Phasal Eliminativism, Anti-Lexicalism, and the Status of the Unarticulated

This paper explores the prospect that grammatical expressions are propositionally whole and psychologically plausible, leading to the explanatory burden being placed on syntax rather than pragmatic processes, with the latter crucially bearing the feature of optionality. When supposedly unarticulated constituents are added, expressions which are propositionally distinct, and not simply more specific, arise. The ad hoc nature of a number of pragmatic processes carry with them the additional problem of effectively acting as barriers to implementing language in the brain. The advantages of an anti-lexicalist biolinguistic methodology are discussed, and a bi-phasal model of linguistic interpretation is proposed, Phasal Eliminativism, carved by syntactic phases and (optionally) enriched by a restricted number of pragmatic processes. In addition, it is shown that the syntactic operation of labeling (departing from standard Merge-centric evolutionary hypotheses) is responsible for a range of semantic and pragmatic phenomena, rendering core aspects of syntax and lexical pragmatics commensurable

Inquiries into words, constraints and contexts : Festschrift in the honour of Kimmo Koskenniemi on his 60th birthday

Peer reviewe

ADAPTING A VOCABULARY NOTEBOOK STRATEGY TO THE NEEDS OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Vocabulary, both the number of words and the knowledge about each word, are important in the comprehension of academic text in post-secondary education, and adult English language learners often have vocabularies of low quantity (number of words) and quality (knowledge about words). Research points to the effectiveness of teaching independent vocabulary learning strategies as a path to independent vocabulary learning for ELLs, but the specifics of what to teach and how to teach it are less clear. The present study investigated an independent vocabulary learning strategy, the vocabulary notebook, with ELLs studying in a community college academic English as a second language program. The purpose of the study was to determine how to most effectively implement a vocabulary notebook intervention, and what modifications researcher, teacher, and students would need to make to the strategy to make it actually useful and feasible. A mixed methods, formative experiment was conducted. Five focal students and nine other participants used the vocabulary notebook, and then provided feedback, via surveys, interviews, focus groups, and a post-semester reflection. In addition, classroom observation data were collected, and the teacher was interviewed. Interviews were transcribed and surveys, focus groups, and classroom observations were summarized. All transcripts and summaries were then coded. Finally, a Vocabulary Levels Test was given as a pre- and post-test, and quantitatively analyzed. Results suggest that, although very interested in learning vocabulary, students had very few comprehensive and coherent strategies in place. The vocabulary notebook iv became a tool for talking about what matters in learning about words and word meanings, so as to effect a change in student strategy use in collecting information about words so as to be able to use new words correctly. In addition, learners expressed a strong need to develop their social language, and initially indicated no real understanding of the disconnect between social and academic language. Finally, no statistically significant difference was found between the pre- and post-Vocabulary Levels Test. Other findings and implications for practice are also discussed

Term-driven E-Commerce

Die Arbeit nimmt sich der textuellen Dimension des E-Commerce an. Grundlegende Hypothese ist die textuelle Gebundenheit von Information und Transaktion im Bereich des elektronischen Handels. Überall dort, wo Produkte und Dienstleistungen angeboten, nachgefragt, wahrgenommen und bewertet werden, kommen natürlichsprachige Ausdrücke zum Einsatz. Daraus resultiert ist zum einen, wie bedeutsam es ist, die Varianz textueller Beschreibungen im E-Commerce zu erfassen, zum anderen können die umfangreichen textuellen Ressourcen, die bei E-Commerce-Interaktionen anfallen, im Hinblick auf ein besseres Verständnis natürlicher Sprache herangezogen werden

Proceedings of the Morpho Challenge 2010 Workshop

In natural language processing many practical tasks, such as speech recognition, information retrieval and machine translation depend on a large vocabulary and statistical language models. For morphologically rich languages, such as Finnish and Turkish, the construction of a vocabulary and language models that have a sufficient coverage is particularly difficult, because of the huge amount of different word forms. In Morpho Challenge 2010 unsupervised and semi-supervised algorithms are suggested to provide morpheme analyses for words in different languages and evaluated in various practical applications. As a research theme, unsupervised morphological analysis has received wide attention in conferences and scientific journals focused on computational linguistic and its applications. This is the proceedings of the Morpho Challenge 2010 Workshop that contains one introduction article with a description of the tasks, evaluation and results and six articles describing the participating unsupervised and supervised learning algorithms. The Morpho Challenge 2010 Workshop was held at Espoo, Finland in 2-3 September, 2010.reviewe

Number Specification in L2 processing of Norwegian adult L2 English speakers: Time-frequency representation (TFR) analysis

This thesis investigates the processing of non-local agreement violations and whether they are affected by double marking from a determiner-number specification in Norwegian L2 speakers of English. We tested non-local subject-verb agreement, a mismatch between Norwegian and English, and the double marking on the number of the noun that is a common feature of the two languages by using online Grammaticality Judgement test (GJT) during EEG (electroencephalogram) recording. There were four conditions to test the participants’ sensitivity towards determiner number specification: (1) Grammatical unspecified, (2) ungrammatical unspecified, (3) grammatical specified, (4) ungrammatical specified. The EEG data were analyzed with TFRs (time-frequency references) to observe the changes in different frequency bands of neural oscillations. Behavioural and neural responses to the sentences were compared to understand the neural mechanisms regarding the interaction between non-local agreement violations and determiner-number specification. The results showed no evidence for an interaction between specificity and grammaticality. The specificity did not seem to affect participants’ judgment of the grammaticality. That is, we did not see any change in the theta band (4-8 Hz); however, a relative decrease in the activation for the ungrammatical items vs grammatical items in the alpha band (8-12 Hz) and a relative decrease in the activation for the number-specified items vs number-unspecified items in alpha bands (8-12 Hz) was observed. The alpha band reactivity observed during language comprehension does not necessarily reflect the linguistic analyses but the attention. Alpha band decrease is explained as the engagement of the additional attentional resources to explain a faulty representation. The results of the behavioural data showed that the participants were better when judging the grammatical sentences than the ungrammatical sentences, and the unspecified grammatical sentences were judged more accurately than the other three conditions. The findings of the current study suggest that the agreement violation in GJT led the participants to have increased attentional process demands as they needed to judge the mismatching property between their L1 Norwegian and L2 English

Discourse structure and language technology

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.An increasing number of researchers and practitioners in Natural Language Engineering face the prospect of having to work with entire texts, rather than individual sentences. While it is clear that text must have useful structure, its nature may be less clear, making it more difficult to exploit in applications. This survey of work on discourse structure thus provides a primer on the bases of which discourse is structured along with some of their formal properties. It then lays out the current state-of-the-art with respect to algorithms for recognizing these different structures, and how these algorithms are currently being used in Language Technology applications. After identifying resources that should prove useful in improving algorithm performance across a range of languages, we conclude by speculating on future discourse structure-enabled technology.Peer Reviewe

The relevance of referring expressions: the case of diary drop in English

This thesis offers a pragmatic analysis of subjectless sentences in non-null subject languages, focusing on English ‘diary drop’ (as in ‘Saw a good film yesterday’). In chapter 1, I survey the data and discuss existing syntactic analyses (Haegeman & Ihsane 1999, 2001). While these generally acknowledge the importance of pragmatic factors in an overall account, no detailed investigation of their contribution has been proposed. In chapter 2, I consider subjectless sentences in child language, and suggest that relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95) can shed light on why such utterances occur. In chapter 3, I revisit the adult data, and having established that null subjects function as referring expressions, I consider two pragmatically-oriented approaches to the analysis of referring expressions: Accessibility Theory (Ariel, 1990) and the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski, 1993). Both adopt the relevance-theoretic framework, but claim that relevance alone is insufficient to account for the data. In chapters 4 and 5, I develop a relevance-based account of referring expressions, and argue that we can do without the machinery of Accessibility Theory and the Givenness Hierarchy on two assumptions: first, that referring expressions encode procedural as well as conceptual meaning (Blakemore 1987, 2002), and second, that this procedural meaning does not identify the intended referent by appeal to considerations of Accessibility or Givenness. An important implication of my account is that the choice of referring expression not only affects reference resolution but can also contribute to what is implicitly communicated by an utterance. I provide detailed evidence for this. In chapter 6, I return to the original null subject data and show that my relevance-based approach sheds new light on how these utterances function in a non-null subject language. In Chapter 7, I draw general conclusions and revisit the conceptual-procedural distinction in light of the analyses proposed

The Role of Formulaic Language in the Creation of Grammar

Research in the field of Formulaic Language has shown it to be a very diverse phenomenon in both the form it takes and the functions it performs (e.g., Erma and Warren, 2000; Wray, 2002). The proposal made by Sinclair (1991) states that language as a system is organized according to two principles, the idiom principle\u27, which includes the use of all multi-word prefabricated sequences, and \u27the open choice principle,\u27 which covers word-for-word operations. Formulaic language is the embodiment of the idiom principle and constitutes the core of linguistic structure. Therefore, it must be subjected to scientific scrutiny from the variety of perspectives \u2013 typological, psycholinguistic, socio-pragmatic, and language acquisition. This dissertation reports on the percentage of formulaic sequences - prefabs - in spoken and written Russian; the distribution of prefab types across two spoken and four written genres, and their interaction with non-prefabricated language and the impact that prefabs have on the structure of a particular language type. Russian is the language typologically and structurally different from English. The main structural difference between English and Russian is that the Russian language has a free word order, wide inflectional system to code grammatical relations, and a satellite verb system. I hypothesize that these structural differences influence the quantity and the nature of formulaic sequences used in the language, the nature of alternation of prefabricated and non-prefabricated strings, and the preference of the speakers for one rather than the other aforementioned principles. The method applied in the analysis of Russian prefabs is developed by Erman and Warren (2000) and originally was applied to the analysis of the English texts. This dissertation seeks to address a methodological issue of applying this method to typologically different languages. It has been argued (Garcia and Florimon van Putte, 1989) that the fixedness of the English word order contributes to the co-occurrence of elements and the formation of formulaic sequences in English. In this case, formulaic language becomes a language-specific tendency pertaining to English, and not a universal mechanism for language storage, processing, production and use. The findings support the usage-based approaches driven by forces resulting from the frequency of use, discourse and communicative functions, grounded in the fine balance between the economy principle and the power of language creativity. The results of the study are used to draw implications for language processing and language modeling. As we continue to perfect the methods of identification, classification and analysis of formulaic sequences, we will be in a better position to describe not only the amount but the nature of formulaic language, its interaction with non-formulas, and the impact this alternation has on the linguistic structure as a whole. The current study investigates the nature of formulaic language in a free word order language. We seek to apply the method of identification, classification and analysis of prefabs, its interaction with each other and with non-formulaic language, as well as the estimation of choices made in producing spoken and written language. My dissertation results suggest that a free word order language uses at least as many prefabs as a fixed word order language. On average, in a free word order language like Russian 65% of spoken and 58% of written language is composed of multiword formulaic sequences. The results strengthen the hypothesis that the idiom principle is a mechanism of global linguistic organization and processing. The proportion and distribution or prefabs is less affected by language type than by spoken written medium distinction and genre variation. In addition, the results show that prefabs are frozen structures not amicable to standard syntactic transformations even in a free word order language. The results support the dual system of language processing, i.e., holistic and analytic, present in a free word order language