Ambiguity Avoidance by Means of Function Words in English? Providing Additional Corpus-based Counterevidence

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-236
Author(s):  
Günter Rohdenburg
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Testing Procedures ◽  
Direct Objects ◽  
Optional Function ◽  
Free Constructions

Abstract The present paper considers three types of constructions where optional function words have been claimed to be used primarily for the purpose of avoiding a global or local attachment ambiguity. a) In the absence of the complementiser in that-clauses, certain subject NPs might be (temporarily) misconstrued as direct objects of the superordinate verb. b) In the absence of the complementiser that, certain adverbials might be (wrongly) assigned to the subordinate or the superordinate clause. c) In the absence of a relativiser, certain combinations of the antecedent NP and the relative clause subject might be (temporarily) misconstrued as forming a single NP. The paper uses two corpus-based testing procedures to refute these claims. (i) Analysing otherwise comparable ambiguity-free and ambiguity-prone structures in a)–c) we find that they involve similar rates of function word use. (ii) Moreover, it is shown that a variety of other ambiguity-free constructions, containing the same or other optional grammatical markers, display similar distributional profiles.

scholarly journals Exchange of Disfluency With Age From Function Words to Content Words in Spanish Speakers Who Stutter

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 754-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Au-Yeung ◽  
Isabel Vallejo Gomez ◽  
Peter Howell
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Change ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Content Word ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Function Word ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Group 5 ◽  
Group 2 ◽  
Optional Function

The main purpose of the present study was to examine whether the developmental change in loci of disfluency from mainly function words to mainly content words, observed for English speakers who stutter (P. Howell, J. Au-Yeung, & S. Sackin, 1999), also occurs for comparable Spanish speakers who stutter. The participants were divided into 5 age groups. There were 7 participants in Group 1, from 3 to 5 years old; 11 in Group 2, from 6 to 9 years old; 10 in Group 3, from 10 to 11 years old; 9 in Group 4, from 12 to 16 years old; and 9 in Group 5, from 20 to 68 years old. Across all groups, 36 of the 46 participants were male. The study method involved segmenting speech into phonological words (PWs) that consist of an obligatory content word with optional function words that precede and follow it. The initial function words in the PWs were examined to establish whether they have a higher disfluency rate than the final ones (J. Au-Yeung, P. Howell, & L. Pilgrim, 1998). Disfluency on function words in a PW was higher when the word occurred before a content word rather than after a content word for all age groups. Disfluencies on function and content words were then examined to determine whether they change over age groups in the same way as for English speakers who stutter (Howell et al., 1999). The rate of disfluency on function words was higher than that on content words, particularly in the youngest speakers. Function word disfluency rate dropped off and content word disfluency rate increased across age groups. These patterns are similar to those reported for English. Possible explanations for these similarities across the two languages are discussed.

scholarly journals Communicative Efficiency, Uniform Information Density, and the Rational Speech Act theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Philip Levy
Keyword(s):  
Computer Simulation ◽  
Iterative Process ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Information Density ◽  
Major Class ◽  
Communicative Efficiency ◽  
Optional Function

One major class of approaches to explaining the distribution of linguistic forms is rooted in communicative efficiency. For theories in which the communicative efficiency of an utterance is itself dependent on the distribution of linguistic forms in the language, however, it is less clear how to make distributional predictions that escape circularity. We propose an approach to making distributional predictions for these cases by iterating between speaker and listener in the Rational Speech Act theory. Characteristics of the fixed points of this iterative process constitute the distributional predictions of the theory. Through computer simulation we apply this approach to the well-studied case of predictability-sensitive optional function word omission for the theory of Uniform Information Density, and show that the approach strongly predicts the negative correlation between phrase onset probability and rate of function word use that has previously been argued for and that has been empirically observed in previous studies.

scholarly journals Phonological Words and Stuttering on Function Words

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 1019-1030 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Au-Yeung ◽  
Peter Howell ◽  
Lesley Pilgrim
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Content Word ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Phonological Word ◽  
The People

Stuttering on function words was examined in 51 people who stutter. The people who stutter were subdivided into young (2 to 6 years), middle (6 to 9 years), and older (9 to 12 years) child groups; teenagers (13 to 18 years); and adults (20 to 40 years). As reported by previous researchers, children up to about age 9 stuttered more on function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs), whereas older people tended to stutter more on content words (nouns, main verbs, adverbs, adjectives). Function words in early positions in utterances, again as reported elsewhere, were more likely to be stuttered than function words at later positions in an utterance. This was most apparent for the younger groups of speakers. For the remaining analyses, utterances were segmented into phonological words on the basis of Selkirk’s work (1984). Stuttering rate was higher when function words occurred in early phonological word positions than other phonological word positions whether the phonological word appeared in initial position in an utterance or not. Stuttering rate was highly dependent on whether the function word occurred before or after the single content word allowed in Selkirk’s (1984) phonological words. This applied, once again, whether the phonological word was utterance-initial or not. It is argued that stuttering of function words before their content word in phonological words in young speakers is used as a delaying tactic when the forthcoming content word is not prepared for articulation.

scholarly journals Unique function words characterize genomic proteins

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (26) ◽  
pp. 6703-6708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Scaiewicz ◽  
Michael Levitt
Keyword(s):  
Domain Architecture ◽  
Protein Sequences ◽  
Genomic Diversity ◽  
Unique Function ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Sequence Motif ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Conserved Domain ◽  
Sequence Profiles ◽  
Multiple Domain

Between 2009 and 2016 the number of protein sequences from known species increased 10-fold from 8 million to 85 million. About 80% of these sequences contain at least one region recognized by the conserved domain architecture retrieval tool (CDART) as a sequence motif. Motifs provide clues to biological function but CDART often matches the same region of a protein by two or more profiles. Such synonyms complicate estimates of functional complexity. We do full-linkage clustering of redundant profiles by finding maximum disjoint cliques: Each cluster is replaced by a single representative profile to give what we term a unique function word (UFW). From 2009 to 2016, the number of sequence profiles used by CDART increased by 80%; the number of UFWs increased more slowly by 30%, indicating that the number of UFWs may be saturating. The number of sequences matched by a single UFW (sequences with single domain architectures) increased as slowly as the number of different words, whereas the number of sequences matched by a combination of two or more UFWs in sequences with multiple domain architectures (MDAs) increased at the same rate as the total number of sequences. This combinatorial arrangement of a limited number of UFWs in MDAs accounts for the genomic diversity of protein sequences. Although eukaryotes and prokaryotes use very similar sets of “words” or UFWs (57% shared), the “sentences” (MDAs) are different (1.3% shared).

scholarly journals Segmentation of vowel-initial words is facilitated by function words

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
YUN JUNG KIM ◽  
MEGHA SUNDARA
Keyword(s):  
Function Word ◽  
First Year ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Fluent Speech ◽  
First Year Of Life

AbstractWithin the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1–1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not 0;8 are able to segment vowel-initial words that immediately follow the function word the [ði], while ruling out a bottom-up, phonotactic account of these results. Thus, function words facilitate the segmentation of vowel-initial words that appear sentence-medially for infants aged 0;11.

Children's Responses to Telegraphic and Grammatically Complete Prompts to Imitate

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley L. Bredin-Oja ◽  
Marc E. Fey
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Semantic Relation ◽  
Language Delay ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Intervention Technique ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Alternating Treatment Design ◽  
Treatment Design

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to determine whether children in the early stage of combining words are more likely to respond to imitation prompts that are telegraphic than to prompts that are grammatically complete and whether they produce obligatory grammatical morphemes more reliably in response to grammatically complete imitation prompts than to telegraphic prompts.MethodFive children between 30 and 51 months of age with language delay participated in a single-case alternating treatment design with 14 sessions split between a grammatical and a telegraphic condition. Alternating orders of the 14 sessions were randomly assigned to each child. Children were given 15 prompts to imitate a semantic relation that was either grammatically complete or telegraphic.ResultsNo differences between conditions were found for the number of responses that contained a semantic relation. In contrast, 3 of the 5 children produced significantly more grammatical morphemes when presented with grammatically complete imitation prompts. Two children did not include a function word in either condition.ConclusionProviding a telegraphic prompt to imitate does not offer any advantage as an intervention technique. Children are just as likely to respond to a grammatically complete imitation prompt. Further, including function words encourages children who are developmentally ready to imitate them.

Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bates ◽  
Virginia Marchman ◽  
Donna Thal ◽  
Larry Fenson ◽  
Philip Dale ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Maternal Education ◽  
Linear Increase ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Small Samples ◽  
Initial Increase ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Closed Class

ABSTRACTResults are reported for stylistic and developmental aspects of vocabulary composition for 1, 803 children and families who participated in the tri-city norming of a new parental report instrument, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. We replicate previous studies with small samples showing extensive variation in use of common nouns between age o;8 and 1;4 (i.e. ‘referential style’), and in the proportion of vocabulary made up of closed-class words between 1;4 and 2;6 (i.e. ‘analytic’ vs. ‘holistic’ style). However, both style dimensions are confounded with developmental changes in the composition of the lexicon, including three ‘waves’ of reorganization: (1) an initial increase in percentage of common nouns from 0 to 100 words, followed by a proportional decrease; (2) a slow linear increase in verbs and other predicates, with the greatest gains taking place between 100 and 400 words; (3) no proportional development at all in the use of closed-class vocabulary between 0 and 400 words, followed by a sharp increase from 400 to 680 words. When developmental changes in noun use are controlled, referential-style measures do not show the association with developmental precocity reported in previous studies, although these scores are related to maternal education. By contrast, when developmental changes in grammatical function word use are controlled, high closed-class scores are associated with a slower rate of development. We suggest that younger children may have less perceptual acuity and/or shorter memory spans than older children with the same vocabulary size. As a result, the younger children may ignore unstressed function words until a later point in development while the older children tend to reproduce perceptual details that they do not yet understand. Longitudinal data show that early use of function words (under 400 words) is not related to grammatical levels after the 4OO-word point, confirming our ‘stylistic’ interpretation of early closed-class usage. We close with recommendations for the unconfounding of stylistic and developmental variance in research on individual differences in language development, and provide look-up tables that will permit other investigators to pull these aspects apart.

scholarly journals Complexity/informativeness trade-off in the domain of indefinite pronouns

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 166
Author(s):  
Milica Denić ◽  
Shane Steinert-Threlkeld ◽  
Jakub Szymanik
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Efficient Communication ◽  
Universal Properties ◽  
Linguistic Analyses ◽  
Indefinite Pronoun ◽  
And Function ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns

The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between complexity and informativeness (Kemp & Regier 2012). The argument has been based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work extends this analysis to a category of function words: indefinite pronouns (e.g. someone, anyone, no-one, cf. Haspelmath 2001). We build on previous work to establish the meaning space and featural make-up for indefinite pronouns, and show that indefinite pronoun systems across languages optimize the complexity/informativeness trade-off. This demonstrates that pressures for efficient communication shape both content and function word categories, thus tying in with the conclusions of recent work on quantifiers by Steinert-Threlkeld (2019). Furthermore, we argue that the trade-off may explain some of the universal properties of indefinite pronouns, thus reducing the explanatory load for linguistic theories.

scholarly journals What reading aloud reveals about speaking: Regressive saccades implicate a failure to monitor, not inattention, in the prevalence of intrusion errors on function words

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (8) ◽  
pp. 2032-2045 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth R Schotter ◽  
Chuchu Li ◽  
Tamar H Gollan
Keyword(s):  
Word Length ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Content Word ◽  
Function Word ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Versus Content ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Automatic Retrieval ◽  
Intrusion Errors ◽  
Word Skipping

Bilinguals occasionally produce language intrusion errors (inadvertent translations of the intended word), especially when attempting to produce function word targets, and often when reading aloud mixed-language paragraphs. We investigate whether these errors are due to a failure of attention during speech planning, or failure of monitoring speech output by classifying errors based on whether and when they were corrected, and investigating eye movement behaviour surrounding them. Prior research on this topic has primarily tested alphabetic languages (e.g., Spanish–English bilinguals) in which part of speech is confounded with word length, which is related to word skipping (i.e., decreased attention). Therefore, we tested 29 Chinese–English bilinguals whose languages differ in orthography, visually cueing language membership, and for whom part of speech (in Chinese) is less confounded with word length. Despite the strong orthographic cue, Chinese–English bilinguals produced intrusion errors with similar effects as previously reported (e.g., especially with function word targets written in the dominant language). Gaze durations did differ by whether errors were made and corrected or not, but these patterns were similar for function and content words and therefore cannot explain part of speech effects. However, bilinguals regressed to words produced as errors more often than to correctly produced words, but regressions facilitated correction of errors only for content, not for function words. These data suggest that the vulnerability of function words to language intrusion errors primarily reflects automatic retrieval and failures of speech monitoring mechanisms from stopping function versus content word errors after they are planned for production.

Early lexical development in German: a study on vocabulary growth and vocabulary composition during the second and third year of life

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTINA KAUSCHKE ◽  
CHRISTOPH HOFMEISTER
Keyword(s):  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Vocabulary Size ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Developmental Patterns ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Vocabulary Growth ◽  
Noun Bias ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Vocabulary Spurt

This paper focuses on aspects of early lexical acquisition in German. There have been conflicting results in the literature concerning both the pattern of vocabulary growth and the composition of the early lexicon. Our study describes the development of various categories of words and questions the preponderance of nouns in spontaneous speech. 32 children were studied longitudinally through recordings made at age 1;1, 1;3, 1;9 and 3;0. The following properties of the data were investigated: vocabulary size in relation to age, frequency of word use, and distribution of word categories. The results show that use of both types and tokens increases with time. A trend analysis indicates an exponential increase in vocabulary production in the second year, followed by a further expansion. This vocabulary spurt-like pattern can be observed in the use of word types and tokens. The findings in regard to vocabulary composition illustrate the dynamics present in the development of word categories. In the beginning, children use mostly relational words, personal-social words and some onomatopoeic terms. These categories are gradually complemented with nouns, verbs, function words and other words so that we see a balanced lexicon by 3;0. Trend analyses clarify characteristic developmental patterns in regard to certain word categories. Our spontaneous speech data does not support a strong noun-bias hypothesis.

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