325 research outputs found

    “All These Nouns Together Just Don’t Make Sense!”: An Investigation of EAP Students’ Challenges with Complex Noun Phrases in First-Year College-Level Textbooks

    Get PDF
    Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988; 2004). However, in spite of the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are often overlooked in preparatory English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs. This mixed methods study aims to investigate to what extent CNP present syntactic parsing challenges for upper-level college EAP students, and whether there is a perceived need for direct instruction in CNP in EAP programs. A special CNP proficiency test was administered to 70 upper-level Ontario college EAP students and a native speaker comparator group, and the results were compared with those obtained from interviews with seven of the test-takers. The results obtained from the statistical analyses and the interviews indicate that CNP are challenging to parse for upper-level EAP students and that direct instruction in CNP may be beneficial for improving their reading comprehension. Some teaching implications of the findings are also addressed.Les groupes nominaux complexes (GNC) sont un vecteur important du discours écrit universitaire (Halliday, 1988; 2004). Cependant, bien qu’on admette les difficultés qu’ils posent aux apprenant.e.s d’anglais, les GNC sont souvent peu pris en compte par les programmes préparatoires d'anglais sur objectifs universitaires (English for Academic Purposes ou EAP). Cette étude à méthodologie mixte vise à déterminer dans quelle mesure a) les GNC présentent des défis d'analyse syntaxique pour les étudiant.e.s de l’enseignement collégial postsecondaire inscrit.e.s à des cours EAP avancés, et b) un enseignement explicite des GNC est perçu comme nécessaire. Un test de compétence spécifique aux GNC a été administré à 70 étudiant.e.s de cours EAP avancés d’un collège de l'Ontario et à un groupe comparatif composé de locuteurs natifs; les résultats au test ont été triangulés par le moyen d’entretiens avec sept participants. Les résultats obtenus à partir des analyses statistiques des tests et des entretiens indiquent que les GNC sont difficiles à analyser pour les étudiant.e.s des cours EAP avancés, et que l'enseignement explicite des GNC pourrait permettre d’améliorer leur compréhension en lecture. Des pistes pédagogiques découlant des résultats sont également abordées

    How tight is your language? A semantic typology based on Mutual Information

    Get PDF
    Languages differ in the degree of semantic flexibility of their syntactic roles. For example, Eng- lish and Indonesian are considered more flexible with regard to the semantics of subjects, whereas German and Japanese are less flexible. In Hawkins’ classification, more flexible lan- guages are said to have a loose fit, and less flexible ones are those that have a tight fit. This classification has been based on manual inspection of example sentences. The present paper proposes a new, quantitative approach to deriving the measures of looseness and tightness from corpora. We use corpora of online news from the Leipzig Corpora Collection in thirty typolog- ically and genealogically diverse languages and parse them syntactically with the help of the Universal Dependencies annotation software. Next, we compute Mutual Information scores for each language using the matrices of lexical lemmas and four syntactic dependencies (intransi- tive subjects, transitive subject, objects and obliques). The new approach allows us not only to reproduce the results of previous investigations, but also to extend the typology to new lan- guages. We also demonstrate that verb-final languages tend to have a tighter relationship be- tween lexemes and syntactic roles, which helps language users to recognize thematic roles early during comprehension

    Transforming noun phrase structure form into heuristics and rules for detecting compound noun in Malay sentence

    Get PDF
    This paper addresses the process of transforming noun phrase structure form into a list of suitable heuristic used for detecting compound noun word in Malay sentence.The heuristic is used to obtain the syntax sentence structure for finding a compound noun pair of words in Malay sentence. To obtain the list of these rules, the noun phrase structure form must be created first, so that we know the possibility of the words' combination as a compound noun.The noun phrase structure form is grouped based on three different noun categories, such as i) noun and noun ii) noun and noun modifier, and iii) noun and non-noun modifier.However, in our research work, we focus on the category of noun and noun modifier.The heuristic rules and noun phrase structure form are important to understand because they help to clarify the concept of finding compound noun pair of words in Malay sentence.This compound noun output will use an input in our next research named head modifier detector

    On the Use of Parsing for Named Entity Recognition

    Get PDF
    [Abstract] Parsing is a core natural language processing technique that can be used to obtain the structure underlying sentences in human languages. Named entity recognition (NER) is the task of identifying the entities that appear in a text. NER is a challenging natural language processing task that is essential to extract knowledge from texts in multiple domains, ranging from financial to medical. It is intuitive that the structure of a text can be helpful to determine whether or not a certain portion of it is an entity and if so, to establish its concrete limits. However, parsing has been a relatively little-used technique in NER systems, since most of them have chosen to consider shallow approaches to deal with text. In this work, we study the characteristics of NER, a task that is far from being solved despite its long history; we analyze the latest advances in parsing that make its use advisable in NER settings; we review the different approaches to NER that make use of syntactic information; and we propose a new way of using parsing in NER based on casting parsing itself as a sequence labeling task.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2020/11Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01This work has been funded by MINECO, AEI and FEDER of UE through the ANSWER-ASAP project (TIN2017-85160-C2-1-R); and by Xunta de Galicia through a Competitive Reference Group grant (ED431C 2020/11). CITIC, as Research Center of the Galician University System, is funded by the Consellería de Educación, Universidade e Formación Profesional of the Xunta de Galicia through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER) with 80%, the Galicia ERDF 2014-20 Operational Programme, and the remaining 20% from the Secretaría Xeral de Universidades (Ref. ED431G 2019/01). Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez has also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC), under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (FASTPARSE, Grant No. 714150)

    Final Modals, Adverbs and Antisymmetry in Vietnamese

    Get PDF
    Cet article étudie la syntaxe et la sémantique des constructions du vietnamien où l’élément auxiliaire apparaît à droite du syntagme verbal. À première vue, cette distribution représente une objection aux propositions universalistes de Kayne 1995 et Cinque 1998, objection qui a déjà fait l’objet de deux analyses (Duffield 1998 et Simpson 1997, 1998). Le présent article réexamine les faits soutenant ces précédentes propositions. Il montre que ces faits sont insuffisants pour justifier la complexité dérivationnelle de l’une ou de l’autre interprétation, et propose un traitement plus simple, qui prend en considération l’interprétation des conditions grammaticales et extragrammaticales régissant le placement de l’auxiliaire en vietnamien, tout en conciliant ces distributions avec les principes universels.This paper is concerned with the syntax and semantics of Vietnamese constructions in which a modal element appears unexpectedly to the right of the verb-phrase. Prima facie, this distribution presents a challenge to the universalist proposals of Kayne 1995 and Cinque 1998, a challenge that has been addressed in two previous analyses: Duffield 1998 and Simpson 1997, 1998. The present article re-examines the empirical evidence supporting those previous proposals. It is argued that this evidence is insufficient to justify the derivational complexity of either account. A simpler alternative treatment is proposed which takes account of the various grammatical and extragrammatical conditions governing modal placement in Vietnamese, while simultaneously reconciling these distributions with universal principles

    Sino-Tibetan: Part 2 Tibetan

    Get PDF

    Relative clauses in Xong (Miao-Yao)

    No full text
    This paper provides an overview of relative clause constructions in Xong (Miao-Yao). Xong features an unusual number of distinct relative clause types, including some that obligatorily precede their head noun, others that obligatorily follow it, and still others that occur in either position. They occur with zero, one, or two relative clause markers. These formal variations are often accompanied by varying restrictions on possible roles of the head noun. Typologically rare aspects of Xong relative clauses – including pre-head relative clauses in a VO language, and pre-head relative clauses marked with an initial relativizing particle – are also discussedAustralian National Universit
    • …
    corecore