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Within the context of multilingualism, there has been burgeoning research interest in interlanguage varieties. This corpus‐based study investigated structural and functional variations in phrase frames (p‐frames) in argumentative writing by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners from Arabic, German, Hindi, and Chinese language backgrounds. P‐frames, recurrent non‐contiguous co‐selection units within texts, were automatically extracted, manually filtered, and analyzed for variability, predictability, and discourse function. The results revealed learners’ shared reliance on prompt‐related p‐frames as well as potential L1 influence on specific p‐frames. German learners displayed the lowest degree of flexibility and creativity, while Hindi learners exhibited the highest. Chinese and Arabic learners demonstrated moderate levels, falling between the two extremes. Statistically significant differences in p‐frame tokens across functional categories were observed in all groups. This study contributes to a nuanced understanding of phraseological competence in EFL learners from different L1 backgrounds and holds pedagogical implications for the globalized educational landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is set in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand and investigates the influence of cultural knowledge on the type of topics that speakers of New Zealand Englishes (NZEs) associate to in their narrations. A storytelling task based on picture prompts of New Zealand landscapes shows a major difference between the cultural associations of Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand European) participants. The difference can be captured in two cultural frames that underlie the preferred topics chosen by the two groups. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for defining NZEs, and they also bear ramifications for theory development in Cultural Linguistics, highlighting the nested and flexibly construable nature of cultural conceptualisations. For research on world Englishes, the study is an example of how cultural‐linguistic analyses can be extended towards larger cultural framings to explain cultural variation among speakers of Englishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the compatibility between Data-Driven Learning (DDL) and usage-based approaches to second language acquisition (SLA). Usage-based approaches emphasize the importance of language use and its impact on language development. DDL, which utilizes language corpora to study learner input and output, aligns with usage-based SLA by exposing learners to authentic usage data and helping them derive regularities and patterns. The article suggests future research directions, including the creation of DDL materials guided by usage-based SLA principles and longitudinal studies to examine the long-term effects of DDL. The author emphasizes the importance of establishing stronger connections between DDL and SLA theory to enhance language learning outcomes. [Extracted from the article]

What is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., "Ebony folded a napkin in 10 seconds" vs. "Ebony did some folding for 10 seconds") can influence whether the very same visual event is processed as containing distinct temporal stages including a well‐defined endpoint or lacking such structure, respectively. In two experiments, we show that processing (a)telicity in language shifts how people later construe the temporal structure of identical visual stimuli. We conclude that event construals are malleable representations that can align with the linguistic framing of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A psycholinguistic study was conducted to assess the level of trust in different fictional products with varying framing. It was found that the product type has the greatest influence on the level of acceptance, while the expert or layperson status of the participants has the least influence. The second most relevant influencing factor is framing. The level of trust is estimated higher by all groups when a product description using the frame SUPPORTING rather than the frames DECIDING or CONTROL is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguistic DNA project seeks to understand the evolution of philosophy, society and language during the Modern English period. Corpora like Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) allow us to apply statistical data‐driven models extracting patterns to confirm our expectations. As systems biology has revolutionised biology by systematically searching for all patterns, we detect patterns in our data systematically with contextual and distributional semantic approaches, an approach that could be called systems history. We uncover semantic patterns with methods from text mining, computational linguistics and digital humanities. We normalise the spelling automatically to present‐day variants and use bottom‐up analyses to step from words to concepts: collocations, topic modelling and distributional semantics. We illustrate the approaches with two case studies: associations of poverty changing across time, and Charles Dickens social criticism, his vision of helping to improve the situation of the poor. As no gold standard for our task exists, our approaches are exploratory, which entails considerable manual intervention, e.g. sifting candidate lists, reading excerpts and interpreting topic models. A fully automatic approach is currently neither feasible nor envisaged: semi‐automatic approaches give researchers the inspiring opportunity to interact with the texts in a constant move between distant and close reading. The different characteristics of the various statistical methods offer complementary perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Fausey and Boroditsky (Psychon. Bull. Rev., 17, 2010, 644) demonstrated that agentive descriptions of accidents can increase perceived blame and financial liability. We conducted direct replications of their studies 1 and 2 in English, as originally used, and in Croatian. Methods: Participants in the first experiment read either an agentive or a nonagentive description of an incident that resulted in a fire and rated the level of blame and financial liability of the main character in the story. The second experiment examined the direct influence of language on financial liability assessments while manipulating the blame level. Participants were presented with the same story as in the first experiment with the added sentence about the blame level attributed to the main character by an independent panel. We used the materials from the original studies and replicated the studies using a large sample of native English‐speaking residents of the USA and Croatian students. Results: We successfully replicated original findings in English, but results of the experiments conducted in Croatian were mixed. In the first experiment, we found a smaller effect of agentive language and only on the blame level and not on the proposed financial penalty. In the second experiment, we did not find the effect of agentive language on the proposed fine. Conclusions: Our experiments confirmed the original findings in English. The effect might exist in Croatian too, but its exact size remains to be determined in future research. Possible explanations of observed differences between results in English and Croatian are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jaakko Hintikka proposed treating objectual perception sentences, such as "Alice sees Bob," as de re propositional perception sentences. Esa Saarinen extended Hintikka's idea to eventive perception sentences, such as "Alice sees Bob smile." These approaches, elegant as they may be, are not philosophically neutral, for they presuppose, controversially, that the content of all perceptual experiences is propositional in nature. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal treatment of objectual and eventive perception sentences that builds on Hintikka's modal approach to propositional attitude ascriptions while avoiding controversial assumptions on the nature of perceptual experiences. Despite being simple and theoretically frugal, our approach is powerful enough to express a variety of interesting philosophical views about propositional, objectual, and eventive perception sentences, thus enabling the study of their inferential relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2‐ to 4‐year‐old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a noun or a verb. We assigned the children to a noun condition or a verb condition. Before the test, those in the noun condition were exposed to sentences where la petite predicted nouns, and those in the verb condition to sentences where la petite predicted verbs. At testing, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds, but not 2‐year‐olds, from the verb condition looked at the verb interpretation longer than did the children in the noun condition. This suggests a progression in children's ability to rely on input to adapt their predictions in language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kind representations, concepts like table, triangle, dog, and planet, underlie generic language. Here, we investigate the formal structure of kind representations—the structure that distinguishes kind representations from other types of representations. The present studies confirm that participants distinguish generic‐supporting properties of individuals (e.g., this watch is made of steel) and accidental properties (e.g., this watch is on the nightstand). Furthermore, work dating back to Aristotle establishes that only some generic‐supporting properties bear a principled connection to the kind, that is, are true of an individual by virtue of its being a member of a specific kind (e.g., telling time for a watch). The present studies tested the hypothesis that principled connections are part of the formal structure of kind representations. Specifically, they tested whether they structure a newly learned kind representation. Experiment 1 found that introducing a property of a newly encountered novel kind in any one of four linguistic frames that provide evidence that a property has a principled connection to a kind (e.g., "It has fur because it is a blick") led participants to infer a different conceptual consequence of principled connections (i.e., "There is something wrong with this blick, which does not have fur") for which they had no direct evidence. Two introduction frames that provided no evidence for principled connections (e.g., "Almost all blicks have fur") did not generate the same consequence. Experiment 2 found that all of the targeted properties were generic licensing, irrespective of the introduction frame. That the distinction between properties that bear principled connections to their kinds, and merely generic‐supporting properties structures novel kind representations, provides strong evidence that this distinction is part of the formal structure of kind representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the role of child cognitive abilities for procedural and declarative learning in the earliest stages of second language (L2) exposure. In the context of a computer game, 53 first language Italian monolingual children were aurally trained in a novel miniature language over 3 consecutive days. A mixed effects model analysis of the relationship between cognitive predictors and outcomes in morphosyntax measured via a grammaticality judgment test (GJT) was performed. Relative to adults trained in the same paradigm, children with higher procedural learning ability (measured via an alternate serial reaction time task) showed significantly better learning of word order, although the effect size was small. Modeling accuracy in online sentence comprehension during the game also evidenced that higher procedural learning ability was positively associated with significantly better outcomes as practice progressed. By contrast, a composite measure of verbal and visual declarative learning ability did not predict L2 outcomes in either the GJT or the online measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have investigated the effects of prewriting tasks on writing quality and language (e.g., individual vs. collaborative planning, text‐chat vs. face‐to‐face [FTF] discussion, etc.). Recent meta‐analyses have found a small advantage for text chat on writing, but no studies involved logographic languages, for which character learning may limit and tax language production. In this study we explore this issue, as university learners of Chinese (N = 10) engaged in prewriting discussions orally and via text chat followed by a timed‐writing task. Results show that during FTF planning, students engaged in talk that was greater in terms of discussion length and number of turns; in students' writing, FTF planning resulted in increased lexical complexity and syntactic richness. Our results contradict theoretical perspectives suggesting that text chat might be more advantageous, as well as one empirical study by Liao. Finally, we discuss the implications for learning to write in a non‐alphabetic language. The Challenge: Researchers have explored the effects of pre‐task planning modes (e.g., face‐to‐face versus text chat) on learners' writing performance, finding advantages for text chats. However, English has traditionally been the L2 investigated rather than logographic languages (e.g., Chinese). Do such findings hold true with non‐alphabetic languages? Which pre‐task planning mode is more beneficial? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Studies have shown that word dictation and syntactic skills are significant predictors of written composition performance among Chinese children in elementary grades. However, there is a paucity of research on the bidirectional relationships between these two cognitive‐linguistic skills (i.e., word dictation and syntactic skills) and Chinese writing skills. Methods: This paper reports the findings of a 1‐year longitudinal study tracking the developmental patterns of Chinese writing among students in Grades 3 and 5 in Hong Kong. The participants were administered tasks involving cognitive‐linguistic skills (working memory, word dictation and syntactic skills) and writing skills (narrative writing and expository writing). Results: Multiple regression analysis revealed that word dictation and syntactic skills in Grades 3 and 5 were significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese written composition performance in Grade 4 and Grade 6. Syntactic skills, but not word dictation, contributed a significant amount of unique variance to writing performance after controlling for the autoregressor effect of writing. The results also showed that written composition performance in Grades 3 and 5 contributed unique variance to individual differences in syntactic skills in Grades 4 and 6, after controlling for syntactic skills in the preceding year and other cognitive‐linguistic variables. Conclusion: The patterns of results underscore the significance of syntactic skills in Chinese written composition in upper elementary grades and the bidirectional relationship between syntactic skills and written composition in Chinese. Highlights: What is already known about this topicChinese word dictation, syntactic skills and verbal working memory are the major types of developmental skills important in Chinese writing among children in elementary grades. What this paper addsThe longitudinal contribution of word dictation to writing performance across grades was mediated by the contribution of word dictation to concurrent writing performance.Syntactic skills contributed a unique amount of variance to writing performance across grades even after controlling for the autoregressor effect of writing.The longitudinal relationships between syntactic skills and written composition were bidirectional. Implications for theory, policy or practiceAn emphasis on grammar teaching in the context of writing may benefit both writing and syntactic skills development.Combined word dictation and composing instruction, rather than teaching word dictation alone or composing instruction alone, may enhance composing skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies within the world Englishes paradigm have furnished detailed descriptions of numerous lexical, morphological and syntactic features. Although laudable exceptions exist, pragmatics as well as the concept of pragmatic nativisation have so far been largely neglected in world Englishes – particularly from an empirical angle. The present paper investigates pauses – more specifically the choice between filled (for example, uh, uhm) and unfilled pauses (that is, silence) – in two South Asian Englishes, Indian and Sri Lankan English, in comparison to the culturally distinct British English. Central research questions include: (a) are there variety‐specific differences in the use of filled/unfilled pauses; (b) which additional factors determine the choice between filled and unfilled pauses; and (c) what implications do the results have for the notion of pragmatic nativisation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper offers a comprehensive description of M[eteorological] constructions in Polish and their analysis within a typological framework formulated by Eriksen, Kittilä and Kolehmainen. The article demonstrates the utility of that framework (both with respect to its morpho‐syntactic and semantic distinctions) and corroborates various of its synchronic and diachronic hypotheses. The author also introduces original data that further advance the typology of M constructions. Overall, the evidence reveals great complexity of M constructions, much greater than presented in grammar books on which crosslinguistic studies tend to be subsequently based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject-verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., "the owner(s) of the house(s) is/are away"). In the general population, attraction errors are not straightforwardly dependent on the presence or absence of morphophonological plural markers but on their syntactic configuration. The same would be expected for dyslexic children if their syntactic problems are not phonological in nature. We also looked at the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing by comparing auditory and written presentation of stimuli and stimuli with high and low frequency attractors. Dyslexic children produced more agreement errors than age-matched controls, but their errors were distributed in the expected manner and did not align with the presence of morphophonological number markers in the subject overall. Furthermore, there was no effect of either presentation mode or attractor frequency on the number of agreement errors. Our results confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that they are not due to a phonological deficit or to verbal working memory limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hallmark of grammatical knowledge is the ability to parse novel syntactic structures. Previous artificial language studies have examined learning hierarchical structures, but few have involved meaningful language and shown generalization to novel structures. This study addressed this issue using the semiartificial language paradigm. The experimental group of monolingual English speakers was exposed to singly embedded sentences combining Chinese syntax with English lexis. A novel testing procedure was used where participants made plausibility judgments on grammatical sentences featuring two‐level embedding. Only correct application of the rules underlying the training sentences permitted correct discrimination of plausible and implausible sentences. The experimental group performed above chance, an untrained control group performed at chance, and an untrained and unaware Chinese control group showed above‐chance performance. Confidence judgments and rule recognition analysis suggested that learning was implicit. We concluded that the experimental group demonstrated structural generalization and might have acquired the syntactic rule system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This work makes the Minkowski sum of ellipsoids into a consolidated tool for the representation of the yield surface of arbitrarily shaped composite cross sections under axial force and biaxial bending and shows how best to use it within the incremental nonlinear analysis of three‐dimensional frames. A geometric interpretation of each term of the sum allows us to construct complex convex surfaces using a low number of ellipsoids, each of them evaluated in a robust and efficient decoupled manner. Specialized algorithms, which exploit the parameterization of the yield surface in terms of a cross‐section collapse mechanism, are proposed for an efficient stress update based on the elastic predictor–return mapping scheme on a three‐dimensional beam finite element. The derivation of the algorithmic tangent moduli for the Minkowski sum completes the elements required for an efficient path‐following nonlinear analysis. The proposed methodology is general and can be applied for the representation of any zonoid yield surface and the corresponding implicit stress integration to a variety of structural and plasticity models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article documents double‐object constructions in contemporary Syrian Arabic and presents an analysis of the case‐frame alternations found there. Some double‐object verbs assign accusative case to their indirect object, as in English, while others assign it dative, as in German. Yet, for both verb types, the double‐object frame productively alternates with a frame in which the indirect object occurs in a prepositional phrase. Consequently, dative has, at the same time, properties of a lexical case (it is contingent on its lexical environment) but also properties of a structural case (it is suppressed in the prepositional frame). Further, restrictions on cliticization, animacy, and idiom patterns indicate that the prepositional frame of verbs displaying a double‐object frame is derived from the underlying double‐object frame. An analysis is presented in which D‐feature checking enforces the order indirect object > direct object in the double‐object frame regardless of the case of the indirect object, and the alternation between dative, accusative, and the prepositional frame is contingent on properties of the applicative head that θ‐licenses the indirect object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates two automated systems, the L2 syntactic complexity analyzer (SCA) and Coh‐Metrix, for their analysis of English syntactic complexity as a way to capture variation across two genres. The purpose of the paper is to partially replicate previous studies that have found complexity differences between narrative and argumentative essays while also evaluating two automated tools that can be used for analysing variation in other contexts. We first test the reliability of SCA and Coh‐Metrix by comparing their results with the hand‐coded results of 30 essays. We then examine the two systems' ability to detect genre effects on syntactic complexity using 162 essays (narrative and argumentative) written by 81 ESL students. Results indicate that the majority of measures from the two systems are reliable, but some measures were not transparent and consistent. Additionally, both SCA and Coh‐Metrix measures show higher syntactic complexity in the argumentative essays than the narratives, confirming both the findings of previous research and that both tools may be valid for studying variation in complexity. Findings are discussed in terms of the motivation for genre differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a classifier occurs with a numeral and an event-denoting expression, it is used as a unit to count events. The classifier is called a verbal classifier if the event-denoting expression is verbal, although the classifier itself is not verbal. This paper argues that a numeral and a verbal classifier have a spec-head relation, and the verbal expression is the complement. The proposal explains a number of syntactic generalizations of verbal classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. Like a frequentative adverb such as twice, a verbal classifier expression is either event-internal or event-external. The two types of classifiers have different possible positions in the language. The position contrasts are explained by different heights of the projection headed by a classifier. Theoretically, on the one hand, this research unifies the syntax of nominal and verbal numeral classifiers; and on the other hand, it explores the syntactic distinctions between event-internal and event-external verbal classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the prosodic, semantic and syntactic properties of fronted wh-echo questions (FWhEQs) in Italian, comparing them to information seeking wh-questions (WhQs). Results from a production experiment showed that the two differ prosodically: FWhEQs start low, rise later (the pitch accent was realized on the verb participle) and end with a high boundary tone, whereas WhQs in most of the cases start with a rise, followed by a small plateau and end with a rise or a low F0. At the syntactic level we argue that a FWhEQ moves as a whole to the specifier of a TopicP within a higher superordinate ForceP. At the semantic level, we propose that FWhEQs differ from regular WhQs in that they express a meta speech act: with a FWhEQ the speaker asks the addressee to repeat an assertion. We formalize this idea arguing that the movement of the whole ForceP to a higher ForceP, together with the obligatory final rising intonation, activates a REQUEST operator in the superordinate ForceP. The REQUEST operator is a meta speech act as it applies to another speech act, rather than to a sentence radical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Scholars have often invoked the progress of chromatic pitches through a piece as a metaphor for dramatic events, defining 'tonal problems' and 'promissory notes' as chromatic pitches that enter early in a piece, threaten the governing tonality's sovereignty and signify a conflict to be resolved (see Cone (1982), Carpenter (1988) and Schachter (1999).). Edward Cone's well-known reading of Schubert's Moment musical in A♭ (Op. 94 No. 6) posits the inability of E♮ to be fully assimilated, expressing 'the occurrence of a disquieting thought to one of a tranquil, easy-going nature'. This article extends these models, interpreting the tonal problems F♮ and C♮ in Brahms's song Unbewegte laue Luft, Op. 57 No. 8, as realising present and future temporalities that remain latent in Georg Friedrich Daumer's poem. Brahms's E major song seems to model the poem's temporal progression from present to future, invoking F♮ to signify the protagonist's suppressed desire in the present and later respelling the pitch as E♯ to suggest emergent desire and its imagined future. Whereas Daumer's poem only contrasts the images of nature's external calm with the protagonist's internal passion, the tonal consequences of F and C in Brahms's setting also draw these images together, suggesting that they are intertwined in the protagonist's perceptions. His initially subconscious desires influence his experience of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This essay explores the interplay between states of syntactic completion and incompletion in the text and music of Brahms's O kühler Wald and how the composer thereby conveys an interpretation of the poetic text to create an experience for the listener that bears a striking resemblance to the experience of the poem's lovelorn persona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deaf individuals usually face more challenges in reading and writing, because they are often deprived of adequate spoken input from their infancy. Research on the language features of deaf individuals' writing is abundant. However, their language structures have as yet been unexplored. In order to address this subject, this article uses the holistic approach of complex network theory. This study builds three syntactic dependency networks, the intent being to capture the macroscopic linguistic features in writing of deaf individuals. Three networks are constructed: one is created from a treebank of texts produced by deaf individuals, and the other two are created from two treebanks of spoken and written language samples produced by hearing people. A dependency-based theory of syntax is used. The results indicate that the language system of individuals with deafness is structurally similar to that of hearing people, especially to that of their spoken language, but individuals with deafness tend to have lower language proficiency in both syntactic and lexical aspects. The rigid use of function words and less diversity of vocabulary might be part of the reason for the observed differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from a study by Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues on comprehension of spoken English requests by a bonobo (Kanzi) and a human infant (Alia) supports Fitch's hypothesis that humans exhibit dendrophilia, or a propensity to manipulate tree structures, to a greater extent than other species. However, findings from language acquisition suggest that human infants do not show an initial preference for certain hierarchical syntactic structures. Infants are slow to acquire and generalize the structures in question, but they can eventually do so. Kanzi, in contrast, is dendrophobic: even though his non-hierarchical strategy impairs comprehension, he never acquires the hierarchical structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that grammatical constructions, specifically argument structure constructions that determine the 'who did what to whom' part of sentence meaning and how this meaning is expressed syntactically, can be considered a kind of relational category. That is, grammatical constructions are represented as the abstraction of the syntactic and semantic relations of the exemplar utterances that are expressed in that construction, and it enables the generation of novel exemplars. To support this argument, I review evidence that there are parallel behavioral patterns between how children learn relational categories generally and how they learn grammatical constructions specifically. Then, I discuss computational simulations of how grammatical constructions are abstracted from exemplar sentences using a domain-general relational cognitive architecture. Last, I review evidence from adult language processing that shows parallel behavioral patterns with expert behavior from other cognitive domains. After reviewing the evidence, I consider how to integrate this account with other theories of language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ten years ago, researchers using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a Semantic Illusion: Semantically anomalous, but structurally well-formed sentences did not affect the N400 component-traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration-but instead produced a P600 effect, which is generally linked to syntactic processing. This finding led to a considerable amount of debate, and a number of complex processing models have been proposed as an explanation. What these models have in common is that they postulate two or more separate processing streams, in order to reconcile the Semantic Illusion and other semantically induced P600 effects with the traditional interpretations of the N400 and the P600. Recently, however, these multi-stream models have been called into question, and a simpler single-stream model has been proposed. According to this alternative model, the N400 component reflects the retrieval of word meaning from semantic memory, and the P600 component indexes the integration of this meaning into the unfolding utterance interpretation. In the present paper, we provide support for this 'Retrieval-Integration (RI)' account by instantiating it as a neurocomputational model. This neurocomputational model is the first to successfully simulate the N400 and P600 amplitude in language comprehension, and simulations with this model provide a proof of concept of the single-stream RI account of semantically induced patterns of N400 and P600 modulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare * a person who [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will analyze the conceptual and computational motivations of the property of displacement in natural languages from a revisited perspective. We will account for displacement phenomena proposing our own version of displacement-as-external token Merge, as opposed to the traditional displacement-as-literal movement or, more recently, displacement-as-copy and Merge (Chomsky ; Kitahara ; Nunes ). As far as empirical data is concerned, we will provide a brief analysis of parasitic gaps and their derivation, comparing our proposal with previous accounts making particular stress on the idea that operations are not feature-driven in a highly constrained syntactic component, but interface-driven, syntax being free and unbounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I investigate the nature of parameters responsible for the distribution of argument ellipsis ( AE) from the perspective of Colloquial Singapore English ( CSE). One recent theory by Saito (2007) suggests that this process, technically analyzed through LF-Copy, is blocked by ϕ-feature agreements of T with subject DPs and v with object DPs, respectively. I provide evidence from Case marking, VP- and CP-ellipsis, and Exceptional Case-Marking constructions that in CSE both functional heads possess abstract ϕ-feature agreement, as in Standard English. The agreement theory predicts that neither the null subject nor null object position should permit AE in CSE. The fact, however, is that AE is blocked in subject positions but permitted in object positions. I propose that AE in CSE is controlled, instead, by the presence of an operator-variable topic chain, formed to reflect the language's topic-prominent profile, as manifested in its definite subject preference. This analysis is supported by the observation that the null subject position allows AE in CSE as long as it is not linked to the topic position, as in the case of the hanging topic construction. The alternative analysis suggests that the cross-linguistic distribution of AE is conditioned by (at least) two parameters: agreement and topichood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the phonetics and phonology of Mayan languages. The focus is primarily descriptive, but the article also attempts to frame the sound patterns of Mayan languages within a larger typological and theoretical context. Special attention is given to areas which are ripe for further descriptive or theoretical investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the morphology and syntax of Mayan languages.It focuses on core verbal complex, including roots, stem formation and voice. It focuses on ergative alignment pattern, with split ergativity and reflexes of syntactic ergativity. Information on embedded clauses and nominal licensing is presented.

Adults exhibit strong preferences when framing symmetrical relations. Adults prefer, for example, "A zebra is like a horse" to "A horse is like a zebra," and "The bicycle is near the building" to "The building is near the bicycle." This is because directional syntax requires more typical or prominent items (i.e., reference points) to be placed in the complement position. Three experiments with children ages 4-8 (N = 181) explored whether children share this sensitivity to directional syntax. Children of this age showed an incipient preference for framing reference points as complements. Stating, "Girls do math as well as boys," which frames boys as the reference point for girls, may therefore actually teach children that boys set the standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the syntactic and semantic properties of movement and adjunction and proposes a new analysis of these two phenomena according to which they are closely related to each other. The basic pieces of grammatical machinery that carry out movement also carry out adjunction. Building on independently appealing ideas concerning neo-Davidsonian semantic composition and 'move as re-merge,' the proposed framework naturally accounts for (i) adjuncts' puzzling status 'either inside or outside' a maximal projection, (ii) adjuncts' ability to escape reconstruction, and (iii) the prohibition on extraction from adjuncts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, a direct assessment of the effect of language lexical-syntactic structure and magnitude semantic access on numerical processing was made by contrasting the performance of Arabic/ Hebrew bilinguals in a digital ( Hindi-digits/ Arabic-digits) and verbal numerical comparison task ( Arabic, an inverted language: Units-Decades, Hebrew, a non-inverted language: Decades-Units). Our data revealed in the digital presentation format (Experiment 1) a regular distance effect in Arabic language- Hindi digits and Hebrew language- Arabic digits, characterized by an inverse relation between reaction times and numerical distance with no difference in the mean reaction times of participants in Arabic- L1 and Hebrew- L2. This indicates that both lexical digits of two-digit numbers in L1 and L2 are similarly processed and semantically accessed. However in the verbal presentation format (Experiment 2) a similar pattern of distance effect was found, but the mean reaction times in Arabic were lower than in Hebrew in each numerical distance. This indicates that the processing of two-digit number words in L1 and L2 is semantically accessed and determined by the syntactic structure of each language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to investigate the association between syntactic awareness and discourse-level reading comprehension in 136 Hong Kong Chinese children. These children, aged 11, from a longitudinal study, were administered a set of cognitive and linguistic measures. Partial correlational analyses showed that children's performances in two syntactic tasks were significantly correlated with their discourse-level reading comprehension. A multiple hierarchical regression analysis indicated that syntactic skills, especially the conjunction cloze task, accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension even when age, nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge, as well as the auto-regressive effect of previous reading comprehension skill were statistically controlled in this study. Findings suggest that syntactic awareness is uniquely associated with discourse-level reading comprehension in Hong Kong fifth graders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author comments on an article related to linguistic grammatical variations in Modern English. It states that English does not show any clear subject-verb agreement and also that Optimality-theoretic typologies limit the space of cross-linguistic syntactic variation. The author suggests that English has a case of highly restricted residual verb-second, which affects a subclass of lexical verbs in Quotative Inversion.

This paper reports a series of formal acceptability-judgment experiments designed to investigate the syntactic properties of a relatively understudied type of wh-dependency: multiple wh-questions in English. By using a factorial definition of island effects made available only by formal experiments, we report an unpredicted pattern of acceptability that suggests the existence of reverse island effects for whether and adjunct islands inside of multiple wh-questions, but not for subject and CNPC islands. We argue that this unpredicted effect can best be analyzed by taking into account the parsing processes that are necessary for real-time comprehension of multiple wh-questions in English. We propose that multiple wh-questions require a backward search for an antecedent that is in many ways similar to the forward search for a gap site that occurs in single wh-questions in English (). We then present additional acceptability-judgment experiments in both English and Japanese to test the predictions of the backward-search analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech errors are a traditional source of evidence about what speakers have to do, and what they occasionally fail to do, when they talk. In particular, the linguistic patterns in errors are theoretically informative for what they disclose about the language production process. Among the most notable regularities in errors is a strong tendency for the structures of sentences to remain stable when words move around. These stable structural properties provide the backdrop against which slips in speaking have been used to explain how sentences develop before they are produced. This article traces the outlines of speech-error analysis and then turns the focus around to look explicitly at how impervious to error the syntactic properties of language are. The aim is to assess the value of systematic studies of syntactic error for tracing the unfolding of spoken language when people try to say what they mean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norwegian allows implicit possessives with nouns in some cases when the subject is the understood possessor (e.g. Han vasket hendene‘he washed hands.DEF’). The core group of nouns that allow this option is body-part nouns, but it can be extended to nouns denoting objects in the ‘personal domain’. There are both syntactic and semantic restrictions on sentences with implicit possessives. These restrictions are discussed, and it is shown that the distribution of nouns with implicit possessives follows that of the local simple reflexive seg. An account is given which highlights the connection between reflexive binding and implicit possessives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents recent research that provides an overarching model of exemplar theory capable of explaining phenomena across the phonetic and syntactic strata. The model represents a unique exemplar-based account of constituency interactions encompassing both linguistic domains. It yields simulation and experimental results in keeping with experimental findings in the literature on syllable duration variability and offers an exemplar-theoretic account of local grammaticality. In addition, it provides some insights into the nature of exemplar cloud formation and demonstrates experimentally the potential gains that can be enjoyed via the use of rich exemplar representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I define exclamatives pragmatically, as a speech act which contains an assertion, and where there is a mismatch between this assertion and a presupposition. The assertion normally expresses a higher degree than expected, i.e. they are scalar. The speech act is instantiated in various ways in the Scandinavian languages. The aim of this article is to describe and characterise the syntactic variation in Scandinavian exclamative clauses, in the standard languages, as well as in some regional variants. First, I discuss the definition of exclamatives, and I recognise three main types, which I call degree, polar and reinforcing exclamatives. Second, I give a survey of the syntactic variation of the three types in Scandinavian, where I discuss syntactic properties such as word order and extraction possibilities as well as lexical, syntactic and prosodic features that are exclusive to exclamatives. Last, I conclude the paper by a taxonomy of exclamatives in Scandinavian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I intend to shed light on the fact that Japanese exclamatives, unlike their English counterparts, may not be embedded under factive verbs but instead may be embedded under a set of assertive predicates such as say and think (first observed in Ono 2006 ). I argue that this contrast is attributed to the interrogative and declarative syntax that English and Japanese exclamatives have, respectively. In order to account for the selection of predicates that may embed Japanese exclamatives, I further argue for a cartographic approach based on Rizzi’s (1997) and Haegeman’s (2006) left periphery structures and following Ono (2006) , namely that Japanese exclamatives always contain MoodP, which allows only a subset of assertive matrix predicates to embed exclamatives given its position above TopicP and FocusP in the hierarchy. Another observation made in the paper is that the subject DP in Japanese exclamatives is obligatorily either aboutness topicalized or exhaustive listing focalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses exclamative utterances that have the form of Y/N questions with no wh-phrase present but only the finite verb in initial position. It will be shown that they cannot be captured by a purely pragmatic ‘reinterpretation’ of Y/N questions. This result implies that verb-initial structures are syntactically ambiguous. An alternative to the traditional view on clause types as features/operators in the C-domain, triggering V–C movement, will be suggested. V–C movement marks syntactically all those structures that correspond to non-assertive speech acts. The structures are disambiguated by non-syntactic means like intonation and/or lexical triggers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materials consisted of four versions of successively more nested syntactic structures. It was found that (1) people read the more nested materials slower than the less nested materials; and (2) the locus of the relative slowdown occurred early in the nested structures. There was no corresponding slowdown when processing the verbs at the end of each clause. The results are therefore not predicted by retrieval-based integration accounts of syntactic complexity. Rather, the results support expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity for these materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the study of the history and structure of English noun phrase (NP) and offers introduction to several articles discussed in the journal. As stated, progress in the syntactic or grammatical theory in the last decade or so has led to analysis of the NP structure and functions within various theoretical frameworks propounded by several experts.

The article discusses the first use of first verbs among the children. It notes that the overall functions, meanings and grammar of verbs in their first appearance in children's speech has flexible use. It points out that they use their verbs in utterances with multiple communicative functions and in multiple syntactic frames. It contends that restricted uses of individual verbs is not a stage of language development. It was found out that children are not as conservative language learners as some language acquisition theories.

Experimental research shows that human sentence processing uses information from different levels of linguistic analysis, for example, lexical and syntactic preferences as well as semantic plausibility. Existing computational models of human sentence processing, however, have focused primarily on lexico-syntactic factors. Those models that do account for semantic plausibility effects lack a general model of human plausibility intuitions at the sentence level. Within a probabilistic framework, we propose a wide-coverage model that both assigns thematic roles to verb–argument pairs and determines a preferred interpretation by evaluating the plausibility of the resulting ( verb, role, argument) triples. The model is trained on a corpus of role-annotated language data. We also present a transparent integration of the semantic model with an incremental probabilistic parser. We demonstrate that both the semantic plausibility model and the combined syntax/semantics model predict judgment and reading time data from the experimental literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When political actors debate the merits of a public policy, they often focus on the consequences of a bill or legislative proposal, with supporters and opponents making stark but contradictory predictions about the future. Building upon the framing literature, I examine how rhetoric about a policy's consequences influences public opinion. I show that predictive appeals work largely by altering people's beliefs about the impact of a policy. Following in the tradition of recent framing research, this article also examines how opinions are influenced when people are exposed to opposing predictions. The analysis focuses on two strategies that are common in real-world debates—the (in which an initial appeal is challenged by a statement making the opposite prediction) and the (which counters an initial appeal by shifting the focus to some other consequence). There are important differences in the effectiveness of these two strategies—a finding that has implications for the study of competitive framing and the policymaking process more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]