11,626 research outputs found
Expletives as features
Expletives have always been a central topic of theoretical debate and subject to different analyses within the different stages of the Principles and Parameter theory (see Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995; Lasnik 1992, 1995; Frampton and Gutman 1997; among others). However, most analyses center on the question how to explain the behavior of expletives in A-chains (such as there in English or Þad in Icelandic). No account relates wh-expletives (as one finds them in so-called partial wh-movement constructions in languages such as Hungarian, Romani, and German) to expletives in Achains. In this paper, I argue that the framework of the Minimalist Program opens up the possibility of accounting for expletive-associate relations in A-/A'-chains in a unified manner. The main idea of the unitary analysis is that an expletive is an overtly realized feature bundle that is (sub)extracted from its associate DP. There in an expletive-associate chain is a moved D-feature which orginates inside the associate DP. Similarily, in A'-chains, the whexpletive originates as a focus-/wh-feature in the wh-phrase with which it is associated. This analysis provides evidence for the feature-checking theory in Chomsky (1995). The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 contains the discussion of expletive there. In section 3 I suggest an analysis for whexpletives, and I also explore whether this analysis can be extended to relations between X°-categories such as auxiliary and participle complexes
Predicting Native Language from Gaze
A fundamental question in language learning concerns the role of a speaker's
first language in second language acquisition. We present a novel methodology
for studying this question: analysis of eye-movement patterns in second
language reading of free-form text. Using this methodology, we demonstrate for
the first time that the native language of English learners can be predicted
from their gaze fixations when reading English. We provide analysis of
classifier uncertainty and learned features, which indicates that differences
in English reading are likely to be rooted in linguistic divergences across
native languages. The presented framework complements production studies and
offers new ground for advancing research on multilingualism.Comment: ACL 201
Instructional strategies and tactics for the design of introductory computer programming courses in high school
This article offers an examination of instructional strategies and tactics for the design of introductory computer programming courses in high school. We distinguish the Expert, Spiral and Reading approach as groups of instructional strategies that mainly differ in their general design plan to control students' processing load. In order, they emphasize topdown program design, incremental learning, and program modification and amplification. In contrast, tactics are specific design plans that prescribe methods to reach desired learning outcomes under given circumstances. Based on ACT* (Anderson, 1983) and relevant research, we distinguish between declarative and procedural instruction and present six tactics which can be used both to design courses and to evaluate strategies. Three tactics for declarative instruction involve concrete computer models, programming plans and design diagrams; three tactics for procedural instruction involve worked-out examples, practice of basic cognitive skills and task variation. In our evaluation of groups of instructional strategies, the Reading approach has been found to be superior to the Expert and Spiral approaches
Entity Recognition at First Sight: Improving NER with Eye Movement Information
Previous research shows that eye-tracking data contains information about the
lexical and syntactic properties of text, which can be used to improve natural
language processing models. In this work, we leverage eye movement features
from three corpora with recorded gaze information to augment a state-of-the-art
neural model for named entity recognition (NER) with gaze embeddings. These
corpora were manually annotated with named entity labels. Moreover, we show how
gaze features, generalized on word type level, eliminate the need for recorded
eye-tracking data at test time. The gaze-augmented models for NER using
token-level and type-level features outperform the baselines. We present the
benefits of eye-tracking features by evaluating the NER models on both
individual datasets as well as in cross-domain settings.Comment: Accepted at NAACL-HLT 201
Particle verbs and the conditions of projection
In this paper I discuss the properties of particle verbs in light of a proposal about syntactic projection. In section 2 I suggest that projection involves functional structure in two important ways: (i) only functional phrases can be complements, and (ii) lexical heads that take complements and project must be inflected. In section 3, I show that the structure of particle verbs is not uniform with respect to (i) and (ii). On the one hand, a particle always combines with an inflected verb; in this respect, particle verbs look like verb-complement constructions. On the other hand, the particle is not a functional phrase and therefore is not a proper complement, which makes the combination of the particle and the verb look more like a morphologically complex verb. I argue that syntactic rules can in fact interpret the node dominating the particle and the verb as a projection and as a complex head. In section 4, I show that many of the characteristic properties of particle verbs in the Germanic languages follow from the fact that they are structural hybrids
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