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Mandarin Chinese is typologically unusual among the world's languages in having flexible word order despite a near absence of inflectional morphology. These features of Mandarin challenge conventional linguistic notions such as subject and object and the divide between syntax and semantics. In the present study, we tested monolingual processing of argument structure in Mandarin verb-final sentences, where word order alone is not a reliable cue. We collected participants' responses to a forced agent-assignment task while measuring their electroencephalography data to capture real-time processing throughout each sentence. We found that sentence interpretation was not informed by word order in the absence of other cues, and while the coverbs BA and BEI were strong signals for agent selection, comprehension was a result of multiple cues. These results challenge previous reports of a linear ranking of cue strength. Event-related potentials showed that BA and BEI impacted participants' processing even before the verb was read and that role reversal anomalies elicited an N400 effect without a subsequent semantic P600. This study demonstrates that Mandarin sentence comprehension requires online interaction among cues in a language-specific manner, consistent with models that predict crosslinguistic differences in core sentence processing mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates negative simple sentences and negation structures in English and Albanian, two Indo-European languages with both similar and distinct linguistic backgrounds and syntactic features. The study sets out with two primary hypotheses. Firstly, negative simple sentences in English and Albanian have similar word order, but there are some differences regarding the particle location in some sentences due to their distinct syntactic and grammatical features. Secondly, the syntax of negation in both languages reflects unique language-specific characteristics. The objectives of this study encompass an analysis of word order patterns, negative particle usage, sentence structure and semantics. Through comparative analysis, this research aims to shed light on the aspects of negation in these languages. The findings of this study provide valuable insights into the differences and similarities in negation structures, i.e., negative sentences, in English and Albanian language. The analysis confirms the presence of distinct word order patterns in some sentences in English and Albanian language. These differences align with the broader word order tendencies observed in each language. Secondly, the study reveals variations in negative particle usage. English primarily employs a single particle ('not') and on different occasions ('no'), while Albanian utilizes both a pre-verbal particle ('nuk') and particles like 's'', 'jo', 'mos', etc. which are used to convey negative meaning. Other words with negative meaning are also analyzed in this paper. Another difference is the use of double negative in Albanian, a phenomenon not normally present in English language. These differences contribute to the richness and complexity of negation structures in Albanian. This research highlights the interaction between negation and the types of negation in sentences translated from English to Albanian and vice versa, and if different negation types affect word order in translated sentences. It also explores the semantics of negation, emphasizing mutual semantic effects while discovering differences that contribute to distinctions in meaning. In conclusion, this brief study advances our understanding of negation structures in English and Albanian, providing valuable insights into the syntax and semantics of negation in these languages. These findings contribute to the broader field of comparative linguistics and give insight into the nature of negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do bilinguals mix adjectives and nouns from two languages with a word order conflict at the boundary between them? Prominently competing theories of code-switching (CS) that appeal to abstract features or to a matrix language remain in a stalemate, since their predictions have been reported to mostly coincide. Here, we contribute data from northern New Mexico bilingual community members who switch between Spanish and English in both directions. Beyond the NP-internal mixes within the purview of the theories, the widened data set encompasses all relevant mixes and positions: every adjective or associated noun at the boundary with the other language. We thus assess lone-item and multi-word mixing types, distinguishing also between multi-word CS at different points of the NP. Multi-word CS at the adjective-noun boundary is indeed rare. These bilinguals choose CS after the determiner with prenominal modifiers in English adjective-noun pairs, as previously observed, and at the external NP boundary. Furthermore, they disproportionately prefer the shared predicative position. Accounting for all adjective mixes, the Variable Equivalence hypothesis proposes that, where cross-language equivalence is not consistent due to language-internal variability, bilinguals prefer CS at alternative syntactic boundaries that are consistently equivalent and more frequent in their combined linguistic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages are neither designed in classrooms nor drawn from dictionaries—they are products of human minds and human interactions. However, it is challenging to understand how structure grows in these circumstances because generations of use and transmission shape and reshape the structure of the languages themselves. Laboratory studies on language emergence investigate the origins of language structure by requiring participants, prevented from using their own natural language(s), to create a novel communication system and then transmit it to others. Because the participants in these lab studies are already speakers of a language, it is easy to question the relevance of lab‐based findings to the creation of natural language systems. Here, we take the findings from a lab‐based language emergence paradigm and test whether the same pattern is also found in a new natural language: Nicaraguan Sign Language. We find evidence that signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language may show the same biases seen in lab‐based language emergence studies: (1) they appear to condition word order based on the semantic dimension of intensionality and extensionality, and (2) they adjust this conditioning to satisfy language‐internal order constraints. Our study adds to the small, but growing literature testing the relevance of lab‐based studies to natural language birth, and provides convincing evidence that the biases seen in the lab play a role in shaping a brand new language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the presence of falconry in the Old English poem "The Battle of Maldon" and the Middle High German work "Kudrun." It discusses the different interpretations of the motif, including its connection to noble lineage, bravery, and disdain for invaders. The comparison with "Kudrun" helps to clarify scholarly debates and presents a more positive view of the young warrior in "The Battle of Maldon." Additionally, the article provides evidence from various sources to support the existence of falconry in early medieval England, highlighting its association with royalty and nobility. It suggests that falconry may have played a significant social role during this time. [Extracted from the article]

Creative association is inherent and essential to creativity and insight. Here we utilised a Chinese compound Remote Associates Task (cRAT) to identify the potential impact of word order (i.e., solution position hereinafter) and word frequency on creative association across two behavioural experiments. Experiment 1 identified the effects of (a) word order and word frequency on cRAT-induced association without considering the specific strategies used during solving such problems and (b) their interaction not only on performance in solving the cRAT, including solution time and accuracy, but also on difficulty rating. Following a coarse-to-fine approach, Experiment 2 examined the effect of both factors on creative association determined according to each participant's trial-by-trial reports regarding insight solution strategies. Main effects of word order and word frequency, and a two-way interaction, were found on the accuracy and self-rated difficulty. These findings shed light on creative association, multiply-constrained problem solving and constructing compounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The natural ecology of language is conversation, with individuals taking turns speaking to communicate in a back-and-forth fashion. Language in this context involves strings of words that a listener must process while simultaneously planning their own next utterance. It would thus be highly advantageous if language users distributed information within an utterance in a way that may facilitate this processing–planning dynamic. While some studies have investigated how information is distributed at the level of single words or clauses, or in written language, little is known about how information is distributed within spoken utterances produced during naturalistic conversation. It also is not known how information distribution patterns of spoken utterances may differ across languages. We used a set of matched corpora (CallHome) containing 898 telephone conversations conducted in six different languages (Arabic, English, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish), analyzing more than 58,000 utterances, to assess whether there is evidence of distinct patterns of information distributions at the utterance level, and whether these patterns are similar or differed across the languages. We found that English, Spanish, and Mandarin typically show a back-loaded distribution, with higher information (i.e., surprisal) in the last half of utterances compared with the first half, while Arabic, German, and Japanese showed front-loaded distributions, with higher information in the first half compared with the last half. Additional analyses suggest that these patterns may be related to word order and rate of noun and verb usage. We additionally found that back-loaded languages have longer turn transition times (i.e., time between speaker turns). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent studies have posed the hypothesis according to which the grammatical stage that precedes the cultured trend of Brazilian Portuguese is Colonial Brazilian Portuguese, not Classical Portuguese. Therefore, there are still few works systematically comparing these two varieties. This is the goal of the present paper, which focuses on word order. By undertaking a corpus-based study using the same textual genre from the contemporary authors Eusébio de Matos and António Vieira, we have looked for all word order patterns while paying special attention to the X*VS order (with one or more constituents preceding the verb and a postverbal subject), given that it is quite typical of Classical Portuguese as a V2-like grammar, unlike the modern Portuguese grammars. We have observed that, although the colonial text follows the general trends of the classical language, it starts to depart from a V2-like grammar because it shows a higher frequency of non-V2 orders and a preference for informationally marked constructions involving internal positions to the clause. From a parameter hierarchy viewpoint, the main conclusion is that such differences represent frequency divergences which are consistent with nano- or microparametric changes which took place later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emojis have become a ubiquitous part of everyday text communication worldwide. Cohn et al. (Cognit Res Princ Implic 4(1):1–18, 2019) studied the grammatical structure of emoji usage among English speakers and found a correlation between the sequence of emojis used and English word order, tending towards an subject–verb–object (SVO) sequence. However, it remains unclear whether emoji usage follows a universal grammar or whether it is influenced by native language grammar. Therefore, this study explored the potential influence of Japanese grammar on emoji usage by Japanese speakers. Twenty adults, all native Japanese speakers, participated in pairs. In Experiment 1, participants engaged in conversations through Google Hangouts on iPads. The experiment consisted of four conversation rounds of approximately 8 min each. The first two rounds involved one participant using only written Japanese and the other using only emojis and punctuation, with roles reversed in the second round. The third round required both participants to use only emojis and punctuation. The results indicated that participants preferred subject–object–verb (SOV) or object–verb (OV) sequences, with OV patterns being more common. This pattern reflects a distinctive attribute of Japanese grammatical structure, marked by the frequent omission of the subject. Experiment 2 substituted emojis for words, showing nouns were more commonly replaced than verbs due to the difficulty in conveying complex meanings. Reduced subject replacements again emphasised Japanese grammatical structure. In essence, emoji usage reflects native language structures, but complexities are challenging to convey, resulting in simplified sequences. This study offers insights for enhancing emoji-based communication and interface design, with implications for translation and broader communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of Abe's (2016) proposal that in the case of an A‐chain, any member can be the target for pronunciation, I argue that Japanese passives may have the bottom copies of the produced A‐chains pronounced. When the passivized subjects appear to occupy their original θ‐positions, it is standardly claimed that the relevant word order is derived by scrambling other material sentence‐initially. Contrary to this claim, I demonstrate that there are cases, including those of what Miyagawa (1989) calls the causative‐passive construction, where the passivized subjects actually occupy their original θ‐positions. I then provide evidence that those passivized subjects undergo “covert” A‐movement, hence giving support to my bottom copy pronunciation analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-distance dependencies such as relative clauses (RCs) are known to be vulnerable in heritage grammars (e.g., Montrul, 2008). Previous studies in RC comprehension have shown that heritage language (HL) children show similar comprehension to monolingual children (Jia & Paradis, 2020), while differential performance has also been found (Kidd et al., 2015). The present study investigates 11–13-year-old monolingual and German-dominant HL children's real-time parsing strategies in subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) processing in Greek. We conducted a self-paced listening task in Greek in which we manipulated the type of RC (subject vs. object), and the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled). Our analyses revealed no significant group differences between HL and monolingual children. Both groups of children processed SRCs faster than ORCs on the critical RC verb segment. We also examined if case-marked pre-verbal NPs would facilitate the processing of ORC structures. Although children processed pre-verbal faster than post-verbal NPs, ORC structures with pre-verbal NPs received the lowest scores in the grammaticality judgment task. We discuss these findings on the grounds of Relativized Minimality (Friedmann et al., 2009) and Fodor and Inoue's (2000) Diagnosis and Repair Model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work is devoted to the syntax of specificational constructions with proper names within a typological perspective. The provided typology is based on the results obtained from the analysis of grammar descriptions and available corpus data for 94 languages. The paper discusses the morphosyntactic means that languages use to express specification, namely juxtaposition, attribution, and other less common strategies. It is shown that juxtapositional and attributive strategies are in competition in many of the sampled languages, so that certain expressions (for example, specificational constructions with the common noun 'city') prefer attributive-like coding, while others (especially constructions including personal names) show a clear tendency for juxtapositional coding cross-linguistically. Evidence from languages using an attributive strategy in specificational constructions shows that the common noun is generally the syntactic head of the construction. This conclusion contributes to the wide-scale discussion of the semantic grounds for headedness in specificational constructions. In addition, the paper shows that languages tend to place common nouns before personal proper names regardless of the word order used in specificational constructions with toponyms. This, as predicted, is correlated with the relative ordering of the head noun and its genitival dependent. The results of the present study also show that the constituent ordering in constructions with personal names implicationally depends on the order in constructions with toponyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Cognitive control processes have been extensively studied in spoken word production, however, relevant investigations of written word production are scarce. Using data from a group of post-stroke individuals we studied, for the first time, the neural substrates of cognitive control in written word production. We addressed three questions: Are control mechanisms: (1) shared by language and non-language domains; (2) shared by lexical and segmental levels of word production within the word production system; (3) related to both interference and facilitation effect types? Methods: To address these questions, for each participant we calculated cognitive control indices that reflected the interference and facilitation effects observed in written Blocked Cyclic Naming (written language production) and Simon (visuo-spatial processing) tasks. These behavioral cognitive control indices were studied both on their own, as well as in relation to the distribution of structural (gray matter) lesions. Results: For Question 1, we provide strong evidence of domain-specific control mechanisms used in written word production, as, among other findings, distinct regions within Broca’s Area were associated with control in written word production vs. control in visuo-spatial processing. For Question 2, our results provide no strong evidence of shared control mechanisms for lexical and segmental levels of written word production, while they highlight the role of BA45 in instantiating control mechanisms that are specific to the two levels. For Question 3, we found evidence that BA45 supports distinct mechanisms associated with facilitation and interference, while orbital frontal cortex supports control process(es) associated with both. Discussion: These findings significantly advance our understanding of the cognitive control mechanisms involved in written language production, as well as of the role of Broca’s Area in cognitive control and language production more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical redundancy is a widespread feature across languages. Although redundant cues can be seen to increase the complexity and processing burden of structures, it has been suggested that they can assist language acquisition. Here, we explored if this learning benefit can be observed from the very initial stages of second language (L2) acquisition and whether the effect of redundancy is modulated by the perceptual salience of the redundant linguistic cues. Across two experiments, three groups of adult native speakers of English were incidentally exposed to three different artificial languages; one that had a fixed word order, Verb-Object-Subject, and two in which thematic role assignment was additionally determined by a low-salient (Experiment 1) or a high-salient (Experiment 2) redundant case marker. While all groups managed to learn the novel language, our results pointed towards a hindering role of redundancy, with participants in the non-redundant condition achieving greater learning outcomes compared to those in both redundant conditions. Results also revealed that this impeding effect of redundancy on L2 learners can be attenuated by the salience of the redundant cue (Experiment 2). In conjunction with earlier findings, the present results suggest that the effect of redundancy on L2 acquisition can be differentially manifested depending on the stage of L2 development, learners' first language biases and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated how heritage Spanish-English bilinguals integrate their cue hierarchies to process simple sentences in both Spanish and English. Sentence interpretation is achieved by weighing the various cues that are present in the sentence against that language's cue hierarchy. The Unified Competition Model (UCM) suggests that bilinguals show a variety of patterns in sentence interpretation strategies depending on language proficiency. Previous research on heritage Spanish-English bilinguals and late bilinguals has demonstrated differences in cue utilization and sentence interpretation compared to monolinguals. However, good-enough processing suggests that when a sentence does not meet certain heuristics, like the first-noun agent heuristic, a semantic representation of the sentence will be processed instead of a syntactic one. Even with reliable sentential-level cues such as word order, a plausible semantic representation of the sentence is favored. This is especially the case with inanimate-inanimate (IA-IA) sentences, like in the present study, in which there is less reversibility of thematic roles without competing with semantic plausibility. For this study, participants (n = 32) read a total of 80 inanimate sentences in English and Spanish with subject-verb-object and object-verb-subject (OVS) word orders, indicated the subject of the sentences, and completed language proficiency and dominance tasks. When reading Spanish sentences, participants read the OVS word order faster. English proficiency was a significant predictor of sentence reading time and choice selection time but did not predict word choice. The results suggest that IA-IA sentences pose challenges for cue utilization and thematic role assignment due to semantic limitations. This study found that participantsmay prioritize semantic plausibility over syntactic representations in sentence processing, supporting a good-enough processing model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the verb-initial independent declarative clauses with overt subjects (V1) in the Old English Bede on which the most complete witnesses disagree. It identifies the syntactic and textual environments in which the V1 clauses are altered or omitted and the types of changes they undergo. The article demonstrates that the majority of the alterations and omissions are recorded in the later manuscripts B and Ca. Most of them reflect the change to the V2 and V3 word order and the rise of the þa VS clauses in the V1 textual environments (e.g. reported discourse). Besides these widely attested developments in syntax and textual organisation, the corpus also exhibits the alterations that can be attributed to the individual scribes who modify or omit the V1 clauses to align the Old English translation with the Latin, eliminate asyndetic parataxis, homogenise the style, and streamline the narrative. The variants and scribal interventions uncovered by the present inquiry not only help form a more complete picture of the transmission and uses of the manuscripts of the Old English Bede but also contribute to the diachronic and synchronic study of the Old English language and style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study challenges the widespread belief that Thai lacks word stress, demonstrating its pivotal role in morphophonology. Through a Maximum Entropy analysis, we investigated how specific segmental properties statistically influence speakers' choices of word order in coordinate compounds. Results indicate a significant effect of phonological weight on the ordering patterns. Specifically, the dispreference for stop codas in final positions and the preference for long or low vowels word-finally converge to differentially distribute phonological weight, ensuring that final syllables are heavier in accordance with the Stress-to-Weight Principle. Additionally, a marginal affinity is observed between the final syllable and the (historical) high-register tone, aligning with the well-documented tone-stress interaction where high tones gravitate towards stressed syllables. These findings provide compelling evidence for the existence of word stress in Thai: compound stress necessarily coincides with word stress, as dictated by the Continuous Column Constraint. Thus, this work suggests that relying solely on phonetic cues is insufficient for identifying stress; instead, a comprehensive analysis incorporating "phonological exponents" is essential to capture the greater phonological contrasts licensed in stressed syllables. This study also contributes to a deeper understanding of metrical and prosodic prominence, revealing that word stress can sometimes be masked by higher-level prominence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreements persist regarding the neural basis of syntactic processing, which has been linked both to inferior frontal and posterior temporal regions of the brain. One focal point of the debate concerns the role of inferior frontal areas in receptive syntactic ability, which is mostly assessed using sentence comprehension involving complex syntactic structures, a task that is potentially confounded with working memory. Syntactic acceptability judgments may provide a better measure of receptive syntax by reducing the need to use high working memory load and complex sentences and by enabling assessment of various types of syntactic violations. We therefore tested the perception of grammatical violations by people with poststroke aphasia (n = 25), along with matched controls (n = 16), using English sentences involving errors in word order, agreement, or subcategorization. Lesion data were also collected. Control participants performed near ceiling in accuracy with higher discriminability of agreement and subcategorization violations than word order; aphasia participants were less able to discriminate violations, but, on average, paralleled control participants discriminability of types of violations. Lesion-symptom mapping showed a correlation between discriminability and posterior temporal regions, but not inferior frontal regions. We argue that these results diverge from models holding that frontal areas are amodal core regions in syntactic structure building and favor models that posit a core hierarchical system in posterior temporal regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the great unknowns in language evolution is the transition from unstructured sign combination to grammatical structure. This paper investigates the central — while hitherto overlooked — role of functor–argument metaphor. This type of metaphor pervades modern language, but is absent in animal communication. It arises from the semantic clash between the default meanings of terms. Functor–argument metaphor became logically possible in protolanguage once sufficient vocabulary and basic compositionality arose, allowing for novel combinations of terms. For example, the verb to hide, a functor, could be combined not only with a concrete, spatial entity like food as its argument, but also with an abstract, non-spatial one like anger. Through this clash, to hide is reinterpreted as a metaphorical action. Functor–argument metaphor requires the possibility of term combinability and the existence of compositionality. At the same time, it transcends compositionality, forcing a non-literal interpretation. We argue that functor–argument metaphor led the development of protolanguage into fully-fledged language in multiple ways. Not only did it expand expressiveness, but it drove the development of syntax including the conventionalization and fixation of word order, and the development of demonstratives. Thus, functor–argument metaphor fills in multiple gaps in the trajectory from a protolanguage, with only some terms and simple term combinations, to the elaborate grammatical structures of fully-fledged human languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether Differential Object Marking (DOM) realization and word order in relative clauses (RCs) in Spanish affect processing and interpretation among monolinguals and highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilinguals. RCs are parallel in Catalan and Spanish, but DOM is much more restricted in Catalan than in Spanish, and, interestingly, the distinction between subject and object RCs relies mainly on the presence/absence of DOM. To examine DOM optionality, we concentrate on the top portion of the animacy scale and test the human/non-human contrast. Exploring these two populations allows us to test whether they resort to different strategies for the following three reasons: (1) bilingualism places an increased burden on memory processes); (2) the partial overlap between both DOM systems might lead to the influence from Catalan into Spanish); and (3) optionality has been proposed to characterize bilingual grammars). Findings from a word-by-word non-cumulative self-paced reading task showed that DOM modulates RC processing. With [+human] obligatorily marked objects, both monolinguals and bilinguals read subject RCs faster than object RCs, suggesting a strategy favoring subject RCs. However, monolinguals solved the interpretation early while processing but bilinguals, despite the more restricted DOM character of Catalan, are sensitive to DOM albeit displaying delayed spill-over effects. With [−human] optionally marked objects, bilinguals performed faster than monolinguals. We suggest that the uneven experience with DOM in Catalan, particularly with the non-standard variety that frequently displays DOM and that our bilinguals also speak in everyday conversations, facilitates bilinguals' adaptation to the optional marking of non-human objects in Spanish, much in the same manner that they accommodate the presence or absence of DOM with both human and non-human objects in other native language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the GiNZA v4 natural language processing library, this study examines the case marking richness and word order flexibility in Japanese dialects across 47 regions to investigate the dynamic self-adaptation within the language subsystem, specifically morphology and syntax. Case marking richness is evaluated using the moving-average mean size of paradigm, while word order flexibility is assessed through entropy. The findings reveal a positive correlation between case marking richness and word order flexibility, providing empirical support for the "complexity trade-off hypothesis". Leveraging the distinct morphosyntactic features inherent in dialects, this study proposes a hypothesis for categorizing Japanese dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored sentence processing in two typologically distinct languages: Korean, a verb-final language, and Tongan, a verb-initial language. The first experiment revealed that in Korean, sentences arranged in the scrambled OSV (Object, Subject, Verb) order were processed more slowly than those in the canonical SOV order, highlighting a scrambling effect. It also found that sentences with subject topicalization in the SOV order were processed as swiftly as those in the canonical form, whereas sentences with object topicalization in the OSV order were processed with speeds and accuracy comparable to scrambled sentences. However, since topicalization and scrambling in Korean use the same OSV order, independently distinguishing the effects of topicalization is challenging. In contrast, Tongan allows for a clear separation of word orders for topicalization and scrambling, facilitating an independent evaluation of topicalization effects. The second experiment, employing a maze task, confirmed that Tongan’s canonical VSO order was processed more efficiently than the VOS scrambled order, thereby verifying a scrambling effect. The third experiment investigated the effects of both scrambling and topicalization in Tongan, finding that the canonical VSO order was processed most efficiently in terms of speed and accuracy, unlike the VOS scrambled and SVO topicalized orders. Notably, the OVS object-topicalized order was processed as efficiently as the VSO canonical order, while the SVO subject-topicalized order was slower than VSO but faster than VOS. By independently assessing the effects of topicalization apart from scrambling, this study demonstrates that both subject and object topicalization in Tongan facilitate sentence processing, contradicting the predictions based on movement-based anticipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that child HSs' performance in offline linguistic tasks is typically worse than their age-matched monolingual peers and is modulated by linguistic and child-level factors. This study examined the comprehension and production of three Mandarin non-canonical structures in 5- to 9-year-old Mandarin–English heritage children and Mandarin-speaking monolingual children, including an online processing task. Results showed that heritage children had different performance in production and offline comprehension across structures compared to monolinguals. In online processing, they showed sensitivity to different cues similarly to monolinguals but took longer to revise initial misinterpretations. Within heritage children, we found that presence of morphosyntactic cues facilitated performance across tasks while cross-linguistic influence was only identified in production and offline comprehension but not in online processing. Additionally, input quantity predicted their production and offline comprehension accuracy of non-canonical structures, whereas age modulated their production. Lastly, online processing was not modulated by age nor input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to enhance the theory of Dynamic Asymmetry by including symmetric head-head structures, the inevitable first step of any derivation (the "ignition" problem). The symmetry-breaking "repair" options available give rise to basic head-initial and head-final word orders. One of the consequences of this approach is that all word-order parameters reduce to head movement options. We take this to be a conceptual advance for the theory of word order variation. This approach and the empirical data discussed here also provide us with a unique opportunity to consider the role of labelling and linearization in the architecture of universal grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A grammatical construction resembling Present-Day English locative inversion has already been found in Old English, with a fronted prepositional phrase prompting V2 word order, both in main and subordinate clauses. It has been demonstrated that several discourse-related factors influence the positioning of objects, fronted locatives, finite verbs and subjects in subordinate clauses. One of the main aims of the present paper is to provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the locative inversion construction in Old English subordinate clauses. The Old English data for this study were obtained from the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, and they were analysed using Corpus Studio. The results were compared with those for main clauses, and discourse-related factors such as PP anaphoricity or subject type were analysed in order to find the motivation for the existence of this alternation of word orders. PP anaphoricity proved not to be a determining factor in triggering finite verb inversion, while other factors such as subject weight and subject type do seem to motivate finite verb inversion, thus yielding an embedded PP-V-S word order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of word order in unergative and unaccusative constructions in Basque (e.g., negar ein 'to cry' and heldu 'to arrive', respectively). It considers the results of an acceptability judgment as well as elicitation tasks carried out among two generations of Basque native speakers (55–75 years old, and 35–45 years old). Unlike the younger participants, the older participants lack the syntactic focus strategy. It is proposed that this lack among the older participants was conditioned by the socially restricted bilingualism that they experienced during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), while the younger participants appeared to have acquired (i.e. recovered) the syntactic focus strategy because they experienced the legitimacy and vitality of Basque in public life and in formal education following the Normalization Law of 1982. Studies in Basque sociolinguistics have identified language changes through feature loss, dialectal leveling and contact-induced change, but no studies to date have identified the recovery of a previously lost syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g., fish and shoe vs. shoe and fish) have yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we tested the possibility that effects of animacy are outranked by reading and writing habits. We examined adult speakers of German (left-to-right script) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left script), as well as German preschool children who do not yet know how to read and write. Participants were tested in a picture naming task that presented an animate and an inanimate entity next to one another. On half of the trials, the animate entity was located on the left and, on the other half, it was located on the right side of the screen. We found that adult German and Arabic speakers differed in their order of naming. Whereas German speakers were much more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was presented on the left than on the right, a reverse tendency was observed for speakers of Arabic. Thus, in literate adults, the ordering of conjoined noun phrases was influenced by reading and writing habits rather than by the animacy status of an entity. By contrast, pre-literate children preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position, suggesting that effects of animacy in adults have been overwritten by effects of literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study aimed to examine age-related differences in the comprehension of Korean comparative sentences with varying word orders by employing both offline and online measures, and to investigate how variations in word order affect sentence processing across different age groups. Methods: A total of 52 monolingual native Korean speakers, 26 young adults, and 26 older adults, completed a sentence-picture-matching task under two word order conditions: comparative-first and nominative-first. Offline measures included accuracy and response time, while an online method involved eye)tracking within the Visual World Paradigm. Data analyses were performed using linear and generalized linear mixed-effects models. Results: Older adults demonstrated lower accuracy and longer response times compared to younger individuals. Distinctive fixation patterns were observed, particularly in the sentential-final phrase, across different age groups. Specifically, nominative-first sentences elicited greater target advantage scores among younger adults, whereas older adults showed higher scores in comparative-first sentences. Conclusion: The study highlights the potential of comparative sentences in elucidating age-related changes in sentence comprehension. These differences were evident not only in offline tasks but also in real-time processing, as evidenced by eye-tracking data. The findings suggest distinct processing strategies employed by young and older adults and underscore the importance of considering both syntactic and semantic cues in sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The given text provides information about the Pesh language, including its classification within the Chibchan family, its endangered status, and its typological characteristics. It discusses various aspects of the language, such as verb agreement, case marking, word order, tense and aspect markers, and pragmatic enclitic markers. The text also includes a collection of narratives from the Pesh language, which offer insights into Pesh culture and folklore. Additionally, it provides a transcription of a conversation in the Miskito language, with Spanish borrowings included. [Extracted from the article]

An OSV word order that deviates from the canonical SVO word order is typically viewed as derived through movement. This theory has been widely supported by psycholinguistic studies showing that the displaced constituents are mentally reactivated at the gap positions. However, some cognitive-functionalists have proposed an alternative account: in a topic-prominent language like Chinese, topic is the basic unit of a sentence that delimits the frame within which the main predication holds. The present study adopts the cross-modal antecedent priming technique to test whether the sentence-initial object is structurally associated with the verb in native speakers' online processing. Results of two experiments show that the sentence-initial object is not associated with the verb whatsoever, neither lexically nor structurally, shedding light on the typological characteristics of Chinese as a topic-prominent language. However, the processing of the antecedent object was shown facilitated at the post-quantifier position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns er and der in German. Factors such as subject-hood, focus, and topicality, as well as order of mention have been linked to an increased probability of certain referents being selected as the pronoun's antecedent and described as increasing this referent's prominence, salience, or accessibility. The goal of this study was to find out whether pronoun processing is primarily guided by linguistic factors (e.g., grammatical role) or nonlinguistic factors (e.g., first-mention), and whether pronoun interpretation can be described in terms of referents' "prominence" / "accessibility" / "salience." The results showed an overall subject preference for er, whereas der was affected by the object role and focus marking. While focus increases the attentional load and enhances memory representation for the focused referent making the focused referent more available, ultimately it did not affect the final interpretation of er, suggesting that "prominence" or the related concepts do not explain referent selection preferences. Overall, the results suggest a primacy of linguistic factors in determining pronoun resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine translation evaluation is difficult and challenging for natural languages because different languages behave differently for the same dataset. Lexical-based metrics have been poorly represented semantic relationships and impose strict identity matching. However, translation and assessment become difficult for target morphologically rich languages with relatively free word order. Most of the standard evaluation metrics consider word order but do not effectively consider sentence structure. In this paper, we propose a novel machine translation evaluation metric SemSyn which incorporates both semantic and syntactic similarity. We incorporate the term frequency-inverse document frequency with the earth mover's distance and word embedding to cover the semantic similarity. The part of speech and dependency parsing tags assist in covering syntactic similarity in the sentence structure. Part of speech and dependency parsing tags are extracted from universal dependencies and trained on the SpaCy library. Experimental results show that SemSyn has a higher correlation with human judgment than other evaluation metrics for morphologically rich language and other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In this paper, we studied how native (L1) speakers of Russian and speakers of Mandarin Chinese learning Russian as a foreign language (L2) process Russian sentences with different word orders. We compared SVO (canonical) and OVS (non-canonical) orders in isolation and in context. Experiments focusing on the L2 processing of different word orders are still not very numerous, and those using context are extremely rare. Methods: In Experiment 1, target sentences were presented in isolation. In Experiment 2, one-sentence contexts introduced one NP mentioned in the target sentence, either the first (so that given information preceded new information, which is characteristic for Russian and many other languages) or the second. As a result, two factors could be compared: the syntactic (word order) and the contextual (whether the context is appropriate from the information-structural perspective). We used different measures to capture online and offline effects: word-by-word reading times, question-answering accuracy and sentence rating on a 1 to 5 scale (for L1 participants). Results and discussion: In both experiments, RTs and question-answering accuracy data showed that non-canonical orders were difficult for L2 participants, but not for L1 participants. However, L1 participants gave non-canonical orders lower ratings in isolation, presumably because in naturally occurring texts, they are used only in particular contexts. As for the context factor in Experiment 2, some effects were the same for L1 and L2 processing: all participants read given NPs faster than new ones and preferred sentences with a 'given -- new' word order. The latter may reflect the universal principles of narrative coherence. However, unlike native speakers, L2 readers are not sensitive to more subtle contextual requirements of different word orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers both a descriptive account and an analysis of the possible consequences of linguistic contact between the Daco-Romanian variety spoken by the Lipovan community and Russian (starting from a fieldwork-based corpus study) regarding (low) verb movement in neutral readings, ultimately reflected in the preference for [adv-v] word order. The situation identified in Lipovan Daco-Romanian will be compared with that of old and standard Daco-Romanian, Moldovan Daco-Romanian, and Russian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of languages have been argued to establish basic word order by means of VP-fronting (e.g., Kayne 1994 , Massam 2001). However, many such analyses overgenerate: some material thought to be VP-internal never appears fronted and must apparently always be stranded (Chung 2005 , Massam 2010). Here, I provide novel evidence for VP-fronting in an SVO language, the understudied Polynesian outlier Imere (Vanuatu), motivated by the placement of adverbial particles. But this analysis too faces the stranding problem: VP-fronting cannot drag along any DPs, PPs, or CPs. To solve this issue, I propose that VP-fronting is accompanied by distributed deletion (Fanselow and Ćavar 2001), driven by a constraint that favors realizing only the verb. I extend this analysis to eight other VP-fronting languages, from five language families. In all these languages, what remains in the fronted VP is a structurally reduced dependent, like an adverbial particle or a determinerless object. Building on Clemens 2014 , 2019 , I adopt a constraint that requires dependents of a head that spell out in the same phase to remain adjacent, thus surviving distributed deletion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages vary in how they signal "who does what to whom". Three main strategies to indicate the participant roles of "who" and "whom" are case, verbal indexing, and rigid word order. Languages that disambiguate these roles with case tend to have either verb-final or flexible word order. Most previous studies that found these patterns used limited language samples and overlooked the causal mechanisms that could jointly explain the association between all three features. Here we analyze grammatical data from a Grambank sample of 1705 languages with phylogenetic causal graph methods. Our results corroborate the claims that verb-final word order generally gives rise to case and, strikingly, establish that case tends to lead to the development of flexible word order. The combination of novel statistical methods and the Grambank database provides a model for the rigorous testing of causal claims about the factors that shape patterns of linguistic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed much research on semantic analysis and syntactic anatomy in ordinary language processing. However, it is still a matter of considerable debate about when and how the semantic integration of single word meanings works and interacts with syntax during on-line comprehension. This study, in an eye-tracking paradigm, took 38 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese as the participants and took Chinese relative clauses as stimuli to figure out the functions of semantics by investigating the conditioning semantic factors influencing and governing the word order variation of Chinese relative clauses during different processing stages. Accordingly, this study manipulated two syntactic variables, i.e., relative clause type and the position of the numeralclassifier sequence (NCL) in the relative clause, as well as a semantic variable, i.e., the abstractness of the head noun that the relative clause modified. Specifically, the study addressed two questions: (1) when semantics is activated and interacts with syntax and (2) how semantics affects syntax during the time course of Chinese relative clause processing. The results indicated that: (1) Semantics was activated and interacted with syntax during the early and late processing stages of Chinese relative clauses, which challenged the sequential order of syntactic and semantic processes, and supported the claims of the Concurrent Processing Model. (2) The syntactic order of the Chinese relative clause was affected by the semantic information of the head noun that the clause modified. Object-extraction relative clauses (ORCs) had a conjunction preference for the order "an object relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." Instead, the subject-extraction relative clause (SRC) which modified a concrete noun (CN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "numeral-classifier sequence preceding the subject relative clause and the head noun," while the subject-extraction relative clause which modified an abstract noun (AN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "subject relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." The findings of this study were evaluated in light of the perspectives of truth value semantics of the syntactic components, the semantic compatibility of numeral-classifier sequence and its modified noun as well as the discourse functions of outer modifier nominals and inner modifier nominals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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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.

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]