scholarly journals Variety, Idiosyncracy, and Complexity in Language and Language Technologies

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Levin
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Long Tail ◽  
Transformational Grammar ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Language Technologies

This paper addresses three issues in language technologies. For each issue, the paper recommends an area of linguistics that is easily accessible to computer scientists and provides some examples that may be thought-provoking. The first issue is linguistic diversity, which is addressed by language typology. Typology provides an insightful view of the syntax and semantics of word order, as presented in Section 2.2. The second issue is the long tail of sparse phenomena. Section 3.3 uses Construction Grammar as a framework for addressing the details of definiteness and modality. Finally, Section 4 addresses how to make error analysis fun. It moves beyond monoclausal sentences and revives some rules from 1970s style transformational grammar as a fun way to analyze complex sentences.

Production and comprehension of graphic symbol utterances expressing complex propositions by adults who use augmentative and alternative communication systems

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANN SUTTON ◽  
JILL P. MORFORD ◽  
TANYA M. GALLAGHER
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Augmentative And Alternative Communication ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Alternative Communication ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Graphic Symbol ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Symbol Display ◽  
Voice Output

We explored production and comprehension of complex sentences constructed using a limited vocabulary on a graphic symbol display with voice output by 25 adults who use augmentative and alternative communication. When asked to construct subject (SS) and object (OS) relative clause sentences, only a minority of participants encoded SS and OS relative clause sentences using different word orders. When asked to interpret graphic symbol utterances, most participants chose an SS interpretation. Thus, the word order used most frequently in production appeared to have a single preferred interpretation. The relationship between the word orders produced in graphic symbol utterances and the way the same word orders are interpreted is not necessarily straightforward.

scholarly journals Clause Intertwining and Word Order in Ancient Greek

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rutger J. Allan
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Contrastive Topic ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
Left Dislocation ◽  
Complement Clause

AbstractIn Ancient Greek complex sentences consisting of a main and complement clause, constituents which semantically and syntactically belong to the complement clause can be placed in a position preceding or interrupting the main clause. This phenomenon is referred to as clause or sentence intertwining. This paper examines the pragmatic factors involved in the preposing of contituents in sentences containing an in initival complement clause. It will be argued that the specific pragmatic function of the preposed constituents is Theme (left dislocation), new/contrastive topic or narrow focus. Preposing can be analyzed as a device to pragmatically highlight the involved constituents. The paper also addresses the position of new, contrastive and given topics and of adverbs and clauses with Setting function.

scholarly journals Skolt Saami: A typological profile

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (93) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Miestamo
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
A Value ◽  
The World ◽  
Nominal Categories

This article presents a typological overview of Skolt Saami based on the examination of the features in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database. The relevant properties of Skolt Saami are discussed and the language is assigned a value for each feature. The features cover phonology, different domains of grammar – morphology, nominal categories, nominal syntax, verbal categories, word order, simple clauses and complex sentences - as well as some aspects of the lexicon. The typological profile Skolt Saami that emerges from the examination of the features is then compared with the languages in the database to see what the typological distance is between Skolt Saami and these other languages.  

scholarly journals English and Russian Genitive Alternations: A Study in Construction Typology

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-116
Author(s):  
Sergei Monakhov
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Structural Similarity ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
Genitive Case

There is little doubt that one of the most important areas of future research within the framework of Construction Grammar will be the comparative study of constructions in different languages of the world. One significant gain that modern Construction Grammar can make thanks to the cross-linguistic perspective is finding a clue to some contradictory cases of construction alternation. The aim of the present paper is to communicate the results of a case study of two pairs of alternating constructions in English and Russian: s-genitive (SG) and of-genitive (OG) in English and noun + noun in genitive case (NNG) and relative adjective derived from noun + noun (ANG) in Russian. It is evident that the long years of elaborate scientific analysis have not yielded any universally accepted view on the problem of English genitive alternation. There are at least five different accounts of this problem: the hypotheses of the animacy hierarchy, given-new hierarchy, topic-focus hierarchy, end-weight principle, and two semantically distinct constructions. We hypothesised that in this case the comparison of the distribution of two English and two Russian genitives could be insightful. The analysis presupposed two consecutive steps. First, we established an inter-language comparability of two pairs of constructions in English and Russian. Second, we tested the similarity of intra-language distribution of each pair of constructions from the perspective of the animacy hierarchy. For these two purposes, two types of corpora were used: (1) a translation corpus consisting of original texts in one language and their translations into one or more languages; and (2) national corpora consisting of original texts in two respective languages. It was established that in both languages, the choice between members of an alternating pair is governed by the rules of animacy hierarchisation. Additionally, it was possible to disprove the idea that the animacy hierarchy is necessarily based on the linearisation hierarchy. Two Russian constructions are typologically aligned with their English counterparts, not on the grounds of the linear order of head and modifier but on the grounds of structural similarity. The English SG and Russian NNG construction are diametrically opposed in terms of word order. However, they reveal the same underlying structure of the inflectional genitive as contrasted with the analytical genitive of the Russian ANG and the English OG. These findings speak strongly in favour of the animacy hierarchy account of English genitive alternation.

scholarly journals Constructionist basis of composing and translating political speeches: A case study of President Trump’s inaugural address

2021 ◽  
Vol 105 ◽  
pp. 03006
Author(s):  
Nataliia Talavira
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Inaugural Address ◽  
American President ◽  
Political Speeches ◽  
Linguistic Material

Application of the principles and tenets of cognitive linguistics to translation studies rests on the assumption that both of them employ the same meaning process while working with a text. Procedures implemented to translate the inaugural address of American President Trump have been regarded from the point of view of Construction Grammar. The construction is viewed as the main translation unit representing source linguistic material below the level of the text. The paper singles out from the translation of President Trump’s inaugural address equivalent constructions with identical form and meaning and non-equivalent pairings indicating transformations of structure or semantics in the original constructions. Syntactical modifications include the change of word order, grammar tenses or omission of construction component, while lexical transformations result in generalization, carried out by words with more abstract meaning than those in the source construction; simplification, representing separate objects or features from the array of denoted in the source pairing; and specification accentuating and detailing particular entities.

scholarly journals Formal Basis of a Language Universal

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-42
Author(s):  
Miloš Stanojević ◽  
Mark Steedman
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Practical Interest ◽  
Categorial Grammars ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Formal Basis ◽  
Crosslinguistic Variation ◽  
Language Universal ◽  
Separable Permutations

Abstract Steedman (2020) proposes as a formal universal of natural language grammar that grammatical permutations of the kind that have given rise to transformational rules are limited to a class known to mathematicians and computer scientists as the “separable” permutations. This class of permutations is exactly the class that can be expressed in combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs). The excluded non-separable permutations do in fact seem to be absent in a number of studies of crosslinguistic variation in word order in nominal and verbal constructions. The number of permutations that are separable grows in the number n of lexical elements in the construction as the Large Schröder Number Sn−1. Because that number grows much more slowly than the n! number of all permutations, this generalization is also of considerable practical interest for computational applications such as parsing and machine translation. The present article examines the mathematical and computational origins of this restriction, and the reason it is exactly captured in CCG without the imposition of any further constraints.

scholarly journals THE ERROR ANALYSIS REFLECTED IN ENGLISH RECOUNT WRITING

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Megantari N.W.Y. ◽  
Budasi I.G.
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Free Writing ◽  
Tenth Grade ◽  
Guided Writing ◽  
Verb Tense ◽  
Types Of Error ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

This study was designed in the form of descriptive qualitative that describe the Analysis of Errors Reflected in Recount Writing Committed by the Tenth Grade Students of SMK Negeri 1 Denpasar. This study aimed at identifying and describing the types and sources of errors. The subjects of this study were the tenth grade students of SMK Negeri 1 Denpasar. The participants of this study were 28 students of class X RPL 1.The data were collected based on the students’ recount writings. There were two techniques to collect the data, namely guided writing and free writing. The errors were classified into 13 types of error as suggested by (Azar, 1999) and (Zawahreh, 2012) namely: singular/plural, word form, verb tense, add a word, omit a word, word order, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, meaning not clear, run-on sentence, preposition, and pronoun. The results of the analysis show there were 307 errors found in Holiday Task 1, 328 errors found in Holiday Task 2, 183 errors were found in Unforgettable Experience Task 1, and 264 errors were found in Unforgettable Experience Task 2. The sources of errors were classified into three types based on the result of student’s writing as suggested by (Richards, 1971) and Brown (1980) namely: Intralingual, Interlingual, and Communication Strategy. The most frequent sources of errors were caused by communication strategy with 587 errors (63%), intralingual with 336 errors (36,51%), and interlingual with 4 errors (0,42%).

scholarly journals THE MEDICAL LITERATURE: EQUIVALENCE OF TRANSLATION

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-113
Author(s):  
Feruza SHARIPOVA
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Scientific Text ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Translational Equivalence ◽  
Medical Interpreter ◽  
Grammatical Structures

The purpose of this article is to analyze the translational equivalence of medical dialogues from the textbook "Medicine in Dialogues" by K.B. Shodmonov, M. Baratova, D. Razhabova, Z. Nematova, taking into account the scientific and methodological base of the categories. The article provides an overview of the glossary and texts to determine the semantic similarity of the source text and its translation. The distribution of frequencies of using equivalent categories is due to linguistic reasons, differences in grammatical structures, a variety of word combinations, differences in word order, etc. As a result of the analysis, the most frequently used equivalence approaches in the scientific medical style of translation are defined in this article. In many dialogues, examples of translations of sentences at the level of medical words (terminological units) are given due to the fact that in a scientific style a literal translation of the text is much preferable, since a scientific text requires clarity in its presentation with the most complete correspondence of the translation to the original. This is due to the fact that in the second part of the textbook, where dialogues with a difficult level are given, detailed complex sentences are often used, in addition, the original translation contains a large number of terms that have completely different formulations in English. Low level of comprehension of the problem of translation equivalence leads to simplification of the perception of the essence of translation reduces the explanatory power of analysis, its concrete phenomena and possibilities of the linguo- translation studies in general, prevents the single scientific picture of translation as an object studied, in consequence of which the perspective of its research is partly lost. In practical terms, the chosen problem requires application of the results of research in the training and works of translators, teachers and editors in assessing the quality of translations.Achieving the equivalence of translation is the goal of the medical interpreter.

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