Locality and Expectation Effects in Hindi Preverbal Constituent Ordering

We investigate the relative impact of two influential theories of language comprehension, viz., Dependency Locality Theory(Gibson 2000; DLT) and Surprisal Theory (Hale 2001, Levy 2008), on preverbal constituent ordering in Hindi, a predominantly SOV language with flexibleword order. Prior work in Hindi has shown that word order scrambling is influenced by information structure constraints in discourse. However, the impact of cognitively grounded factors on Hindi constituent ordering is relatively underexplored. We test the hypothesis that dependency length minimization is a significant predictor of syntactic choice, once information status and surprisal measures (estimated from n-gram i.e., trigram and incremental dependency parsing models) have been added to a machine learning model. Towards this end, we setup a framework to generate meaning-equivalent grammatical variants of Hindi sentences by linearizing preverbal constituents of projective dependency trees in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank (HUTB) corpus of written text. Our results indicate that dependency length displays a weak effect in predicting reference sentences (amidst variants) over and above the aforementioned predictors. Overall, trigram surprisal outperforms dependency length and parser surprisal by a huge margin and our analyses indicate that maximizing lexical predictability is the primary driving force behind preverbal constituent ordering choices in Hindi. The success of trigram surprisal notwithstanding, dependency length minimization predicts non-canonical reference sentences having fronted direct objects over variants containing the canonical word order, cases where surprisal estimatesfail due to their bias towards frequent structures and word sequences. Locality effects persist over the Given-New preference of subject-object ordering in Hindi. Accessibility and local statistical biases discussed in the sentence processing literature are plausible explanations for the success of trigram surprisal. Further, we conjecture that the presence of case markers is a strong factor potentially overriding the pressure for dependency length minimization in Hindi. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the information locality hypothesis and theories of language production.

THE TRANSLATION OF INFORMATION PATTERN FOR I CARE A LOT MOVIE SUBTITLE FROM ENGLISH TO INDONESIAN

Movie subtitle translation is the transfer of meaning from source text into target text in the form of text under the screen with limited time and characters. One of the problems in translating movie subtitle is the information pattern. Information patterns are how the information is organized. This information arrangement includes information status and information urgency. This research uses descriptive and comparative methods. The results of the study indicate that (i) there are parallels in information pattern urgency, namely foreground position tends to be in the beginning of the speech; (ii) the misalignment of information status occurs in sentences translation with it subject and that impersonal and in interrogative and imperative sentences translation, as well as in sentences translation with the non-doer subject.

THE TRANSLATION OF INFORMATION PATTERN FOR I CARE A LOT MOVIE SUBTITLE FROM ENGLISH TO INDONESIAN

Movie subtitle translation is the transfer of meaning from source text into target text in the form of text under the screen with limited time and characters. One of the problems in translating movie subtitle is the information pattern. Information patterns are how the information is organized. This information arrangement includes information status and information urgency. This research uses descriptive and comparative methods. The results of the study indicate that (i) there are parallels in information pattern urgency, namely foreground position tends to be in the beginning of the speech; (ii) the misalignment of information status occurs in sentences translation with it subject and that impersonal and in interrogative and imperative sentences translation, as well as in sentences translation with the non-doer subject.

The influence of information status on the prosody of sentence topics

In a production experiment on German we investigated the prosodic effects of informativeness (comprising information status and contrast) on sentence-initial referents, i.e. sentence topics. While referents in sentence-final position usually receive the nuclear accent of the utterance, commonly defined as the last and information-structurally crucial pitch accent in an intonation unit, sentence topics in German often carry a prenuclear accent. However, the status of prenuclear accents is still unclear: are they just “ornamental” or do they express meaning differences? We expected to find a direct relationship between the informativeness of a sentence topic and its prosodic prominence but the hypothesis could only be confirmed to a very limited extent. Results show that informativeness does not affect the accent type of sentence-initial referents, as they are consistently marked by rising prenuclear accents, even on given items. Only the parameter duration shows a main effect of informativeness in the expected direction, since contrastive referents proved to be longer than given ones. In general, and surprisingly, however, contrastive topics are mostly produced as prosodically less prominent than non-contrastive items that are either given, accessible or new. An explanation that holds for our data set may be that the contrast is already expressed by a parallel syntactic structure, which speakers often realize prosodically by a flat hat pattern. We conclude that prenuclear accents on sentence- initial referents are consistently placed for rhythmic reasons in German and that their prosodic form is only slightly influenced by a referent’s level of informativeness.

Microbiological Characteristics and Surgical Management of Animal-Bite-Related Oral & Maxillofacial Injuries: A Single Center’s Experience

The objective of the current study is to retrospectively evaluate animal-bite injuries and to gain insight into the epidemiology, accident consequences and treatment concept of these accidents in oral and maxillofacial surgery. Data of patients, who were admitted January 2015 and April 2021, were retrospectively evaluated regarding the patients’ characteristics (age, gender), facial distribution of substance defects/partial amputations, duration of hospitalization, operation treatments and antibiotic treatments. Data of 75 patients were included. Patients were bitten by dogs (n = 69.92%), cats (n = 4) and horses (n = 2). Lower eyelid/cheek complex was the most affected region (n = 37, 32.74%). Most of the patients between 0 and 3 years had to be operated on under general anesthesia (p = 0.011), while most of the adults could be operated on under local anesthesia (p = 0.007). In the age group 0–12 years, 30 patients (68%) were operated on under general anesthesia. Ampicillin/Sulbactam (48%) was the antibiotic most used. Antibiotics were adjusted after wound swabs in case of wound infections or critical wound conditions. This means that resistant antibiotics were stopped, and sensitive antibiotics were used. Structured surgical and antibiotic management of animal-bite wounds in the maxillofacial region is the most important factor for medical care to avoid long-term aesthetic consequences. Public health actions and policies under the leadership of an interdisciplinary committee could improve primary wound management, healing outcome and information status in the general population.

Pre- and postnominal onymic genitives in (Early) New High German

This empirical study focuses on the diachrony of adnominal genitives of proper names in (Early) New High German (17th to 19th centuries), e.g., Carls Haus vs. das Haus Carls ‘Carl’s house’. Starting from the observation that word order variation exists within the whole period investigated, the study identifies determining factors for this variation and weights them in a multifactorial model of word order variation and change, the first time this has been done for German. The focus is on formal factors such as syntactic complexity, a factor that increases in importance over the observed time span. The historical data allow not only the investigation of established formal parameters but also the identification of new factors such as the type of inflectional marker (due to genitive allomorphy in older stages of German). In addition to these formal factors, genitive semantics, pragmatic information status and genre are also taken into account. Explanations for the trend towards the postnominal position of complex adnominal genitives as well as the stability of bare name possessors in the prenominal position are discussed.

Social media affordances and information abundance: Enabling fake news sharing during the COVID-19 health crisis

This study modelled factors that predict fake news sharing during the COVID-19 health crisis using the perspective of the affordance and cognitive load theory. Data were drawn from 385 social media users in Nigeria, and Partial Least Squares (PLS) was used to analyse the data. We found that news-find-me perception, information overload, trust in online information, status seeking, self-expression and information sharing predicted fake news sharing related to COVID-19 pandemic among social media users in Nigeria. Greater effects of news-find-me perception and information overload were found on fake news sharing behaviour as compared to trust in online information, status seeking, self-expression and information sharing. Theoretically, our study enriches the current literature by focusing on the affordances of social media and the abundance of online information in predicting fake news sharing behaviour among social media users, especially in Nigeria. Practically, we suggest intervention strategies which nudge people to be sceptical of the information they come across on social media.

Indefinite subjects in Mandarin Chinese

Indefinite subjects in Mandarin Chinese are dis-preferred or restricted according to previous studies although they do exist in natural data. In this study we examine two issues: when they are used and why they are used. The first issue is best answered by looking at the information status of indefinite subjects. We adopt the framework of givenness and newness developed by Prince (1992) and revised by Birner’s (2004, 2006). We find that although indefinite subjects are new most of the time, most of them also carry some old information; the given-before-new principle is satisfied. For the second issue, we examine topic continuity of indefinite subjects in discourse. We find that they perform a discourse function different from that of the post-verbal NPs in existential sentences. Most of the time their referents are non-persistent, and they are not discourse topics, unlike post-verbal NPs in existential sentences.