Syntax Commons^™

Language Learning From The Developmental And Neurocognitive Perspective: An Examination Of The Impact Of Music On Second Language Acquisition, Shelby Grimm

Honors College Theses

This literature review aims to analyze the influence of music as a learning tool throughout the process of second language acquisition. Through the compilation and analysis of recent research conducted on the academic, cultural, and linguistic impacts of music on the four modes of language, which include reading, speaking, writing, and listening, this thesis will demonstrate the effects of incorporating music into the second language learning curriculum. Definitions of both music and language, as well as a description of the components of both areas will be included. An examination of the neurocognitive relationship between music and language, as well as …

Notes On Extended Benefactives, Jim Wood, Shayley Martin

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

Wood and Zanuttini (2018) have discussed data suggesting that low Appl(icative) phrases can occur as the complement of a preposition in some varieties of English. However, their claim was based on a limited data set that is potentially open to alternative analyses. This paper reports on judgment data collected by the second author of the present paper in January 2018 which go well beyond the examples discussed by Wood and Zanuttini (2018), and support their claim that a beneficiary and a DP can form a constituent inside a PP that excludes the PP and any verb it may be associated …

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

A Comparative Analysis Of Classifiers Within The Dp System, Xuan Hu, Paula Rodriguez Monroy

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Who Wants In On This Linguistic Analysis?, Lane Fischer

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper brings together previous research on the Midland English dialect region construction want + [intransitive preposition] heretofore referred to as the wants in phenomenon. I will build on past research of wants in and present its construction, background, sociolinguistic relevance and will then present further questions I have about the construction, my hypotheses on these questions, and results from my own intuitions as a speaker of the Midland dialect and a linguistic survey. With reference to a similar Midland construction, need + [past participle], I ultimately propose that although these two constructions share many of the same syntactic restrictions, …

Doxastic Feel Like (That), Aarohi Srivastava

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

Doxastic feel like is used to convey a belief or opinion, similar to think:

(1) I feel like your drawing is better than mine.

Doxastic feel like is an intriguing topic of study due to the potential for microsyntactic variation, along with the thick web of linguistic prejudice surrounding this construction. Doxastic feel like is primarily associated with stereotypes regarding age, gender, and intelligence. A survey was conduced to measure participants of diverse demographic backgrounds in their acceptability of feel like in different contexts. Overall, respondents were found to have high acceptability of this construction. In addition, respondents were …

Lulling Waters: A Poetry Reading For Real-Time Music Generation Through Emotion Mapping, Ashley Muniz, Toshihisa Tsuruoka

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Through a poetic narrative, “Lulling Waters” tells the story of a whale overcoming the loss of his mother, who passed away from ingesting plastic, as he attempts to escape from the polluted oceanic world. The live performance of this poem utilizes a software system called Soundwriter, which was developed with the goal of enriching the oral storytelling experience through music. This video demonstrates how Soundwriter’s real-time hybrid system was able to analyze “Lulling Waters” through its lexical and auditory features. Emotionally salient words were given ratings based on arousal, valence, and dominance while the emotionally charged prosodic features of the …

Mapbook Of Syntactic Variation In American English: Survey Results, 2015–2019, Jim Wood, Kaija Gahm, Ian Neidel, Sasha Lioutikova, Luke S. Lindemann, Lydia Lee, Josephine Holubkov

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This work presents the results of a series of acceptability judgment surveys conducted by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (YGDP) between 2015 and 2019. It contains over 200 maps of some 194 sentences, covering a wide range of syntactic constructions, including dative presentatives, personal datives, extended benefactives, the have yet to construction, the done my homework construction, wicked, hella, the so don’t I construction, the alls construction, the come with construction, fixin’ to, the needs washed construction, non-polarity anymore (aka “positive anymore”), and many others. For each sentence, we also provide some basic demographic information, such …

Doing Away With Defaults: Motivation For A Gradient Parameter Space, Katherine Howitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I propose a reconceptualization of the traditional syntactic parameter space of the principles and parameters framework (Chomsky, 1981). In lieu of binary parameter settings, parameter values exist on a gradient plane where a learner’s knowledge of their language is encoded in their confidence that a particular parametric target value, and thus grammatical construction of an encountered sentence, is likely to be licensed by their target grammar. First, I discuss other learnability models in the classic parameter space which lack either psychological plausibility, theoretical consistency, or some combination of the two. Then, I argue for the Gradient Parameter …

A Generative Approach To Oscan Syntax: Towards An Analysis Of The Conditional Construction, Jennifer Mclish

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This thesis presents an analysis of some aspects of the syntax of Oscan, a dead language from the Italic family, with a focus on the conditional construction. Drawing on modern approaches to the syntax of the related language Latin, I show that deviation from the default SOV word order of Oscan can be described in terms of discourse-marking focus and topic movement. Due to the frequent appearance of imperatives in conditional constructions, I address the syntax of imperatives in some detail. Applying current generative theories of the imperative to the Oscan consequent clause, I conclude that the Oscan imperative is …

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 …

Investigating The Relationship Between Individual Differences And Island Sensitivity, Catherine Pham, Lauren Covey, Alison Gabriele, Saad Aldosari, Robert Fiorentino

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

It is well-attested that native speakers tend to give low acceptability ratings to sentences that involve movement from within islands, yet the source of island effects remains an active debate. The grammatical account posits that island effects result from syntactic constraints on wh-movement, whereas the resource-limitation view posits that low ratings emerge due to processing-related constraints on the parser, such that islands themselves present processing bottlenecks. The current study addresses this debate by investigating the relationship between island sensitivity and individual differences in cognitive abilities, as it has been argued that the two views make distinct predictions regarding whether a …