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The unit of study is Tirap district which lies in the south-eastern part of Arunachal Pradesh; and the languages or varieties are Nocte, Khappa, Ollo and Tutsa.Presently, Tirap is mainly inhabited by Nocte; few villages in the district show occupancy by Nocte-Ollo and Nocte-Khappa. Noctes form the bulk of population of Tirap. This study probes the so-called sub-tribes of Nocte – Ollo and Khappa. Khappa is regarded as a literary medium of Nocte; hence the variety is used in composing songs and poetry. Ollo seeks to be an independent tribe in near future. Tutsa was regarded as a sub-tribe of Nocte, until 1991 the former got registered as an independent tribe.The study is an attempt to lay out grammatical features based on the usage of auxiliary verbs and Be Verbs found in these languages/ varieties – Nocte, Khappa, Ollo and Tutsa; and trace how far the morphology of these languages bears the same source or show resemblances. The features taken into account here are as follows:The study illustrates the various auxiliary verbs featuring in these languages like toŋ, nyi, daŋ jaŋ, diaŋ. It brings into focus that the existential verbs and possessive verbs are derived from posture verb toŋ ‘sit’ and verb nyi/daŋ ‘live/stay’ and je ‘exist’. These verbs provide an understanding not only of the cognates which is interestingly shared among the four; but also, the usages of content and function words shared by the same.In addition, the study describes the Be verb hon in Ollo and Tutsa which perform inchoative functions.The description adds not only to the understanding of rich varieties of auxiliary verbs used in these languages.; but also, source of lexical/grammatical cognates shared by these languages despite retaining their uniqueness.

N-gram language modelling, a proven and effective method in NLP, is widely used to calculate the probability of a sentence in natural language. Language pattern is a linguistic level between word/character and sentence, which exists in pattern grammar. In this research, the approach of language model and language pattern are combined for the first time, and language patterns are studied by use of the N-gram model. Chinese function-word-centered patterns are extracted from the LCMC corpus, and aligned into pattern chains. The language model is trained from these chains to investigate the properties and distribution of Chinese function words, the interaction of content words and function words, and the interaction between patterns. The results indicate that there are approximately 10,000 function-word-centered patterns in the texts, which are distributed exponentially. This research summarizes the most common function-word-centered patterns and content-word-centered patterns, and discusses the interactions of patterns based on corpus data. The bigram language model of these patterns reflects the restrictions of function words. In addition, the research adopts an innovative method to visualize the interactions between patterns. This research fills the research gap between word/character and sentence, and reveals basic Chinese pattern categories and the interactions between patterns, which makes a significant contribution to Chinese linguistic research, and improves the efficiency of NLP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Background: Although discourse‐level assessments contribute to predicting real‐world performance in persons with aphasia (PWA), the use of discourse measures is uncommon in clinical settings due to resource‐heavy procedures. Moreover, assessing function word use in discourse requires the arduous procedure of defining grammatical categories for each word in language transcripts. Aims: The purpose of this exploratory study was twofold: (1) to develop core function word lists as a clinician‐friendly means of evaluating function word use in discourse; and (2) to examine the ability of the core function word measure to differentiate PWA from cognitively healthy adults and persons with fluent aphasia from non‐fluent aphasia. Methods & Procedures: The 25 most commonly used function words (core function words) were extracted from narrative language samples from 470 cognitively healthy adults, which were divided into seven age groups (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s). The percent agreement of core function words for 11 PWA (fluent aphasia = 5; non‐fluent aphasia = 6) and 11 age‐ and education‐matched controls were then calculated. Percent agreement for the core function words produced was compared between the controls and the PWA group, and between participants with fluent aphasia and non‐fluent aphasia. Outcomes & Results: The results indicated that PWA produced fewer core function words from the lists than the control group, and that core function word use was strongly correlated with aphasia severity. Persons with non‐fluent aphasia produced fewer core function words than those with fluent aphasia, although this could be a confound of aphasia classification from the use of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB)—Revised. Conclusions & Implications: Core function word lists consisting of a limited number of items for quantifying function word use in discourse remain in a nascent stage of development. However, the findings are consistent with previous studies analysing the total production of function words in language samples produced by PWA. Therefore, core function words may potentially serve as a clinician‐friendly manner of quantifying function words produced in discourse. What this paper addsWhat is already known on the subjectFunction word analysis in discourse requires arduous processes of identifying the error production and grammatical category of function words in discourse. Previous studies have demonstrated that core lexicon measures are an efficient, simple means of quantifying discourse in PWA. However, function words have never been considered for generating an independent core lexicon list.What this paper adds to existing knowledgeAs an exploratory study, we focused primarily on developing a clinician‐friendly measure to evaluate function word production in discourse, motivated by the idea of an adaptation strategy within the core lexicon framework. Our findings demonstrated that by using a simple scoring system that the core lexicon measure provides, we differentiated the control group from the PWA group, and persons with fluent aphasia from persons with non‐fluent aphasia. Additionally, we found significant correlations between function word production and aphasia severity determined by WAB Aphasia Quotient (AQ).What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?The results add empirical evidence for the utility of core function word lists for quantifying function word usage in discourse in PWA. Counting the presence and absence of function words in discourse will allow clinicians to avoid labour‐intensive preparatory work, and to obtain useful diagnostic information in a less time‐consuming way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the differentiated uses of the preposition ‘like’ and the conjunction ‘as’ in their function of constituents of poetic similes. As evidenced by the suggested analysis of linguistic data from the texts of W. Shakespeare’s sonnets, the function words ‘like’ and ‘as’ are distinguished as elements of a discursively rooted opposition that is based on the contrastive construal of two cognitive operations. Whereas the preposition ‘like’ indicates that a simile construes abstract and perceptually inaccessible things in terms of perceptual characteristics, the conjunction ‘as’ evokes the cognitive categorization of particular entities and phenomena as belonging to general categories of things, events and situations.

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This article is concerned with the possibility that syntactic structure may feature “small stuff” not just at the very top of the clause, but also lower down, in the domain that would usually be regarded as the lexical domain. The analysis is based on a range of (dialectal) Dutch and Frisian data, suggesting an initial analysis for the relevant morphosyntactic facts in terms of which a “smaller” higher category - what superficially looks like the definite and indefinite article in the relevant systems - seems to be located at the bottom of a nominal structure.

Copyright of Journal of Beijing Normal University is the property of Beijing Normal University, Institute of History 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.)

The aim of this paper is to analyse Hausa function words of Arabic origin which act as grammatical elements within sentence structure. The twenty-one items identified in Hausa dictionaries as Arabic loans have been presented with reference to their grammatical status (nouns, particles, phrases) and function (co- and subordinators, prepositions). The descriptive features of the Arabic forms and their Hausa counterparts have been taken from reference grammars and verified contextually in regard to their functioning in sentences extracted from texts published on the BBC web-site. As a result, the function words of Arabic origin in Hausa were divided into groups according to their grammatic or pragmatic/stylistic functions. The analysis shows that the Hausa function words are result of contextual adaptation of the Arabic words to the Hausa grammar rather than simply lexical borrowings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is cumulative evidence suggesting that hyper-glossing facilitates lower-level processing and enhances reading comprehension. There are plentiful studies on electronic dictionaries for English. However, research on e-dictionaries for languages with no boundaries between words is still scarce. The main aim for the current study is to investigate the usage and efficacy of e-dictionaries for Japanese language learners. This article reports the results of two studies concerning e-dictionaries: a survey study investigating the use of e-dictionaries (with a particular focus on e-glossaries that change a digital text into a hypertext) by L2 learners of Japanese, and a comparative study examining existing e-glossaries to evaluate whether they provide the optimal level of support for reading Japanese e-texts. The results of the survey showed that learners have their preferred e-dictionaries (in most cases, e-word dictionaries in which the user can look up individual words), and that few learners are aware of the existence of e-glossaries. The results of further study revealed that existing e-glossaries have various functions, but lack some requisite information crucial to the target language. This study suggests that technical issues revolving around the lack of spaces between words may be a reason for the lag in usage and efficacy of e-glossaries for languages without word boundaries.