Academic literature on the topic 'By-phrase'

The present paper examines the N1 by N1 construction using corpus linguistic methodology.The distribution of types of the construction that occur more than once either unhyphenated or hyphenated in any subcorpus of the British National Corpus accessed through the BrighamYoung University interface is examined. Written and spoken language as well as variousgenres are compared. Hyphenation is also investigated. A collocation analysis of some typesof the construction is further carried out and it is concluded that the N1 by N1 construction canbe part of the on a N1 by N1 basis construction. Results from the quantitative analysis as wellas the qualitative discussion suggest that the N P N construction may be undergoinglexicalisation starting as an adverbial and moving to functioning as a premodifier. Thissuggestion is indicated through complementary diachronic searches in the Oxford EnglishDictionary. It is also indicated that the construction may follow a development pattern similarto that of N1 to N1. The notion of construction is discussed in relation to the N1 by N1 construction, and a hierarchical view of constructions is proposed as a solution to some of theproblems with the term.

<p>The present paper examines the N₁ by N₁ construction using corpus linguistic methodology.The distribution of types of the construction that occur more than once either unhyphenated or hyphenated in any subcorpus of the British National Corpus accessed through the BrighamYoung University interface is examined. Written and spoken language as well as variousgenres are compared. Hyphenation is also investigated. A collocation analysis of some typesof the construction is further carried out and it is concluded that the N₁ by N₁ construction canbe part of the on a N₁ by N₁ basis construction. Results from the quantitative analysis as wellas the qualitative discussion suggest that the N P N construction may be undergoinglexicalisation starting as an adverbial and moving to functioning as a premodifier. Thissuggestion is indicated through complementary diachronic searches in the Oxford EnglishDictionary. It is also indicated that the construction may follow a development pattern similarto that of N₁to N₁. The notion of construction is discussed in relation to the N₁ by N₁ construction, and a hierarchical view of constructions is proposed as a solution to some of theproblems with the term.</p>

An experiment was conducted to examine how eye movements during reading of regular and phrase-segmented texts vary with reading performance. Each participant read a set of either regularly formatted or phrase-segmented texts as eye movements were monitored. Each text was followed by a set of comprehension questions. The effects of individual differences (high- vs. low-performance readers) and text formatting (regular vs. phrase-segmented) were investigated by examination of readers' eye movement patterns. Previous research has revealed that poor readers' performance on tasks that require syntactic processing differs from that of good readers', and that poor readers' comprehension and reading rate improves when presented with phrase-segmented text. It was hypothesized that high- and low-performance readers' eye movements would differ during regular text reading in replication of previous research, and that furthermore low-performance readers' eye movements while reading phrase-segmented text would resemble those of high-performance readers' in the same condition. Results revealed differences between high- and low-performance readers' eye movements for regular texts, but not for phrase-segmented texts. This was due to changes in eye movement measures across text conditions for low-performance readers only.

Language production involves two stages of lexical retrieval with a word’s lemma (meaning, syntax) accessed before its lexeme (form). Adult speakers of gendered languages are said to access gender via the lemma (Vigliocco, Antonini and Garrett, 1997). However, presenting gender incongruous distractors during picture naming does not produce interference for Spanish speakers (Costa, Sebastián-Gallés, Miozzo & Caramazza, 1999; O’Rourke, 2007). Spanish demonstrates predictability between determiner gender and noun form: 96.3% of nouns ending in /a/ are feminine, taking the definite determiner la, and 99.87% of nouns ending in /o/ are masculine, preceded by el (Teschner & Russell 1984). Morphophonological regularity might allow Spanish speakers to bypass lemma-level gender. This dissertation addressed the question of whether young children learning Spanish access gender with the lemma of individual words, utilize language-specific morphophonological regularities alone, or use a combination of lexical familiarity and morphophonological regularity. This was tested in an elicited imitation task manipulating lexical status, congruity and gender. Spanish-English bilingual children (2;0-4;0) and Spanish-speaking adults repeated Spanish words and non-words preceded by gender congruous and incongruous definite articles. If children access gender with lemmas, children should omit fewer articles for words vs. non-words in congruous (el libro-them bookm) versus incongruous conditions (la libro-thef bookm). If children use morphophonological patterns, words should show no advantage; however, children should omit fewer feminine than masculine 12 articles in congruous (la f fupa f) versus incongruous conditions (elm fupa f) since feminine is more regular than masculine. Alternately, if lexical familiarity and morphophonological regularity play a role, children should omit fewer articles for words than non-words and fewer feminine than masculine articles in congruous versus incongruous conditions. The results suggest that children, like adults, use both lexical familiarity and morphophonological regularity to produce determiner-stem sequences. Words exerted an influence, but only in processing efficiency while regularity affected patterns for both words and non-words. Unlike adults, for children regularity was preferred over distributional frequency and lexical familiarity was only advantageous if familiar words demonstrated regular feminine morphology. The data suggest that children use language specific input statistics from early in language production and, additionally, provide evidence for developmental processing strategies.

Aquesta tesi és el resultat de la primera investigació extensa en l’adquisició de les passives agentives en dues varietats de català: el català central i el mallorquí. L’adquisició de passives per part dels nens mostra un retard en diverses llengües, especialment aquelles en què la passiva verbal i l’adjectiva no són homòfones. En primer lloc presento un estudi de dades espontànies tant en adults com en nens per veure la freqüència dels diferents tipus de passives (perifràstica, adjectiva i pronominal) en català. Mitjançant una tasca d’aparellament d’imatges i frases vaig realitzar un primer experiment per esbrinar l’adquisició de passives agentives en català. Com que en català mallorquí s’utilitza la mateixa preposició en les passives llargues i en els nominals agentius vaig fer un segon experiment per veure la possible facilitació en la comprensió de les formes passives llargues en tenir la mateixa preposició. La preposició però, no va tenir cap efecte en els resultats. Finalment, un tercer experiment compara la comprensió de les passives adjectives i les passives curtes. Els resultats indiquen que fins als 7 anys els nens fan una interpretació adjectiva de les passives verbals.<br>This thesis results from the first comprehensive investigation into children’s acquisition of actional passives in two varieties of Catalan: Central Catalan and Majorcan Catalan. The acquisition of passives by children has proved to be delayed in a number of languages, especially those which do not have s-homophones between an adjectival passive and a verbal passive. Firstly, a study of spontaneous production in children and adults was made to see the frequency of the different kinds of passives (periphrastic, adjectival and pronominal) for both groups. Using a sentence-picture matching task I undertook a first experiment to see if there was delay in the acquisition of actional passives in Catalan. Also, and because the by-phrase in Majorcan Catalan has the same preposition as agentive nominals, a second experiment was run to see the possible facilitation of having the same preposition in the comprehension of long passive constructions; no effect of the preposition was found. Lastly, a third experiment was run to check the comprehension of adjectival passives versus short passives; verbal passives were shown to be interpreted as adjectival until the age of 7.

This study is about the structure of the noun phrases used with with signalling nouns, which are abstract nouns that are hard to understand without a context. The inspiration for the study comes from work by John Flowerdew. The aim is to investigate in what type of noun phrases (NP) the signalling nouns are used by L2 English students and if the structures of these NPs tell us something about the meaning of the nouns. The material of the study is from the pioneering learner corpus the International Corpus of Learner’s English (ICLE). In general, it was found that the chosen signalling nouns thing, argument, possibility, chapter, kind and fact, are frequently used in complex NPs. There were some differences in the distribution of nouns, with thing, kind and fact having rather high frequencies in comparison to the other nouns. For this reason, samples of these nouns were selected for the analysis. The findings indicate that these signalling nouns rarely appear alone but are most often used in complex NPs. Furthermore, the results also show that a large proportion of these nouns is used in fixed phrases.