Null Direct Object Clitics in Basque Spanish: A Study Across Four Generations

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-384
Author(s):  
Ager Gondra
Keyword(s):  
Formal Education ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Acceptance Rate ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Differential Behavior ◽  
Generational Effects ◽  
Object Clitics ◽  
Different Levels

Abstract The null direct object clitic is described as one of the distinctive morphosyntactic features of Basque Spanish (e.g., compré el libro i , pero se me ha olvidado traer øi). However, no study to date has explored the variable usage of this form in cross-generational terms. The present inquiry aims to fill this void by analyzing and contrasting the results of two studies by four generations of Spanish-Basque bilinguals with the following age ranges: 85–96 (Generation 1), 55–75 (Generation 2), 35–45 (Generation 3), 18–25 (Generation 4). The education level of the participants was also taken into consideration. The first study consisted of an acceptability judgment task, in which the participants rated the acceptability of sentences with a null direct object using a 5-point Likert scale. The independent linguistic variables in this study were the semantic features [+/-definiteness] and [+/-specificity]. The acceptance rate of null direct object clitics was significantly higher among Generation 1 and 2 speakers than among those of Generation 3 and 4, with no effect of definiteness or specificity. In the second study, based on an elicitation task, older speakers (Generation 1 and 2) produced significantly more null direct object clitics than their younger counterparts (Generation 3 and 4). By contrasting the differential behavior of the participants across and within the same generation, it is shown that the generational effects observed are mainly due to the participants’ different levels of formal education.

scholarly journals Efecto de la Escolarización en la Producción de Relaciones Causales y Contracausales: Evidencia Psicolingüística para el Ámbito Educativo

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 258
Author(s):  
Gabriela Mariel Zunino
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Discourse Comprehension ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Different Levels

In order to promote the practical application of psycholinguistic data in educational fields and expecting that this transfer would enhance the development of both the pedagogical field and the investigation in experimental psycholinguistics, we present two experiments to analyse the production of semantic relations in discourse, especially the causality/countercausality dimension. We found that the pattern of causal advantage is cross-wise and consistent in subjects with different levels of formal education, so it could be a suitable scaffold to develop other aspects of discourse comprehension and production. We compare our results with previous findings about discourse comprehension and interpret the data in the framework of educational processes. To use of empirical evidence about language processing on educational fields allows not only to review specific issues such as the characteristics of teaching materials, but also to improve educational process in a comprehensive way, making possible to adapt different approaches to populations with different characteristics.

A New Equilibrium in the Government of Public Education: A Comparison of Trends in Three National Systems

1973 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-141
Author(s):  
G. L. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The Government ◽  
Control Education ◽  
National Systems ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Government Authority

It is apparent that formal education has become a subject of high public interest and a source of social conflict; consequently, it is not surprising that there has developed a variety of pressures for the rearrangement of the power to control education. The most obvious manifestation of this power is the formal authority available at different levels of government. This article is an attempt to identify and account for the major recent trends in the patterns of government authority for education in England, the United States, and Australia, and on the basis of those trends to forecast the likely future roles of central, intermediate, and local government bodies in the control of education.

A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom About the Informed Public: National Political Information in Ghana

1976 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred M. Hayward
Keyword(s):  
Formal Education ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Major Interest ◽  
Informed Citizenry ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Different Levels

This study examines the extent, impact and implications of political information in Ghana using survey data. A major interest is to identify and examine variables which influence level of information and to look at the consequences for the political process of different levels of political information. I examine conventional wisdom concerning the ignorance of the masses about national politics and call into question some common assumptions. Many of the differences usually assumed between developed and underdeveloped nations are found either not to exist or to be smaller than hypothesized. The data suggest that in some areas of national political information the masses in non-modernized societies are more politically aware than their counterparts in modernized societies. It is also suggested that there is no necessary link between education (literacy) and political information and that there are a number of functional equivalents to formal education. In the last section of the study several propositions about the informed citizenry are discussed.

scholarly journals ‘Wh-on-earth’ in Chinese speakers’ L2 English: Evidence of dormant features

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boping Yuan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Acceptability Judgment ◽  
Made In

Adopting a decompositional approach to items in the lexicon, this article reports on an empirical study investigating Chinese speakers’ second language (L2) acquisition of English wh-on-earth questions (i.e. questions with phrases like what on earth or who on earth). An acceptability judgment task, a discourse-completion task and an interpretation task were used in the study, and the results indicate that in Chinese speakers’ L2 English, the form of wh-on-earth can be learned and stored in a native-like manner, but without being endowed with fully elaborated features. A distinction between active features and dormant features in L2 lexicon is made in the analysis, and it is argued that features transferred from learners’ L1 to their L2 are likely to lose their vigour and vitality in their L2 lexicon and become dormant if there is no evidence in the target language input to confirm or disconfirm them. A typical consequence of a dormant feature is random behaviours of a related structure in L2 learners’ production and interpretation. The results of the study show that semantic features, discourse features as well as morphosyntactic features can become dormant in L2 lexicon.

Delay in the acquisition of Differential Object Marking by Spanish monolingual and bilingual teenagers

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes ◽  
Acrisio Pires ◽  
Will Nediger
Keyword(s):  
Repeated Measures ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Test Items ◽  
Feature Reassembly ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Vulnerability Hypothesis ◽  
Object Marking

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study investigated the acquisition of Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM) by bilingual and monolingual Spanish teenagers, evaluating to which extent their knowledge of DOM can be explained by different theories of acquisition. Design/Methodology/Approach: Two experiments with bilingual and monolingual Spanish teenagers (ages 10 to 15) were conducted. The experiments included an Elicited Production Completion Task, in which a space was to either be filled with an object marker or left blank, and a Context-Matching Acceptability Judgment Task. Data and Analysis: 54 subjects (44 bilinguals and 10 monolinguals) were tested. For both tasks, there were 6 conditions testing different syntactic–semantic features that trigger DOM (test items n = 42 in each task). The data were analysed with linear regressions and repeated measures analyses of variance. Findings/Conclusions: This study’s results show that bilingual teenagers do not demonstrate significant differences from age-matched monolinguals in their competence regarding the syntactic–semantic properties of DOM. Both groups are below ceiling in showing evidence of knowledge about all the syntactic–semantic features involved in DOM, indicating the possibility of a significant delay beyond childhood in their acquisition. Originality: There are few previous studies on the acquisition of DOM, and none which consider the full range of features and specific population considered here. Work by Montrul focuses on the animacy feature, while Guijarro-Fuentes considers the full range of features, but for adult L2 learners of Spanish. Significance/Implications: This study shows that the Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis, the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, the Full Access/Full Transfer Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis have limitations in explaining its results. Instead, a feature-based approach is proposed in which the specification of features beyond animacy raises difficulties for the acquisition of DOM until late childhood.

Research on Sentence Segmentation with Conjunctions in Patent Machine Translation

2014 ◽  
Vol 513-517 ◽  
pp. 4605-4609
Author(s):  
Li Fang Xu ◽  
Yun Zhu ◽  
Li Jiao Yang ◽  
Yao Hong Jin
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Sentence Segmentation ◽  
Patent Documents ◽  
Different Levels

The processing of long sentences is a difficult problem in machine translation. Previous researchers used punctuation to deal with it. In this paper, we presented a rule-based method for sentence segmentation with conjunctions to improve the performance of long sentence machine translation in patent text. We divided conjunctions into different LEVELs according to semantic features of verbs which are before and behind them. Then, we formulated a number of rules based on the LEVELs of conjunctions to segment long Chinese sentence into separated shorter ones. We conducted experiments on 10 intact patent documents which contain 901 conjunctions. Consequently, our method achieves an accuracy of over 89% overall. The result indicates that our method can efficiently improve the performance of long patent sentence translation.

scholarly journals An Improved Object Detection Method using Feature Map Refinement and Anchor Optimization

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 541-549
Author(s):  
Yuxia Wang ◽  
Wenzhu Yang ◽  
Tongtong Yuan ◽  
Qian Li
Keyword(s):  
Object Detection ◽  
Detection Method ◽  
Search Space ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Detection Accuracy ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Feature Map ◽  
Input Size ◽  
Fusion Operation ◽  
Different Levels

Lower detection accuracy and insufficient detection ability for small objects are the main problems of the region-free object detection algorithm. Aiming at solving the abovementioned problems, an improved object detection method using feature map refinement and anchor optimization is proposed. Firstly, the reverse fusion operation is performed on each of the object detection layer, which can provide the lower layers with more semantic information by the fusion of detection features at different levels. Secondly, the self-attention module is used to refine each detection feature map, calibrates the features between channels, and enhances the expression ability of local features. In addition, the anchor optimization model is introduced on each feature layer associated with anchors, and the anchors with higher probability of containing an object and more closely match the location and size of the object are obtained. In this model, semantic features are used to confirm and remove negative anchors to reduce search space of the objects, and preliminary adjustments are made to the locations and sizes of anchors. Comprehensive experimental results on PASCAL VOC detection dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with VGG-16 and lower dimension 300×300 input size, the proposed method achieves a mAP of 79.1% on VOC 2007 test set with an inference speed of 24.7 milliseconds per image.

scholarly journals Control Stimuli in Experimental Code-Switching Research

Languages ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Koronkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Complex Sentence ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Auxiliary Verb ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

The current study investigates whether there is variation among different types of control stimuli in code-switching (CS) research, how such stimuli can be used to accommodate heterogeneity, and how they can also be used as a baseline comparison of acceptability. A group of native Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 20) completed a written acceptability judgment task with a 7-point Likert scale. Five different types of control stimuli were included, with three types considered to be completely acceptable (complex-sentence switches, direct-object switches, and subject–predicate switches) and two types considered to be completely unacceptable (pronoun switches and present–perfect switches). Additionally, a set of present–progressive switches were included as a comparison, as their acceptability status is still actively debated. The participants as a whole exhibited the expected grammatical distinctions among the control stimuli, but with a high degree of individual variability. Pronoun switches and auxiliary verb switches were rated significantly lower than the complex-sentence switches, direct-object switches, and subject–predicate switches. These results show that control stimuli can also establish a baseline comparison of acceptability, and recommendations for inclusion in experimental CS research are provided.

Competing constraints on the variable placement of direct object clitics in Mexico City Spanish

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 514-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Schwenter ◽  
Rena Torres Cacoullos
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Speech Corpora ◽  
Object Clitics ◽  
Direct Objects ◽  
Clitic Placement ◽  
Finite Verb

We utilize variationist methodology to explore the conventionalization and pragmatics of 3rd person direct object clitic placement in Spanish periphrastic constructions. Analysis of 652 tokens extracted from three Mexico City speech corpora indicates that while proclitic position is the majority variant, the rate of enclitic position depends on particular [finite + non-finite verb] constructions, distinguished by frequency measures and more grammaticalized meanings. At the same time, enclisis is favored by propositional or non-referential direct objects and by direct objects of low topic persistence, measured by subsequent mentions. In contrast, proclitic position is favored more by inanimate than human referents, especially those that show topic persistence and whose previous mention was in the syntactic role of direct object in the same or preceding clause. These quantitative patterns suggest that proclisis indicates prototypical DOs in non-prototypical use, i.e. topical inanimates. Thus, despite conventionalization of the general proclitic schema, particular constructions and semantic-pragmatic considerations are operative factors in the variation.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Sally Dowling ◽  
David Pontin ◽  
Kate Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Knowledge Networks ◽  
Breastfeeding Support ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Seminar Series ◽  
Policy Priority ◽  
Social Engagements ◽  
Different Levels

This introductory chapter provides a brief background into the seminars which have helped to shape the publication of this book. Here, the emphasis is on breastfeeding, as it is a policy priority for the four devolved UK governments with a responsibility for health and is acknowledged to be important in improving public health and reducing health inequalities. However, there is a clear relationship in the United Kingdom between socioeconomic status and breastfeeding, with significantly lower rates among women living in the most deprived areas. There are also differences between younger mothers and older mothers, women with different levels of formal education, and women from different ethnic backgrounds. The variation in available breastfeeding support is also part of the story, as is the loss of intergenerational kin-based knowledge networks. In addition, a whole range of micro-practices, social engagements, and events unfold when mothers try to integrate breastfeeding into the rest of their lives. It is these parts of the story that the seminar series focused on — the nuances of breastfeeding babies as a social practice.

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