Error analysis of tense and aspect in the written English of Turkish students

Ankara : The Institute of Economics and Social Sciences of Bilkent Univ., 1993.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1993.Includes bibliographical refences.This study sought to identify the most common tense and aspect errors in the written English of native Turkish-speaking, first-year undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language. The study was based on error analysis to form a basis for teachers, syllabus designers, textbook writers, and researchers. The data used in this study were elicited from the written discourse of one hundred volunteers from different faculties at Cumhuriyet University in Sivas. The written discourse was elicited by asking students to write a short autobiographical essay. Verb strings were identified and categorized as types of syntactic and semantic/pragmatic errors. Syntactic errors were identified applying the surface structure formula given below to the each verb string in the data: Tense + ( Modal) t (have + -en) + (be + -ing) + Main verb Semantic/pragmatic errors were identified by referring to the larger context and inferring the intended meaning. The results of the study showed that semantic/pragmatic errors were more common than syntactic errors in the written English of Turkish students. Out of 316 errors, 61.39% were semantic/pragmatic errors and 38.60% were syntactic errors. Semantic/pragmatic errors were categorized into two types: 1) verb tense and aspect errors and 2) lexical errors. The majority of semantic/pragmatic errors (71.64%) were verb tense and aspect errors, and 28.35% were lexical errors. Verb tense and aspect errors fell into four categories: use of present tense instead of past tense (30.93%); use of present progressive aspect instead of simple present (24.46%); use of present perfect aspect instead of simple past (23.02%); and use of past tense instead of present tense (21.58%). Syntactic errors were categorized into four types: misuse of the progressive aspect; lack of subject-verb agreement; omission of the verb; and misordered verb string· Among the syntactic error categories, misuse of the progressive aspect (33.60%) was the largest group. Lack of subject- verb agreement constituted 30.32% of the syntactic errors, omission of the verb constituted 27.04%, and misordered verb string constituted 9.01%. Misuse of the progressive aspect was categorized into two types of errors: omission of the auxiliary 'be' (63.41%), and omission of the '-ing' morpheme (36.58%). The omission of verbs was also categorized into two types: omission of the copula (78.78%) and omission of other verbs (21.21%). The findings of the study suggest that the meaning of tenses is more problematic than the form. Thus, the teaching of tense and aspect should be contextualized in meaningful discourse. Syntactic errors may be treated by focusing on oral and written drills.Şahin, Mehmet KadirM.S

The Open Method of Coordination and integration theory: are there lessons to be learned?

This paper seeks to contextualize the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and enrich our understanding of it by submitting constructivist insights to its policy assessment with a focus on the Employment Strategy (EES). The most developed and longest-standing OMC policy area, employment provides fertile ground for the assessment of a rapidly expanding theoretical perspective in IR and European integration applied to a growing policy process. Normative considerations as to the essence of the EU and its future trajectory were highly influential in the process of launching the OMC. The paper provides a framework of integration theory and highlights the particular contribution that the ‘thin’ variant of constructivism has made in understanding different aspects of EU policy and politics. In the next section, the OMC is discussed and its core characteristics identified. I claim that most of the OMC’s core elements are directly linked to constructivist assumptions about policy change. The paper identifies three of those, namely policy discourse, learning and participation in policy-making. I subject those to an empirical and theoretical assessment by use of the relevant literature. Concluding that the record shows such mechanisms to be hardly present in the Employment Policy OMC, I argue that an institutionalist reading of OMC provides a credible alternative by focusing on power resources, preferences and strategies available to core OMC actors, namely member states and the Commission. The paper concludes with a twofold argument: firstly, constructivist hopes on OMC are, at least in the current context, ill-founded. Secondly, while the OMC retains a number of advantages, practical policy suggestions that will enhance its appeal to policy-makers and the public alike are due before it becomes a credible policy option

Interpretation and Construction in Contract Law

Interpretation determines the meaning of a legal actor’s words and actions, construction their legal effect. Although the interpretation-construction distinction has a long pedigree, contract scholars today rarely attend to it, and the relationship between the two activities remains understudied. This Article provides an account of the interplay between interpretation and construction in contract law. It begins with the history of the concepts, focusing on the works of Lieber, Williston and Corbin. It adopts Corbin’s complimentary conception, according to which interpretation alone never suffices to determine speech act’s legal effects; a rule of construction is always required. The Article departs from Corbin, however, by arguing that contract law recognizes multiple types of meaning, and therefore calls for different types of interpretation. Legally relevant meanings include plain meaning, contextually determined use meaning, subjective and objective meanings, purpose, and the parties’ beliefs and intentions. Which type of meaning is legally relevant when depends on the applicable rule of construction. Consequently, although interpretation comes first in the process of determining parties’ legal obligations, the correct approach to legal interpretation is determined by rules of construction. The Article identifies two additional ways construction can be said to be prior to interpretation in contract law. First, judicial acts of construction can attach to contract boilerplate standard legal effects that depart from the words’ ordinary meaning, turning them into a legal formality. Acts of construction can thereby give boilerplate new semantic meanings, to which interpretation must attend. Second, when parties choose their words in light of their legal effects, rules of construction often figure into their communicative intentions. Rules of construction can therefore also be prior the pragmatic meaning of what parties say and do. Understanding this complex interplay between interpretation and construction is essential to understanding how the law determines the existence and content of contractual obligations. Although this Article does not argue for one or another rule of interpretation or construction, it lays the groundwork for analyses of which rules are appropriate when

Exploding explicatures

‘Pragmaticist’ positions posit a three-way division within utterance content between: (i) the standing meaning of the sentence, (ii) a somewhat pragmatically enhanced meaning which captures what the speaker explicitly conveys (following Sperber and Wilson 1986, I label this the ‘explicature’), and (iii) further indirectly conveyed propositions which the speaker merely implies. Here I re-examine the notion of an explicature, asking how it is defined and what work explicatures are supposed to do. I argue that explicatures get defined in three different ways and that these distinct definitions can and do pull apart. Thus the notion of an explicature turns out to be ill-defined

Poznawcze przesłanki semiozy zorientowanej na mit

This article addresses the cognitive premises of designation units denoting mythic concepts in a variety of texts and discourses. The article focuses on myth-oriented semiosis as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon reflected in the semantic transformations of lingual signs, resulting in the development of noematic senses relevant to the states of affairs in diverse worldviews or modelled alternative realities. This article provides an analysis of the basic cognitive models and procedures responsible for irrational cognition. The reconstructed cognitive models are then discussed in terms of their correspondence with the universal patterns of open system interaction and information exchange.Ten artykuł dotyczy poznawczych przesłanek jednostek desygnacyjnych oznaczających mityczne pojęcia w różnych tekstach i dyskursach. Artykuł koncentruje się na semiozie zorientowanej na mit jako zjawisku poznawczym i kulturowym odzwierciedlonym w semantycznych przekształceniach znaków językowych, co skutkuje rozwojem noematycznych zmysłów związanych ze stanami rzeczy w różnych światopoglądach lub modelowanych alternatywnych rzeczywistościach. Ten artykuł zawiera analizę podstawowych modeli i procedur poznawczych odpowiedzialnych za irracjonalne poznanie. Zrekonstruowane modele poznawcze są następnie omawiane pod kątem ich zgodności z uniwersalnymi wzorcami interakcji otwartego systemu i wymiany informacji

From Biological to Synthetic Neurorobotics Approaches to Understanding the Structure Essential to Consciousness (Part 3)

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by forecasting the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness

Towards authentic tasks and experiences: The example of parser-based CALL

Authenticity of language learning tasks, authenticity of learning experiences and the use of authentic language are important characteristics of communicative language teaching and learning. In this article, ways of achieving productive use of authentic language in a computer-assisted language learning environment are discussed. This discussion concentrates on a particular area of CALL-parser-based CALL. The use and adaptation of two existing parsers for two CALL tools that support text production by encouraging learners to concentrate on the linguistic structure – mainly the grammar – of a text they have just produced in a communicative task are outlined to provide concrete evidence for the contribution language processing techniques can make to the field of Computer-Assisted Language Learning.L'authenticité de la tâche langagière à effectuer, de l'expérience d'apprentissage et de l'utilisation de la langue sont des caractéristiques importantes dans l'apprentissage et l'enseignement des langues basés sur une approche communicative. Notre discussion porte sur une exploitation que nous croyons productive de cette langue authentique dans des environnements d'ELAO. Elle se concentre plus particulièrement sur un type d'ELAO, celui base sur le TAL. Nous décrivons l'utilisation et l'adaptation de deux parseurs dans deux systèmes d'ELAO

Grammaticality, Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well‐formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large‐scale experiments using crowd‐sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state‐of‐the‐art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic