we investigated the prosodic effects of informativeness (comprising information status and contrast) on sentence-initial referents, i.e. sentence topics. While referents in sentence-final position usually receive the nuclear accent of the utterance, commonly defined as the last and information-structurally crucial pitch accent in an intonation unit, sentence topics in German often carry a prenuclear accent. However, the status of prenuclear accents is still unclear: are they just “ornamental” or do they express meaning differences? We expected to find a direct relationship between the informativeness of a sentence topic and its prosodic prominence but the hypothesis could only be confirmed to a very limited extent. Results show that informativeness does not affect the accent type of sentence-initial referents, as they are consistently marked by rising prenuclear accents, even on given items. Only the parameter duration shows a main effect of informativeness in the expected direction, since contrastive referents proved to be longer than given ones. In general, and surprisingly, however, contrastive topics are mostly produced as prosodically less prominent than non-contrastive items that are either given, accessible or new. An explanation that holds for our data set may be that the contrast is already expressed by a parallel syntactic structure, which speakers often realize prosodically by a flat hat pattern. We conclude that prenuclear accents on sentence- initial referents are consistently placed for rhythmic reasons in German and that their prosodic form is only slightly influenced by a referent’s level of informativeness.

Unsupervised Abstractive Opinion Summarization by Generating Sentences with Tree-Structured Topic Guidance

Abstract This paper presents a novel unsupervised abstractive summarization method for opinionated texts. While the basic variational autoencoder-based models assume a unimodal Gaussian prior for the latent code of sentences, we alternate it with a recursive Gaussian mixture, where each mixture component corresponds to the latent code of a topic sentence and is mixed by a tree-structured topic distribution. By decoding each Gaussian component, we generate sentences with tree-structured topic guidance, where the root sentence conveys generic content, and the leaf sentences describe specific topics. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated topic sentences are appropriate as a summary of opinionated texts, which are more informative and cover more input contents than those generated by the recent unsupervised summarization model (Bražinskas et al., 2020). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the variance of latent Gaussians represents the granularity of sentences, analogous to Gaussian word embedding (Vilnis and McCallum, 2015).

The non-existence of finite sentential subjects

The non-existence of finite sentential subjects

Formation of historical commenting competence in students – future teachers of the Russian language and literature

Introduction. The relevance of the research lies in the fact that historical commenting on linguistic phenomena is an important means of solving the problems of training language teachers, since it allows explaining modern linguistic facts, concepts, patterns by establishing their diachronic properties. The purpose of the study is to test a model of the formation of historical commenting competence in students – future teachers of the Russian language and literature. Materials and methods. The study was conducted from January to December 2020 at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. The sample included 90 people. Methods applied: comparative historical analysis of monuments of ancient Russian writing; expert assessments; methodology for determining the formation of linguistic competence of students (E.N. Piskunova); mathematical statistics (χ2-Pearson test). Research results. The program of the courses "Old Church Slavonic" and "History of the Russian literary language" included the study and comparative historical analysis of the monuments of ancient Russian writing. The results of testing the model showed statistically significant changes in the experimental group according to the following criteria: information-cognitive (χ2 = 20.3; p <0.01), activity-semantic (χ2 = 45; p <0.01), professional-communicative (χ2 = 8.5; p <0.05) and practice-oriented (χ2 = 21.1; p <0.01). Discussion and conclusion. A comparative analysis of the research results showed that teaching the historical syntax of the Russian language affects the formation of the competence of historical commenting in students – future language teachers and the level of their training. The developed methodological toolkit provides an analysis of the syntactic field of subject sentences of the Old Russian language and their historical commenting on the basis of the subject of the dictum and the subject of modus.