Perception of Word-level Prominence in Free Word Order Language Discourse

2019 ◽  
pp. 002383091988408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Luchkina ◽  
Jennifer S. Cole
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
Rating Task ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Russian Speaker ◽  
Free Word

This study examines the contribution of constituent order, prosody, and information structure to the perception of word-level prominence in Russian, a free word order language. Prominence perception is investigated through the analysis of prominence ratings of nominal words in two published narrative texts. Word-level perceived prominence ratings were obtained from linguistically naïve native speakers of Russian in two tasks: a silent prominence rating task of the read text passages, and an auditory prominence rating task of the same texts as read aloud by a native Russian speaker. Analyses of the prominence ratings reveal a greater likelihood of perceived prominence for words introducing discourse-new referents, as well as words occurring in a non-canonical sentence position, and featuring acoustic-prosodic enhancement. The results show that prosody and word order vary probabilistically in relation to information structure in read-aloud narrative, suggesting a complex interaction of prosody, word order, and information structure underlying the perception of prominence.

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

scholarly journals Word order in Latin locative constructions: a corpus study in Caesar’s De bello gallico

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Structural Domains ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
First Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.

scholarly journals When discourse matches syntax: On meta-informative centering theory and discourse coherence in the recent history of English

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Ana Elina Martínez Insua
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Order Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Centering Theory ◽  
Free Word

This paper is concerned with how <em>there</em>-constructions may have helped to achieve discourse coherence in the recent history of English. From the theoretical framework of Meta-Informative Centering Theory (MIC) the paper explores the possibility to establish a relation between the syntactic structures under analysis and the distinction between 'smooth-shift' and 'rough-shift' transitions from one centre of attention to another (Brennan, Friedman &amp; Pollard, 1987). This will help, ultimately, to investigate the interaction between centering and MIC theories, word order and information structure in a 'non-free' word order language such as English. A corpus- driven analysis of the behaviour of spoken and written <em>there</em>-constructions from late Middle English to Present Day English will show their capacity to function either as highly coherent structures that continue with the same local topic as the previous utterance(s), or as means to shift the local focus of attention.

Development of Automatic Rule-based Semantic Tagger and Karaka Analyzer for Hindi

2022 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Pragya Katyayan ◽  
Nisheeth Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Contextual Knowledge ◽  
Text File ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Hindi is the third most-spoken language in the world (615 million speakers) and has the fourth highest native speakers (341 million). It is an inflectionally rich and relatively free word-order language with an immense vocabulary set. Despite being such a celebrated language across the globe, very few Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications and tools have been developed to support it computationally. Moreover, most of the existing ones are not efficient enough due to the lack of semantic information (or contextual knowledge). Hindi grammar is based on Paninian grammar and derives most of its rules from it. Paninian grammar very aggressively highlights the role of karaka theory in free-word order languages. In this article, we present an application that extracts all possible karakas from simple Hindi sentences with an accuracy of 84.2% and an F1 score of 88.5%. We consider features such as Parts of Speech tags, post-position markers (vibhaktis), semantic tags for nouns and syntactic structure to grab the context in different-sized word windows within a sentence. With the help of these features, we built a rule-based inference engine to extract karakas from a sentence. The application takes in a text file with clean (without punctuation) simple Hindi sentences and gives back karaka tagged sentences in a separate text file as output.

Parsing Korean: A Free Word Order Language

1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-128
Author(s):  
K.-S. CHOI
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Topic, focus, and discourse structure

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dejan Matić
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
Information Packaging ◽  
One To One ◽  
Free Word ◽  
Free Variation

It is commonly assumed that word order in free word order languages is determined by a simple topic – focus dichotomy. Analysis of data from Ancient Greek, a language with an extreme word order flexibility, reveals that matters are more complex: the parameters of discourse structure and semantics interact with information packaging and are thus indirectly also responsible for word order variation. Furthermore, Ancient Greek displays a number of synonymous word order patterns, which points to the co-existence of pragmatic determinedness and free variation in this language. The strict one-to-one correspondence between word order and information structure, assumed for the languages labelled discourse configurational, thus turns out to be only one of the possible relationships between form and pragmatic content.

scholarly journals Turkish Discourse Bank: Porting a discourse annotation style to a morphologically rich language

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deniz Zeyrek ◽  
Işın Demirşahin ◽  
Ayışığı B. Sevdik Çallı
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
Paper Briefly ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

This paper briefly describes the Turkish Discourse Bank, the first publicly available annotated discourse resource for Turkish. It focuses on the challenges posed by annotating Turkish, a free word order language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology. It shows the usefulness of the PDTB style annotation but points out the need to expand this annotation style with the needs of the target language.

The DINOUS parser

1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-173
Author(s):  
ANTHONY DRAGGIOTIS ◽  
MARIA GRIGORIADOU ◽  
GIORGOS PHILOKYPROU
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Free Word ◽  
The Way

This paper deals with the development of parsing techniques for the analysis of natural language sentences. We present a paradigm of a multi- path shift-reduce parser which combines two differently structured computational subsystems. The first uses information concerning native speakers' preferences, and the second deals with the linguistic knowledge. To apply preferences on parsing, we propose a method to rank the alternative partial analyses on the basis of parse context and frequency of use effects. The method is mainly based on psycholinguistic evidence, since we hope eventually to build a parser working as closely as possible to the way native speakers analyse natural sentences. We also discuss in detail techniques for optimizing the effectiveness of the proposed model. The system has worked successfully in parsing sentences in Modern Greek, a language where the relatively free word order characteristic results in many ambiguity problems. The proposed parsing model is consistent with many directions in the field of preference-based parsing, and it is proved to be adequate in building effective and maintainable natural language analysers. It is believed that this model can also be used in parsing sentences in languages other than Greek.

scholarly journals Word Order and Information Structure

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ad Neeleman ◽  
Hans van de Koot
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Free Word ◽  
As Effects

This chapter is concerned with the question to what extent free word order phenomena are regulated by information-structural (IS) constraints. Progress on this question must combine detailed empirical study with bold theoretical work that aims to test restrictive hypotheses about available syntactic operations, available IS-primitives, and their mapping. The present chapter evaluates four cross-cutting word order generalizations on the basis of a rough classification of syntactic operations and IS-primitives. Operations will be divided into those that are A-related (A-scrambling, passive), those that are A′-related (A′-scrambling), those that involve doubling with a pronoun or clitic, and finally those that involve extraposition, and it is assumed that IS-primitives are restricted to topic, focus, contrast, and givenness. Some discussion is offered of how the four generalizations identified here might emerge as effects of deeper properties of the language faculty or human psychology.

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