Lexical typology : a programmatic sketch

The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for Lexical Typology as a new kind of linguistic typology.1 The goal of Lexical Typology is to investigate crosslinguistically significant patterns of interaction between lexicon and grammar

A syntactic-semantic analysis of English (non)-dativizable constructions in the production of a set of 2L1 English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual twins

This paper analyzes the syntactico-semantic factors which trigger Dative shift in English dativizable verbs, i.e. those verbs that allow alternation between double object and prepositional complement constructions. It also focuses on non-dativizable verbs that restrict their subcategorization framework to either double object or prepositional complement constructions. This syntactico-semantic relation between dativizable and nondativizable structures is addressed in acquisition by examining the incidence for the two verb types in a set of English/Spanish 2L1 bilingual twins. Our results show that the syntactic and semantic features that dativizable and non-dativizables present go hand in hand with the age of first occurrence and the language development of the participants. Hence, dativizable to-dative double object constructions (DOC) are the utterances produced the earliest at the age of 2, as opposed to dativizable to/for-datives and non-dativizable constructions, which begin to emerge at around the age of 3. Finally, our results also suggest that the high adult input frequency explains the twins' early production of dativizable structures and that, in the same way, the children's low exposure to non-dativizable utterances correlates with the later occurrence in the twins' spontaneous production.peer-reviewe

Crosslinguistic influence between Chinese and English in object realization

La omisión de objetos es una propiedad definida del chino mientras que en inglés y en español las normas son más estrictas en este aspecto. Este trabajo, basado en una investigación con participantes bilingües chino-inglés, español-inglés, y monolingües inglés, analiza la omisión de objetos en inglés. El objetivo es evaluar hasta qué punto el mecanismo del objeto nulo en chino influye en el desarrollo del inglés de niños bilingües chino-inglés. En este estudio comparo los objetos nulos ilícitos producidos por los participantes desde los puntos de vista cuantitativo y cualitativo. Los resultados demuestran que existe una diferencia apreciable entre el rendimiento de los participantes bilingües chino-inglés y los de otros grupos con respecto al asunto estudiado, lo cual respalda la conclusión: aunque el mecanismo de objeto nulo es una propiedad de las gramáticas en desarrollo, en el caso del desarrollo del inglés de niños bilingües chino-inglés, resulta en transferencia negativa.Filología InglesaMáster en Estudios Ingleses Avanzados: Lenguas y Culturas en Contact

Code-Mixing and Mixed Verbs in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children: Input and Innovation

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Bilingual Knowledge Extraction Using Chunk Alignment

In this paper, we propose a new method for effectively acquiring bilingual knowledge by exploiting the dependency relations among the aligned chunks and words. We use a monolingual dependency parser to automatically obtain dependency parses of target language using chunk and word alignment. For reducing the computational complexity of structural alignment, we use a bilingual dictionary and adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy. By sharing the dependency relations of a given source sentence, we automatically obtain a dependency parse of a target sentence that is structurally consistent with the source sentence. Moreover, we extract bilingual knowledge bases from translation correspondences of singletons to surface verb subcategorization patterns by exploiting the bilingual dependency relations. To acquire reliable ones, we take a stepwise filtering method based on statistical test

Overt Subject Distribution in early Italian Children

The distribution of the subjects in early Italian productions is used to retrieve information about the grammatical knowledge of children. We performed a cross-sectional study of 59 children’s productions (age 22/35 months) and a longitudinal study of 4 children’s utterances (age 18/39 months). The subject use is analysed in * copula versus lexical verbs. * unaccusative versus unergative/transitive. The overt subjects were analized for: * the nominal/pronominal status. * the pre/ post verbal position. We found that the subject use is greater with copula than main verbs and with unaccusative than unergative verbs and that SV order is preferred with “to be”, “transitive” and “unergative” verbs, while VS order with “unaccusative” verbs. These findings suggest that children distinguish between copula and lexical verbs and between “unergative” and “unaccusative” verbs, showing that the subject of the unaccusative verbs is generated in internal argument positio

XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework

Task-oriented dialog systems are becoming pervasive, and many companies heavily rely on them to complement human agents for customer service in call centers. With globalization, the need for providing cross-lingual customer support becomes more urgent than ever. However, cross-lingual support poses great challenges---it requires a large amount of additional annotated data from native speakers. In order to bypass the expensive human annotation and achieve the first step towards the ultimate goal of building a universal dialog system, we set out to build a cross-lingual state tracking framework. Specifically, we assume that there exists a source language with dialog belief tracking annotations while the target languages have no annotated dialog data of any form. Then, we pre-train a state tracker for the source language as a teacher, which is able to exploit easy-to-access parallel data. We then distill and transfer its own knowledge to the student state tracker in target languages. We specifically discuss two types of common parallel resources: bilingual corpus and bilingual dictionary, and design different transfer learning strategies accordingly. Experimentally, we successfully use English state tracker as the teacher to transfer its knowledge to both Italian and German trackers and achieve promising results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to EMNLP 2018 conferenc