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Many attempts to define depiction appeal to viewers' perceptual responses. Such accounts are liable to give a central role in determining depictive content to picture features responsible for the response, design. A different project is to give a compositional semantics for depictive content. Such attempts identify syntax: picture features systematically responsible for the content of the whole. Design and syntax are competitors. But syntax requires system, in how picture features contribute to content, that design does not. By examining John Kulvicki's semantics for basic depictive content, I argue that the relevant systematicity is absent from the pictorial realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connected speech is often used to assess many aspects of an individual's language abilities after stroke. However, it is unknown the degree to which elicitation methods differ in generating structural and syntactic aspects of connected speech, two critical components of successful communication. Quantifying the degree to which elicitation methods differ in eliciting structurally, syntactically, and lexically complex connected speech at the earliest stage of stroke before reorganization and rehabilitation of function independent of clinical diagnosis of aphasia has not been examined to date. Addressing this gap has implications for early clinical intervention as well as empirical studies of connected speech production. We compared two common elicitation methods, picture description and storytelling on lexical, structural, and syntactic measures of connected speech in speakers during the acute stage of left hemisphere stroke. We measured connected speech using an automated quantitative production analysis approach (Fromm et al., 2021) in 71 native-English speaking participants (27 female; 59 ± 13 years) within an average 3.9 days from left hemisphere stroke onset. We tested the degree of agreement and consistency between elicitation methods for lexical, structural, and syntactic measures of connected speech, as well as the degree of concordance in classifying deficits across individuals. Storytelling elicited significantly more words and more structurally complex, lexically diverse, and syntactically accurate speech in comparison to picture description. Elicitation methods differed in measuring outcomes across participants for the lexical and syntactic, but not structural complexity aspects of connected speech where storytelling classified more participants with impairments in comparison to picture description. These differences suggest storytelling provides assessment of connected speech abilities more reflective of real-world abilities where its use is particularly critical for examining individual differences and providing diagnoses of acute stroke language deficits. As a result, using storytelling as a connected speech elicitation method more effectively captures a patient's language capabilities after stroke, consequently informing clinical diagnosis and treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the variation in information structure of Estonian -des, -mata and -maks constructions, and analyzes the factors influencing this variation. The paper describes information structure via the categories of information status and information role. Information status, which refers to the general pragmatic status of a linguistic unit, has two possible values: an information unit or an element of an information unit. Information role refers to the pragmatic status of an element in the information structure of a larger information unit. Information role has five possible values: focus, background of the comment, topic, frame or prominent element. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, this article gives an account of the variation in the information status and information role of Estonian converb constructions. In addition, this paper discusses the way in which the relevant explanatory variables relate to the information status and role of converb constructions. This analysis gives an overview of how the information status of converb constructions relates to the presence of punctuation, the position of the converb construction relative to the main clause, the number of words in the converb construction, the semantic function of the converb construction, the position of the converb within the construction, the morphological form of the converb, and the number of modifiers of the converb. This analysis also discusses how the information role of converb constructions relates to the position and semantic function of the construction and the presence of a lexicogrammatical prominence marker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding on psycholinguistic research on linguistic adaptation, the phenomenon whereby speakers change how they comprehend or produce structures as a result of cumulative exposure to less frequent or unfamiliar linguistic structures, this study asked whether speakers can learn semantic and syntactic properties of the American English vernacular negative auxiliary inversion (NAI) structure (e.g., didn't everybody eat, meaning "not everybody ate") during the course of an experiment. Formal theoretical analyses of NAI informed the design of a task in which American English-speaking participants unfamiliar with this structure were exposed to NAI sentences in either semantically ambiguous or unambiguous contexts. Participants rapidly adapted to the interpretive properties of NAI, selecting responses similar to what would be expected of a native speaker after only limited exposure to semantically ambiguous input. On a separate ratings task, participants displayed knowledge of syntactic restrictions on NAI subject type, despite having no previous exposure. We discuss the results in the context of other experimental studies of adaptation and suggest the implementation of top-down strategies via analogy to other familiar structure types as possible explanations for the behaviors observed in this study. The study illustrates the value of integrating insights from formal theoretical research and psycholinguistic methods in research on adaptation and highlights the need for more interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work in both experimental and naturalistic contexts to understand this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing the form and content of images. These models are empirically credible and can be construed as literal grammars for images. Images can have rich syntactic structure, though of a markedly different form than sentences in language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Truth appears to be a predicate of sentence-like structures. This raises the question of what a sentence is (or what it is to be sentence-like) such that it is truth-apt. A natural move is to treat sentences and truth-aptness as somehow conceptually or metaphysical coeval—made for each other. This resolution conflicts, however, with now standard approaches in syntactic theory that treat sentences as mere epiphenomena. Siding with the developments in syntax, the paper argues that truth-aptness properly belongs, not to sentences, but to clauses as structures that can be selected by verbs that specify truth-apt states. It is further argued that this arrangement is perfectly consistent with truth-conditional semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ScreeLing is a screening instrument developed to assess post-stroke aphasia, via the linguistic levels Syntax, Phonology, and Semantics. It could also be a useful test for the clinical subtypes of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer's dementia (AD), as specific and often selective disorders are expected. Its ability to differentiate between the clinical subtypes of FTD and AD is, however, still unknown. We investigated differences in ScreeLing total and subscores, linguistic-level disorders' relationship with disease severity, and classification abilities, in patients with behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD; n = 46), patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA; n = 105) (semantic variant primary progressive aphasia [svPPA], non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia [nfvPPA], and logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia [lvPPA], AD [ n = 20] and controls [ n = 35]). We examined group differences in ScreeLing total and subscores, and one-, two- or three-level linguistic disorders using one-way analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) or Quade's rank ANCOVA. We used frequency analyses to obtain the occurrence of the linguistic-level disorders. We determined sensitivity and specificity by the area under the curve by receiver-operating characteristics analyses to investigate classification abilities. The total score was lower in patients (bvFTD: 63.8 ± 8.5, svPPA: 58.8 ± 11.3, nfvPPA: 63.5 ± 8.4, lvPPA: 61.7 ± 6.6, AD: 63.8 ± 5.5) than controls (71.3 ± 1.0) (p <.001). Syntax subscores were lower in svPPA (19.4 ± 4.6; p <.001) and lvPPA (20.3 ± 3.2; p =.002) than controls (23.8 ± 0.4). Phonology subscores were lower in lvPPA (19.8 ± 2.6) than bvFTD (21.7 ± 2.8) (p =.010). Semantics subscores were lowest in svPPA (17.8 ± 5.0; p <.002). A selective phonological disorder was most prevalent in lvPPA (34.9%). The higher the disease severity, the more linguistic-level disorders. The optimal cutoff for the total score was 70, and 23 for all three subscores. Good classification abilities were found for the Semantics (svPPA vs. bvFTD), Phonology (lvPPA vs. svPPA), and Syntax (nfvPPA vs. lvPPA) subscores. This easy to administer test gives information about language processing with the potential to improve differential diagnosis in memory clinics and in the future potentially also clinical trial planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During communicative face-to-face interactions, emotional expressions are typically processed along with auditory speech. Although previous research has demonstrated the interaction between emotion and linguistic processes, so far no study has focused on the effect of the speaker's emotional facial expression on natural language processing. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, participants listened to spoken sentences while seeing the portrait of the speaker's face with either happy, neutral, or fearful emotional expression. In Study 1A, the N400 effect, a neural marker of semantic comprehension, was unaffected by the speaker's emotional expression. In Study 1B, we manipulated morphosyntactic agreement. The P600 effect was boosted by the happy emotional expression. This may be interpreted as reflecting additional effort in linguistic reanalysis, in line with the heuristic processing style that characterises positive emotions. The present results demonstrate an influence of the speaker's emotional facial expressions on non-emotional language processing during audiovisual communicative interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs' semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the defining properties of human language is the abundance of potentially unbounded dependencies between elements in a sentence. And yet, how speakers formulate dependencies in sentence production is still poorly understood. Here we examine the timing of verb planning in sentences involving across-the-board and parasitic gap constructions. Using a new task we call the Sentence-Word Interference task, we show that speakers plan the verb of a secondary clause before sentence onset, but selectively when producing across-the-board sentences and not when producing parasitic gap sentences. Based on this timing contrast, we argue that speakers plan verbs predominantly before the production of their dependents, but only when verbs and their dependents engage in both conceptual and direct syntactic relationships. More broadly, the current study suggests that sentence planning is constrained by syntactic relationships that are not reducible to conceptual relationships or to surface word order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language is a key human faculty for communication and interaction that provides invaluable insight into the human mind. Previous work has dissected different linguistic operations, but the large-scale brain networks involved in language processing are still not fully uncovered. Particularly, little is known about the subdomain-specific engagement of brain areas during semantic, syntactic, phonological, and prosodic processing and the role of subcortical and cerebellar areas. Here, we present the largest coordinate-based meta-analysis of language processing including 403 experiments. Overall, language processing primarily engaged bilateral fronto-temporal cortices, with the highest activation likelihood in the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Whereas we could not detect any syntax-specific regions, semantics specifically engaged left posterior temporal areas (left fusiform and occipitotemporal cortex) and the left frontal pole. Phonology showed highest subdomain-specificity in bilateral auditory and left postcentral regions, whereas prosody engaged specifically the right amygdala and the right IFG. Across all subdomains and modalities, we found strong bilateral subcortical and cerebellar contributions. Especially the right cerebellum was engaged during various processes, including speech production, visual, and phonological tasks. Collectively, our results emphasize consistent recruitment and high functional modularity for general language processing in bilateral domain-specific (temporo-frontal) and domain-general (medial frontal/anterior cingulate cortex) regions but also a high specialization of different subareas for different linguistic subdomains. Our findings refine current neurobiological models of language by adding novel insight into the general sensitivity of the language network and subdomain-specific functions of different brain areas and highlighting the role of subcortical and cerebellar regions for different language operations. Public Significance Statement: Language is a key capacity for human communication. Here, we present the largest meta-analysis of 403 neuroimaging experiments on language production and comprehension, including data from 7,112 participants. We provide novel insight into brain areas contributing to different specific linguistic subdomains and highlight the role of subcortical and cerebellar areas for language processing in general and for specific subdomain-related processes. The cerebellum is often neglected in the study of language and should be included in future models on the neurobiology of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Parallel Architecture is a conception of the organization of the mental representations involved in language and of the role of language in the mind as a whole. Its basic premise is that linguistic representations draw on three independent generative systems—phonological, syntactic, and semantic structures—plus a system of interface links by which they communicate with each other. In particular, words serve as partial interface links that govern the way they compose into novel sentences.It is shown that this architecture also provides a natural way to account for our ability to talk about what we see: semantic structure in language has to communicate via interface links with a level of spatial representation that encodes understanding of the physical world. It is suggested that such configurations of independent but linked representations are a widespread feature of cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language comprehension by providing informative cues. How syntactic contextual information influences the processing of incoming words is, however, less known. Here we employed a masked syntactic priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments in the German language to test whether masked primes automatically influence the categorisation of nouns and verbs. We found robust syntactic priming effects with masked primes but only when verbs were morpho-syntactically marked. Furthermore, we found that, compared to baseline, primes slow down target categorisation when the relationship between prime and target is syntactically incorrect, rather than speeding it up when the relationship is syntactically correct. This argues in favour of an inhibitory nature of syntactic priming. Overall, the data indicate that humans automatically extract syntactic features from the context to guide the analysis of incoming words during online language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While prepositions create a phrasal structure in the sentence, they choose complements consisting of words originated from nouns, pronouns or verbs as dependent elements. Prepositional phrases determine specific syntactic roles for themselves and assign various semantic roles to the compulsory element attached to them, in other words, to their complements. In this study, the syntactic roles that prepositions assign to their complements are analysed within the frame of dependency grammar and volition theory while semantic roles are analysed within the frame of role theory, which is discussed within government and binding theory that is one of the subtitles of state grammar and transformational generative grammar. Tuvan language has a large number of inflected prepositions. Inflected prepositions form a prepositional phrase with the words coming before and after them and fulfil a specific function in the sentence. The syntactic and semantic role of each preposition varies according to the dependent morphemes. Therefore, a preposition may have multiple syntactic and semantic roles. This situation can only be resolved in context. In this study, syntactic and semantic roles that inflected prepositions, ışkaş, deg, deeş, -bile and hire, attach to their complements are analysed on the basis of the mentioned theories and within the sample sentences selected from grammar books, dictionaries and literary texts. In the end of each section of preposition analysed, a table consisting of preposition’s meaning, function, complement type, syntactic role, and semantic role is presented. In this way, it is aimed to reveal each feature of the analysed prepositions clearly and collectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the teaching of the noun phrase (NP) in the 4th year of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). Firstly, the lack of progression and depth found in the Secondary Education and Baccalaureate curricula regarding the teaching-learning process of units smaller than sentences is brought to light. Secondly, the didactic transposition about the NP presented in several textbooks from 4th of ESO is revised. We also present a didactic proposal about several grammatical contents that can be taught at this stage, so that the configuration of the NP is examined with a level of profundity and complexity higher than the one from previous years. This proposal is completed with a set of exercises to reinforce the theoretical contents presented. The main goal of this didactic proposal is to address the study of the linguistic system in Secondary not only as a communicative tool, but also as a scientific object. In this way, the metalinguistic ability will be strengthened from the development of skills such as active observation, reflection, hypothesis formulation and (counter)argumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference across verb classes, represented here as a difference in formal feature strength. To fully acquire the relevant grammatical distribution, L2 learners must successfully acquire (i) licensing restrictions on argument structure and (ii) underlying lexical semantic representations of individual verbs. Three groups of L2 learners (n = 66) and a group of native Spanish speakers (n = 19) completed two judgment tasks (one with aural stimuli and one with written stimuli) which presented object experiencer psych verbs in multiple argument structures. Results show that advanced L2 learners are largely sensitive to the distribution tested here; however, while they have acquired relevant licensing restrictions, they may associate fixed feature settings with verbs that allow variable feature settings. These results are consistent with predictions made by the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis and highlight the role of lexical semantic features in second language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work points out the main studies about the syntax of null subjects and their correlated properties in natural languages within the minimalist program. To this end, we presented and discussed the four types of null subject languages which describe the state of the art of the research within the minimalist program, namely: consistent null-subject languages; partial nullsubject languages; radical null-subject languages; and expletive null-subject languages. Considering that Brazilian Portuguese and Finnish are partial null subject languages, we compare the (as)symmetries in the syntax of null subjects between these languages, using approaches not yet widely discussed in the literature. Going beyond the morphology-syntax interface, we conclude that minimalist studies propose that the formal features (hence abstract) in the functional head T are crucial for the licensing and identification of null subjects, including in radical null-subject languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is a chronic, debilitating disorder characterised by distorted thinking, perceptions, behaviours, and even language impairments. We investigated the linguistic anomalies in Korean schizophrenia patients compared to non-psychotic psychiatric controls to determine whether the linguistic anomalies in English speakers with schizophrenia were replicated in Korean speakers. Thirty-four schizophrenia patients and 70 non-psychotic psychiatric controls were included in this study. The SCT was utilised as the text data for analysis. For linguistic analysis, we evaluated texts regarding semantics and syntax. We separately counted the number of semantic or syntactic errors in the written texts of study participants and compared them between patients and controls. Schizophrenia patients showed significantly more semantic errors (p <.001) and syntactic errors (p <.001) per 1,000 characters than non-psychotic psychiatric controls. Specifically, inappropriate word or syntactic component selection is noticeable in schizophrenia patients. These differences were still significant after adjusting for general intelligence measured by the K-WAIS-IV. Schizophrenia patients showed both semantic and syntactic errors in written language. Moreover, these errors seemed to be partly independent of general intelligence. Notably, patients showed a noticeable number of syntactic errors. Further investigation into the language of patients with schizophrenia and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its apparently ambiguous semantics and syntax, Ps 73:24b remains an unresolved crux in Psalms studies. This article brings valency theory to bear upon this cryptic clause. Attention to the valency patterns occurring with the clause's verb (לקח) presents a contextually compelling solution to its grammatical and semantic difficulties, suggesting that the language of Ps 73:24b may not be ambiguous after all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common framing has it that any adequate treatment of quotation has to abandon one of the following three principles: (i) The quoted expression is a syntactic constituent of the quote phrase; (ii) If two expressions are derived by applying the same syntactic rule to a sequence of synonymous expressions, then they are synonymous; (iii) The language contains synonymous but distinct expressions. In the following, a formal syntax and semantics will be provided for a quotational language which adheres to all three principles. The point here is not merely to provide a "possibility proof", but to reveal the hard constraints on the theory of quotation, and to highlight certain assumptions at the syntax/semantics/post-semantics interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Auditory sentence comprehension involves processing content (semantics), grammar (syntax), and intonation (prosody). The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is involved in sentence comprehension guided by these different cues, with neuroimaging studies preferentially locating syntactic and semantic processing in separate IFG subregions. However, this regional specialisation has not been confirmed with a neurostimulation method. Consequently, the causal role of such a specialisation remains unclear. This study probed the role of the posterior IFG (pIFG) for syntactic processing and the anterior IFG (aIFG) for semantic processing with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in a task that required the interpretation of the sentence's prosodic realisation. Healthy participants performed a sentence completion task with syntactic and semantic decisions, while receiving 10 Hz rTMS over either left aIFG, pIFG, or vertex (control). Initial behavioural analyses showed an inhibitory effect on accuracy without task‐specificity. However, electric field simulations revealed differential effects for both subregions. In the aIFG, stronger stimulation led to slower semantic processing, with no effect of pIFG stimulation. In contrast, we found a facilitatory effect on syntactic processing in both aIFG and pIFG, where higher stimulation strength was related to faster responses. Our results provide first evidence for the functional relevance of left aIFG in semantic processing guided by intonation. The stimulation effect on syntactic responses emphasises the importance of the IFG for syntax processing, without supporting the hypothesis of a pIFG‐specific involvement. Together, the results support the notion of functionally specialised IFG subregions for diverse but fundamental cues for language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of language has been investigated by several research communities, including biologists and linguists, striving to highlight similar linguistic capacities across species. To date, however, no consensus exists on the linguistic capacities of non‐human species. Major controversies remain on the use of linguistic terminology, analysis methods and behavioural data collection. The field of 'animal linguistics' has emerged to overcome these difficulties and attempt to reach uniform methods and terminology. This primer is a tutorial review of 'animal linguistics'. It describes the linguistic concepts of semantics, pragmatics and syntax, and proposes minimal criteria to be fulfilled to claim that a given species displays a particular linguistic capacity. Second, it reviews relevant methods successfully applied to the study of communication in animals and proposes a list of useful references to detect and overcome major pitfalls commonly observed in the collection of animal behaviour data. This primer represents a step towards mutual understanding and fruitful collaborations between linguists and biologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We created a dataset of 205 English novel noun-noun compounds (NNCs, e.g., "doctor charity") by combining nouns with higher and lower agentivity (i.e., the probability of being an agent in a sentence). We collected active and passive interpretations of NNCs from a group of 58 English native speakers. We then measured interpretation time differences between NNCs with active and passive interpretations (i.e., 108 NNCs), using data obtained from a group of 68 English native speakers. Data were collected online using crowdsourcing platforms (SONA and Prolific). The datasets are available at osf.io/gvc2w/and can be used to address questions about semantic and syntactic composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine here the distribution of morphological case (e.g., accusative, genitive, and dative) among object complements of monotransitive verbs in Classical Greek (CG). Accusative-marked objects are generally deemed to be direct objects (DO), while dative- and genitive-marked complements are typically treated as syntactically or semantically separate, sometimes being treated as objects bearing exceptional/semantic/quirky case and sometimes being analyzed simply as indirect objects (IO). Restricting our focus to verbs which have a single complement, we can observe that the distribution of accusative (ACC), genitive (GEN), and dative (DAT) marking on these in CG is atypical. CG productively places DAT and GENNP s alongside ACCNP s as a singular complement to monotransitive verbs, allowing them to occupy what would normally be thought of as the direct-object position, but for their GEN and DAT case-marking. We offer an analysis of these verbs and their semanto-syntactic collocations, seeking to understand what is communicated through the marking of either ACC, GEN, or DAT on complement NP s. We find first that ACC and GEN-marking verbs interact in a transitivity hierarchy, being set apart by the change of state of the object (following an analysis laid out by Luraghi 2010). Second, we find that DAT-marking verbs exist outside of this hierarchy, making up their own productive class of interaction verbs , those which denote a complex series of overlapping subevents (first laid out by Blume 1998). Thus, this study offers an analysis of a wide array of ACC, GEN, and DAT case-marking verbs collected from a corpus of nine Classical Greek authors, providing the first statistical analysis of the conundrum of 'atypical' case-selection patterns of Classical Greek monotransitive verbs, wherein non-ACC cases are used to mark what appear to be DO s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current models of the affinity between syntax and vocabulary are complex and recognize the contribution of bootstrapping and computational processes. To date, the mutual facilitation between these two constructs over time has not been studied in second language (L2) school children. The present study investigated longitudinally the direction and strength of the associations between syntactic and vocabulary skills in English Language Learners (ELLs; N = 409, 204 females, M age = 78 months, low socioeconomic status backgrounds) and their monolingual English-speaking peers (EL1; N = 157, 92 females, M age = 77 months, low socioeconomic status backgrounds). Children were assessed annually from Grade 1 to Grade 4 on a syntactic and a vocabulary task. Overall, autoregressive cross-lagged analyses indicated that early syntax predicted later vocabulary and vice versa, yet, the magnitude of prediction varied across groups. Notably, in the early stages of L2 learning, the predictive power from vocabulary to syntax was stronger than that in the opposite direction. Moreover, the predictive power from vocabulary to syntax was consistently stronger in the ELL than in the EL1 group. The results suggest that, in general, with sufficient quantity and quality of exposure to the L2, lexical and syntactic bootstrapping coexist. However, among novice young ELLs, bootstrapping is stronger from vocabulary to syntax than the other way around. Results underscore the importance of studying the relations between vocabulary and syntax longitudinally, and caution about an injudicious application of L1-based models to young L2 children's language development. Public Significance Statement: In this longitudinal study, we followed 409 ELLs and 157 EL1s from Grades 1 to 4 and assessed them annually on vocabulary and syntax. We found that children build up syntax based on vocabulary, and vice versa, that they learn novice vocabulary from syntactic cues. While this observation applies to both ELLs and EL1s, the magnitude of such relations varies across groups. Results suggest that ELLs consistenty rely more on vocabulary to develop syntax than their EL1 peers. This study contributes to a more granular understanding of vocabulary and syntactic development of ELL and EL1 children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated how second language speakers use syntactic and semantic cues in processing complex sentences. Turkish speakers of English, native speakers of English and native speakers of Turkish participated in a self-paced reading experiment, a read-aloud task and a pen-and-paper questionnaire in their relevant languages. The participants' working memory capacity was also measured. The results supported the primacy of syntax view for native speakers of Turkish and English (Frazier & Fodor, 1978). Both groups of native speakers primarily used syntactic cues in their on-line decisions; semantic information influenced later decisions only. The second language speakers, however, used semantic cues in both their initial and later decisions, with evidence for accessing complex syntactic representations. The results are taken to support the view that native and non-native speakers weight linguistic cues differentially (Cunnings, 2017). The potential reasons for differential cue-retrieval in the first and second language are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this text is to offer an overview of current research directions in comparative syntax and semantics, considering a brief history of the two areas and their current international trends. As Contrastive Linguistics still presents relatively incipient development in Portuguese-speaking areas, the main paths of research in diachronic syntax and semantics are presented in the formalist, functionalist and variationist strands, as well as the research groups that represent them, especially in Brazil and Portugal. Finally, the contributions of the articles that make up the special issue that accompanies this text are described, as well as a reflection on the directions that they point for future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The works of Henry James (1843-1916) are often considered precursors of English-language modernism due to their treatment of consciousness. To represent the characters' mental activity, James employs long and winding sentences, ambiguities, and subtle inversions of word order. As a result, the language he uses becomes aesthetically self-centered. Building upon this notion, our aim is to analyze how James employs these techniques to linguistically elaborate on the narrative category of space in his novel, The Golden Bowl, which was published in 1904. We propose that the author prefigures literary modernism by employing syntax and semantics to construct space - or the material dimension around the characters - in a distinctive manner. To conduct this analysis, we draw upon the insights of Luis Alberto Brandão (2013), Kate Stanley (2013), Stephen Kern (2011), Malcolm Bradbury and James Mcfarlane (1991), and Mary Cross (1981). Our findings reveal that the spatiality of The Golden Bowl, being an integral part of a structure that prioritizes the medium itself, moves away from mere empirical or accessory representation of material reality. Instead, spatiality gains formal prominence by actively interrupting expected linguistic continuities and destabilizing the reader's attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the perfective progressive periphrasis (PPP) in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) and Argentinian Spanish (AS) in a comparative way. Based on different linguistic tests, we make two statements regarding the PPP in comparison with the imperfective progressive periphrasis (IPP). Firstly, we claim that the PPP has a progressive and perfective meaning. Secondly, we claim that the PPP allows iterative readings when combined with telic events (i.e., achievements in BrP and AS and accomplishments just in AS). We propose a syntactic and semantic analysis which accounts for these observations in a compositional way: while the gerund form expresses a progressive meaning (present in both periphrases), the auxiliary on the PPP expresses a perfective meaning which allows the iterative readings observed in this periphrasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers jointly model multiple linguistic tasks (e.g., joint modeling of named entity recognition and named entity classification and joint modeling of syntactic parsing and semantic parsing) with an implicit assumption that these individual tasks can enhance each other via the joint modeling. Before conducting research on jointly modeling multiple tasks, however, such researchers hardly examine whether such assumption is true or not. In this paper, we empirically examine whether named entity classification improves the performance of named entity recognition as an empirical case of examining whether semantics improves the performance of a syntactic task. To this end, we firstly specify the way to determine whether a linguistic task is a syntactic task or a semantic task according to both syntactic theory and semantic theory. After that, we design and conduct extensive experiments on two well-known benchmark datasets using three representative yet diverse state-of-the-art models. Experimental results demonstrate that named entity recognition does not lie at the semantic level and is not a semantic task; instead, it is a syntactic task and that the joint modeling of named entity recognition and classification does not improve the performance of named entity recognition. Experimental results also demonstrate that traditional handcrafted feature models can achieve state-of-the-art performance in comparison with the auto-learned feature model on named entity recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, the written narratives of bilingual middle school students who acquired Turkish as a second language were examined in terms of syntax and semantics. The study group of the current study is comprised of 31 bilingual middle school students (15 girls and 16 boys) attending a school in the Mazıdağı district of the city of Mardin in the spring term of the 2020-2021 school year. All the students in the study group are bilingual students who first acquired their regional language and then Turkish at school or in the social environment. The study was carried out using the document analysis method, one of the qualitative research designs. Content analysis was performed on the written products of the participating students. In the study, the bilingual middle school students were asked to create a fictional text within one class hour, based on the five visuals previously given to them. No intervention was made to the students who created the text during the writing process, they were only allowed to perform creative writing from the visuals presented to them, and the syntax of the texts created by these students, who had acquired Turkish as a second language, was examined. It was determined that the mother tongue is effective in the syntax formed by the students in their written narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combined with CCL and BCC corpus, the authors analyze the syntactic and semantic features of the multi-category word “一阵风（Yizhenfeng）” from a synchronic perspective. Through sorting out the lexicalization process of the word, it is believed that it first appeared in the Tang Dynasty as a phrase and changed as an adverb in the Ming Dynasty. It develops as a verb in modern Chinese. The change of syntactic position and the grammaticalization of “一（Yi）” are the motivation of the word. Metaphor is the formation mechanism of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explore the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and language domain (vocabulary, syntax, process), the QUILS was administered to 212 kindergartners. Children from very-high poverty schools performed significantly below children from high poverty and mid-low poverty schools. SES impacts language-learning processes (i.e., fast mapping) in addition to language products (i.e., vocabulary, syntax). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan and the argument/adjunct property of relevant syntactic elements is approached from a generative perspective. The distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan demonstrates a regular pattern. Some nominalizers are bi-functional in that they can mark both participant and event nominalizations while others are uni-functional in that they can only mark participant nominalizations. It is found that the difference between the two types of nominalizers correlates to whether the nominalizer (NML) is argument-associated or adjunct-associated. An account of the correlation is developed in the theoretical framework of generative grammar. It is argued that the syntactic derivation of an NML-phrase gives rise to a binding relationship between the nominalizer and the suppressed element in the source constituent Aspect Phrase (AspP) or the AspP itself, leading to a condition on its semantic interpretation. The condition is satisfied in a participant NML-phrase headed by a nominalizer of either type and in an event NML-phrase headed by a bi-functional nominalizer. It is not in an event NML-phrase headed by a uni-functional nominalizer for the reason that in the calculation of event semantics arguments align with events while adjuncts align with predicates. Specifically, a bi-functional nominalizer, being argument-associated, semantically matches both a suppressed argument in a participant NML-phrase and the source constituent AspP, whereas a uni-functional one, being adjunct-associated, semantically matches a suppressed adjunct in a participant NML-phrase but not the source constituent AspP. Consequently, no event NML-phrase headed by an adjunct-associated nominalizer is found in this language. The findings of this study have implications for both analyzing the distribution of nominalizers in other Tibeto-Burman languages and the syntactic and semantic mechanisms that constrain them, and for classifying the argument/adjunct asymmetry, which is fundamental in most current linguistic frameworks as well as research on human sentence processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first systematic investigation of the role of insubordination, the diachronic conventionalization of formally subordinate clauses as main clauses, in the syntax and semantics of the Ancient Greek sentence. Since diachronic studies are still a desideratum, this paper details the insubordination of if- and that-clauses from Archaic to Post-Classical Greek. Firstly, a principled diachronic analysis of the insubordination of various if-wishes (with ϵἰ, ϵἰ/αἲ γάρ and ϵἴθϵ/αἴθϵ (γάρ)) and that-wishes (with ὡς and ἵνα) is performed using both functional (discursive vs syntactic independence) and formal criteria (vocatives, particles, sentence complexity, mood extensions) in order to determine their relative degree of conventionalization of the main clause use. Subsequently, insubordinate directive, assertive and evaluative constructions (with ϵἰ, ἐάν, ὅπως and ἵνα) from Archaic, Classical and Post-Classical Greek are analysed before presenting a diachronic constructional typology of insubordination and suggestions for future avenues of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awake brain surgery, combined with neurophysiological evaluation and intraoperative mapping, is one of the preferential lines of treatment when approaching low-grade gliomas. Speech and language assessment is used while applying Direct Electrical Stimulation (DES) and during the resection of a lesion/tumour, as it allows to establish related eloquent areas and optimise the extent of the resection and avoid impairments. Patients need to be assessed pre, intra and post-surgery, but in under resourced countries such as Portugal, there are still no standardised and validated tools to conduct this type of evaluation. To address this need, the tasks of the Dutch Linguistic Intraoperative Protocol (DuLIP) were adapted to European Portuguese, and the resulting materials were standardised for a group of 144 Portuguese participants. For each task, the impact of age, gender and schooling were measured. The resulting Portuguese version of the DuLIP (DuLIP-EP) consists of 17 tasks, including phonological, syntactic, semantic, naming and articulatory tests. No significant differences were found between male and female participants. However, schooling influenced phonological and syntactic fluency, object naming and verb generation. Schooling and age had a significant impact on semantic fluency and reading with semantic odd word out tasks. This is the first contribution to the standardisation of a tool that can be used during an awake brain surgery in Portugal, which includes a new phonological odd word out task that is not currently available in the Dutch version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a computational approach to Arabic syntax. The approach uses the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) framework. Semantic networks and frames were used to handle computational semantics using lambda notation. This was implemented in Prolog using Definite Clause Grammar (DCG) as a formalism for analyzing and generating syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the perfective progressive periphrasis (PPP) in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) and Argentinian Spanish (AS) in a comparative way. Based on different linguistic tests, we make two statements regarding the PPP in comparison with the imperfective progressive periphrasis (IPP). Firstly, we claim that the PPP has a progressive and perfective meaning. Secondly, we claim that the PPP allows iterative readings when combined with telic events (i.e., achievements in BrP and AS and accomplishments just in AS). We propose a syntactic and semantic analysis which accounts for these observations in a compositional way: while the gerund form expresses a progressive meaning (present in both periphrases), the auxiliary on the PPP expresses a perfective meaning which allows the iterative readings observed in this periphrasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To estimate comparative efficiency of voice recognition system Voice Recognition System (VRS) and Medical Transcriptionist (MT) by qualitative and quantitative assessment of errors in Radiology Reports at Cross-Sectional Imaging. Study Design: Prospective cross-sectional study. Place and Duration: Dow Institute of Radiology, DUHS; from 1st February to 30th April 2020. Methodology Total consecutive criteria 201 cross-sectional reports were included in the study, these cases dictated by Radiologists and transcribed by Medical Transcriptionist were re-phonated on Voice Recognition System (VRS); the outcome of these reports were saved on Microsoft word files. Voice Recognition USB Headset and the microphone-both systems were analyzed for the functionality of VRS. Data was further categorized into CT and MRI long and short cases; error types and frequency were recorded. Results: Mean Error rate (MER) of the Reports for voice recognition system (n=201) was 15.2% +/- 12.3 (S.D.) while that for Medical Transcriptionist (n=201) was 2% +/- 1.94 (S.D.). Independent t-test showed statistically significant greater Error Rate for VRS as compared to MT; [p-value 0.000]. A linear positive correlation was seen between no. of errors and total word count. There was no statistically significant difference between no. of errors for CT category as compared to MRI category, but regarding the error rate of MT and VRS Reports for MRI reports; there was a significant association of MER in the long cases as compared to short cases. In voice recognition system Reports, syntactic errors were found in a total of 184 Reports whereas semantic errors were found in a total of 82 reports. Typographical type error was the leading error seen in 175 Reports In Medical Transcriptionist reports; Syntactic and Semantic errors were seen in only a few Reports (14); [p-value-0.022]. Conclusion: Medical Transcriptionist was found to have higher efficacy as compared to Voice recognition. VR has a significantly high frequency of error rate as compared to MT, deeming it unsuitable for implementation in cross-sectional imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crucial issue in the debate about the correct treatment of natural language tense concerns covert variables: do we have reason to think there are any in the syntax, as the quantifier theorist maintains? If not, it seems we can quickly discount the quantifier theory from consideration, without even considering the data in its favour. And, indeed, there is a good reason to doubt that there are such variables: contemporary syntactic theory, notably, does not seem to posit them. I respond to this argument going from the premise that positing covert variables is illicit to the conclusion that quantifier theories of tense are false. I argue that the argument fails by suggesting a non-committal understanding of the process of positing covert variables. On this view, even if we are not doing fundamental syntax in so positing, nevertheless there is a reason to think we are doing something theoretically productive, because it seems like an important part of the practice of semantics and because it seems like semantics is a discipline which is making progress. The progress of semantics supports the methodology of positing variables at its heart; the quantifier theorist of tense, accordingly, need not worry about their syntactic commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heyday of discussions initiated by Searle's claim that computers have syntax, but no semantics has now past, yet philosophers and scientists still tend to frame their views on artificial intelligence in terms of syntax and semantics. In this paper I do not intend to take part in these discussions; my aim is more fundamental, viz. to ask what claims about syntax and semantics in this context can mean in the first place. And I argue that their sense is so unclear that that their ability to act as markers within any disputes on artificial intelligence is severely compromised; and hence that their employment brings us nothing more than an illusion of explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the position of object and adverbial clitic pronouns in coordinated affirmative verb-first declaratives introduced by e(t) "and" in Old Occitan and early Old French, a context in which clitics are variably preverbal or postverbal. An empirical study reveals that this variation is principled and reflects semantico-discursive properties in the same way in these two related and grammatically similar medieval Gallo-Romance varieties. On a theoretical level, I posit that preverbal clitics occur when conjunction occurs at the TP level, and postverbal clitics occur when conjunction occurs at the CP level, and that the choice of clause structure (TP vs. CP) for second conjunct clauses depends on illocutionary force, which in turn depends on discourse coherence relations and the semantics of verba dicendi (verbs of utterance). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. First, I review classic arguments for compositionality and conclude that they fail to establish compositionality as a property of human language. Next, I state a new competence argument, acknowledging the fact that any competent user of a language L can assign to most expressions in L at least one meaning which is a function only of the meanings of the expression's parts and of its syntactic structure. I then discuss selected results from cognitive neuroscience, indicating that the human brain possesses the processing capacities presupposed by the competence argument. Finally, I outline a language processing architecture consistent with the neuroscience results, where semantic representations may be generated by a syntax‐driven stream and by an "asyntactic" processing stream, jointly or independently. Compositionality is viewed as a constraint on computation in the former stream only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural use of language involves at least two individuals. Some studies have focused on the interaction between senders in communicative situations and how the knowledge about the speaker can bias language comprehension. However, the mere effect of a face as a social context on language processing remains unknown. In the present study, we used event-related potentials to investigate the semantic and morphosyntactic processing of speech in the presence of a photographic portrait of the speaker. In Experiment 1, we show that the N400, a component related to semantic comprehension, increased its amplitude when processed within this minimal social context compared to a scrambled face control condition. Hence, the semantic neural processing of speech is sensitive to the concomitant perception of a picture of the speaker's face, even if irrelevant to the content of the sentences. Moreover, a late posterior negativity effect was found to the presentation of the speaker's face compared to control stimuli. In contrast, in Experiment 2, we found that morphosyntactic processing, as reflected in left anterior negativity and P600 effects, is not notably affected by the presence of the speaker's portrait. Overall, the present findings suggest that the mere presence of the speaker's image seems to trigger a minimal communicative context, increasing processing resources for language comprehension at the semantic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between form and meaning is central to the theory of language. Traditionally, syntax and semantics are viewed as two different levels of representation. Based on insights from the intersection of dynamical systems theory and the theory of computation, and guided by linguistic data, I argue that there is only one space, a syntacticsemantic one. I model it here as a stable, countably infinite attractor of an iterated map dynamical system. One advantage of this approach is that it supports a unified treatment of grammatical and ungrammatical processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short text similarity measurement methods play an important role in many applications within natural language processing. This paper reviews the research literature on short text similarity (STS) measurement method with the aim to (i) classify and give a broad overview of existing techniques; (ii) find out its strengths and weaknesses in terms of the domain the independence, language independence, requirement of semantic knowledge, corpus and training data, ability to identify semantic meaning, word order similarity and polysemy; and (iii) identify semantic knowledge and corpus resource that can be utilized for the STS measurement methods. Furthermore, our study also considers various issues such as the difference between the various text similarity methods and the difference between semantic knowledge sources and corpora for text similarity. Although there are a few review papers in this area, they focus mostly only on one/two existing techniques. Furthermore, existing review papers do not cover recent research. To the best of our knowledge, this is a comprehensive systematic literature review on this topic. The findings of this research can be as follows: It identified four semantic knowledge and eight corpus resources as external resources that can be classified into general-purpose and domain-specific. Furthermore, the existing techniques can be classified into string-based, corpus-based, knowledge-based and hybrid-based. Moreover, expert researchers can utilize this review as a benchmark as well as reference to the limitations of current techniques. The paper also identifies the open issues that can be considered as feasible opportunities for future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the neurobiology of syntax, a methodological challenge is to vary syntax while holding semantics constant. Changes in syntactic structure usually correlate with changes in meaning. We approached this challenge from a new angle. We deployed word lists--typically, the unstructured control in studies of syntax--as both test and control stimuli. Three-noun lists ("lamps, dolls, guitars") were embedded in sentences ("The eccentric man hoarded lamps, dolls, guitars...") and in longer lists ("forks, pen, toilet, rodeo, lamps, dolls, guitars..."). This allowed us to minimize contributions from lexical semantics and local phrasal combinatorics: the same words occurred in both conditions, and in neither case did the list items locally compose into phrases (e.g., "lamps" and "dolls" do not form a phrase). Crucially, the list partakes in a syntactic tree in one case but not the other. Lists-in-sentences increased source-localized MEG activity at; 250-300 ms from each of the list item onsets in the left inferior frontal cortex, at; 300-350 ms in the left anterior temporal lobe and, most reliably, at; 330-400 ms in left posterior temporal cortex. In contrast, the main effects of semantic association strength, which we also varied, localized in the left temporoparietal cortex, with high associations increasing activity at; 400 ms. This dissociation offers a novel characterization of the structure versus word meaning contrast in the brain: the frontotemporal network that is familiar from studies of sentence processing can be driven by the sheer presence of global sentence structure, while associative semantics has a more posterior neural signature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) has been associated with semantic processing, the role of this region in syntactic structure building of sentences remains a subject of debate. Functional neuroimaging studies contrasting well‐formed sentences with word lists lacking syntactic structure have produced mixed results. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined whether the left ATL is selectively involved in semantic processing or also plays a role in syntactic structure building by manipulating syntactic complexity and meaningfulness in a novel way. To deprive semantic/pragmatic information from a sentence, we replaced all content words with pronounceable meaningless placeholders. We conducted an experiment with a 2 × 2 factorial design with factors of SEMANTICS (natural sentences [NAT]; sentences with placeholders [SPH]) and SYNTAX (the basic Japanese Subject‐Object‐Verb [SOV] word order; a changed Object‐Subject‐Verb [OSV] word order). A main effect of SEMANTICS (NAT > SPH) was found in the left ATL, as well as in the ventral occipitotemporal regions. The opposite contrast (SPH > NAT) revealed activation in the dorsal regions encompassing Brodmann area 44, the premotor area, and the parietal cortex in the left hemisphere. We found no main effect of SYNTAX (OSV > SOV) in a subregion of the left ATL that was more responsive to natural sentences than meaningless sentences. These results indicate selective involvement of a subregion of the left ATL in semantic/pragmatic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]