Learning Functional Prepositions

In first language acquisition, what does it mean for a grammatical category to have been acquired, and what are the mechanisms by which children learn functional categories in general? In the context of prepositions (Ps), if the lexical/functional divide cuts through the P category, as has been suggested in the theoretical literature, then constructivist accounts of language acquisition would predict that children develop adult-like competence with the more abstract units, functional Ps, at a slower rate compared to their acquisition of lexical Ps. Nativists instead assume that the features of functional P are made available by Universal Grammar (UG), and are mapped as quickly, if not faster, than the semantic features of their lexical counterparts. Conversely, if Ps are either all lexical or all functional, on both accounts of acquisition we should observe few differences in learning. Three empirical studies of the development of P were conducted via computer analysis of the English and Spanish sub-corpora of the CHILDES database. Study 1 analyzed errors in child usage of Ps, finding almost no errors in commission in either language, but that the English learners lag in their production of functional Ps relative to lexical Ps. That no such delay was found in the Spanish data suggests that the English pattern is not universal. Studies 2 and 3 applied novel measures of phrasal (P head + nominal complement) productivity to the data. Study 2 examined prepositional phrases (PPs) whose head-complement pairs appeared in both child and adult speech, while Study 3 considered PPs produced by children that never occurred in adult speech. In both studies the productivity of Ps for English children developed faster than that of lexical Ps. In Spanish there were few differences, suggesting that children had already mastered both orders of Ps early in acquisition. These empirical results suggest that at least in English P is indeed a split category, and that children acquire the syntax of the functional subset very quickly, committing almost no errors. The UG position is thus supported. Next, the dissertation investigates a \u27soft nativist\u27 acquisition strategy that composes the distributional analysis of input, minimal a priori knowledge of the possible co-occurrence of morphosyntactic features associated with functional elements, and linguistic knowledge that is presumably acquired via the experience of pragmatic, communicative situations. The output of the analysis consists in a mapping of morphemes to the feature bundles of nominative pronouns for English and Spanish, plus specific claims about the sort of knowledge required from experience. The acquisition model is then extended to adpositions, to examine what, if anything, distributional analysis can tell us about the functional sequences of PPs. The results confirm the theoretical position according to which spatiotemporal Ps are lexical in character, rooting their own extended projections, and that functional Ps express an aspectual sequence in the functional superstructure of the PP

Agent-oriented constructivist knowledge management

In Ancient Times, when written language was introduced, books and manuscripts were often considered sacred. During these times, only a few persons were able to read and interpret them, while most people were limited in accepting these interpretations. Then, along with the industrial revolution of the XVIII and XIX centuries and especially boosted by the development of the press, knowledge slowly became available to all people. Simultaneously, people were starting to apply machines in the development of their work, usually characterized by repetitive processes, and especially focused in the production of consuming goods, such as furniture, clocks, clothes and so on. Following the needs of this new society, it was finally through science that new processes emerged to enable the transmission of knowledge from books and instructors to learners. Still today, people gain knowledge based on these processes, created to fulfill the needs of a society in its early stages of industrialization, thus not being compatible with the needs of the information society. In the information society, people must deal with an overloading amount of information, by the means of the media, books, besides different telecommunication and information systems technology. Furthermore, people’s relation to work has been influenced by profound changes, for instance, knowledge itself is now regarded as a valuable work product and, thus, the workplace has become an environment of knowledge creation and learning. Modifications in the world economical, political and social scenarios led to the conclusion that knowledge is the differential that can lead to innovation and, consequently, save organizations, societies, and even countries from failing in achieving their main goals. Focusing on these matters is the Knowledge Management (KM) research area, which deals with the creation, integration and use of knowledge, aiming at improving the performance of individuals and organizations. Advances in this field are mainly motivated by the assumption that organizations should focus on knowledge assets (generally maintained by the members of an organization) to remain competitive in the information society’s market. This thesis argues that KM initiatives should be targeted based on a constructivist perspective. In general, a constructivist view on KM focuses on how knowledge emerges, giving great importance to the knowledge holders and their natural practices. With the paragraph above, the reader may already have an intuition of how this work faces and targets Knowledge Management, however, let us be more precise. Research in Knowledge Management has evolved substantially in the past 30 years, coming from a centralized view of KM processes to a distributed view, grounded in organizational and cognitive sciences studies that point out the social, distributed, and subjective nature of knowledge. The first Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) were centrally based and followed a top-down design approach. The organization managers, supported by knowledge engineers, collected and structured the contents of an organizational memory as a finished product at design time (before the organizational memory was deployed) and then disseminated the product, expecting employees to use it and update it. However, employees often claimed that the knowledge stored in the repository was detached from their real working practices. This led to the development of evolutionary methods, which prescribe that the basic KM system is initially developed and evolves proactively in an on-going fashion. However, most of the initiatives are still based on building central repositories and portals, which assume standardized vocabularies, languages, and classification schemes. Consequently, employees’ lack of trust and motivation often lead to dissatisfaction. In other words, workers resist on sharing knowledge, since they do not know who is going to access it and what is going to be done with it. Moreover, the importance attributed to knowledge may give an impression that these central systems take away a valuable asset from his or her owner, without giving appreciable benefits in return. The problems highlighted in the previous paragraph may be attenuated or even solved if a top-down/bottom-up strategy is applied when proposing a KM solution. This means that the solution should be sought with aim at organizational goals (top-down) but at the same time, more attention should be given to the knowledge holders and on the natural processes they already use to share knowledge (bottom-up). Being active agency such an important principle of Constructivism, this work recognizes that the Agent Paradigm (first defined by Artificial Intelligence and more recently adopted by Software Engineering) is the best approach to target Knowledge Management, taking a technological and social perspective. Capable of modeling and supporting social environments, agents is here recognized as a suitable solution for Knowledge Management especially by providing a suitable metaphor used for modeling KM domains (i.e. representing humans and organizations) and systems. Applying agents as metaphors on KM is mainly motivated by the definition of agents as cognitive beings having characteristics that resemble human cognition, such as autonomy, reactivity, goals, beliefs, desires, and social-ability. Using agents as human abstractions is motivated by the fact that, for specific problems, such as software engineering and knowledge management process modeling, agents may aid the analyst to abstract away from some of the problems related to human complexity, and focus on the important issues that impact the specific goals, beliefs and tasks of agents of the domain. This often leads to a clear understanding of the current situation, which is essential for the proposal of an appropriate solution. The current situation may be understood by modeling at the same time the overall goals of the organization, and the needs and wants of knowledge holders. Towards facilitating the analysis of KM scenarios and the development of adequate solutions, this work proposes ARKnowD (Agent-oriented Recipe for Knowledge Management Systems Development). Systems here have a broad definition, comprehending both technology-based systems (e.g. information system, groupware, repositories) and/or human systems, i.e. human processes supporting KM using non-computational artifacts (e.g. brain stormings, creativity workshops). The basic philosophical assumptions behind ARKnowD are: a) the interactions between human and system should be understood according to the constructivist principle of self-construction, claiming that humans and communities are self-organizing entities that constantly construct their identities and evolve throughout endless interaction cycles. As a result of such interactions, humans shape systems and, at the same time, systems constrain the ways humans act and change; b) KM enabling systems should be built in a bottom-up approach, aiming at the organizational goals, but understanding that in order to fulfill these goals, some personal needs and wants of the knowledge holders (i.e. the organizational members) need to be targeted; and c) there is no “silver bullet��? when pursuing a KM tailoring methodology and the best approach is combining existing agent-oriented approaches according to the given domain or situation. This work shows how the principles above may be achieved by the integration of two existing work on agent-oriented software engineering, which are combined to guide KM analysts and system developers when conceiving KM solutions. Innovation in our work is achieved by supporting topdown/bottom-up approaches to KM as mentioned above. The proposed methodology does that by strongly emphasizing the earlier phases of software development, the so-called requirement analysis activity. In this way, we consider all stakeholders (organizations and humans) as agents in our analysis model, and start by understanding their relations before actually thinking of developing a system. Perhaps the problem may be more effectively solved by proposing changes in the business processes, rather than by making use of new technology. And besides, in addition to humans and organizations, existing systems are also included in the model from start, helping the analyst and designer to understand which functionalities are delegated to these so-called artificial agents. In addition to that, benefits as a result of the application of ARKnowD may be also attributed to our choice of using the proper agent cognitive characteristics in the different phases of the development cycle. With the main purpose of exemplifying the use of the proposed methodology, this work presents a socially-aware recommender agent named KARe (Knowledgeable Agent for Recommendations). Recommender Systems may be defined by those that support users in selecting items of their need from a big set of items, helping users to overcome the overwhelming feeling when facing a vast information source, such as the web, an organizational repository or the like. Besides serving as a case for our methodology, this work also aims at exploring the suitability of the KARe system to support KM processes. Our choice for supporting knowledge sharing through questioning and answering processes is again supported by Constructivism proponents, who understand that social interaction is vital for active knowledge building. This assumption is also defended by some KM theories, claiming that knowledge is created through cycles of transformation between two types of knowledge: tacit and explicit knowledge. Up to now, research on KM has paid much attention to the formalization and exchange of explicit knowledge, in the form of documents or other physical artifacts, often annotated with metadata, and classified by taxonomies or ontologies. Investigations surrounding tacit knowledge have been so far scarce, perhaps by the complexity of the tasks of capturing and integrating such kind of knowledge, defined as knowledge about personal experience and values, usually confined on people’s mind. Taking a flexible approach on supporting this kind of knowledge conversion, KARe relies on the potential of social interaction underlying organizational practices to support knowledge creation and sharing. The global objective of this work is to support knowledge creation and sharing within an organization, according to its own natural processes and social behaviors. In other words, this work is based on the assumption that KM is better supported if knowledge is looked at from a constructivist perspective. To sum up, this thesis aims at: 1) Providing an agent-oriented approach to guide the creation and evolvement of KM initiatives, by analyzing the organizational potentials, behaviors and processes concerning knowledge sharing; 2) Developing the KARe recommender system, based on a semantically enriched Information Retrieval technique for recommending knowledge artifacts, supporting users to ask and answer to each others’ questions. These objectives are achieved as follows: - Defining the principles that characterize a Constructivist KM supporting environment and understanding how they may be used to support the creation of more effective KM solutions; - Providing an agent-oriented approach to develop KM systems. This approach is based on the integration of two different agent-oriented software engineering works, profiting from their strengths in providing a comprehensive methodology that targets both analysis and design activities; - Proposing and designing a socially aware agent-oriented recommender system both to exemplify the application of the proposed approach and to explore its potential on supporting knowledge creation and sharing. - Implementing an Information Retrieval algorithm to support the previously mentioned system in generating recommendations. Besides describing the algorithm, this thesis brings experimental results to prove its effectiveness

Critical Thinking Skills Profile of High School Students In Learning Science-Physics

This study aims to describe Critical Thinking Skills high school students in the city of Makassar. To achieve this goal, the researchers conducted an analysis of student test results of 200 people scattered in six schools in the city of Makassar. The results of the quantitative descriptive analysis of the data found that the average value of students doing the interpretation, analysis, and inference in a row by 1.53, 1.15, and 1.52. This value is still very low when compared with the maximum value that may be obtained by students, that is equal to 10.00. This shows that the critical thinking skills of high school students are still very low. One fact Competency Standards science subjects-Physics is demonstrating the ability to think logically, critically, and creatively with the guidance of teachers and demonstrate the ability to solve simple problems in daily life. In fact, according to Michael Scriven stated that the main task of education is to train students and or students to think critically because of the demands of work in the global economy, the survival of a democratic and personal decisions and decisions in an increasingly complex society needs people who can think well and make judgments good. Therefore, the need for teachers in the learning device scenario such as: driving question or problem, authentic Investigation: Science Processes

Focus Structures in Mùwe Ké: Grammatical Category or Much Ado About Nothing?

This thesis investigates the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in Mùwe Ké, a Tibeto-Burman language of Mugu, Nepal with roughly five thousand speakers. The focus structures mainly involve the obligatory focus marking of actors with the otherwise-optional ergative marker -gane and a preferred immediately preverbal focus position for focussed terms, both of which are shown to correlate with the notion of focus. This is a common finding for Tibeto-Burman languages since the expression of information structure in the language family has previously been associated with differential case marking, topic and focus marking, word order and the positioning of salient terms. However, in recent years, the very notion of focus as a stable cross-linguistic category has been debated. The research and analyses presented are based on a corpus of field data collected over three years in Nepal and a grammatical sketch of M we K  is provided first. Following a discussion on the theoretical approaches and notions that are adopted, a description of focus structures in the language is offered and the manifestations of focus are listed. Subsequently, focus as a category is questioned and an alternative approach is outlined using Cognitive Grammar as the theoretical framework to show the underlying processes that are associated with information update. The reanalysis fails to find evidence for a category of focus in the language due to the lack of any clearly identifiable content or a one-to-one correlation between differential ergative marking, the preverbal position and focus. It does, however, show varying interpretative strategies, or focal effects, that may be associated with information structure and which overlap with the notion of focus

A Grammar of Eastern Geshiza : A Culturally Anchored Description

This dissertation describes Eastern Geshiza, a previously insufficiently known Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) Horpa language spoken primarily in eastern Geshiza Valley of Danba County in the People’s Republic of China. The approximately 5000 speakers of Eastern Geshiza are categorised as ethnic Tibetans, practice agriculture, and follow the religious traditions of Bön and Tibetan Buddhism. Adopting a functional-typological framework and following an approach that emphasises linguistic ecology, the dissertation aims to anchor the grammatical description to the various contexts of the language. Eastern Geshiza is currently endangered. Almost all speakers of the language are bilingual: Eastern Geshiza functions as an in-group language while Sichuanese Mandarin, also acquired since childhood, is used for external communication as a regional lingua franca. Knowledge of Tibetan lects and Written Tibetan, however, is low among the speakers. A substantial influx of new lexical loans from Chinese and a gradual language shift towards Chinese among the young constitute issues that will greatly affect both the future shape and vitality of the language. Eastern Geshiza exhibits complex phonology. It possesses an extensive phoneme inventory that contains 8 fully phonemic vowels and 37 fully phonemic consonant phonemes. The language abounds in complex consonant clusters of up to three members. Eastern Geshiza is morphologically complex. The complexity is particularly prominent in verb morphology that is characterised by an argument indexation system based on accessibility hierarchy and a set of multi-functional verbal prefixes that encode orientation, aspect, and mood. Like many of the other regional languages, Eastern Geshiza is also rich in evidential categories and includes the grammatical category of engagement. Typological peculiarities of the language make it an important source of data for typological research. The dissertation is based on first-hand field data collected on five major field trips during 2015-18 with the total duration of approximately eight months. The fieldwork was primarily carried out in Balang Village and the surrounding area, the easternmost Geshiza communities closest to Danba County Town. As its theoretical foundations, the description builds on Basic Linguistic Theory and linguistic typology. I hope that this description of the language’s most prominent features will be helpful in advancing our knowledge of Horpa studies and Trans-Himalayan linguistics together with providing new material for linguistic typology and other branches of linguistics.Tämä väitöskirja kuvaa itäisen geshizan kielen. Geshiza on aiemmin riittämättömästi tunnettu sinotiibetiläinen (transhimalajalainen) horpakieli, jota puhutaan pääasiallisesti Geshizan laakson itäosissa Danban läänissä Kiinan kansantasavallassa. Itäisen geshizan noin 5000 puhujaa luokitellaan etnisesti tiibetiläisiksi. He harjoittavat maanviljelystä ja seuraavat uskontoinaan sekä böniä että tiibetinbuddhalaisuutta. Lähestymistavaltaan tämä funktionaalis-typologiseen viitekehykseen nojaava deskriptiivinen kielioppi painottaa kieliekologiaa ja pyrkii ankkuroimaan geshizan kielen sen moninaisiin konteksteihin. Itäinen geshiza on muuttunut uhanalaiseksi. Lähes kaikki itäisen geshizan puhujat ovat kaksikielisiä: itäinen geshiza toimii ryhmän sisäisenä kielenä, kun taas sichuanin mandariinia, jonka geshizat myös oppivat lapsuudessaan, käytetään ryhmän ulkoiseen kommunikaatioon lingua francana. Tiibetin kielimuotoja tai kirjoitettua tiibetiä ei kuitenkaan tunneta laajalti geshizojen keskuudessa. Suuri määrä uusia lainasanoja kiinasta ja asteittainen kielenvaihto kohti kiinaa nuorten geshizojen parissa ovat tällä hetkellä kaksi keskeistä asiaa, jotka vaikuttavat geshizan kielen tulevaan muotoon sekä sen elinvoimaisuuteen jatkossa. Itäisen geshizan kielessä on kompleksinen fonologia. Kielessä on laaja foneemi-inventaario, joka sisältää 8 täysin foneemista vokaalia sekä 37 täysin foneemista konsonanttifoneemia. Konsonantit muodostavat laajan kirjon konsonanttiyhtymiä, joissa voi olla jopa kolme jäsentä. Lisäksi itäinen geshiza on morfologisesti kompleksinen kieli. Tämä kompleksisuus tulee vahvasti esille verbimorfologiassa, jossa keskeistä osaa näyttelee saavutettavuushierarkiaan (accessibility hierarchy) perustuva argumentti-indeksaatio ja monikäyttöiset verbiprefiksit, jotka merkitsevät orientaatiota, aspektia, sekä modusta. Kuten monet muut alueen kielet, itäinen geshiza sisältää runsaasti evidentiaalisuuden kategorioita ja kielessä on tämän lisäksi myös hiljattain tunnistettu engagement-kategoria. Kielen typologiset ominaispiirteet tekevät siitä tärkeän lähteen typologiselle tutkimukselle. Tämä väitöskirja perustuu ensikäden kenttätutkimusaineistoon, jonka keräsin viiden keskeisen aineistonkeruumatkan aikana vuosina 2015-2018. Aineistonkeruumatkojen yhteenlaskettu kokonaiskesto oli noin kahdeksan kuukautta. Suoritin kenttätutkimuksen pääasiallisesti Balangin kylässä sekä sitä ympäröivällä alueella, jotka muodostavat itäisimmät geshizankieliset yhteisöt Danban läänikaupungin läheisyydessä. Teoreettisena pohjana kieliopille toimii Basic Linguistic Theory ja kielitypologia. Toivon, että laatimani kielioppi geshizan keskeisimmistä ominaisuuksista auttaa edistämään horpakielten ja sinotiibetiläisten (transhimalajalaisten) kielten tutkimusta sekä tarjoaa lisäksi uutta materiaalia kielitypologialle ja muille kielitieteen haaroille

North East Indian Linguistics 8 (NEIL 8)

This is the eighth volume of North East Indian Linguistics, a series of volumes for publishing current research on the languages of North East India, the first volume of which was published in 2008. The papers in this volume were presented at the 9th conference of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), held at Tezpur University in February 2016. The papers for this anniversary volume continue the NEILS tradition of research by both local and international scholars on a wide range of languages and topics. This eighth volume includes papers on small community languages and large regional languages from across North East India, and present detailed phonological, semantic and morphosyntactic studies of structures that are characteristic of particular languages or language groups alongside sociolinguistic studies that explore language attitudes in contexts of language shift