Chapter 2. Gender assignment in mixed noun phrases

2022 ◽  
pp. 13-48
Author(s):  
Kate Bellamy ◽  
M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Natalia Mitrofanova ◽  
Olga Urek ◽  
Yulia Rodina ◽  
Marit Westergaard

Abstract Previous research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that this property is acquired early in transparent gender systems such as Russian. However, it is not clear to what extent children are sensitive to the assignment cues and to what extent they simply memorize correspondences between frequent lexical items. Furthermore, we do not know if bilingual children are different from monolingual children in this respect. This article reports on a study investigating bilingual children’s sensitivity to gender assignment cues in Russian. A group of 64 bilingual German–Russian children living in Germany participated in the study, as well as 107 monolingual controls in Russia. The elicitation experiments used both real and nonce words, as well as noun phrases with mismatched cues (where the morphophonological shape of the noun cued one gender and the agreement on the modifying adjective another). The results show that both bilinguals and monolinguals are highly sensitive to cues, both to the frequent transparent cues and to more fine-grained gender regularities in situations where there is ambiguity. There is also an age effect, showing that younger children pay more attention to the cue on the noun itself, thus displaying a preference for regular patterns, while older children are more sensitive to gender agreement on other targets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-350
Author(s):  
Diana Passino

"Preliminary Notes on Gender Assignment Manipulation in Sanvalentinese. This contribution draws attention on a peculiar feature of the Italo-Romance dialect spoken in San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore, where a subgroup of feminine nouns displays both feminine and masculine plural options. Gender shift to masculine in the plural seems to be exploited to obtain semantic differences related to countability and evaluation, namely to refer respectively to weak differentiation and pejorative meaning. This phenomenon, known as recategorization or gender assignment manipulation, is rather common in African languages of different families, but less pervasive and systematic in Romance. Gender and recategorization in Sanvalentinese are discussed in relation to inflectional classes, of which this contribution provides a sketch. Keywords: gender, number, recategorization, inflectional class, overdifferentiation, collective plural, Romance dialectology, metaphony."


2019 ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
O. Tuhai

The article focuses on the basic theoretical approaches to the analysis of complementary complexes in modern grammar paradigms. The phenomenon of clausal complementation has been presented. Subordinate sentences are characterized as object clausal complements with the status of a core internal argument of the main predicate. Grammatical configuration and functioning of finite/infinitive complementary sentences in English have been revealed. Grammatical status of clauses under the study is postulated as object predication or the internal verbal complement in the function of an object. Grammatical indicators of finite sentences are analyzed considering specific that/wh- markers of complementation, semantics of matrix verbs as well as temporal tense-form feature in a verbal phrase. Grammatical configuration of infinitive sentences is denoted by to-/wh-markers and noun phrases in a certain case. Identifying criteria of verbal clausal complements have been distinguished. Morphology of the predicate, internal/external syntax of a complementary construction are grounded as leading features of their definition. Typology of verbal complementation in terms of transitivity, complement attachment to the perculia part of speech, functional communicative approach has been reviewed. General monotransitive, complex-transitive and ditransitive complementation has been outlined. When being attached to a particular language constituent a clause is determined as nominal, adjective or verbal complement. Due to communicative peculiarity finite subordinate clauses are positioned as content declarative, interrogative and exclamative.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irma Maria Lontoh ◽  
Jenny Hilda Pakasi ◽  
Martha Salea-Warouw

The fishermen community is a community found in North Sulawesi, especially in the coastal area of Sario-Malalayang, Manado. With different cultural backgrounds, ethnicities, this group has its own uniqueness, especially in language. This research succeeded is finding expressions in the fishermen community in the coastal area of Sario-Malalayang. These expressions consist of forms of words, phrases, and clauses in accordance with the lingual forms of theory from Widdowson (1997: 3). The results of the study found a number of lingual forms in affixed words, which had a similar prefix as in the words ba-daseng, ba-kintu, ba-tono, ba-saoh, ba-pake. In addition, the majority of phrases contained in the results of the study are predominantly dominated by noun phrases, such as in the lips phrases of napo, puru loe, coolies, ikang itching, mulu sosoroka, gargantang tubir.This research also succeeded in exploring and discovering cultural meanings. The meanings in the form of words, such as ‘badaseng’, ‘sunga’, then the form of a phrase, like ‘puru loe’, ‘mulu sosoroka’, then sentence expressions in the form of expressions like ‘udang deng katang so kurang sama’, ‘kase wora mar jang talapas’, ‘karja cuma sampe di kuli aer’, etc. The expressions encountered generally contain various cultural meanings, namely advice, satire, ridicule, seduction, warning, insults, and despair. Based on the conclusion, the researcher suggests to the next researcher, to be more comprehensive related to the use of Manado Malay language expression in different background and contexts in order to get a whole description about expressions system of Manado Malay language, especially in the fishermen community in North Sulawesi.Keywords: fishermen community, language and culture


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shintaro Tsuji ◽  
Andrew Wen ◽  
Naoki Takahashi ◽  
Hongjian Zhang ◽  
Katsuhiko Ogasawara ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Named entity recognition (NER) plays an important role in extracting the features of descriptions for mining free-text radiology reports. However, the performance of existing NER tools is limited because the number of entities depends on its dictionary lookup. Especially, the recognition of compound terms is very complicated because there are a variety of patterns. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study is to develop and evaluate a NER tool concerned with compound terms using the RadLex for mining free-text radiology reports. METHODS We leveraged the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES) to develop customized pipelines using both RadLex and SentiWordNet (a general-purpose dictionary, GPD). We manually annotated 400 of radiology reports for compound terms (Cts) in noun phrases and used them as the gold standard for the performance evaluation (precision, recall, and F-measure). Additionally, we also created a compound-term-enhanced dictionary (CtED) by analyzing false negatives (FNs) and false positives (FPs), and applied it for another 100 radiology reports for validation. We also evaluated the stem terms of compound terms, through defining two measures: an occurrence ratio (OR) and a matching ratio (MR). RESULTS The F-measure of the cTAKES+RadLex+GPD was 32.2% (Precision 92.1%, Recall 19.6%) and that of combined the CtED was 67.1% (Precision 98.1%, Recall 51.0%). The OR indicated that stem terms of “effusion”, "node", "tube", and "disease" were used frequently, but it still lacks capturing Cts. The MR showed that 71.9% of stem terms matched with that of ontologies and RadLex improved about 22% of the MR from the cTAKES default dictionary. The OR and MR revealed that the characteristics of stem terms would have the potential to help generate synonymous phrases using ontologies. CONCLUSIONS We developed a RadLex-based customized pipeline for parsing radiology reports and demonstrated that CtED and stem term analysis has the potential to improve dictionary-based NER performance toward expanding vocabularies.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002383092097705
Author(s):  
Monika Molnar ◽  
José Alemán Bañón ◽  
Simona Mancini ◽  
Sendy Caffarra

We assessed monolingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-Basque toddlers’ sensitivity to gender agreement in correct vs. incorrect Spanish noun phrases (definite article + noun), using a spontaneous preference listening paradigm. Monolingual Spanish-learning toddlers exhibited a tendency to listen longer to the grammatically correct phrases (e.g., la casa; “the house”), as opposed to the incorrect ones (e.g., * el casa). This listening preference toward correct phrases is in line with earlier results obtained from French monolingual 18-month-olds (van Heugten & Christophe, 2015). Bilingual toddlers in the current study, however, tended to listen longer to the incorrect phrases. Basque was not a source of interference in the bilingual toddler’s input as Basque does not instantiate grammatical gender agreement. Overall, our results suggest that both monolingual and bilingual toddlers can distinguish between the correct and incorrect phrases by 18 months of age; however, monolinguals and bilinguals allocate their attention differently when processing grammatically incorrect forms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (3) ◽  
pp. 749-788
Author(s):  
Ramón González Ruiz ◽  
Dámaso Izquierdo Alegría

AbstractEncapsulators are cohesive noun phrases that compress the content of discursive segments of predicative nature. Their persuasive potential has been extensively highlighted in the literature. Some studies have identified general tendencies in the use of encapsulators in thematic or rhematic positions. However, the parameters influencing the preference for thematic or rhematic encapsulators have not been specifically addressed with quantitative data. The aim of this article is to analyse those parameters in a corpus of newspaper editorials. We have selected several parameters, most of them related to their evaluative and/or persuasive potential, that might influence the use of encapsulators in the thematic-rhematic progression. Rhematic encapsulators are slightly more frequent, but we show that there are no clear correlations between each pair of parameters. Although evaluation seems to play a role (the most evaluative encapsulators tend to appear in rhematic positions), we try to show that this is mediated by many other factors that make encapsulation a less predictable type of referential expression. We also reflect on the importance of other parameters, i.e. cognitive (accessibility) and textual (genre).


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