Syntax Commons^™

Destined Failure, Chengjun Pan

Masters Theses

I attempt to examine the complex structure of human communication, explaining why it is bound to fail. By reproducing experienceable phenomena, I demonstrate how they can expose communication structure and reveal the limitations of our perception and symbolization.I divide the process of communication into six stages: input, detection, symbolization, dictionary, interpretation, and output. In this thesis, I examine the flaws and challenges that arise in the first five stages. I argue that reception acts as a filter and that understanding relies on a symbolic system that is full of redundancies. Therefore, every interpretation is destined to be a deviation.

Parasitic Gaps In Japanese: An Mg-Based Approach, Yu Tomita, Hitomi Hirayama

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper aims to provide an account based on Minimalist Grammar (MG) for what are called parasitic gaps in Japanese, which we take as a null pronoun. The main goal of this paper is to provide a syntactic account of the environment in which a parasitic gap reading is licensed in Japanese. First, Japanese parasitic gaps are compared with English ones, illustrating the puzzle to be solved. We argue that the possibility of co-indexing between a parasitic gap (null pronoun) and wh-phrase is correlated with the point at which the wh-phrase enters the derivation. We also show that scrambling counterbleeds …

Can Language Models Learn Constraints On Gap-Filler Dependency? Case Of Japanese Relative Clause Islands, Maho Takahashi

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Corpus-Based Investigation Of The Markedness And Frequency Of Japanese Passives In Contemporary Written Japanese, Tatsuya Aoyama

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Japanese passives are traditionally considered to have two types: direct and indirect passives. However, more recent studies, such as Ishizuka (2012), suggest the two types can be unified under the same syntactic movement analysis. Utilizing the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ; Maekawa, 2008; Maekawa et al., 2014), this study aims to investigate how likely different types of passives appear in the naturally occurring texts, especially in relation to markedness-based hierarchy called Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan and Comrie, 1977), and to investigate if true indirect passives occur in contemporary written Japanese.

Cands: A Computational Implementation Of Collins And Stabler (2016), Satoru Ozaki, Yohei Oseki

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Syntacticians must keep track of the empirical coverages and the inner workings of syntactic theories, a task especially demanding for minimalist syntacticians to perform manually and mentally. We believe that the computational implementation of syntactic theories is desirable in that it not only (a) facilitates the evaluation of their empirical coverages, but also (b) forces syntacticians to specify their inner workings. In this paper, we present CANDS, a computational implementation of Collins AND Stabler (2016) in the programming language Rust. Specifically, CANDS consists of one main library, cands, as well as two wrapper programs for cands, derivck and derivexp. The …

Do Language Models Know How To Be Polite?, Soo-Hwan Lee, Shaonan Wang

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Politeness is often associated with a degree of formality that the speaker conveys to the addressee of a conversation. There are multiple ways to convey politeness in natural language. Languages such as Korean and Japanese, for instance, have politeness markers that appear in certain positions inside a given sentence. Sometimes, the absence of these politeness markers leads to inappropriateness. This work focuses on a particular case in which a politeness marker can be realized only when its dependency requirement is satisfied. While language model (LM) performance on syntactic dependencies such as filler-gap dependencies (Wilcox et al., 2018), subject-verb agreement (Linzen …

Processing French Rcs With Postverbal Subjects In A Minimalist Parser, Daniel Del Valle, Aniello De Santo

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Computational models with explicit assumptions about the connection between syntactic representations and processing difficulty can help strengthen bridges between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. In this sense, a model based on Stabler’s parser for Minimalist grammars (MGs; Stabler 2013) has been shown to predict a variety of off-line processing pref- erences, by exploiting complexity metrics tracking how syntactic structure affects memory load (Graf et al. 2017:a.o.). This model provides an interpretable linking theory between fine-grained syntactic structure in the generative tradition and precise sentence processing results, through transparently specified notions of cognitive cost. Here, we build on recent work on the …

(De)Constructing Paradigmaticity In Syntax: An Information-Theoretic Approach, Ryan Ka Yau Lai

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

The notions of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations are central to linguistics. Traditionally, two linguistic forms are paradigmatically related if they fall in the same grammatical slot and can substitute for each other, and syntagmatically related if they occur next to each other. For example, in mainstream American English, modals may and can have a paradigmatic relationship since they share a syntactic position, but the modal may and perfect auxiliary have have a syntagmatic relationship as they co-occur in distinct syntactic positions, e.g. They may have eaten. Paradigmatically related forms may form a closed set, or paradigm. Paradigms are well-studied in …

L’Emprunt Lexical De L’Arabe Algérien À L’Amazighe : Étude Sur Un Corpus Parémiologique, Abdelaziz Berkai

Journal of Amazigh Studies

Résumé :

Une étude très récente de parémiologie contrastive entre le kabyle et l’arabe algérien montre, par-delà l’« isomorphisme » parémiologique existant entre les deux langues-cultures, qu’un certain nombre de mots de l’arabe dialectal seraient des emprunts à l’amazighe. C’est l’étude de ces emprunts au plan lexico-sémantique, et subsidiairement étymologique, qui constitue l’objet de notre proposition de contribution. Nous commencerons chaque fois par la vérification des données en arabe classique et en dialectal algérien, avant d’analyser les matériaux amazighs et d’en tirer les conclusions qui s’imposent.

Mots-clés : emprunt lexical, parémiologie, arabe algérien, et langue amazighe

Lexical borrowing of Algerian …

Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones

Masters Theses

Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …

"Does This Make Sense?": The Effect Of Congruent Guise In Regional Accent On Grammatical Acceptability Judgments, Nour Kayali

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with congruent or incongruent social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgement task. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a congruent place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

Collaborative Textbook On English Syntax (Version 1.0), Matt Garley, Karl Hagen, The Students Of Eng 270 At York College / Cuny

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Evaluation Rubric For Educational Resources For An Undergraduate English Syntax Course, Matt Garley

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Covert Determiners In Appalachian English Narrative Declarative Sentences, William Oliver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I explore the syntax and semantics of covert determiners (Ds) in matrix subject determiner phrases (DPs) with definite specific interpretations. To conduct my investigation, I used the Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English (AAPCAppE), a million-word Penn Treebank corpus, and the software CorpusSearch, a Java program that searches Penn Treebank corpora. My research shows that Appalachian English contains a linguistic phenomenon where speakers drop the D, replacing overt Ds with covert Ds, in definite specific DPs. For example, where Standard English speakers say The doctor came by horseback, Appalachian speakers may use a covert D …

A Claiming Of Kin: A Linguistic Analysis Of Southern Appalachian English In Melissa Range's Scriptorium: Poems, Jolee White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.

Nominal Incorporation In Shiwilu (Kawapanan): Nouns, Classifiers And The Deceased Marker =Ku’, Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Shiwilu is a good representative of the Andes-Amazonia transitional zone, in that it exhibits a mixture of phonological and grammatical traits that are typical of the languages of these two regions (Valenzuela 2015, 2018). The present article addresses a phenomenon that is common in Amazonian languages but absent in the Central Andean families Quechuan and Aymaran: nominal incorporation (Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999: 10; Adelaar with Muysken 2004; Aikhen- vald 2017: 296). In this work, ‘nominal incorporation’ is a cover term to designate the process of inserting into the verb a noun, a classifier, or the deceased marker =ku’."

The Linearization Of V(P)-Doubling Constructions, Rong Yin

Doctoral Dissertations

When an item moves, it is usually pronounced once but in some cases, it is pronounced multiple times. So, a question is: What determines whether a moved item gets pronounced in only one of its positions or in multiple positions? This dissertation aims at providing an answer to this question by designing a linearization process that yields the correct phonetic realization of a moved item, with a focus on V(P) movement. In particular, this dissertation provides a detailed analysis of how V(P)-doubling cases are linearized and thus show how a V(P) ends up being pronounced multiple times.

Regarding the proposed …

Non-Argumental Clitics In Spanish And Galician: A Case Study Of The Distribution Of Solidarity And Ethical Clitics, Susana Huidobro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the properties of what traditional grammars call “superfluous elements” or non-arguments, so-called Ethical Dative Clitics (Bello 1954, Seco 1962 among others) and Solidarity Clitics (Álvarez, Rosario, X.L. Regueira & H. Monteaguedo 1986) in Spanish and Galician. This research fills an important gap in the existing formal literature on these forms, providing the first thorough syntactic and typological investigation of the latter phenomenon.

The study of non-argumental datives encounters difficulties at different levels: at a descriptive/empirical as well as at a theoretical level. From a descriptive point of view, there are no, so far in the literature, clear …

Can Language Models Capture Syntactic Associations Without Surface Cues? A Case Study Of Reflexive Anaphor Licensing In English Control Constructions, Soo-Hwan Lee, Sebastian Schuster

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

We examine GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019), which is trained only on surface strings, to see whether or not the model makes correct predictions about the agreement patterns of a reflexive anaphor in English control constructions. Our findings show that GPT-2 struggles with transitive subject control constructions, but does well on transitive object control constructions. One reason might be that the model tries to associate the anaphor with the closest noun phrase. Moreover, while we find that a model with a larger number of parameters shows higher accuracy on the tasks related to subject control constructions, performance remains below chance.

Learning Constraints On Wh-Dependencies By Learning How To Efficiently Represent Wh-Dependencies: A Developmental Modeling Investigation With Fragment Grammars, Niels Dickson, Lisa Pearl, Richard Futrell

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

It’s hotly contested how children learn constraints on wh-dependencies, called syntactic islands. When learning this knowledge, a prerequisite is knowing how to represent wh-dependencies so that constraints can be hypothesized over those representations. Previous work has explained disparate sets of syntactic island constraints by assuming different wh-dependency representations, without a unified dependency representation capturing all these constraints. We implement a modeled learner who learns a Fragment Grammar (FG) representation of wh-dependencies–a representation comprised of potentially different-sized fragments that combine to form full dependencies–that best accounts for the input while being as compact as possible. …