Syntax Commons^™

Computational Approaches To The Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody To Improve Parsing, Hussein M. Ghaly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing.

Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected …

Knowledge Of The Present Perfect By Albanian/English Bilinguals, Erjon Xholi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper concerns the acquisition process of a specific part of English grammar by native speakers of Albanian. The focus is the English present perfect, and the similarities and differences that it bears to the Albanian Compound Perfective. The two constructions are made from similar parts, but they crucially differ in the aspectual nature of their participles. While the Albanian particle is perfective, the English is underspecified. We argue that the process of the acquisition of the PP by Albanian bilinguals is one where input, analogy, and direct grammar teaching do not suffice. We apply Generative Grammar logic to the …

Phrasal And Clausal Exceptive-Additive Constructions Crosslinguistically, Ekaterina Vostrikova

Doctoral Dissertations

This work focuses on the syntax and semantics of exceptive and exceptive-additive constructions across different languages. Exceptive-additive constructions are constructions that can be interpreted as ‘except for’ and ‘in addition to’ depending on the context they are used in. The meaning an exceptive-additive construction gets depends on the other functional elements in a sentence. Those constructions get the exceptive meaning when they are put together with universal quantifiers and they get the additive meaning with existentials, wh-words and focus associates. In each context only one of the meanings is available. This work is the first systematic study of the …

Binding And Coreference In Vietnamese, Thuy Bui

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the real-time comprehension and final interpretation of object pronouns in Vietnamese, a language in which reflexive and non-reflexive pronominal forms have overlapping meanings. It addresses the questions of whether and how Principle B is applied as a structural constraint to determine the appropriate antecedent for pronouns in the language. The central argument is that Vietnamese speakers rely on two distinct mechanisms to resolve anaphoric relations: Within a pronoun's local domain, even though coreference is highly permissive, binding is strictly prohibited. Results from three two-alternative forced choice and three self-paced reading experiments show consistent profiles for both the …

Computing Agreement In A Mixed System, Sakshi Bhatia

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops a comprehensive response to the question of how agreement is computed in Hindi-Urdu – a language with a mixed agreement system where the verb can agree with a subject or an object depending on the structural context. This dissertation covers new empirical and theoretical ground in two domains. First, I identify three kinds of atypical agreement patterns which are not accounted for under traditional approaches Hindi-Urdu agreement -- verb agreement with the nominal component of Noun-Verb complex predicates, long distance agreement of embedding Adjective-Verb predicates with embedded infinitive clause objects, and copular agreement in identity copula structures. …

Spanish Nominalizations And Case Assignment, Dr. Jeff Renaud, Tania Leal

Celebration of Learning

Nominalizations are syntactic structures wherein verbal roots co-occur with verbal and nominal properties, classifying them as verbal (VN) (El andar el niño tan tarde) or nominal (NN) (El andar errabundo del niño). While NNs mark agents genitive (del niño), VNs require nominative agents (el niño). NNs co-occur with adjectives (errabundo), whereas VNs co-occur with adverbs (tan tarde). Alexiadou et al. (2011) posit separate syntactic structures for the two. In this study, we investigate via self-paced reading task the types of case available in each structure, providing evidence of …

Cue-Based Reflexive Reference Resolution: Evidence From Korean Reflexive Caki, Namseok Yong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to reveal cognitive mechanisms and factors that underlie the reflexive dependency formation. In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of how our mind works in building linguistic dependencies (including an antecedent-reflexive dependency) because relevant research has proved promising and illuminating in regard to the properties (e.g., system architecture, computational algorithms, etc.) of human language processor and its close connection with other cognitive functions such as memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006; McElree, 2000; McElree, Foraker, & Dyer, 2003; Van Dyke & Johns, 2012; Wagers, Lau, & …

Do It Like A Syntactician: Using Binary Gramaticality Judgements To Train Sentence Encoders And Assess Their Sensitivity To Syntactic Structure, Pablo Gonzalez Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The binary nature of grammaticality judgments and their use to access the structure of syntax are a staple of modern linguistics. However, computational models of natural language rarely make use of grammaticality in their training or application. Furthermore, developments in modern neural NLP have produced a myriad of methods that push the baselines in many complex tasks, but those methods are typically not evaluated from a linguistic perspective. In this dissertation I use grammaticality judgements with artificially generated ungrammatical sentences to assess the performance of several neural encoders and propose them as a suitable training target to make models learn …

Heritage Speaker And Late Bilingual L2 Relative Clause Processing And Language Dominance Effects, Leeann S. Stevens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traditionally, heritage speakers are recognized as a heterogeneous group whose skills in their heritage language are unlike those of monolinguals or L2 learners of that language. Indeed, much evidence confirms the cognitive and linguistic uniqueness of this population. However, highly proficient heritage speakers may pattern more similarly to another bilingual population than typically assumed: first-generation late bilinguals.

The present study examines group-level processing differences between Spanish heritage speakers and Spanish-English late bilinguals in English, the second-learned and current societal majority language of these populations. Dominance is also analyzed as a possible effect of group processing differences, since traditionally and definitionally …

Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguities In Declarative And Interrogative Contexts: Oral Reading Data, Tyler J. Peckenpaugh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the …

Differences In Syntactic Complexity In The Writing Of El1 And Ell Civil Engineering Students, Santiago Gustin

Dissertations and Theses

Traditional studies in syntactic complexity consider increased clausal complexity to be characteristic of development, proficiency and growth in written language production. However, this stereotypical view ignores two important facts. First, complexity differs by register (i.e. daily speech versus formal writing). Second, as the proficiency of writers increases, their complexity in formal writing changes from clausal complexity to phrasal complexity (i.e. lower-proficiency writers have more subordinate clauses whereas higher-proficiency writers tend to have more noun phrases). Therefore, in this study, I argue for the need to consider not just clausal complexity but also phrasal complexity measures when assessing development and performance …

P’Urhépecha Classifier Morphemes, Matthew Ball

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Divorce Licensing: Separate Criteria For Predicate And Clausal Ellipsis, Tracy Conner

Doctoral Dissertations

Current theories of ellipsis share the assumption that ellipsis is licensed by the presence of a licensing feature, [E], on a functional node in syntax (Lobeck 1995, Merchant 1999, 2004). This dissertation provides evidence from both Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American English (AAE) that the functional heads that license ellipsis must be phonologically overt, which is unexpected under current theories. AAE is particularly important to establish this generalization due to the fact that, although the pronunciation of auxiliary be and the possessive ’s morpheme is typically optional preceding a full predicate, new experimental evidence reported in this dissertation …

Touch Down In Pittsburghese, R. Thomas Mccoy

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In standard American English, down may take a DP object only if the DP indicates a path, as in I walked down the street. However, for some speakers of Pittsburgh English, it is also grammatical for down to take a DP object indicating a location or goal, as in She works down Baltimore (meaning ‘She works down in Baltimore’). In this work, I describe the distributional properties of this usage, which I name “touch down.” Based on these properties, I propose the syntactic analysis that touch down licenses a silent preposition where standard American English has an overt …

A Jewel Inlaid: Ergativity And Markedness In Nepali, Luke S. Lindemann

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

Nepali presents with a complex case marking pattern in which ergative case is obligatory in perfective transitive clauses, disallowed in unaccusative intransitive clauses and copular clauses, and varies with the nominative elsewhere. Where ergative marking is variable, its usage correlates with a variety of semantic and pragmatic factors. The purpose of this investigation is to precisely delineate the grammatical domains for which ergative marking is variable and to provide a unified analysis of the semantic and pragmatic factors that correlate with its expression.

The study of pragmatic phenomena requires the implementation of multiple strategies for collecting language data. The data …

I Feel Like That One Complementizer Is Not Enough, Aidan Kaplan

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This study presents a description and analysis of an instance of syntactic microvariation, which I call the like that construction. In this construction, an embedded CP is apparently introduced by two complementizers or complementizer-like elements, as in I feel like that we’re going to win the game. This construction is found to be acceptable to speakers from all over the US, with no apparent geographic constraints, while it is also unacceptable to many speakers. Using judgments from a consultant who accepts this construction as well as examples drawn from the Internet, I show that the syntactic properties of like …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Opening Statements In Trial: Reconsidering The Classical Canon Of Invention, Andrew Chandler

Undergraduate Theses

This analysis of 21 opening statements probes at current persuasive practices employed by trial attorneys through the lens of mainstream legal advice and an expanded definition of rhetorical invention – one which includes both discovery and creation. An evaluation of such practice reveals the utility, and furthermore the duty of the advocate, to draw upon an expanded realm of available arguments.

Assessment Of Academic Vocabulary In Early Adolescents Using A Novel Sampling Method, Amber Cline

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The current study examined a method of language sampling (the Dixit Method- Science, Math, Engineering, Arts, and Math) in early adolescents with typically developing language. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the DM-STEAM in eliciting lexically sophisticated spoken language samples in the early adolescent population. To examine lexical sophistication, traditional measures of analysis such as mean length of utterance (MLU) and average type token ratio (AVG TTR) were applied along with a measure of low frequency vocabulary. To compare performance on the DM-STEAM, school standardized assessments were obtained to measure student skill in academic content …

Conjunctions And Interjections In Modern Standard Arabic, Abdulkareem Said Ramadan

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Conjunctions and Interjections in Modern Standard Arabic is a grammar for Modern Standard Arabic introducing conjunctions and interjections from the most basic to the most advanced, with drills for each grammatical point. Skill in the use of conjunctions and interjections is essential for acquiring proficiency in expressing relationships of causation, order, time sequence and other relationships among events and ideas.

Each chapter presents the grammar of conjunctions and interjections in clearly organized tables with examples of each use. An additional section presents multiple drills for practice and functional use.

Aimed as a textbook for students for all four years of …

The Intersection Of Speech-Language Pathologists’ Beliefs, Perceptions, And Practices And The Language Acquisition And Development Of Emerging Aided Communicators, Margaret Vento-Wilson

Education (PhD) Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the convergence of aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems, the language acquisition and development of young children who are minimally verbal or nonverbal who acquire their native language while simultaneously learning to use an aided AAC system, and explicit and implicit elements that influence language outcomes. Factors investigated include those related to language acquisition universals, the AAC system, the young aided AAC user, and practices, philosophies, and beliefs of speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Further examined were: (a) language acquisition parallels in atypical populations who do not possess the full range of senses who have been shown to …