LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)

Sentence repetition in Farsi-English bilingual children

The current study aimed to create an assessment that can be used in the future to measure the language abilities of Farsi-speaking children in a clinical setting. A Farsi sentence-repetition task was created that included structures organised into three levels of complexity from least to most complex. Twenty typically developing Farsi-English bilingual children between the ages of 6;3–11;6 were recruited from Farsi schools in Toronto, Canada. Signi cant di erences on the participants’ performance among the three levels were found with the lowest performance in the most complex sentences and the highest performance in the least complex ones. Speci c structures appeared to be more challenging than others within each level of complexity. The children’s decreasing performance with increasing complexity and the evidence that speci c structures are challenging within each level make the Farsi sentence repetition task a promising tool for assessing the language skills of Farsi-English speaking children

Predication and equation

English is one language where equative sentences and non-equative sentences have a similar surface syntax (but see Heggie 1988 and Moro 1997 for a discussion of more subtle differences). In this paper we address the fact that many other languages appear to use radically different morphological means which seem to map to intuitive differences in the type of predication expressed. We take one such language, Scottish Gaelic, and show that the real difference is not between equative and non-equative sentences, but is rather dependent on whether the predicational head in the structure proposed above is eventive or not. We show that the aparently odd syntax of “equatives” in this language derives from the fact that they are constructed via a non-eventive Pred head. Since Pred heads cannot combine with non-predicative categories, such as saturated DPs, “equatives” are built up indirectly from a simple predicational structure with a semantically bleached predicate. This approach not only allows us to maintain a strict one-to-one syntax/semantics mapping for predicational syntax, but also for the syntax of DPs. The argument we develop here, then, suggests that the interface between the syntactic and semantic components is maximally economical— one could say perfect

Joint Morphological and Syntactic Disambiguation

In morphologically rich languages, should morphological and syntactic disambiguation be treated sequentially or as a single problem? We describe several efficient, probabilistically interpretable ways to apply joint inference to morphological and syntactic disambiguation using lattice parsing. Joint inference is shown to compare favorably to pipeline parsing methods across a variety of component models. State-of-the-art performance on Hebrew Treebank parsing is demonstrated using the new method. The benefits of joint inference are modest with the current component models, but appear to increase as components themselves improve

Do Marked Topics Enhance Memory?

We examined the effects of markedness, the deviation from the canonical Subject-Verb-Object structure in English, on the memory of listeners for the topic of the sentence. We used three marked topic constructions: Left-Dislocation, Object-Fronting, and Subject-Marking. Sentences with these structures were inserted as the 6th item in lists of 12 canonical sentences. In all sentences the topic was the name of a man. We measured recall of the critical name. The results revealed that topics of Left-Dislocated sentences were recalled more than topics of the other constructions, with topics of Object-Fronting sentences recalled the least. We briefly discuss how sentence processing procedures might give rise to these effects

The syntactic structure of predicatives : clues from the omission of the copula in child english

This paper explores the syntax of main clause predicatives from the perspective of trying to account for an asymmetry in copular constructions in certain languages. One of the languages in which we find such an asymmetry is child English (around age 2). Specifically, new results show that children acquiring English tend to use an overt (and inflected) copula in individual-level predicatives, but they tend to omit the copula in stage-level predicatives. The analysis adopted to account for this pattern draws on evidence from adult English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese that stage-level predicates are Aspectual (they contain AspP) while individual-level predicates are not (they involve only a lexical Small Clause predicate). Children's omission of the copula in structures with AspP is linked to the fact that at this stage of development, children fail to require finiteness in main clauses. In particular, Asp0 is temporally anchored in child English, thereby obviating the need for a finite (temporally anchored) Infl, i.e. an inflected copula

External versus internal possessor structures and inalienability in Russian

This study deals with the choice between two external possessor structures in Russian: the possessive dative and the U + genitive PP. Is shows that this choice is primarily related to the thematic role of the possessor adjunct, which can vary with the same verb: the possessive dative presents it as a goal or as an experiencer, while the U-construction views it as a source or a location. Two general conclusions can be drawn from this study: - Russian views the possessive relation through its relationship with space. - Russian external possessor structures reflect two different delimitations of inalienable possession, one restricted to animate referents for the dative and one extended to a wide range of possessive relations including inanimate referents for the U-construction