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Advertising is a tool for someone to promote the goods or places of business that they offer. From the advertisements, consumers can find out what the seller sells. From the advertisements, consumers can be interested and buy the products. The Language used in advertising is very diverse because it is to attracts the attention of consumers. This advertisements research has found errors in the use of language with the descriptive qualitative method. The data were taken from banners and signboards around the Ngunut village road, Tulungagung district. From this study, it was found that there were still errors in using the language of making the advertising media in the advertising language. The errors are punctuation, word writing, and name phrase structure errors using Indonesian and English.

Phrase structure rules express the basic structural facts of the language in the form of “phrase markers”. This study discussed about the noun phrase in Minangkabau Language. The aim of this study is to find out the noun phrases of Minangkabau Language and how the noun phrases are used in the language. The used method is qualitative research design by interviewing the native speakers of Minangkabau by using the depth interview. the participants are the people who lived in Sukaramai Districts. They were born in Pariaman Districts and they are educated people who understand about the phrase structure.The researcher described the finding data more details. In this study, there are six noun phrase forms in Minangkabau Language and there is one unique form. The noun phrases are implicated in the daily activity of society. In fact, there was a unique noun phrase in Minang Language namely: Noun Phrase (NP) is N1 + sa + N2.

This is a reply to Caponigro 2019, which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed in Donati and Cecchetto 2011 and Cecchetto and Donati 2015 falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. Caponigro questions the reliability of the data supporting D&C’s hypothesis that ever-relatives introduced by a phrase (ever+NP relatives) should not be assimilated to free relatives. This reply reports the findings of four controlled experiments in English and Italian and discusses five properties that set free relatives apart from full relatives (occurrence with a complementizer, occurrence with a relative pronoun, infinitival use, absolute use, adverbial use). Crucially, ever+NP relatives do not pattern like free relatives in any of these five domains, either in Italian or in English. This clearly shows that ever-relatives are not a counterexample to D&C’s phrase structure theory. Another potential counterexample, Romanian free relatives, is also discussed. As for ever+NP relatives, in Italian they are shown to be garden-variety headed relatives, while in English they are headed relatives that involve a D-to-D movement that is responsible for the syntactic formation of the complex determiner what+ever.

The present study examined the effects of using automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology on oral complexity in a flipped English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course. A total of 160 undergraduates were enrolled in a 14-week quasi-experiment. The experimental group (EG) and the control group (CG) were taught with a flipped approach, but the EG students needed to undertake an additional pre-class task with ASR technology. In each unit, all students’ in-class task performance was recorded, based on which the metrics of oral complexity were coded and computed. A two-way between- and within-subjects repeated measures design was conducted to examine the effects of the group factor, the time factor and the group × time interaction effects. The results showed that the EG students performed statistically better than their counterparts in the CG on lexical complexity and syntactic complexity. Moreover, significant improvement in phrasal complexity was witnessed over time in both groups. Significant group × time interaction effects were witnessed on overall complexity or subordination complexity. The gradients of the EG trajectories of the two metrics were greater than those of the CG. However, on phrasal complexity, the interaction effect was not significant.

Lexical bundles are two or more string of words that co-occur frequently in a corpus. Hence, this corpus-based research design study examines the effects of lexical bundles on English as a foreign language learner’s abstract genre academic writing skills, and it also investigates students’ perception towards lexical bundles instruction to enhance their academic writing skills. Hence, frequent lexical bundles were selected from 70 computer science articles. These articles were selected from 7 journals that were published in reputable, indexed, and through representative criteria. Accordingly, sixteen frequent lexical bundles were selected through corpus analysis software (Laurence Anthony’s Antconc software) for the purpose of classroom instruction. The bundles are intended to help computer science students to develop their abstract genre academic writing skills. Students have instructed their academic writing through corpus informed instruction for two months, and the data were gathered through pre and post-tests and questionnaire. The findings indicated that lexical bundles have a positive effect on students’ academic writing skills, particularly abstract genre writing. Besides, the students have a positive perception of the lexical bundle and the instruction to enhance their academic writing skills. Finally, this research calls attention to discipline-oriented lexical bundles since they are crucial for academic writing.Â

The study aims at investigating the discourse marker hasa ‘now’ in Jordanian Arabic using relevance theory. The study also examined the grammaticalization of hasa and how it developed to be a discourse marker. The study also explored the functions of hasa in Jordanian Arabic. The data, which consisted of 500 tokens of hasa ‘now,’ were collected from Jordanian radio programs, personal communications, and interviews with native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. The study found out that hasa ‘now’ was developed from the phrase hay ilsaE•ah ‘this hour’ by the process of grammaticalization. The study also found out that the lexical meaning of hasa as an adverb meaning ‘now’ developed to be a discourse marker serving different functions. The study also showed that hasa limits the hearer to a possible interpretation of utterances, which helps the hearer to reach the optimal relevance.

Within the framework of the systematic functional grammar (SFG), Matthiessen (2004) has provided an analysis of the word/element order according to which word/element order in a clause is decided by experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. In this study which has been conducted aiming at the description and analysis of the word/element order in a simple Persian clause, we have sought to describe and analyze the sequence of the main elements in a Persian active simple declarative clause within Matthiessen (2004)’s metafunctional model. In fact, through evidence from Persian language, i.e. samples derived from Persian texts and also other Persian researchers’ works, we have sought to demonstrate how the three experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions are involved in determining the order of the main elements in an active simple declarative clause in Persian. The results of this study show that the “basic” order of the main elements in a Persian simple clause and specifically single-Complement clause is in line with both experiential and interpersonal metafunctions and any type of the movement of the aforementioned elements in an active simple declarative clause in Persian language is explained with the help of the mechanisms of textual metafunction.

The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it is understood that the processing of coreference resolution is closely related to the working memory. In this relationship between memory and anaphora resolution, the distance factor between the referent and anaphor can play a significant role as distance increases the processing costs when reading sentences. It is known that the working memory is limited; yet there is still no consensus among researchers regarding the nature of storable items. Moreover, the syntactic node, here taken as a representative of the structure of a phrase, was observed as possible storage and recoverable unit in the working memory. Thus, the objective of the study was to verify whether the syntactic distance factor, embeddings with 1 and 2 intervening syntactic nodes, is a storable unit in the working memory, investigating its influence in the processing of different anaphora resolution. The self-paced reading experimental technique was used in an experiment. Seventy participants, all university students, were tested individually and underwent a training session before the task. The results suggest that the syntactic distance is a relevant factor in the working memory with significant differences between conditions with syntactic distance concerning those with linear distance, indicating the formation of chunks. There was an increase in reading times depending on the number of intervening embeddings, and different processing costs for each type of anaphora resolution investigated . The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it is understood that the processing of coreference resolution is closely related to the working memory. In this relationship between memory and anaphora resolution, the distance factor between the referent and anaphor can play a significant role as distance increases the processing costs when reading sentences. It is known that the working memory is limited; yet there is still no consensus among researchers regarding the nature of storable items. Moreover, the syntactic node, here taken as a representative of the structure of a phrase, was observed as possible storage and recoverable unit in the working memory. Thus, the objective of the study was to verify whether the syntactic distance factor, embeddings with 1 and 2 intervening syntactic nodes, is a storable unit in the working memory, investigating its influence in the processing of different anaphora resolution. The self-paced reading experimental technique was used in an experiment. Seventy participants, all university students, were tested individually and underwent a training session before the task. The results suggest that the syntactic distance is a relevant factor in the working memory with significant differences between conditions with syntactic distance concerning those with linear distance, indicating the formation of chunks. There was an increase in reading times depending on the number of intervening embeddings, and different processing costs for each type of anaphora resolution investigated .

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the ‘level’ of the child and the ‘level’ of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restle...

This paper aims to give an account of the multiple determination (determiner spreading) phenomenon in Arabic. Determiner spreading is the syntactic representation and phonological realization of multiple determiners within the same determiner phrase. As a cross-linguistic phenomenon, determiner spreading has been investigated in other languages (e.g., Scandinavian and Greek); different accounts have been proposed. For Scandinavian languages, determiner spreading has been analyzed as a representation of different semantic interpretations. As far as Greek is concerned, some analyses have been proposed; however, two prominent ones have received considerable attention in the literature: (i) a residue of a reduced relative clause and (ii) an instantiation of close appositions. Contrary to those analyses, this paper claims that none of the two analyses is suitable for Arabic; thus, a language-specific analysis is required. To analyze determiner spreading in Arabic, the current paper posits the following research question: What is the linguistic purpose of the multiple determiners found in Arabic determiner phrases? Answering the research question, the paper claims that, in addition to its indispensable role in establishing agreement between nouns and adjectives within the Arabic determiner phrase, determiner spreading demarcates syntactic and semantic phrase boundaries. The paper takes Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology as a theoretical framework to argue that attributive adjectives are projection of an agreement phrase headed by the definite article ʔal or by the indefinite phonological marker `nunation: -n’. This proposal requires no syntactic movements in the syntax proper. The ultimate linear order is achieved in the phonological components.

Purpose The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed online and off-line sentence-processing tasks using relative clause sentences. The response time (RT) data obtained from the online processing task were analyzed at each word position and between adjacent words for items answered both correctly and incorrectly on the off-line comprehension task. A linear mixed-effects model and a generalized linear mixed-effects model were used to analyze the performances on the online/off-line sentence-processing task between the two groups. Results The results revealed that the processing pattern of RTs on the online processing task differed between the two groups, such that the SLI group did not show the predicted RT increase while the TD group did. Also, the SLI group processed each word with comparable or faster reading rates than the TD group. On the off-line comprehension task, the SLI group performed poorly compared to the TD group. Conclusions Processing of syntactically complex sentences differed between the TD and SLI groups, such that the SLI group had lower accuracy on the off-line comprehension task and was less efficient on the online processing task as compared to the TD group. These results mainly support the syntactic deficit account in children with SLI.

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two ov...

Sentiment analysis of short texts is difficult for their simplicity and compactness. This goes a step further when it comes to the Chinese texts. Although deep learning achieved better accuracy in sentiment analysis, there is a lack of explain-ability. Thus, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of techniques for sentiment analysis of Chinese short financial texts with deep learning. For this, we built a Chinese short financial texts corpus (CSFC) and designed an ablation experiment. Beside the CFSC, we used a Chinese review collection and an English short-text repository in the experiment for comparison. There are five techniques involved. They are the Pinyin, the segmentation, the lexical analysis, the phrase structure and the attention mechanism. As results, we found that the phrase structure and the attention mechanism are two of the best. Therefore, the best model in the experiment is called a Phrase Structure and Attention-based Deep network model (PhraSAD). Moreover, to improve the classification accuracy on neutral data, we use a dual classifier strategy for 3-class problems. Experimental results showed that PhraSAD outperformed all other compared models on all experimental datasets.

Evidence from the contemporary translation services market and many centuries of translation practice demonstrate that translation into a non-native language (L2 translation) can be performed effec...

Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This is potentially problematic, since relevant syntactic indices may not be the same across languages. The current study is the first to explore which syntactic features predict text quality in Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative writing. In order to do so, the quality of 125 argumentative essays written by students was rated and the syntactic features of the texts were analyzed. A multilevel regression analysis was then used to investigate which features contribute to text quality. The resulting model (explaining 14.5% of the variance in text quality) shows that the relative number of finite clauses and the ratio between the number of relative clauses and the number of finite clauses positively predict text quality. Discrepancies between our findings and those of previous studies indicate that the relations between syntactic features and text quality may vary based on factors such as language and genre. Additional (cross-linguistic) research is needed to gain a more complete understanding of the relationships between syntactic constructions and text quality and the potential moderating role of language and genre.

Finding the structure of a sentence—the way its words hold together to convey meaning—is a fundamental step in language comprehension. Several brain regions, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, and the left anterior temporal pole, are supposed to support this operation. The exact role of these areas is nonetheless still debated. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that different brain regions could be sensitive to different kinds of syntactic computations. We compare the fit of phrase-structure and dependency structure descriptors to activity in brain areas using fMRI. Our results show a division between areas with regard to the type of structure computed, with the left anterior temporal pole and left inferior frontal gyrus favouring dependency structures and left posterior superior temporal gyrus favouring phrase structures.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a core technique for implementing natural user interfaces. In this study, we propose a neural network architecture to learn syntax vector representation by employing the correspondence between texts and syntactic structures. For representing the syntactic structures of sentences, we used three methods: dependency trees, phrase structure trees, and part of speech tagging. A pretrained transformer is used to propose text-to-vector and syntax-to-vector projection approaches. The texts and syntactic structures are projected onto a common vector space, and the distances between the two vectors are minimized according to the correspondence property to learn the syntax representation. We conducted massive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodology using Korean corpora, i.e., Weather, Navi, and Rest, and English corpora, i.e., the ATIS, SNIPS, Simulated Dialogue-Movie, Simulated Dialogue-Restaurant, and NLU-Evaluation datasets. Through the experiments, we concluded that our model is quite effective in capturing a syntactic representation and the learned syntax vector representations are useful.

This study aims at investigating the change of cognitive presence (CP), which is one of the basic variables for effective learning in online discussions, based on the cognitive style. Cognitive styles of the participants were identified based on the group embedded figures test (GEFT). The participants of the study took part in online discussions for seven weeks. Content analysis was used to measure cognitive presence in students’ online discussions. The analysis was based on practical inquiry (PI) model which defines four phases of cognitive presence. The data were also analysed using the nonparametric tests, Spearman Rhu correlation, and descriptive statistics. The findings indicate that, in regard to the cognitive presence of the participants, those phases with the highest frequency are found to be exploration and triggering event. It is also found that the CPs of the participants do not vary based on their cognitive styles. In addition, unlike what was reported by previous studies there are no significant differences between the number of words used by the participants and the rate of involvement in online discussions depending on their CPs. On the other hand, there are moderate and strong correlations between the participants’ CP phases suggesting that the CP phases may be developed in relation to one another. Based on the findings, some suggestions are developed in regard to the scope of learning analytics and discussion dynamics concerning the discussion environments in online learning.

The goal of this research is to design and implement a chatbot for querying Wordnet semantic relations. The study creates a contextual chatbot named WordnetBot, a web application that utilizes the use of technologies such as Dialogflow, React, NodeJS, Javascript, and MariaDB. The Wordnet database which leverages all other dictionaries due to its semantic relations representation was used as the data source. Phrase Structure Analysis extracts the keyword and the semantic relation from a user’s message or query. It complements the Machine Learning and AI capabilities of Dialogflow in the analysis. The researcher designed an architectural framework for the integration of the different components of WordnetBot.

Due to the fact that both the subject and the topic can occupy the initial position of the sentence, English subject is always deemed as the UNMARKED TOPIC (Lambrecht, 1994), while the topic is not always the subject. In accordance with Rizzi’s (1997) topicalization, both the subject and the topicalized constituents can be topics. Many other languages are found to have multiple topics (Erteschik-Shir, 2007). This study agrees that more than one topic is possible in English. With respect to the order, it finds that the principle of end-weight, applies only to the DP subject topics, but not other preposed constituents. The preverbal constituents in the data abide by the topic-comment structure in general. Via the authentic data, we find that the subject topic is prominently DPs. Non-subject topics are PPs, CPs, adverbs, AdvPs, and DPs, among which PPs are prominent in expository texts while CPs are prevailing in narrative proses. The frequent appearance of the PPs is found to be the genre-effect that PPs are compact structures often used as the sentence opener to make the discourse coherent in expository texts. Meanwhile, the conspicuous occurrence of the CPs, inter alia, the control constructions, is due to the characteristics of the chronological linkage in narrative proses.

This qualitative study aims at exploring the internal structure of personal experience oral narrative in Arabic in terms of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical components and Labov (1972) approach of narrative structure, who claimed its presence in all well-formed narratives. Recordings of orally told narratives by five Saudi informants were elicited in informal settings, and were coded and qualitatively analyzed to provide a comprehensive understanding of oral narrative structure in Arabic. The findings of this study confirmed that the Labovian components of the internal structure of oral narrative were exhibited in Arabic oral narratives. The results also seemed to support the idea of the essential role of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical categories. That is, pauses and intonational contours line up to form the structure of the narrative. In addition, adverbial particles can be used as a mechanism to reinforce the internal structure of the narrative which coincide with pause phrasing and intonational contours. With regard to syntactic constituency component, the study found out that each line corresponds to at least one clause or phrase.

This study focuses on the survey of frequency and occurrence of phrase structure rules used in the written and oral mode of first year tertiary ESL students. It describes the sentence-embedded structures namely, nominal, adjectival and adverbial. As far as phrase structure rules are concerned, the constituents of the noun phrase, verb phrase, adjectival phrase and adverbial phrase are given structural labels. The researcher made use of the quantitative description of the oral and written structures of 76 first year students enrolled in a language class. The results of the study show that majority of the students write their essay using nominals followed by adverbials and the least used are adjectivals. In the oral mode, the most commonly used phrase structure rules are adverbials, followed by nominals and the least used are adjectivals. Though students have a good command of English in writing and speaking, they should be exposed to different communicative situations and develop a balanced style in expressing meaning using varied grammatical structures.

Terminology represents a significant factor in healthcare communication between specialists and patients. The present paper deals with the lexicosemantic characteristics of multi-word lexical units multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, epidural abscess, Huntington’s chorea, and carpal tunnel syndrome. The research questions focus on collocations, word combinations, and concordances in which they regularly appear; the first lemma to the left and the first lemma to the right from the studied lexeme demonstrate the principal positions of our interest. Simultaneously, the researcher considers their semantic restrictions, semantic prosody, and grammatical relations that influence their lexical features. The whole linguistic material is investigated in the framework of the text corpus English Web 2015 (enTenTen15) with the help of the search tool Sketch Engine. To begin the research, the frequencies of these lexical units are elaborated. The researcher also looks into the morphological classification of the studied words as these two factors affect them from the lexicological perspective. The research outcomes confirm that the nervous disease names appear in a wide range of structures, and they considerably contribute to successful communication in the medical surroundings. Moreover, the results indicate that the lexicosemantic behaviour of the terms reflects extralinguistic factors (psychological, social) of individual communication acts. The phenomenon is to be further examined and interpreted within the corpus analyses of other chosen lexical units, not only from the field of medicine. Eventually, the researcher outlines possible pedagogical implications of the research results in the process of teaching English.

The article presents an attempt to establish and describe the main properties of aphorism as an object of linguistics. In modern linguistics, a number of researches are devoted to the study of aphorism as a phrase text and a fixed phrase. However, the concept of aphorism in linguistics does not have its own definition. In this regard, the analysis of the linguistically relevant properties of the aphorism that characterize its linguistic nature is of current importance. The purpose of the study is to determine and describe the minimum number of the most linguistically significant properties of an aphorism, to establish their obligatory / optional character, their specificity / generality (for aphorism and more than a word units close to it). Research methods - descriptive method, structural, semantic, functional, discursive, stylistic analysis, taxonomy. The material for the research was the statements in Russian, English, Belarusian, Polish, contained in written texts of different genres, as well as in compilations from various sources, in reference editions, in the title of which the term aphorism (or its derivative - aphoristic ) was used. The total number of analyzed units is over 50,000 from over 120 sources. As a result of the study, it was found that linguistically relevant properties of aphorism (differentiating it as an object of linguistics) are more than a word nature, one phrase structure, generalized meaning, nominative nature, discursive autonomy, textuality, reproducibility, stability, idiomatic nature, expressiveness of the verbal form. A number of properties coincide in aphorisms and phraseological units (more than word nature, reproducibility, stability, idiomatic nature), but none is obligatory for aphorism. Obligatory properties of aphorism are one phrase structure, generalized meaning, nominative nature, discursive autonomy. The main (differential) property of aphorism as an object of linguistics is the generalized meaning, which in relation to the expressed reality has a specific character - universal character. The introduction of linguistically relevant features of aphorism into science allows it to be defined in terms of linguistics as a one-phrase unit, nominative, discursively autonomous, predominantly more than a word units, reproducible, fixed unit that differs from all other more than a word units in one specific property - the generalized meaning (a universal generalization of reality). This property characterizes aphorisms as a variety of linguistic units (phrase texts or fixed phrases), determines their discursive autonomy and nominative nature, and manifests the categorical quality of their content plan - aphoristic nature.

The study examines phases in developing specification of grammatical marking of emergent clause-combining (CC) as indicative of children’s growing ability to integrate two or more independent predi...

This study aimed at investigating the effect of Memrise application on Iranian EFL learners’ collocation learning and retention. To this end, a quasi-experimental design was used. 75 Iranian intermediate EFL learners studying English at a private language institute, namely Farahan, Iran were selected to participate in the study based on convenience sampling in the form of two intact classes. The scores obtained were entered into SPSS software for the purpose of data analysis. The results of data analysis showed that Memrise application had a statistically differential effect on collocation learning of Iranian EFL learners. Moreover, it was demonstrated that Memrise application had a statistically differential effect on collocation retention of Iranian EFL learners. In addition, it was proved that there was a significant difference between the immediate post-test scores Iranian EFL learners who received Memrise application and those who received traditional teaching. Finally, it was indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the delayed post-test scores of Iranian EFL learners who received Memrise application and those who received traditional teaching. Key Words: Collocation Learning; Collocation Retention; Memrise application; Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL); Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

Following Swales’ (1990) influential study on research article (RA) introductions, some attention has increasingly been paid to other rhetorical units of both expert and learners’ writing, including titles. A key and effective discursive means through which titles are constructed and presented is the syntactic configuration. The present study, thus, investigates the syntactic structures employed by authors of conference paper titles (CPTs) in Applied Linguistics. A qualitative content analysis was employed to study a corpus of 592 CPTs from a popular conference for researchers, scholars, and practitioners of Applied Linguistics worldwide, supported by some descriptive statistics. The analysis of data study identified three main title styles: Single Unit Title, Compound Unit Title, and Complex Unit Title. The analysis showed that, out of these three title styles, Compound Unit Titles were preferred by researchers. Further, the colon was the dominantly used punctuation mark in separating the components of Compound Unit titles. The final point was that authors preferred prepositional phrases in the post modification of the noun phrase structure of CPTs. The findings of this study have implications for the scholarship on titlelogy, academic writing pedagogy as well as further research.

Because innovations in media technologies affect all aspects of our daily lives, multimodal and computational literacies are becoming increasingly important as a way to empower English as a Foreign...

Bilingual students are underrepresented in gifted and talented (GT) programs, and language/literacy research on these students is scarce. This study examined academic language in expository writing of 65 GT students, including 32 bilinguals, in Grades 4–8. Outcomes at the word, phrase, sentence, and text levels were compared for bilinguals’ versus monolinguals’ English writing, and bilinguals’ English versus Spanish writing. In addition, two students’ texts were explored qualitatively. In English, bilinguals and monolinguals did not significantly differ on any measure. Bilinguals scored higher in English than Spanish on most traditional word- and sentence-level measures, were equal in lexical diversity, and varied at the phrase level. English and Spanish writing was similar in content and structure, suggesting transfer of text-level skills. The qualitative assessment highlighted diverse attempts at information condensing and author distance with varying success, again with similar outcomes at the text level.

Experimental studies show that children have greater difficulty with wh-extraction from object position than subject position, arguably an intervention effect (e.g., Relativized Minimality). In thi...

Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task, children heard short sentences with subject-relative (e.g., "Boys that help girls are nice") or object-relative (e.g., "Boys that girls help are nice") clauses, and determined the gender of the individual performing the action. In the rhythm-discrimination test, children heard two short rhythmic sequences on each trial and decided if they were the same or different. Children with better performance on the rhythm task exhibited higher scores on the grammar test, even after holding constant age, gender, music training, and maternal education. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with another group of same-age children (N = 96) while further controlling for working memory. Our data reveal, for the first time, an association between receptive grammar and rhythm perception in typically developing children. This finding is consistent with the view that music and language share neural resources for rule-based temporal processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated incidental learning of single-word items and collocations through listening to teacher talk. Although there are several studies that have investigated incidental vocabulary learning through listening, no intervention studies have explicitly investigated the extent to which listening to teachers in a classroom context might contribute to vocabulary learning. The present study fills this gap. Additionally, the study explored the relationship between vocabulary learning gains and two factors: frequency of occurrence and first language (L1) translation. A meaning-recall test and a multiple-choice test were used to evaluate learning gains. The results indicated that (a) listening to teacher talk has potential to contribute to vocabulary learning of both single-word items and collocations, (b) using L1 translation to explain target word meanings contributed to larger gains on the immediate posttest, (c) frequency of occurrence was not a significant predictor of incidental vocabulary learning.

One way to investigate learner writing is by analyzing the most frequently recurring sequences of words, that is, lexical bundles. This paper presents results for lexical bundles analyses of a Malaysian corpus (MCSAW) against its reference language variety, LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays). Key 4-word lexical bundles are firstly investigated in terms of their frequencies as well as distribution in both corpora. Following this, key lexical bundles are further categorized and analyzed according to their functions, including qualitative analysis of the most recurrent bundles by examination of concordance lines. Results show that learners use simple types of lexical bundles repeatedly compared to their native speaker counterparts. Evidence of tautology can also be found in learner writing. The findings highlight that using lexical bundles appropriately is important to achieve native-like fluency, while the absence of more varied lexical bundles in learners’ discourse may result in unidiomatic-sounding writing style.

A number of natural language processing tools for Urdu language processing have been developed in the past few years for word segmentation, part of speech tagging, chunking, named entity recognition and parsing. Corpora, especially treebanks, are essential data resources for language processing. This work presents the development and evaluation of an Urdu treebank, the CLE-UTB and a statistical parser. The treebank has been annotated with phrase structure annotation. Part of speech tagging has been performed semi-automatically by using an existing tagger and incorrect tags were corrected manually by annotators. The syntactic annotation has been performed in the Penn Treebank style to mark phrases. The annotation scheme also adds functional labels for grammatical roles. Currently, the treebank contains 7854 annotated sentences and 148,575 tokens. Completeness and correctness of the syntactic labels have been checked automatically after manual annotation. To ensure the annotation consistency of the resource, a grammar-based evaluation and an automatic consistency checking tool have been used to detect linguistically implausible constituents. The inter-annotator agreement is greater than 90%. We have developed a bidirectional long-short term memory (BiLSTM) based parser and a POS tagger which have been trained on the final version of the treebank. We have improved our results by training the word embeddings on a large Urdu text corpus. Our parser produced an f-score of 88.1% and the POS tagger performed with an accuracy of 96.3%.

Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension an...

Previous research suggests that toddlers can rely on distributional cues in the input to track adjacent and nonadjacent grammatical dependencies. It remains unclear whether toddlers understand the ...

Narrow reading has the potential to reduce vocabulary load and to provide rich opportunities for developing collocation knowledge, but these benefits rely on narrow reading increasing lexical repetition within a text. Hence, interest in narrow reading has been limited by the relatively small lexical effect of narrowing reading by topic (Nation, 2013). Nevertheless, research in data-driven learning and teaching and language corpora has reported positively on learners using concordances in a manner comparable to narrow reading. However, the potential for concordances to provide an increased lexical-repetition effect has not been assessed. This study bridges this gap by exploring the degree of lexical repetition available in concordances and identifies corpus composition as a key predictor of lexical repetition. The study uses standardised type-token ratio (sTTR) to analyse concordances extracted from corpora at three different levels of homogeneity/heterogeneity. The results show large, reliable variations in lexical repetition resulting from variation in corpus homogeneity/heterogeneity, and so identifies concordance-based narrow reading as a possible means of overcoming the limitations of traditional narrow reading by topic. The results are discussed with reference to pedagogical implications for language learners, teachers, and researchers.

Conflicting ways to understand the nature of paragraphs, including their purpose and structure, have been central to composition theory for many decades. Yet English teachers across countries are e...

Children’s sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous wh-questions like Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?, ...

Sempre foi discutido na literatura o status categorial das Small Clauses (SCs (STOWELL, 1981; MORO 2000 e outros), PrP (BOWERS, 1993), PredP (BAILYN, 2001) etc.) e, já que uma teoria de estrutura de sintagmas exocêntrica pede que Objetos Sintáticos tenham rótulos para que Interpretação Plena os interprete em CI, então é importante perguntarmos qual o rótulo das SCs. O principal objetivo deste artigo é argumentar que o sistema apresentado nos dois artigos recentes, Problems of Projection, PoP (CHOMSKY, 2013; 2015), pode explicar morfologia de caso e concordância dentro das SCs interlinguisticamente, discutindo dados do português e do russo. Proponho que, no Sistema de PoP, SCs podem ser rotuladas como ϕ, quando o sujeito e o predicado compartilham estes traços. De outra forma, quando a morfologia do conjunto sujeito-predicado não combina, o sujeito deve ser alçado, a fim de que o traço de caso do predicado seja checado.

Linguistic and narrative strategies employed in two dyadic interviews of male veterans of the war in Afghanistan were analysed and compared. Each interviewee told chains of connected stories that positioned them in relation to catastrophic events and their effects. These incidents were framed as being linked to decisions that the teller had taken in perilous circumstances. Sequences of generic clauses in sections of orientation were used to manage knowledge asymmetries, to establish story world norms, to display professional, soldierly and veteran identities and to present danger, serious injury, and death as normative in the context of military work in a conflict zone. Resolutions to narratives involving death or injury resided not in specific narrative event clauses but in sections of evaluation that framed the outcome of a preceding story chain in terms of its personal, current significance to the speaker. Our exploration of contrasting accounts of similarly catastrophic events by two storytellers, one of whom was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, offers insights into ways in which trauma is represented that could be useful in psychotherapeutic contexts.

Understanding that people’s ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4–5 years old by typically developing (TD) children...

Syntactic complexity has been recognized as an important construct in writing research, and for the past five decades, many syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) have been examined in numerous studies. This systematic review is the first study of its kind to synthesize 36 studies spanning from 1970 to 2019 by identifying and cataloging all SCMs examined during this period. An analysis was performed on how the use of SCMs varied by genre, grade level, students’ writing ability, and writing quality. Five online databases (Academic Search Premier, ERIC, PsycINFO, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, and PsycARTICLES) were searched. A total of 48 SCMs were grouped into six categories: T-units and sentences, clauses, phrases, words, combined measures, and other measures. Most studies examined three common SCMs: mean T-unit length, mean number of words per clause, and mean number of clauses per T-unit. The argumentative genre had the highest values for T-unit length and mean number of clauses per T-unit, which could indicate greater sentence complexity. Higher-grade-level students generally construct sentences that are syntactically complex, but comparison between studies was difficult because different studies investigated different SCMs. Although students with higher writing abilities generally construct sentences that are syntactically more complex compared to students with lower writing abilities, the findings are not conclusive, as only a few studies examined this relationship. A similarly inconclusive relationship was found between syntactic complexity and writing quality because only a few studies examined this relationship. More research is needed to examine the relationship between SCMs, writing quality, and genre.