Quantification and the English comparative

From the introduction: The work which led to this paper was provoked by the publication of two sharply divergent approaches to the English comparative construction, one by Robert B. Lees, the other by Carlota S. Smith. Since each of these approaches represents the work of a competent linguist who heartily rejects the possibility that there might ultimately be more than one correct analysis of the English comparative, it appeared to be of some interest to review and evaluate these two rival views. It soon became apparent, however, that neither of these views was entirely adequate. This paper accordingly represents an attempt to point out certain shortcomings in each of these two analyses and to propose and motivate a third alternative

Worksheets for a first course in transformational syntax

From the introduction, The worksheets collected here were written in answer to a need for short exercises that could be easily worked in class and that would illustrate and allow for the application of material presented to the Area Linguistics course of the Summer Institute of Linguistics held at the University of North Dakota during the summer of 1965. With the exception of the introductory worksheets, which were designed to provide a bridge for he approach of transformational syntax by students who had some acquaintance with the Tagmemic view of grammar, these materials were intended as pedagogical aids for the presentation of Transformational Syntax as revised by Chomsky in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965

Nominal juxtaposition in Australian languages: An LFG analysis

It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function within the clause. We argue that such constructions should be treated syntactically as set-valued grammatical functions in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Sets as values for functions are well-established in LFG and are used in the representation of adjuncts, and also in the representation of coordination. In many Australian languages, coordination is expressed asyndetically, that is, by nominal juxtaposition with no overt coordinator at all. We argue that the syntactic similarity of all juxtaposed constructions (ranging from coordination through a number of more appositional relations) motivates an analysis in which they are treated similarly in the syntax, but suitably distinguished in the semantics. We show how this can be achieved within LFG, providing a unified treatment of the syntax of juxtaposition in Australian languages and showing how the interface to the semantics can be quite straightforwardly defined in the modular LFG approach. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Detecting East Asian Prejudice on Social Media

The outbreak of COVID-19 has transformed societies across the world as governments tackle the health, economic and social costs of the pandemic. It has also raised concerns about the spread of hateful language and prejudice online, especially hostility directed against East Asia. In this paper we report on the creation of a classifier that detects and categorizes social media posts from Twitter into four classes: Hostility against East Asia, Criticism of East Asia, Meta-discussions of East Asian prejudice and a neutral class. The classifier achieves an F1 score of 0.83 across all four classes. We provide our final model (coded in Python), as well as a new 20,000 tweet training dataset used to make the classifier, two analyses of hashtags associated with East Asian prejudice and the annotation codebook. The classifier can be implemented by other researchers, assisting with both online content moderation processes and further research into the dynamics, prevalence and impact of East Asian prejudice online during this global pandemic.Comment: 12 page