Greville G. Corbett (Ed.) the Expression of Gender the Expression of Cognitive Categories
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English Dative Alternation and Evidence for a Thematic Strategy in Adult SLA
UCLA Issues in Applied Linguistics Title English Dative Alternation and Evidence for a Thematic Strategy in Adult SLA Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64d102q5 Journal Issues in Applied Linguistics, 5(1) ISSN 1050-4273 Author Davies, William D Publication Date 1994-06-30 DOI 10.5070/L451005171 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California English Dative Alternation and Evidence for a Thematic Strategy in Adult SLA William D. Davies University of Iowa INTRODUCTION A body of recent work in second language acquisition is concerned with applying constructs from Chomsky's conception of Universal Grammar in both constructing an overall theory of SLA and explaining various phenomena in L2 learners (e.g., Flynn, 1984, 1987; Hilles, 1986; Phinney, 1987; White, 1985a, 1985b; papers in Flynn and O'Neil, 1988). A key linguistic construct that has received relatively little attention in SLA research is thematic roles—notions such as AGENT, THEME, GOAL, LOCATION, SOURCE, and others that are believed to contribute to semantic encoding and decoding. Although thematic roles (alternatively, thematic relations, semantic roles, case roles, 9-roles) have long been part of modem linguistic theory (cf. Gruber, 1965; Fillmore, 1968; Jackendoff, 1972), they have enjoyed increased popularity in the recent linguistic literature owing in part to their central role in Chomsky's (1981) government and binding (GB) theory, as embodied in the G-Criterion.^ Various formulations of the 9-Criterion have been proposed, but the simple formulation in (1) will suffice here. (1) e-Criterion (Chomsky 1981, p. 36): Each argument bears one and only one H-role, and each H-role is assigned to one and only one argument. -
PUMICE: a Multi-Modal Agent That Learns Concepts and Conditionals
PUMICE: A Multi-Modal Agent that Learns Concepts and Conditionals from Natural Language and Demonstrations Toby Jia-Jun Li1, Marissa Radensky2, Justin Jia1, Kirielle Singarajah1, Tom M. Mitchell1, Brad A. Myers1 1Carnegie Mellon University, 2Amherst College {tobyli, tom.mitchell, bam}@cs.cmu.edu, {justinj1, ksingara}@andrew.cmu.edu, [email protected] Figure 1. Example structure of how PUMICE learns the concepts and procedures in the command “If it’s hot, order a cup of Iced Cappuccino.” The numbers indicate the order of utterances. The screenshot on the right shows the conversational interface of PUMICE. In this interactive parsing process, the agent learns how to query the current temperature, how to order any kind of drink from Starbucks, and the generalized concept of “hot” as “a temperature (of something) is greater than another temperature”. ABSTRACT CCS Concepts Natural language programming is a promising approach to •Human-centered computing ! Natural language inter enable end users to instruct new tasks for intelligent agents. faces; However, our formative study found that end users would of ten use unclear, ambiguous or vague concepts when naturally Author Keywords instructing tasks in natural language, especially when spec Programming by Demonstration; Natural Language Pro ifying conditionals. Existing systems have limited support gramming; End User Development; Multi-modal Interaction. for letting the user teach agents new concepts or explaining unclear concepts. In this paper, we describe a new multi- INTRODUCTION modal domain-independent approach that combines natural The goal of end user development (EUD) is to empower language programming and programming-by-demonstration users with little or no programming expertise to program [43]. -
Third Declension, That Is, Consonant-Stem Nouns; Patterns I
Chapter 7: Third-Declension Nouns Chapter 7 covers the following: third declension, that is, consonant-stem nouns; patterns in the formation of the nominative singular of third declension; and the agreement between third- declension nouns and first/second-declension adjectives. At the end of the lesson, we’ll review the vocabulary which you should memorize in this chapter. There is only one important rule to remember here: the genitive singular ending in third declension is -is . We’ve already encountered first- and second-declension nouns. Now we’ll address the third. A fair question to ask, and one which some of you may be asking, is why is there a third declension at all? Third declension is Latin’s “catch-all” category for nouns. Into it have been put all nouns whose bases end with consonants ─ any consonant! That makes third declension very different from first and second declension. First declension, as you’ll remember, is dominated by a-stem nouns like femina and cura . Second declension is dominated by o- or u-stem nouns like amicus or oculus . Those vowels give those declensions a certain consistency, but the same is not true of third declension where one form, the nominative singular, is affected by the fact that its ending -s runs into the wide variety of consonants found at the ends of the bases of third-declension nouns, and the collision of those consonants causes irregular forms to appear in the nominative singular. That’s the bad news. The good news is that only one case and number is affected by this, the nominative singular. -
Animacy, Definiteness, and Case in Cappadocian and Other
Animacy, definiteness, and case in Cappadocian and other Asia Minor Greek dialects* Mark Janse Ghent University and Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg This article discusses the relation between animacy, definiteness, and case in Cappadocian and several other Asia Minor Greek dialects. Animacy plays a decisive role in the assignment of Greek and Turkish nouns to the various Cappadocian noun classes. The development of morphological definiteness is due to Turkish interference. Both features are important for the phenom- enon of differential object marking which may be considered one of the most distinctive features of Cappadocian among the Greek dialects. Keywords: Asia Minor Greek dialectology, Cappadocian, Farasiot, Lycaonian, Pontic, animacy, definiteness, case, differential object marking, Greek–Turkish language contact, case typology . Introduction It is well known that there is a crosslinguistic correlation between case marking and animacy and/or definiteness (e.g. Comrie 1989:128ff., Croft 2003:166ff., Linguist List 9.1653 & 9.1726). In nominative-accusative languages, for in- stance, there is a strong tendency for subjects of active, transitive clauses to be more animate and more definite than objects (for Greek see Lascaratou 1994:89). Both animacy and definiteness are scalar concepts. As I am not con- cerned in this article with pronouns and proper names, the person and referen- tiality hierarchies are not taken into account (Croft 2003:130):1 (1) a. animacy hierarchy human < animate < inanimate b. definiteness hierarchy definite < specific < nonspecific Journal of Greek Linguistics 5 (2004), 3–26. Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:55:21PM via free access issn 1566–5844 / e-issn 1569–9856 © John Benjamins Publishing Company 4 Mark Janse With regard to case marking, there is a strong tendency to mark objects that are high in animacy and/or definiteness and, conversely, not to mark ob- jects that are low in animacy and/or definiteness. -
3.1. Government 3.2 Agreement
e-Content Submission to INFLIBNET Subject name: Linguistics Paper name: Grammatical Categories Paper Coordinator name Ayesha Kidwai and contact: Module name A Framework for Grammatical Features -II Content Writer (CW) Ayesha Kidwai Name Email id [email protected] Phone 9968655009 E-Text Self Learn Self Assessment Learn More Story Board Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Features as Values 3. Contextual Features 3.1. Government 3.2 Agreement 4. A formal description of features and their values 5. Conclusion References 1 1. Introduction In this unit, we adopt (and adapt) the typology of features developed by Kibort (2008) (but not necessarily all her analyses of individual features) as the descriptive device we shall use to describe grammatical categories in terms of features. Sections 2 and 3 are devoted to this exercise, while Section 4 specifies the annotation schema we shall employ to denote features and values. 2. Features and Values Intuitively, a feature is expressed by a set of values, and is really known only through them. For example, a statement that a language has the feature [number] can be evaluated to be true only if the language can be shown to express some of the values of that feature: SINGULAR, PLURAL, DUAL, PAUCAL, etc. In other words, recalling our definitions of distribution in Unit 2, a feature creates a set out of values that are in contrastive distribution, by employing a single parameter (meaning or grammatical function) that unifies these values. The name of the feature is the property that is used to construct the set. Let us therefore employ (1) as our first working definition of a feature: (1) A feature names the property that unifies a set of values in contrastive distribution. -
The Term Declension, the Three Basic Qualities of Latin Nouns, That
Chapter 2: First Declension Chapter 2 covers the following: the term declension, the three basic qualities of Latin nouns, that is, case, number and gender, basic sentence structure, subject, verb, direct object and so on, the six cases of Latin nouns and the uses of those cases, the formation of the different cases in Latin, and the way adjectives agree with nouns. At the end of this lesson we’ll review the vocabulary you should memorize in this chapter. Declension. As with conjugation, the term declension has two meanings in Latin. It means, first, the process of joining a case ending onto a noun base. Second, it is a term used to refer to one of the five categories of nouns distinguished by the sound ending the noun base: /a/, /ŏ/ or /ŭ/, a consonant or /ĭ/, /ū/, /ē/. First, let’s look at the three basic characteristics of every Latin noun: case, number and gender. All Latin nouns and adjectives have these three grammatical qualities. First, case: how the noun functions in a sentence, that is, is it the subject, the direct object, the object of a preposition or any of many other uses? Second, number: singular or plural. And third, gender: masculine, feminine or neuter. Every noun in Latin will have one case, one number and one gender, and only one of each of these qualities. In other words, a noun in a sentence cannot be both singular and plural, or masculine and feminine. Whenever asked ─ and I will ask ─ you should be able to give the correct answer for all three qualities. -
LINGUISTICS 221 Lecture #3 DISTINCTIVE FEATURES Part 1. an Utterance Is Composed of a Sequence of Discrete Segments. Is the Segm
LINGUISTICS 221 Lecture #3 DISTINCTIVE FEATURES Part 1. An utterance is composed of a sequence of discrete segments. Is the segment indivisible? Is the segment the smallest unit of phonological analysis? If it is, segments ought to differ randomly from one another. Yet this is not true: pt k prs What is the relationship between members of the two groups? p t k - the members of this set have an internal relationship: they are all voiceles stops. p r s - no such relationship exists p b d s bilabial bilabial alveolar alveolar stop stop stop fricative voiceless voiced voiced voiceless SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES! Segments may be viewed as composed of sets of properties rather than indivisible entities. We can show the relationship by listing the properties of each segment. DISTINCTIVE FEATURES • enable us to describe the segments in the world’s languages: all segments in any language can be characterized in some unique combination of features • identifies groups of segments → natural segment classes: they play a role in phonological processes and constraints • distinctive features must be referred to in terms of phonetic -- articulatory or acoustic -- characteristics. 1 Requirements on distinctive feature systems (p. 66): • they must be capable of characterizing natural segment classes • they must be capable of describing all segmental contrasts in all languages • they should be definable in phonetic terms The features fulfill three functions: a. They are capable of describing the segment: a phonetic function b. They serve to differentiate lexical items: a phonological function c. They define natural segment classes: i.e. those segments which as a group undergo similar phonological processes. -
Introduction to Latin Nouns 1. Noun Entries – Chapter 3, LFCA Example
Session A3: Introduction to Latin Nouns 1. Noun entries – Chapter 3, LFCA When a Latin noun is listed in a dictionary it provides three pieces of information: The nominative singular, the genitive singular, and the gender. The first form, called nominative (from Latin nömen, name) is the means used to list, or name, words in a dictionary. The second form, the genitive (from Latin genus, origin, kind or family), is used to find the stem of the noun and to determine the declension, or noun family to which it belongs. To find the stem of a noun, simply look at the genitive singular form and remove the ending –ae. The final abbreviation is a reference to the noun’s gender, since it is not always evident by the noun’s endings. Example: fëmina, fëminae, f. woman stem = fëmin/ae 2. Declensions – Chapters 3 – 10, LFCA Just as verbs are divided up into families or groups called conjugations, so also nouns are divided up into groups that share similar characteristics and behavior patterns. A declension is a group of nouns that share a common set of inflected endings, which we call case endings (more on case later). The genitive reveals the declension or family of nouns from which a word originates. Just as the infinitive is different for each conjugation, the genitive singular is unique to each declension. 1 st declension mënsa, mënsae 2 nd declension lüdus, lüdï ager, agrï dönum, dönï 3 rd declension vöx, vöcis nübës, nübis corpus, corporis 4 th declension adventus, adventüs cornü, cornüs 5 th declension fidës, fideï Practice: 1. -
Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect Peter Auer & Vanessa Siegel
1 Grammatical gender in the German multiethnolect Peter Auer & Vanessa Siegel Contact: Deutsches Seminar, Universität Freiburg, D-79089 Freiburg [email protected], [email protected] Abstract While major restructurations and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, the article demonstrates that the three-fold gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers of immigrant background. We inves- tigate gender in a German multiethnolect, based on a corpus of appr. 17 hours of spontaneous speech by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly of Turkish and Balkan backgrounds). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from child- hood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent processes, such as the frequent use of bare nouns determiners in grammatical contexts where German requires it. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective/noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized, gender-neutral suffix for pre-nominal adjectives (i.e. schwa). The disappearance of gender/case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical cat- egory of gender is lost in A + N phrases (without determiner). 1. Introduction Modern German differs from most other Germanic languages -
Arxiv:2106.08037V1 [Cs.CL] 15 Jun 2021 Alternative Ways the World Could Be
The Possible, the Plausible, and the Desirable: Event-Based Modality Detection for Language Processing Valentina Pyatkin∗ Shoval Sadde∗ Aynat Rubinstein Bar Ilan University Bar Ilan University Hebrew University of Jerusalem [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Paul Portner Reut Tsarfaty Georgetown University Bar Ilan University [email protected] [email protected] Abstract (1) a. We presented a paper at ACL’19. Modality is the linguistic ability to describe b. We did not present a paper at ACL’20. events with added information such as how de- sirable, plausible, or feasible they are. Modal- The propositional content p =“present a paper at ity is important for many NLP downstream ACL’X” can be easily verified for sentences (1a)- tasks such as the detection of hedging, uncer- (1b) by looking up the proceedings of the confer- tainty, speculation, and more. Previous studies ence to (dis)prove the existence of the relevant pub- that address modality detection in NLP often p restrict modal expressions to a closed syntac- lication. The same proposition is still referred to tic class, and the modal sense labels are vastly in sentences (2a)–(2d), but now in each one, p is different across different studies, lacking an ac- described from a different perspective: cepted standard. Furthermore, these senses are often analyzed independently of the events that (2) a. We aim to present a paper at ACL’21. they modify. This work builds on the theoreti- b. We want to present a paper at ACL’21. cal foundations of the Georgetown Gradable Modal Expressions (GME) work by Rubin- c. -
Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: a Case Study from Koro
Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: A Case Study from Koro By Jessica Cleary-Kemp A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Associate Professor Lev D. Michael, Chair Assistant Professor Peter S. Jenks Professor William F. Hanks Summer 2015 © Copyright by Jessica Cleary-Kemp All Rights Reserved Abstract Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: A Case Study from Koro by Jessica Cleary-Kemp Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Associate Professor Lev D. Michael, Chair In this dissertation a methodology for identifying and analyzing serial verb constructions (SVCs) is developed, and its application is exemplified through an analysis of SVCs in Koro, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. SVCs involve two main verbs that form a single predicate and share at least one of their arguments. In addition, they have shared values for tense, aspect, and mood, and they denote a single event. The unique syntactic and semantic properties of SVCs present a number of theoretical challenges, and thus they have invited great interest from syntacticians and typologists alike. But characterizing the nature of SVCs and making generalizations about the typology of serializing languages has proven difficult. There is still debate about both the surface properties of SVCs and their underlying syntactic structure. The current work addresses some of these issues by approaching serialization from two angles: the typological and the language-specific. On the typological front, it refines the definition of ‘SVC’ and develops a principled set of cross-linguistically applicable diagnostics. -
LA SITUACION LINGUISTICA EN GRECIA. PROBLEMAS Y PERSPECTIVAS' Pedro BADENAS DE LA PENA C.S.I.C
LA SITUACION LINGUISTICA EN GRECIA. PROBLEMAS Y PERSPECTIVAS' Pedro BADENAS DE LA PENA C.S.I.C. Madrid El proceso de una integración económica, política y cultural europea, derivado del actual grado de desarrollo de la CEE, está permitiendo que asistamos a un redescubrimiento de la gran complejidad que se esconde tras el fácil, e inexacto, cliché de la supuesta "homogeneidad" eurooccidental. En primer lugar, conviene ya relegar el concepto de "occidental" para lo que realmente denota, una mera distribución geográfica. Su extensión a otros terrenos no deja de ser una manipulación semántica, más o menos interesada. Si por algo se caracteriza Europa es por ser un mosaico lingüístico, surgido y moldeado históricamente por tres culturas diferenciadas -latina, germánica y eslava- pero procedentes de una cepa común: el mundo grecorromano. Este pasado esencial de lo que podríamos llamar civilización europea es, ya en su misma raíz, doble. El carácter dual del Imperio Romano obedecía, entre otras razones, a una división lingüística: uso del latín en la pars Occidentis y del griego en la pars Orientis, división que se ahondaría desde la Alta Edad Media cuando definitivamente Roma y Bizancio se conviertan en focos opuestos de irradiación cultural. La función civilizadora de la lengua griega (v. mapa 1) condicionó decisivamente, a través de Bizancio, a los pueblos eslavos, pero de manera muy distinta a como actuó el latín en Occidente. El resultado más evidente lo tenemos en la fragmentación románica, mientras que el griego no llegó a ese proceso y permaneció como área lingüísitica unitaria. Dentro del ámbito lingüístico indoeuropeo -en Europa- el griego, como el aibanés, no han dado, pues, lugar a nuevas lenguas.