scholarly journals Major Total Conversion in English: The Question of Directionality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Barli Bram
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Item ◽  
Total Conversion ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Test Materials ◽  
Large Corpus

<p>This research investigates the directionality of major total conversion in English, where major total conversion is defined as the process and at the same time as the result of deriving a new lexical item by altering the part of speech of the base without marking the alteration overtly, as in the presumed pair dry – to dry. The question is whether there is a reliable strategy for deciding which member of a pair is the base and which member is the converted counterpart. Various attempts had been made to resolve the controversial directional issue, but the results have been inconsistent. The investigation aims to discover whether or not there exists a coherent notion about how to decide directionality by considering four factors assumed in the literature to reflect directionality. A large corpus of potential examples of major total conversion was collected to act as test materials. The four factors were compared for each major total conversion pair to see to what extent there was agreement among them. Results showed the factors did not agree to the expected extent. The findings are discussed in detail and it is claimed the inconsistencies can often be explained with recourse to a few general principles. In conclusion, on the whole the four factors considered are consistent with one another. In other words, the notion about how to determine directionality in major total conversion is coherent and can be maintained for English.</p>

scholarly journals Major Total Conversion in English: The Question of Directionality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Barli Bram
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Item ◽  
Total Conversion ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Test Materials ◽  
Large Corpus

<p>This research investigates the directionality of major total conversion in English, where major total conversion is defined as the process and at the same time as the result of deriving a new lexical item by altering the part of speech of the base without marking the alteration overtly, as in the presumed pair dry – to dry. The question is whether there is a reliable strategy for deciding which member of a pair is the base and which member is the converted counterpart. Various attempts had been made to resolve the controversial directional issue, but the results have been inconsistent. The investigation aims to discover whether or not there exists a coherent notion about how to decide directionality by considering four factors assumed in the literature to reflect directionality. A large corpus of potential examples of major total conversion was collected to act as test materials. The four factors were compared for each major total conversion pair to see to what extent there was agreement among them. Results showed the factors did not agree to the expected extent. The findings are discussed in detail and it is claimed the inconsistencies can often be explained with recourse to a few general principles. In conclusion, on the whole the four factors considered are consistent with one another. In other words, the notion about how to determine directionality in major total conversion is coherent and can be maintained for English.</p>

Is there anything there when there is not there? Null expletives and second language data

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroyuki Oshita
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Lexical Item ◽  
Psychological Reality ◽  
Language Data ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Linguistic Characterization ◽  
Large Corpus ◽  
Made In

This article explores the issue of the psychological reality of null expletives, i.e., the silent counterparts of the so-called dummy subjects such as English it and there. Following Jackendoff’s (1997; 2002) notion of `defective’ lexical item, I define null expletives as extremely `defective’ words with syntactic properties but no semantic or phonological content. By comparing native speakers of pro-drop languages and those of topic-drop languages in terms of their grammatical judgement of and productive use of English, I argue that null expletives are very likely psychologically real to speakers of pro-drop languages but not to those of topic-drop languages. This conclusion is based on observations made in previous second language (L2) studies and the analysis of data obtained from a large corpus of nonnative English. The question of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in L2 grammar and the linguistic characterization of so-called free subject-verb inversion in pro-drop languages are also discussed in relation to the issue of the psychological reality of null expletives.

The Penn Chinese TreeBank: Phrase structure annotation of a large corpus

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAIWEN XUE ◽  
FEI XIA ◽  
FU-DONG CHIOU ◽  
MARTA PALMER
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
The Public ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
The World ◽  
Structure Annotation ◽  
Annotation Quality ◽  
Large Corpus

With growing interest in Chinese Language Processing, numerous NLP tools (e.g., word segmenters, part-of-speech taggers, and parsers) for Chinese have been developed all over the world. However, since no large-scale bracketed corpora are available to the public, these tools are trained on corpora with different segmentation criteria, part-of-speech tagsets and bracketing guidelines, and therefore, comparisons are difficult. As a first step towards addressing this issue, we have been preparing a large bracketed corpus since late 1998. The first two installments of the corpus, 250 thousand words of data, fully segmented, POS-tagged and syntactically bracketed, have been released to the public via LDC (www.ldc.upenn.edu). In this paper, we discuss several Chinese linguistic issues and their implications for our treebanking efforts and how we address these issues when developing our annotation guidelines. We also describe our engineering strategies to improve speed while ensuring annotation quality.

The Reliability of Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Potts ◽  
Robin Law ◽  
John F. Golding ◽  
David Groome
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Recognition Test ◽  
Laboratory Tests ◽  
The Other ◽  
Clinical Factors ◽  
Test Items ◽  
T1 And T2 ◽  
Test Materials ◽  
Induced Forgetting

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) refers to the finding that the retrieval of an item from memory impairs the retrieval of related items. The extent to which this impairment is found in laboratory tests varies between individuals, and recent studies have reported an association between individual differences in the strength of the RIF effect and other cognitive and clinical factors. The present study investigated the reliability of these individual differences in the RIF effect. A RIF task was administered to the same individuals on two occasions (sessions T1 and T2), one week apart. For Experiments 1 and 2 the final retrieval test at each session made use of a category-cue procedure, whereas Experiment 3 employed category-plus-letter cues, and Experiment 4 used a recognition test. In Experiment 2 the same test items that were studied, practiced, and tested at T1 were also studied, practiced, and tested at T2, but for the remaining three experiments two different item sets were used at T1 and T2. A significant RIF effect was found in all four experiments. A significant correlation was found between RIF scores at T1 and T2 in Experiment 2, but for the other three experiments the correlations between RIF scores at T1 and T2 failed to reach significance. This study therefore failed to find clear evidence for reliable individual differences in RIF performance, except where the same test materials were used for both test sessions. These findings have important implications for studies involving individual differences in RIF performance.

Identification and Transformation of Terminal Morphemes in Medical English

1969 ◽  
Vol 8 (02) ◽  
pp. 84-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Pratt ◽  
M. Pacak
Keyword(s):  
Word Form ◽  
Subsequent Transformation ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Morphological Segmentation ◽  
Medical English ◽  
Nominal Form ◽  
Admissible Path ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The Given ◽  
Admissible Sequences

The system for the identification and subsequent transformation of terminal morphemes in medical English is a part of the information system for processing pathology data which was developed at the National Institutes of Health.The recognition and transformation of terminal morphemes is restricted to classes of adjectivals including the -ING and -ED forms, nominals and homographic adjective/noun forms.The adjective-to-noun and noun-to-noun transforms consist basically of a set of substitutions of adjectival and certain nominal suffixes by a set of suffixes which indicate the corresponding nominal form(s).The adjectival/nominal suffix has a polymorphosyntactic transformational function if it has the property of being transformed into more than one nominalizing suffix (e.g., the adjectival suffix -IC can be substituted by a set of nominalizing suffixes -Ø, -A, -E, -Y, -IS, -IA, -ICS): the adjectival suffix has a monomorphosyntactic transformational property if there is only one admissible transform (e.g., -CIC → -X).The morphological segmentation and the subsequent transformations are based on the following principles:a. The word form is segmented according to the principle of »double consonant cut,« i.e., terminal characters following the last set of double consonants are analyzed and treated as a potential suffix. For practical purposes only such terminal suffixes of a maximum length of four have been analyzed.b. The principle that the largest segment of a word form common to both adjective and noun or to both noun stems is retained as a word base for transformational operations, and the non-identical segment is considered to be a »suffix.«The backward right-to-left character search is initiated by the identification of the terminal grapheme of the given word form and is extended to certain admissible sequences of immediately preceding graphemes.The nodes which represent fixed sequences of graphemes are labeled according to their recognition and/or transformation properties.The tree nodes are divided into two groups:a. productive or activatedb. non-productive or non-activatedThe productive (activated) nodes are sequences of sets of graphemes which possess certain properties, such as the indication about part-of-speech class membership, the transformation properties, or both. The non-productive (non-activated) nodes have the function of connectors, i.e., they specify the admissible path to the productive nodes.The computer program for the identification and transformation of the terminal morphemes is open-ended and is already operational. It will be extended to other sub-fields of medicine in the near future.

Use of a Lyophilized Reference Plasma to Compare Coagulation Test Procedures

1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (02) ◽  
pp. 426-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Kahan ◽  
I Nohén
Keyword(s):  
Oral Anticoagulant Therapy ◽  
Repeated Measurements ◽  
Test Procedures ◽  
Coagulation Activity ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Measured Activity ◽  
Test Materials ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The One

SummaryIn 4 collaborative trials, involving a varying number of hospital laboratories in the Stockholm area, the coagulation activity of different test materials was estimated with the one-stage prothrombin tests routinely used in the laboratories, viz. Normotest, Simplastin-A and Thrombotest. The test materials included different batches of a lyophilized reference plasma, deep-frozen specimens of diluted and undiluted normal plasmas, and fresh and deep-frozen specimens from patients on long-term oral anticoagulant therapy.Although a close relationship was found between different methods, Simplastin-A gave consistently lower values than Normotest, the difference being proportional to the estimated activity. The discrepancy was of about the same magnitude on all the test materials, and was probably due to a divergence between the manufacturers’ procedures used to set “normal percentage activity”, as well as to a varying ratio of measured activity to plasma concentration. The extent of discrepancy may vary with the batch-to-batch variation of thromboplastin reagents.The close agreement between results obtained on different test materials suggests that the investigated reference plasma could be used to calibrate the examined thromboplastin reagents, and to compare the degree of hypocoagulability estimated by the examined PIVKA-insensitive thromboplastin reagents.The assigned coagulation activity of different batches of the reference plasma agreed closely with experimentally obtained values. The stability of supplied batches was satisfactory as judged from the reproducibility of repeated measurements. The variability of test procedures was approximately the same on different test materials.

Design of English text-to-speech conversion algorithm based on machine learning

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Li Dongmei
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Feature Recognition ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
English Text ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Modern Computer ◽  
Conversion Algorithm

English text-to-speech conversion is the key content of modern computer technology research. Its difficulty is that there are large errors in the conversion process of text-to-speech feature recognition, and it is difficult to apply the English text-to-speech conversion algorithm to the system. In order to improve the efficiency of the English text-to-speech conversion, based on the machine learning algorithm, after the original voice waveform is labeled with the pitch, this article modifies the rhythm through PSOLA, and uses the C4.5 algorithm to train a decision tree for judging pronunciation of polyphones. In order to evaluate the performance of pronunciation discrimination method based on part-of-speech rules and HMM-based prosody hierarchy prediction in speech synthesis systems, this study constructed a system model. In addition, the waveform stitching method and PSOLA are used to synthesize the sound. For words whose main stress cannot be discriminated by morphological structure, label learning can be done by machine learning methods. Finally, this study evaluates and analyzes the performance of the algorithm through control experiments. The results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper has good performance and has a certain practical effect.

A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF TIME-PREPOSITIONS IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (28) ◽  
pp. 187-195
Author(s):  
Yabing Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Foreign Students ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Organic Structure ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
Oral Speech ◽  
The Russian Language

This article is devoted to the problem of using Russian time-prepositions by foreigners, especially by the Chinese. An analysis of modern literature allows the author to identify the main areas of the work aimed at foreign students’ development of the skills and abilities to correctly build the prepositional combinations and continuously improve the communication skills by means of the Russian language. In this paper, the time-prepositions in the Russian language have been analyzed in detail; some examples of polysemantic use of prepositions, their semantic and stylistic shades alongside with possible errors made by foreign students are presented. The results of the study are to help in developing a system of teaching Russian time-prepositions to a foreign language audience, taking into account their native language, on the basis of the systemic and functional, communicative and activity-centred basis. The role of Russian time-prepositions in constructing word combinations has been identified; the need for foreign students’ close attention to this secondary part of speech has been specified. It has been stated that prepositions are the most dynamic and open type of secondary language units within the quantitative and qualitative composition of which regular changes take place. The research substantiates the need that students should be aware of the function of time-preposition in speech; they are to get acquainted with the main time-prepositions and their meanings, to distinguish prepositions and other homonymous parts of speech as well as to learn stylistic shades of time-prepositions. Some recommendations related to the means of mastering time-prepositions have been given: to target speakers to assimilate modern literary norms and, therefore, to teach them how to choose and use them correctly by means of linguistic keys that are intended to fill the word with true meaning, to give it an organic structure, an inherent form and an easy combinability in the texts and oral speech.

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