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Copyright of Alustath is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There is a long-standing debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities—accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, and so on. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence linking common linguistic patterns to specific features of human cognition, but these experiments tend to use English speakers, who in many cases have direct experience with the common patterns of interest. Here we highlight the importance of testing populations whose languages go against cross-linguistic trends. We investigate whether adult monolingual speakers of Kîîtharaka, which has an unusual way of ordering words, mirror the word-order preferences of English speakers. We find that they do, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representations play a role in shaping word order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-label text classification is a method for categorizing textual data based on features extracted from the original textual information. When it comes to modelling text structural properties, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has demonstrated outstanding performance. However, most existing graph-based models do not model the structure of a single text unit and do not consider the sequence information in each document (e.g., word order). To resolve these issues and fully utilize the text's structural and sequential details, a text classification model called Sequential GCN with Multi-Head Attention (SGCN-MHA) is proposed in this paper. For each text, a separate text graph is constructed in which nodes are the words of the text, and the edges between nodes corresponding to the word relations. Then the GCN is used to extract the structural feature. To enable the word nodes in the document graph to hold contextual information, the BiLSTM is also applied to learn the sequential feature for each graph. Finally, the Multi-Head Attention mechanism is adopted to interact with these two features and then aggregate them to get access to critical information in the text. The efficiency of our approach has been tested on two standard datasets, including comparative and ablation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word order is one of the most important grammatical devices and the basis for language understanding. However, as one of the most popular NLP architectures, Transformer does not explicitly encode word order. A solution to this problem is to incorporate position information by means of position encoding/embedding (PE). Although a variety of methods of incorporating position information have been proposed, the NLP community is still in want of detailed statistical researches on position information in real-life language. In order to understand the influence of position information on the correlation between words in more detail, we investigated the factors that affect the frequency of words and word sequences in large corpora. Our results show that absolute position, relative position, being at one of the two ends of a sentence and sentence length all significantly affect the frequency of words and word sequences. Besides, we observed that the frequency distribution of word sequences over relative position carries valuable grammatical information. Our study suggests that in order to accurately capture word–word correlations, it is not enough to focus merely on absolute and relative position. Transformers should have access to more types of position-related information which may require improvements to the current architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the syntax of interrogative clauses in Istro-Romanian. The aim is to determine the parametric settings for V-to-C, subject placement (SVO or VSO) and the target for constituent movement under discourse triggers. The findings indicate that Istro-Romanian preserved the parametric settings from Old Romanian, especially those that converged with the parametric settings in Croatian grammar. In particular, SVO can be explained only through inheritance, whereas VSO, lack of V-to-C and scrambling are a matter of both inheritance and convergence with Croatian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual analysis of trajectory topics is helpful for mining potential trajectory patterns, but the traditional visual analysis method ignores the evolution of the temporal coherence of the topic. In this paper, a novel visual analysis method for dynamic topic analysis of traffic trajectory is proposed, which is used to explore and analyze the traffic trajectory topic and evolution. Firstly, the spatial information is integrated into trajectory words, calculating the dynamic trajectory topic model based on dynamic analysis modeling and, consequently, correlating the evolution of the trajectory topic between adjacent time slices. Secondly, in the trajectory topic, a representative trajectory sequence is generated to overcome the problem of the trajectory topic model not considering the word order, based on the improved Markov Decision Process. Subsequently, a set of meaningful visual codes is designed to analyze the trajectory topic and its evolution through the parallel window visual model from a spatial-temporal perspective. Finally, a case evaluation shows that the proposed method is effective in analyzing potential trajectory movement patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the numeral phrase in Soikkola Ingrian. It focuses on the external syntax of the numeral phrase (first of all, case marking of its components) and on the number agreement between the numeral phrase in the subject position and the predicate. The sources of data are (a) a collection of spontaneous speech samples recorded in 2006-2013, (b) samples of spontaneous speech published by previous researchers, (c) elicited material recorded in 2006-2023. Though the numeral phrase in Soikkola Ingrian preserves most of the common Finnic traits, it has some less common features, e.g. agreement in all numeral phrases with a numeral ending in 'one' or expressing approximate quantity through a reversed word order. Most likely these features arose due to the contact influence of Russian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the cross-language influence of a reader's first language (L1, German) grammar knowledge on the syntactic processing of sentences in their second language (L2, English), using a grammaticality judgement task and comparing results with monolingual L1 English-speakers. In Experiment 1, unbalanced bilinguals (N = 82) read sentences in their L1 German and L2 English that were either grammatical in German but not English, grammatical in English but not German, or ungrammatical in both languages. Sentences were presented in mixed-language blocks. Grammaticality judgements were less accurate and slower for ungrammatical L2 sentences that were grammatical in their literal L1 translation, compared with sentences that were ungrammatical in both languages. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with an independent German-English bilingual sample (N = 78), using monolingual language blocks. In Experiment 3, effects were absent in decision accuracy and weaker in decision latency for monolingual English readers (N = 54). A post hoc validation study with an independent sample of L1 English-speakers (n = 21) provided further evidence that the ungrammatical English sentences with German word order were indeed less natural and grammatically acceptable to L1 English-speakers than the grammatical English sentences. These findings suggest that, consistent with competition models of language comprehension, multiple languages are simultaneously active and can compete during syntactic processing. However, due to the complex nature of cross-language comparisons, the cross-language transfer effects are likely to be driven by multiple interacting factors, of which one is cross-language transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to elucidate the subject and non-subject agreement mechanisms within Yemsa relative clauses, an area not comprehensively covered by existing research. By analysing these agreement forms, the study seeks to bridge the identified gap in the understanding of Yemsa's syntactic structures. The research questions guiding this study focus on the mechanisms through which subject agreements are manifested in Yemsa's relative clauses and the morphological markers they employ, alongside an examination of how non-subject agreements within these clauses diverge from subject agreements. The data were collected through the elicitation technique through informant interviews about subject and non-subject agreements in the Yemsa relative clauses. The data were analysed using a descriptive approach. The person-marker inventories are suffixes. Siewierska's Prominence Hierarchy works in Yemsa. The order of the suffixes is modifier > head. Person markers simultaneously indicate masculine and feminine referents and numbers. Siewierska's Predicate Hierarchy works on Yemsa. The suffix element -nà appears in the relative verbs. The word order in the relative clause is (O)VS. The nominative case is unmarked, whereas the accusative case is marked. The subject argument is expressed in the same manner as an independent clause. The description of the subject and the non-subject agreement in the Yemsa relative clauses has significant implications for developing the general features of Omotic and Afroasiatic languages. The study will serve as an input for the preparation of pedagogical materials in the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses pragmatically marked structures in Kagayanen language, a Western Austronesian language spoken in the central Philippines. Topics discussed include negative constructions, non-declarative speech acts and special focus constructions. Also discussed are interjections and the general pro-form kwa.

Copyright of Philologist / Filolog: Journal of Language, Literary & Cultural Studies is the property of University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Philology / Univerzitet u Banjoj Luci, Filoloski Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines data from Spanish middle-passive sentences whose grammatical subject contains a body-part noun, externally possessed by means of a dative possessor. I advocate for an analysis whereby the possessor originates inside the theme DP and raises to the specifier of an applicative projection to be licensed with dative case. I show that the unmarked order for dative DPs in these configurations is preverbal. These phrases may appear as the sole preverbal constituent, presumably in preverbal subject position, thus forcing the theme DP to remain inside the VP; alternatively, both the dative DP and theme DP can occur preverbally, in which case, the former appears to be left dislocated while the latter would be probed to preverbal subject position. This last scenario leads to a minimality violation, since the theme would be probed over the empty pronominal standing for the possessor that must necessarily sit in Spec, ApplP for the inalienable possession construal to obtain. Instead, I argue that both preverbal dative and theme DPs in Spanish middle-passive sentences are left dislocated and corefer with empty pronominals inside the sentence; the null dative possessor, being closer to T° always raises to subject position, which avoids any potential intervention effects. Finally, I explore how these data can be analyzed within a paratactic approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to define the featural composition of the complementizers that introduce subjunctive complements in Istro-Romanian, and to identify the internal organization of the subjunctive clause in terms of subject positions, verb movement, clitic placement and constituent fronting. In a nutshell, the observation is that the complementizer neca replaces se within the syntactic pattern of Old Romanian; that is, a pattern that displays intra- and inter-language variation with respect to the distribution of complementizers within the subjunctive CP. Tests of word order also indicate intra-language variation in the parametric settings for clitic placement (either high or low), for the argumental subject position (either in Spec,TP, yielding SVO, or in Spec,vP, yielding VSO) and for constituent movement under discourse triggers (either scrambling or fronting to CP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although extensive research has been carried out on opaque formulaic language where the meaning is not the sum of the individual words (i.e., idioms and many collocations), it is still not clear how cross-language congruency and frequency of exposure influence the learning of transparent formulaic language in an L2. In the current study, self-paced reading along with offline word order recognition tasks were used to investigate the role of cross-language congruency and the frequency of exposure on the learning and processing of fully transparent binomials. In the self-paced reading, Arabic second language learners of English and native English speakers encountered three types of binomial phrases either two or five times in English texts: English-only binomials, Arabic-only binomials that were translated into English, and congruent binomials (acceptable in English and Arabic). A subsequent offline task revealed that both native and non-native speakers developed knowledge of the 'correct' order of binomials (i.e., fish and chips, not chips and fish) after only two exposures in the self-paced reading. Native speakers were more accurate on congruent and English-only items than Arabic-only items, while non-natives speakers exhibited no differences in accuracy across the binomial types. The offline task showed that native speakers responded faster to congruent and English-only items than Arabic-only, and non-native speakers responded faster to congruent items than English-only and Arabic-only. The frequency of exposure had no effect, with no difference in response times and accuracy between two and five exposures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "Feature-exponence mapping in language contact," discusses the relevance of models of grammar that distinguish between underlying syntactic features and their morpho-phonological representation in analyzing bilingual and multilingual data. The paper argues that feature reassembly, a framework developed in the 90s for studying second language acquisition, is unnecessary when using these models. The article also explores the relationship between complexity and embeddedness in feature bundles and the importance of scrutinizing the feature-exponence mapping using multilingual data. It concludes by discussing the implications of different morphological theories on the relationship between exponents and features. The article provides valuable insights into the study of language contact and its effects on grammar. [Extracted from the article]

Besides highly grammaticalized analytic verb forms that constitute the system's main tense, aspect, and mood forms, Basque has a handful of less grammaticalized periphrases for secondary aspectual and modal meanings. In both older and more recent texts, some of these periphrases have been reanalyzed as monoclausal and readjusted in accordance with the auxiliated verb's argument structure. This readjustment or actualization process involves changes in two respects: case-marking and indexation through auxiliary change. The reanalysis and actualization of theses periphrases seem to be driven by analogy with highly extended and frequent analytic verb forms. With regard to their actualization, it seems to depend on three factors: word order, valency of the auxiliated verb, and plural patient agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study dwells on some selected linguistic devices of syntactic variation known as word order between Arabic and English language. This is because the two languages under the study have a lot of functions in Nigeria and the globe at large. Some of these include: language of instruction, commerce, official and personal, national and international and many more. Based on this relevancy, this paper sees the need to offer a syntactic baseline between Arabic and English with emphasis on word order. The researchers use some sentences of Arabic and English from already existing literature which showcase that there is word order variation in some structural configurations. The method used for data collection is secondary as a result of scouting information from text books, journals and internet. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the syntactic variation of word order between Arabic and English language to add value to the existing knowledge in field of linguistics. The outcomes of this study demonstrate that the linguistic elements such as Subject, Predicator (Verb) and Object are mostly differ. This is as a result of the Arabic has VSO while English has SVO. Therefore, the two languages prove to have different syntactic environment for both Subject and Predicator but share only Object position as a syntactic environment according to this finding. So, the word order between the two languages could argue to be different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ČAJKA, František. Fragment of the Czech Church Slavonic Translation of the Forty Homilies on the Gospels by Pope Gregory the Great in the So-Called Rumyantsev Manuscript (No. 436). The so-called Rumyantsev Manuscript (No. 436) dates back to the early 16th century and is housed within the manuscript collections (ф. 256 Собрание рукописных книг Н. П. Румянцева, № 436) of the Russian State Library (Российская государственная библиотека, РГБ) in Moscow. The Russian Church Slavonic manuscript represents the "Torzhestvennik" (минейный Торжественник), which contains homiletic-exegetical texts for various feasts, as well as hagiographical texts arranged according to the liturgical calendar (from September to August). The mentioned manuscript is renowned in the fields of Slavic studies and medieval studies because it contains the famous recording of the text of the First Old Church Slavonic Legend of St. Wenceslas (The Life of St. Wenceslas) in its South Russian (Vostokov's) version. In the Rumyantsev Manuscript (No. 436), we have recently identified another text of West Slavic (Czech Church Slavonic) origin, represented by a fragment of the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Latin Forty Homilies on the Gospels by Pope Gregory the Great (XL homiliarum in Evangelia libri duo). The mentioned translation (i.e. Besědy na evangelije) was created in the early medieval Bohemia during the 11th century, most likely in the Sázava Monastery. The aim of the study is to highlight the mentioned textual fragment, make its material accessible through an edition and provide its basic textological characteristics. The newly recorded text of the Besědy na evangelije, written in the manuscript on fol. 167a 7 - 167b 22, dated January 25th, represents a substantial part of the 2nd chapter of the 23rd homily. Textual analysis has demonstrated the relative antiquity of the text fragment, its affiliation to the "Pogodin" textual line, and a significant textual affinity to the wording represented by the oldest relatively complete manuscript, the Pogodin manuscript from the 13th century. As a result of the text's development in the Russian environment, specific textual features of the manuscript appear, representing partial changes in word order, morphology, or lexicon, as well as instances of text abbreviation or expansion. The existence of the text of the Besědy na evangelije in the Rumyantsev Manuscript (No. 436) is another piece of evidence of the importance and popularity of Gregory the Great as a theologian and teacher in the East Slavic environment. His thoughts and teachings had an impact on the theology and spiritual life of the East Slavic countries and contributed to the shaping of their Christian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of verbal affixes in two Austronesian languages, Riau-Malay and Sundanese, with a focus on their morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties. Both languages are spoken in the Indonesian archipelago, and while they share certain linguistic characteristics, they exhibit intriguing differences in their verbal affixation systems. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of linguistic diversity within Austronesian languages and to reveal on the mechanisms underlying verb formation in these two distinct linguistic systems. By comparing and contrasting the verbal affixation systems in these languages, this study aims to reveal striking differences in terms of affix types, attachment patterns, and grammatical functions. The analysis explored the morphology of verbal affixes used in Riau-Malay and its comparison in Sundanese. It identifies clear distinctions in the ways affixes are employed to mark tense, aspect, mood, and other grammatical categories. Furthermore, the study also investigated the syntactic roles of verbal affixes, exploring how they affect word order and argument structure in sentences. This analysis exposes intriguing patterns of valency-changing operations in Riau-Malay and Sundanese. The findings of this study are expected to enhance people's understanding of Riau-Malay and Sundanese and to contribute to the broader typological and theoretical discussions in linguistics. The comparative analysis of these two languages provides valuable insights into the ways in which languages within the Austronesian family can diverge and adapt to their unique cultural and historical contexts. Ultimately, this study may be valuable to advance our knowledge of linguistic diversity and variation, offering a deeper appreciation of the intricate web of languages that shape human communication in the Indonesian archipelago and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines word order asymmetry as one prominent obstacle in the cognitive process of English–Chinese sight translation. A within-subject experiment was designed for 23 MA translation students who sight translated sentences with different degrees of structural asymmetry from English into Chinese in both single sentence and discourse contexts. To measure cognitive load, participants' eye movements during translation were recorded using an eye tracker. Three major findings were generated: (1) The effect of word order asymmetry was confirmed on both sentence-based and word-based processing; (2) Contextual information did not contribute to less effortful processing in the discourse context (as indicated by more fixations and longer regressions); (3) Segmentation was used far more frequently than restructuring to address asymmetric structures. We expect these findings will enrich our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms involved in interpreting between languages that are structurally very different and help inform training practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Enletawa Journal is the property of Enletawa Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Acta Linguistica Asiatica is the property of Acta Linguistica Asiatica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Acta Linguistica Asiatica is the property of Acta Linguistica Asiatica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cross-lingual text summarization is a highly desired service for overseas report editing tasks and is formulated in a distributed application to facilitate the cooperation of editors. The multilanguage pre-trained language model (MPLM) can generate high-quality cross-lingual text summaries with simple fine-tuning. However, the MPLM does not adapt to complex variations, like the word order and tense in different languages. When the model performs on these languages with separate syntactic structures and vocabulary morphologies, it will lead to the low-level quality of the cross-lingual summary. The matter worsens when the cross-lingual summarization datasets are low-resource. We use a knowledge distillation framework for the cross-lingual summarization task to address the above issues. By learning the monolingual teacher model, the cross-lingual student model can effectively capture the differences between languages. Since the teacher and student models generate summaries in two languages, their representations lie on different vector spaces. In order to construct representation relationships across languages, we further propose a similarity metric, which is based on bidirectional semantic alignment, to map different language representations to the same space. In order to improve the quality of cross-lingual summaries further, we use contrastive learning to make the student model focus on the differentials among languages. Contrastive learning can enhance the ability of the similarity metric for bidirectional semantic alignment. Our experiments show that our approach is competitive in low-resource scenarios on cross-language summarization datasets in pairs of distant languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tagalog is a strongly head-initial language: arguments without special discourse status typically follow their lexical heads. However, genitive-marked pronominal arguments display a word order alternation where instead of following their lexical head, they may precede it. This alternation, which I refer to here as Genitive Inversion, has received comparatively little attention in the research on Tagalog, even though it is relatively commonplace. This paper offers a detailed description of the behavior of Genitive Inversion, showing what kinds of arguments it can apply to and what environments it can apply in. I show that this process raises questions about the basic properties of Tagalog and discuss directions for potential analyses and avenues for further research into this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides word order, word choice is a key stumbling block for machine translation (MT) in morphologically rich languages due to homonyms and polysemous difficulties. On the other hand, un-translated/improperly translated words are a severe issue for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) models. The quantity of parallel training corpus has limited unsupervised SMT (USMT) systems. Still, current research lines have successfully trained SMT systems in an unsupervised manner using monolingual data alone. However, there is still a need to enhance the translation quality of the MT output due to unaligned and improperly sensed words. This problem is addressed by incorporating unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) into the decoding phase of USMT. The work provided a compendium of SMT systems for five translation tasks, i.e. En→Indic languages for the WMT test dataset and evaluated on BLEU and METEOR evaluation metrics. The studies were performed on En→Hi, En→Kn, En→Ta, En→Te, and En→Be tasks and showed an improvement in BLEU points by 2.3, 2.68, 0.78, 2.32, and 1.79, respectively, and METEOR points by 1.07, 1.34, 0.72, 0.693, and 1.191, respectively, over the baseline model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether cross-linguistic differences affect how adult second language (L2) learners use different types of verb subcategorization information for prediction in real-time sentence comprehension. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested if first language (L1) German and L1 Turkish intermediate-to-advanced learners of L2 English make use of categorical and gradient probabilistic selectional information of ditransitive verbs to predict whether the verbs would be followed by prepositional-object or double-object dative constructions. L1 German learners used both categorical ("pay/*donate the woman the money") and gradient ("pay/#send the woman the money") constraints for prediction in a target-like manner. In contrast, L1 Turkish learners were delayed in recruiting categorical verb information and were only selectively sensitive to gradient verb information. We argue that target-like predictive processing across categorical and gradient verb information is attainable for L2 learners, but differences in L1-L2 word order may curtail the utility of prediction by verb subcategorization information in L2 processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the analysis of word order variation regarding subjects, direct objects, and non-direct object phrases called the "Target" in the corpus of languages of northwestern Iran, viz., Armenian, Mukri Kurdish, and Northeastern Kurdish (Indo-European), Jewish Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (Semitic), and Azeri Turkic (Turkic). The objective is to examine the effects of formal and semantic (in)definiteness in combination with animacy on Target word order variation to find out which one can be a triggering factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"A Grammar of Upper Tanana, Volume 2: Semantics, Syntax, Discourse" by Olga Lovick is a comprehensive grammar of the Upper Tanana language, a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alaska. The book is well-organized and covers a wide range of topics, including semantic systems, clause structure, and syntax of structures with more than one clause. It includes a large amount of data, with each example carefully referenced to its source. The book is situated within the context of Dene linguistics and syntactic typology, and the author provides honest reflections on the limitations of elicitation. The only criticism is the font, which can make it difficult to distinguish between certain letters. Overall, "A Grammar of Upper Tanana" sets a high standard for grammars in any language family. [Extracted from the article]

The morpheme dāk 得 has a broad range of functions in modern Cantonese, including being used as a particle introducing an adverbial construction, as a particle introducing the so-called 'potential complement' (we refer to this as the 'long potential') and as a verbal (quasi-)suffix (the 'short potential'), which indicates that the state of affairs denoted by the verb may happen. In this paper, we first offer a general introduction on dāk 得 in modern Cantonese, which we then compare with Mandarin de 得 and parallel acquisitive modals in Lao, Vietnamese, and Zhuang, also with a focus on their modal meanings. We will then provide a diachronic overview of Cantonese dāk 得 based on a sample of texts from the 19th and early 20th century written in Cantonese by Western scholars, missionaries, and officers. The historical Cantonese data will be analyzed and compared to the development of the cognate morpheme de 得 in mainstream Chinese written sources: because of the limited diachronic depth of Cantonese data, this is necessary to delve further into the history of this item and of the related constructions. We will argue that: a. all the contemporary Cantonese (and Mandarin) uses seem to derive from the attainment sense of postverbal de/dāk 得; b. the vast majority of possible word order configurations were attested at some point in the recorded history of Chinese, but there appear to be also some patterns which could be specific to Cantonese; c. there seems to be a (partial) structural and semantic split between the 'short' potential and the 'long' potential; d. the adverbial construction probably had a more straightforward development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies using a grammaticality decision task have revealed surprising flexibility in the processing of word order during sentence reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. Participants in these studies typically exhibit a transposed-word effect, in which they make more errors and slower correct responses for stimuli that contain a word transposition and are derived from grammatical as compared to ungrammatical base sentences. Some researchers have used this finding to argue that words are encoded in parallel during reading, such that multiple words can be processed simultaneously and might be recognised out of order. This contrasts with an alternative account of the reading process, which argues that words must be encoded serially, one at a time. We examined, in English, whether the transposed-word effect provides evidence for a parallel-processing account, employing the same grammaticality decision task used in previous research and display procedures that either allowed for parallel word encoding or permitted only the serial encoding of words. Our results replicate and extend recent findings by showing that relative word order can be processed flexibly even when parallel processing is not possible (i.e., within displays requiring serial word encoding). Accordingly, while the present findings provide further evidence for flexibility in the processing of relative word order during reading, they add to converging evidence that the transposed-word effect does not provide unequivocal evidence for a parallel-processing account of reading. We consider how the present findings may be accounted for by both serial and parallel accounts of word recognition in reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guglielmo Cinque, the author of the book under review, once claimed that the asymmetries of linear order fit directly into Kayne's LCA (Cinque [5]). Berwick & Chomsky ([1]) and Chomsky ([4]) suggest that structures are created by the operation Merge in narrow syntax, and unordered structures are externalized in the sensorimotor system. Chomsky ([2]) partially agrees with Kayne ([8]) and "takes the LCA to be a principle of the phonological component" (Chomsky [2]: 313). [Extracted from the article]

This paper develops Ramchand's first phase syntax theory by investigating the Mandarin directional serial verb construction. Specifically, the position of the theme argument in these constructions is investigated, and two major word order variants are identified: the VOV type and the VVO type. The former are argued to be accomplishments, whereas the latter are achievements. The analysis embraces Ramchand's spirit that three sub-eventive projections (InitP, ProcP, and ResP) exist universally as the basic building blocks in the first-phase syntax, and it proposes that the surface word order alternation and situation type shift is the consequence of the occurrence/absence of the ResP and the different insertion position of the directional morphemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, many students struggle to construct proper English sentences, particularly in conditional sentences. The teaching methods teachers used failed to engage students. Also, some experts believe that the difficulties students face with conditionals arise from the interaction between meaning and form. So, understanding this relationship and how it frequently appears in conditional sentences is crucial. To address this issue, a study was conducted to assess the proficiency of eleventh-grade students at SMA Negeri 1 Waringinkurung in constructing conditional sentences. The research involved 32 students, and the methodology used was qualitative content analysis, which included test and interview. The students' sentences were coded and sorted using a method called summative content analysis. This method involves identifying and measuring specific words or material in the text to understand how they are used. The researcher used various categories like formula of conditional sentences, main and if clauses, modal verbs, verb tense, and word order for further analysis. This analysis helped the researcher evaluate the students' understanding and proficiency in constructing conditional sentences.The study found that students commonly made mistakes in verb tenses and the use of modal verbs. Interview with the students also confirmed that verb tenses were the most challenging aspect for them. In summary, the research findings demonstrate that students exhibit a good ability to construct conditional sentences, consistent with established classifications in the literature (Arikunto, 2013). Findings showed student challenges with verb tenses and modal verbs, offering valuable insights for educators to enhance conditional sentence proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the characteristics of wh-exclamatives in Jordanian Arabic. I argue that exclamatives are not complete sentences because they are temporally deictic to the moment of utterance. In other words, they lack Tense specification and are considered tenseless expressions (i.e., root small clauses). Two notable complexities arise in wh-exclamatives in Jordanian Arabic, namely the obligatory presence of the demonstrative-like element ha- and fixed word order. These intricacies are attributed to the exclamative head's requirement for a specifier. This requirement can be fulfilled either through the combination of a wh-form (external merge) or the movement of the degree phrase to the specifier position (internal merge). The study proposes that the demonstrative-like ha- functions as the actual manifestation of the Relator head which connects and establishes the relationship between the two constituents in exclamatives. Furthermore, based on the distinct semantic and distributional properties of the auxiliary kān 'was', the paper argues for the differentiation of the auxiliary in exclamatives from other typical auxiliaries that occupy verb or Tense nodes in sentences. Therefore, it suggests that exclamative auxiliaries encode and express the grammatical features of the functional head, labeled as Excl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantic-syntagmatic analysis of Bulgarian double-preposition constructions reveals that they are formed through two main mechanisms - semantic (linguistic) and notional (non-linguistic). Semantic constructions are characterised by combinations of prepositions in synonymous relations, while notional constructions arise when a broad-meaning preposition is combined with a prepositional phrase. The synonymous semantic relation of the two prepositions turns them into a single unit with a single meaning. In notional constructions, prepositions do not form a single semantic whole, but rather function as markers of relevance and are involved in the organization of the utterance / sentence as meaning-forming elements. The word order in double-preposition constructions depends on the semantic content of the meanings of the prepositions: in case of relatively similar content, word order is free, while in the presence of a preposition with a broad semantic content, it is fixed, i.e. the preposition with the broader content appears in initial position. The identification of semantic and notional varieties not only helps to systematize double-preposition constructions, but can also serve to distinguish them from prepositions co-occurring for some other reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading numbers aloud involves visual processes that analyze the digit string and verbal processes that produce the number words. Cognitive models of number reading assume that information flows from the visual input to the verbal production processes—a feed‐forward processing mode in which the verbal production depends on the visual input but not vice versa. Here, I show that information flows also in the opposite direction, from verbal production to the visual input processes. Participants read aloud briefly presented multi‐digit strings in Hebrew, in which the order of words is congruent with the order of digits (21 = twenty‐and‐one), and in Arabic, in which the ones word precedes the tens word (one‐and‐twenty). The error‐by‐digit‐position curve was affected by language: relative to Hebrew, in Arabic the error rate was slightly lower for the unit digit and slightly higher for the decade digit, indicating that in Arabic the unit digit was processed earlier and the decade digit later, in accord with the Arabic word order. This language‐dependent processing order originated in the visual level and was not a verbal confound, because it persisted even when I controlled for the serial position of the decade/unit word in the verbal number by using numbers with 0 (two hundred three/two hundred thirty). I conclude that the visual analyzer's digit scanning order, decade‐first or unit‐first, is not fixed but affected by the language in which the number is produced—a top‐down, verbal‐to‐visual information flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern Chinese, a Directional Verb Construction (DVC) may contain either two or three verbs. DVCs with two verbs can be represented in three different ways, and DVCs with three verbs can be represented in four different ways. The different positions of the shared internal noun phrase (NP) argument result in divergent word orders of DVCs. Based on the Corpus of the United Daily News, this study discusses the syntax-pragmatic interface in Chinese DVCs within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) with the intention of ascertaining how NP arguments are linked to syntax in DVCs, while at the same time accounting for what pragmatic factors play a role in determining constructional schemas for argument linking. The results show that different patterns of DVCs have different focus domains, and that the differential activation state of the internal NP argument plays an essential role in determining word order. Considering the correlation between activation state and focus domain, a highly activated internal NP tends to be linked to the position following the word b or immediately following V1. In contrast, a least activated NP tends to be linked to the position immediately following V2 or V3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the view that eventive and stative passive participles are verbs and adjectives, respectively. Instead, I argue that existing diagnostics are sensitive to the eventive/stative contrast and to independent restrictions on word order. I show that both eventive and stative participles in Serbo-Croatian have the external syntax and morphology of adjectives, and propose that passive participles in various languages are adjectives that embed varying amounts of verbal structure. Finally, I contend that agentive phrases are always available with stative participles that entail a prior event in languages that obligatorily express grammatical aspect on the verb stem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bohemistyka is the property of Instytut Filologii Slowianskiej Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Unbounded dependencies are structures where two elements that typically co-occur appear far from one another in spite of the syntactic dependency between them. Wh-interrogatives are one of the mostly investigated types of unbounded dependencies cross-linguistically. To contribute to the ongoing linguistic research in wh-interrogatives, the current paper attempts to explore them in one of the Arabic varieties: Hijazi Arabic (HA). The paper primarily focuses on how to account for the constructions of HA wh-interrogatives using one of the prominent non-transformational theories in generative syntax: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The analysis proposed herein also sheds light on the word order used in HA. The paper concludes that there are two constraints to which wh-interrogatives in HA are subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies a corpus-based quantitative approach to the word order typology and linguistic theories about word order in several genetically unrelated language varieties in northwestern Iran, such as Mukri Kurdish, Northeastern Kurdish and Armenian (Indo-European), Jewish Neo-Aramaic (Semitic), and Azeri Turkic (Turkish). Despite the difference in the default position of the direct object, the existing corpora of published and personal field data of narrative free speech demonstrate that these languages share the clause-final position of Targets predominantly (e.g., physical and metaphorical goals, recipients, addressees, and resultant-states) in their word order. Yet, Targets are more flexible in Mukri Kurdish, Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, and Azeri Turkic, whereas they are less flexible in Armenian and Northeastern Kurdish. Among various factors relevant to the placement of Targets, morphosyntactic features such as parts of speech exhibit constraints and clear preferences in the pre- and postverbal placement of Targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers evidence, which is based on acceptability judgement tasks, in favour of the absence of unmarked linear serializations of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Results from 16 experiments of acceptability judgements from 197 native speakers of JA point to the fact that JA places no adjective ordering. However, two factors are found to be significant. The first factor pertains to the number of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives. All possible word order patterns of different stacked adjectives are (fully) acceptable with two stacked adjectives. However, constructions with three or more stacked adjectives are significantly degraded. This is universally held, regardless of the type of the stacked adjectives (size, color, shape, etc.). We ascribe this to the third-factor effects (Chomsky in Linguist Inq 36(1):1–22, 2005) (particularly with reference to working memory and processing load) in restricting the possible number of adjectives in a given construction. A second factor relates to the syntactic position of the adjectives (attributive vs. predicative). The results reveal that attributive adjectives are significantly more acceptable than predicative adjectives (which can also be freely stacked in JA). This is also attributed to the effects of these factors favoring minimal computations. We follow O'Grady (Front Psychol 12:660296, 2021) in that the processing of across-clausal phenomena (as is the case with predicative adjectives) is more demanding than intra-clausal ones (as is the case with attributive adjectives). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistica Uralica is the property of Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I apply a recently emerging perspective on the complexity of action selection, the rate-distortion theory of control, to provide a computational-level model of errors and difficulties in human language production, which is grounded in information theory and control theory. Language production is cast as the sequential selection of actions to achieve a communicative goal subject to a capacity constraint on cognitive control. In a series of calculations, simulations, corpus analyses, and comparisons to experimental data, I show that the model directly predicts some of the major known qualitative and quantitative phenomena in language production, including semantic interference and predictability effects in word choice; accessibility-based ("easy-first") production preferences in word order alternations; and the existence and distribution of disfluencies including filled pauses, corrections, and false starts. I connect the rate-distortion view to existing models of human language production, to probabilistic models of semantics and pragmatics, and to proposals for controlled language generation in the machine learning and reinforcement learning literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has suggested that L2 learners often use non-target processing strategies to understand sentences, but that these strategies can be changed through targeted instruction that directs their attention to different linguistic forms or structures. The present study explores the effects of pretraining 'blocking' practice—a novel type of training designed to help learners inhibit the application of a strict word-order based processing strategy—prior to receiving a traditional Structured Input (SI) training focused on OVS word order and accusative case markers in German. The study compares three groups of third-semester German learners who completed three different activities in one training session: (1) SI with blocking practice (+BP), (2) SI preceded by explicit information (+EI), and (3) SI without EI or blocking practice (−EI). The effects of training were measured by sentence-level interpretation and production tasks administered as a pretest, posttest, and four-week delayed posttest. Learner performance was also assessed during training. Results in all assessment measures indicated that EI was most effective, but that blocking practice lent a slight advantage over −EI groups during and after training. These results are discussed in the context of studies on processing instruction and learned attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major issue in SLA research concerns the operationalization of syntactic complexity, in particular the need for fine-grained measures that go beyond the traditional focus on syntactic elaboration. Following recent findings that have demonstrated the potential of syntactic diversity for providing a more detailed picture of how complexity develops across languages and proficiency levels, the present study argues for the use of two types of non-canonical structures, passives and argument inversions, as indices of syntactic complexification in advanced L2 German writing. Based on 75 argumentative texts written by experienced L2 learners of German (B2 to C2 CEFR levels), we addressed the question to what extent learners' use of non-canonical word order is a hallmark of advanced proficiency compared to measures of syntactic elaboration. The results revealed a considerable increase in the frequency of argument inversions from B2 to C1 and highlighted the interrelationship between diversity and elaboration in learner compositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study investigating the distribution of the three grammatical cases in Estonian (nominative, genitive, partitive) and the factors affecting the interpretation of syntactic role for nouns marked in these cases. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed on the properties of grammatical relations, we take the perspective of morphological case, and investigate the relative frequency of each case in both written and spoken corpora, according to the encoded grammatical roles, referential properties (animacy, number, countability) and syntactic context (word order, transitivity), as well as probing the differences according to register. We find that each case is prototypically, but not reliably, associated with a particular grammatical role, and that a cluster of features are available to assist speakers in identifying the function of a case-marked noun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentence similarity is used in various fields, such as the mining of text, information retrieval from the web, and dialogue-based system. This research mainly focuses on calculating the sentence-length similarity between very brief texts. It provides a method that works on the implicit word order and contextual relations in the phrases. A combination of data from the corpus statistics and hierarchical database is used to determine the computation of similarity between sentence pairs. Our technique can simulate human sensible knowledge according to the usage of a lexical database, and it may be applied to other areas according to the incorporation of corpora statistics. Numerous applications that involve the representation and finding of text knowledge can make use of the suggested approach. Studies done on two sets of chosen sentence pairings reveal that the suggested approach offers a similarity metric that significantly correlates with human intuition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]