Usage Effects on the Cognitive Routinization of Chinese Resultative Verbs

The present study adopts a corpus-oriented usage-based approach to the grammar of Chinese resultative verbs. Zooming in on a specific class of V-kai constructions, this paper aims to elucidate the effect of frequency in actual usage events on shaping the linguistic representations of resultative verbs. Specifically, it will be argued that while high token frequency results in more lexicalized V-kai complex verbs, high type frequency gives rise to more schematized V-kai constructions. The routinized patterns pertinent to V-kai resultative verbs varying in their extent of specificity and generality accordingly serve as a representative illustration of the continuum between lexicon and grammar that characterizes a usage-based conception of language

Treebank-based acquisition of a Chinese lexical-functional grammar

Scaling wide-coverage, constraint-based grammars such as Lexical-Functional Grammars (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Bresnan, 2001) or Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994) from fragments to naturally occurring unrestricted text is knowledge-intensive, time-consuming and (often prohibitively) expensive. A number of researchers have recently presented methods to automatically acquire wide-coverage, probabilistic constraint-based grammatical resources from treebanks (Cahill et al., 2002, Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill et al., 2004; Miyao et al., 2003; Miyao et al., 2004; Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2002; Hockenmaier, 2003), addressing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in constraint-based grammar development. Research to date has concentrated on English and German. In this paper we report on an experiment to induce wide-coverage, probabilistic LFG grammatical and lexical resources for Chinese from the Penn Chinese Treebank (CTB) (Xue et al., 2002) based on an automatic f-structure annotation algorithm. Currently 96.751% of the CTB trees receive a single, covering and connected f-structure, 0.112% do not receive an f-structure due to feature clashes, while 3.137% are associated with multiple f-structure fragments. From the f-structure-annotated CTB we extract a total of 12975 lexical entries with 20 distinct subcategorisation frame types. Of these 3436 are verbal entries with a total of 11 different frame types. We extract a number of PCFG-based LFG approximations. Currently our best automatically induced grammars achieve an f-score of 81.57% against the trees in unseen articles 301-325; 86.06% f-score (all grammatical functions) and 73.98% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the f-structures automatically generated for the original trees in 301-325 and 82.79% (all grammatical functions) and 67.74% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the manually annotated gold-standard f-structures for 50 trees randomly selected from articles 301-325

Null Subjects in Northeast English

This paper presents data and analysis relating to null subjects in spoken colloquial English. While English is not a „pro-drop? language (i.e. subjects must usually be overt), a corpus of speech collected on Tyneside and Wearside in 2007 shows that null subjects are permitted in finite clauses in certain contexts. This paper analyses these examples and follow-up questionnaires, and compares the data with the other types of null subject described in the literature (pro-drop, topic-drop, early null subjects, aphasics? null subjects and „diary-drop?), ultimately concluding that the colloquial English phenomenon is most closely related to diary- drop

The Teaching and Learning of Lexical Chunks: A Comparison of Observe Hypothesise Experiment and Presentation Practice Production.

The focus of this study is the comparison of two teaching frameworks: Presentation Practice Production (PPP) and Observe Hypothesise Experiment (OHE) in the context of teaching twelve lexical chunks to two groups of twenty-one EAP students. An analysis of pre- and post-test scores demonstrated that both frameworks were successful in aiding students’ productive and receptive knowledge of the target language. The question as to whether one framework was more effective than the other in the context studied was answered negatively, since no statistically significant difference between the treatment types was found. The results suggest that both input and output oriented activities can aid the acquisition of chunks to the same extent and thus, perhaps, the choice between these frameworks may be more dependent on teaching and learning styles than upon their impact on the acquisition of formulaic language. Key words: Observe Hypothesise Experiment, Presentation Practice Production, formulaic language, lexical chunks, productive knowledge, receptive knowledge, input oriented activities, output oriented activitie

Teaching spoken discourse markers explicitly: A comparison of III and PPP

This article reports on mixed methods classroom research carried out at a British university. The study investigates the effectiveness of two different explicit teaching frameworks, Illustration, Interaction, Induction (III) and Present, Practice, Produce (PPP) used to teach the same spoken discourse markers (DMs) to two different groups of Chinese learners and compared to a control group. Univariate analysis of the pre and post tests indicated statistically significant differences between the PPP group and III/control groups in terms of a higher mean usage of the target DMs in the immediate post test. Qualitative results demonstrated that the PPP group generally found this method to be more useful, which tallied with their better performances in the tests. Both groups also articulated a desire for a different kind of practice to be used in class, based on rehearsal for real world tasks. This suggests a need to reconceptualise practice within III, PPP or other teaching frameworks

An analysis of interlinguistic influence from Chinese into English in Direct Object realization of Chinese-English bilingual children

While null objects are possible and pervasive in Chinese, their occurrence in languages like English and Spanish is rather restricted. In the case of developing grammars, the omission of categories that characterizes the initial stages of acquisition also affects the object category, together with inflection, subjects, determiners, etc. The main goal of this article is to investigate the nature of interlinguistic influence from Chinese into English in a set of Chinese-English (C-E) bilingual children with a focus on bilingual children’s early direct object (DO) realization in English and to provide new empirical evidence for the postulation that the development of the two languages is interdependent. In order to do so, a comparative study has been carried out: the English production of C-E bilinguals is analysed with regard to DOs and, in order to determine whether the possible overproduction of null DOs is due to influence from the other first language (L 1) (i.e. Chinese) or is rather part of the developmental process, a double comparison is established with English monolinguals (E monolinguals) and with Spanish-English bilinguals (S- E bilinguals). The results show that C-E bilinguals’ performance in terms of DO realization in English is significantly different from that of both E monolinguals and S-E bilinguals and that the latter two groups behave similarly. This finding supports the conclusion that, although null DOs occur in the initial stages of child language acquisition regardless of whether the adult grammar allows them (Chinese) or not (English and Spanish), in the case of C-E bilinguals’ English development, interlinguistic influence from Chinese into English has a negative effect as reflected in null DOs being produced at a higher rate and until later in life.La omisión de objetos es una propiedad gramatical muy frecuente en chino, mientras que en inglés y en español su uso está más restringido. En este trabajo analizamos la omisión de los objetos que producen en ingles los siguientes grupos: niños bilingües chino-inglés, español-inglés y mononolingües inglés. Evaluamos hasta qué punto el mecanismo del objeto nulo en chino influye en el desarrollo del inglés de niños bilingües chino-inglés. Para ello, ofrecemos un estudio comparativo doble: por un lado, entre la producción de los niños bilingües chino-inglés y la de los mononolingües inglés, con el fin de determinar si la omisión de objetos caracteriza la adquisición lanío de la gramática monolingüe como de la bilingüe; y, por otro lado, entre dicha producción de los niños bilingües chino-inglés y la de los niños bilingües español-inglés, para establecer si las gramáticas bilingües son paralelas en su desarrollo. Los resultados demuestran que existe una diferencia significativa entre la producción y el desarrollo gramatical de los bilingües chino-inglés y los de los otros dos grupos con respecto al uso de objetos, lo cual respalda la conclusión de que, aunque el mecanismo de objeto nulo es una propiedad de las gramáticas en desarrollo, en el caso del inglés de niños bilingües chino-inglés, se produce una interferencia negativa del chino en el inglés que se manifiesta en un mayor uso de objetos nulos en inglés y hasta etapas posteriores

Treebank-based acquisition of LFG parsing resources for French

Motivated by the expense in time and other resources to produce hand-crafted grammars, there has been increased interest in automatically obtained wide-coverage grammars from treebanks for natural language processing. In particular, recent years have seen the growth in interest in automatically obtained deep resources that can represent information absent from simple CFG-type structured treebanks and which are considered to produce more language-neutral linguistic representations, such as dependency syntactic trees. As is often the case in early pioneering work on natural language processing, English has provided the focus of first efforts towards acquiring deep-grammar resources, followed by successful treatments of, for example, German, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. However, no comparable large-scale automatically acquired deep-grammar resources have been obtained for French to date. The goal of this paper is to present the application of treebank-based language acquisition to the case of French. We show that with modest changes to the established parsing architectures, encouraging results can be obtained for French, with a best dependency structure f-score of 86.73%

An investigation of Chinese students’ grammar developmental sequence: a corpus study of academic writing

The paper explores the impact of three major dominants of acquisition order: semantic complexity, input frequency, and native language transfer. A special corpus of Chinese students’ academic writing was created to present both qualitative and quantitative data for the research. The number of texts analyzed for this research is 510, comprising 701 440 words. The research is longitudinal; the data presented in this paper were obtained in the period of February 2015 - February 2017. The research will be carried out, thus the results which we want to discuss are preliminary. The research findings provide support for pedagogical recommendations to present the patterns in receptive grammar acquisition (input) which can result in more error-free and diversified grammatical outpu