Does the Use of Complex Sentences Differentiate Between Bilinguals With and Without DLD? Evidence From Conversation and Narrative Tasks

Over-identification of language disorder among bilingual children with typical development (TD) is a risk factor in assessment. One strategy for improving assessment accuracy with bilingual children is to determine which linguistic sub-domains differentiate bilingual children with TD from bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). To date, little research on sequential bilinguals with TD and DLD has focussed on complex (multi-clausal) sentences in naturalistic production, even though this is a noted domain of weakness for school-age monolinguals with DLD. Accordingly, we sought to determine if there were differences in the use of complex sentences in conversational and narrative tasks between school-age sequential bilinguals with TD and with DLD at the early stages of L2 acquisition. We administered a conversation and a narrative task to 63 English L2 children with TD and DLD, aged 5–7 years with 2 years of exposure to the L2. Children had diverse first language backgrounds. The L2-TD and L2-DLD groups were matched for age, length of L2 exposure and general L2 proficiency (receptive vocabulary size). Language samples from both tasks were coded and analyzed for the use of complex versus simple sentences, for the distribution of complex sentence types, for clausal density and mean length of utterance (MLU). Complex sentences included coordinated clauses, sentential complement clauses, adverbial clauses and relative clauses. Using regression modelling and PERMANOVA, we found that the L2-TD group produced more complex sentences than the L2-DLD group, with coordinated clauses, adverbial clauses and relative clauses differing the most between the groups. Furthermore, the two groups differed for mean clausal density, but not for MLU, indicating that clausal density and MLU did not estimate identical morphosyntactic abilities. Individual variation in complex sentence production for L2-TD was predicted by longer L2 exposure and task; by contrast, for L2-DLD, it was predicted by older age. This study indicates that complex sentence production is an area of weakness for bilingual children with DLD, as it is for monolinguals with DLD. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

Absolute Participial Construction Theory: Controversial Issues

The study focuses on current problems associated with the evolution of absolute participial construction and its linguistic status in the French language. It has been established that, borrowed from classical Latin, the absolute construction with an ablative was accepted to the Old French language, presumably in the 13 th –14 th centuries thanks to translations from the Latin language. Widely used in literature, the construction caused disputes among grammarians and only at the beginning of the 20 th century it was recognized as normative. In the second part of the article, a review of the Russian and foreign scientific literature is made, the most controversial issues and the author's own position based on corpus data are formulated. The properties inherent in all types of absolute participial constructions are determined: binarity, semantic duality, expression of predominantly temporary, causal meaning or value of an accompanying action, mobility, syntactic optionality in relation to a matrix sentence, the possibility of functioning only as part of a complex sentence. It was revealed that this construction is an economical formal way of expressing a proposition based on a secondary predicative connection. The features of constructions with present participles, past participles and complex past participles are analyzed. The conclusion is made about the need for a differentiated approach to the analysis of these types of absolute structures. The prospect of further studies of linguistic structures is shown.

Formation of Syntactic Connection in Modern German Applied Constructions

Annotation: The article analyzes the problems of formation of syntactic connections in applied constructions in modern fiction. The author tried to justify the need to separate the applied phenomenon as a separate type of syntactic connection with specific structural and semantic features. Applied phenomenon is expressed by a stylistic style that allows one or another piece of information in a sentence to be activated and is a type of syntactic connection in the modern syntactic system of the German language that requires more consistent and systematic study and description. Keywords: syntactic connection, applied phenomenon, applied construction, complex sentence, compound sentence.

L’expression de l’opinion

Users of forums, social networks and news portals now have the opportunity to publicly express their opinions on current political events, social issues, or their everyday lives. The analysis of opinion expression, which primarily represented a research topic in the field of language learning, has now become an important research challenge in the field of computational linguistics, which provides relevant solutions for various companies and organizations. The aim of this article is to analyse messages by which users of the social network Twitter reacted to an incident in which Emmanuel Macron was slapped in the face by a man as he went out to meet the public. We analysed the tweets that express agreement, disagreement and a neutral attitude towards the action. The analysis includes 80 tweets and refers to the textual, syntactic and lexical levels. The results show that tweets expressing disagreement have a typical declarative or exclamatory form, simple sentence structure and include explicit vocabulary expressing the author’s opinion (shameful, disrespectful). Tweets demonstrating agreement are more likely to have an exclamatory form, simple sentence structure and include an explicit term (well done, deserve a slap). Opinion-neutral tweets, on the other hand, are more likely to be formulated as declarative sentences with complex sentence structure and do not include an explicit term expressing the author’s opinion. The presented method is established on basic grammatical criteria (number of sentences, sentence structure, sentence form, keywords), which can also be applied to computational analysis of large collections of texts. In the future, the presented model could be applied to investigate various political, societal or healthcare challenges (elections, corruption or pandemic issues).

MEANS OF SYNTACTIC COMPRESSION IN ENGLISH TEXTS ON MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AND METHODS OF THEIR TRANSLATION INTO UKRAINIAN

The article is devoted to the analysis of syntactic compression means and methods of their translation; study of frequency of syntactic compression means use and frequency of their translation methods application on the material of mechanical engineering texts. The research material is syntactic units of language selected from the mechanical engineering texts, demonstrating the use of syntactic compression, and their translation into Ukrainian. Examples were selected from the manuals on mechanical engineering, operating instructions for various devices, bilingual sites of international engineering companies such as SKF and DENSO. The results of our study showed that the most productive means of syntactic compression in the mechanical engineering texts are the infinitive (27%), gerund (18%), and adjective (16%). Less productive means of syntactic compression are ellipsis (11%), replacement (10%), syntactic reduction (9%) and nominalization (9%). A study of ways to translate English compressed structures in the mechanical engineering texts, depending on the syntactic compression means used, showed that most often the infinitive is translated by a complex sentence of the goal (65.4%), and least often – a complex sentence of cause and effect); the most frequent way of translating an adjective is a complex sentence with attribute (72.8%), the least frequent – unfolding (1.2%); gerund in these texts is most often translated by replacing parts of speech (78.7%), least often – a complex sentence of mode of action (1.1%); the most typical way of translating an ellipse is unfolding (80%), the least frequent ways of an ellipse translating are complex sentences of purpose (1.7%), time (1.7%) and admission (1.7%); nominalization is most often translated by a complex sentence of the goal (40.7%), least often – a complex sentence with attribute (1.9%); the most frequent way of translating syntactic reduction in the texts of mechanical engineering is unfolding (89.4%), the least frequent – explanatory translation (10.6%); replacement is most often translated by unfolding (75.5%), and the least often – explanatory translation (24.5%). Keywords: speech compression; syntactic compression; syntactic compression means; compressed structures; translation methods; mechanical engineering texts.

'GRAMMARLY' AS A TEACHERS' ALTERNATIVE IN EVALUATING NON -EFL STUDENTS WRITINGS

In evaluating students’ EFL writing, lecturers nowadays can implement corrective evaluation by using an online automatic software. Grammarly is automated online software that is comonly used in EFL writing classes. It is an internet proofreading service that evaluates the correctness grammarl, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary as well as detects plagiarism. This paper reports research aimed at exploring the use of Grammarly software for evaluating non-EFL students’ writings. This research employed descriptive-qualitative method with students of ITB AAS Indonesia as the data sources. The results of analysis show that in correcting students' language errors, lecturers can evaluate and analyze in details without a lot of correcting efforts or improvements. Grammarly can be considered as a useful tool for lecturers who need to correct non-EFL students’ writings. Grammarly will automatically check or detect the work being typed from various related aspects. Various writing errors made by the students were found in Grammarly’s reports, both in the aspect of correctness and clarity. Correctness is concerned with the mechanical norms in writing, whereas clarity deals with concise and direct language use. The spelling errors found in students’ writings are text inconsistencies, misspelled words, and improper formatting whereas for grammatical there are subject-verb disagreement, passive voice misuse, as well as unclear, wordy, and incomplete sentences. Meanwhile, the errors in punctuation are shown by inappropriate use of punctuation marks in compound/complex sentence, comma misuse within clauses, and improper formatting. It can be concluded that Grammarly can be an alternative for lecturers’ in evaluating non-EFL students' writings.

Simultaneous interpretation of complex structures from English into Arabic

A complex sentence is described as such by virtue of its multiple constituents which vary from clauses, subclauses to phrases. English and Arabic linguistic literature includes references to the issue of syntactic complexity, yet the approaches are different. The present study seeks to investigate how Arab simultaneous interpreters translating from English into Arabic deal with syntactically complex structures. To achieve this goal, the final debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is selected as the test-ground. The study finds that simultaneous interpreters operating from English into Arabic deal with complex structures in different ways by adopting and adjusting their strategies. The dominant strategy is linearization, which is triggered by the need to translate under time pressure. This strategy also unloads the simultaneous interpreter’s cognitive burden. Yet complete linearization is impossible, since omission and compression may interfere as in the case of embedding and ‘that’ structures. Other strategies, particularly addition and chunking, are also observable, being applied when interpreters find themselves faced with asyndetic structures and multiple embedding.

Poly-predicative conditional constructions in Catalan (in comparaison with Spanish and French)

By poly-predicative conditional constructions we mean complex sentences that contain at least three simple sentences, each representing either a condition or a consequence. Poly-predicative sentences can in addition contain other simple sentences that represent neither condition, nor consequence. Poly-predicative constructions that, apart from one condition and one consequence, also include other simple sentences, are not classified here as poly-predicative conditional constructions. While poly-predicative constructions in general have already been in the focus of researches attention, this article seems to address them on Catalan material for the first time. The purpose of this article is an analysis of syntactic relations in poly-predicative conditional constructions. Its objectives include their comparison in Catalan, Spanish, and French, identification of the main types of these constructions, and an analysis of their characteristics. Since the use of tenses and moods in the constructions addressed coincides with that in prototypical bi-predicative conditional constructions, we do not examine it here. The methods, used in this study, included: sampling during corpus collection, classification, description, comparison, transformational analysis and synthesis. The study is based on Catalan texts and their translations into Spanish and French. The findings of the study include: 1) Poly-predicative conditional constructions with several condition and/or consequence clauses are possible. Condition and consequence clauses can occupy different positions in poly-predicative conditional constructions; 2) In contrast to Catalan and Spanish, French admits the replacement of the conditional conjunction si by que; 3) Prototypical conditional and poly-predicative constructions are invariably characterized by subordination relations, with coordination parataxis possible as well. In addition, more complex syntactic structures are possible like, e. g., parallel co-coordination; 4) A prototypical conditional construction being a complex sentence, this limits possible syntactic types of poly-predicative conditional constructions. They cannot be structured as a string of simple sentences connected by coordination or subordination. Consecutive subordination of three or more subordinate sentences is not characteristic of conditional constructions; 5) The study identified a similarity between poly-predicative conditional constructions in Catalan, Spanish, and French. The present research is a contribution into the syntax of Romance languages.

Domain-general mechanism relationship with non-canonical sentence comprehension

Purpose: Canonical sentence structures are the most frequently used in a given language. Less frequent or non-canonical sentences tend to be more challenging to process and to induce a higher cognitive load. To deal with this complexity several authors suggest that not only linguistic but also non-linguistic (domain-general) mechanisms are involved. In this study, we were interested in evaluating the relationship between non-canonical oral sentence comprehension and individual cognitive control abilities.Method: Participants were instructed to perform a sentence-picture verification task with canonical and non-canonical sentences. Sentence structures (i.e., active or passive) and sentence types (i.e., affirmative or negative) were manipulated. Furthermore, each participant performed four cognitive control tasks measuring inhibitory processes, updating in working memory, flexibility and sustained attention. We hypothesized that more complex sentence structures would induce a cognitive cost reflecting involvement of additional processes, and also that this additional cost should be related with cognitive control performances.Results: Results showed better performances for canonical sentences compared to non-canonical ones supporting previous work on passive and negative sentence processing. Correlation results suggest a close relationship between cognitive control mechanisms and non-canonical sentence processing.Conclusion: This study adds evidence for the hypothesis of a domain-general mechanism implication during oral language comprehension and highlights the importance of taking task demands into consideration when exploring language comprehension mechanisms.