MODIFICATION OF NOUN PHRASES. A CHALLENGE FOR COMPOSITIONAL SEMANTICS

1980 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
ARNIM VON STECHOW
Author(s):  
Henriëtte de Swart

Bare nouns are noun phrases with a common noun lacking an overt determiner. Depending on the theoretical framework at hand, and the syntax–semantics interface adopted, they are analysed as NPs, NumPs, or DPs with an empty (null) D. No information on singular/plural, mass/count, definite/indefinite reference can be derived from the determiner if there is none (in overt syntax, at least), so bare nouns raise challenges to syntactic theory as well as compositional semantics. Much of the literature zooms in on the implications of a missing/covert D, but this chapter places special emphasis on syntactic and semantic number in bare nouns.


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.


Author(s):  
Michael Glanzberg

This chapter examines how concepts relate to lexical meanings. It focuses on how we can appeal to concepts to give specific, cognitively rich contents to lexical entries, while at the same time using standard methods of compositional semantics. This is a problem, as those methods assume lexical meanings provide extensions, while concepts are mental representations that have very different structure from an extension. The chapter proposes a way to solve this problem which is by casting concepts in a metasemantic role for certain expressions, notably verbs, but more also generally, with expressions that function as content-giving predicates in a sentence.


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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document