scholarly journals Stage and Individual-level predicates whithin "if" and "when" clauses: what works and what doesn't

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 167
Author(s):  
Asuncion Martínez-Arbelaiz

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 28.3pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Clauses headed by <em>if</em> and <em>when</em> are very often considered syntactically and semantically equivalent.&nbsp; Nevertheless, in this paper we show that the type of predicate has an impact both on the grammaticality and the interpretation of the subordinate clause in Spanish. Theses clauses provide evidence for the proposal that stage-level predicates involve an extra-argument that individual-level predicates lack. Following Kratzer (1995), we assume that this is extra-argument is a spatio-temporal argument. While stage-level predicates in the subordinate clause are perfectly grammatical, individual-level predicates yield to ungrammatical sentences, unless an indefinite or a kind-referring NP is involved. &nbsp;Kratzer&acute;s Prohibition against vacuous quantification provides a sound account for the asymmetry between the two types of predicates.&nbsp; In addition, a stative verb in the <em>when</em> clause is grammatical, but it forces an epistemic reading. When both predicates are individual-level predicates in the subordinate and the main clause, the <em>if</em> clause may can take a factual reading while the <em>when</em> clause is ungrammatical unless there is some kind of operator involved through a generic, a kind-referring NP or an indefinite pronoun.</span></p>

Author(s):  
Hiroki Fujita ◽  
Ian Cunnings

Abstract We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like “While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily”. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (“laughed”), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (“the baby”) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (“dressed”). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 580
Author(s):  
Anna Lena Emonds ◽  
Katja Mombaur

As a whole, human sprinting seems to be a completely periodic and symmetrical motion. This view is changed when a person runs with a running-specific prosthesis after a unilateral amputation. The aim of our study is to investigate differences and similarities between unilateral below-knee amputee and non-amputee sprinters—especially with regard to whether asymmetry is a distracting factor for sprint performance. We established three-dimensional rigid multibody models of one unilateral transtibial amputee athlete and for reference purposes of three non-amputee athletes. They consist of 16 bodies (head, ipper, middle and lower trunk, upper and lower arms, hands, thighs, shanks and feet/running specific prosthesis) with 30 or 31 degrees of freedom (DOFs) for the amputee and the non-amputee athletes, respectively. Six DOFs are associated with the floating base, the remaining ones are rotational DOFs. The internal joints are equipped with torque actuators except for the prosthetic ankle joint. To model the spring-like properties of the prosthesis, the actuator is replaced by a linear spring-damper system. We consider a pair of steps which is modeled as a multiphase problem with each step consisting of a flight, touchdown and single-leg contact phase. Each phase is described by its own set of differential equations. By combining motion capture recordings with a least squares optimal control problem formulation including constraints, we reconstructed the dynamics of one sprinting trial for each athlete. The results show that even the non-amputee athletes showed less symmetrical sprinting than expected when examined on an individual level. Nevertheless, the asymmetry is much more pronounced in the amputee athlete. The amputee athlete applies larger torques in the arm and trunk joints to compensate the asymmetry and experiences a destabilizing influence of the trunk movement. Hence, the inter-limb asymmetry of the amputee has a significant effect on the control of the sprint movement and the maintenance of an upright body position.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 200-222
Author(s):  
Hamada Hassanein ◽  
Mohammad Mahzari

Abstract This study has set out to identify, quantify, typify, and exemplify the discourse functions of canonical antonymy in Arabic paremiography by comparing two manually collected datasets from Egyptian and Saudi (Najdi) dialects. Building upon Jones’s (2002) most extensive and often-cited classification of the discourse functions of antonyms as they co-occur within syntactic frames in news discourse, the study has substantially revised this classification and developed a provisional and dynamic typology thereof. Two major textual functions are found to be quantitatively significant and qualitatively preponderant: ancillarity (wherein an A-pair of canonical antonyms project their antonymicity onto a more important B-pair) and coordination (wherein one antonym holds an inclusive or exhaustive relation to another antonym). Three new functions have been developed and added to the retrieved classification: subordination (wherein one antonym occurs in a subordinate clause while the other occurs in a main clause), case-marking (wherein two opposite cases are served by two antonyms), and replacement (wherein one antonym is substituted with another). Semicanonical and noncanonical guises of antonymy are left and recommended for future research.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Stefan Th. Gries ◽  
Stefanie Wulff

ABSTRACT This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anirudh Som ◽  
Sujeong Kim ◽  
Bladimir Lopez-Prado ◽  
Svati Dhamija ◽  
Nonye Alozie ◽  
...  

Early development of specific skills can help students succeed in fields like Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Different education standards consider “Collaboration” as a required and necessary skill that can help students excel in these fields. Instruction-based methods is the most common approach, adopted by teachers to instill collaborative skills. However, it is difficult for a single teacher to observe multiple student groups and provide constructive feedback to each student. With growing student population and limited teaching staff, this problem seems unlikely to go away. Development of machine-learning-based automated systems for student group collaboration assessment and feedback can help address this problem. Building upon our previous work, in this paper, we propose simple CNN deep-learning models that take in spatio-temporal representations of individual student roles and behavior annotations as input for group collaboration assessment. The trained classification models are further used to develop an automated recommendation system to provide individual-level or group-level feedback. The recommendation system suggests different roles each student in the group could have assumed that would facilitate better overall group collaboration. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to develop such a feedback system. We also list the different challenges faced when working with the annotation data and describe the approaches we used to address those challenges.


Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.14 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Therkelsen

In the article I propose an analysis of the Danish causal conjunctions <em>fordi, siden</em> and <em>for</em> based on the framework of Danish Functional Grammar. As conjunctions they relate two clauses, and their semantics have in common that it indicates a causal relationship between the clauses. The causal conjunctions are different as far as their distribution is concerned; <em>siden</em> conjoins a subordinate clause and a main clause, <em>for</em> conjoins two main clauses, and <em>fordi</em> is able to do both. Methodologically I have based my analysis on these distributional properties comparing <em>siden</em> and <em>fordi</em> conjoining a subordinate and a main clause, and comparing <em>for</em> and <em>fordi</em> conjoining two main clauses, following the thesis that they would establish a causal relationship between different kinds of content. My main findings are that <em>fordi</em> establishes a causal relationship between the events referred to by the two clauses, and the whole utterance functions as a statement of this causal relationship. <em>Siden</em> presupposes such a general causal relationship between the two events and puts forward the causing event as a reason for assuming or wishing or ordering the caused event, <em>siden</em> thus establishes a causal relationship between an event and a speech act. <em>For</em> equally presupposes a general causal relationship between two events and it establishes a causal relationship between speech acts, and <em>fordi</em> conjoining two main clauses is able to do this too, but in this position it also maintains its event-relating ability, the interpretation depending on contextual factors.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Marín ◽  
Cristina Sánchez Marco
Keyword(s):  

<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-ansi-language: ES;" lang="ES">En este art&iacute;culo ofrecemos un estudio sobre las propiedades sem&aacute;nticas y &ndash;en menor medida, morfol&oacute;gicas&ndash; de los predicados psicol&oacute;gicos. Ponemos especial &eacute;nfasis en las propiedades que parecen afectar de forma similar a verbos (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">odiar,</em> <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">preocupar(se)</em>) y a nombres psicol&oacute;gicos (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">odio,</em> <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">preocupaci&oacute;n</em>). Por lo que respecta a los verbos, en la l&iacute;nea sugerida por F&aacute;bregas y Mar&iacute;n (2012), demostramos que todos ellos, tanto los de experimentante sujeto (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">odiar</em>) como los de experimentante objeto (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">preocupar(se)</em>) denotan estados, si bien los primeros denotan estados <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">individual-level</em> (IL), mientras que los segundos describen estados <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stage-level</em> (SL). Por lo que respecta a los nombres, de acuerdo con Sanrom&aacute;n (2012), comprobamos que tambi&eacute;n responden a esta divisi&oacute;n entre nombres psicol&oacute;gicos de estado IL (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">odio</em>) y de estado SL (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">preocupaci&oacute;n</em>). Los verbos de apoyo que acompa&ntilde;an a unos nombres y a otros constituyen uno de los indicios m&aacute;s claros de tal distinci&oacute;n: el significado b&aacute;sico de los verbos de apoyo de nombres IL (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">guardar, tener</em>) es el de posesi&oacute;n; los verbos de apoyo de nombres SL (<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pasar, salir</em>) expresan, en cambio, desplazamiento. Esta distinci&oacute;n nos permite afinar m&aacute;s el an&aacute;lisis de los verbos psicol&oacute;gicos: los de experimentante sujeto no han sufrido cambio alguno, mientras que los de experimentante objeto son fruto de un cambio de estado equiparable a un cambio de ubicaci&oacute;n, esto es, a un desplazamiento. El an&aacute;lisis que ofrecemos, basado en la causatividad, es aplicable tanto a verbos como a nombres: los predicados psicol&oacute;gicos que denotan estados SL contienen un operador causativo del que los predicados psicol&oacute;gicos que denotan estados IL carecen.</span>


2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 596-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
rebecca g. deason ◽  
david r. andresen ◽  
chad j. marsolek

studies with humans have failed to produce evidence that any direct causal relation exists between the asymmetry of one function in an individual and the asymmetry of a different function in that individual. without such evidence, factors external to an individual's nervous system, such as social interactions, may play crucial roles in explaining the directions of all asymmetries at all levels.


Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 245-273
Author(s):  
Marie Herget Christensen ◽  
Tanya Karoli Christensen ◽  
Torben Juel Jensen

AbstractIn modern Danish, main clauses have the word order X>Verb>Adverb (i. e., V2) whereas subordinate clauses are generally characterized by the “subordinate clause” word order Subject>Adverb>Verb. Spoken Danish has a high frequency of “main clause” word order in subordinate clauses, however, and in the article we argue that this “Main Clause Phenomena” (cf. Aelbrecht et  al. 2012) functions as a foregrounding device, signaling that the more important information of the clause complex is to be found in the subordinate clause instead of in its matrix clause.A prediction from the foregrounding hypothesis is that a subordinate clause with Verb>Adverb word order will attract more attention than a clause with Adverb>Verb word order. To test this, we conducted an experiment under the text change paradigm. 59 students each read 24 constructions twice, each containing a subordinate clause with either Verb>Adverb or Adverb>Verb word order. Half of the subordinate clauses were governed by a semifactive predicate (open to both word orders) and the other half by a semantically secondary sentence (in itself strongly favoring Verb>Adverb word order). Attention to the subordinate clause was tested by measuring how disinclined the participants were to notice change of a word in the subordinate clause when re-reading it.Results showed significantly more attention to Verb>Adverb clauses than to Adverb>Verb clauses (though only under semifactive predicates), and more attention to subordinate clauses under semantically secondary than semifactive predicates. We consider this as strongly supporting the hypothesis that Verb>Adv word order functions as a foregrounding signal in subordinate clauses.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-374
Author(s):  
Jessaca Spybrook ◽  
Qi Zhang ◽  
Ben Kelcey ◽  
Nianbo Dong

Over the past 15 years, we have seen an increase in the use of cluster randomized trials (CRTs) to test the efficacy of educational interventions. These studies are often designed with the goal of determining whether a program works, or answering the what works question. Recently, the goals of these studies expanded to include for whom and under what conditions an intervention is effective. In this study, we examine the capacity of a set of CRTs to provide rigorous evidence about for whom and under what conditions an intervention is effective. The findings suggest that studies are more likely to be designed with the capacity to detect potentially meaningful individual-level moderator effects, for example, gender, than cluster-level moderator effects, for example, school type.


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