Here

Introduction
Dear TABU Dag 2009 participant,
We are very happy to welcome you to the 30th anniversary of the
TABU Dag conference at the University of Groningen, The
Netherlands! We would like to celebrate this linguistic event with a
long tradition together with you. Therefore, we created a very
interesting program covering various areas of linguistic research.
This year, 70 oral presentations and 24 posters will be presented at
TABU Dag. We welcome more than 180 participants from around
20 countries. We want to thank all authors for their contributions to
TABU Dag 2009!
In this booklet you can find all abstracts of accepted oral
and poster presentations that are listed in alphabetical order of
the authors. Furthermore, the booklet contains the schedule of
TABU Dag for June 11th and 12th as well as maps of the conference
venue and additional conference locations.
We are very happy to announce four keynote speakers who
will inspire all participants and celebrate the anniversary of TABU
Dag with us: Jack Chambers, Ken Church, Marianne Gullberg,
and Matthias Schlesewsky.
We are grateful to our sponsors and to the Center for
Language and Cognition Groningen who made this event
possible!
We wish you a pleasant and successful conference,
The TABU Dag 2009 Organizers
Diana Dimitrova, Dörte Hessler, Myrte Gosen, Alexandra Lenz and
Martijn Wieling
1
TABU Dag 2009 is sponsored by
The STEVIN Lassy project
The welcome reception is offered to you by the University of
Groningen, the Municipality of Groningen and the Province of
Groningen.
3
Contents and Abstracts
Map of Conference Locations……………………………………………………………….14
Map of Conference Venue……………………………………………………………………..15
Program June 11………….……………………………………………………………………….16
Program June 12………………………………………………………………………………….18
Poster Session I……………………………………………………………………………………20
Poster Session II…………………………………………………………………………………..21
…
Keynote Abstracts
Jack Chambers (University of Toronto)………………………………………………………..22
It's Not Your Fault: the Cognitive Basis for Some 'Bad' Grammar
Ken Church (Johns Hopkins University)……………………………………………………...23
Repetition and Language Models
Marianne Gullberg (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)………...….24
The relevance of gestures to first and second language acquisition studies
Matthias Schlesewsky (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz)…………………………25
The truth about semantic P600 effects: A case for the importance of cross-linguistic
validation in the neurocognition of language
5
Accepted Abstracts
Nasser Al-Horais………………………………………………………………………………….…26
Typological Variation in Sentential Negation: Can it occur with one negative marker?
Harwintha Anjarningsih and Ria de Bleser……………………………………………………27
Developmental Dyslexia in Bahasa Indonesia: Developing A Screening Test
Aysa Arylova………………………………………………………………………………………..28
The Locational Predicative Possession Construction in Russian
Veerle Baaijen, David Galbraith and Kees de Glopper..................................................29
Explaining knowledge change through writing
Joaquim Barbosa, Idalina Ferreira and Fátima Silva……………………………………….30
Information Structure and Indirect Anaphora Resolution
Karin Beijering………………………………………………………………………………………32
The grammaticalization of Mainland Scandinavian MAYBE
Ildikó Berzlánovich and Gisela Redeker………………………………………………………33
The structure of lexical cohesion
Hanno Biber………………………………………………………………………………………...34
Corpus Analysis and Text Types in Literary Journals. Observations and Explorations of
the AAC-Austrian Academy Corpus
Antal van den Bosch...........................................................................................................35
Implicit Linguistics
Rita Calabrese……………………………………………………………………………………..36
The interpretation of Prepositional Phrases as Arguments and Adjuncts in L2
acquisition
Tal Caspi…………………………………………………………………………………………….37
The receptive-productive gap in L2 vocabulary development: a dynamic analysis
6
María José Castro-Bleda and Pablo Aibar-Ausina…………………………………………39
Trends in connectionist natural language processing
Mayya Choban……………………………………………………………………………………40
The Semantic Categorization of “Giving” Event in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Çağrı Çöltekin……………………………………………………………………………...………41
Language Acquisition and Learning Theory: Some Misconceptions about Learnability
J. L. De Lucca………………………………………………………………………………………42
Retrieval of word sense candidates based on a collocates hyperthesaurus
Inês Duarte………………………………………………………………………………………….44
Light Verbs as Predicates
Sergio Raul Duarte and Janneke Huitink……………………………………………………..46
Attitudes about taste
Sergio Raul Duarte and Gisela Redeker............................................................................47
Using discourse information in sentiment polarity classification
Matthew Elliott, Draque Thompson and Nicholas Davis…………………………………..49
A Cognitive Technology Project: Semantically Sensitive Natural Language Processing
Agnes Engbersen………………………………………………………………………………….50
Interactions between elderly and caregivers
Christina Englert……………………………………………………………………………………51
Elderly people talking
Myrthe Faber, Jessica Overweg, Margreet van Koert and Angeliek van Hout...........52
Comprehension of scalar implicatures in five year-old Dutch-speaking children
Inge Genee…………………………………………………………………………………………53
From interlanguage to First Nations English? Grammatical aspects of Joe Little Chief’s
Blackfoot-English writings
7
Kees de Glopper…………………………………………………………………………………..54
Argumentative writing in L1 and EFL of Dutch secondary school students
Diewke de Goede, Petra van Alphen, Emma Mulder, José Kerstholt and
Jos van Berkum.....................................................................................................................56
How do you feel today? The effect of mood on language processing
Frederike Groothoff and Sanne Kuijper……………………………………………………….57
Are you stressed? Children’s comprehension and production of marked stress
Stella Gryllia…………………………………………………………………………………………58
Investigating the prosodic correlates of contrast. Comparing Greek to Italian
Marieke Haan………………………………………………………………………………………59
Audience design in documentary film interviews
Wilbert Heeringa and Febe de Wet…………………………………………………………...61
The origin of Afrikaans pronunciation: a comparison to west Germanic languages
and Dutch dialects
Geraldine Herbert and Carl Vogel…………………………………………………………….61
A Diachronic Study of Irish Prepositions
Herman Heringa...…………………………………………………………………………………62
How depictives and appositive adjectives are different
Jack Hoeksema……………………………………………………………………………………64
Discontinuous conjunction of nominal modifiers
Erik Hoekstra………………………………………………………………………………………...65
Verb-Raising and the Head Final Filter
Marieke Hoetjes, Emiel Krahmer and Marc Swerts………………………………………….66
It’s a tie. The influence of gestures and their visibility on speech
Nienke van der Hoeven-Houtzager...................................................................................67
Relearning in the elderly: Age-related effects on the size of savings
8
Martine Jong, Judith Rispens and Gerard Bol……………………………………………….67
Poor nonword repetition in specific language impairment: cause or consequence of
small vocabulary size?
Peter Jordens………………………………………………………………………………………69
Functional categories in learner languages
Hirokatsu Kawashima……………………………………………………………………………..70
Understanding Discriminative Perception of English Consonant Minimal Pairs from the
Perspective of Two Levels of Processing: Sound and Meaning
Yu-guang Ko.........................................................................................................................71
Modeling Ordering Effect in Binary Judgment Experiment
Daniël de Kok and Gertjan van Noord.............................................................................72
A chart generator for the Dutch Alpino Grammar
Ruud Koolen and Emiel Krahmer.......................................................................................73
Need I say more? On factors causing referential overspecification
Gideon Kotzé……………………………………………………………………………………….74
Training a statistical parser for parsing French for use in syntax-based machine
translation
Joost Kremers……………………………………………………………………………………….74
Morphology = Syntax = Morphology
Tina Krennmayr…………………………………………………………………………………….75
Recalling extended metaphors in news discourse
Anne Küppers………………………………………………………………………………………77
Linear and Hypertext Discourse Structure: Printed and Online Support of Newspapers
Aletta Kwant, Jan Berenst and Kees de Glopper............................................................78
The effect of teacher elicitation techniques during reading aloud sessions
Therese Leinonen………………………………………………………………………………….79
A Dialectometric Study of Swedish Vowels
9
Kathrin Linke……………………………………………………………………………………….80
Dorsal Fricatives in German: Derivation and Representation
Wander Lowie……………………………………………………………………………………...82
Modeling early phonological development in a foreign language
Kathrin Luckmann…………………………………………………………………………………82
The discourse marker like in clause-final position
Jianqiang Ma, Daniël de Kok and Gertjan van Noord...................................................83
An Extended Method for Iterative Error Mining in Parsing Results
Beth Martin………………………………………………………………………………………….83
The Effect of Bilingual Immersion Programmes on Early Childhood Identity
Alice Middag……………………………………………………………………………………….84
Two types of expletive negation
Peter Nabende and Jörg Tiedemann...............................................................................85
An Evaluation of Phrase-based SMT and Finite State Transducer models for Translating
Transliterations
Aleksei Nazarov……………………………………………………………………………………86
Vowel reduction in Dutch: an alternative perspective
Mari Nygård………………………………………………………………………………………...87
Phi-feature valuing in discourse ellipses
Proscovia Olango and Gosse Bouma...............................................................................89
An Evaluation of TermPedia on Data from EMEA Reports and the Merck Manuals
Fátima Oliveira, Fátima Silva, Purificação Silvan, Luis Filipe Cunha and
Idalina Ferreira…………………………………………………………………………………….90
Some remarks on the aspectual properties of complex predicates with light verbs
and deverbal nouns
Dennis Ott……………………………………………………………………………………...……92
Remnant movement in a world without traces
10
Esther Pascual……………………………………………………………………………………...93
Because she said so: On the multifunctionality of direct speech in the jury room
Markus Paulus and Paula Fikkert………………………………………………………………..94
Conflicting cues in early word learning: 14- and 24-month-olds’ use of gaze and
point information to map words to referents
Markus Paulus, Oliver Lindemann and Harold Bekkering………………………………….96
Embodied verbal learning? Evidence for motor simulation in verbal knowledge
acquisition
Vitoria Piai, Marcel Bastiaansen and Rob Schreuder......................................................97
Comprehending Particle Verbs: an EEG approach
Theeraporn Ratitamkul…………………………………………………………………………...98
Referential choices in young Thai children’s narratives
Nina Reshöft………………………………………………………………………………………..99
First Language Thinking: The Representation of Motion in Second Language Writing
Joost Rommers, Marcel Bastiaansen and Ton Dijkstra...................................................101
Literal word meaning activation during idiom comprehension
Audrey Rudel……………………………………………………………………………………..102
Syntactic structure and activation of semantic informations in noun phrases
containing a polysemic adjective
Kathy Rys…………………………………………………………………………………………..104
Overgeneralization in second dialect acquisition and the role of type frequency
Nathalie Schapansky……………………………………………………………………………105
Lexical semantic relations and linear ordering
Ankelien Schippers and Jack Hoeksema…………………………………………………...106
Variation in long-distance movement constructions: a diachronic perspective
Rianne Schippers…………………………………………………………………………………108
EPP and the object obligation of particle verbs in Dutch: An acquisitional account
11
Anke-Elaine Schmidt…………………………………………………………………………….109
Error Analysis: The phonology of German learners of English
Katharina Schuhmann………………………………………………………………………….110
Perceptual Learning in Hindi-English Bilinguals
Marjoleine Sloos…………………………………………………………………………………..111
Frequency and grammar in interaction
Ielka van der Sluis, Nikiforos Karamanis, Anne Schneider, Saturnino Luz,
Gavin Doherty and Stephan Schlog…………………………………………………………112
Is HCI Research Relevant to the Practice of Natural Language Processing?
Hana Smiskova and Marjolijn Verspoor...........................................................................114
Identifying formulaic sequences (chunks) in learner data: methodology
Bahareh Soohani………………………………………………………………………………...115
Augmentative Reduplication in Farsi
Ryan Taylor, Laurie Stowe, Gisela Redeker and John Hoeks……………………………118
Models of Language Comprehension and Pronoun Ambiguity in Discourse
Hayo Terband, Ben Maassen and Frank Guenther……………………………………….119
Testing hypotheses about the neurological mechanisms underlying Childhood
Apraxia of Speech (CAS)
Jörg Tiedemann………………………………………………………………………………….120
Evidence Based Word Alignment
Esteve Valls………………………………………………………………………………………..122
The case of North-Occidental Catalan: towards a linguistic convergence with the
Standard?
Marijn van 't Veer………………………………………………………………………………...123
Grammatical Inventories
Dorina Veldhuis…………………………………………………………………………………..124
The building blocks of language: the impact of literacy on speech segmentation
12
Sanne Verhoef and Maaike Verrips.................................................................................126
Language analysis as a method to determine national or regional origin in asylum
cases
Kirsten Vis, José Sanders and Wilbert Spooren……………………………………………..127
Diachronic change in subjectivity and stance: conversationalization in journalistic
texts
Nynke van der Vliet……………………………………………………………………………...129
Who's got the floor? - speaking patterns in group conversation
Margreet Vogelzang and Jennifer Spenader................................................................129
Do Presupposition Triggers Influence the Felicity of Voice Mismatched Sentences?
Mark de Vries……………………………………………………………………………………..131
Right Dislocation and Afterthoughts
Christian Waldmann…………………………………………………………………………….133
Paths in L1 acquisition of verb second – on the role of input and frequency
Islam Youssef ……………………………………………………………………………………..134
Phonological Correlates of Emphasis in Baghdadi Arabic
Liang-Chih Yu and Chien-Lung Chan………………………………………………………..135
Acquisition of Meaningful Combinations of Words from Psychiatric Texts
Yan Zhao…………………………………………………………………………………………..136
POS Multi-tagging based on combined models
Marie-Elise van der Ziel......................................................................................................136
The Effect of Pragmatic Infelicity on Children’s Interpretation of Weak Crossover
Sentences: Evidence from Dutch
Jan-Wouter Zwart………………………………………………………………………………..137
Embedded verb-second revisited: a layered derivations account
13
Map of Conference Locations
[1]
Conference Venue: Academy building
Broerstraat 5, Groningen
[2]
Lunch restaurant: El Txoko
Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat 53, Groningen
[3]
Closing drinks: Bar Pepper
Oude Boteringestraat 17, Groningen
[4]
Conference dinner: Ni Hao Wok
Gedempte Kattendiep 122, Groningen
14
Map of Conference Venue
Academy building, University of Groningen
Broerstraat 5, Groningen
Conference rooms:
A02, A03, A07, A08, Heymanszaal, Geertsemazaal, Offerhauszaal
15
Program June 11th, 2009
08:30
09:20
09:20
09:30
09:30
10:30
10:30
11:00
Registration and Welcome reception
(Entrance hall Academy building and Room Spiegelzaal)
Opening by J.A. Westerhuijs
(Room Spiegelzaal)
Plenary talk: Ken Church
(Room Geertsemazaal)
Coffie break and Late registration
(Room Bruinszaal and Entrance hall Academy building)
Psycholinguistics
SESSION 1
Discourse
Phonetics/
Phonology
Syntax/
Semantics
Language
Acquisition
Room A02
Literal word
meaning
activation during
idiom
comprehension
Rommers, J. et al.
Room A03
Vowel
reduction in
Dutch: an
alternative
perspective
Nazarov, A.
Room A07
Because she said
so: On the
multifunctionality of
direct speech in
the jury room
Pascual, E.
Heymanszaal
Verb-Raising
and the Head
Final Filter
Hoekstra, E.
Room A08
Functional
categories in
learner
languages
Jordens, P.
11:30
11:55
Comprehending
Particle Verbs: an
EEG approach
Piai, V. et al.
Frequency and
grammar in
interaction
Sloos, M.
Linear and
Hypertext Discourse
Structure: Printed
and Online Support
of Newspapers
Küppers, A.
Right
Dislocation
and
Afterthoughts
Vries, M. de
Identifying
formulaic
sequences
(chunks) in
learner data:
methodology
Smiskova, H. &
Verspoor, M.
12:00
12:25
How do you feel
today? The effect
of mood on
language
processing
Goede, D. de et
al.
Grammatical
Inventories
Veer, M. van 't
Diachronic change
in subjectivity and
stance:
conversationalization in journalistic
texts
Vis, K. et al.
Morphology =
Syntax =
Morphology
Kremers, J.
Modelling early
phonological
development in
a foreign
language
Lowie, W.
11:00
–
11:25
12:30
14:00
16
Lunch
(Restaurant El Txoko)
Program June 11th, 2009 (continued)
Psycholinguistics
Computational
Linguistics
Room A02
Embodied verbal
learning?
Evidence for
motor simulation
in verbal
knowledge
acquisition
Paulus, M. et al.
Heymanszaal
Implicit
Linguistics
Bosch, A. v. d.
14:30
14:55
It’s a tie. The
influence of
gestures and their
visibility on speech
Hoetjes, M. et al.
An Extended
Method for
Iterative Error
Mining in Parsing
Results
Ma, J. et al.
15:00
15:25
Recalling
extended
metaphors in
news discourse
Krennmayr, T.
A chart
generator for
the Dutch Alpino
Grammar
Kok, D. de &
Noord, G. van
14:00
14:25
15:30
16:30
16:30
17:00
17:00
18:00
19:30
22:30
SESSION 2
Neurolinguistics
Room A03
Poor nonword
repetition in
specific language
impairment:
cause or
consequence of
small vocabulary
size?
Jong, M. et al.
Testing
hypotheses about
the neurological
mechanisms
underlying
Childhood
Apraxia of Speech
(CAS)
Terband, H. et al.
Developmental
Dyslexia in Bahasa
Indonesia:
Developing a
Screening Test
Anjarningsih, H. &
Bleser, R, de
Syntax/
Semantics
Language
Acquisition
Room A07
Two types of
expletive
negation
Middag, A.
Room A08
The building
blocks of
language: the
impact of
literacy on
speech
segmentation
Veldhuis, D.
The Locational
Predicative
Possession
Construction in
Russian
Arylova, A.
The effect of
teacher
elicitation
techniques
during reading
aloud sessions
Kwant, A. et al.
How depictives
and appositive
adjectives are
different
Heringa, H.
Referential
choices in
young Thai
children’s
narratives
Ratitamkul, T.
Poster session I
(Hall Economics)
Coffee break
(Room Academia Lounge)
Plenary talk: Marianne Gullberg
(Room Geertsemazaal)
Conference dinner
(Restaurant Ni Hao Wok)
17
Program June 12th, 2009
08:30
09:00
09:00
10:00
10:00
10:30
Late registration
(Entrance hall Academy building)
Plenary talk: Matthias Schlesewsky
(Room Offerhauszaal)
Coffee break
(Room Bruinszaal)
Language
Variation and
Change
Phonetics/
Phonology
SESSION 3
Discourse
Syntax/
Semantics
Language
Acquisition
Room A02
A Diachronic
Study of Irish
Prepositions
Herbert, G. &
Vogel, C.
Room A03
Perceptual
Learning in
Hindi-English
Bilinguals
Schuhmann, K.
Room A07
Models of
Language
Comprehension
and Pronoun
Ambiguity in
Discourse
Taylor, R. et al.
Heymanszaal
Light Verbs as
Predicates
Duarte, I.
Room A08
Explaining
knowledge
change
through writing
Baaijen, V. et
al.
11:00
11:25
Language analysis
as a method to
determine
national or
regional origin in
asylum cases
Verhoef, S. &
Verrips, M.
Dorsal
Fricatives in
German:
Derivation and
Representation
Linke, K.
Need I say more?
On factors
causing referential
overspecification
Koolen, R. &
Krahmer, E.
Some remarks
on the
aspectual
properties of
complex
predicates with
light verbs and
deverbal nouns
Oliveira, F. et al.
Argumentative
writing in L1
and EFL of
Dutch
secondary
school students
Glopper, K. de
11:30
11:55
The case of NorthOccidental
Catalan: towards
a linguistic
convergence with
the Standard?
Valls, E.
Phonological
Correlates of
Emphasis in
Baghdadi
Arabic
Youssef, I.
Investigating the
prosodic
correlates of
contrast.
Comparing Greek
to Italian
Gryllia, S.
EPP and the
object
obligation of
particle verbs in
Dutch: An
acquisitional
account
Schippers, R.
First Language
Thinking: The
Representation
of Motion in
Second
Language
Writing
Reshöft, N.
12:00
12:25
The origin of
Afrikaans
pronunciation: a
comparison to
west Germanic
languages and
Dutch dialects
Heeringa, W. &
Wet, F. de
Error Analysis:
The phonology
of German
learners of
English
Schmidt, A.
Information
Structure and
Indirect Anaphora
Resolution
Barbosa, J. et al.
Lexical semantic
relations and
linear ordering
Schapansky, N.
The
interpretation
of Prepositional
Phrases as
Arguments and
Adjuncts in L2
acquisition
Calabrese, Rita
10:30
10:55
12:30
14:00
18
Lunch
(Restaurant El Txoko)
Program June 12th, 2009 (continued)
Language
Variation and
Change
Computational
Linguistics
Room A02
A
Dialectometric
Study of
Swedish
Vowels
Leinonen, T.
Heymanszaal
Is HCI Research
Relevant to the
Practice of
Natural
Language
Processing?
Sluis, I. van der
et al.
14:30
14:55
Variation in
long-distance
movement
constructions:
a diachronic
perspective
Schippers, A. &
Hoeksema, J.
An Evaluation of
TermPedia on
Data from EMEA
Reports and the
Merck Manuals
Olango, P. &
Bouma, G.
15:00
15:25
The
grammaticalization of
Mainland
Scandinavian
MAYBE
Beijering, K.
15:30
15:55
Typological
Variation in
Sentential
Negation: Can
it occur with
one negative
marker?
Al-Horais, N.
14:00
14:25
16:00
17:00
17:00
18:00
18:00
18:15
18:15
20:00
SESSION 4
Discourse
Syntax/
Semantics
Language
Acquisition
Room A03
Are you
stressed?
Children’s
comprehension and
production of
marked stress
Groothoff, F. &
Kuijper, S.
The structure of
lexical
cohesion
Berzlánovich, I.
& Redeker, G.
Room A07
Embedded verbsecond revisited:
a layered
derivations
account
Zwart, J.W.
Room A08
Language
Acquisition and
Learning Theory:
Some
Misconceptions
about
Learnability
Çöltekin, Ç.
Phi-feature
valuing in
discourse ellipses
Nygård, M.
Overgeneralization in second
dialect
acquisition and
the role of type
frequency
Rys, K.
An Evaluation of
Phrase-based
SMT and Finite
State Transducer
models for
Translating
Transliterations
Nabende, P. &
Tiedemann, J.
The discourse
marker like in
clause-final
position
Luckmann, K.
Discontinuous
conjunction of
nominal modifiers
Hoeksema, J.
The Effect of
Pragmatic
Infelicity on
Children’s
Interpretation of
Weak Crossover
Sentences:
Evidence from
Dutch
Ziel, M. van der
Evidence Based
Word Alignment
Tiedemann, J.
Using discourse
information in
sentiment
polarity
classification
Duarte, S. &
Redeker, G.
Do Presupposition
Triggers Influence
the Felicity of
Voice
Mismatched
Sentences?
Vogelzang, M. &
Spenader, J.
Comprehension
of scalar
implicatures in
five year-old
Dutch-speaking
children
Faber, M. et al.
Poster session II including Coffee
(Restaurant Academia)
Plenary talk: Jack Chambers
(Room Offerhauszaal)
Closing and TABU Dag Best Presentation and Best Poster Award
(Room Offerhauszaal)
Closing drinks
(Bar Pepper)
19
Poster session I (June 11th, 2009, 15:30 – 16:30)
(Hall Economics)
De Lucca, J.: Retrieval of word sense candidates based on a collocates
hyperthesaurus
Duarte, S. & Huitink, J.: Attitudes about taste
Genee, I.: From interlanguage to First Nations English? Grammatical aspects of Joe
Little Chief’s Blackfoot-English writings
Haan, M.: Audience design in documentary film interviews
Kotzé, G.: Training a statistical parser for parsing French for use in syntax-based
machine translation
Ott, D.: Remnant movement in a world without traces
Paulus, M. & Fikkert, P.: Conflicting cues in early word learning: 14- and 24-montholds’ use of gaze and point information to map words to referents
Rudel, A.: Syntactic structure and activation of semantic informations in noun
phrases containing a polysemic adjective
Vliet, N. van der: Who's got the floor? - speaking patterns in group conversation
Waldmann, C.: Paths in L1 acquisition of verb second – on the role of input and
frequency
Yu, L. & Chan, C.: Acquisition of Meaningful Combinations of Words from Psychiatric
Texts
20
Poster session II (June 12th, 2009, 16:00 - 17:00)
(Restaurant Academia)
Biber, H.: Corpus Analysis and Text Types in Literary Journals. Observations and
Explorations of the AAC-Austrian Academy Corpus
Caspi, T.: The receptive-productive gap in L2 vocabulary development: a dynamic
analysis
Castro-Bleda, M. J. & Aibar-Ausina, P.: Trends in connectionist natural language
processing
Choban, M.: The Semantic Categorization of “Giving” Event in a Cross-linguistic
Perspective
Elliott, M. et al.: A Cognitive Technology Project: Semantically Sensitive Natural
Language Processing
Engbersen, A.: Interactions between elderly and caregivers
Englert, C.: Elderly people talking
Hoeven-Houtzager, N. van der: Relearning in the elderly: Age-related effects on the
size of savings
Kawashima, H.: Understanding Discriminative Perception of English Consonant
Minimal Pairs from the Perspective of Two Levels of Processing: Sound and
Meaning
Ko, Y.: Modeling Ordering Effect in Binary Judgment Experiment
Martin, B.: The Effect of Bilingual Immersion Programmes on Early Childhood Identity
Soohani, B.: Augmentative Reduplication in Farsi
Zhao, Y.: POS Multi-tagging based on combined models
21
It's Not Your Fault: the Cognitive Basis for Some
'Bad' Grammar
Jack Chambers
University of Toronto
Linguists pay little attention to what are known as "usage problems". They are
usually left to teachers and editors, and the 'problems' that get most
attention are often passing fancies. Twentieth-century contempt for "ain't,"
the eighteenth-century colloquialism for "isn't" and "hasn't," resulted in its
extinction in all standard varieties of English. That is a rare victory for
prescriptivism. Current contempt by some people for "quote" as a noun (as in
"Her blog includes a long quote from Chomsky"), where a few years ago the
nominal "quotation" was expected, indeed required, is a lost cause;
"quotation" is already considered old-fashioned and will be obsolete in a
generation. However, some usage problems go deeper into the language
faculty. I will look at two that are not passing fancies but are stable and
persistent. One is failure of number agreement after expletive there (as in
"There is at least a hundred ways to make ratatouille") and the other is failure
of case concord in compound objects (as in "That gesture is very insulting to
your mother and I"). These are stable because they keep occurring at about
the same rate from one generation to the next. They are persistent because
they sometimes occur even in the speech of highly educated, fairly
meticulous speakers who are well aware of the grammatical rules. The reason
for their stability and persistence, I will show, is that they tax the cognitive limits
of our processing abilities. Examining them provides an insight into linguistic
processing. It also sheds light on the social role of grammar prescriptions. Why
do our grammars encode 'rules' that no one can keep? And it also provides
a codicil on the Chomskyan conception of the autonomy of the language
faculty. Here, at the fringes of linguistic respectability, is evidence that
cognitive limitations can override linguistic principles.
22
Repetition and Language Models
Ken Church
Johns Hopkins University
Repetition is very common. Standard bag-of-word models in Information
Retrieval do not attempt to model discourse structure such as given/new. The
first mention in a news article (e.g., "Manuel Noriega, former President of
Panama") is different from subsequent mentions (e.g., "Noriega"). Adaptive
language models were introduced in Speech Recognition to capture the
fact that probabilities change or adapt. After we see the first mention, we
should expect a subsequent mention. If the first mention has probability p,
then under standard (bag-of words) independence assumptions, two
mentions ought to have probability p^2, but we find the probability is
actually closer to p/2. Adaptation matters more for meaningful units of text.
In Japanese, words (meaningful sequences of characters) are more likely to
be repeated than fragments (meaningless sequences of characters from
words that happen to be adjacent). In newswire, we find more adaptation
for content words (proper nouns, technical terminology and good keywords
for information retrieval), and less adaptation for function words, clichés and
ordinary first names. There is more to meaning than frequency. Content
words are not only low frequency, but likely to be repeated.
23
The relevance of gestures to first and second
language acquisition studies
Marianne Gullberg
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Studies of both first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition have largely
focused on the acquisition of form over meaning. While comprehension
studies indicate that language learners' understanding is not always adult- or
target-like, surprisingly little is known about the nature of the differences once
forms are in use. This talk presents a series of studies exploring what child and
adult language learners' gestures reveal about their developing meanings in
the domain of motion. First, I demonstrate parallel crosslinguistic differences in
adult native speakers' speech and gestures. Second, I show that gestures
change in parallel with developing verb meaning in Dutch children and in
adult second language learners, providing details about learners' current
semantic representations. Together the studies support the notion that
speech and gesture form an integrated system where gestures can shed light
on the process of acquisition by revealing shifts in meaning representations.
24
The truth about semantic P600 effects: A case
for the importance of cross-linguistic validation
in the neurocognition of language
Matthias Schlesewsky
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz
The cognitive neuroscience of language has recently seen a very prominent
debate about so-called "semantic P600" effects. Semantic P600s, i.e.
observations of an ERP component that was long considered syntactic in
nature in response to semantic violations, have been claimed to challenge
the dominant role of syntax in determining online sentence interpretation and
to rather demonstrate a greater independence of combinatory semantic
processing. Hence, these effects have initiated a discussion about
fundamental properties of the language processing architecture, with a
trend towards interactive models being favoured over modular ones. In this
talk, I will present electrophysiological data from German, Turkish, Chinese
and Icelandic, all of which show qualitatively different patterns from English
and Dutch for typical semantic P600 manipulations, thereby calling the whole
debate into question. Based on the architectural assumptions of a crosslinguistic neurocognitive model of language comprehension (the eADM), I
will argue that the language specific pattern of semantic anomalies are best
viewed as correlates of the syntax-semantics interface and its architectural
restrictions. I will show that under such a perspective they can be used as
diagnostics in order to typologise languages with respect to their verbargument linking characteristics.
25
Accepted Abstracts
Typological Variation in Sentential Negation: Can it occur with one
negative marker?
Nasser Al-Horais (Newcastle University)
In this paper, I examine the question of parametric variation in the syntactic
expression of sentential negation. It is argued that typological variation in sentential
negation is not only subject to a broad cross-linguistic variation (mainly via a single
negative marker with a particular syntactic status), but it can also be found within a
language, and even with one and the same negative marker. This negative marker
is the Arabic negation marker laysa which has a rich variety of different patterns to
express sentential negation. Three different syntactic functions can be found with
laysa:
(i) a negative copular verb, negating only present tense copular constructions with
a zero-form copula:
(1) a. ʔal-ʔawlaad-u
the-boys-Nom
lays-uu
sighaar-an
neg.m3p
little.Acc
‘The boys are not little.’
(ii) a negative auxiliary verb followed by a main verb in an imperfective form, or in
perfective form obligatorily preceded by the preverbal marker QAD:
(2) a. laysa
Khalid-un ya-ktubu
neg.3ms xalid-Nom 3m-write-Present
Ŝ-Ŝ iʕr-a
the-poetry-Acc
“Khalid does not write poetry.”
(2) b. laysa
kul-u l-
madʕuwe-ina
neg.3m all-Nom the-invited-people-Gen
*(QAD)
jaʔuu
perf marker came.3mp
“All of the invited people have not come.”
(iii) a negative particle negating a structure derived by so-called Bare Argument
Ellipsis:
26
(3)a.
aljamiʕat-u
l-jadidat-u
sa-tubna
fii l-Gahirat-i
wa
the-university-Nom the-new-Nom will-be-built in the-Cairo-Gen and
laysa fii l-askaadariat-i
neg
in Alexandria-Gen
“The new university will be built in Cairo and not in Alexandria.”
(3) b. Gabal-tu
met-I.3s
Khalid-an
wa
laysa zaid-an
xalid-Acc
and
neg
Zaid-Acc
“I met Khalid and not Zaid.”
(3) c. kaana
fii d-dar-i
xalid-un
wa
was-past.3ms in the-house-Gen Khalid-Nom and
laysa zaid-un
neg
Zaid-Nom
“Khalid was in the house and not Zaid.”
Besides shedding new light on the variation in the expression of sentential negation,
it is worth noting that laysa, with these three different syntactic functions, is a
negation head or just a particle. In (1) and (2), where the negation is inflected and
requires the presence of a particular tense (present) or modal particle (QAD), the
negation is a head, whereas in the remaining example (3), where laysa negates
Bare Argument Ellipsis constructions, the negation is not a head as it lacks inflection,
and does not require the presence of a particular tense. This strongly imposes a tight
relationship between negative heads and tense as proposed by Fassi Fehri (1993),
Haegeman (1995), Zanuttini (1997) and Collberg & Håkansson (1999), among others.
Developmental Dyslexia in Bahasa Indonesia: Developing a
Screening Test
Harwintha Anjarningsih1 and Ria de Bleser2
of Groningen; 2Potsdam University)
(1University
Aimed at filling the vacuum in reading research in Bahasa Indonesia, this study has
three objectives: to find out whether phonological awareness correlates with
reading success in Bahasa Indonesia and if it does, to identify the level of
phonological awareness that correlates best with normal reading in Bahasa
Indonesia: whether it is at the phoneme, rime, or syllable level; to point out how the
lexical and sub-lexical route is employed in normal reading in Bahasa Indonesia; and
to identify reading performance that may suggest the occurrence of impaired
reading in Bahasa Indonesia which is possibly displayed by the children with the
27
lowest reading performance. Ten typically developing third-grade students
participated in the study by doing tasks divided into two parts: phonological
awareness part and reading part. Error patterns of the ten students are analysed for
the error analysis and for the analysis on the relationship between psycholinguistic
variables and reading performance. Five of those students were recorded during
the reading part and the data were used in the latencies analysis.
Syllable level phonological awareness was found to be correlated well with reading
success and followed by phoneme level phonological awareness. Beginning
reading in Bahasa Indonesia seems to be characterized by the utilization of the sublexical route and skilled reading by lexical route. The development of the lexical
route depends on the development of the sub-lexical route which is influenced by
the complexity of the Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence. The lexical route for
words with simple graphemes is developed first, the lexical route for words with
consonant clusters developed later, and the last to develop is the lexical route for
words with digraphs. Furthermore, Late AoA, imageability, syllable number, and
resemblance to words influence the lexical processing of the stimuli in the test.
Impaired reading seems to be characterized by less developed sub-lexical route as
evidenced by difficulties with words containing consonant clusters and digraphs
and longer latencies for reading aloud words and pseudowords.
Although further study with a bigger sample and improvements to the test are
needed, the result of this study is a good start in developing a developmental
dyslexia screening-test and enhancing reading research in Bahasa Indonesia
The Locational Predicative Possession Construction in Russian
Aysa Arylova (University of Groningen)
The topic of this talk is the Russian predicative possession construction illustrated in
(1). The construction involves a PP possessor, a Nominative possessum, and an
existential verb, mainly byt’ ‘be’:
(1)
U menja
est’
sobak-a.
at I.GEN
is
dog.F-NOM.SG
‘I have a dog.’
28
The sentence in (1) is an instance of the locational strategy of encoding predicative
possession, according to the typological classification of Stassen (2005). The
predominant analysis of the structure of the Russian locational predicative
possession construction (LPPC) is a PP/Small Clause analysis in the style of Freeze
(1992), Den Dikken (1998), Harley (2002). The small clause containing the possessor
and the possessum is headed either by the preposition u ‘at’, or by some kind of
abstract head X. The verb byt’ ‘be’ in a small clause analysis can be viewed either
as a functional element in the IP domain or a one-place predicate taking the small
clause as its argument. One of the problems for the PP/Small Clause analysis is that it
cannot account for the differences between the LPPC and unambiguously small
clause constructions, such as constructions with AP/NP predicates. The differences
include the distribution of the Genitive of Negation, the behavior of the verb byt’
‘be’, and the possibility of embedding under control and raising predicates.
In this talk I argue for an alternative view of the structure of the Russian LPPC: a
double unaccusative analysis, where the existential byt’ ‘be’ is a lexical predicate
taking the possessor and the possessum as its two internal arguments (cf. Chvany
1975). I discuss the details of the double unaccusative analysis, such as the ordering
of the arguments in the LPPC, which can be established with the help of Harley’s
(2002) quantifier binding diagnostic. Finally, I suggest that a double unaccusative
analysis of the Russian LPPC can more easily incorporate the properties
differentiating the LPPC from AP/NP predicate constructions.
Explaining knowledge change through writing
Veerle Baaijen1, David Galbraith2 and Kees de Glopper1
(1University of Groningen; 2Staffordshire University)
There is general agreement within research on writing that writing involves more than
translating preconceived ideas into written text. Instead, it is assumed that writing
also involves the development and refinement of ideas in the course of writing. This
has led to theories of writing as a problem solving activity (Flower & Hayes, 1980;
Galbraith & Torrance, 1999a). Such theories also assume that writing should be a
valuable tool for learning (Ackerman, 1993). However, until now, there is no
conclusive evidence whether and how writing contributes to learning (Klein, 1999).
Generally speaking there are two approaches within writing research to the
question of how writing facilitates learning. Some researchers focus on the effect of
29
writing on knowledge change and others focus exclusively on the processes
involved in writing. The aim of this research is to bring those two approaches
together and to test how processes of writing relate to knowledge change.
Therefore, this first experiment focuses on different writing conditions (Galbraith,
1999) in which knowledge change appears to be happening and simultaneously
investigates the underlying writing processes.
In this study 84 students, half of whom were low self-monitors and half of whom were
high self-monitors, were asked to plan and write an article for the university
newspaper about a current affairs topic. In order to assess the extent to which
writers develop their ideas during writing participants were asked to list their ideas, to
rate the importance of these ideas and to indicate how much they felt they knew
about the topic, both before and after writing. Then, the writing task was divided
into two phases. First, half the participants were asked to plan their essay by making
an organized outline and the other half of the participants was asked to write down
a single sentence summing up their overall opinion. During the second phase,
participants had 30 minutes to write their article for the university newspaper. During
this phase Inputlog was used to record the writing processes while writing.
Analysis of the results is currently in progress. It will include analysis of differences
between high and low self- monitors on the following dependent variables: (i) the
extent to which knowledge is transformed during writing (ii) the extent to which the
different planning tasks influence the knowledge change and (iii) the extent to
which writers pause within and between different text units and before and after
introducing new content.
Information Structure and Indirect Anaphora Resolution
Joaquim Barbosa, Idalina Ferreira and Fátima Silva (Universidade do Porto)
Nominal indirect anaphora is commonly described as a text/discourse phenomenon
deeply related with reference processing, which contributes simultaneously to the
introduction of new discourse referents and to the maintenance of information flow.
Indirect anaphora is, for this reason, clearly connected to information structure and
to the distinction between topic and focus, in the way that is a process of
dependent interpretation between an anaphoric expression and its anchor.
30
Erkü & Gundel (1987:543) have already pointed out the correlation between
anaphora resolution and the sentence topic, as shown in (1):
(1)
We stopped for drinks at the New York Hilton before going to the Thai
restaurant. The waitress was from Bangkok.
These authors claim that, in sentences like (1), the anaphoric expression is more likely
to be interpreted anaphorically referring to the Hilton than to the Thai restaurant, in
spite of the fact that world knowledge and the immediacy between the NP Thai
restaurant and the anaphoric expression might suggest otherwise.
Based on this problem (see also Hajičová, Partee & Sgall 1998; Komagata 2003),
several tests were applied to a corpus of European Portuguese (i) to deal with the
correlation between nominal indirect anaphora resolution in complex sentences
and the information structure of those sentences, and (ii) to discuss whether
modified anaphoric expressions occurring in such contexts, as in (2), may contribute
to its better understanding.
(2)
We stopped for drinks at the New York Hilton before going to the Thai
restaurant. The nice waitress was from Bangkok.
Based on some authors who claim that nominal indirect anaphora has a hybrid
discursive status as a thematic/rhematic structure (Schwarz 2000), we consider that
sentences like (1) and (2) may have tripartite structures in which the antecedent of
an anaphoric expression is always in the main clause, consisting of the focus of the
previous sentence. Therefore, we claim that the resolution of this type of anaphora is
both related to topic and focus.
References
• Erkü, Feride and Gundel, Jeanette (1987) – The pragmatics of indirect anaphors. In
Verschuren, J. & Bertuccelli-Papi, M. (eds.) – The Pragmatic Perspective: selected papers
from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s.
• Hajičová, E., Partee, B., and Sgall, P. (1998) – Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures,
and Semantic Content. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Komagata, N. (2003) – Information Structure in Subordinate and Subordinate-Like Clauses.
Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 12.
• Schwarz, M. (2000) – Indireckte Anaphern in Text. Tubingen: Verlag.
31
The grammaticalization of Mainland Scandinavian MAYBE
Karin Beijering (University of Groningen)
This paper is concerned with epistemic adverbs of the MAYBE type (deriving from a
modal auxiliary ‘can’ or ‘may’ + a verb meaning ‘happen’ or ‘be’) in Mainland
Scandinavian. Swedish kanske is an epistemic adverb with special syntactic status
(cf. Andréasson 2002), because it does not always adhere to standard Swedish word
order in declarative main clauses. That is, kanske may violate the Verb Second (V2)
principle, according to which the finite verb must always be the second constituent
in a declarative main clause. As the examples in (1) show, both V2 and non V2 word
orders are possible in the declarative main clause "Maybe Olle did not sleep last
night" (cf. Andréasson 2002:1):
(1) a. Olle
har
kanske
inte
sovit
inatt
Olle
has
maybe
not
slept
last.night
(1) b. Olle
kanske
inte
har
sovit
inatt
Olle
maybe
not
has
slept
last.night
(1) c. Kanske
Olle
inte
har
sovit
inatt
Maybe
Olle
not
has
slept
last.night
There are three different clause types containing kanske. The first type is a V2 clause
in which MAYBE can be any constituent except the second one ((1a)); the second
type is a non V2 clause which has MAYBE as its second constituent, that is, it
occupies the position of the finite verb ((1b)); and the third type is a non V2 clause
with MAYBE as its first constituent followed by a clause which has subordinate word
order ((1c)).
The number of syntactic positions for a linguistic item is a useful criterion in
determining the degree of grammaticalization. Since grammaticalization generally
involves syntactic fixation, a decrease in syntactic freedom would imply advanced
grammaticalization of MAYBE. Corpus data of MAYBE is analyzed and compared for
Danish,
Norwegian
and
Swedish
in
order
to
determine
the
degree
of
grammaticalization for MAYBE in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. When
comparing the degree of multipositionality of MAYBE, one might find different stages
of grammaticalization. That is, MAYBE can be more grammaticalized (=less syntactic
freedom) in one language than in another (=more syntactic freedom).
32
I will outline the etymology, development and grammaticalization path of Mainland
Scandinavian MAYBE and show that the coexistence of three different clause types
is due to different stages within one and the same grammaticalization process
instead of separate grammaticalization paths (cf. Andréasson 2002: 40-46).
Reference
• Andréasson, Maia. 2002. Kanske- en vilde i satsschemat. (=Meddelanden från Institutionen
för svenska språket 41). Göteborg: Institutionen för Svenska Språket.
The structure of lexical cohesion
Ildikó Berzlánovich and Gisela Redeker (University of Groningen)
The structure of lexical cohesion in texts can be described in terms of lexical chains,
i.e., sequences of related words (Barzilay & Elhadad 1999). Alternatively, it can be
conceptualized as a graph structure (Erkan & Radev 2004), allowing multiple
relations among the lexical items and ignoring directionality. The graph-based
model provides a much richer representation of lexical cohesion than approaches
that compute lexical chains, and thus offers a better chance of capturing the total
impact of lexical cohesive links on the textual organization. In this talk, I will illustrate
such a rich representation and show how it can be related to discourse structure.
The lexical cohesion in a text is conceptualized as an undirected weighted multigraph, where the vertices are the elementary discourse units and the edges are the
lexical cohesive links. Discourse structure is described in terms of genre-specific
'moves' expressed in (usually complex) discourse units that are located high in the
rhetorical structure (RST; Mann & Thompson 1988) tree. By comparing the centrality
of a discourse unit in the cohesion network with its centrality in the discourse
structure tree, we can assess the alignment between cohesion and coherence. In
information-oriented texts, e.g. encyclopedia entries, this alignment should be very
close, whereas cohesion should not or only loosely align with discourse structure in
texts with a dominant intentional structure, e.g. fundraising letters. This has been
shown in Author et al. (2008).
In that earlier study, we used a simple version of a cohesion analysis yielding a graph
structure, calculating centrality in terms of the number of lexical links of discourse
units with other units in the text. I will now present a refined measure, where the
lexical cohesive links are weighted by (i) the textual distance and (ii) the type of
33
relation between the lexical items. The centrality of an EDU is then measured as the
weighted sum of the edges connecting it to other EDUs in the text.
With these refinements in our measurement, we expect cohesion-based centrality to
align even more closely with the discourse structure in encyclopedia texts, while no
increased alignment is expected for fundraising letters. Initial tests show that this
seems to be the case (further tests will be conducted in the next months).
Corpus Analysis and Text Types in Literary Journals. Observations
and Explorations of the AAC-Austrian Academy Corpus
Hanno Biber (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
The "AAC-Austrian Academy Corpus" is the corpus research unit of the Austrian
Academy of Sciences in Vienna and concerned with establishing and exploring
large electronic text corpora and conducting scholarly research in the fields of
digital text corpora. In this paper the problems and methodological questions
concerning the annotation of different text types within the text corpus will be
addressed. The relations between various approaches will be discussed and
examples of the annotation procedures and their analytical concepts will be given.
The texts integrated into the collections of the AAC stemming from the last 150 years
are predominantly German language texts of historical and cultural significance.
The AAC has collected thousands of texts representing an astonishing range of
different text types. Among the sources, which cover manifold domains and genres,
there are literary journals, newspapers, novels, dramas, poems, advertisements,
essays, travel accounts, cookbooks, pamphlets, political speeches as well as plenty
of scientific, legal, and religious texts, to name just a few.
In this paper particular emphasis will be given to the corpus based methods for the
analysis of text types within literary journals and similar text type containers. The AAC
can provide a great number of reliable resources and interesting corpus based
approaches for investigations into the linguistic and textual properties of these texts.
Well beyond 400 million running words of text have already been scanned,
converted into machine-readable text and carefully annotated. The annotation
and mark-up schemes of the AAC are based upon XML related standards. Most of
the projects in the first phase of corpus build-up were dealing with issues related to
the application of basic structural mark-up and selected thematic features of the
34
texts. In the next phase of application development the AAC will further intensify its
efforts towards deeper thematic annotations, thus exploring problems of linguistics
and textual scholarship by means of experimental as well as exploratory analyses.
Reference
• http://www.aac.ac.at
Implicit Linguistics
Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University)
Natural language processing (NLP) models and systems typically employ abstract
linguistic representations (syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic) as intermediate
languages. It is scientifically mandatory to ask ourselves the question whether we
could do without them. We know that any invented intermediate structure is always
implicitly encoded somehow in the words at the surface, and the way they are
ordered. Can we somehow make use of this implicit encoding when performing NLP
tasks?
Classes of NLP tasks in which this question can be investigated in extremo are
processes in which form is mapped to form, i.e., in which neither the input nor the
output contains abstract elements to begin with. Examples are spelling correction
(converting a corrupted text to a clean, intended form of the same text); machine
translation (converting a text in one language to a text in another language
carrying approximately the same meaning); paraphrasing and summarization
(which are like translation, except the language remains the same). The text-to-text
scheme also fits communicative turn-based language use where one utterance is
followed by another, such as question answering and dialogue. The scheme even
generalizes to information retrieval, where short queries are mapped onto ranked
lists of documents.
Interestingly, this list of examples covers a major part of NLP's current application
areas. Even more interesting is the fact that many successful applications in all of
these areas (in fact nearly all of the most successful applications) make no use of
explicit abstract linguistic representations.
In this contribution I propose to investigate the possibility of NLP with implicit
linguistics by way of memory-based learning (MBL). MBL is a class of machine
35
learning algorithms that implements De Saussure's analogy principle: it makes use of
analogical proportions to map unseen input to output, by making use of similaritybased reasoning on memorized examples of input-output mappings. The simplicity
of the approach makes it amenable to efficient implementation in computer
programs. Most of the successful implicit approaches to the aforementioned text-totext task in fact make use of some variant of this memory-based or similarity-based
approach, often in a stochastic variant.
I argue that MBL approaches do not operate without linguistics, because they
successfully accomplish tasks that involve morphosyntactic or semantic knowledge.
I discuss the question where the linguistics is in these models, as it is not explicitly
present. I argue that the linguistics happens in the similarity-based reasoning, i.e., in
the processing itself.
The interpretation of Prepositional Phrases as Arguments and
Adjuncts in L2 acquisition
Rita Calabrese (University of Salerno)
Early research on second language (L2) acquisition pointed out that semantically
transparent properties of a given target language (TL) are easier to be
acquired/learnt than more abstract syntactic properties which do not directly
correspond to semantic representations (Kellerman 1987). This assumption suggests
that aspects of grammar that require not only syntactic knowledge, but also the
ability to integrate syntactic knowledge and knowledge from other domains of
language is hardly to be acquired by L2 learners (Sorace 2005). In particular,
features that belong to the interface between syntax and lexicon may be
vulnerable to variability and even deviation with respect to the TL constraints.
Starting from the assumption that L2 learners employ qualitatively different parsing
strategies from native speakers at the semantic-syntactic level, I have carried out a
study on a sample of L2 data to investigate learners' difficulty to automatically
integrate phrase structure and lexical-semantic information by focusing on
argument structure and complementation in their interlanguage. Given the
assumption that the notion of argument is a notion at the interface of the syntactic
and semantic levels determining the valency of a verb and its subcategorization
frame, so presumably fuzzy categories like `argument' and `adjunct' may lead to
36
frequent misinterpretation and misuse of prepositional phrase (PP) attachments and
verb complementation by L2 learners.
To verify this hypothesis a small corpus of written productions from Italian university
students has been automatically parsed by using the VISL applications/language
tools which can provide both syntactic and semantic information on a given
constituent structure. Every PPs occurring in the annotated corpus have been then
searched for and classified by: 1. head word and 2. syntactic function (argument
and adjunct). Following the procedure adopted in a recent study on the automatic
detection and extraction of arguments and adjuncts from a parsed corpus of
English native speakers (Merlo-Ferrer 2006), I have matched corpus-based evidence
and the linguistic diagnostics (e.g. head dependency and optionality) generally
used to decide whether a PP is an argument or an adjunct to find out similarities
and\or differences in L1\L2 syntactic constructions.
The receptive-productive gap in L2 vocabulary development: a
dynamic analysis
Tal Caspi (University of Groningen)
Vocabulary knowledge is often described as a continuum of receptive-toproductive abilities (Read, 2000), yet several studies have noted a discrepancy
between receptive and productive knowledge levels, which remains consistent
despite overall increases in proficiency (Melka, 1997; Meara & Schmitt, 1997, Laufer
& Paribakht 1998; Fitzpatrick et al., 2008). The receptive-productive vocabulary
knowledge gap is the focus of the current study, which investigates it from a
Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) perspective.
DST is a theory of change and development which is broadly applied in the natural,
social, behavioral and cognitive sciences. It is a framework for analyzing complex
systems, defined as networks of interacting components that are embedded in
environments consisting of similar structures, as functions of the interactions between
their components and with the environment. The dynamic approach to language
extends this perspective to linguistic development in both communities and
individual users (Komarowa & Nowak 2001; de Bot 2007).
The main methods of investigating development applied by the dynamic approach
are variability analysis and mathematical modeling (van Geert, 1994; van Dijk, 2003).
37
The two methods are complementary: variability analysis supplements the general
trends obtained by traditional statistical techniques with temporal patterns of
development and interaction, while modeling configures findings as parameters in
functions that simulate development. So far, variability analysis of L1 and L2 data has
revealed that a typical dynamic pattern of interaction known as the precursor
model (van Geert, 2003) has explanatory power with regard to the differential
development of various components of linguistic proficiency (Robinson & Mervis,
1998; Verspoor, et al 2008).
The current study assessed growth along a receptive-productive continuum of word
knowledge levels that ranges from least to most productive: recognition, recall,
controlled production and free production (Laufer & Nation 1995; Laufer et al 2004).
The study’s main questions are whether the receptive-productive gap is stable, and
whether it can be considered as resulting from a dynamic precursor interaction
between the continuum levels. The study collected longitudinal L2 data from four
case studies, analyzed its growth trends and variability, and configured the findings
in a model of dynamic interaction between knowledge levels. The findings indicate
that the gap is robust, and that the precursor model can account for its presence.
The presentation will include an introduction to DST in the context of L2 acquisition,
an explanation of the methodology and main findings, and a discussion on the
implications of applying DST to L2 vocabulary knowledge.
References
• de Bot, C. L. J. (2007). Dynamic systems theory, life-span development and language
attrition. In B. Köpke, M.S. Schmid, M. Keijzer, & S. Dostert (Eds.), Language attrition:
theoretical perspectives (pp. 53-68). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Fitzpatrick, T., Al-Qarni, I., and Meara, P. (2008). Intensive vocabulary testing: a case study.
Language learning journal, 36, 239-248.
• Komarova, N. L. and Nowak, M. A. (2001). Towards an evolutionary theory of language.
Trends in cognitive sciences, 5, 288-295.
• Laufer, B., Elder, C., Hill, K., and Congdon, P. (2004). Size and strength: do we need both to
measure vocabulary knowledge? Language testing, 21, 202-226.
• Laufer, B. and Nation, P. (1995). Vocabulary size and use: lexical richness in L2 written
production. applied linguistics, 16, 307-322.
• Laufer, B. and Paribakht, T. S. (1998). The relationship between passive and active
vocabularies: Effects of language learning context. Language learning, 48, 365-391.
38
• Meara, P. & Schmitt, N (1997). Towards a new approach to modeling vocabulary
acquisition. In N. Schmitt & M. McCarthy (eds.), Vocabulary: description, acquisition and
pedagogy (pp. 109-121). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Melka, F. (1997). Receptive vs. productive aspects of vocabulary. In N. Schmitt & M.
McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: description, acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 84-102).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Read, J. (2000). Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Robinson, B. F and Mervis, C. B (1998). Disentangling early language development:
modeling lexical and grammatical acquisition using an extension of case-study
methodology. Developmental psychology, 34, 363-375.
• van Geert, P. (2003). Dynamic systems approaches and modeling of developmental
processes. In J.Valsiner & K. J. Conolly (Eds.), Handbook of developmental psychology
(pp. 640-672). London: Sage.
• van Geert, P. (2008). A dynamic systems approach to the study of L1 and L2 acquisition:
an introduction. The modern language journal, 92, 179-199.
• Verspoor, M. H., Lowie, W. M., and van Dijk, M. (2008). Variability in second language
development from a dynamic systems perspective. The modern language journal, 92,
214-231.
Trends in connectionist natural language processing
(1Universidad
María José Castro-Bleda1 and Pablo Aibar-Ausina2
Politécnica de Valencia; 2Universitat Jaume I Castellón)
Language modeling is the attempt to characterize, capture and exploit regularities
in natural language. In problems such as automatic speech or handwritten text
recognition, machine translation, text classification or other pattern recognition
tasks, language models are useful to adequately guide the search for the optimal
response and to increase the success rate of the system.
Under the statistical framework to language modeling, n-grams are the most
popular language models. They are simple and robust models which adequately
capture local restrictions between words. Their parameters are learned from text
corpora using the occurrence frequencies of subsequences of n word units.
Deciding a value for n is a trade-off: larger values of n can capture longer-term
dependencies between words; however, the number of different n-grams grows
very fast (exponentially) with n, and more parameters requires more training data to
39
estimate them reliably. To alleviate this problem, some techniques can be applied,
such as smoothing or clustering techniques, class n-grams, integrated models, etc.
We have worked in a different line to solve the above problem by applying neural
networks to language modeling. Connectionist language models offer many
advantages over their statistical counterparts, but they also have some drawbacks
like a much more expensive computational cost. This work is a step towards a better
understanding
of
how
neural
networks
can
perform
language
modeling
applications. Experimental results for a variety of authors show that artificial neural
networks can learn language models which have performances comparable or
better than standard statistical models based on conventional statistical language
models. We also propose new trends for extending language models based on
artificial neural networks.
The Semantic Categorization of “Giving” Event in a Cross-linguistic
Perspective
Mayya Choban (National Academy of Security Service of Ukraine)
The fundamental property of language is its ability to create a mental picture of the
world. Categorization of the three-participant situations of physical and abstract
transfer and their representation as grammatical constructions in different languages
is of interest for such situations may be hypothesized to be a conceptual universal.
Among the diverse relations of two persons in the process of their activity the most
common ones are the relations of giving something (physical or abstract) by the
agent to the recipient. The conceptual core of “giving” situation includes the Agent,
the Recipient and the Theme (a physical object), the Agent, the Beneficiary and the
Theme (beneficial transfer), the Sayer, the Receiver and the Signal (abstract
transfer). The thematic roles of the participants are determined by the lexicalsemantic group of verbs of giving and passing information. Most of them allow two
construals in English: a) the ditransitive construction with two objects (He gave me
an apple. He showed me his pictures.) and b) the caused-motion construction with
the preposition to which focuses on the caused motion of a thing to some location
(He gave an apple to me. He said it to her). The caused-motion constructions are
not typical of languages having the dative case (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian) but they
sometimes occur in German (cf. Er verkauft dem Nachbar den Garten and Er
verkauft den Garten an den Nachbar).
40
A prototypical act of transfer schema involves the change of ownership of a
physical object whereas in abstract transfer of passing information it does not take
place (e.g. He told me the news – Now we both know the news).
Verbs of different semantics constitute beneficial transfer which can be identified by
the preposition for before the Beneficiary in English: She made him coffee – She
made coffee for him. In case languages the preposition with the same meaning as
English for plus Accusative is used to denote Beneficiary, cf.:
German: Sie machte ihm Kaffee – Sie machte Kaffee für ihn.
Russian: Она сварила ему кофе – Она сварила кофе для него.
Ukrainian: Вона зробила йому каву – Вона зробила каву для нього.
The number of verbs of giving in English is much less compared to flective
languages, the verb give having the greatest meaning load. It also serves as part of
a source domain for metaphorical extensions (e.g. She gave me a smile), which is
not the case in German, Russian and Ukrainian.
Language Acquisition and Learning Theory: Some Misconceptions
about Learnability
Çağrı Çöltekin (University of Groningen)
Children's apparent ease of acquiring languages in the face of the complexity of
the human languages and arguably inadequate input that they are exposed to in
the course of acquisition has been one of the puzzles for the theories of language.
Since we can not (yet) study the process of language acquisition directly,
researchers propose theories or models of language acquisition and test their
predictions in the light of empirical data about how children learn languages. As
well as accounting for the empirical data, the models of human language
acquisition have to account for certain formal theoretical results. In this talk, I will
argue that some of the widely accepted theories of language acquisition are based
on misguided---or, at best, highly restrictive--- interpretations of formal learning
theory results. Besides, the developments in machine learning provided many
theoretical and practical results on learnability, which are generally overlooked by
researchers working on language acquisition.
41
This talk will focus on two of these misconceptions. First, I will discuss the use of Gold's
theorem (Gold, 1967) for claims about language acquisition, and argue against
arriving at strong conclusions on language acquisition based on it. Gold's work has
been one of the most influential studies in learning theory, however, one should
consider its application to the human language acquisition problem cautiously.
Among other assumptions, Gold's theorem is based on the assumption that the
learning succeeds when the target grammar is `identified'. I argue that, a different
learning criterion such as `PAC learning' (Valiant, 1984) is more suitable for modeling
language acquisition.
Second, some theories of language acquisition are formed with the assumption that
the size of hypothesis space is the determining factor for learnability. However,
relatively recent research in the learning theory showed that the learnability problem
is more complex than it was assumed. Rather than the size of hypothesis space,
other metrics, such as `VC dimension' (Vapnik and Chervonenkis, 1971), determine
the learnability of the problem. In other words, learning problems formulated as a
search through infinite number of hypotheses are not necessarily `unlearnable'.
In this talk, I will summarize the above arguments and provide a simple linguistic
example, where a supposedly unlearnable problem becomes learnable with an
alternative parametrization, using techniques from machine learning.
References
•
Gold, M. E. (1967) "Language Identification in the Limit." Information and Control, 10:447—
474
•
Vapnik, V. & Chervonenkis, A. (1971) "On the uniform convergence of relative
frequencies of events to their probabilities." Theory of Probability and its Applications,
16(2):264—280
•
Valiant, L. (1984) "A theory of the learnable." Communications of the ACM, 27(11):1134-1142
Retrieval of word sense candidates based on a collocates
hyperthesaurus
J. L. De Lucca (Politechnical University of Valencia)
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is one of the first problems that are found by any
natural language processing system - be it syntactic or semantic - concerned with
42
the task of identifying the appropriate meaning or sense of a given ambiguous word
in a text or discourse. It involves the determination of all the different senses for every
word under considerations that depends on manual sense annotation for every one
and assigns each occurrence of a word to the appropriate sense.
This paper describes a heuristic approach to automatically identifying which
sentences in unrestricted text corpora are semantically related and which
correspond to fundamentally some set of related senses applied found at CHADES
(Corpus HispanoAmericano de Español).
Two highly experienced lexicographers participated in the manual tagging, and the
whole exercise spanned approximately four years. The first tagger did the "manual
tagging" on words beginning from A to J; the second tagger did the ones on words
beginning from K to Z in order to achieve a whole work.
In this particular task, knowing that a crucial aspect of our role was in providing
independent taggings in order to gauge the degree of consensus among human
taggers, the lexicographers deliberately did most of the work in isolation. We knew
that others might be analysing the same word, but did not communicate with them
about it in any detail.
The algorithm used a corpus-based system of word sense disambiguation. Using cooccurrence analysis techniques, for extracting candidates phrases representing
word sense examples from a large corpora made of electronic and digitalized
works.
In order to evaluate this structure we use information retrieval techniques combined
with a query expansion method that walks through the corpus-based structure and
assigns diferent weights to its semantic relations. The goal of this project is making
word senses from corpora. Approximately 90% of the word senses are correctly
extracted.
The system uses a method for generating the word senses, based on word cooccurrence probabilities. The word senses candidates are estimated using a corpus
of about fifth megabytes of unlabeled text, collected by a web crawler. This project
concerns the proposition, development and evaluation of a hyperthesaurus
structure to be used in retrieval of word senses applications. It was developed as a
postdoctoral research sponsored by CNPQ.
43
Light Verbs as Predicates
Inês Duarte (University of Lisbon)
Since Jespersen’s remark on the peculiar behaviour of ‘light verbs’, several attempts
to characterize them have been proposed in the literature. Such attempts fall under
three kinds of approaches. The functional-like head approach claims light verbs are
devoided of lexical meaning and behave like functional heads bearing tense and
agreement features (Gross 1981, Cattell 1984, Grimshaw & Mester 1988, a o.). The
auxiliary-like approach argues that light verbs are auxiliaries with aspectual features
(Hook 1974, 1991, Abeillé, Godard & Sag 1998, a.o.). The predicate-like approach
claims that light verbs are a specific subclass of verbs that play a relevant role in the
predication (see Rosen 1990, Alsina 1996, Butt & Geuder 2001, Butt 2003, SamekLodovici 2003, a.o.)
In this paper, we will argue for the third approach on the basis of evidence from
European Portuguese. We will concentrate on two properties of light verbs when
they combine with deverbal nouns.
1. Light verbs always select for complements with the proto θ-role THEME (SamekLodovici 2003) and for an external argument. In most cases, the external argument
bears the proto θ-role selected for by the corresponding main verb (1).
(1) a. A Maria deu um livro ao pai.
(main verb dar)
the Maria-CAUSE gave a book to-the father
b. A Maria deu uma contribuição importante ao debate.
(light verb dar)
the Maria-CAUSE gave a contribution important to-the debate
c. A Maria deu um salto.
(light verb dar)
the Maria-CAUSE gave a jump
When a deverbal noun with a CAUSE external argument combines with a light verb,
this argument must fit the thematic structure of the light verb. This is what happens
with the light verb ter (have), which inherits an external θ-role from the
corresponding main verb indicating the location of the THEME internal argument,
which we will label LOC (2).
(2) a. A Maria saltou lindamente.
the Maria-CAUSE jumped beautifully
44
b. A Maria teve um salto lindo.
the Maria-LOC had a beautiful jump
2. Light verbs present alternances like the ones shown by main verbs. The light verb
fazer (make/do) shows the causative-inchoative alternation (3).
(3) a. O cirurgião fez uma operação complicada (à Maria).
the surgeon-CAUSE made an operation difficult (to-the Maria)
b. A Maria fez uma operação complicada.
the Maria-THEME made an operation difficult
Whether one accounts for these properties in terms of lexical operations on thematic
structures (Samek-Lodovici 2003) or in terms of event structure (Butt 2003), they show
that light verbs behave like predicates.
References
•
Abeillé, A., D. Godard & I. Sag (1998). Two Kinds of Composition in French Complex
predicates. In Hinrichs, E., A. Kathol & T. Nakazawa (orgs.), Complex Predicates in
Nonderivational Syntax. Syntax and Semantics 30. San Diego, Academic Press
•
Alsina, A. (1996). The Role of Argument Structure in Grammar. Stanford, Califórnia, CSLI
•
Butt, M. & W. Geuder (2001). On the (Semi)Lexical Status of Light Verbs. In Corver, N. & H.
Publications.
van Riemsdijk (eds.), Semi-lexical Categories: On the Content of function words and the
function of content words. Berlim, Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 323-370.
•
Butt, M. (2003). The Light Verb Jungle. Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol 9: 1-49.
•
Cattell, R. (1984). Composite Predicates in English. Syntax and Semantics 17. Sydney,
•
Grimshaw, J. & A. Mester (1988). Light Verbs and q-Marking. Linguistic Inquiry, 19-2: 205-
•
Gross, M. (1981). Les Bases Empiriques de la Notion de Prédicat Sémantique. Langages,
•
Hook, P. E. (1974). The Compound Verb in Hindi. Center for South and Southeast Asian
•
Rosen, S. (1990). Argument Structure and Complex Predicates. Nova Iorque, Garland.
Academic Press.
232.
63: 7-52.
Studies, University of Michigan.
•
Samek-Lodovici, V. (2003). The Internal Structure of Arguments and its Role in Complex
Predicate Formation. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 21: 835-881.
45
Attitudes about taste
Sergio Raul Duarte1 and Janneke Huitink2
(1University of Groningen; 2University of Frankfurt)
Data While (1a) is typically understood as reporting the taste of the speaker, (1b) is
naturally understood as meaning that licorice tastes good to Chris (Lasersohn 2005).
As Stephenson (2007) points out, the relevant experiencer need not be linked to the
subject of the matrix attitude, but may also be linked to some salient individual:
(1) a. Licorice is tasty.
b. Chris believes that licorice is tasty.
c. Chris believes the new cat food is tasty, because the cat has eaten a lot of it.
But not all attitude predicates are created equal. Subjective attitude verbs
obligatorily shift the relevant experiencer to the attitude holder (Chris):
(2) a. Chris finds/regards/judges/considers licorice tasty.
b. ??Chris finds/regards/judges/considers the new cat food tasty, because the
cat has eaten a lot of it.
An evidential analysis We propose that the relevant observations are explained by
the evidential properties of the attitude verbs. Following Lasersohn and Stephenson,
we assume that the meaning of sentences like `Licorice is tasty' depends on a
judge-parameter which is set by the context:
(3)
[[tasty]]c;w = λx:x tastes good in w to jc
There are several possible resolutions of jc and `Licorice is tasty' floats several
propositions accordingly (though by in unembedded cases, jc is per default set to
the speaker). In attitude contexts, the evidential profile of the attitude verb helps to
figure out which reading is intended. Subjective attitude verbs like find presuppose
that the attitude holder has direct evidence. This is corroborated by the fact that
`Chris finds licorice tasty' implies that Chris has actually tried the licorice, while this is
not required for `Chris believes licorice is tasty'.
(4) a. [[find]]c;w = λpλx. in all worlds w' compatible with x's beliefs in w where x has
direct experience of p: [[p]]c;w' = 1.
46
b. [[believe]]c;w= λpλx. in all worlds w' compatible with x's beliefs in w where x has
indirect experience of p: [[p]]c;w' = 1.
In principle, the embedded predicate of personal taste has several meanings,
including `tasty for the speaker', `tasty for Chris, but the direct evidence
presupposition rules out the readings other than `tasty for Chris', because Chris
cannot have direct evidence for the truth of the proposition that licorice is tasty to
other people.
The verb believe carries an indirect evidence presupposition, which allows jc to be
resolved to someone who is not Chris or the speaker. This is witnessed by reports of
the tastes of a salient experiencer, which cannot depend on direct evidence, and
need a verb like believe to mark this. For example, `I believe the new brand of cat
food is tasty' is better than `The new brand of cat food is tasty'.
References
•
Lasersohn, Peter. 2005. Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal
•
Stephenson, Tamina. 2007. Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of
tase. Linguistics and Philosophy 28(6): 643{686.
personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy 30(4): 487{525.
Using discourse information in sentiment polarity classification
Sergio Raul Duarte and Gisela Redeker (University of Groningen)
Sentiment
polarity classification
consists in
the identification
of
evaluative
information in human authored opinionating documents, e.g. reviews. The
classification is determined by a quantitative value indicating the polarity and
strength of the writer's opinion towards the item reviewed (i.e. how much a reviewer
likes an item), as gleaned from the use of evaluative expressions. Common
applications are the development of recommendation systems, the detection of
sensitive content or antagonistic language, the mining of sentiment for business and
government, among others.
One of the main approaches in the literature to perform sentiment polarity
classification consists in summing up the semantic values of evaluative keywords in
the text. Voll and Taboada (2007) present a sentiment polarity classifier in which the
keywords are adjectives, verbs, nouns and adverbs listed in a prebuilt dictionary in
47
which the semantic value is specified. Their classifier also considers negation,
intensifiers and modality in calculating the semantic polarity value of the keywords.
The accuracy obtained by their system is 76.1% on a corpus of 400 reviews (the SFU
corpus).
An important drawback of this approach is that the identification of evaluative
content is very narrow, since the analysis is based on isolated words, and no
information is used to determine if the keywords refer to the writer's attitude toward
the item reviewed or to irrelevant attitudinal information, for instance, a movie
character's attitudes in a film review.
In this paper we address this problem by analyzing the use of appraisal elements in
review texts and the distribution of appraisal types with respect to RST functions.
Particularly, we employ the SFU corpus to identify the appraisal types that are more
frequently used to express relevant evaluative information and those attitude types
that may refer to off-topic information, considering also their location throughout the
text. We then identify the RST functions most frequently associated with these
attitude devices. Using this information, we propose strategies to assign weights to
the sentiment value of the keywords according to the RST function in which the word
occurs and the location of the word in the text, since some RST functions have a
greater likelihood to be associated with the appraisal devices that hold relevant
sentiment information. Initial results suggest that these strategies are effective, since
the accuracy of the classifier is increased to 82.2% for the SFU corpus.
Reference
•
Voll, K. and M. Taboada (2007) Not All Words are Created Equal: Extracting Semantic
Orientation as a Function of Adjective Relevance. In Proceedings of the 20th Australian
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Gold Coast, Australia. December 2007. pp.
337-346
48
A Cognitive Technology Project: Semantically Sensitive Natural
Language Processing
Matthew Elliott, Draque Thompson and Nicholas Davis
(Case Western Reserve University)
The goal of the present work is to develop a semantically sensitive natural language
processer. This technology can be applied to robotics by enabling an agent to
express and use semantics.
This parser is based on the principles of Stemmatic Syntax, a theoretical model of
language created by Dr. Per Aage Brandt that breaks down language into a
canonical set of semantically meaningful nodes headed by the verb. Contrary to
many parsing approaches, this system does not add words to a string based on
linear order, but rather it finds local meaning structures, analyzes the relationship
between the words, and finally assigns each word to a nodal position based on the
schematic meaning inherent in syntax. Systematically combining these nodes
accounts for linguistic embedding and recursion by creating a ‘stemmatic tree,’
which reflects local and global meaning. Stemmatic philosophy proposes that,
cognitively, language has three-dimensional thought semantics (i.e. spatial
cognition,
cognitive maps, representations),
two-dimensional
semio-syntactic
structure (stemmatic ‘trees’), and one-dimensional phonetic expression (linear text,
speech). In writing or speaking, cognitive operations go from 3D→2D→1D, while
reading (or listening) implies the opposite. Stemmatic trees are the intermediary, a
bridge, between form and content.
Potential knowledge can be extracted from individual sentences and compiled to
create a stemmatic network organized by grouping lexemes with their nodal values
and syntagmatic similarities. An example may elucidate this concept. Take for
instance this sentence, ‘Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital,'
(Hemingway, A Very Short Story). On a generic level, the system can deduce that a
subject can ‘go back’ to a location. More specifically, the subject, Luz, can ‘go
back’ to the location Pordonone, etc. The verbs ‘go’ and ‘open’ are defined by the
co-text. As the system stemmatizes more information, it builds up a wide depth of
knowledge potentialities and several patterns of affinity emerge, eventually crossing
statistical thresholds to become ‘factual’ knowledge for the system.
The presentation will first introduce the principles of stemmatic semio-syntax and
next describe the language processor based on this paradigm. Finally, we will
49
discuss how this technology can be applied to cognitive robotics for empirical
verification. To test the semantic efficiency of this approach, the agent will be made
to ‘think’ and ‘communicate’ in terms of stemmatics. Again, based on the three
dimensional approach, the agent’s sensory input is 1D, then structured in a 2D
stemmatic tree, and finally represented as a 3D cognitive map.
References
•
Brandt, Per Aage, 1973, L’analyse phrastique. Introduction à la grammatique, Bruxelles:
AIMAV
•
Brandt, Per Aage, 2004, Spaces, Domains, and Meaning. Essays in Cognitive Semiotics,
Bern: Peter Lang Verlag
•
Stemmatic Syntax (2008) from Web site: www.stemma.pbwiki.com
Interactions between elderly and caregivers
Agnes Engbersen (University of Groningen)
Conversation Analytic research on the relationships between verbal, non verbal and
contextual aspects of language use in (care) interactions between elderly people
and caregivers in institutional settings has not been given much attention yet
(Heinemann 2006). In a recently started PhD research project I will focus on the
following question from a multimodal perspective: How do elderly and caregivers
manage their interactions during care activities?
In homes for the elderly many everyday care activities consist of routinized actions.
The routine character is reflected in the sequential organization of both verbal and
physical actions. Activities are enacted within a structured framework of related
actions, a Situated Activity System (SAS; Goffman, 1981; Goodwin, 2000; see
Mazeland 2007), for example ‘washing and dressing’ activities.
The base line of this SAS consists of an ordered series of physical actions being
performed by caregiver and care recipient. Talk during such base line interactions
may be either related to the ongoing activity (‘bound’ topics), or unbound. In my
paper I will explore the interplay between verbal, non verbal and contextual
elements, the way participants shape bound and unbound talk and how this reveals
an orientation to the situated activity system.
50
References
•
Goffman, E. (1981). Footing. In: E. Goffman, Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, pp. 124-159.
•
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal
of Pragmatics, 32, pp. 1489-1522.
•
Heinemann, T. (2006). ‘Will you or can’t you?’: Displaying entitlement in interrogative
requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, pp. 1081-1104.
•
Mazeland, H. (2007). De noties Situated Activity System en Participation Framework i.v.m.
de zorginteracties. Collegetekst CIW. Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit.
Elderly people talking
Christina Englert (University of Groningen)
In my research project I investigate situations and forms of talk of elderly people. My
main research question is: Does the talk of elderly people display forms of
interactional organization and uses of linguistic practices that are characteristic for
and/or constitutive of the social identity of being an elderly person. I am thinking of
linguistic and interactional practices recurrent in our daily lives, such as taking turns,
telling stories, asking and answering questions, or initiating and doing repair.
I want to study the language use of healthy, not demented elderly people in their
natural settings. My primary aim is not to determine what elderly people are not able
to do anymore compared to younger adults, but to first describe what kinds of
communication situations elderly people take part in, how they contribute to these
situations and what kind of interactional and linguistic practices they deploy to
shape their interaction.
I am still at a stage in which I am collecting the data, that consists of video
recordings of natural occurring interactions among elderly people. I describe
preliminary analytical observations by showing examples from my dataset, and I
would like to discuss theoretical and methodological issues for the study of language
use in the elderly population.
51
Comprehension of scalar implicatures in five year-old Dutchspeaking children
Myrthe Faber, Jessica Overweg, Margreet van Koert and Angeliek van Hout
(University of Groningen)
Much developmental work has been devoted to scalar implicatures. These are
implicitly communicated propositions linked to weak terms on a scale of
informativity. For example, when a speaker says Some oranges are in the boxes, the
hearer is entitled to infer pragmatically that not all of the oranges are in the boxes.
The general consensus is that the weaker term (the quantifier some), while logically
compatible with a stronger term from the same scale (the quantifier all), prompts the
inference because the speaker did not use the stronger term (Pouscoulous et al,
2007). The description is underinformative. In comprehension, children are more likely
than adults to treat the weak term as compatible with one that is stronger on the
scale. Adults, on the other hand, are also not at ceiling in their performance
(Noveck, 2001).
Our aim is to determine the abilities of five year-old children (native Dutch speakers)
to draw scalar implicatures with quantifiers and we investigate why some learners
seem to be unable to fully comprehend these. The experiment is conducted within
the COST A33-framework Crosslinguistically Robust Stages of Children’s Linguistic
Performance, with Applications to the Diagnosis of Specific Language Impairment.
The goal of COST is to identify and describe areas of cross-linguistic uniformity that
can then be used to for cross-linguistic tests of language impairment. The focus of
the research is therefore on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic development.
In this study, 25 children (age 5;0-5;6), all native Dutch speakers, plus 20 native Dutch
adult controls, are tested using a Truth-Value Judgement Task (TVJT) designed for
COST by Napoleon Katsos to be applied cross-linguistically. In this task, Mrs.
Caveman asks the child to help her improve her Dutch. Mrs. Caveman makes a
statement about a picture, and the child has to say whether the statement is true or
false. If the child rejects the statement, we ask for an explanation. An example is
given below:
Statement: Sommige sinaasappels liggen in de dozen (Some oranges are in the
boxes.)
52
The child has to say whether it is true or false that some oranges are in the boxes with
respect to the presented scene. In this example, true would reflect the logical
answer, and false would reflect the pragmatic answer, showing that the child can
draw the implicature.
Our goal is to contribute to the cross-linguistic research by providing a systematic
analysis of the comprehension of scalar implicatures with quantifiers in 5;0-5;6 year
old Dutch children. We are presently collecting data, having tested 9 children so far.
In our presentation we will report our results, and discuss methodological issues and
implications for further research.
From interlanguage to First Nations English? Grammatical aspects
of Joe Little Chief’s Blackfoot-English writings
Inge Genee (University of Lethbridge, Canada)
Joe Little Chief was a Siksika Blackfoot man who learned English as a second
language around the turn of the 20th century; in the 1950’s he wrote a collection of
stories which he later sold to the Glenbow Archives in Calgary.
This paper argues that the non-standard English features found in Little Chief’s
writings reflect the grammar of his native Blackfoot and may have been
characteristic of the English spoken by the first generation of Blackfoot people who
attended English residential schools. The features under investigation include: (i) nonstandard tense and aspect; (ii) non-standard infinitive and participle forms; (iii) nonstandard number and gender agreement; (iv) non-standard uses of personal and
possessive pronouns, articles and demonstratives; and (v) non-standard uses of
conjunctions, copula and prepositions.
What makes these features interesting is the fact that they survived beyond the first
few generations of non-native speakers: not only may they still be observed in the
English of elderly individuals whose first language is Blackfoot, but, more importantly,
53
some of them are also preserved in the English spoken by Blackfoot people who
speak English as their first language and have no or limited fluency in Blackfoot: they
have become part of a Blackfoot First Nations English dialect.
Recent work on First Nations Englishes has argued against individual ancestral
languages as the main source of First Nations Englishes or emphasized other
contributions to their development (e.g. Craig 1991; Flanigan 1985, 1987; Wolfram
1984; Rowicka 2005). I argue, with e.g. Alford 1974 and Leap 1993, that the origin of
features which have a clear parallel in the ancestral language is likely to be that
ancestral language, especially in communities in which the major shift to English has
happened within living memory.
References
• Alford, Dan. 1974. The Cheyenne dialect of English and its educational implications. Box
Elder, Montana: Northern Cheyenne Bilingual Program.
• Craig, Beth. 1991. American Indian English. English World-Wide 12.1:25-61.
• Flanigan, Beverly Olsen. 1985. American Indian English and error analysis: The case of
Lakota English. English World-Wide 6,2:217-236.
• Flanigan, Beverly Olsen. 1987. Language variation among Native Americans: Observations
on Lakota English. Journal of English Linguistics 20,2:181-199.
• Leap, William L. American Indian English. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
• Rowicka, Grażyna. 2005. American Indian English. The Quinault case. English World-Wide
26,3:301-324.
• Wolfram, Walt. 1984. Unmarked tense in American Indian English. American Speech
59,1:31-50.
Argumentative writing in L1 and EFL of Dutch secondary school
students
Kees de Glopper (University of Groningen)
Research problem
Writing research has demonstrated resemblances and discrepancies between
writing processes and writing performance in a first and a second or foreign
language. Schoonen et al. (2003, 2009) found very strong correlations between the
writing skills in Dutch and English of secondary school students in the Netherlands.
Their studies identified differences as well: the development of writing proficiency
between grade 8 and grade 10 seems to be larger in English than in Dutch and
54
writing proficiency in English seems to be better predictable with (psycho)linguistic
measures than in Dutch. Writing processes in Dutch and in English have been studied
by Stevenson (2005). Her study demonstrates similarities and differences in planning,
translation and revision processes in Dutch als L1 and English as a foreign language.
A detailed analysis of students’ revisions while writing in English did not demonstrate
inhibition of higher order revision processes, but writing fluency was reduced and
inhibition was found for conceptual processes such as generating ideas and setting
goals.
The aforementioned studies do not delve into text characteristics that are genre
specific. The writing proficiency scores in the studies of Schoonen et al. (2003, 2009)
are so called primary trait scores: general impression ratings of text quality.
Stevenson (2005) did address genre specific features of argumentative writing, but
her analyses are restricted to a comparison of frequencies of claims and arguments
in texts in Dutch and English. This study does provide a detailed analysis of
argumentative writing in L1 and EFL by Dutch students.
Method
Argumentative letters of 40 secondary school students (a systematic sample from
the larger data set of Schoonen et al. (2003, 2009) were analysed. Four letters per
student (two from grade 9 and 10 each, two in Dutch and English each) were
subjected to analyses of the argumentatieve structure and the use of indicators for
claims and arguments. The outcomes of these analyses have been compared (i)
between grades and within languages and (ii) between languages within grades.
Further, the correlation was determined between aspects of argument structure and
use of indicators and the primary trait scores for writing quality.
Results
The analyses of the argumentative features of the letters written in Dutch and English
shed more light on parallels and contrasts in L1 and EFL text production and allow for
a more specific answer to the question to what extent written argumentation in a
foreign language is inhibited.
References
•
Schoonen, R., Van Gelderen, A., De Glopper, K., Hulstijn, J., Simis, A., Snellings, P. &
Stevenson, M. (2003) First language and second language writing: the role of linguistic
fluency, linguistic knowledge and metacognitive knowledge. Language Learning, 53, 1,
165-202.
55
•
Schoonen, R., Van Gelderen, A., Stoel, R., Hulstijn, J. & De Glopper, K. (2009, submitted).
Modelling writing development: L1 and EFL Writing proficiency in secondary school years.
•
Stevenson, M. (2005). Reading and writing in a foreign language. A comparison of
conceptual and linguistic processes in Dutch and English. Amsterdam: SCO-Kohnstamm
Instituut.
How do you feel today? The effect of mood on language
processing.
Diewke de Goede1, Petra van Alphen1, Emma Mulder2, José Kerstholt3
and Jos van Berkum1,4 (1MPI for Psycholinguistics; 2University of
Amsterdam; 3TNO Human Factors; 4Radboud University Nijmegen)
Many aspects of cognition, such as memory retrieval, decision-making, and the use
of stereotypes, have been found to be sensitive to mood, the diffuse, objectless
affective state the person is in (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007). Although the exact
mechanisms are hotly debated, the evidence suggests that people in a happy
mood are more inclined to rely on heuristic processing strategies than people in a
sad mood. Here we investigate whether mood also affects the use of heuristics (or
'educated guesses') to anticipate upcoming language as a sentence unfolds. If it
does, this would show that language processing -- a classic example of 'cold'
cognitive computation -- is not immune to affective variables.
In constructions like "David praised Linda because...", verbs like "praise" heuristically
lead readers to expect more information about the person who is praised (in this
case, Linda), not the person praising. This so-called implicit causality bias can be so
strong that gender-marked pronouns that subsequently disconfirm the expectation - "he" in "David praised Linda because he..." -- actually elicit a P600 effect in ERPs
(Van Berkum et al., 2007), indicating that such pronouns are briefly taken to be
problematic. We reasoned that if people process information more heuristically in a
happy mood than in a sad mood, and if such mood-dependent shifts in processing
strategy can also affect the mechanism involved in language comprehension, a
change in mood should modulate the size of this heuristics-based P600 effect.
In a two-session EEG experiment, we used short film clips to manipulate the mood of
participants just before they read short stories in which verb-based expectations
were sometimes confirmed or disconfirmed with a gender-marked pronoun. When
readers were in a happy mood, bias-inconsistent pronouns elicited a P600 effect, as
56
in the abovementioned ERP study. However, when the same readers were in a sad
mood, no such P600 effect was observed. Importantly, standard morpho-syntactic
subject-verb agreement violations (e.g., "The boys was…") elicited a P600 effect in
either mood.
Our findings support the general idea that mood modulates the degree of heuristic
processing, and they reveal that such mood effects also percolate into basic
language
comprehension
mechanisms. A
change
in
mood has
selective
consequences for language processing: whereas heuristics-based conceptual
anticipation can be abolished in a sad mood, more algorithmic syntactic parsing
mechanisms continue to do their job.
Are you stressed? Children’s comprehension and production of
marked stress
Frederike Groothoff and Sanne Kuijper (University of Groningen)
The interpretation of marked stress can be problematic for children (e.g. Szendröi,
2003). For adults the sentence “Tigger only threw a CHAIR to Piglet” can only mean
(1) Tigger only threw a chair, and threw nothing else, to Piglet (narrow focus
interpretation). For children this sentence is ambiguous and could also mean: (2)
Tigger only threw a chair to Piglet and did nothing else (wide focus interpretation).
While having problems with interpretation, children do not seem to have problems
with the production of marked stress (e.g. Hornby & Hass, 1970; Cutler & Swinney,
1987). However, production and comprehension of marked stress have never been
investigated within the same experiment.
In our experiment we did investigated production and comprehension of marked
stress in the same experiment, with the same children and the same materials. We
used pictures and stories in which things were bought and others were left in the
store. The contrast was between the different products (neutral stress); their different
color (marked stress); or both product and color were contrastive (neutral stress). In
comprehension
we
expected that children
would accept
a wide focus
interpretation for marked stress, this in contrast to the adults. In production we
expected that the children would have adult like stress patterns.
The results of our experiment are not in line with previous studies. For comprehension,
we found that in the marked stress condition subjects more often had a wide focus
57
interpretation than in the experiments of Gualmini et al. (2002) and Szendrői (2004).
However, we found different answer patterns for adults and children. For production,
the results were not as we had expected: children and adults frequently placed
main stress on the noun, independent of the focus in the test item. An explanation
for these production results could be that the contrast, and thus the focus to be
expressed, was not clear enough in the experiment.
Our follow-up experiment put more emphasis on the contrast between the objects:
the participants were instructed to say what the character picked up, and also what
he did not pick up, so they would produce sentences with two conjuncts (e.g. “The
clown only bought the yellow PANTS and did not buy the yellow HEAD”). The results
of the stress patterns for the first conjunct differed from the results for the second
conjunct. In the second conjunct children did use the expected stress pattern.
Investigating the prosodic correlates of contrast. Comparing
Greek to Italian
Stella Gryllia (Leiden University)
Contrast has a double nature, as it can combine with topic (ex.1b) and focus
(ex.2b). The question in (1a) can be interpreted as containing two implicit subquestions, (i)what did you give to your mum for Christmas and (ii)what did you give
to your dad for Christmas. (1b) answers the question partially, addressing only the
first sub-question; to my mum is contrasted to other persons to which one could have
given a book.
(1) a. What did you give to your parents for Christmas?
b. [To my mum]Contrast+Topic I gave [a book]Focus.
Examples like (2b) can also be seen as an answer to an implicit sub-question. In this
case, (2a) is interpreted as containing two sub-questions, (i) what did you give to
Helen and (ii) what did you not give to Helen. (2b) answers the question addressing
only the first sub-question; in (2b) a cd is contrasted to other things that one could
have given to Helen.
(2) a. What did you give to Helen?
b. I gave her [a cd]Contrast+Focus (not a book).
58
This double nature of contrast raises a question about its status in information
structure (Marandin et al. (2002), Molnár (2002)); should contrast be treated as an
independent feature of information structure?
Marandin et al. (2002), based on prosodic evidence from French argue that contrast
should be treated as an independent feature of information structure. In French, a
C-accent seems to be present in contexts where topic combines with contrast and
in contexts where focus combines with contrast. Marandin et al. argue that this Caccent is characterized by a sharp pitch-rise, longer duration and higher intensity,
and signals contrast.
The aims of this paper are twofold; first, to investigate whether there is experimental
evidence from Greek and Italian for Marandin et al.'s claim. Second, this paper aims
at examining whether there is cross-linguistic variation with respect to the prosodic
marking of contrast, comparing data from Greek and Italian. To fulfill these aims two
production experiments were carried out (one experiment per language). The main
question of the production experiments was: do speakers prosodically mark focus or
topic for being contrastive?
References
•
Marandin, J.M. et al. (2002) “Discourse marking in French: C accents and discourse
moves.”, Proceedings of Speech Prosody, Aix-en-Provence.
•
Molnár,V. (2002).“Contrast –from a contrastive perspective”, Information Structure in a
Cross-Linguistic Perspective, H.Hallegard et al. (eds.) Amsterdam, Rodopi:147-61.
Audience design in documentary film interviews
Marieke Haan (University of Groningen)
Investigations of film dialogue show that actors’ interactions normally contain more
information than is necessary for the characters in the film in order to understand
each other. This extra information is added for the audience, so the dialogues are
aimed towards the viewers. Therefore these dialogues are not ‘natural’, but
specifically designed for the spectators (Bubel). Also in documentaries, dialogues
are designed for the audience. Since many different verbal utterances in
documentaries are used, e.g. realized by presenters, narrators, voice-overs, etc.
(Nichols, Bruzzi). This investigation concentrates on interviews in documentaries.
59
These interviews do not only show talking heads (with the interviewer often cut off),
but also pictures that are related to interview topics.
In terms of the ‘participation framework’ (Goffman, Clark), documentary film
audiences may be seen as ‘overhearers’: looking at conversations between actors
or interviewers and interviewees, but being no part of the ongoing communication.
However, as overhearers, spectators are enabled to understand the interviews in full.
There are two relevant cinematographic elements used: verbal communication
designed for overhearers, and visual communication designed for audiences during
the process of overhearing interviews. Moving images are used to make the
overhearers’ knowledge (more) complete, during or in spite of the verbal
utterances. The question then is: How is overhearer design in documentary interviews
applied? It is investigated by means of a corpus analysis of 71 interview sequences
of 10 documentary films.
Verbal utterances in interviews may be understood by the ‘third party’ of the
overhearers in front of the TV screen. However, the mutual knowledge between the
interactors on the screen – that makes their utterances smooth and easy – must be
no longer mute but ‘talkative’. This is the core of the audience design, that the
‘common ground’ (Clark) between the interactors on the screen, their shared
knowledge, is made accessible to overhearers.
Speakers (in the interviews) act so that overhearers may profit by their utterance
design: they add examples to the verbal text, make expressions concrete,
paraphrase propositions, etc. But when interviewees are speaking often images are
shown (other than talking heads): e.g. images that are telling the same as the text,
that show persons which are referred to, or that provide the viewers with a setting of
place or time related to the verbal text. In such a way, the interview information is
made available to overhearing and viewing audiences, verbally as well as visually.
References
•
Bruzzi, S. (2006): New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London.
•
Bubel, C.M. (2008): Film Audiences as Overhearers. Journal of pragmatics 40, 55-71.
•
Bubel, C.M. (2006): The linguistic Construction of Character Relations in TV Drama. PhD
•
Clark, H.H. (1996): Using Language. Cambridge.
•
Goffmann, E. (1976): Replies and Responses. Language and society 5, 257-313.
•
Nichols, B. (2001): Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington.
Thesis, University of Saarbrücken.
60
The origin of Afrikaans pronunciation: a comparison to west
Germanic languages and Dutch dialects
Wilbert Heeringa1 and Febe de Wet2
(1Meertens Institute Amsterdam; 2Stellenbosch University)
This paper aims to find the origin of Afrikaans pronunciation with the use of
dialectometry. First, Afrikaans was compared to Standard Dutch, Standard Frisian
and Standard German. Pronunciation distances were measured by means of
Levenshtein distances. Afrikaans was found to be closest to Standard Dutch.
Second, Afrikaans pronunciation was compared to 361 Dutch dialect varieties in the
Netherlands
and
North-Belgium.
Material
from
the
Reeks
Nederlandse
Dialectatlassen was used. Afrikaans was found to be closest to the South Holland
variety of Zoetermeer, which largely agrees with Kloeke (1950, Herkomst en Groei
van het Afrikaans).
Finally, vowel and consonant similarity were studied separately. The strong
relationship between Afrikaans and the South Hollandish varieties can be explained
by their vowels. With regard to the consonants, the Town Frisian varieties are most
closely related to Afrikaans, probably since they still maintain features which were
lost in the South-Hollandish dialects.
A Diachronic Study of Irish Prepositions
Geraldine Herbert and Carl Vogel (University of Dublin)
The recent application of computational models to the problem of language
change has demonstrated that quantitative measures of language change can be
yielded. We present an attempt to quantify aspects of Language change in Irish. To
this end a model of language change proposed by Lieberman et al (2007) is
employed.
Lieberman's work focuses on tracking the rate of regularization in English verbs and
concludes that the rate of regularization and the frequency of usage of any word
are inversely related to each other; a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes
10 times as fast. While evidence of an inverse relationship between frequency and
complexity is not new the use by Lieberman of a computational model to quantify
61
the relationship is novel and allows predictions to be made about regularization in
the future.
We explore the survival of Irish prepositions from Old Irish through to Modern Irish.
Prepositions were selected as a closed class category to view in isolation from the
rest of the grammar. Although relational in general, as verbs are, unlike verbs,
prepositions to not tend to have inflection patterns to regularize. Thus, the
ontogenesis and survival of particular prepositions is of interest, and we wish to
establish whether the survival rates relative to frequency of attested use of
prepositions replicates the Lieberman model. However, Irish also has prepositions
that incorporate pronouns and which are relevant to study in terms of possible
inflection paradigms in the same way as the verb study.
We observe that extant analysed diachronic corpora of Irish suggests that the
overall survival of the Old Irish Prepositions conform to the spirit of the Lieberman
model, but there are exceptions with the survival of some prepositions that do not
record high frequency of occurrence while a number of prepositions with high
frequency did not survive.
How depictives and appositive adjectives are different
Herman Heringa (University of Groningen)
Depictives and appositive adjectives, illustrated in (1) and (2) respectively, seem to
be very similar constructions. The only apparent distinction between the two is the
intonation. The appositive adjectives are separated from the intonation contour of
the matrix by so-called comma-intonation. Depictives lack this special intonation
pattern.
(1) a. John arrived home, drunk.
[appositive adjectives]
b. They dragged Mary, totally unconscious, into the ambulance.
(2) a. John arrived home drunk.
[depictives]
b. They dragged Mary unconscious into the ambulance.
In this talk, I will show that depictives and appositive adjectives differ also in their
restrictions and possibilities, both syntactically and semantically. Appositive
adjectives, for example, can be preceded by subordinators, whereas depictives
62
cannot (3). Also, depictives are always stage level modifiers, whereas appositive
adjectives can be used to modify on the individual level (4).
(3) a. They dragged Mary, though entirely healthy, into the ambulance.
b. *They dragged Mary though entirely healthy into the ambulance
(4) a. Peter, really smart, won the quiz.
b. *Peter won the quiz really smart.
The main focus of the talk will be on case marking on the constructions in question in
the slavic languages, in particular Czech and Russian. In Czech, both depictives and
appositive adjectives always get the same case as their anchor. In Russian, on the
other hand, depictives have a sameness/instrumental alternation, depending on
aspect. Appositive adjectives, however, do not show this alternation and are
obligatorily marked with the same case as their anchor. The example in (5) is from
Richardson (2007: 116).
(5)
Druz'ja priveli ego
domoj p'janymi / p'janogoi
friends brought
him:acc
[Russian]
home drunk:instr / drunk:acc
'Friends brought him home drunk.'
a. Appositive interpretation (Case agreement)
b. NP modifier/attribute interpretation (Case agreement)
c. Depictive interpretation (instrumental Case or Case agreement)
I will argue that both depictives and appositions are control structures where the
adjective functions as the predicate of the PRO subject. Appositive adjectives are
adjoined to the subject or object itself. Depictives, on the other hand, are adjoined
to a projection of the verb. Furthermore, I propose that appositive adjectives involve
a complete CP, whereas depictives are small clauses. In order to explain the case
marking patterns, I will use the system developed for case marking predicates from
Matushansky (2008). In this system, heads assign case to their sister and everything it
includes. Also, elements can receive more than one case feature and PF has rules to
decide which of these features will be spelled out.
References
•
Matushansky, O. (2008). A Case Study of Predication. In F. Marušič and R. Žaucer, eds.,
Studies in Formal Slavic Linguistics. Contributions from Formal Description of Slavic
Languages 6.5. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 213-239.
63
•
Richardson, K. (2007). Case and Aspect in Slavic. (Oxford Linguistics). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Discontinuous conjunction of nominal modifiers
Jack Hoeksema (University of Groningen)
There are two competing views on the basic parallelism requirements in the area of
conjunction: (1) conjuncts must have identical categories, based on internal
constituency, (2) conjuncts must have identical categories, based on distributional
properties. The former view is that of X-bar grammar and its various descendants,
whereas the latter is enshrined in the categorial grammar tradition (cf. e.g.
Steedman 1985). I will present new evidence for the categorial perspective, from a
type of coordination involving prenominal adjectival phrases and postnominal PPs
and relative clauses in older stages of Dutch.
(1)
De Heer Bodisco was een zeer beschaafde man, en op wiens oordeel, in
verschillende betrekkingen, groote prijs gesteld werd.
“Mr Bodisco was a very civilized man, and whose judgment, in various
matters, was highly esteemed.”
(2)
Het was eene seer lange brief, en die door alle drie die heeren nog al een
wijle wierde bestudeert.
“It was a very long letter, and which was studied by those three gentlemen
for quite a while”
In categorial terms, both conjuncts, though internally quite divers, as similar because
they as adnominal modifiers of the general category NP/NP. In current Dutch,
sentences such as (1) are out. I will argue that this is due to conflicting requirements
of directionality, which became gradually more important. A categorial model, with
an OT superstructure, can successfully account for this type of change.
Reference
•
Mark Steedman, 1985, ‘Dependency and Coordination in the Grammar of Dutch and
English,’ Language 61-3, 523-568.
64
Verb-Raising and the Head Final Filter
Erik Hoekstra (Fryske Akademy, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences)
The following patterns represent the ordering possibilities for 3-verb clusters (without
the infinitival marker "to") in West Germanic languages past and present (inspired by
Koopman 1990):
(1) Verb cluster break-up scheme
V1 ... V2 ... V3 ...
V2 ... V3 V1
V1 ... V3 V2 ...
V2 V1 ... V3
V3 V2 V1 ...
V3 V1 ... V2
V3 is the main verb; V1 and V2 are auxiliaries such as perfect auxiliaries, modal
auxiliaries. The dots represent break-up of the verbal cluster by non-verbal material. I
will present data in support of (1) from Modern Dutch, Modern Frisian, Old English,
Old Frisian, as well as from several Dutch dialects of the 19th and 20th centuries. The
generalisation covering the facts in (1) is given in (2):
(2) Extended Koopman's Generalisation
A head-final ordering relation between two verbs may not be broken up by nonverbal material
Thus the following suborders are never broken up: 32, 31 and 21.
(2) is not as strange as it may seem. A similar, though not identical, generalisation
holds with respect to prenominal AP's, whose heads must be adjacent to (the
projection of) the noun. It goes by the name of the Head Final Filter. After presenting
the empirical basis for the Head Final Filter (Williams 1981), I go on to discuss the
following questions:
(3-i) What sort of principle (semantic, syntactic, phonological) is responsible for this
ordering generalisation?
(3-ii) Does the concept "underlying order" need to exist in syntactic theory?
(3-iii) What factor correlates with the difference between verb ordering and
adjective ordering.
65
The answers will be: syntactic, no, selection versus iteration; but the motivation for
these answers are, hopefully, more interesting than the answers themselves. Given
time, I will criticize some existing account of V-Raising.
References
•
Koopman, W. (1990). Word order in Old English. With special reference to the Verb
Phrase. Dissertation University of Amsterdam. Amsterdam Studies in Generative Grammar
1.
•
Williams, Edwin (1982) “Another Argument that Passive is Transformational,” Linguistic
Inquiry 13, 160–163.
It’s a tie. The influence of gestures and their visibility on speech
Marieke Hoetjes, Emiel Krahmer and Marc Swerts (Tilburg University)
Gestures can be defined as the symbolic movements that we make when we
speak. They are such an integral part of speech that people are generally not
aware of producing them or of perceiving them. Once we start paying attention,
however, it becomes clear that speech-accompanying gestures are omnipresent.
Despite this omnipresence, gestures tend to be overlooked when studying language
use and many aspects of their relationship to speech and their role in
communication have only recently been studied.
Various studies have shown that there is a close relationship between speech and
gesture, but several questions remain. For example, do people produce gestures
primarily for themselves or for the addressee and to what extent does performing a
gesture have an effect on speech itself? To try and answer these questions we might
ask whether people are still likely to gesture when they cannot see their addressee
and whether people’s speech changes when they cannot gesture.
An experimental paradigm was developed in which thirty eight first year student
pairs took part. One of the participants, the instructor, had to watch video clips
depicting a person tying different kinds of tie-knots and instruct the other participant,
the matcher, to tie a tie in the same manner as in the video clips. Half of the
instructors were unable to see the matcher because an opaque screen had been
placed between the instructor and the matcher and all instructors had to sit on their
hands for half of the experiment. The instructor was videotaped during the
66
experiment and photographs were taken of the end state of each tie-knot on the
matcher.
In this talk I want to discuss whether visibility leads to better instructions and whether
it is possible to hear whether an instructor is able to gesture or not. In other words, are
matchers better at tying a tie-knot when they can see the instructor and does the
instructors’ speech change when they are unable to see the matcher or when they
are ‘tied down’ and unable to gesture? Results show that not being allowed to
gesture during this kind of instruction giving is difficult, and that gestures can have a
noticeable impact on speech. In addition, it was found that instructors continue to
gesture even when the matcher cannot see them.
Relearning in the elderly: Age-related effects on the size of savings
Nienke van der Hoeven-Houtzager (University of Groningen)
This paper reports on a study on learning new words and relearning old words in
young (mean age 22.40), middle-aged (mean age 50.33) and elderly speakers
(mean age 76.00) of French as a foreign language. The study focuses on the
question if there is a difference between learning new words and relearning words
that were learned in the past but seem to be forgotten. The results show that the
three groups perform rather similarly in relearning old words, but that the younger
learners are significantly more efficient in learning new words. In addition a
questionnaire on contact with French and a test for working memory capacity were
administered, but neither language contact nor age-related decline in working
memory capacity can be seen as single factors explaining the difference between
learning and relearning. The decline in older adults to learn new lexical information is
related to theories that explain age-related memory deficits, and is conceived of as
an age-related deficiency to form associations between unrelated concepts.
Poor nonword repetition in specific language impairment: cause
or consequence of small vocabulary size?
Martine Jong1, Judith Rispens2 and Gerard Bol1
of Groningen; 2University of Amsterdam)
(1University
Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have severe problems with
nonword repetition (NWR). Controversy exists on the causal mechanisms of this
67
deficit. A dominant hypothesis is that NWR is constrained by phonological storage
capacity, and that this plays a key role in learning new words. However, difficulties
with NWR have also been interpreted as a consequence of a small vocabulary size
rather than as a causal factor. The present study is an investigation into the
association between NWR, vocabulary and word learning in SLI.
Two experiments have been carried out, one in which the items of an NWR task
have been varied on (1) length to study the capacity of the phonological short term
memory and (2) phonotactic probability. The latter measure has shown to influence
NWR and has been taken as evidence that the repetition of nonwords makes use of
the lexical representations in the mental lexicon. In the second experiment, the
ability to learn novel words was investigated by a long-term repetition priming task in
which nonwords were either presented once or twice.
Three groups of children participated: one group of 8-year-old children with SLI, one
group of age-matched typically developing (TD) peers, and one group of younger
TD children matched with the children with SLI on vocabulary size.
The results of the first experiment show a significant influence of phonotactic
probability on NWR. This effect is the same for all three groups. Length also has a
significant effect on NWR. There is a significant interaction between group and
length as the SLI group is more severely affected by nonword length. No main effect
of priming was found in the second experiment, but there was a significant
interaction between phonotactic probability and priming, and a marginally
significant interaction between phonotactic probability and group. The TD children
showed a priming effect on low phonotactic probability items only. The SLI children
did not show a priming effect in general. These findings underline that NWR is
affected by lexical influences, but the group differences are better explained by a
limited phonological short-term capacity of the SLI children. The SLI children
furthermore demonstrate more difficulties with novel word learning. The results of our
experiments will be discussed with respect to the NWR deficit and word learning in
SLI.
68
Functional categories in learner languages
Peter Jordens (VU University Amsterdam)
Language acquisition is a developmental process which occurs in stage-wise
progression. At the initial stage both in first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition
learners make use of a relatively simple language system to communicate. Later on,
as the result of a process of language development interacting with target
language input, this basic learner variety will normally be given up in favour of a
more complex version.
I will argue that both in child L1 and in adult L2 Dutch, learner varieties develop from
a lexical system to a functional system. At the lexical stage, functional categories
are absent. Hence, functional properties of the linguistic system such as auxiliaries,
inflection, word order variation and the determiner system are not part of the
grammatical system of learners at the relevant stage, at least not productively.
My claim is that at the initial stage of language acquisition, utterance structure is
based on linguistic knowledge of predicate-argument structure as it is stored in the
mental lexicon. At the relevant stage, this lexical knowledge is simultaneously used
for the purpose of information structuring. However, this is unlike the target
language. In the target language, information structure is expressed by means of
functional elements. Therefore, I will argue that it is the principles of information
structure that are the driving force causing learners to develop their lexical variety at
the initial stages of language acquisition into the functional variety of a fully-fledged
target system.
The data of the present study originate from investigations on the acquisition of
Dutch by children learning this language as their native language and adults
learning it in an untutored second language learning environment. Both the L1 and
L2 data come from longitudinal studies of utterances produced spontaneously. At
the lexical stage, topicalisation cannot be expressed with the functional means of
the target system. However, it can be expressed with the structure of an agentive
lexical projection as in disse hoeniet meeneme (this have-to-not withtake) or die
magwel kopen (that may-indeed buy). Reanalysis of the initial position as a topic
position can be accounted for in terms of a functional projection (FP). FP serves as
the structural prerequisite for the expression of the functional properties of
information structure of the target language. Hence, topicalisation is the driving
force in the development of learner languages from a lexical to a functional system.
69
Understanding Discriminative Perception of English Consonant
Minimal Pairs from the Perspective of Two Levels of Processing:
Sound and Meaning
Hirokatsu Kawashima (Nagasaki University of Foreign Languages)
Recent years have seen an increasing number of studies dealing with ESL/EFL
listening and steady developments in both theory and practice (e.g., Rost 2002). It
must be noted, however, that much of the nature of learning and teaching of
listening remains unclear and unexplored. Buck (2001: P.51) points out that there
have been no “complete unified descriptions” of the sub-skills of listening. Phoneme
identification is claimed to be one important sub-skill of listening in the literature
(such as Flowerdew & Miller 2005), for example, but systematic understanding of its
nature has not yet been obtained.
An investigation was conducted in order to make a contribution to this research
situation, focusing upon discriminative perception of English consonant minimal
pairs. Japanese learners of English (non-English major university students, aged 18-19,
N=42) participated in this investigation, in which they were asked to discriminate 7
types of English consonant minimal pairs phonetically (e.g., light vs. right, N=42) and
to judge if English sentences, which include such pairs (N=42), are semantically
correct (e.g., I sink the story is interesting vs. I think the story is interesting, N=42). Their
discriminative performances at these two processing levels and general listening
proficiency were measured, and relationships among sound-based and meaningbased
discriminative
performances
and
general
listening proficiency
were
examined employing simple and multiple regression analyses.
The analysis of the collected data shows, for example, 1) that relationships between
discriminative performances at semantic and phonetic levels should be viewed as
more non-linear rather than linear, 2) that such relationships become stronger as
general listening proficiency increases, and 3) meaning-based discriminative
performance is more related to general listening proficiency than sound-based
discriminative performance. These kinds of relationships are deemed to represent an
important aspect of the nature of discriminative perception of English consonant
minimal pairs. The presenter, based upon multiple analyses of the data, will discuss
such findings in terms of the sub-skills of listening.
References
•
70
Buck, G. (2001) Assessing Listening. Cambridge University Press
•
Flowerdew, J. & L. Miller (2005) Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice.
Cambridge University Press
•
Rost, M. (2002) Teaching and Researching Listening. Longman
Modeling Ordering Effect in Binary Judgment Experiment
Yu-guang Ko (National Chung Cheng University)
Ordering has been found to be influential on acceptability of sentences. For
example, Luka and Barslou (2005) reported a structural priming effect caused by
prior presentation of sentences with identical structure in a series of acceptability
judgment experiments.
To factor out the effect of ordering, Myers (2007) and Ko (2007) analyzed order of
sentence presented in a experimental session as a continuous and linear factor. A
significant increase in acceptability for grammatical sentences was found in Ko
(2007), replicating the result of Luka and Barsalou (2005). However, contrary to what
Luka and Barsalou (2005) argue, the significant ordering effect can also be caused
by a “practice effect”, namely, an effect caused by subjects’ increasing familiarity
with the experimental paradigm.
Although the structural priming effect and the “practice effect” are both reflected
on ordering of presentation, they can be torn up by a statistical technique discussed
in Baayen (2008) called “Break-point analysis”. The break-point analysis looks for a
specific point in a continuous scale and computes the effects of factors to data
before and after this point separately. To demonstrate its usefulness, the present
study conducted a binary judgment experiment and applied the technique above
to analyze it to detect possible discontinuity caused by practice and structural
identity and measures the respective effect size of them separately. The result
showed that a break-point came in at the early stage of the experimental session,
while significant ordering effects were found in two groups of data points.
Based on the result, it can be argued that the subjects became familiar with the
experimental paradigm of binary judgment with ease, since not many trials were
used for practice. The ordering effect was still present after that, arguably to be
caused by repeated exposure to sentences with identical structure.
71
References
•
Baayen, R. H. 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
•
Ko, Y.-G., 2007. Grammaticality and Parsability in Mandarin Syntactic Judgment
Experiments. Master's thesis, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan.
•
Luka, B & Barsalou, L. W. 2005. Structural facilitation: Mere exposure effects for
grammatical acceptability as evidence for syntactic priming in comprehension. Journal
of Memory and Language, 52, 436-459.
•
Myers, J. 2009. The design and analysis of small-scale syntactic judgment experiments.
Lingua, 119,425-444.
A chart generator for the Dutch Alpino Grammar
Daniël de Kok and Gertjan van Noord (University of Groningen)
Natural language generation is a useful technique for grammar verification,
machine translation, sentence compression, sentence fusion, and other tasks. In this
talk we will introduce a chart generator for the wide-coverage Alpino grammar for
Dutch.
Chart generation has been applied succesfully to natural language generation for
other grammars, such as the English Resource Grammar (Caroll and Oepen, 2005).
But characteristics of the Alpino grammar requires a different methodology than
previously described in literature. For instance, Alpino represents the analysis of a
sentence as a dependency tree rather than using a formalism such as Minimal
Recursion Semantics. Additionally, the Alpino grammar builds dependency
structures in a manner where we can not always check immediately whether the
required dependency relations are present.
We will report on the abstract dependency trees used as input for our generator,
which are underspecified variants of CGN dependency trees. We will also discuss
the bottom-up generation algorithm, and how we incoorporate top-down
knowledge such as expected dependency relations to guide the generation
process. Finally, we will report on our first experiences with generation from abstract
dependency trees derived from the Alpino test suite.
72
Need I say more? On factors causing referential overspecification
Ruud Koolen and Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg University)
Referring expressions (e.g. ‘the green chair’) are ubiquitous in human speech
production. It is often assumed that speakers include just enough information in their
references for the addressee to single out who or what the speaker is referring to
(‘the target’). However, recent research (e.g. Engelhardt et al. 2006) has revealed
that speakers often overspecify their references and include more information than
is strictly speaking necessary for identification. Yet, when, why and how speakers
overspecify is still largely unknown.
We hypothesize that at least three factors may cause speakers to overspecify: the
complexity of the domain, the complexity of the target object(s), and the
communicative setting. In order to investigate to what extent these factors influence
the information load of referring expressions, the D-TUNA corpus was collected: a
corpus of 2400 Dutch referring expressions. Data was collected in a large elicitation
experiment, in which participants were presented trials consisting of pictures in two
possible domains: the furniture domain and the more complex people domain.
Complexity of the trials was manipulated by including both singular and plural trials.
For singular trials, participants were asked to describe one target object in such a
way that it could be distinguished from six distractor objects; for plural trials,
participants were asked to describe two target objects. Sixty participants were
randomly assigned to three conditions, which represented three communicative
settings: text, speech and face-to-face. Participants in the text condition typed their
identifying descriptions, while participants in the speech condition and the face-toface condition were asked to speak out their descriptions to a confederate. Only in
the face-to-face condition, the participants could see the confederate. Each
identifying description was annotated semantically in XML: it was provided with
information regarding its own properties and the properties of the distractor objects.
Results show effects on overspecification for all three factors mentioned. Referring
expressions are more frequently overspecified in the complex people domain. The
same goes for expressions describing complex plural trials, for which descriptions are
more frequently overspecified than for singular trials. Written and spoken referring
expressions appear not to differ in semantic content, but in number of words:
speakers need more words to provide the same information as people who type
their expressions. Current analyses focus on how speakers overspecify exactly, and
these results will be presented at TABU as well.
73
Reference
•
Engelhardt, P., Bailey, K. and Ferreira, F. (2006). Do speakers and listeners observe the
Gricean Maxim of Quantity? Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 554-573
Training a statistical parser for parsing French for use in syntaxbased machine translation
Gideon Kotzé (University of Groningen)
In this presentation, we investigate various techniques on successfully training a
statistical parser using the MaltParser system on a French treebank. First, we give an
overview of the data available to us, mentioning statistics and some preprocessing
necessary for training the parser. Next, we represent the most optimal settings to
date, discussing all significant improvements and the reasons for them. We also
discuss the tools we used to optimise training, which include a separate part-ofspeech tagger and lemmatiser, and give an overview of the important linguistic
features needed for training. The work was done in the context of the STEVIN project
Parse and Corpus Based Machine Translation (PaCoMT), in which we aim to
integrate efficient parsers for French, English and Dutch into the MT engine.
Morphology = Syntax = Morphology
Joost Kremers (University of Frankfurt)
The difference between morphology and syntax is theoretically expressed as a
distinction between the types of structures they involve: morphology deals with Xstructures, syntax with XP-structures. In bare phrase structure, however, projection
levels are derivative, which means that it is not possible to distinguish between the
two. When we merge 'boil' and 'water', the initial merge does not tell us whether the
derivation will eventually yield 'to boil water' or 'water boiler'.
The fact that in the former case, [boil water] is embedded under functional material
and in the latter case under the nominaliser '-er' won't help us, either. Agglutinative
and polysynthetic languages such as Turkish, Nahuatl or Inuktitut suggest that
"morphological" structures may include functional material as well.
I propose that the distinction between "syntax" and "morphology" is actually an
optical (or rather acoustic) illusion. There is only one structure-building mechanism,
74
let's call it Syntax. This module manipulates heads, which are bundles of morphosyntactic features, WITHOUT the phonological material associated with those heads
(cf. Beard's 1988 'Separation Hypothesis' or Late Insertion in DM).
The phonological material is dealt with in the phonological component. Lexical
mapping rules associate syntactic structures (not just heads but also larger structures,
e.g. idioms) with phonological material (cf. Jackendoff 1997, 2002, Ackema &
Neeleman 2004). Some syntactic structures are associated with segmental material
or syllabic structures (cf. prosodic morphology, McCarthy & Prince 1996), while other
syntactic structures are mapped onto phonological (prosodic) structures in terms of
prosodic words and phonological phrases. The former we customarily call
"morphology", the latter "syntax".
This model allows a much more straightforward description of certain types of
syntax-morphology interaction. Gerund-like deverbal nouns, for example, have
syntactic properties, e.g. in that they can assign accusative case, but the noun itself
appears a product of morphology. In the current model, we can simply say that the
nominaliser attaches to vP (much in the spirit of Abney 1987). Crucially, the process
that combines the phonological material associated with the two heads takes
place in phonology, not in syntax. This is especially helpful in the case of Arabic,
where something like head movement of V or lowering of the nominaliser is
undesirable and where the nominalising morphology is prosodic, not affixal.
Another example of interaction are so-called facial adverbs in sign languages.
These are adverbs expressed on the face, simultaneously with the verb they modify.
As adverbs, they seem to be syntactic, but their form suggests they are
morphological. The current model resolves this conflicting status.
Recalling extended metaphors in news discourse
Tina Krennmayr (VU University Amsterdam)
Journalists may play with words; they may use metaphors as a rhetorical device and
employ them to persuade readers or to explain an abstract topic to a wider
audience. Metaphors, in particular extended metaphors, help create a coherent
text structure.
75
Manual metaphor annotation of 200,000 words from the registers fiction,
conversation, academic texts and news of the BNC-Baby corpus has shown that,
especially compared to literary texts and spoken language, journalistic writing is rich
in metaphorical expressions (Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayr & Pasma, in
preparation). However, merely because a word or phrase counts as a metaphor on
a symbolic level, we cannot automatically conclude that readers activate
underlying conceptual structures every time they come across metaphorical
expressions in news texts.
A number of reaction times studies have tested whether people use conceptual
mappings when processing metaphorical language (e.g. Nayak & Gibbs 1990;
Glucksberg, Brown & McGlone 1993; Allbritton, McKoon & Gerrig 1995; Keysar, Shen,
Glucksberg & Horton 2000; Thibodeau & Durgin 2008). The findings are inconsistent.
Some present evidence that even conventional metaphorical expressions (e.g.
Thibodeau & Durgin 2008) and idiomatic expressions (e.g. Nayak & Gibbs 1990)
activate mappings while others claim that people rely on conceptual metaphors for
novel expressions only (e.g. Keysar, Shen, Glucksberg, Horton 2000).
Adding an alternative perspective, I present an off-line study – a cued delayed
recall task – to examine weather readers may rely on metaphoric schemas when
processing extended metaphor, drawing on research by Bower, Black & Turner
(1979) on script recall. The test passages resemble authentic news reports. Using a
between-subject
design,
I
manipulate
the
degree
of
conventionality
of
metaphorical expressions as well as signaling of an extended mapping (auto
racing). For instance, in the conventional condition, a subject would read “(…)
China and India pulled ahead economically (…)” while subjects in the novel
condition would read “(…) China and India turbocharged ahead economically
(…)”. In the condition with signal, the source domain is made explicit by a simile
(“Economic development is (…) like auto racing”) while subjects in the no-signal
condition do not receive such a cue. We assume that in a two-day delay the text
base will have decayed and the subjects need to rely on the situation model (van
Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) when recalling the text. The recall results will allow tentative
conclusions about the use of metaphorical schemas in language comprehension.
References
•
Allbritton, D. W., McKoon, G. & Gerrig, R.J. (1995). Metaphor-Based Schemas and Text
Representations: Making Connections Through Conceptual Metaphors. Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 21 (3), 612 – 625
76
•
Bower, G. H., Black, John B. & Turner, T. J. (1979). Scripts in Memory for Text. Cognitive
Psychology, 11, 177-220.
•
Gerard J. Steen, Lettie Dorst, Berenike Herrmann, Anna Kaal, Tina Krennmayr, Tryntje
Pasma (in preparation). Linguistic metaphor identification in natural discourse: A
casebook. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
•
Glucksberg, S., Brown, M. & McGlone, M.S. (1993). Conceptual metaphors are not
automatically accessed during idiom comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 21, 711-715.
•
Keysar, B. Shen, Y., Glucksberg, S. & Horton, W.S. (2000). Conventional Language: How
Metaphorical Is It? Journal of Memory and Language 43, 576-593.
•
Nayak, N.P. & Gibbs, R.W. (1990). Conceptual knowledge in the interpretation of idioms.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119, 315-330.
•
Thibodeau, P. & Durgin, F. H. (2008). Productive figurative communication: Conventional
metaphors facilitate the comprehension of related novel metaphors. Journal of Memory
and Language, 58, 521-540.
•
Van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of discourse comprehension. New York:
Academic Press.
Linear and Hypertext Discourse Structure: Printed and Online
Support of Newspapers
Anne Küppers (Université Catholique de Louvain)
The talk reports on ongoing work dealing with the linguistic impact of putting the
traditional newspaper news online. In this framework we investigate the differences
in structuring printed and online newspapers with respect to their linear and
hypertextual organization of information. The aim is to answer the question to what
extent the paper version differs from the Internet version of the same newspapers
regarding the way in which information is displayed.
Whereas the structure of printed media like newspapers, scientific journal articles or
books is fixed historically and refers to given models (titles, table of contents,
summaries, text structure etc.), hypertext is not (yet) based on such well established,
historically proven organization patterns (Fastrez & Peeters, 2001, 167).
Our endeavour will be a methodological one. We present a grid that was built up in
order to analyse the linguistic structure of printed and online “frontpage” news. In
line with Jucker (2003, 133), we assume that the hypertextual organization of
information in online newspapers is an effect of the overall increase of information
77
which requires a modularization of this information. We will show that differences can
be observed on the macro-level of the document structure as well as on its microlevel or hyperstructure in the sense of Lugrin (2001). Typical characteristics of the
macro-level include the section disposition, the peritext, the presence and placing
of titling and images etc., while the micro-level is analysed in terms of features like
the function of titling and images, the text types introduced, or the discourse
structuring by the peritext and intratextual referencing. Some of these features play
a role on both levels of analysis thus requiring a holistic method linking up the two
structural levels.
On the basis of an empirical investigation of a corpus of printed and online versions
of Belgian, French-speaking newspapers, we will show how the structures of linear
and hypertext information organization differ between the two media.
References
•
Fastrez, P. & H. Peeters (2001): Proposition d’une critériologie dans le choix des modes de
structuration des hypermédias. In: Recherches en Communication, 16.
•
Jucker, A. (2003): Mass media communication at the beginning of the twenty-first
century: Dimensions of change. In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 4 (1). 129-148.
•
Lugrin, G. (2001): Le mélange des genres dans l’hyperstructure. In: Semen, 13.
(http://semen.revues.org/document2645.html).
The effect of teacher elicitation techniques during reading aloud
sessions
Aletta Kwant, Jan Berenst and Kees de Glopper (University of Groningen)
Language learning is a major goal in educational settings for young children. In
these settings reading aloud sessions play an important role. These sessions offer rich
opportunities for language learning because the picture books that are used
contain a wider vocabulary than occurs in ordinary conversations. Picture books are
therefore part and parcel of intervention programs for early childhood education.
Picture books also have rich contents for the social and emotional developmental.
However, a specific support of picture books for the language development in the
social and emotional domain is no common practice.
To be effective in supporting the social and emotional development of young
children the social and emotional content and the corresponding language of the
78
picture books must be within the reach of children of this age. This is not a matter of
course because most children in preschool and kindergarten can not read
themselves and need a mediator to become familiar with the content and
language of a picture book. In an educational setting it usually will be the teacher
who mediates between the children and the book(s).
During the reading aloud sessions in the intervention part of the research project
described here, teachers have ‘keys’ at their disposal. These keys contain
instructions for the reading aloud session. The keys specify elicitation techniques that
aim at stimulating children to think about and reflect on the books in a more
conscious way and providing children with opportunity in participating in the
reading aloud sessions in an active and attuned way.
This presentation addresses the effects of the keys and gives an answer to the
following question: What are the effects of different kind of teacher elicitation
techniques on the contributions of children during a picture book reading aloud
session?
We will discuss the effects of different types of teacher elicitations on the
contributions of the children during reading aloud sessions. It will be shown that
delayed reactions by the teacher, longer pauses and non/verbal communication
positively affect the contributions of the children. Due to the keys, the role of the
teacher changes from instructor to conversational partner. Especially a wondering
and unsure attitude of the teacher with respect to social and emotional book
events elicits a greater amount of contributions of the children and more attuned
reactions. Video fragments will illustrate our presentation.
A Dialectometric Study of Swedish Vowels
Therese Leinonen (University of Groningen)
This paper offers a synchronic study of Swedish dialects based on acoustic analysis
of vowel pronunciation. Among Swedish dialects vowels differ a lot in contrast to
consonants, and the variation in vowel pronunciation is important for characterizing
dialectal identity (Bruce, Engstrand and Eriksson 1998). The data for the present study
come from the project Swedia2000 (http://swedia.ling.gu.se/) where vowels were
elicited with mono- and bisyllabic words with vowels in a coronal context. 105 sites in
Sweden and Swedish-language areas in Finland are included and each site is
79
represented by 12 speakers (3 elderly women, 3 elderly men, 3 young men and 3
young women).
The vowel pronunciations are analyzed acoustically by means of principal
component analysis of Bark filtered spectra, a method which shows high correlation
with formant measurements but can be automated more reliably to a higher extent
(Jacobi 2009).
Comparison of the older and the younger speaker group shows a significant
ongoing dialect levelling. In peripheral parts of the language area where the older
speakers speak very divergent dialects the younger speakers show strong
convergence to standard Swedish. In some urban areas, on the other hand, the
younger speakers seem to develop varieties that diverge from the standard
language.
Distances between varieties are analyzed by means of cluster analysis and
multidimensional scaling (Heeringa 2004). Results are visualized on choropleth maps.
References
•
Bruce, G., Engstrand, O. and Eriksson, A. (1998), De svenska dialekternas fonetik och
fonologi år 2000 (Swedia 2000) en projektbeskrivning, Folkmålsstudier 39, 33–54.
•
Heeringa, W. (2004), Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences using Levenshtein
•
Jacobi I. (2009), On Variation and Change in Diphthongs and Long Vowels of Spoken
Distance, PhD thesis, University of Groningen.
Dutch, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.
Dorsal Fricatives in German: Derivation and Representation
Kathrin Linke (Leiden University)
We present the well-known case of ich-laut vs. ach-laut alternation in German, and
show that its interaction with related phonological processes leads to opacity in
such a way that no derivational version of OT developed so far can account for it.
We propose a representational solution, to which we provide additional evidence
from Greek.
80
1. The issue. The German consonantal phoneme inventory provides a voiceless
dorsal fricative with a velar and a palatal allophonic variant as illustrated in Buch
[buːx] `book' and Bücher [by:ç ɐ] `books'.
The dorsal fricative surfaces as the velar variant [x] following non-front vowels and as
the palatal variant [ç] after front vowels and, additionally, sonorant coronal
consonants, which
suggests that they are
regressively assimilated to the
tautomorphemically preceding front or non-front segment.
2. Interacting Processes Leading to Opacity. A second allophonic process in
German is ʀ-vocalisation, in which /ʀ/ is replaced by [ɐ] in syllable codas (Itô &
Mester 2001), resulting in incidences in which the palatal fricative opaquely surfaces
after 'back' segments.
Furthermore, DFA also interacts with the phonological processes of g-spirantisation
and coda devoicing, which account for the differences in word pairs such as König
[køːnɪç] 'king' / Könige [køːnɪgə] 'kings'. In Standard German, underlying /g/ in syllable
codas with nucleus /ɪ/ are spirantised, opaquely surfacing as the palatal fricative [ç]
(Hall 1989, Itô & Mester 2001).
3. Account Using Derivational Versions of OT. Firstly, we will discuss OT based
approaches to DFA in German and their accounts for the opaque results of the
interacting processes mentioned above. It will be shown that e.g. the Richness-ofthe-Base principle causes problems that cannot be overcome even by using
Candidate Chain Theory (McCarthy 2006), an approach for treating opacity in OT
that adopts a maximal degree of derivationalism.
4. Account Incorporating Representations in OT. Evidence from Modern Greek, in
which a similar (but reversed) dorsal fricative assimilation phenomenon can be
witnessed, suggests that this assimilation process is not actively enforced by
constraints but instead heavily relies on the feature geometric structure of the dorsal
fricative and its preceding and/or succeeding elements and processes such as
feature economy. Therefore, secondly, an alternative analysis of DFA (and related
processes) in German will be introduced that incorporates representations in the OT
framework. We argue that dorsal fricatives lack a vocalic place specification and
need to borrow this specification from their neighboring segments.
81
Modeling early phonological development in a foreign language
Wander Lowie (University of Groningen)
In this paper I will report on a longitudinal study investigating several aspects of early
phonological development in L2. Where previous studies into L2 phonology have
mainly concentrated on phonological variables in isolation and cross-sectionally, the
current study focuses on the development of pronunciation from a dynamic point of
view. To this end, the study uses variability analyses (cf. Verspoor, Lowie, & van Dijk
2008) to investigate a range of phonetic correlates, followed by simulations to test
hypotheses derived from the data. This paper reports on a longitudinal analysis of
the L2 development of a 7-9 year old Dutch learner of English. The analyses
concentrate on the Voice Onset Time and the /ε/ - /æ/ vowel contrast over a
period of two years. The data reveal that the developmental patterns of early L2
learners show a high degree of variability and an interesting interaction between the
phonetic correlates investigated and the speaking situation.
The discourse marker like in clause-final position
Kathrin Luckmann (University of Duisburg-Essen)
The rapid spread of discourse like in urban centres and predominant use by young
people has led it to be stylistically stigmatized, particularly the quotative be like,
which has recently been subject to numerous investigations. Despite having been
reduced to a filler or hesitation marker, in more recent studies, its function is usually
explained primarily in terms of marking focus. In my presentation I address the topic
from a pragmatic variationalist perspective: how do use and function of the
pragmatic marker like differ in the north of England and the south of Ireland? Unlike
most unconventional forms of usage of like in spoken discourse, like in clause-final
position is, surprisingly, not a recent development. It forms part of two sets of regional
varieties of English, located in the north of England and the southwest of Ireland. In
spite of being a dialectal feature, this specific discourse marker, however, is not used
predominantly among older dialect speakers, but is just as much a characteristic of
the language of younger people from these regions, as well as used extensively in
the modern-day urban areas Newcastle and Cork.
In my corpus-based study, I show first, what discourse marking functions clause-final
like has in spoken discourse, completing the network of meanings already
assembled in previous research on the discourse marker like in other positions, and
82
second, analyse its distribution according to the sociolinguistic variables of age,
gender and level of education. My findings will then be contrasted with those for
clause-initial and internal position.
An Extended Method for Iterative Error Mining in Parsing Results
Jianqiang Ma, Daniël de Kok and Gertjan van Noord
(University of Groningen)
Error mining is a technique that detects incorrect or incomplete linguistic descriptions
that cause incomplete parsing of sentences in natural language parsing systems.
Van Noord (2004) proposed a method for finding suspicious n-grams of arbitrary
length. Sagot and de la Clergerie (2006) described an extension that uses an
iterative process to gradually shift blame to specific unigrams or bigrams, rather than
blaming each form occurring in an unparsable sentence. De Kok and Van Noord
(2009) generalized the method beyond the scope of unigram/bigram by producing
n-grams that are as long as necessary to identify problematic forms, but not longer.
All the above approaches define errors as n-grams of specific words. This fails to
account for patterns that include more abstract features such as part of speech
tags and lemmas. Besides n-grams of words, we introduce hybrid n-grams of words,
part of speech tags and lemmas in the iterative process, in the hope of discovering
interesting patterns. This presentation describes the new method and discusses the
results in comparison with previous approaches.
The Effect of Bilingual Immersion Programmes on Early Childhood
Identity
Beth Martin (University of New England / PHORMS Management AG)
Within the social sciences, in particular sociolinguistics, research involving bilingual
programmes for children such as immersion programmes or two-way bilingual
programmes, although abundant, has largely focused on the outcomes of such
programmes, i.e. the cognitive changes or academic achievements and levels of
language proficiency attained. There has been a paucity of studies investigating
what involvement in such programmes means to the participants or, in other words,
what the act of becoming bilingual has meant to the child learner and his or her
identity. This paper then presents the findings from research conducted on the
effect immersion situations have on the identity of children of primary school age.
83
Supporting a chaos theory perspective on identity, the study analyzed the way the
children experience their own linguistic identities by using language silhouettes and
questionnaires and then comparing results from normal state school systems, which
make no provision for mother tongues other than German, with the immersion
programme run by the PHORMS Schools in Berlin, Germany.
Two types of expletive negation
Alice Middag (Leiden University)
The term ‘expletive negation’ refers to a negative marker that occurs in a
construction but does not contribute a negative interpretation to it. In (1a), French
ne ‘not’ does not negate the sentence as it does in (1b) when combining with pas
‘not’.
(1) a. Je
I
crains que
Marie ne
vienne
fear
Mary not
comes
that
‘I’m afraid Mary will come’
(1) b. Je
I
crains que
Marie ne
vienne
pas
fear
Marie not
comes
not
that
‘I’m afraid Mary will not come’
In a language like Dutch, negation cannot be expletive in such constructions: in (2)
negation only has negative force.
(2)
Ik
ben
bang dat
Marie niet
komt
I
am
afraid that
Mary not
comes
‘I’m afraid Mary will not come’
This does not mean that Dutch niet is unable to express expletive negation – in the
rhetorical question (3) it does.
(3)
Hoe
vaak heb
ik
How
often have I
het
al
it
already
niet
gezegd
not
said
‘How many times didn’t I tell you!’
Interestingly, French ne ... pas also expresses expletive negation in this context:
84
(4)
Que
de
fois
How
of
times n:has-he
n’a-t-il pas
couru de
not
run
risques inutiles
of
risks
unnecessary
‘How many times didn’t he run unnecessary risks’
Basing myself on research in six languages, I advance two hypotheses that account
for these observations:
- There are two types of expletive negation (contra Espinal (1997) and Brown (1999))
- The type illustrated in (3)/(4) occurs in all languages; that in (1a) does not
Several arguments support this analysis. First, there is a semantic difference between
the two types of expletive negation: the first (1a) expresses negative hope (cf. Muller
(1991) and Rooryck (to appear)), whereas the second (3)/(4) expresses the
affirmation (not the negation!) of the sentence. Second, type one only occurs in
subordinate clauses, whereas type two occurs in main and subordinate clauses.
Finally, a correlation between the first type of expletive negation and Negative
Concord (two instances of negation expressing a single negation together) shows
that there are two types of expletive negation that behave differently.
References
• Brown, S. 1999. The syntax of negation in Russian. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
• Espinal, M.T.1997. Non-negative negation and wh-exclamatives. Negation and polariy.
Forget et al. (eds) Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
• Muller, C. 1991. La négation en français. Geneva: Droz.
• Rooryck, J. To appear. On the scalar nature of syntactic negation in French.
An Evaluation of Phrase-based SMT and Finite State Transducer
models for Translating Transliterations
Peter Nabende and Jörg Tiedemann (University of Groningen)
Transliteration is used to obtain phonetic equivalents in a target language for a
given source language word. However, transliteration often results in different
spellings in target languages using the same writing system. A problem that has not
been addressed in the literature at least to our knowledge is that of automatically
translating transliterations. Translating new entity names is important for improving
performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Machine
Translation (MT) and Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). We attempt to
85
address the problem of translating entity names whose origin is in a language using
a different writing system. We train and evaluate various Weighted Finite State
Transducers (WFSTs) and state of the art Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation
(PSMT) models for a characterbased translation of the transliterated entity names. In
particular, we evaluate the WFST and PSMT models on Russian person names
between Dutch and English, and between English and French. From our
experiments, PSMT models perform best with consistent improvements compared to
a baseline method of copying strings.
Vowel reduction in Dutch: an alternative perspective
Aleksei Nazarov (Leiden University)
The process of vowel reduction in Dutch optionally reduces full vowels in weak
prosodic positions to schwa. This (lexically governed) process is sensitive to
differences in vowel identity and prosodic positions, so that the are some possible
forms where not all unstressed vowels are reduced. Reduction correlates with stylistic
factors: the more reduction, the more informal the style.
(1) fònoloɣí ~ fònəloɣí ~ fònələɣí (but *fònoləɣí) - ‘phonology’
The standard interpretation of these data is that reduced and unreduced forms all
have the same metrical structure, and vowel reduction is a purely segmental
process. Kager (1989) even calls vowel reduction a ‘window into (Dutch) metrical
structure’. In the current proposal, however, this assumption is challenged. A model
is presented where reduced and unreduced forms differ in their metrical structure,
and the segmental difference between full vowels and schwa is a consequence of
the metrical differences. For this purpose, a slightly modified version of the prosodic
hierarchy is presented, where the level traditionally called the metrical foot is split
out into two levels: the level of the Superfoot, and the (lower) level of the Foot,
where only Superfeet project (primary or secondary) stress; a language-specific
assumption for Dutch is that the Foot may contain only one full vowel (this idea had
already been presented in Van der Hulst & Moortgat (1981)). This yield different
metrical structures for the different realisations in (1) (with Superfeet being indicated
by square brackets, and Feet by parentheses):
(2) [(fò)(no)(lo)][(ɣí...)] ~ [(fònə)(lo)][(ɣí...)] ~ [(fònələ)][(ɣí...)] ‘phonology’
86
An Optimality Theory account of the data will be presented, which models the
variation between reduced and unreduced forms by different rankings of
constraints concerning the metrical structure (according to a special model of
variation in OT). This model naturally predicts the facts about the stylistic value of
reduced and unreduced variants. A few advantages of the model presented here
are the following. Lexical exceptions to vowel reduction (i.e., words in which vowels
never reduce) can be represented using underlying prosodic material (Feet);
underlying Feet are already assumed for exceptional stress in Dutch in many
approaches - thus, no generic diacritical marks are needed which prevent a word
from being reduced. Also, the assumption that Feet are domains with exactly one
full vowel allow for a simple account for form restrictions on so-called Germanic
stems in Dutch.
References
• Hulst, H. van der & M. Moortgat. 1981. Prosodische fonologie en de accentuatie van
Nederlandse woorden, of: Leeft het Nederlands op grote voet? Ms., U Leiden/U of
Connecticut.
• Kager, R.W.J. 1989. A Metrical Theory of Stress and Destressing in English and Dutch. Diss, U
Utrecht.
Phi-feature valuing in discourse ellipses
Mari Nygård (NTNU Trondheim)
Spoken Norwegian displays a high frequency of discourse ellipsis. In particular,
arguments in topicalized position are vulnerable to omission:
1.
2.
Ø tjente
rått
Ø earned
plenty on
Har
du
Have you
gjort
på
telefonhealing.
telephone healing.
leksene dine?
done homework?
Ø gjorde jeg i går.
Ø did I yesterday.
The issue to be addressed in this talk is whether it is plausible to assume a full
sentence structure for these cases, and in particular, what this structure contains.
More specifically, I discuss the presence of phi-features. I suggest a separationist
analysis where grammatical features are in principle torn apart from lexical
concepts (Harley & Noyer 1999, among others). Hence, phi-features are assumed to
87
be present in syntactic nodes independently of lexical insertion. Support for this view
comes from examples where anaphors (4), verbs (5) and predicatives (6) show
agreement with null subjects:
3.
4.
Ø har valgt
å
ikke
trene
meg
Ø have chosen to
not
exercise myself
i
hjel.
to
death.
Ø suis tellement énervée que
Ø me suis assise
Ø am so
Ø me am seated on
nervous
that
sur la télécommande.
remote control.
(Haegeman & Ihsane 2001)
5.
Ø Ø slitne
etter ferien.
Ø Ø tired (pl) after the holiday.
Another group of examples which point in the same direction are sentences
displaying so called semantic agreement (6, 7), where there is an apparent
mismatch between the number features of the subject and those of the verb (see
also Den Dikken 2001, Sauerland & Elbourne 2002, Josefsson 2006):
6.
Peter and Mary travel in Royal circles.
7.
Politiet er snille.
The police (sg) are nice (pl).
It appears that in these sentences, the agreement process is sensitive to semantic
information about plurality or collectivity of the subject DP. Hence, both these
groups of data demonstrate a separation between visible morphology on lexical
items on the one hand, and abstract grammatical features on the other. I therefore
propose a unified analysis for the two groups, where undefined phi-feature matrixes
are linked to syntactic positions. These matrixes are valued depending on what
lexical items are inserted, or in certain cases depending on how these items are
semantically conceived of. For the discourse ellipses, this entails that phi-features are
present independently of lexical insertion, and that they are valued from information
from the conceptual-intentional interface.
References
• Chomsky, Noam (2001) “Derivation by phase,” in M. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A Life in
Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 89-155.
88
• Den Dikken, Marcel (2001) ““Pluringulars”, pronouns and quirky agreement” in The
Linguistic Review 18, 19-41.
• Haegeman, Liliane and Tabea Ihsane (2001) “Adult Null Subjects in the non-pro-drop
Languages: Two Diary Dialects”, in Language Acquisition, 9(4), 329-346.
• Harley Heidi and Rolf Noyer (1999) “Distributed Morphology” in GLOT International Volume
4 Issue 4.
• Hornstein, Norbert, Jairo Nunes and Kleanthes K. Grohmann (2005) Understanding
Minimalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Josefsson, Gunlög (2006) “Semantic and grammatical genders in Swedich – independent
but interacting dimensions” in Lingua 116, 1346-1368.
• McShane, Marjorie J. (2005) A Theory of Ellipsis, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sauerland, Uli and Paul Elbourne (2002) “Total Reconstruction, PF Movement, and
Derivational Order” in Linguistic Inquiry, Volume 33, Number 2, Spring 2002: 283-319.
An Evaluation of TermPedia on Data from EMEA Reports and the
Merck Manuals
Proscovia Olango and Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen)
TermPedia is a supervised document enrichment tool which is designed to link a
technical term to an encyclopedia entry, while taking into account the meaning of
that term in context. TermPedia was trained on medical English data from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a free open content online encyclopedia created through collective
effort of a community of voluntary contributors. In an effort to evaluate the
performance of TermPedia, data from European Medicines Evaluation Agencies
(EMEA) reports and the Merck manuals online library were used.
If a technical term occurs in a document without any definition or explanation, it
may hinder the understanding of that document by users who are not experts in the
knowledge domain that the document discusses. Even if a term is defined in a
document, the definition may contain other technical terms that require
explanation. Hopefully by linking terms to encyclopedias, not only definitions, but
also explanations of the terms can be provided and this shall provide sufficient
information
for
document
understanding.
Furthermore,
by
integrating
this
information as hypertext links in the text, term definitions and explanations are
brought just a "click" away. Linking terms to an external resource like an
encyclopedia should automatically take into account the fact that terms can be
89
single words as well as phrases, that terms in a text may differ in spelling from entries
in an encyclopedia, and that terms may be ambiguous.
We collected all internal links from Wikipedia; this is to say, links from one Wikipedia
page to another Wikipedia page. These links tell us which words and phrases have
been used to point to specific Wikipedia pages. This information has been used to
train a system for automatic term recognition. Term sense disambiguation is
performed by either selecting the most frequent target page for a term, or by using
contextual information.
TermPedia was tested on data from two medical sources in order to evaluate the
performance of the system on data from outside Wikipedia. We evaluated the
performance of the term recognition and term disambiguation processes. Results will
be delivered in the presentation.
Some remarks on the aspectual properties of complex predicates
with light verbs and deverbal nouns
Fátima Oliveira, Fátima Silva, Purificação Silvan, Luis Filipe Cunha and
Idalina Ferreira (Universidade do Porto)
The main goal of this paper is to describe some semantic properties of the light verbs
fazer (‘make’), dar (‘give’) and ter (‘have’) occurring with deverbal nouns in
European Portuguese. In order to do so, we will take into account the interaction
between the light verbs, the aspectual classes of the verbs from which the nouns are
derived and the final interpretation of these complex predicates.
In this type of structures, the light verb ter (‘have’) differs from the other two because
it shows more flexibility in the combination with nominalisations derived from all
aspectual classes. Nonetheless, the complex predicate in which this light verb
participates must always be followed by modification. Furthermore, they often
convey two different final interpretations (for instance, resultative or eventive)
depending to a great extent on the selected adjectival modification, as illustrated
by (1) and (2).
(1)
O João teve um discurso emocionado.
João had an emotional speech.
90
(2)
O João teve um discurso útil.
João had a useful speech.
The light verb fazer (‘make’) is compatible with processes, culminated processes
and culminations (cf. Moens (1987)). Typically, it does not require modification.
Moreover, this light verb preserves or assigns a complex structure to the final
interpretation. This is the reason why fazer (‘make’) cannot occur with points.
In contrast to fazer (‘make’), dar (‘give’) is much more restrictive insofar as it can not
be combined with culminated processes, states, some processes and some
culminations. This light verb usually selects situations with a simpler phase-structure,
characteristic that justifies the co-occurrence with points.
The characteristics adduced above for fazer (‘make’) and dar (‘give’) are illustrated
by the following examples.
(3)
A Maria fez um salto.
Mary made a jump.
(4)
A Maria deu um salto.
Mary gave a jump.
In (3), since fazer (‘make’) assigns structure to the situation, “salto” (‘jump’) can only
be understood in the context of athletic competition. In its turn, dar (‘give’)
maintains the non-durative aspectual profile of the verb from which the deverbal
noun is derived.
The complex predicates under consideration seem to be a kind of a “jungle” (Butt
(2003)), because of the different possibilities of combinations with deverbal
nominalisations and because of the different variables that contribute to the final
reading (cf. Duarte et al. (2006)). Nevertheless, this paper puts forward some ideas
concerning the role played by aspect that can contribute to a better understanding
of this type of complex predicates.
References
• Butt, M. (2003) “The Light Verb Jungle”, in Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics, 9, p. 1-49.
91
• Duarte et al. (2006) “Verbos leves com nomes deverbais em português europeu”, in
Textos seleccionados do XXI Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística,
Lisboa: APL, p. 315 – 328.
• Moens, M. (1987) Tense, aspect and temporal reference, PhD dissertation, University of
Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science.
Remnant movement in a world without traces
Dennis Ott (Harvard University)
Remnant movement (RM) plays a central role in Germanic syntax (Müller 1998).
Abstractly, RM constructions have the following structure, with a trace occurring in
the fronted “incomplete” XP:
(1) [XP ... tY ... ] ... Y ... tXP ...
Beyond topicalization, RM has been employed in the analysis of a wide array of
phenomena, such as verb movement (e.g. Nilsen 2003, Koopman & Szabolcsi 2000),
and more generally as a means of accounting for word-order variation (Kayne 1994,
Mahajan 2003) and/or eliminating head movement (Platzack 2009) and covert
movement (Kayne 1998). Overall, while some of these analyses have been criticized
(Fanselow 2002, Zwart 2003), there is robust evidence for the existence of structures
like (1).
From a theoretical perspective, however, RM is notoriously problematic. Even when
familiar problems concerning unbound traces, “shape conservation”, and Müller’s
Generalization (Müller 1996) are set aside, it is unclear how a configuration like (1)
would even arise under the Copy Theory of Movement (Chomsky 1993 et passim),
according to which (1) is syntactically represented as in (1'):
(1') [XP WYZ ] ... Y ... [XP WYZ ] ...
It is not at all clear how to formulate RM once traces are abandoned as
representational devices, a corollary of the idea that movement reduces to Internal
Merge (Chomsky 2004): plainly, Internal Merge does not create “remnants”. Notice
also that it is unclear how identical copies in RM constructions are linearized in the
right way, given that there is no appropriate c-command relation (Gärtner 1998).
92
Proposals for deriving RM effects in a copy framework include Distributed Deletion
((2a); Fanselow & Cavar 2002) and movement of phase edges ((2b); Müller 2004,
Bentzen 2007):
(2) a. [XP WYZ[Top] ] ... [XP WY[Foc]Z ] ...
b. [XP W [X' X0YZ ] ... [XP W [X' X0YZ ] ... (X0 a phase head)
This talk will shed light on the question how RM can be formulated in a framework
based on Internal Merge rather than Move-α/trace theory. To this end, I will discuss
to what extent RM can be reformulated as sketched in (2) as well as arguments
purporting to show that both variable deletion and “true” RM are part of grammar
(Hinterhölzl 2002). While the main purpose of this talk will be to highlight precisely the
problems posed by RM, I will make some tentative proposals for rethinking the
relevant analyses while preserving restrictiveness in the theory of movement (Abels
2007).
Because she said so: On the multifunctionality of direct speech in
the jury room
Esther Pascual (University of Groningen)
This paper deals with the use of direct speech for purposes other than genuine
quotation. Indeed, the direct speech construction may be used to introduce actual
or so-called ‘constructed dialogue’ (Tannen 1986, 1989). I show that the direct
speech construction may serve to present not only types of thoughts, emotions and
attitudes, as assumed in the literature, but (at least) also inferences, decisions,
intentions, and actions. This is claimed to be mainly motivated by a (perhaps
universal) cultural model of language as informational (Sweetser 1987), establishing
a fundamental link between saying, believing, and truth; as well as the
understanding of talk-in-interaction as indicative of the utterer’s mental, emotional
and behavioral world (Cicourel 1973). Various instances of direct speech, such as
following verbs of saying or thinking, and in isolation, are examined. The construction
appears as a fuzzy category within a continuum of various types of demonstrations
(Clark & Gerrig 1990). Non-genuine quotations are regarded as involving what I
have called fictive interaction (Pascual, 2002, 2006). This constitutes a non-genuine
channel of communication, typically not involving a literal or loose quotation. Fictive
interaction –for instance through direct speech– may thus serve to set up
interactional as well as non-interactional realities, such as mental, emotional or
93
attitudinal states. Attested instances of intra-sentential fictive interaction: “the
attitude that, yes, I can do it”; “the attitude of yes, I can do it”; and “the ‘yes, I can
do it’ attitude”.
This study is based on the full transcript of a real-life jury deliberation in a deathpenalty murder trial recorded and broadcast by an American television station in
2004.
References
• Cicourel, A.V. 1973. Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Education.
• Clark, H.., Gerrig, R.J. 1990. Quotation as demonstration. Language 66(4):784–805.
• Pascual, E. 2002. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in
Criminal Courts. Utrecht: LOT.
• Pascual, E. 2006. Fictive interaction within the sentence. Cognitive Linguistics 17(2): 245267.
• Sweetser, E. 1987. The definition of lie. In: Holland, D. and N. Quinn (Eds.). Cultural Models
in Language and Thought. Chicago: UCP.
• Tannen, D. 1986. Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational
and literary narratives. In: Coulmas, F. (Ed.). Direct and Indirect Speech. Berlin: Mouton.
• Tannen, D. 1989. “Oh talking voice that is so sweet”: Constructing dialogue in
conversation. In: Talking Voices. Cambridge: CUP.
Conflicting cues in early word learning: 14- and 24-month-olds’
use of gaze and point information to map words to referents
Markus Paulus and Paula Fikkert (Radboud University Nijmegen)
In recent years the question of how infants map words to referents has received
considerable attention. It has, for example, been suggested that early in
development perceptual saliency and temporal contiguity play an important role in
word-referent mapping, whereas later in development social cues like eye gaze
gain more importance (Hollich et al., 2000; Moore et al., 1999). In teaching words,
however, caregivers use diverse social cues and the impact of the different cues on
infants’ word learning remains unclear. Furthermore, infants’ sensitivity for the various
social cues could also change during development. Whereas infants, for example,
follow gazes from 3 to 6 months on (Entremont et al., 1997), they start to reliably
94
follow pointing gestures around the beginning of the second year of life (Morissette
et al., 1995).
Using an eye-tracking procedure we investigated whether 14- and 24-month-old
infants rely more on an actor’s gaze or on an actor’s pointing behavior when
mapping a new word to a referent. To this end infants observed a model on an eyetracking screen gazing at an unknown object and pointing at another unknown
object while teaching the infants a new word (tan). This action was repeated ten
times. After the 6th and the 10th trial participants received two test trials. On the test
trials infants were repeatedly asked where the tan is. Based on findings that
language input influences looking behavior (cf. Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 2006) we
expected that infants would look longer to the referent of the newly acquired word.
Preliminary analyses reveal that the 14-month-old infants showed no systematic
looking behavior to one of the two objects. The 24-month-old children looked
significantly longer to the object the model has been pointing to when teaching the
new word.
The results suggest that the 14-mont-old infants do not show a preference for
pointing or gazing when learning new word-referent mappings. This could be due to
younger infants’ general preference for saliency cues and neglect of social cues in
early word learning (Hollich et al., 2000). The 24-month-olds, however, show a clear
preference for using the pointing cue. This could indicate that over the second year
of life infants pay more attention to culturally acquired cues like pointing (cf.
Wittgenstein, 1953) than to presumably from very early on working mechanisms like
automatic gaze following (see Entremont et al., 1997) when learning about the
referent of new words.
References
• D’Entremont, B., Hains, S.M.J., & Muir, D.W. (1997). A demonstration of gaze following in 3to 6-month-olds. Infant Behavior and Development, 20, 569-572.
• Hollich, G., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. (2000). Breaking the language barrier: An
emergentist coalition model of word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development, 65, 1-138.
• Moore, C., Angelopoulos, M., & Bennett, P. (1999). Word learning in the context of
referential and salience cues. Developmental Psychology, 35, 60-68.
95
• Morissette, P., Ricard, M., & Gouin-Decarie, T. (1995). Joint visual attention and pointing in
infancy: a longitudinal study of comprehension. British Journal of Developmental
Psychology, 13, 163-75.
• Tanenhaus, M.K., & Trueswell, J.C. (2006). Eye movements and spoken language
comprehension, in M. Traxler & M. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics:
second edition (pp. 863-900). Academic Press, Elesevier: New York.
• Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Embodied verbal learning? Evidence for motor simulation in verbal
knowledge acquisition
Markus Paulus, Oliver Lindemann and Harold Bekkering
(Radboud University Nijmegen)
Recent research suggests that language processing automatically activates
modality-specific subsystems and interferes with perceptual and motor processes
(see Fischer & Zwaan, 2008, for a review). Several theorists in the field of cognitive
psychology and psycholinguistics have thus proposed that our propositional
knowledge about, for example, actions and objects is bodily grounded in
sensorimotor experiences (Barsalou, 2008). Following these so-called embodied
cognition approaches, it is assumed that the processing of verbal descriptions about
functional objects consists in a covert simulation of associated motor programs and
a mental re-enactment of the objects’ functional use. Furthermore, neuroimaging
studies of language processing have shown a somatotopically organized, i.e.
effector-specific, pattern of activation in premotor cortex for words denoting actions
that are related to different body parts (e.g., Hauk, Johnsrunde, & Pulvermüller,
2004).
However, it is unclear whether the activation of motor representations is indeed
necessary for language comprehension or if the activation of the motor system is
merely a byproduct of an amodal information processing (Mahon & Caramazza,
2008).
If
perceptuomotor
simulations
are
indeed
necessary
for
language
comprehension and verbal learning we would expect that the verbal acquisition of
novel functional object knowledge should be affected by a concurrent motor task
but not by another attention-demanding task. Furthermore, when simulations are
effector-specific we would expect that verbal knowledge acquisition of handrelated objects (e.g., a tool that you use with your hands) should be selectively
impaired by a hand-related but not by a foot-related motor task.
96
We tested this prediction by varying the presence of motor interference in four
conditions (squeezing a ball with hands vs. squeezing a ball with the feet vs. oddball
detection task vs. no secondary task; each n=16) while participants verbally
acquired functional object knowledge. Subsequently we examined the effects on
an object detection task, which has been shown to be sensitive to functional object
knowledge (van Elk, van Schie, & Bekkering, 2008). Results revealed that learning of
functional object knowledge was only impaired when participants performed an
effector-specific motor task while training, i.e. squeezing the balls with their hands, as
expected by the embodied cognition hypothesis.
The present finding demonstrates the crucial role of the motor system in the verbal
acquisition of novel object knowledge and provides support for an embodied
account to language processing.
References
• Barsalou, L.W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617-645.
• Fischer, M.H., & Zwaan, R.A. (2008). Embodied language – A review of the role of the
motor system in language comprehension. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,
61, 825-850.
• Hauk, O., Johnsrunde, I., & Pulvermüller, F. (2004). Somatotopic representation of action
words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron, 41(2), 301-307.
• Mahon, B.Z., & Caramazza, A. (2008). A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis
and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content. Journal of Physiology – Paris, 102,
59-7
• Van Elk, M., van Schie, H.T., & Bekkering, H. (2008). Conceptual knowledge for
understanding other's actions is organized primarily around action goals. Experimental
Brain Research, 189, 99-107.
Comprehending Particle Verbs: an EEG approach
Vitoria Piai, Marcel Bastiaansen and Rob Schreuder
(Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
Particle verbs (e.g., look up) are verbs formed by two constituents: a main verb and
a particle. Dutch particle verbs, (e.g., 'afstuderen' to graduate; 'af' finished,
'studeren' to study) are separable in the sense that the particle may be realized
separated from the main verb in certain syntactic contexts (e.g., 'ik studeer af' I
graduate). In principle, the Dutch syntax allows any number of words to intervene
97
between the main verb and the particle - observed distances in the Twente Corpus
(72 million words), for instance, range from 0 to 15 words. Besides, the meaning of
the particle verb may be partially or completely non-compositional (compare
'afstuderen' to graduate vs. 'oppassen' to look out/after, 'op' up, 'passen' to fit).
When encountering such particle verbs in their separated version, the processor
must store the main verb (e.g. 'pas' fit) and integrate it with the particle (e.g. 'op' up)
further downstream. Little is known about when and how this integration is realized
and on which factors may influence this process and even less has been empirically
tested.
We report an EEG study on the comprehension of Dutch separable particle verbs.
Subjects read sentences containing particle verbs while their EEG was recorded. We
manipulated a) the "family size" of the main verb (the number of particle verbs that
can be formed with one same main verb by combining it with different particles)
and b) the actual realization of the particle, which could either be (1) the expected
one given the sentential context, (2) a particle forming an existing particle verb yet
yielding a semantic violation given the sentential context or (3) a particle forming a
non-existing particle verb (i.e., a morpholexical violation, for example 'toe+hangen').
For both manipulations, we found a negative peak around 300 ms which seems to
be sensitive to morphological processing. Concerning b), the semantic violation
yielded an N400 effect relative to the expected particle, which is in agreement with
previous research on standard semantic violations. However, encountering a
morpholexical violation yields both an N400 effect and an additional late positivity
relative to the expected particle. We discuss the implications of these findings for
when and how the integration of the particle with the main verb takes place.
Referential choices in young Thai children’s narratives
Theeraporn Ratitamkul (Chulalongkorn University)
In narrating a story, a child has to constantly make a decision concerning referential
choices. A Thai-speaking child, for example, needs to decide at various points in the
discourse whether to refer to an entity using a lexical, pronominal, or null form. This
study examines how 4-year-old Thai children refer to entities in story-telling and
discusses factors influencing their referential choices.
Data came from the Thai Frog Stories (Zlatev & Yangklang 2001), in which 10 Thaispeaking 4-year-olds told a story stimulated by a picture book. Arguments of verbs
98
were coded for linguistic forms (lexical, pronominal, or null), and grammatical roles
(S: intransitive subject, A: transitive subject, or O: object), following Du Bois (1987).
Contexts in which a referring expression occurred were also specified. Adapted from
Jisa (2000), the contexts were INT: introducing, REIN: reintroducing, PROM:
promoting, and MA: maintaining.
Four-year-olds were found to use lexical forms most often when they introduced new
characters (the INT context). Lexical forms gradually decreased when referents were
reintroduced (REIN), promoted to the subject position (PROM), and continued in the
subject position (MA), respectively. Overall, lexical forms were prevalent in child
speech even when they appeared unnecessary. The distributional pattern of null
forms, on the other hand, was in the opposite direction. Their proportion was largest
in the MA context, followed by the PROM and REIN contexts, and smallest in the INT
context. As for pronominal forms, they were infrequent in children’s narratives and
were used only to refer to main characters.
Children also followed the Preferred Argument Structure constraints (Du Bois 1987) in
that there were only a small number of clauses with two new arguments and that
new arguments rarely appeared in the transitive subject (A) position. However, the
number of clauses with two lexical arguments was relatively high, and so was the
number of lexical arguments in the A position. This goes against the predictions
made by the One Lexical Argument and Non-lexical A constraints.
This study revealed that when choosing referential forms, four-year-old Thai children
to a certain extent paid attention to contexts, which were related to the status of
referents in the mind of the narrator and his addressee. The overuse of lexical forms
showed that children at this age were not yet fully capable of creating coherence
by using appropriate anaphoric forms. This is partly because of the complexity of
story-telling, which requires that children perform multiple tasks simultaneously.
First Language Thinking: The Representation of Motion in Second
Language Writing
Nina Reshöft (University of Bremen)
The linguistic patterns used to describe motion events in different types of languages
have been a matter of debate within scientific approaches to the relationship
between language and thought. Investigations of lexicalization patterns for motion
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events in different languages are largely based on a widely-accepted dichotomy
proposed by Talmy (e.g., 1985, 1991). According to this typological distinction, the
manner of motion is lexicalized by the main verb in satellite-framed languages (e.g.,
English), while the direction of the movement is encoded in "satellites" outside the
verb. By contrast, verb-framed languages (e.g., Romance languages, Turkish)
typically encode the direction or of motion in the main verb, while the manner
component is optionally expressed by additional phrases outside the verb.
It has been claimed (e.g., Slobin 1996a/b, 2000) that the different linguistic
representation of lexical patterns (verb-framed vs. satellite-framed) corresponds to
different mental representations of motion events. Speakers of English, for example,
seem to pay more attention to the manner of motion, whereas the direction of
motion is foregrounded in Romance languages.
The different constructions that are available in each language to describe motion
events and the grammatical constraints related to them are said to provide
speakers of different languages with different ways of "thinking for speaking" (Slobin
1996a). Accordingly, learners of a typologically different language must learn a
different way of thinking for speaking. The present corpus-based study extends
Talmy's typological framework to the domain of Second Language Acquisition and
shows how the predominant patterns of a native language are represented in
written L2 production. Specifically, the present analysis is concerned with the
linguistic patterns that are to be found in English texts produced by speakers of
French, Italian, and Spanish. It is further shown how languages of the same type (i.e.,
French, Italian, and Spanish) differ among each other in the way motion events are
lexicalized.
The data from the French, Italian, and Spanish subcorpora of the International
Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), compared to the patterns found in native English
speaker data (British National Corpus), reflect the typical patterns of verb-framed
languages in many respects. Descriptions of movement in the two types of corpora
differ largely in the variety and amount of different types of motion verbs as well as
in the representation of information about the direction of a movement.
References
• Granger, Sylviane / Dagneaux, Estelle / Meunier, Fanny (2002): The International Corpus of
Learner English. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
100
• Slobin, Dan I. (1996a): “From "thought and language" to "thinking for speaking"”. In:
Gumperz, J. J. & Levinson, S. C. [eds.]: Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 70-96.
• Slobin, Dan I. (1996b). "Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish". In:
Shibatani, Masayoshi & Sandra A. Thompson [eds.], Grammatical constructions: their form
and meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press 195-219.
• Slobin, Dan I. (2000): “Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and
determinism”. In: Niemeier, Susanne and Dirven, René [eds.]: Evidence for Linguistic
Relativity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 107-138.
• Talmy, Leonard (1985): "Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms". In:
Shopen, Timothy [ed.]: Language typology and syntactic description. Volume III:
Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 57-149.
• Talmy, Leonard (1991): “Path to realization”. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual
Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of
California, Berkeley 480-519.
• The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition) (2007): Distributed by Oxford
University
Computing
Services
on
behalf
of
the
BNC
Consortium.
URL:
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
Literal word meaning activation during idiom comprehension
(1Max
Joost Rommers1, Marcel Bastiaansen1,2 and Ton Dijkstra3
Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen; 2Radboud University
Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Centre for
Cognitive Neuroimaging, Nijmegen; 3Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders
Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Centre for Cognition, Nijmegen)
Idioms are usually defined as expressions of which the figurative meaning cannot be
derived from the literal meaning of their component words. For instance, the idiom
"to kick the bucket" has nothing to do with a bucket or with kicking, but rather
means to die. Common in everyday conversation, idioms regularly confront our
comprehension system with a challenging paradox: although the individual words
have a meaning that is irrelevant for the overall meaning of the expression, they
have to be recognized nonetheless. We investigated whether this recognition
process implies the activation of literal word meanings, as predicted by some
models of idiom comprehension.
101
EEG was recorded while participants read sentences in which the target word was
(1) a correct (expected) word, (2) a word that was semantically related to the
expected word, or (3) a semantically unrelated word. Both (2) and (3) were
semantic violations in the sentence context. The words appeared in either a literal or
an idiomatic context. Off-line pretests of the materials indicated that the selected
idioms were familiar and opaque, and that idiomatic and literal contexts did not
differ in cloze probability. A plausibility judgment task showed that both types of
semantic violation were implausible in both types of context.
Based on earlier research (Federmeier & Kutas, 1999), the literal conditions were
expected to show a 'graded' N400, with both violations eliciting an N400 effect
relative to the correct word, but the semantically unrelated one being of highest
amplitude. Regarding idiomatic contexts, N400 amplitude was expected to show
the same pattern only if literal word meanings become active. If literal word
meanings are not automatically activated during the comprehension of idioms,
N400 effects for semantically related and unrelated words should be be of equal
amplitude.
This study is among the first to address idiom comprehension with EEG. The results
discussed in the talk have consequences for models of idiom processing, but also
speak to the general issue of context-dependency of word meaning activation.
Reference
• Federmeier, K.D., & Kutas, M. (1999). A rose by any other name: long-term memory
structure and sentence processing. Journal of memory and Language, 41, 469-495.
Syntactic structure and activation of semantic informations in noun
phrases containing a polysemic adjective
Audrey Rudel (Université Blaise Pascal)
Our research focuses on the link between syntax and semantics in sense
construction of complex expressions containing words with multiple meanings. This
paper deals with the French polysemic adjective ‘cher’ within the framework of
cognitive linguistics. Firstly, we analyse the semantic structure of this item in order to
give a conceptual representation of it. Secondly, we examine the way sense can be
constructed in expressions composed of ‘cher’ and a noun. We look for semantic
regularities taking into account both semantic and syntactic structures.
102
The French adjective ‘cher’ presents two main meanings: 'beloved' and 'expensive'.
According to our hypothesis, linguistic items are associated, into the mental lexicon
of speakers-hearers, with an organized conceptual structure composed of numerous
semantic pieces of information.
We can determine different main semantic pieces of information associated with
the item ‘cher’:
- [SENTIMENTAL VALUE] for the meaning 'beloved' (affective sense),
- [MATERIAL VALUE] for the meaning 'expensive' (physical sense).
The sentimental and material senses are linked by a common concept which can
be [VALUE]. To elaborate the semantic representation of the adjective ‘cher’ in a
conceptual perspective, we were inspired by the theory of Cognitive Grammar
established by R.W. Langacker (1987) and re-used by D. Tuggy (1993). Thus, the
concept [VALUE] shared by the two senses is part of the "schematic sense" of the
adjective ‘cher’ and the sentimental and material senses correspond to
"elaborations" or "instantiations" of that schematic sense.
Combined with a noun, ‘cher’ shows strong semantic variations: it presents either its
affective sense, either its physical sense. It depends on which pieces of information
are activated during the process of sense construction. When [SENTIMENTAL VALUE]
is selected and activated, ‘cher’ takes its affective sense. When [MATERIAL VALUE] is
selected and activated, it has its physical sense. Thanks to the study of many
utterances, we bring to the fore the existence of semantic regularities in sense
construction of expressions combining ‘cher’ and a noun. These regularities allow
predicting which sense of ‘cher’ will be selected and activated. They are especially
linked to syntactic parameters such as the position of the adjective within the noun
phrase (anteposition or postposition).
To conclude, the semantic-cognitive analysis of the adjective ‘cher’ and the study
of its combinatorial with the substantive lead us to underline the complex
mechanisms of sense construction and utterance interpretation. Furthermore, this
analysis highlights the link between syntactic construction and information structure.
References
• Langacker, R.W. (1987), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 1, Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
103
• Taylor, J.R. (1992), Old problems: Adjectives in Cognitive Grammar, Cognitive Linguistics, 31: 1-36.
• Tuggy, D. (1993), Ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness, Cognitive Linguistics, 4-3: 273-290.
Overgeneralization in second dialect acquisition and the role of
type frequency
Kathy Rys (University of Antwerp / FWO Flanders)
In this paper we focus on the distinction between token frequency (i.e. the
frequency of usage of individual words in language use) and type frequency (i.e.
the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic pattern) as explanatory factors in the
process of second dialect acquisition. From the literature it appears that both kinds
of frequency play a role in language use, language acquisition and language
change. Recently, it has been demonstrated that type frequency generally has
more explanatory power than token frequency (Baayen, 2001; Baayen & Lieber,
1991; ; Bybee, 2001; Eddington, 2002a,b, 2003). Bybee (2001) argues that the
productivity of linguistic patterns is determined by type frequency and not by token
frequency (e.g. overregularization of the First Conjugation by French children).
Moreover, according to Bybee, the productivity of a morphological pattern is
diminished when that pattern applies to very high token frequency items.
In this paper, data on the overgeneralization errors made by standard-speaking
children who learn a Flemish dialect as a second language (Rys, 2007) are used to
demonstrate that type frequency is the determining factor of the productivity of
dialect features. It is the phonological features with the highest type frequency that
are overgeneralized most often by children who are acquiring the dialect as a
second language. Further, in support of Bybee, we show that high token frequency
detracts from the productivity of dialect features. In addition, we will argue that
overgeneralizations may sometimes lead to dialect change, and that type
frequency is the pivotal factor when this dialect change takes place.
References
• Baayen, Harald. (2001). Word frequency distributions. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Baayen, Harald, & Lieber, Rochelle. (1991). Productivity and English derivation: A corpus
study. Linguistics 29: 801-843.
• Bybee, Joan. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
104
• Eddington, David. (2002a). Dissociation in Italian conjugations: A single-route account.
Brain and language 81: 291-302.
• Eddington, David. (2002b). Spanish gender assignment in an analogical framework.
Journal of quantitative linguistics 9: 49-75.
• Eddington, David. (2003). Issues in modeling language processing analogically. Lingua
114: 849-871.
• Rys, Kathy. (2007). Dialect as a second language: Linguistic and non-linguistic factors in
secondary dialect acquisition by children and adolescents. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, Ghent University.
Lexical semantic relations and linear ordering
Nathalie Schapansky (Simon Fraser University)
This work shows that the lexical semantic relations of hyponymy and holonymy
determine the linear ordering of constituents across or within clauses, phrases, or
words. Hyponyms must precede hyperonyms and holonyms must precede
meronyms.
This
precedence
law
governs
linearization.
Variations
in
the
grammaticalization processes are to be expected.
Lehman and Martin-Berthet (2005) show that, in French, the order antecedent >
anaphor is determined by the order hyponym > hyperonym (1) and holonym >
meronym (2).
1.
2.
Un chat entra. L’animal était malade/*Un animal entra. Le chat était malade.
Il regarde l’arbre; le tronc était tout craquelé/*Il regarde le tronc; l’arbre était
tout craquelé.
For want of better terms, the hyponym in (1) and the holonym in (2) are called
includers, while the hyperonym in (1) and the meronym in (2) are called includees.
The includer takes precedence over the includee. This precedence law governs the
ordering relation of constituents across clauses, as above, or within clauses, phrases,
or words.
90% of the world languages have either a SVO or SOV order (Whaley 1997). In these
languages, the subject has been grammaticalised as the includer and the
predicate as the includee. The head/complement relation also is determined by the
order includer > includee. The includer can be either the head or the complement,
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as evidenced in Breton, a head first language, for possessive constructions (3) and
compounds (4).
3. a.
b.
Maria hé zad ‘Maria her father = Maria’s father’
tad Maria ‘father Maria = Maria’s father’
4. a.
dourgi ‘otter’ from ‘dour + ki = water + dog’
b.
kidour ‘otter’ from ‘ki + dour = dog + water’
Suffixation, as a preponderant derivational process (Whaley 1997), follows the order
includer > includee, whether the base is a hyponym (5a) or a holonym (5b), as
shown for Breton.
5. a.
b.
logod ‘mice’ + -a (action of gathering) →
logota ‘to catch, hunt mice’
logod ‘mice’ + -enn (unit/part)
logodenn ‘mouse’
→
In conclusion, the precedence law includer > includee determines the linear
ordering of constituents. What counts as includer or includee, however, is
parameterized across and within languages. This can change overtime–Breton
dourgi is an older form while kidour is a more recent one. This precedence law
reflects our relation to the world and serves to cement relations from anaphora to
compounding. This analysis can be extended to account for other parts of the
grammar as well.
References
• Lehman, A. and F. Martin-Berthet, 2005. Introduction à la lexicologie: sémantique et
morphologie. Paris: Armand Collin.
• Whaley, L. J., 1997. Introduction to typology. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Variation in long-distance movement constructions: a diachronic
perspective
Ankelien Schippers and Jack Hoeksema (University of Groningen)
This talk concerns Dutch historical corpus data regarding long-distance (LD)
movement constructions and the variation and change these data show. LDmovement constructions are traditionally analyzed as involving a productive rule
that moves an element over clause boundaries (cf. Chomsky, 1977). Recently, some
106
studies have presented corpus material that appears to contradict this analysis
(Dąbrowska, 2004; Verhagen, 2005), since their data shows that LD wh-movement
constructions almost invariably involve the matrix verb ‘think’ or ‘say’ and a second
person matrix subject. This has led to the idea that LD-movement constructions don’t
involve a productive rule, but are formed by analogy to the template [wh +
think/say + 2nd pers [that...]].
However, our diachronic corpus data contradicts this: LD-movement is possible with
a wide variety of matrix verbs and the pattern [wh + think/say + 2nd pers [that….]] is
only very frequent for wh-movement in recent periods. Moreover, in LD-movement
constructions other than questions (e.g. relatives and topicalization constructions), a
much wider variety of matrix predicates is attested. These constructions also have
different preferences regarding the type of matrix predicate: e.g. weten ‘know’ is
most frequent for relatives, while it virtually doesn’t show up in wh-movement
constructions. This suggests the choice of matrix predicate is influenced by the
semantics of a particular construction and the pragmatics of the speech situation.
We take the fact that the constructions under consideration show such a wide
variety of matrix predicates as evidence for a productive rule underlying LDdependencies. However, we don’t want to deny that frequency plays a role, too.
Our data show a strong increase of LD wh-movement constructions relatively to
other types of LD-movement over the past few decades. However, the variety of
matrix predicates attested in LD wh-movement constructions in this period is very
limited, mirroring the findings of Verhagen and Dąbrowska. Furthermore, LDmovement constructions appear to be constrained by semantic and pragmatic
effects.
Therefore, we argue that LD-constructions are formed by a productive movement
rule, but that the use of this rule is constrained by various non-syntactic factors. These
factors all conspire together resulting in the formulaic-like LD wh-movement
constructions we find in contemporary corpora.
References
• Chomsky, N. (1977). On Wh-Movement. In: P.Culicover, T. Wasow, and A. Akamajian
(eds.), Formal syntax. Academic Press: New York.
• Dąbrowska, E. (2004). Language, Mind and Brain. Georgetown: Georgetown University
Press.
• Verhagen, A. (2005). Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
107
EPP and the object obligation of particle verbs in Dutch: An
acquisitional account
Rianne Schippers (Utrecht University)
Dutch transitive particle verbs obligatorily take an object (compare (1a) and (1b)).
(1) a. Jan eet *(de appel) op
(Jan eats the apple up)
b. Jan eet (de appel)
(Jan eats the apple)
In this talk I will (a) pursue the idea that this obligation is caused by the EPP and (b)
show it results from acquisition steps. The account is based on a longitudinal study of
the Dutch child Sarah (CHILDES Van Kampen corpus), aged 1;6 till 2;6. I will argue
that the object obligation of transitive particle verbs is the result of three consecutive
steps in acquisition: (1) the lexical classification in the two word stage, (2) the
acquisition of verb second and (3) the acquisition of the EPP.
Step one
In the two word stage there is an overwhelming amount of sentences that have a
topic and a predicate. The group of predicative elements contains verbs, adjectives
and particles, see (2).
(2) a. particle
schoen weg/uit (shoe away/off)
b. adjective
pappa lief/vies (daddy nice/dirty)
c. verb
pappa slapen (daddy sleep)
At this stage in acquisition, children group the three different categories in (2)
together in one lexical group. In order to be able to distinguish the predicates from
each other, children need to acquire language specific knowledge.
Step two
Verb second (V2) enables the Dutch-learning child to distinguish verbs from the
other predicates in (2). Acquiring V2 also leads to a reanalysis of particle verbs. Prior
to the acquisition of V2 both particles and verbs form primary predicates. I argue
that after the acquisition of V2, particles form complex predicates with verbs.
108
Step three
The acquisition of V2 is shortly followed by the acquisition of the EPP (3 weeks). The
rise of the EPP reflects an acquisition step for complex predicates. The acquisition of
the EPP does not only lead to the subject obligation of verbs, but also to the subject
obligation of the other predicates in (2) (Stowell 1983). I propose that because
particles form a complex head with verbs, their subject becomes the (obligatory)
object of the particle verb. The obligatoriness of the EPP leads to the obligatory
presence of the particle’s subject, the particle verb’s object. The result is an object
obligation of transitive particle verbs. Due to the new configuration, the subject (as
external argument of the simplex predicate) gets an explicit licensing position and
becomes obligatory.
Error Analysis: The phonology of German learners of English
Anke-Elaine Schmidt (University of Essen)
Although phonetics and phonology is nowadays an integral part of university
education when learning or studying a second language, teaching is usually
restricted to how sounds should be produced. Students’ errors in phonology on the
other hand are hardly ever analysed and it is often not explained what causes these
errors. This, however, is also a result of the lack of empirical research in the area.
Most phonetics and phonology books for German learners of English neglect error
analysis and only provide a few lines about why students have problems
pronouncing eth or theta sounds and occasionally the buzzword ‘terminal
devoicing’ appears.
Thus, in my research I have now set out to analyse German students’ L2
pronunciation errors systematically with regard to their quality and quantity. While
first-year students of English were asked to read out a text aloud, they were
recorded and afterwards had to answer further questions. This material has then
been analysed and the errors categorised. It turned out that not only terminal
devoicing but especially “fortisation”, i.e. the process of making lenis sounds fortis, is
very common among German learners. Furthermore, the fact that sounds in
unstressed positions are not reduced and that word stress is often on the wrong
syllable accounts for many of the errors. Partly, these errors are due to language
interference from German but they also result from similar spelling of other more
familiar English words. A detailed study of German learners’ errors together with an
in-depth explanation of their origin will help to improve language courses in the
109
future and give foreign students the chance to make their pronunciation as nativelike as possible.
Perceptual Learning in Hindi-English Bilinguals
Katharina Schuhmann (Stony Brook University)
This study investigates whether perceptual learning effects that have been reported
for monolingual speakers (e.g., Norris, McQueen, & Cutler 2003, Eisner & McQueen
2005, Kraljic & Samuel 2006, Kraljic, Samuel, & Brennan 2008) also occur in bilinguals.
The existing literature on perceptual learning only reports experiments conducted in
monolingual contexts: Listeners who are exposed to sounds that are ambiguous
between for example /f/ and /s/ while performing a lexical decision task in Dutch,
show a shifted category boundary in the direction of the training when tested on a
continuum between /f/ and /s/ (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler 2003).
Kraljic & Samuel (2006) show that perceptual learning effects on the voicing contrast
in dental stops generalize to the voicing contrast in bilabial stops in English speakers.
Our study examines whether the generalization of perceptual learning effects from
one stop contrast to another instance of the same kind of contrast (as in Kraljic &
Samuel 2006) operates at a purely abstract, phonological level or whether
language-specific phonetics also play a role. We therefore tested whether
perceptual learning in bilinguals carries over to stop contrasts in another language.
We exposed Hindi-English bilinguals to sounds that are ambiguous between /k/ and
/g/ while they performed a lexical decision task in English. Afterwards, participants
categorized ambiguous stimuli of three Hindi stop continua (dental, retroflex, and
velar stops) and one English stop continuum (velar stops).
The data from 28 Hindi-English bilinguals analyzed so far suggest that perceptual
learning in stops is specific to the language of training. Participants showed marginal
perceptual learning effects for English velar stops (p=.100), while they showed no
significant perceptual learning effects for either of the three continua involving Hindi
stop contrasts.
The missing perceptual learning effects in Hindi are most likely related to the fact
that the Hindi phoneme inventory distinguishes four types of stops at each place of
articulation, using two contrastive features (voice and aspiration/spread glottis).
Naturally, the same phonetic space (e.g., velar stops) is broken down into four
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contrastive sounds in Hindi (/gh/, /g/, /k/, and /kh/), but only two contrastive sounds
in English (/g/ and/k/). The results indicate a) that perceptual learning effects do not
generalize to an untrained language with a distinct set of phonetic realizations of
the voicing contrast in stops, or b) that the overall use of space due to the sound
inventory influences perceptual learning effects. Directions for future research will be
discussed.
References
• Eisner, Frank, & McQueen, James M. (2005). The specificity of perceptual learning in
speech processing. Perception & Psychophysics 67:224-238.
• Kraljic, Tanya, & Samuel, Arthur G. (2006). Generalization in perceptual learning for
speech. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 262-268.
• Kraljic, Tanya, & Samuel, Arthur G. (2007). Perceptual adjustments to multiple speakers.
Journal of Memory and Language 56:1-15.
• Kraljic, Tanya, & Samuel, Arthur G. & Brennan, Susan. (2008). First impressions and last
resorts. How listeners adjust to speaker variability. Psychological Science 19:332-338.
• Norris, Dennis, McQueen, James M., & Cutler Anne (2003). Perceptual learning in speech.
Cognitive Psychology, 47, 204-238.
Frequency and grammar in interaction
Marjoleine Sloos (Leiden University)
There are two main approaches in phonology; one is the generative approach,
currently mainly in terms of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993/2004), the
other is usage-based-oriented phonology, here identified with Exemplar Theory
(Bybee 2001 et seq., Pierrehumbert 2002 amongst others). These approaches have
quite opposite goals; generative grammar investigates the internal system of
language, phonological rules, whereas usage-based phonology investigates e.g.
frequency effects and models the lexicon. Recently some articles suggest that
frequency can interact with grammar (Anttila 2006, Zhang & Lai 2008), which would
be problematic for both OT as well as ET, because, to put it boldly, OT cannot
handle frequency effects, whereas in ET grammar is not implemented.
In order to investigate the interaction between frequency and grammar, we
performed a production experiment. As a frequency effect we selected pretonic
schwa deletion in Dutch, e.g. gelijk [χəlɛɪk] ‘right/justice’ → [χlɛɪk]. Gelijk, a highfrequency word, was matched with low-frequent gelid [χəlɪt] ‘joint’. Schwa deletion
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was expected to occur more often in high-frequency words than in low-frequency
words. Syllabification was selected as a phonological process; stimuli consisted of
words that would result in phonotactically ill-formed clusters after schwa deletion
and words that would have well-formed clusters: after schwa deletion, gelijk begins
with phonotactically well-formed /χl/, but beneden has an ill-formed onset /bn/. The
hypothesis was that deletion would not occur when the resulting word would have
an ill-formed cluster.
The results show a frequency effect within the category of high-frequency words
and, most importantly, this effect only occurred when the target onset cluster was a
well-formed cluster. This shows that there is indeed an interaction between
frequency effects and grammar. I will show that both OT and ET fail to account for
these facts, but that a combined model for OT and ET can capture both the
frequency effect as well as the interaction between frequency and grammar.
References
• Anttila, Arto. 2006. Variation and opacity. Natural language & Linguistic theory, 24: 893944.
• Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and language use. New York, CUP.
• Pierrehumbert, Janet. B. 2002. Word-specific phonetics. In: C. Gussenhoven & N. Warner
(Eds.), Laboratory Phonology, Vol. VII. 101-137. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.
• Prince and Smolensky. 1993/2004. Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative
grammar. MIT Press, Massachusetts.
• Zhang & Lai. 2008. Phonological knowledge beyond the lexicon in Taiwanese double
reduplication. WCCFL 27.
Is HCI Research Relevant to the Practice of Natural Language
Processing?
Ielka van der Sluis, Nikiforos Karamanis, Anne Schneider, Saturnino Luz,
Gavin Doherty and Stephan Schlogl (Trinity College Dublin)
Natural Language processing (NLP) is characterized as the field which aims to
provide computers with the ability to process human language [1]. To get
computers to perform useful language-related tasks such as conversing with a
human, translating a document, answering questions using information from the
Web, is the ultimate goal of NLP. In sharing the goal of making human-computer
communication more natural NLP is closely related to human Computer interaction
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(HCI). Although the two fields have common research ancestors [2, 3], only limited
interaction between the two fields can be detected [4], [5], [6]. Inspired by a
preliminary study by Reiter [7] we performed a bibliometric analysis of crossreferences between HCI and NLP.
In a deeper literature review we focus on biomedical NLP (BioNLP), Meeting
Browsing (MB) and Natural Language Generation (NLG), three diverse subdomains
of NLP. All three areas have clearly defined contexts of human activity where a
need for NLP technology has been identified. However, our study reveals relatively
little application of HCI methods and research developments. In the area of MB, for
instance, despite the fact that meetings have been widely studied in HCI from the
perspective of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), observational
methods are rarely employed. This is evident in recent efforts aimed at collecting
meeting data undertaken within the MB community. Although meeting data have
been recorded, transcribed and annotated at various levels, these data originated
either from scenarios carefully designed so as to enable the investigation of linguistic
aspects of the activity [8] or from meetings held among the researchers themselves
[9]. Observation data on the information browsing task itself is much harder to find.
Similar observations apply for BioNLP and NLG.
Although there have been some attempts to use HCI methods in NLP system design
the strongest point of contact between HCI and NLP seems to remain the area of
evaluation. There is little usage in the NLP community of HCI methods and research
that could benefit the design of NLP-based systems. Observational methods, which
for example are commonly employed in HCI studies, are rarely applied when data is
collected for MB, NLG or BioNLP. There also remain significant gaps in HCI research
concerning the design of NLP systems. We argue that understanding and addressing
these gaps is necessary in order to make HCI methods relevant to NLP practice.
References
1. Jurafsky, D., Martin, J.H.: Speech and Language Processing. Prentice Hall Series in Artificial
Intelligence (2nd edition) 2008.
2. Winograd, T.: Shifting viewpoints: Artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.
Artificial Intelligence 170 (2006).
3. Grudin, J.: Turing maturing: the separation of artificial intelligence and human-computer
interaction. Interactions 13 (2006) p54-57.
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4. Ozkan, N., Paris, C.: Cross-fertilization between human computer interaction and natural
language processing: Why and how. International Journal of Speech Technology 5 (2002)
p135-146.
5. Dybkjaer, L., Bernsen, N.O.: Usability issues in spoken dialogue systems. Natural Language
Engineering 6 (2000) p243-271.
6. Larsen, L.B.: Assessment of spoken dialogue system usability - what are we really
measuring? In: EUROSPEECH 2003. p1945-1948.
7. Reiter, E.: The shrinking horizons of computational linguistics. Computational Linguistics. 33
(2007) p283-287.
8. Carletta, J., Ashby, S., Bourban, S., Flynn, M., Guillemot, M., Hain, T., Kadlec, J., Karaiskos,
V., Kraaij, W., Kronenthal, M., Lathoud, G., Lincoln, M., Lisowska, A. McCowan, I., Post, W.,
Reidsma, D., Wellner, P.: The AMI meetings corpus. In: Proceedings of the Measuring
Behavior 2005 symposium on "Annotating and measuring Meeting Behavior". (2005).
9. Janin, A., Baron, D., Edwards, J., Ellis, D., Gelbart, D., Morgan, N., Peskin, B., Pfau, T.,
Shriberg, E., Stolcke, A., Wooters, C.: The ICSI meeting corpus. In: IEEE International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings of (ICASSP
'03). Volume 1. (2003) 364-367.
Identifying formulaic sequences (chunks) in learner data:
methodology
Hana Smiskova and Marjolijn Verspoor (University of Groningen)
This paper will illustrate the process of definition and identification of chunks
(formulaic sequences) and provide a rationale for the methodology to be used in a
longitudinal study. Taking an emergentist, usage-based perspective to second
language acquisition, the study aims to trace the development of chunks over time
in two input condition groups: high input and low input. A trend has already been
found in the successful use of lexical chunks by learners in high input conditions
(Verspoor & Edelenbos 2008).
Chunks have been recognized as an essential aspect of native speaker language.
Learners who demonstrate knowledge of chunks are therefore considered
successful in approximating native-like proficiency. Different sources, however,
acknowledge that formulaic sequences are not easy to identify. Wray (2002) points
out that the process of definition and identification is inherently cyclical: first,
prototypical, representative samples must be identified in a corpus to enable their
effective definition. Identification thus relies less on formal definition than vice versa.
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Moreover, the precise “borders” of some formulaic sequences are difficult to
determine, either by use of native speaker intuition or corpora search engines, as
there may be overlaps (even a simple word string like thank you, besides occuring
entirely alone, can also be found in longer strings such as thank you very much or
thank you very much indeed, Wray 2002). The issue of “chunk borders and overlap”
can be accounted for by Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991), which perceives
grammar and lexicon as lying on a continuum and can therefore account for both
a holistic and a partial storage of longer sequences, and Pattern Grammar (Hunston
and Francis 2000), which focuses on the association of lexical items into whole
constructions.
After presenting a working definition of “chunks” and the identification process to be
used in this study, we will argue that longer, semi-fixed formulaic sequences could
be a distinguishing factor between the developmental stages of individual learners.
While some are clearly capable of using a whole range of chunk types as well as
longer stretches of native-speaker like language, others rely heavily on their L1 Dutch
constructions. We will also focus on the acquisition stages of these longer, semi-fixed
sequences to illustrate differences between different stages of L2 development in
individual learners.
References
• Hunston, S. and Francis, G. (2000). Pattern Grammar: a corpus-driven approach to the
lexical grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. II.: descriptive
application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Verspoor, M. & P. Edelenbos. (2008). Tweetalig Onderwijs: Beter geschoolde leerlingen in
2024. In De Graaff, R & D.Tuin (Eds). De Toekomst van het Talenonderwijs: Nodig? Anders?
Beter?. IVLOS: Utrecht
• Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Augmentative Reduplication in Farsi
Bahareh Soohani (Leiden University)
This paper investigates augmentative reduplication in Farsi. Data such as, xune
muneQ, houses and the likeQ and medad pedadQ, pencils and the likeQ, which
are taken from informal conversations of Tehran speakers and also based on my
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knowledge of Farsi as a native speaker. I was unable to find any written sources for
such data. To my knowledge, there is no previous research on this word formation
process, so that the first goal of the paper is to provide an extensive overview of the
data. In Farsi, a noun can be reduplicated to create a new noun with augmentative
meaning. we will consider the data in two groups: regular (cf.(1)), and alternating
(cf.(2)).
(1)
Regular reduplication in Farsi:
a.
ketab ketab metab
noun reduplication form
bookQ
b.
books and the likeQ
xune xune mune
noun reduplication form
houseQ
(2)
houses and the likeQ
Alternating reduplication form in Farsi:
a.
miz
miz piz
noun reduplication form
b.
tableQ
tables and the likeQ
medad
medad pedad
noun reduplication form
pencilQ
pencils and the likeQ
As shown in the examples, reduplication in Farsi is a suffixation process which involves
suffix with pre-specified consonant /m/ that is adjoined to the partially reduplicated
suffix. In the alternating type, the pre-specified consonant changed to /p/. I will
investigate this alternative in more detail and consider a number of possible
analyses. In my analysis, I describe this word formation process based on two
morphological theories: Prosodic Morphology (McCarthy and Prince 1998, 1990) and
Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1990). According to the former approach,
it is assumed that reduplication morphemes consists of units of prosodic hierarchy,
such as the syllable. In Optimality Theory (OT), reduplication is accounted for in terms
of correspondence constraints which demand identity between base and
reduplicant within certain limits. One attractive aspects of Prosodic Morphology is
that it can explain the basic prosodic and morphological characteristics of
reduplication in Farsi. According to this theory, reduplication in Farsi involves a
reduplication template of a prosodic unit which consists of at least two syllables and
copies the reduplication base. Although the Prosodic Morphology is able to capture
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the basic characteristics of this word formation process in Farsi, there are still some
questions that remain unsolved. I will try to find proper answers to these questions
within OT frame work. Ranking particular constraints explains, (i) why the first
consonants of the reduplicated morpheme will be deleted after pre-linking suffix
/m/, (ii) why this suffixation change to /p/ and not /b/ or/n/ in the alternating forms,
and (iii) why we can not keep both the suffix /m/ and the first consonant of the
reduplicated morpheme. To sum up, the OT approach can explain the
morphological phenomenon under study most adequately.
This study is also relevant for typological research. Although reduplicative
morphemes do not appear in most of the western branches of the Indo-European
language family, reduplication is rather common in Indo-Iranian language of the
east such as Sorani Kurdish, Tajik, and Punjabi and as shown here, Farsi too. In several
languages and language groups of Southern and South East Asia, we can find
similar morphological process where the meaning of approximate groups is
expressed reduplication of the augmentative type, as shown in the following
examples:
Tajik (Iranian, Tajikistan: Rastorgueva 1963:25-26)
non
breadQ
nonpon
food and the likeQ
Punjabi (Indo-Aryan, India:Bhatiu 1993)
paaNii
waterQ
paaNii vaNii
water and the likeQ
Vietnamese (Dao 1998:1, 6)
sa ch
waterQ
sa ch sieɑ c
books and the likeQ
We will offer a brief comparison of the processes with the one in Farsi, and speculate
on the question of whether this type of reduplication might be on areal feature
which is shared by these groups of language.
References
• Bhatia, Tej K.(1993). Punjabi: A cognitive-descriptive grammar. New York: Routledge.
• Hurch, Bernhard (2005). Studies on Reduplication. Berlin. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Inkelas, Sharon and Zoll, Cheryl (2005). Reduplication Doubling in Morphology.
Cambridge: University Press.
• Kager, Rene (1999). Optimality Theory .Cambridge: University Press.
• McCarthy, John.J (2008). Doing Optimality Theory. UK: Blackwell.
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• Rastorgueva, V.S.(1963). A Short Sketch of Tajik Grammar [Translated and edited by
Herbert H. Paper]. The Hague: Mouton.
Models of Language Comprehension and Pronoun Ambiguity in
Discourse
Ryan Taylor, Laurie Stowe, Gisela Redeker and John Hoeks
(University of Groningen)
How do we understand structures with multiple possible interpretations? Different
models of on-line language processing make different predictions about ambiguous
structures; which model of comprehension is right has yet to be resolved. Pronouns
provide fertile grounds for research on ambiguity, and moreover serve to create a
better understanding of discourse comprehension. We report on a self-paced
reading experiment that tested two models of sentence processing, the Constraintbased model (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; MacDonald &
Seidenberg, 2006), and the Race model (Pickering, Traxler, & Crocker, 2000; Traxler,
Pickering, & Clifton, 1998). These models predict different performance at a point of
ambiguity
in
self-paced
reading.
The
Constraint-based
model
predicts
a
competition between potential sentences occurs at the point of ambiguity, resulting
in longer reading times there, whereas the Race model predicts that one analysis is
chosen at the point of ambiguity and reanalysis only occurs at a disambiguating
phrase (MacDonald et al., 1994; Pickering et al., 2000; Traxler et al., 1998).
In a self-paced reading experiment, the topic of the discourse was temporarily
ambiguous, thus making the pronoun ambiguous, as in (1c):
1. a.
b.
c.
Andrew showed Paul his time machine.
Paul sent Andrew back in time.
He wrote from his time machine about what happened. (N.B. original
materials were in Dutch)
This ambiguity was resolved with a later adverbial phrase (i.e., From his time
machine). The Constraint-based model predicts a processing delay at the pronoun,
whereas the Race model predicts a delay at the disambiguating adverbial. The
results are discussed in relation to Constraint-based and Race models in general,
with particular attention to their handling of discourse structure.
118
References
• MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). Lexical nature of
syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review , 101 (4), 676–703.
• MacDonald, M. C., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2006). Constraint satisfaction accounts of lexical
and sentence comprehension. In M. Traxler & M. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of
psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 581–611). New York: Elsevier.
• Pickering, M. J., Traxler, M. J., & Crocker, M. W. (2000). Ambiguity resolution in sentence
processing: Evidence against frequency-based accounts. Journal of Memory and
Language, 43 , 447–475.
• Traxler, M. J., Pickering, M. J., & Clifton, C., Jr.. (1998). Adjunct attachment is not a form of
lexical ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language , 39 , 558–592.
Testing hypotheses about the neurological mechanisms
underlying Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS)
(1Radboud
Hayo Terband1, Ben Maassen2 and Frank Guenther3
University Nijmegen; 2University of Groningen; 3Boston University)
Introduction: Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) has been associated with a wide
variety of diagnostic descriptions and has been shown to involve different symptoms
during successive stages of development. In a previous study (Terband et al., in
press), we attempted to associate the symptoms of CAS in a particular
developmental stage with information processing deficits by using computational
modeling with the DIVA model (e.g. Guenther et al., 2006). The hypothesis was that
the speech production system in CAS suffers from poor feedforward control and
consequently an increased reliance on the feedback control subsystem. A series of
computer simulations accounted for four key characteristics of speech production in
CAS: stronger coarticulation, distorted vowel productions, searching articulation,
and increased token-to-token variability. In the present study, two possible core
deficits of degraded forward control in CAS were investigated: reduced/degraded
somatosensory information (H1) and increased levels of neural noise (H2).
Method: In a series of computer simulations with the DIVA model we systematically
varied the involvement of these two deficits during the acquisitional processes of
babbling and imitation learning. H1 was implemented as noise in the somatosensory
and motor state representations (i.e., the cell activations in the model’s
somatosensory and motor cortices). In the case of H2, we added noise to the motor,
somatosensory, and auditory cortices. The babbling stage was evaluated by the
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sum-squared Euclidean error of the trained forward model. Imitation learning was
evaluated acoustically on four selected key symptoms of CAS. To differentiate the
effect of noise during acquisition from the effect of system noise alone, we
investigated the effect both deficits have on speech production after asymptotic
learning as control conditions.
Results: Babbling: Results showed decreased forward model performance with
increased intensity for both deficits. This effect is much larger for H2. Imitation
learning: Results show increased severity of four symptoms of CAS for both deficits deviant coarticulation, speech sound distortion, searching articulation, and
increased variability - but on different scales. The comparison between during and
after learning shows a larger difference for H1. Detailed results will be available at
the conference.
Discussion and conclusions: Results do not differentiate directly between the
hypotheses. However, results imply that for increased levels of neural noise the
majority of the symptoms should be attributed mainly to production/execution.
Degraded somatosensory information affects the acquisitional processes to a larger
extent, causing inherently unstable or deviant motor commands. These findings lead
to
directly
testable
predictions
for
auditory
and
articulatory
perturbation
experiments.
Evidence Based Word Alignment
Jörg Tiedemann (University of Groningen)
Automatic word alignment has received a lot of attention mainly due to the
intensive research on statistical machine translation. In recent years various
discriminative approaches have been proposed (Taskar et al 2005, 2006, Moore
2005, 2006, Liu et al, 2005, Blunsom and Cohn 2006). They require word-aligned
training data for estimating model parameters in contrast to the traditional IBM
alignment models that work on raw parallel corpora (sentence aligned only).
In this talk, we present another supervised alignment approach based on
association evidence indicating relations between words in context. Each piece of
link evidence is seen as independent but not mutually-exclusive probabilistic
indication and their disjunctive sum is used to make alignment decisions. For
example, the alignment evidence E(a|s,t) based on two clues is defined as this:
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E(a|s,t) = E(a,r1|s,t)+E(a,r2|s,t)-E(a,r1|s,t)*E(a,r2|s,t)
Link evidence is based on association features, for example string similarity or cooccurrence. As usual, these features need to be weighted according to their
strength in predicting links. The difference to other approaches using, for example,
linear combinations of features is that in our approach strong clues have a larger
influence on the alignment decisions made. The intuition behind this is that very
strong pieces of evidence are hard to overrule by many (other) weak indications. It
is sufficient to have only a few but solid clues to create a link. In this way, our
approach can be described as a sub-linear combination of high precision features.
The feature weights have to be learned from word aligned training data. The fact
that alignment clues are modeled as individual (independent) pieces of evidence
makes it possible to optimize there weights independently of each other. (Note that
complex features can easily be created in cases where this independence
assumption is strongly violated.) This makes learning extremely simple and fast and a
wide range of statistical, orthographic and positional clues can be combined in this
way. I our experiments we can show that this "evidence-based" approach to word
alignment can be used to improve the baseline of statistical alignment and also
outperforms a discriminative approach using a maximum entropy model with the
same set of features.
References
• P. Blunsom, T. Cohn, "Discriminative word alignment with conditional random fields", In
Proceedings of ACL, Sydney, Australia, 2006.
• S. Lacoste-Julien, B. Taskar, D. Klein, and M. Jordan, "Word Alignment via Quadratic
Assignment", In Proceedings of HLT-NAACL, New York, 2006.
• Liu, Yang, Liu, Qun, Lin, Shouxun, "Log-Linear Models For Word Alignment", In Proceedings
of ACL, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005.
• Robert C. Moore, A discriminative framework for bilingual word alignment, In Proceedings
of HLT/EMNLP, Vancouver, Canada , 2005.
• Robert C. Moore, Wen-tau Yih, Andreas Bode: Improved Discriminative Bilingual Word
Alignment. ACL 2006.
• B. Taskar, S. Lacoste-Julien, and D. Klein, "A Discriminative Matching Approach to Word
Alignment", In Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP, Vancouver, Canada, 2005.
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The case of North-Occidental Catalan: towards a linguistic
convergence with the Standard?
Esteve Valls (University of Barcelona)
During the last decades, the language policy carried out in Catalonia has resulted in
a better knowledge of Standard Catalan among the young generations. Some
experts state that this situation will lead to: (1) a process of linguistic convergence
that will reduce the dialectal diversity within Catalonia; and (2) a process of linguistic
divergence that will increase the differences between the Catalan spoken in
Catalonia and the varieties used in the other territories of the Catalan linguistic area.
In this presentation, we want to pay attention to the current situation of NorthOccidental Catalan, a dialect spoken in the Western area of Catalonia and in the
Autonomous Community of Aragon. Our aim is to determine the speed of the
linguistic change on the basis of quantitative data. To do that, we will show the
results of applying the dialectometric techniques developed at the University of
Barcelona to a corpus of linguistic data collected in the area. This corpus, which is
about 20.000 items, includes data from rural and urban areas located both in
Catalonia and Aragon; besides, the informants belong to four age groups, as we
intend to analyze the linguistic change in terms of apparent time. Using this corpus,
we would like to provide an answer to the following questions:
(1)
Has the process of linguistic convergence strengthened during the last
decades or it is actually slowing down because of the major awareness of its
speakers?
(2)
Are the rural areas more resistant to the pressure of the standard language
(3)
Is it possible to detect the border-effect that arises due to the existence of
than the urban areas?
political borders among these varieties? Do the dialects located in different
autonomous communities evolve differently depending on the language
policies of Catalonia and Aragon?
(4)
Does the standardization process entails a complete dialectal uniformization
or it results in a “dialectalized standard”, i.e., a common variety for all NorthOccidental subdialects that still keeps some of the most general features of
the dialect?
(5)
Is it possible to use dialectometric techniques to determine the different rates
at which morphological and phonological features evolve?
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To shed light on these questions, not only will we present the results of the
dialectometric analysis of the data, but we will also show some concrete examples
of the former signals of linguistic provenance that have now been replaced by the
Standard forms.
Grammatical Inventories
Marijn van 't Veer (Leiden University)
1. Introduction
The goal of linguistic theory is to explain both the similarities of, and differences
between, human languages. The framework of Optimality Theory attempts to do so
by positing the grammar as a language-specifc ranking of universal constraints. The
research presented here applies this idea to the realm of the segment inventory. The
status of the segment inventory of natural languages is not entirely clear within
Optimality Theory (OT). Whereas it is seen as a phonological primitive in some
analyses (for example, Flemming, 1995), both Prince and Smolensky (1993) and
Kager(1999) treat the inventory as a byproduct of grammar (i.e., a ranking of
faithfulness and markedness constraints). The latter solution is arguably more in
accordance with the spirit of OT: that which is language specific is derived from the
constraint ranking, and no language specific underlying representations are
assumed. However, a systematic investigation into how this can be accomplished
has never been undertaken.
2. Current Research
The present research demonstrates how segment inventories can be described
using a set of very simple constraints: two kinds of Feature Cooccurrence Constraints
(FCCs) are involved, and only one type of faithfulness constraint:
Feature Cooccurrence Constraints:
*[F][G]
a segment should not be specified for features [F] and [G]
[F] → [G]
a segment specified for feature [F] should be specified for feature [G]
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Faithfulness constraints:
IDENT[G]
for every segment at level α that is specified for F, the corresponding segment
at level β must be specified as well (where α and β are input and output
levels)
These constraints are realized for every feature, and ranked for every language in
the p-base database (Mielke, 2004). Applied to a subset of this database, these
constraints result in a two-stratum ranking describing the inventory of the language.
3. Implications
The implications of this approach are interesting in various respects. First and
foremost, it is shown that within OT, the segment inventory of natural languages can
be seen as an epiphenomenon of grammar, and subject to the same constraints as
other linguistic structures. Furthermore, a systematic description of inventories allows
for further typological investigations. Next, the description of the inventory in terms of
FCCs and ident constraints allows for predictions about the acquisition of the
inventory. Finally, this approach to segment inventories raises interesting predictions
when it comes to the relative markedness of segments, for example in epenthesis.
References
• Flemming, E. (1995). Auditory representations in phonology. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, University of California Los Angeles.
• Kager, R. (1999). Optimality theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mielke, J. (2004). Emergent features. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ohio State
University.
• Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. (1993). Optimality theory - constraint interaction in generative
grammar. ROA, 1-262.
The building blocks of language: the impact of literacy on speech
segmentation
Dorina Veldhuis (Tilburg University)
Current studies in neurolinguistics often take ‘words’ as a basis for research.
However, just as gestures do not necessarily refer to ‘words’, studies of language
acquisition within the tradition of Cognitive Linguistics have pointed out that the
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constituent building blocks children use and recognize do not always correspond to
conventional words (cf. Tomasello 2006). Similarly, a large number of descriptive and
experimental studies from the 1970s and 1980s has shown that children do not
‘automatically’ segment speech into words when they are requested to segment
sentences. What is more, these studies have shown that children up to the age of
about seven often lack the matalinguistic awareness of what our conventional
‘words’ exactly are, and that this awareness only develops when children get older.
Accordingly, researchers such as Karmiloff-Smith et al. (1996) concluded that age
affects children’s metalinguistic awareness, and their awareness of conventional
words. Homer (2007) and Kurvers & Uri (2006) suggested that it is probably not age
which is the decisive factor in children’s ‘word’ awareness, but rather literacy. As
Piaget already suggested that people only start to think according to certain
conventions once they have been exposed to it for a while (in Vygotsky 1986), the
hypothesis for this research is that children will only be able to segment speech into
conventional words once they have been exposed to formal literacy education.
In comparing speech segmentation styles of pre-readers and readers, the influence
of literacy on speech segmentation was tested in several pilot studies. Production
and perception tasks show that literacy indeed seems a decisive factor in speech
segmentation and in the perception of what the basic building blocks of language
are.
References
• Homer, Bruce D. (2000). Literacy and metalinguistic awareness: a cross-cultural study.
(thesis, National library Canada).
• Karmiloff-Smith, Annette et al. (1996). Rethinking metalinguistic awareness: representing
and accessing knowledge about what counts as word. Cognition, 58. 197-219.
• Kurvers, Jeanne & Uri, Helene (2006). Metalexical awareness: development, methodology
or written language? A cross-linguistic comparison. J Psycholinguist Res, 35. 353-367.
• Tomasello Michael (2006). Acquiring linguistic constructions. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.),
Handbook of Child Psychology. New York: Wiley.
• Vygotsky, Lev (1986). Thought and language. Alex Kozulin (ed.). Massachusettes: MIT
press.
125
Language analysis as a method to determine national or regional
origin in asylum cases
Sanne Verhoef and Maaike Verrips (De Taalstudio, Amsterdam)
When a foreign citizen applies for asylum in the Netherlands, doubts may arise
regarding the nationality, regional origin or ethnic background of the applicant, in
particular when they cannot show any documents to prove their claims. In such
cases, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service can offer the asylum seeker the
opportunity to dispel these doubts by means of a language analysis. In a language
analysis the language(s) spoken by the foreign citizen as well as his knowledge
about his claimed culture and region of origin are evaluated. The outcome of
language analyses may be crucial for the Dutch government’s decision whether to
grant asylum or not.
In the Netherlands, language analyses are carried out by the Bureau Land en Taal
(Office for Country Information and Language Analysis) of the Immigration and
Naturalisation Service. Language analyses are based on a recorded interview in
which the asylum seeker is asked questions about his background, for example
about local customs and names of towns and villages in the area. He is asked to
answer extensively while using his own language variety. A language analyst listens
to the recording and lays down his findings in a written “language analysis report”.
The report discusses the asylum seeker’s knowledge of his claimed region of origin
and culture and describes his language use, illustrated with examples of
pronunciation, word-choice and grammar. The language analyst generally is a
native speaker of the language that is analysed, and not necessarily a professional
linguist. He writes his report under supervision of a linguist, who does not necessarily
speak the language that is concerned. When an asylum seeker disagrees with the
outcome of a language analysis, he has the right to have a contra-expertise
(second opinion) carried out by an independent organisation or expert, at his own
cost.
In this presentation I will discuss the use of language analysis in the Dutch asylum
procedure and some of the concerns that linguists have raised about the quality
and reliability of such analyses. These concerns relate mainly to the complexity of
the language phenomena involved: multilingualism, language attitudes, and the
scarcity of descriptive studies of certain languages.
126
Diachronic change in subjectivity and stance:
conversationalization in journalistic texts
Kirsten Vis, José Sanders and Wilbert Spooren (VU University Amsterdam)
In different areas of research it has been suggested that public discourse is subject
to change (Bhatia 2005, Biber 2004, Fairclough 1994, Swales 1990), particularly to the
tendency towards a more informal and conversational style, as signalled by
Fairclough in studies of public texts such as university prospectuses, political
speeches and journalistic texts.
Although this theory is intuitively plausible, there is hardly any empirical evidence.
Therefore we put the conversationalization hypothesis to an empirical test in a
corpus analysis of Dutch news from 1950 and 2002 (first manually on 30,000 and
50,000 words respectively; second automatically on 2,000,000 words).
Since typical features of informal communication (conversation) are copresence of
speaker and listener and self-expression - both aspects of (inter)subjectivity (Clark
1996, Lyons 1994) - in our view conversationalization is best understood in terms of
foregrounding and (inter)subjectification. While subjectivity is the foregrounded
expression of the locutionary’s agent of herself and her own attitudes and beliefs
(Langacker 1990), intersubjectivity can be described as the explicit expression of the
speaker’s attention to the ‘self’ of the addressee (Traugott 2003). A means to
measure conversationalization lies in the frequency of (inter)subjective linguistic
features such as stance (Du Bois 2007).
Diachronic studies investigating stance markers such as stance adverbials, (semi)modals, and stance complement clauses show that in various registers speakers
and writers have become more inclined to express stance, especially over the last
50 years; thus suggesting major shifts in social norms (Biber 2004).
In this study, we extend this stance model of conversationalization with linguistic
features of speaker subjectivity and intersubjectivity as found in conversational data
by Scheibman (2002). This includes explicit reference to speaker and listener by
pronouns, questions, and exclamations. In addition, presentational coherence
markers (Mann and Thompson 1988), deictic elements and intensifiers (Pearce 2005)
are included. To minimize the effects of the subjectivity of other speakers than the
journalist on our results, we separate direct quotations in our corpus.
127
The results show that, contrary to expectations, explicit reference to speaker and
listener seem to have generally decreased in news, when excluding direct
quotations. Other markers have generally not changed in frequency. However,
direct quotations themselves are used more in 2002 than in 1950. In addition, they
have
become
more
subjective.
This
suggests
an
unexpected
form
of
conversationalization in news: conversation is not imitated but incorporated more. In
this paper these counterintuitive findings are discussed and possible explanations
proposed.
References
•
Bhatia, V.K. (2005). In H. Halmari and T. Virtanen (eds.) Persuasion across genres.
•
Biber, D. (2004). Historical Patterns for the Grammatical Marking of Stance: A Cross-
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 213-225.
Register Comparison, Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5 (1): 107-136.
•
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
•
Du Bois, J.W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.) Stancetaking in discourse.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 139-182.
•
Fairclough, N. (1994). Conversationalization of public discourse and the authority of the
consumer. In R. Keat, N. Whiteley and N. Abercrombie (eds.) The Authority of the
Consumer. London: Routledge, 253-268.
•
Langacker, R.W. (1990). Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics, 1: 5-38.
•
Lyons, J. (1994). Subjecthood and subjectivity. In M. Yaguello (ed.) Subjecthood and
Subjectivity: Proceedings of the Colloquium ‘The Status of the Subject in Linguistic Theory’.
Paris: Ophrys, 9-17.
•
Mann, W.C. and S.A. Thompson (1988). Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional
•
Pearce, M. (2005). Informalization in UK party election broadcasts: 1966–97. Language &
theory of text organization. Text 8 (3): 243-281.
Literature, 14 (1): 65-90.
•
Scheibman, J. (2002). Point of view and grammar: Structural patterns of subjectivity in
American English conversation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
•
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings.
•
Traugott, E. (2003). From subjectification to intersubjectification. In R. Hickey (ed.) Motives
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
for Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124-39.
128
Who's got the floor? - speaking patterns in group conversation
Nynke van der Vliet (University of Groningen)
Group meetings form an important part of many professional activities. They are
useful to plan work, solve and highlight problems and share knowledge between
people. With increased possibilities of recording and archiving the meeting process,
there is a growing need for meeting browsers to enable users to navigate through
an archive of meetings. For this information-retrieval task as well as for summarization
of meetings, the recorded talk needs to be indexed or annotated. A description at
the level of single turns is usually too fine-grained for this; in particular, many turns are
not perceived as being part of the main 'floor' of the conversation, but rather as side
comments. Therefore, floor can be an important concept for understanding the
content and discourse structure of a meeting.
Previous attempts at statistical modelling to predict the floor have been limited to
considering patterns of who has spoken previously (e.g. Parker, 1988). Herein, a floor
is defined as a pair-wise conversation between two participants of a group
conversation. Edelsky (1981) defines floor as a psychologically developed,
interactional space among interactants, which is related to the topic of the
discourse, communicative actions (how things are being said in the discourse), and
the participant's sense of what is happening in the conversation.
This presentation discusses the application of both the floor concepts of Parker and
Edelsky to the AMI and ICSI meeting corpora to see if the theory is appropriate for
modelling floor in conversation. Parker's floor model is easy to apply and describes
the sequence of speaking turns, but it ignores some important aspects of
conversation. The application of Edelsky's floor concept shows that a sort of ‘main’
conversation can be distinguished next to other utterances that form the
background speech. In this speech there are several types of utterances that have
different functions in the turn-taking process in group conversation.
Do Presupposition Triggers Influence the Felicity of Voice
Mismatched Sentences?
Margreet Vogelzang and Jennifer Spenader (University of Groningen)
Kehler (2002) and Kehler et al. (2008) have shown that the type of rhetorical relation
holding between two clauses influences pronoun interpretation. Pronouns in
129
PARALLEL relations such as (1) have different interpretation preferences than
pronouns in CAUSE-EFFECT relations like (2).
(1) Samuel threatened Justin with a knife, and Erin blindfolded him. (PARALLEL)
(2) Samuel threatened Justin with a knife, and Erin stopped him. (CAUSE-EFFECT)
According to Kehler et al. (2008), simple strategies for pronoun interpretation that
say e.g. object pronouns prefer object antecedents, work for PARALLEL relations in
e.g. (1), but are irrelevant for CAUSE-EFFECT relations like (2).
A further claim of Kehler’s theory is that PARALLEL relations prefer PARALLEL syntactic
structures, while for CAUSE-EFFECT relations this is irrelevant. Thus voice mismatches,
with a passive clause followed by an active clause, are dispreferred in PARALLEL
relations, e,g, (3) and one reason why would be because it make anaphor
interpretation difficult because simple strategies are no longer possible.
(3) Justin was threatened by Samuel with a knife, and Erin blindfolded him.
(PARALLEL)
(4) Justin was threatened by Samuel with a knife, and Erin stopped him. (CAUSEEFFECT)
It has been suggested that the presence of a presupposition marker like too might
help repair the damage made by the mismatch, making such sentences more
felicitous, e.g. (5).
(5) Samuel threatened Justin with a knife, and Erin blindfolded him too. (PARALLEL)
In a study testing Kehler’s theories with Verb Phrase Ellipsis, Frazier and Clifton (2006)
unexpectedly found that people disliked syntactic mismatches regardless of
whether or not they were PARALLEL or CAUSE-EFFECT. But their examples didn’t have
too in them, and all of Kehler’s examples did.
In a sentences judgment task experiment, we ask Dutch speakers to judge the
felicity of PARALLEL and CAUSE-EFFECT sentences with and without syntactic voice
mismatches. An additional factor is the presence or absence of the presupposition
triggers too (ook) and toch, and testing in Dutch is particularly useful because the
Dutch trigger toch marks Denial of Expectation, a type of CAUSE-EFFECT relation.
Each sentence also contained an object pronoun and we also study how the
130
presence of the presupposition trigger influences the pronoun interpretation. Our
prediction is that the presence of the presupposition trigger will improve the
mismatch sentences because it offers listeners an alternative means for interpreting
the coherence relation.
Right Dislocation and Afterthoughts
Mark de Vries (University of Groningen)
This talk discusses the properties of right-peripheral dislocation constructions in
Germanic languages. Examples are (1) and (2):
(1) They were really big, those pizzas.
(2) Something beautiful appeared in the sky, a double rainbow.
The main claims are the following:
A. Two types need to be distinguished: backgrounding right dislocation (1) and
afterthoughts (2). The differences, however, are essentially semantic/pragmatic and
phonological, but not necessarily syntactic. In (1), those pizzas is destressed, and
forms a prosodic unit with the matrix. In (2), on the other hand, a double rainbow is
assigned
an
independent
intonation
contour
containing
a
pitch
accent.
Semantically, those pizzas in (1) functions as a reminder. By contrast, a double
rainbow in (2) provides new information. As for the syntax, I argue against a
movement analysis of backgrounding right-dislocation (cf. Averintseva-Klisch 2008).
To this end, I will present examples from Dutch, German, and English showing a lack
of reconstruction effects, and the possibility of non-local construal (cf. Zwart 2001
and De Vries 2007).
B. Dislocation in the right periphery forms a natural class with apposition. This class
can be described as anchored parenthesis: the relevant phrases are analyzed as
parenthetical secondary predicates of some anchor in the matrix – often a
(pro)nominal. Building on Potts (2007), Heringa (2007), and O’Connor (2008), I argue
that there is a secondary proposition that can schematically be represented as
<pro-anchor> = <parenthetical material>. Such a copular connection can be
attributive or specific¬ational. In (2), for example, it is specificational, but in (3) – from
German – it is attributive:
131
(3)
Maria ging aus wandern, einfach gekleidet.
‘Maria went for a walk, simply dressed.’
C. Right dislocation and afterthoughts are not constructions in the rigid sense of the
word. Especially in spoken language, phrases with the same function can be found
in intervening positions. This is a relevant difference with left dislocation. In (3),
einfach gekleidet can be shifted to the middle field. Another example is (4) – from
Dutch –, where daar is equated to in Groningen:
(4)
En daar heeft Jan, in Groningen (bedoel ik), zijn toekomstige vrouw leren
kennen.
‘And there, in Groningen (I mean), Jan got to know his future wife.’
Thus, once we recognize the concept of anchored parenthesis, we can generalize
over a number of apparently different constructions.
References
• Averintseva-Klisch,
Maria
(2008).
Rechte
Satzperipherie
im
Diskurs:
Die
NP-
Rechtsversetzung im Deutschen. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Tübingen.
• Heringa, Herman (2007). Appositional constructions: coordination and predication.
Proceedings of the Fifth Semantics in the Netherlands Day, Marlies Kluck & Erik-Jan Smits
(eds.), 67–82. Den Haag: RS Staten Kopie.
• O’Connor, Kathleen (2008). Aspects de la syntaxe et de l’interprétation de l’apposition à
antécédent nominal. Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3.
• Potts, Christopher (2007). Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings. In
The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss (eds.),
475-501. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• de Vries, Mark (2007). Dislocation and backgrounding. Linguistics in the Netherlands 2007,
235-247.
• Zwart, Jan-Wouter (2001). Backgrounding (‘right dislocation’) in Dutch. Manuscript,
University of Groningen.
132
Paths in L1 acquisition of verb second – on the role of input and
frequency
Christian Waldmann (Växjö University)
This presentation deals with similarities and differences in L1 acquisition of verb
second (V2) among Swedish children. In Swedish, V2 means that the finite verb must
be the second constituent in main clauses (1). In subordinate clauses, the finite verb
occurs in a lower position, following sentence negation (2).
(1) a. Igår
ville
handla
julklappar.
wanted
Per
shop Christmas-gifts
(1) b. *Igår Per
ville
inte
handla
yesterday
Per
wanted
...att
Per
inte
ville
that
Per
not
wanted
yesterday
(2)
Per
inte
not
not
handla
julklappar.
shop Christmas-gifts
julklappar
igår.
shop Christmas-gifts
yesterday
This study investigates the acquisition of V2 among 4 monolingual Swedish speaking
children (1;6–3;0), focusing on their input as well as their production.
As regards the input for V2, all children are exposed to an equally large and stable
amount of input for V2. Lexically, the input for V2 is characterized to a great extent
by the same finite verbs and initial constituents.
Although exposed to a quantitatively and qualitatively similar input for V2, not all 4
children acquire V2 alike. 3 children apply V2 consistently in the earliest finite
utterances, finite verbs are rarely misplaced. No lexical limitations are observed.
The fourth child, called Tea, makes abundant verb placement errors up to an age of
3;3, a period during which she applies V2 only sporadically. It is however argued that
Tea’s early V2 consists of imitated chunks and that V2 is not applied systematically
until just before 3;0. Moreover, it is argued that Tea does not misplace finite verbs
randomly, but that her verb placement in main clauses develops systematically in 3
phases: from a low verbal position following sentence negation, as in subordinate
clauses (see (2) above), via a verbal position in the middle field of the clause, as in
(1b) above, to the second position, as in (1a) above. The transition to V2 happens
abruptly between 3;3 and 3;4.
133
As regards the theoretical implications of my results, I discuss the role of input and
frequency in acquisition, arguing that neither copying of input patterns based on
frequency nor triggering parameters can capture Tea’s verb placement. Instead it
seems that Tea formulates and evaluates different hypotheses, a strategy which
allows children to take different paths in acquisition. Furthermore, I explore the
relation between verb placement in subordinate clauses in the input and Tea’s
deviating verb placement in main clauses.
Phonological Correlates of Emphasis in Baghdadi Arabic
Islam Youssef (University of Tromsø)
In this paper, I argue that phonological activity is dependent on the structure of the
contrast system of a given language—following the Toronto school of contrast
(Dresher, Piggot & Rice 1994 inter alia). Based on the system of contrast, the analysis
of language into an economic and exhaustive set of distinctive features is achieved,
and the resulting set of natural classes can account for all kinds of phonological
behavior. I illustrate this with regard to the interaction of pharyngealization and
labialization in Baghdadi Arabic (BA).
In BA, all consonants may occur pharyngealized in syllables containing a back low
vowel [ɑ], while their non-pharyngealized counterparts occur in syllables not
containing the back low vowel. I take this complementary distribution as evidence
that the low vowel [ɑ] has an underlying pharyngealization feature. Furthermore, the
restricted distribution of emphatic non-low vowels suggests that pharyngealization is
contrastive for the coronals [tˤ, sˤ, ðˤ, rˤ, lˤ]. This defines the natural class of
pharyngealization triggers [tˤ, sˤ, ðˤ, rˤ, lˤ, ɑ] by a V-place[dor] feature.
Pharyngealization spreads from these segments within the uninflected word domain,
but is blocked by non-tautosyllabic high vowels or palatal consonants (Hassan &
Esling 2007). These segments constitute the set of blockers, marked with a Vplace[cor] feature.
Another unique fact about BA is that in some contexts [i] and [u] exist in
complementary distribution (Blanc 1964, Altoma 1969), best manifested in the
epenthetic vowel (EV). If the preceding vowel is [u] or [i], the EV would also be [u] or
[i] (i.e. vowel harmony). When the first vowel is [a]; the EV may be [i] or [u]
depending on the consonantal environment. Interestingly, if the cluster consists of a
labial followed or preceded by a velar or emphatic, the EV is always [u]. I argue that
134
these occurrences of [u] can be derived by spreading a V-place[ lab] feature (from
a labial) and an a V or C-place[dor] (from an emphatic or velar).
This simplification of Baghdadi Arabic phonology allows us to account for
pharyngealization and labialization as correlates of emphasis. While the feature Vplace[dor] defines the natural class of pharyngealization triggers in BA, it also
participates in the process of labialization. The proposed set of abstract features
provide a unified analysis of multiple phonological processes in the language and
are
solely
justified
on
overt
phonological
evidence.
Furthermore,
this
representational analysis fits neatly into a constraint-based model of phonology such
as Optimality Theory.
Acquisition of Meaningful Combinations of Words from Psychiatric
Texts
Liang-Chih Yu and Chien-Lung Chan (Yuan Ze University)
With the increased incidence of depressive disorders, many psychiatric websites
have developed community-based services such as message boards, web forums
and blogs for public access. Through these services, individuals can describe their
stressful or negative life events such as death of a family member, argument with a
spouse and loss of a job, along with depressive symptoms, such as depressive mood,
suicidal tendencies and anxiety. Such psychiatric texts (e.g., forum posts) contain
large amounts of natural language expressions related to negative emotion, which
makes them a useful data resource for building emotion-based applications as well
as automatic psychiatric services. For instance, a dialogue system can generate
supportive responses like “Don’t worry”, “That’s really sad” and “Cheer up” if it can
understand the negative life events embedded in the following input sentences.
(1)
I am very worried about my children’s health.
(2)
I broke up with my dear but cruel boyfriend recently.
[Family]
[Love]
(3)
I argued with my best friend and was upset.
[Social]
(4)
I lost my job in this economic recession a few months ago.
[Work]
(5)
I hate to go to school because my teacher always blames me.
[School]
The main characteristic of the above sentences are the meaningful combinations of
words such as <worry, children, health>, <break up, boyfriend>, <argue, friend>,
<loss, job>, and <school, teacher, blame>. Such word combinations carry more
135
information than singe words, which are significant features for identifying negative
life events. Therefore, the aim of this study is two-fold: (a) to automatically discover
meaningful combinations of words from the sentences annotated with negative life
events; and (b) to identify the type (e.g. [Family]) of negative life events of
sentences using the discovered word combinations.
To discover meaningful word combinations, we incorporate the measure mutual
information into a data mining algorithm, called association rule mining, to
incrementally derive frequently co-occurred words in sentences. For simplicity, only
the combinations of nouns and verbs are considered, and the length is restricted to
at most 4 words, i.e., 2-word, 3-word and 4-word combinations. The discovered word
combinations are then combined with single words as features to train classifiers
such as a support vector machine (SVM) and naïve bayes (NB) classifier for negative
life event identification. Experimental results show that the meaningful combinations
of words are high-precision features, thus yielding better performance than the
baseline system using single words alone.
POS Multi-tagging based on combined models
Yan Zhao (University of Groningen)
In a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), we compared two POS multi-tagging decoding
methods: N_best paths and forward-backward methods on three different
languages. We found that the forward-backward method is slightly better than the
N_best paths method. Based on the forward-backward frame, we combined the
HMM and Maximum Entropy Model and obtained a better result than using the
individual models. This result suggests that our combined multi-tagging method
should improve the Alpino parser both in efficiency and accuracy.
The Effect of Pragmatic Infelicity on Children’s Interpretation of
Weak Crossover Sentences: Evidence from Dutch
Marie-Elise van der Ziel (Utrecht University)
The pronoun in sentence (1) can only be interpreted deictically. That is, the
sentence can only mean that a certain mother tickled all the boys. The reading
whereby each boy is tickled by his own mother (e.g. the bound-variable reading) is
136
ungrammatical. The constraint which prohibits the latter interpretation is known as
the Weak Crossover (WCO) constraint.
(1)
??Hisi mother tickled each boyi.
If the WCO-constraint derives from the innate set of linguistic principles of Universal
Grammar (UG), and if children have access to the principles of UG from the onset of
language acquisition (e.g. the Strong Continuity Approach), then children should
have knowledge of the constraint from an early age. However, though some L1acquisition studies report that English preschool children show adult-like sensitivity to
WCO-effects (Thornton 1990, Su, 2001), the results of other studies suggest that 5-year
olds have not acquired the constraint yet (Lewis, 2000). In particular, Thornton (1990)
and Su (2001) report that more than 80 percent of their child participants rejected
the test sentence as a correct description of a situation in which the bound-variable
interpretation of the sentence would be true. In contrast, only 15 percent of the
participants of Lewis (2000) correctly judged the test statement to be false.
This talk will argue that the results of both Su and Thornton may have been
confounded by some methodological problems. Second, this talk will argue that
though Lewis’ study does not suffer from the same problems as Su’s and Thornton’s
studies, the poor performance of Lewis’ participants does not necessarily indicate
that 4-6 year old children have not acquired the WCO-constraint yet. Rather, it is
argued that pragmatically infelicitous use of the possessive pronoun may have
negatively influenced children’s judgements.
In this talk I will present the results of two Truth Value Judgement experiments on the
acquisition of Weak Crossover by Dutch preschool children, in which an attempt is
made to improve the pragmatic felicity of the pronoun in the test statement. The
fact that our child participants performed significantly better on WCO sentences
than the children of Lewis’s study suggests that pragmatic (in)felicity is indeed a
factor influencing children’s judgements, albeit not the only one.
Embedded verb-second revisited: a layered derivations account
Jan-Wouter Zwart (University of Groningen)
Synopsis This paper proposes a new analysis of embedded verb-second (EV2)
phenomena (in languages like Dutch, Frisian, and German), within a version of the
137
minimalist program that assumes layered derivations (Zwart 2008). The proposal is
that EV2 indicates that the matrix clause and the embedded clause are construed
in separate derivation layers, and more particularly that it is the matrix clause that is
the outcome of a previous derivation. The analysis is consistent with the analysis of
embedded root phenomena of Hooper and Thompson (1973), and proposes a
rephrasing of that analysis in current minimalist terms.
Embedded verb-second Dutch, German and Frisian show a pattern of verb
placement where the finite verb is in second position in independent clauses (V2),
and in final position in embedded clauses. In circumscribed constructions, V2 also
occurs in embedded clauses (1).
(1)
Jan
zei
John said
dat
hij
kon
that
he
could AFF
wel
janken
cry
‘John said that he could cry.’
(1) occurs when the matrix part has a subordinate status in terms of information
structure (Hooper and Thompson 1973:473, Zwart 1997:235). EV2 has distinct
properties
(opacity
for
extraction,
no
cliticization/agreement
on
the
complementizer) and restrictions (not with negative, irrealis, or interrogative matrix
clauses; not in subject or adjunct clauses). EV2 is typically analysed as involving
coordination (De Haan 1990), CP-recursion (Vikner 1991) or a restart (Zwart 1997).
Layered derivations A layered derivation is a network of derivations, such that the
output of one derivation layer may function as part of the input of another. In the
transition between derivation layers, material passes through the interfaces, creating
a fixed sound-meaning correspondence and turning complex material into an
atomic element (a standard example is idiom formation). Applied to EV2 it is
tempting to think that the EV2 clause is the output of a separate derivation layer. This
would explain its opacity for extraction (since the output is turned into an atom,
rendering its component parts invisible for syntactic operations). However, subject
clauses and adjunct clauses are by definition the output of a separate derivation,
and they do not show EV2 (with few exceptions).
Proposal This talk therefore considers another implementation of the layered
derivation architecture, where the matrix part is the output of a separate derivation
layer. This predicts that the matrix clause does not allow any kind of modification
(involving negation, mood, or interrogative). It also follows that the EV2 clause
cannot be a subject/adjunct, as the matrix clause would then not be a constituent.
138
It is also consistent with the idea that the matrix clause has subordinate status. I
specifically propose that dat in (1) is not a regular complementizer but a kind of
linker introduced at the interface, which may be absent in some varieties (e.g.
German)
References
• De Haan 1990, Hoofd- en bijzinnen: traditie en progressie, Handelingen Ned.
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• Hooper & Thompson 1973, On the application of root transformations, Linguistic Inquiry 4
• Vikner 1995, Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic languages Oxford
• Zwart 1997, Morphosyntax of verb movement Kluwer
• Zwart 2008, Prospects of top-down derivation, t.a. Catalan Journal of Linguistics.
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