Variation In Syntax Research Articles

A Systematic Review of Uremic Toxin Concentrations and Cardiovascular Risk Markers in Pediatric Chronic Kidney Disease.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) can lead to cardiac dysfunction in a condition known as cardiorenal syndrome (CRS). It is postulated that the accumulation of uremic toxins in the bloodstream, as a consequence of declining kidney function, may contribute to these adverse cardiac effects. While CRS in adults has been extensively studied, there is a significant knowledge gap with pediatric patients. Uremic toxin levels in children remain inadequately characterized and quantified compared to adults. This review aims to systematically evaluate the association between uremic toxin concentrations and cardiac changes in pediatric CRS and to examine the impact of different dialysis modalities, specifically hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis, on uremic toxin clearance and cardiovascular parameters. To address this, we conducted a systematic literature search of PubMed, following PRISMA guidelines. We used the terms "uremic toxins" and "cardiorenal syndrome" with variations in syntax to search for studies discussing the relationship between uremic toxin levels in CKD, the subsequent impact on cardiac parameters, and the emergence of cardiac dysfunction. Full-text articles written in English, conducted on humans aged from birth to 18 years, and published until December 2021 were included. A comprehensive literature search yielded six studies, and their risk of bias was assessed using JBI Critical Appraisal Checklists. Our systematic review is registered on PROSPERO, number CRD42023460072. This synthesis intends to provide an understanding of the role of uremic toxins in pediatric CRS. The findings reveal that pediatric patients with end-stage CKD on dialysis exhibit elevated uremic toxin levels, which are significantly associated with cardiovascular disease parameters. Additionally, the severity of CKD correlated with higher uremic toxin levels. No conclusive evidence was found to support the superiority of either hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis in terms of uremic toxin clearance or cardiovascular outcomes. More pediatric-specific standardized and longitudinal studies are needed to develop targeted treatments and improve clinical outcomes and the quality of life for affected children.

VOCALIZATION OF BLACK-HOODED ORIOLE (<i>ORIOLUS XANTHORNUS</i>, ORIOLIDAE, PASSERIFORMES, AVES): FEMALE SINGING AND DUETTING

Singing is known to play significant roles in songbird communication. For a long time, singing was believed to be a male attribute, whereas rare episodes of female singing were seen as deviations. However, there has been more and more research on female vocals in recent times, suggesting this in no way to be a rare event. In this study, we investigated the vocalization of the Black-hooded oriole (Oriolus xanthornus) in the Nam Cat Tien National Park, southern Vietnam. We identified two singing variants significantly differing in both maximum frequency and frequency range, these parameters being higher in variant 2. Variant 1 appeared to be more often, being performed in various situations: spontaneous singing, territorial interactions, and duets. Variant 2 occurred only in duets or in territorial interactions where the bird focal pair also performed in duets. No syntax variation was found between the different singing variants. In addition, no variation was revealed in the syntax of variant 1 in the different situations (spontaneous singing and duets). In one observation, we reliably discovered that the male used variant 1, vs the female that used variant 2. Variant 1 is likely to usually be used by males, vs variant 2 usually being used by females. We also identified two types of calls for this species.

The Structure of the Noun Phrase in Northern and Southern Ewenki Dialects

Abstract The paper investigates the structure of Ewenki noun phrases, dealing with both their semantics and syntax. Whereas semantics are rather uniform cross-dialectally, there is considerable variation in syntax, especially regarding agreement patterns. As a rule, the more northern a dialect is the less agreement it exhibits within the noun phrase; besides that, cardinal numerals greater or equal to ‘2’ call for the modified noun in plural in rather Southern dialects, but for its unmarked form in rather Northern dialects. From a comparative point of view, it can be shown that the areal-typologically unexpected agreement within the noun phrase is probably the inherited pattern in (Northern) Tungusic languages, whereas the relevant Ewenki dialects lost it secondarily due to Turkic (Dolgan and Sakha) influence.

Name2Vec: Name Matching using Character-based with Deep Learning

Name matching plays a crucial role in big data and various integration applications, being indispensable when consolidating information from diverse sources. This encompasses tasks such as deduplication, data linkage systems, search engines, text and web mining, information extraction, and more. Discrepancies and anomalies in names, including syntax variations like abbreviations, typographical errors, occasional whitespace omissions, word insertions, deletions, and even multiple spellings for the same name, can lead to missed matches. In previous methodologies, a predefined penalty scheme was often employed for each differing character or multi-character token between two strings. This research introduces Name2Vec, an algorithm that addresses name matching using a neural network model to capture name semantics. This approach advances by suggesting a suitable feature set through the fusion of Name2Vec and character-based name representations. The empirical findings of this research confirm that this performance enhancement improves matching efficiency while simultaneously reducing misclassifications compared to state-of-the-art methods.

THE DYNAMICS OF LANGUAGE IN THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

‘The God of Small Things’ is a literary masterpiece by Arundhati Roy that highlights the unconventional style of writing with a gamut of literary techniques employed using the non-sequential narrative and a meticulous use of dialect that serves to highlight the differences present between the various social groups of Kerala primarily in the 1960s. There are notable features in the novel that includes the use of non-standard English, which highlights dialect, and variations in syntax and word choice which represents the cultural and linguistic diversity of India in the characters and setting of the novel. There are numerous and detailed picturesque descriptions of the environment presented through a variety of language techniques in the novel which is truly the soul of the novel and also brings out distinctly the intertwined social and cultural setting of the life in India while exploring the themes of caste, love and power.

Semantic and Thematic Aspects in the Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins sought a stronger rhetorical style in verse-sprung rhythm for the shape, sound, and sense of Carrion Comfort. The poet shows a sense of desolation produced partly by spiritual aridity and partly by a feeling of artistic frustration. The poem reveals strong tensions between his delight in the sensuous world, his urge to express it, and his equally powerful sense of religious vocation in the sonnet. This sonnet is enriched with the vivid use of echo figures of speech, alliteration, repetition, and a highly compressed syntax to project profound personal experiences, including his sense of God’s mystery, grandeur, and mercy in the energizing prosodic element of his verse sprung rhythm, in which each foot may consist of one stressed syllable and any number of unstressed syllables instead of the regular number of syllables used in the traditional meter. Despair and dejection play a prominent role in displaying the writer’s semantic point of view. The tone of the octave and sestet differ drastically in aspects. Initially, the tone is full of distress, while later, the technique is cheerful. This research attempt will seek answers to how the poem's mode and structure dramatize the speaker's exchange with his interiority and the exterior world? What is the effect of the variations in syntax reflecting a claustrophobic interior consciousness? Therefore, this paper explores the semantic and thematic aspects of the sonnet successfully, keeping in mind the poem's thematic aspects and perspectives.

Assessing intra-individual consistency in humpback whale song production using animal-borne acoustic recorders

Studying individual variation in vocal behavior can provide insight into its functions, stability, and mechanisms. Collecting such data at the scale of the individual can be facilitated using animal-borne tags. Here, we use archival suction-cup acoustic recording tags to investigate intra-individual variation in male humpback whale song production. Humpback whale song is a complex and hierarchically structured vocal sequence of 4-7 repeated phrases that are comprised of different units. Repeated songs are termed song sessions. To investigate how consistent song production is within the song session of an individual whale, we deployed suction cup-attached acoustic recording tags on humpback whales in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary during the 2018–2022 breeding seasons. We analyzed tag data from nine whales to assess intra-individual variation in song structure and syntax as well as differences in the acoustic properties of song units across each song iteration. Each tag contained between 4 and 24 song iterations, and song session recordings varied between 45 minutes and 5 hours. Across individuals, the most variable song iterations occurred at the beginning of a song session. All individuals showed variation in syntax and unit production throughout a session; however, some singers were more consistent than others.

Are our brains more prescriptive than our mouths? Experience with dialectal variation in syntax differentially impacts ERPs and behavior

We investigated online auditory comprehension of dialectal variation in English syntax with event-related potential (ERP) analysis of electroencephalographic data. The syntactic variant under investigation was the double modal, comprising two consecutive auxiliary verbs (e.g., might could). This construction appears across subregional dialects of Southern United States English and expresses indirectness or uncertainty. We compared processing of sentences with attested double modals and single modals in two groups of young adult participants: listeners who were either familiar (Southern) or unfamiliar (Unmarked) with double modal constructions. Both Southern and Unmarked listeners engaged rapid error detection (early anterior negativity) and sentence-level reanalysis (P600) in response to attested double modals, relative to single modals. Offline acceptability and intelligibility judgments reflected dialect familiarity, contrary to the ERP data. We interpret these findings in relation to usage-based and socially weighted theories of language processing, which together capture the effects of frequency and standard language ideology.

Systematic composition of independent language features

Systematic reuse is crucial to efficiently engineer and deploy software languages to software experts and domain experts alike. But “software languages are software too”, and hence their engineering, customization, and reuse are subject to similar challenges. To this effect, we propose an approach for composing independent, grammar-based language syntax modules in a structured way that realizes a separation of concerns among the participants in the life cycle of the languages. We present a refined concept of systematic and controlled syntactic variability of extensible software language product lines through identification of syntax variation points and derivation of variants from independently developed features. This facilitates reuse of software languages and reduces the efforts of engineering and customizing languages for specific domains. We realized our concept with the MontiCore language workbench and assessed it through a case study on architecture description languages. Ultimately, systematic and controlled software language reuse reduces the effort of software language engineering and fosters the applicability of software languages.

The Syntax–Prosody Interface

This article provides an overview of current and historically important issues in the study of the syntax–prosody interface, the point of interaction between syntactic structure and phrase-level phonology. We take a broad view of the syntax–prosody interface, surveying both direct and indirect reference theories, with a focus on evaluating the continuing prominent role of prosodic hierarchy theory in shaping our understanding of this area of linguistics. Specific topics discussed in detail include the identification of prosodic domains, the universality of prosodic categories, the recent resurgence of interest in the role of recursion in prosodic structure, crosslinguistic variation in syntax–prosody mapping, prosodic influences on syntax and word order, and the influence of sentence processing in the planning and shaping of prosodic domains. We consider criticisms of prosodic hierarchy theory in particular, and provide an assessment of the future of prosodic hierarchy theory in research on the syntax–prosody interface.

Neural architecture for question answering using a knowledge graph and web corpus

In Web search, entity-seeking queries often trigger a special question answering (QA) system. It may use a parser to interpret the question to a structured query, execute that on a knowledge graph (KG), and return direct entity responses. QA systems based on precise parsing tend to be brittle: minor syntax variations may dramatically change the response. Moreover, KG coverage is patchy. At the other extreme, a large corpus may provide broader coverage, but in an unstructured, unreliable form. We present AQQUCN, a QA system that gracefully combines KG and corpus evidence. AQQUCN accepts a broad spectrum of query syntax, between well-formed questions to short “telegraphic” keyword sequences. In the face of inherent query ambiguities, AQQUCN aggregates signals from KGs and large corpora to directly rank KG entities, rather than commit to one semantic interpretation of the query. AQQUCN models the ideal interpretation as an unobservable or latent variable. Interpretations and candidate entity responses are scored as pairs, by combining signals from multiple convolutional networks that operate collectively on the query, KG and corpus. On four public query workloads, amounting to over 8000 queries with diverse query syntax, we see 5–16% absolute improvement in mean average precision (MAP), compared to the entity ranking performance of recent systems. Our system is also competitive at entity set retrieval, almost doubling F1 scores for challenging short queries.

A New Biomedical Passage Retrieval Framework for Laboratory Medicine: Leveraging Domain-specific Ontology, Multilevel PRF, and Negation Differential Weighting.

Clinical decision support (CDS) search is performed to retrieve key medical literature that can assist the practice of medical experts by offering appropriate medical information relevant to the medical case in hand. In this paper, we present a novel CDS search framework designed for passage retrieval from biomedical textbooks in order to support clinical decision-making using laboratory test results. The framework utilizes two unique characteristics of the textual reports derived from the test results, which are syntax variation and negation information. The proposed framework consists of three components: domain ontology, index repository, and query processing engine. We first created a domain ontology to resolve syntax variation by applying the ontology to detect medical concepts from the test results with language translation. We then preprocessed and performed indexing of biomedical textbooks recommended by clinicians for passage retrieval. We finally built the query-processing engine tailored for CDS, including translation, concept detection, query expansion, pseudo-relevance feedback at the local and global levels, and ranking with differential weighting of negation information. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we followed the standard information retrieval evaluation procedure. An evaluation dataset was created, including 28,581 textual reports for 30 laboratory test results and 56,228 passages from widely used biomedical textbooks, recommended by clinicians. Overall, our proposed passage retrieval framework, GPRF-NEG, outperforms the baseline by 36.2, 100.5, and 69.7 percent for MRR, R-precision, and Precision at 5, respectively. Our study results indicate that the proposed CDS search framework specifically designed for passage retrieval of biomedical literature represents a practically viable choice for clinicians as it supports their decision-making processes by providing relevant passages extracted from the sources that they prefer to refer to, with improved performances.

How Players Speak to an Intelligent Game Character Using Natural Language Messages

AI-driven characters that learn directly from human input are rare in digital games, but recent advances in several fields of machine learning suggests that they may soon be much more feasible to create. This study explores the design space for interacting with such a character through natural language text dialogue. We conducted an observational study with 18 high school students, who played Minecraft alongside a Wizard of Oz prototype of a companion AI character that learned from their actions and inputs. In this paper, we report on an analysis of the 186 natural language messages that players sent to the character, and review key variations in syntax, function and writing style. We find that players’ behaviour and language was differentiated by the extent to which they expressed an anthropomorphic view of the AI character and the level of interest that they showed in interacting with it.

Simplifying the construction of source code transformations via automatic syntactic restructurings

AbstractA set of restructurings to systematically normalize selective syntax in C++ is presented. The objective is to convert variations in syntax of specific portions of code into a single form to simplify the construction of large, complex program transformation rules. Current approaches to constructing transformations require developers to account for a large number of syntactic cases, many of which are syntactically different but semantically equivalent. The work identifies classes of such syntactic variations and presents normalizing restructurings to simplify each variation to a single, consistent syntactic form. The normalizing restructurings for C++ are presented and applied to two open source systems for evaluation. The evaluation uses the system's test cases to validate that the normalizing restructurings do not affect the systems' tested behavior. In addition, a set of example transformations that benefit from the prior application of normalizing restructurings are presented along with a small survey to assess the effect of the readability of the resultant code.

O conceito de crise e suas denominações: tipos e causas das variações na terminologia da crise econômica mundial

This paper aims at introducing the concept of crisis in the economic scope, its denominations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Spanish (ES), concluding with its denominative variants in both languages, such as: economy crisis, 2008 crisis, major crisis and major globalization crisis; crisis economica, crisis de 2008, gran crisis e gran crisis de la globalizacion, respectively, searching to identify the types and causes of these variations. These variants, as fragments, already proposed by Freixa (2014), present the following types: morph syntax variations which are related to an inferior lexicon character, being either by alteration in its syntagmatic structure or by maintenance or change of gender or number; lexicon – may be considered the synonymy itself, since there is total change between both lexical units which will produce the same meaning. Among the causes already proposed by the author (Freixa, 2014), only the following causes will be considered: the functional one, which is constituted by different communicative registers; the stylist icon, which is related to the author’s communicative options and needs. The types and causes of variations will be in traduced, exemplified and analyzed according to the contexts collected from the Brazilian and Spanish corpora, which integrates the Project Valores culturais e didaticos na metafora de especialidade: as multiplas imagens da crise economica mundial na imprensa escrita (Cultural and Didactic Values in the specialty metaphor: multiple images of the world economy crisis in the written midia) – an integrated research Project by USP – University of Sao Paulo, UEM – State University of Maringa, Unesp and University of Vigo, funded by CAPES/DGPU. As a conclusion, it was observed that the search for denominative variants has been relevant to introduce an in vivo terminology because the case of economical crisis concept and its denominations shows that variations found may go beyond the univocality.

STRUCTURE OF CAUSATIVE CATEGORY IN PASSIVE CONSTRUCTION (ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH VERBS TO CAUSE AND TO MAKE)

The paper deals with studying special features of English causative verbs to cause and to make in passive construction. The conclusion is drawn that the given verbs in passive construction have certain differences. Having their causative meaning, they form different semantic situations. The verb to cause forms a situation: «B is caused by A» whereas the verb to make forms the situation «Y is made to do/ become P». Their semantic difference results in the syntax variation. The passive construction with the verb to cause must definitely contain information about the causator, which is a subject in the structure. The verb to make in passive construction can describe 1) a situation when an object of causation takes part in the process which he can’t control, or when he performs smth against his will, 2) a situation when the object of causation can’t resist performing an action, 3) an action can’t be performed without anybody’s help. As a rule, in passive construction with the verb to make the causator in not expressed.

Database project as source of reinforcement and discovery

A database project that reinforces course concepts directly can serve as a starting point for students' discovery of syntax variations among dialects of SQL. This paper describes a semester-long project that mirrors course topics as they are covered during the term, and reports student experience with discovering the differences between two open source relational database management systems. The student experience points to the need for future lab assignments that more deliberately expose students to this discovery.

Duets in Yellow‐Naped Amazons: Variation in Syntax, Note Composition and Phonology at Different Levels of Social Organization

AbstractComplex vocal signals composed of multiple notes are used by many species. Such signals may vary in a number of features such as the rules that govern note order and timing (syntax), the relative number and types of different notes (note composition), and the acoustic structure of notes (phonology). Previous research examining male song in songbirds typically has shown greater conservation of syntax than phonology. Here we investigated whether these patterns of variation are also found in the duets of parrots. We examined geographic variation in the pair duets of yellow‐naped amazons, Amazona auropalliata, at five sites within one vocal dialect. We also examined variation at several levels of social organization, including within pairs, among pairs and among sites, to assess where variability was greatest. Variation was highest at the within‐pair level, although variation was also present at all other levels and for all of the duet factors. We hypothesize that variation at the among‐site level allows duets to indicate site membership, while variation at the within‐pair level allows pairs to change their duet to match their current social or physical environment. Syntax and phonology are also more conserved than note composition for all levels of social organization. This pattern may result because note composition is less important in duet function than syntax or phonology, or because development of syntax and phonology is more heavily influenced by genetic templates.

Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization (review)

Reviewed by: Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization Giuseppe Longobardi and Gabriele Rigon Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. By Ian Roberts and Anna Roussou. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 288. ISBN 0521790565. $96 (Hb). A quarter of a century ago, David Lightfoot began to explore the diachronic implications of adopting a formal syntactic framework of the type elaborated in those decades by Noam Chomsky and his associates. Over this span of years, Lightfoot’s work has devastatingly criticized approaches to syntactic change (e.g. those based on notions such as ‘drift’) that cannot be reduced to the inescapable and most basic reality of language, namely true cognitive objects (grammars) present in the mind/brain of individual speakers. This groundbreaking work has provided us with an important demarcation criterion between scientific investigation of diachronic syntax, based on the study of the objects above (essentially I-languages, in Chomsky’s (1986) terms), and more unrealistic and less safe idealizations whose explanatory apparatus assumes the existence of such dubious entities as genetic memory. The tightening of scientific requirements imposed by this fundamental line of reasoning has had the effect of forcing scholars to rethink the status of many classical phenomena that seem anyway to have some salience in historical linguistics, most notably the concept of derivation of one language from another, that of apparently (uni)directional change, if not the very notion of E-language (again in Chomsky’s (1986) sense), as traditionally used in historical linguistics. Some of the work of the last years is thus attempting to reconstruct the useful part of the diachronic apparatus within the new, more severe epistemological bounds made unavoidable by Lightfoot’s work and more generally by the rise of the generative biolinguis-tic program. Keenan’s (1996, 2002) hypothesis of inertia and its interaction with even the classical notion of etymology in Longobardi 2001, the attempt to elaborate a historical-comparative method [End Page 428] from parametric syntax (Guardiano & Longobardi 2005), securing the very notion of historical relatedness in the cognitive framework, the explicit formulation of a ‘logical problem of language change’ (Clark & Roberts 1993), and the collection of controversial essays on syntactic reconstruction put together by Ferraresi and Goldbach (2008) all bear witness to this trend. Syntactic change targets precisely a much debated concept of formal and less formal historical linguistics, going back at least to Meillet (1912) and definitely in need of serious reconsideration in the biolinguistic framework, namely the concept of grammaticalization. Roberts and Roussou aim at providing an account of grammaticalization within the minimalist framework, supporting the analysis with a number of relevant case studies. Grammaticalization is intended as a diachronic change that involves ‘the creation of new functional material, either through the reanalysis of existing functional material or through the reanalysis of lexical material’ (2). The authors claim that this process is epiphenomenal, in that it can be reduced to a regular parametric change, which leads to structural simplification. The related questions that they address in order to give an exhaustive theoretical account of the issue are: (i) the reason why syntactic change in general is so common in languages, given that according to the minimalist program languages are perfect systems, which in principle should not vary over time; (ii) the nature and the inventory of functional categories, whose definition plays a fundamental role in the analysis of the process; and (iii) the apparent conflict between a descriptive approach to grammaticalization, based on the empirical evidence that the process follows clear paths of development in languages, and the explanatory adequacy of the minimalist model, which does not necessarily suggest privileged directions of shift in parametric change. R&R start by pointing out that the study of linguistic change within the minimalist program poses a logical problem, which derives from hypotheses about the process of language acquisition. According to the principles-and-parameters theory (PPT), the points of crosslinguistic variation in syntax lie essentially in the assignment of different parametric values in different languages. Language acquisition precisely consists of setting these values in accordance with the empirical evidence that the learner is exposed to, that is, with the trigger experience. Thus the process is idealized as deterministic...

Song diversification and complexity in canaries and seedeaters (Serinus spp.)

Bird song is a composite trait that shows great variation in syntax and phonology between taxa, which hampers the precise quantification of complexity. This should be more feasible for closely-related species that share aspects of song organization. We conducted a comparative study of song and syllable characteristics in the largest fringillid genus, Serinus (canaries and seedeaters), with two objectives: (1) to describe and quantify song complexity in the genus and (2) to assess evolutionary dynamics of song, in particular whether interspecific song diversification evolved along intraspecific lines of covariation between syllable characteristics. We document a pattern of intense, very labile evolution of song in the genus. Well-known vocal constraints such as the relationship between frequency and body size did not appear to limit this evolution, and intraspecific trade-offs between different aspects of syllable complexity did not constrain interspecific diversification. Factor analysis returned an axis of variation that comprehensively expresses song complexity in the genus, and is defined by song speed, repertoire size, and also various aspects of syllable phonology. The species body size is not related to this axis of complexity, but to a minor axis that may indicate better respiratory capacity of larger birds. We discuss the pattern of song evolution in Serinus spp. in the context of the evolutionary dynamics of sexually selected traits. © 2007 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2007, 92, 183–194.