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Merlo, Paola, and Ray C. Dougherty. "Natural Language Computing: An English Generative Grammar in Prolog." Language 72, no. 3 (September 1996): 650. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/416294.
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Seuren, Pieter. "Essentials of Semantic Syntax." Cadernos de Linguística 2, no. 1 (January 28, 2021): 01–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.25189/2675-4916.2021.v2.n1.id290.
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Semantic Syntax (SeSyn), originally called Generative Semantics, is an offshoot of Chomskyan generative grammar (ChoGG), rejected by Chomsky and his school in the late 1960s. SeSyn is the theory of algorithmical grammars producing the well-formed sentences of a language L from the corresponding semantic input, the Semantic Analysis (SA), represented as a traditional tree structure diagram in a specific formal language of incremental predicate logic with quantifying and qualifying operators (including the truth functions), and with all lexical items filled in. A SeSyn-type grammar is thus by definition transformational, but not generative. The SA originates in cognition in a manner that is still largely mysterious, but its actual form can be distilled from the Surface Structure (SS) of the sentences of L following the principles set out in SeSyn. In this presentation we provide a more or less technical résumé of the SeSyn theory. A comparison is made with ChoGG-type grammars, which are rejected on account of their intrinsic unsuitability as a cognitive-realist grammar model. The ChoGG model follows the pattern of a 1930s neopositivist Carnap-type grammar for formal logical languages. Such grammars are random sentence generators, whereas, obviously, (nonpathological) humans are not. A ChoGG-type grammar is fundamentally irreconcilable with a mentalist-realist theory of grammar. The body of the paper consists in a demonstration of the production of an English and a French sentence, the latter containing a classic instance of the cyclic rule of Predicate Raising (PR), essential in the general theory of clausal complementation yet steadfastly repudiated in ChoGG for reasons that have never been clarified. The processes and categories defined in SeSyn are effortlessly recognised in languages all over the world, whether indigenous or languages of a dominant culture—taking into account language-specific values for the general theoretical parameters involved. This property makes SeSyn particularly relevant for linguistic typology, which now ranks as the most promising branch of linguistics but has so far conspicuously lacked an adequate theoretical basis.
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Li, Haojie. "On College English Teaching in China from the Perspective of MP in Generative Grammar Theory." Journal of Language Teaching and Research 7, no. 4 (July 1, 2016): 724. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0704.12.
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This paper discusses how the theory of MP in generative grammar can be used in College English teaching in China. The author holds that a brand-new teaching paradigm- autonomous English learning-will be built if certain theories and principles of Minimalist Program (MP) are used in China’s college classroom teaching. College teachers of English apply theories of lexicon, derivation by phase under the framework of MP in generative grammar and organization strategies into their English teaching and learning appropriately and college students will renew their English learning ideas, their learning interest will be stimulated and their enthusiasm and initiative in active English learning will be enhanced.
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Stringer, David. "EMBEDDED WH-QUESTIONS IN L2 ENGLISH IN INDIA." Studies in Second Language Acquisition 37, no. 1 (August 27, 2014): 101–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0272263114000357.
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This corpus study brings a second language (L2) research perspective, insights from generative grammar, and new empirical evidence to bear on a long-accepted claim in the World Englishes literature—namely, that inversion with wh-movement in colloquial Indian English is obligatory in embedded clauses and impossible in main clauses. It is argued that this register of Indian English is a L2 variety, functioning as part of a multilingual code repertoire, but that syntactic universals apply to first and second languages alike. Despite recent attempts at formalization, this distribution should be unattested, as such a grammar would fall outside the constraints of Universal Grammar and would contradict proposed discourse-pragmatic principles of natural language. A Perl program was created to search the Indian subcorpus of the International Corpus of English (Greenbaum, 1996) for relevant distributional patterns. Results reveal that wh-inversion in Indian English operates in the same way as in other varieties: It is robustly attested in main clauses and appears only occasionally in embedded clauses where syntactic and pragmatic conditions allow; it is obligatory only with interrogative complementizer deletion. Thus, contrary to the standard account but commensurate with recent corpus studies, users of English in India exhibit knowledge of universal constraints in this domain.
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DEEGAN, M. "Categorial Grammar, Generative Phonology, and the Morphology of Old English." Literary and Linguistic Computing 5, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 70–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/5.1.70.
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Syarif, Hermawati. "LINGUISTICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION." Lingua Didaktika: Jurnal Bahasa dan Pembelajaran Bahasa 10, no. 1 (July 3, 2016): 50. http://dx.doi.org/10.24036/ld.v10i1.6328.
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Linguistics as the scientific study of language has very crucial role in running language instruction. Changes in language teaching-learning method reflect the development of linguistic theories. This paper describes how the three broad views of linguistic theories, namely traditional grammar, generative grammar, and functional grammar work in relation to English language teaching and learning. Since both linguistics and language learning have the same subject to talk about, the knowledge of the language, then, is the core. Linguistic features analyzed are on the levels of Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics and Discourse as the basic components, supported by Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics. In relation to language teaching and learning, especially English, such knowledge on the English language gives learners the chance to apply in social communication and in any occasion. The use depends on the viewing of linguistic theories (English) in certain era, which reflects the need of learners in using English. It is assumed that the more linguistic competence someone has, the easier he/she can run his/her instructional activities. As the consequence, in the English language learning, the syllabus designer should notify the mentioned levels of linguistic components while constructing English instructional materials, methods, and evaluation based on the stage of learners to avoid misunderstanding in use. In this case, English instructors/teachers should also update their linguistic competence, especially on Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic points of view. Key words/phrases: linguistics, English, language instruction, linguistic competence
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Rong, Xiao. "Combining transformative generative grammar and systemic functional grammar: Linguistic competence, syntax and second language acquisition." International Journal of English and Literature 8, no. 4 (May 31, 2017): 37–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.5897/ijel2017.1050.
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Beukema, Frits, and Peter Coopmans. "A Government-Binding perspective on the imperative in English." Journal of Linguistics 25, no. 2 (September 1989): 417–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002222670001416x.
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Culicover (1976:152) states that ‘the imperative is an idiosyncratic construction in most languages’. One of the aims of this article is to show that as far as this construction in the English language is concerned, this is an overstatement if we give careful consideration to the structural properties of this construction in a restrictive framework such as Government-Binding theory. Given the proposals in current generative grammar concerning the relations between COMP, INFL, V and their corresponding projections, it is worth investigating what the syntactic representation of the imperative may look like.
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Noyer, Rolf. "Generative metrics and Old French octosyllabic verse." Language Variation and Change 14, no. 2 (July 2002): 119–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394502142013.
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Both Old French meters and their Modern French descendants are usually thought to lack the internal binary constituent structure of, say, English or German iambic verse. In this article, however, an underlying iambic structure for the Old French octosyllable is established through quantitative analysis of a large corpus of texts written from c. 975 to 1180 (42 distinct works, including over 22,000 lines). Because no texts conform absolutely to the grammar of English iambic verse (Halle & Keyser, 1971; Kiparsky, 1977), certain measures are proposed for the degree to which a sample deviates from the iambic pattern; these values are then compared with the (chance) deviation of normal Old French prose. A significant correlation emerges between these measures and date of composition, author, and genre: early texts are almost perfectly iambic, and late 12th-century texts approach, but do not reach, chance levels. It is concluded that the grammar of meter used by Old French authors underwent a gradual change during the 12th century, a change comparable to more familiar phonological and syntactic changes.
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Jacobsen, Bent. "The Origin and Rationale of X-bar Syntax." HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business 6, no. 10 (July 29, 2015): 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v6i10.21517.
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The present paper is intended as a reasonably elementary introduction to the nature of X-bar syntax, an important module in the structure of a modern transformational-generative grammar. The examples have been taken from English; however, since X-bar syntax is an integral part of the overall structure of Universal Grammar, the analyses presented here extend to any language.
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Singh, Rajdeep. "Derivational Grammar Model and Basket Verb: A Novel Approach to the Inflectional Phrase in the Generative Grammar and Cognitive Processing." English Linguistics Research 7, no. 2 (June 10, 2018): 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/elr.v7n2p9.
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Generative grammar was a true revolution in the linguistics. However, to describe language behavior in its semantic essence and universal aspects, generative grammar needs to have a much richer semantic basis. In this paper, we took a novel morpho-syntactic approach to the inflectional phrase to account for the very diverse inflectional phrase qualities in different languages. Some languages show a very different surface verbal inflection, providing evidence of a different mental processing at the semantic level. In fact, the inflectional phrase is a great representative of the mental and semantic processing layers in mind. Therefore, in this study, we analyzed the inflectional phrase with a novel approach to take into account this rich verbal inflectional configuration in languages, and to describe why some languages behave in a different way in the spatial and temporal aspect. In this study, we analyzed and discussed the verbal inflectional structure of several languages, including German, Swahili, Persian, English, and Indonesian, and our result is the introduction of a semantic model which provides a much richer insight to the semantics/syntax interplay.
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Obediente, Enrique, and Francesco D’Introno. "Andrés Bello." Historiographia Linguistica 24, no. 3 (January 1, 1997): 331–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.24.3.06obe.
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Summary In this article we will analyze two aspects of Andrés Bello’s (1781–1865) grammatical thought: its relation to the English empiricists and its similarity with generative grammar. His relation to the English empiricists is due to the fact that Bello spent 19 years in London, where he became familiar with the work of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Reid. In fact his philosophical work, Filosofía del entendimiento, sounds like some of those philosophers’ essays. From the empiricists Bello derives the idea that there is no innate universal grammar with rules present in all languages, as well as his concept of language as an independent system of arbitrary and conventional signs. From Reid he derived his interpretation of the evolution of the language: signs start as ‘natural’ (i.e., they allow humans to communicate without any particular language), and then they become ‘artificial’, i.e., arbitrary and conventional, particular to each grammatical system. Because of his philosophical position, Bello has been compared to structuralist linguists. Here we will show that some of Bello’s grammatical thoughts can be compared with those of Chomsky. The reason for this is that in his grammatical analysis Bello uses concepts reminiscent of generative grammar. For example, Bello proposes the notion of an ‘latent proposition’ similar to that of ‘deep sttaicture’. And when he analyzes for example relative clauses and elliptical constructions, he uses concepts that are familiar to generative grammarians. In other words, the paper tries to show that methodologically and analytically Bello shares some concepts present in Chomsky’s linguistic theory. It also shows differences between Bello and Chomsky, and concludes by pointing out that the major difference between the two linguists is that Bello assumes language can be learned through a symbolic system, while Chomsky assumes language to be innate and independent of other cognitive systemsof the mind.
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Khasanah, Noor. "Transformational Linguistics and the Implication Towards Second Language Learning." Register Journal 3, no. 1 (July 1, 2016): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.18326/rgt.v3i1.23-36.
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The essence of Chomsky’s approach to language is the claim that there are linguistic universals in domain of syntax. He felt confident to show that syntax can be defined for any given language. For Chomsky, the nature of such mental representations is largely innate, so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of the world as relatively minor variations in the universal pattern of human language. In teaching English as L2, therefore knowing syntax and grammar of the language is important. Transformational Generative Grammar gives adequate elaboration in understanding them. Thus, the learners are expected to be able to avoid such ambiguity in interpreting the deep structure of a sentence since ambiguity will lead other people as the listeners or hearers of the speakers to misinterpret either consciously or unconsciously. Keywords: Surface Structure; Deep Structure; Constituent; Transformation
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Montrul, Silvina. "Second language acquisition and first language loss in adult early bilinguals: exploring some differences and similarities." Second Language Research 21, no. 3 (July 2005): 199–249. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0267658305sr247oa.
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This study compares the linguistic knowledge of adult second language (L2) learners, who learned the L2 after puberty, with the potentially ‘eroded’ first language (L1) grammars of adult early bilinguals who were exposed to the target language since birth and learned the other language simultaneously, or early in childhood (before age 5). I make two main claims: (1) that the L1 grammar of bilinguals at a given stabilized state (probably endstate) resembles the incomplete (either developing or stabilized) grammars typical of intermediate and advanced stages in L2 acquisition; and (2) that despite similar patterns of performance, when language proficiency is factored in, early bilinguals are better than the L2 learners, probably due to exposure to primary linguistic input early in childhood. I offer empirical evidence from an experimental study testing knowledge of the syntax and semantics of unaccusativity in Spanish, conducted with English-speaking L2 learners and English-dominant Spanish heritage speakers living in the USA. I consider recent treatments of unaccusativity and language attrition within the generative framework (Sorace, 1999; 2000a; 2000b), that offer a unifying account of the formal parallels observed between these two populations I discuss how input, use and age may explain differences and similarities in the linguistic attainment of the two groups.
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SAG, IVAN A., RUI P. CHAVES, ANNE ABEILLÉ, BRUNO ESTIGARRIBIA, DAN FLICKINGER, PAUL KAY, LAURA A. MICHAELIS, et al. "Lessons from the English auxiliary system." Journal of Linguistics 56, no. 1 (January 3, 2019): 87–155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002222671800052x.
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The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the featureaux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstresseddo, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.
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Sigurd, Bengt. "Using Referent Grammar (RG) in Computer Analysis, Generation and Translation of Sentences." Nordic Journal of Linguistics 11, no. 1-2 (June 1988): 129–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0332586500001785.
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The paper presents Referent Grammar (RG), a version of generalized phrase structure grammar. RG uses descriptive labels for defective categories (categories tacking a constituent) instead of slash expressions and needs no null (empty, zero) categories. RG uses both functional and categorial representations and the grammar rules, written in the Prolog DCG formalism, relate these two levels. The functional representations of RG include referent variables (numbers) with noun phrases which makes it possible to keep track of the referents within the sentences and in the text. Relative clauses can be defined in a new way using these referents and the referent, enriched with grammatical features, can be used for controlling agreement. Substantial fragments of Swedish and English grammars have been implemented in RG and the print-out of a demo session shows how RG works in computerized analysis, generation and translation of Swedish and English sentences.
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Xavier, Gildete Rocha. "O parâmetro do sujeito nulo na Aquisição do Português L2 (Null subject parameter in L2 Portuguese Acquisition)." Estudos da Língua(gem) 7, no. 2 (December 1, 2009): 133. http://dx.doi.org/10.22481/el.v7i2.1094.
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Este artigo tem como objetivo investigar como se dá a aquisição do sujeito nulo do Português Brasileiro L2 por falantes nativos de Inglês e Italiano em situação de imersão. A pesquisa desenvolve-se no âmbito da gramática gerativa, (CHOMSKY, 1981, 1986, 1993, 1995, 2000). As questões da pesquisa estão relacionadas à questão do acesso à Gramática Universal.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Gramática gerativa. Princípios e parâmetros. Aquisição de segunda língua. Sujeito nulo.
ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the acquisition of the null subject in Brazilian Portuguese as a second language by native speakers of English and Italian. The research was developed within the framework of Generative Grammar (CHOMSKY, 1981, 1986, 1993, 1995, 2000). This research attempted to investigate whether the L2 learners have access to the Universal Grammar.KEYWORDS: Generative grammar. Principles and parameters. Second language acquisition. Null subject.
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Kong, Stano. "Accounting for the asymmetrical interpretation of thematic and non-thematic verbs in L2 English." International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 57, no. 3 (September 25, 2019): 327–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/iral-2016-0079.
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Abstract This study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of thematic and non-thematic verbs in second language (L2) English by three groups of adult native Chinese speakers and a group of native English speakers. English allows non-thematic verbs to raise but requires thematic verbs to remain in-situ. In contrast, neither thematic nor non-thematic verbs are allowed to raise in Chinese. The results indicate that there is a discrepancy between native and non-native mental representations of the grammars concerned; whereas native grammars require English thematic verbs to remain in-situ but allow non-thematic verbs to raise, neither thematic nor non-thematic verbs are allowed to raise in learners L2 English grammars. Results of the study argue against the Valueless Features Hypothesis (Eubank 1993/94. On the transfer of parametric values in L2 development. Language Acquisition 3. 183–208, 1994. Optionality and the initial state in L2 development. In T. Hoekstra & B. Schwartz (eds), Language acquisition studies in generative grammar: Papers in Honour of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 GLOW Workshop, 369–388. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. Negation in early German-English interlanguage: More valueless features in the L2 initial state. Second Language Research 12. 73–106.), which posits that the L1 syntactic features of INFL are initially inert and are not transferred. Instead, the results support the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou 2007. The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 23. 215–242.), which argues for the inaccessibility of uninterpretable syntactic features beyond a critical period. In particular, it is argued that uninterpretable syntactic features not selected during early stages of primary language acquisition become inaccessible in subsequent language acquisition. The results suggest that there may be cases where apparent target-like performance conceals non-target-like underlying competence.
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Medeiros, Carolina Lacerda. "A AQUISIÇÃO DA POSIÇÃO DO VERBO EM INGLÊS E ALEMÃO: UM ESTUDO COMPARATIVO | THE ACQUISITION OF VERBS IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY." Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, no. 54 (January 12, 2016): 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/ell.v0i54.18104.
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<p><strong>Resumo:</strong> A literatura que discute a sintaxe do verbo nas línguas naturais em geral assume que as línguas V2 são aquelas em que o verbo flexionado ocupa a segunda posição na sentença, sendo a primeira posição ocupada por qualquer outro elemento. O alemão, assim como outras línguas germânicas, é caracterizado como uma língua de tipo V2. O inglês, por outro lado, não apresenta a ordenação de constituintes segundo a qual o verbo obrigatoriamente ocupa a segunda posição na sentença, tendo sido considerado uma língua V2 apenas em seu período arcaico. Este artigo procura fazer um breve estudo comparativo analisando a fala de duas crianças, uma adquirindo o alemão e uma adquirindo o inglês britânico, em diferentes momentos (1;9 até 3;3). Com base na tipologia de Vikner (1995) temos como objetivo verificar até que ponto as duas línguas se assemelham, no âmbito da sintaxe, e em que momento passam a se comportar como línguas distintas no que respeita à posição do verbo uma vez que, linearmente, o inglês apresenta o verbo em segunda posição nas sentenças simples. Como hipótese, temos que um ponto decisivo para a diferenciação das duas gramáticas seria a aquisição de encaixadas. Desse modo, a criança que adquire o alemão começaria a apresentar traços de uma gramática V2 a partir do momento em que adquire sentenças encaixadas, dado que, diferentemente do inglês, esta língua não apresenta verbo em segunda posição nas subordinadas. A criança adquirindo o inglês, por outro lado, mantém a ordem V2 linear nas encaixadas. O <em>corpus </em>utilizado neste trabalho é oriundo da base CHILDES e pode ser acessado <em>online</em>. O quadro teórico se baseia na noção de Gramática de Chomsky (1985), convencionada como Língua-I, que remete à possibilidade de se gerarem estruturas linguísticas e não, por exemplo, a um certo inventário de estruturas. Tais possibilidades são limitadas pela Gramática Universal, parte das faculdades inatas do ser humano, que dispõe de princípios imutáveis e parâmetros que podem ser fixados diferentemente em gramáticas particulares, determinando, assim, os limites de variação entre essas gramáticas (Chomsky & Lasnik 1993). Cada gramática particular, neste sentido, representa uma determinada parametrização dos princípios da Gramática Universal. A gramática do falante, na teoria gerativa, será, portanto, uma entidade individual: uma gramática particular internalizada na mente de cada indivíduo.</p><p><strong>Abstract:</strong> <em>The literature usually assumes that V2 languages are those in which the finite verb is on second position on the sentence, like it is in German. English, on the other hand, does not present the same linearization, so Vikner (1995) classified it as a residual V2-language. This paper aims to provide a comparative study analyzing the speech of two children, one acquiring German and the other acquiring European English, in different moments (1;9-3;3). Based on Vikner's typology, we try to verify how these two languages are syntactically alike and in which moment they begin to behave like different grammars, in what concern verb position, since, linearly, English also presents the verb in second position in matrix sentences. As a hypothesis, we believe that a crucial point in this differentiation would be the acquisition of subordinate sentences. In this sense, the child acquiring German would start presenting V2 grammar traces on the moment s/he acquires subordinate sentences, since, unlike English, this grammar do not present V2 in subordinate structures. The child acquiring English, on the other hand, would maintain the V2 linearization on subordinate sentences. This work is based on the CHILDES corpus, which can be accessed online. The theoretic framework is based on Chomsky's (1985) notion of Grammar as I-Language, that refers to the possibility to generate language structures and not, for example, a certain inventory of structures. Those possibilities are limited by the Universal Grammar, part of human's innate faculties, that is formed by immutable principles and parameters that can be differently fixed by different particular grammars determining the limits of language variation between those grammars. In this sense, each particular grammar represents a different parametrization of the Universal Grammar's principles. Each speaker's grammar, in this sense, will be an individual entity: a particular grammar internalized in the individual's mind</em><em>.</em></p><p>Keywords: <em>Language Acquisition; V2; Comparative Syntax; Generative Grammar.</em></p><p> </p>
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YERASTOV, YURI. "A construction grammar analysis of the transitivebeperfect in present-day Canadian English." English Language and Linguistics 19, no. 1 (January 8, 2015): 157–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674314000331.
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This article offers a syntactic analysis of the construction [be doneNP], e.g.I am done dinner, I am finished my homework, as found in Canadian English and some US dialects. After situating this construction in the context of a productive transitivebeperfect in Scots/English dialects, [be doneNP] will be distinguished from a set of its conceptual and structural relatives, and ultimately be shown not to be reducible to a surface realization of another underlying structure. From the perspective of syntactic theory, the article problematizes the parsimony of the mainstream generative approach (most recently in MacFadden & Alexiadou 2010) in accounting for the facts of [be doneNP] on strictly compositional grounds, as well as the mainstream view of lexical items as projecting theta grids and subcategorization frames (as e.g. in Grimshaw 1979; Emonds 2000). Following Fillmoreet al.(1988), Goldberg (1995, 2005) and others, what will be suggested instead is a construction grammar approach to [be doneNP], under which a construction holistically licenses its argument structure. Along these lines [be doneNP] will be characterized as an abstract construction with some fixed material.
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Aarts, Bas, Dan Clayton, and Sean Wallis. "Bridging the Grammar Gap: teaching English grammar to the iPhone generation." English Today 28, no. 1 (March 2012): 3–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078411000599.
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For second language learners, the value of the explicit teaching of English grammar has never been questioned. However, in recent times there has been dissent about whether or not to teach English grammar to native speakers. From the late 1960s onwards English grammar teaching in the United Kingdom largely disappeared from the curriculum, and was replaced by teachers focusing on students learning to express themselves. This was in the main not a bad thing, because it made students active participants in their own learning, and they were expected to think critically and express themselves well. The teaching of grammar, with its emphasis on rules, drilling and learning by rote, was seen as conformist, dull and unnecessary, and this view seemed to be confirmed by research into the effectiveness of grammar teaching.
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Morin, Cameron, Guillaume Desagulier, and Jack Grieve. "Dialect syntax in Construction Grammar." Belgian Journal of Linguistics, Volume 34 (2020) 34 (December 31, 2020): 248–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00050.mor.
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Abstract This squib focuses on two main issues. Firstly, it examines the ways in which constructionist approaches to language can bring about an improved theoretical understanding of Double Modals (DMs) in dialects of English. DMs have proved to be a long-lasting, notorious puzzle in formal linguistics, and have not received any general solution today, with much analysis devoted to their constituent structure and their postulated layers of derivation, especially in generative models of language. Usage-based strands of Construction Grammar (CxG) appear to naturally overcome such problems, while conveying a more cognitively and socially realistic picture of such dialect variants. Secondly, and more importantly, we argue that such an improved, constructional understanding of DMs can also contribute to advances in the modeling of dialect syntax in CxG, both theoretically and methodologically. In particular, DMs constitute an interesting case of relatively rare and restricted syntactic constructions in the dialects they appear in, and they are likely to exhibit different rates of entrenchment and network schematicity cross-dialectally. Moreover, the empirical challenges surrounding the measurement of DM usage invite us to refine the methodological concept of triangulation, by sketching a two-step approach with a data-driven study of new types of corpora on the one hand, and a hypothesis-driven experimental account of acceptability in relevant geographical locations on the other.
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Sokolova, M., and E. Plisov. "CROSS-LINGUISTIC TRANSFER CLASSROOM L3 ACQUISITION IN UNIVERSITY SETTING." Vestnik of Minin University 7, no. 1 (March 17, 2019): 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.26795/2307-1281-2019-7-1-6.
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Introduction: the paper investigates cross-linguistic influences between the two previously learnt languages and their effects on classroom L3 acquisition. The study checks the predictions of the existing theories of mechanisms of transfer into the L3 attested for naturalistic learners. The main predictions get confirmed with the population of classroom learners of English as the L3. All the participants are native speakers of Russian. They all learnt their dominant foreign language, either French or German, in the classroom. The results suggest a governing role of the Universal Grammar in classroom language learning. Materials and Methods: the experiment uses three production tasks: written production, oral production and pronunciation task. The written assignment asks the participants to translate sentences from Russian into English. The target sentence contains the existential there are that does not exist in Russian. The way the participants structure the target sentence in English allows for conclusion about possible influences of the first foreign language on the development of their L3- English. In the oral production task, the participants are prompted to produce negative sentences. The influences from previously learnt languages is traced through the placement of the negation not. In the pronunciation task Praat was used to measure the duration and the formant frequency of the nasal [N] in English. Differences in sound quality trace back to the influences from the previously learnt languages. The data were analyzed with one-way ANOVA for between and within group differences. Results: in the written task, the participants who studied German as their first foreign language prefer verb final placement in the subordinate, which is ungrammatical in English but grammatical in German. The L2-French group put the verb in the right place, but they do not use the existential there are, which required in English. In the oral task, the placement of negation is Russian-like in both groups. In pronunciation, the quality of English [N] is influenced by the amount of nasality the participants learnt before, i.e. French influences make the English [N] more nasalized than the [N] in the group with German as the first foreign language. Discussion and Conclusion: classroom learners of English as the L3 experience influences from all the previously learnt languages, the native language and the first foreign language. These findings pattern with the assumptions of the main generative theories of naturalistic L3 acquisition. Concluding that classroom language learning is governed by universal grammar, the teaching can benefit from predicting what cross-linguistic influences can be facilitative or not for the acquisition of the target language.
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SEPPÄNEN, AIMO. "The Old English relative þe." English Language and Linguistics 8, no. 1 (April 21, 2004): 71–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s136067430400125x.
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In current accounts the Old English relative þe is analysed in two radically different ways. The traditional view, inherited from the nineteenth-century grammarians, views the word as a relative pronoun, while the generative analysis, derived from some remarks of Jespersen on the ModE relative that, takes it to be a subordinating particle. The generativist view is based on the word's lack of morphological variation, whereas the older approach examines more generally the grammar of the word, noting that the invariable þe shares the typical nominal categories of number and case, functioning both as a singular and a plural and representing all the four cases of OE nominal elements. A further indication of the word's nominal status is its referential function, distinguishing between specific and generic reference. Against these clear facts, the lack of overt inflection is a minor idiosyncrasy, paralleled by the OE generic man/mon, whose pronominal status is widely agreed. Þe may have been a subordinating particle in origin, but by historical OE times it retained this function in relative clauses only after relative adverbs, having been reanalysed elsewhere either as a relative adverb itself, or, in its most frequent relative use, as a pronoun.
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Jaensch, Carol. "L3 acquisition of German adjectival inflection: A generative account." Second Language Research 27, no. 1 (December 22, 2010): 83–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658310386646.
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Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the ‘second language (L2) status factor’ hypothesis (Bardel and Falk, 2007), which proposes that the primacy of the L2 can block the potential positive effects that may be transferable from the first language (L1). This article attempts to extend these hypotheses to the domain of morphosyntax, in relation to the TLA of the properties of grammatical number and gender concord marking on German attributive adjectives; these properties not present in the L1 of Japanese, or the L2 of English. Two further factors are of interest in the current study; first, the performance of the learners according to their L3 and their L2 proficiency levels, a variable not discussed in the above-mentioned studies; and, second, the role that the type of task has on the performance of these learners. Three groups of Japanese native speakers (matched for proficiency within each German group), but with differing English proficiencies, completed a carefully balanced gap-filling task, together with two oral elicitation tasks in the form of games; both of these elicited tokens of adjectival inflection. Initial results offer partial support for weaker versions of the two hypotheses mentioned above. However, neither of the L3 models tested can fully account for the results obtained, which are more consistent with a feature-based account of the organization of grammar in the domain of morphosyntax, such as that of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993). DM is a model for language acquisition which — coupled with a view that the Subset Principle proposed by this account is not observed by non-primary language learners — has recently been proposed to explain the optionality observed in L2 learners’ production (Hawkins et al., 2006). The data presented here suggest that it could be extended to L3 learners’ production.
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Lipovšek, Frančiška. "Why English Exhibits Determiner-Possessor Complementarity and Slovene Doesn’t." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 1, no. 1-2 (December 31, 2004): 15–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.1.1-2.15-22.
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The aim of the paper is to provide an explanation for the following difference between English and Slovene: whereas in English a definite determiner and a possessor are in complementary distribution, in Slovene the two categories are perfectly compatible. Arguing that the traditional approach to determiner-possessor complementarity is inadequate, the paper proposes an explanation that has been developed within the framework of generative grammar: languages exhibiting determiner-possessor complementarity are characterized by the presence of the [∼def] feature on the functional head Pos. The generative approach also shows that (with the definite article and a demonstrative occupying different structural positions) determiner-possessor complementarity is in fact twofold, comprising (i) articlepossessor complementarity and (ii) demonstrative-possessor complementarity.
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WEERMAN, FRED. "Diachronic change: Early versus late acquisition." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14, no. 2 (April 2011): 149–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1366728910000581.
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There is a long linguistic tradition in which language change is explained in terms of first language acquisition. In this tradition, children are considered to be the agents of language change, or at least the agents of changes in the underlying grammar. Since the early 1980s, this has been formulated in the (generative) terminology in terms of parameters set by children: whereas an older generation acquires one particular setting of a parameter (during childhood), a next generation of L1 children may set a parameter differently, based on the input of their parents, and this may lead to a different output. For obvious reasons this argumentation had to be built on theoretical rather than empirical work on language acquisition. There are no children acquiring Old English or Middle Dutch, and, in fact, the field of acquisition research was until recently much less developed and very often not focused on the type of facts that happened to play a role in discussions of language change.
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Elamin, Saadia. "Foreign language courses for translation undergraduates." FORUM / Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation 14, no. 2 (December 31, 2016): 239–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/forum.14.2.04ela.
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Abstract In most parts of the world the principle of translating into one’s native language is rarely observed. Translators find themselves working equally into a foreign language (L2), especially English. This shift in translation directionality needs to find its way to the translation classroom, but even before that, to the L2 courses that precede practical translation training. These courses, so far directed towards improving students’ ability to understand foreign language texts, have to take a new turn towards developing the increasingly required production competence. As the present study has shown, certain rules of English grammar constitute the stumbling block for Arabic undergraduates and generate a number of regularly occurring errors in their English texts. Grammar and other language courses, instead of following the content of standard textbooks, should be designed and delivered to serve the real needs of students and help them to develop the increasingly required L2 production competence.
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Gürel, Ayşe, and Gülsen Yilmaz. "Restructuring in the L1 Turkish grammar." Language, Interaction and Acquisition 2, no. 2 (December 21, 2011): 221–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lia.2.2.03gur.
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This paper compares results of two studies examining L2 English and L2 Dutch-induced syntactic changes that occur in L1 Turkish grammars of speakers living in North America and in the Netherlands, respectively. We examine potential restructuring in the L1 knowledge of binding properties of overt and null subject pronouns in first and second generation immigrants. The results of the L2 Dutch-speaking groups in the Netherlands are found to be similar to those of the L2 English-speaking group in North America, as reported in Gürel (2002), in the sense that all bilingual groups diverge, to some extent, from monolinguals in their judgments of pronoun binding. In line with our predictions, findings suggest that L2 English and L2 Dutch can influence L1 Turkish syntactic judgments in a similar fashion and that an L2 can induce inter- as well as intra-generational L1 change.
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Schwartz, Bonnie D., and Magda Gubala-Ryzak. "Learnability and grammar reorganization in L2A: against negative evidence causing the unlearning of verb movement." Interlanguage studies bulletin (Utrecht) 8, no. 1 (February 1992): 1–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/026765839200800102.
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This paper reassesses the role of Negative Evidence (NE) in nonnative language acquisition. We argue that the grammar-building process cannot make use of NE to restructure (Interlanguage) grammars - irrespective of logical need. The empirical basis comes from White's (1991a; 1991b) study of French speakers acquiring English, where the 'Verb Movement' parameter and the particular learnability problem of 'unlearning' thematic Verb- movement were the focus. The L2ers start off assuming the L1 value of [+] Verb-movement, thus incorrectly allowing the order S V Adv O in English, and the issue is whether NE can force a switch to the [-] value, whereby S V Adv O should be excluded. While it is indisputable that the L2ers changed their linguistic behaviour as a direct consequence of their exposure to NE, the conclusion we draw is quite distinct from that of White. Based on both the postinstruction data and an argument grounded in formal learnability theory, we show that an inherent contradiction must be imputed to the Interlanguage 'grammar' to account for the results: in addition to no longer permitting S V Adv O, the L2ers also (incorrectly) disallow S V Adv PP; to exclude the latter, the grammar must have 'un learned' base-generating Adverbs to the right of VP but other data dispute this, i.e., S V O/PP Adv is still allowed. Since natural language grammars cannot contain such inherent contradictions, we conclude that a natural language grammar could not be the source of this L2 behaviour. Our explanation is that the L2ers simply extended the *S V Adv O pattern that they were taught. In sum, there is no evidence that NE caused the L2ers to unlearn Verb-movement and hence NE did not restructure the Interlanguage grammar. Implications of this conclusion are discussed in relation to the issues of learnability and 'UG-accessibility' in L2A.
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Łyskawa, Paulina, Ruth Maddeaux, Emilia Melara, and Naomi Nagy. "Heritage Speakers Follow All the Rules: Language Contact and Convergence in Polish Devoicing." Heritage Language Journal 13, no. 2 (August 31, 2016): 219–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.46538/hlj.13.2.7.
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We use a comparative variationist framework to compare variable word-final obstruent devoicing patterns in heritage Polish, English and homeland Polish in conversational speech. Phonological and lexical factors are shown to condition this variation differently in the three varieties. We have a particular interest in one other factor relevant to heritage speakers: the amount of code-switching between Polish and English by each speaker. We show that, for second generation heritage speakers, individuals’ code-switching rates are positively correlated with their rates of devoicing. Based on the qualitatively and quantitatively different devoicing patterns of heritage Polish speakers, compared to both homeland Polish and Toronto English, we argue that the phonological grammar of this group of speakers constitutes a convergence of the heritage language and the dominant language’s grammars and suggest that frequent codeswitching provides the context in which these speakers’ knowledge of Polish and English patterns converge.
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Laubstein, Ann Stuart. "Syllable Structure: The Speech Error Evidence." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 32, no. 4 (December 1987): 339–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100012445.
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A competence grammar of English must account for the English speaker’s ability to predict the shape of the regular past tense morpheme on the basis of the stem-final segment, faced, for example, with a neologistic verb like*rolkor*glag. But whether efficient processing of known words routinely utilizes this creative ability is another matter. Efficient on-line processing may favour selection from a store over computation. To what extent selection and computation are balanced in on-line production may even be different from the balance required in efficient comprehension.It would appear therefore that not only is behaviour not a criterion for possession of knowledge — it is in fact only one kind of evidence for it — but also that the constructs required in characterizing competence cannot serve as the only criteria for determining the forms of processing. The evidence from both domains can support but not disconfirm the hypotheses of the other. Nevertheless, the grammars being produced within the generative paradigm are beginning to have the requisite richness of detail that must underly the capacity for language use. As such they provide independently motivated and sufficiently elaborate hypotheses regarding the structures and processes underlying production, allowing the production theorist a preliminary distinction between crucial facts and those best considered irrelevant.
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Agarwal, Nancy, Mudasir Ahmad Wani, and Patrick Bours. "Lex-Pos Feature-Based Grammar Error Detection System for the English Language." Electronics 9, no. 10 (October 14, 2020): 1686. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics9101686.
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This work focuses on designing a grammar detection system that understands both structural and contextual information of sentences for validating whether the English sentences are grammatically correct. Most existing systems model a grammar detector by translating the sentences into sequences of either words appearing in the sentences or syntactic tags holding the grammar knowledge of the sentences. In this paper, we show that both these sequencing approaches have limitations. The former model is over specific, whereas the latter model is over generalized, which in turn affects the performance of the grammar classifier. Therefore, the paper proposes a new sequencing approach that contains both information, linguistic as well as syntactic, of a sentence. We call this sequence a Lex-Pos sequence. The main objective of the paper is to demonstrate that the proposed Lex-Pos sequence has the potential to imbibe the specific nature of the linguistic words (i.e., lexicals) and generic structural characteristics of a sentence via Part-Of-Speech (POS) tags, and so, can lead to a significant improvement in detecting grammar errors. Furthermore, the paper proposes a new vector representation technique, Word Embedding One-Hot Encoding (WEOE) to transform this Lex-Pos into mathematical values. The paper also introduces a new error induction technique to artificially generate the POS tag specific incorrect sentences for training. The classifier is trained using two corpora of incorrect sentences, one with general errors and another with POS tag specific errors. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network architecture has been employed to build the grammar classifier. The study conducts nine experiments to validate the strength of the Lex-Pos sequences. The Lex-Pos -based models are observed as superior in two ways: (1) they give more accurate predictions; and (2) they are more stable as lesser accuracy drops have been recorded from training to testing. To further prove the potential of the proposed Lex-Pos -based model, we compare it with some well known existing studies.
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Pérez Lorido, Rodrigo. "On the Grammatical Domain of Gapping in Old English." Diachronica 13, no. 2 (January 1, 1996): 319–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.13.2.06per.
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SUMMARY This paper is a study of verbal ellipsis in coordinated constructions in Old English, carried out within the theoretical framework of Transformational Grammar and assuming a deletion-based approach. The rule analysed here is the one known as Gapping, and the study focuses primarily on the discussion of its grammatical domain, trying to determine if the rule is a syntactic one or if it falls outside the domain of pure syntax. In order to achieve this, two basic aspects are dealt with which have traditionally constituted good tests of the grammatical nature of Gapping in different languages within the deletion-based approach: the extent to which the application of the rule depends on structural parallelism, and the possibility that Gapping may apply to non-adjacent sentences. The method I have pursued consists of analysing the Gapping patterns found in a corpus of seven Old English texts and comparing them with the well-known facts for Modern English under different perspectives. The conclusions I have come to seem to suggest that Gapping in Old English cannot be accounted for from a purely syntactic point of view and that stipulations of a pragmatic nature must also be included in its formulation. This has obvious consequences for a theory of ellipsis in Old English in particular, and for a theory of Old English grammar in general, for it might suggest that word order in Old English would nut rely only on principles of a syntactic nature, but also on others of a pragmatic, discourse-based one. RÉSUMÉ II s'agit, dans cet article, d'une etude de l'ellipse verbale dans les structures coordonnees en vieil-anglais, etude entreprise dans le cadre theorique de la grammaire generative transformationnelle et dans la perspective d'effacement par identite. La reglejque nous analysons ici est connue sous le nom de 'gapping' et le but fondamental de notre etude est de delimiter le domaine-gramma-tical ou cette regie opere, tout en essayant de demontrer s'il s'agit d'une regie strictement syntaxique ou si — au contraire — il s'agit d'une regie qui deborde le champ de la syntaxe. Pour atteindre ce but on a analyse surtout deux aspects qui constituent, traditionnellement, des preuves fiables lors de la determination du domaine grammatical du 'gapping', a savoir, le degre de parallelisme structural necessaire pour que la regie y opere et la possibilité d'application de celle-ci dans des phrases non adjacentes. La demarche suivie dans cette etude con-siste a analyser les differents exemples de 'gapping' depouilles dans un corpus constitue par sept textes d'ancien anglais, et a les comparer avec des faits pertinents en anglais moderne sous d'autres perspectives. Les conclusions aux-quelles l'auteur a abouti semblent indiquer que le 'gapping' en ancien anglais repond moins a des restrictions syntaxiques qu'en anglais moderne, et que dans sa formulation des stipulations syntaxiques aussi bien que pragmatico-discursives doivent y intervenir. Ce fait aura d'evidentes repercussions pour une theorie de l'ellipse en ancien anglais et, par la, meme pour une theorie de la grammaire de 1'ancien anglais en general, puisqu'il suggere que l'ordre des mots dans cette langue n'est pas uniquement le reflet de principes de type syn-taxique, mais egalement de type communicatif et discursif. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die verbale Auslassung in koordinierten Kon-struktionen des Altenglischen; dabei diente sowohl die generative Transforma-tionsgrammatik als auch die Gleichheitsauslassung als theoretische Grundlage. Die hier analysierte Regel ist allgemeinhin als 'Gapping' bekannt. Die Studie befaßt sich hauptsachlich mit der Untersuchung der grammatischen Reichweite dieser Regel; dabei wird versucht zu ermitteln, ob sie nur auf den syntak-tischen Bereich angewandt werden kann oder ob sie liber die reine Syntax hinausreicht. Um dies zu erreichen, werden zwei grundlegende grammatische Aspekte genauer untersucht, die erfahrungsgemaB zu guten Ergebnissen bei der grammatischen Analyse von Gapping in anderen Sprachen beigetragen ha-ben: das AusmaB, von dem die Anwendung der Regel von struktureller Paral-lelitat abhangt, und die Moglichkeit, daB Gapping auch bei nicht aufeinander folgenden Satzen angetroffen werden kann. Die hier angewandte Methode besteht aus einer Analyse der vorhandenen Muster von Gapping in einem Korpus von sieben altenglischen Texten und einem anschließenden Vergleich mit den weitlaufig bekannten Fakten des modernen Englisch. Die Ergebnisse, zu denen der Autor gekommen ist, machen deutlich, daB im Altenglischen Gapping nicht so sehr den syntaktischen Restriktionen entspricht wie im modernen Englisch, und daB man in seine Formulierung auch grammatisch-diskursive Festlegungen einschließen soil. Das hat deutlich Folgen für eine Theorie der Auslassung im Altenglischen und auch fiir eine Grammatiktheorie des Altenglischen im Allgemeinen, denn das würde heiBen, daB die Wort-stellung in dieser Sprache nicht nur von Prinzipien syntaktischer Art abhangig ist, sondern auch von solchen kommunikativer und diskursiver Natur.
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Bolta, Marija. "Olga Mišeska Tomic, Syntax and Syntaxes: The Generative Approach to English Sentence Analysis; Savremena administracija, Beograd, 1987." Linguistica 29, no. 1 (December 1, 1989): 161–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.29.1.161-167.
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Olga Mišeska Tomic, professor of English Linguistics at the Universities of Skopje nad Novi Sad, has written a well-organised survey of major syntactical issues in the generative approach in general and as it applies to English sentence grammar. It is a well-researched book with and astonishing amount of information, readily comprehensible to the language student, for whom it is principally aimed. The au thor skilfully conducts the reader through quite complex matters, carefully avoiding confusion between simplification and distortion. The main aim of the book, as out lined in the brief Preface, is to expose the assumptions and problems involved in the conceptualisation of the issues rather than the technical, theory-internal formaliza tions. This is by no means a simple task and for most of the ground covered the auth or has had to construct the emerging picture from a patchwork of specialized con tributions to individual aspects of English sentence construction.
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Shirsath, Nilesh, Aniruddha Velankar, Ranjeet Patil, and Shilpa Shinde. "Various Approaches of Machine Translation for Marathi to English Language." ITM Web of Conferences 40 (2021): 03026. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/itmconf/20214003026.
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Machine Translation (MT) is a generic term for computerised systems that generate translations from one natural language to another, with or without human intervention. Text may be used to examine knowledge, and turning that information into pictures helps people to communicate and acquire information.There seems to be a lot of work conducted on translating English to Hindi, Tamil, Bangla and other languages. The important parts of translation are to provide translated sentences with correct words and proper grammar. There has been a comprehensive review of 10 primary publications used in research. Two separate approaches are proposed, one uses rule based approach and other uses neural-machine translation approach to translate basic Marathi phrases to English. While designed primarily for Marathi-English language pairs, the design can be applied to other language pairs with a similar structure.
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Bès, Gabriel G. "Grammaire Générative." Lingvisticæ Investigationes. International Journal of Linguistics and Language Resources 9, no. 1 (January 1, 1985): 1–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.9.1.02bes.
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Generative grammar around 1980 The aim of this paper is to put into interaction Chomsky's methodological claims with his descriptive propositions. §1 presents in compact form Chomsky's methodological positions and in particular Rules and Representations. §2 examines Filters and Control, firstly the control problem and then, systematically, nearly all the filters proposed by Chomsky and Lasnik for English grammar. The main results are the absence of explicative power in all cases and very disturbing descriptive results as regards filters: they suppose different conditions on trace sensivity to them. On Binding is revised in §3 and particularly in relation to Filters and Control. Descriptive results are also disturbing here: they concern structures of obligatory control and embedded infinitive phrases. The Case filter is not a sufficient enough device and filters of the Filters and Control type are always required. Binding conditions on each other leave many unresolved examples. It is claimed (§4) that there is no such permissive notion of counter-examples capable of justifying the detected descriptive problems. Chomsky an hypotheses change, but it is impossible to say if they improve.
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Philippaki-Warburton, Irene. "The theory of empty categories and the pro-drop parameter in Modern Greek." Journal of Linguistics 23, no. 2 (September 1987): 289–318. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226700011282.
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One of the most promising new developments of recent research into theoretical syntax within the model of Government and Binding (GB) as presented in Chomsky (1981) and (1982) has been the new importance given to the study of languages other than English. This has stimulated a great deal of work into a variety of languages (see, for example, Rizzi, 1982; Borer, 1983; Bouchard, 1984; Huang, 1984 and others). It has also been welcomed by linguists outside the TG tradition. Thus, Comrie, (1984:155) expresses his delight that ‘Chomsky (1981) makes clear that generative grammarians have come to realize that an adequate study of syntax within universal grammar requires the study of languages of different types. Chomsky's main concern has always been to formulate a theory that would achieve ‘explanatory adequacy’ by providing a restrictive set of principles which could characterize universally the notion ‘natural language’. However, detailed and in-depth analyses of various languages have revealed that in order to achieve ‘descriptive adequacy’ the theory has to allow for cross-linguistic differences, or ‘parametric variation’. The concept of parametric variation weakens some-what the restrictiveness of the universal grammar (UG) hypothesis and even more so its purported innateness, since the values for the parameters must be arrived at by the child through induction from empirical evidence. Nevertheless, explanatory adequacy may still be attained if the number of parameters is very small and each parameter has few values.
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TOMASELLO, MICHAEL. "The Return of Constructions." Journal of Child Language 25, no. 2 (June 1998): 431–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000998003493.
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Review essay on: Goldberg, A. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. University of Chicago Press (1995). Pp. xi+265.The cornerstone of traditional descriptive grammars is the construction: a recurrent pattern of linguistic elements that serves some well-defined communicative function. Prototypical constructions are sentence-level patterns such as, in English: the imperative, the ditransitive, the passive, the resultative, the yes–no question, and the cleft (each of which may have some subtypes). Also included in some theorists' definition of construction are components of sentences such as the prepositional phrase, the noun phrase, or the genitive noun phrase. Traditional constructions may have some specific words or morphemes associated with them (e.g. by in the full passive, 's in the genitive), but these are generally closed-class morphemes. Almost by definition, traditional constructions are relatively abstract patterns that apply across whole classes of open-class morphemes.One of the defining features of modern-day generative grammar is the absence of constructions. Chomsky (1981) hypothesized that grammatical structure comprises two primary levels: the level of principles and parameters, which is much more abstract than constructions and includes everything from the subjacency constraint to the empty category principle, and the level of the lexicon, which includes all of the concrete morphemes and words of a particular language. In this view, constructions represent a ‘middle level’ of analysis that is, in effect, an epiphenomenon resulting from the interaction of the two primary levels. One outcome of this theoretical move has been that generative linguists concerned with construction-level phenomena have had to fill the generative lexicon with ever richer types of linguistic information, especially for verbs (e.g. Bresnan, 1982; Jackendoff, 1990; Levin, 1995; Pinker, 1989).
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Dube, Busi. "Where are the minimal trees? Evidence from early Zulu L2 subordination." Second Language Research 16, no. 3 (July 2000): 233–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/026765800666067410.
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The Minimal Trees Hypothesis (Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1994; 1996a; 1996b) proposes that second language (L2) initial state grammars lack functional categories because functional categories are not subject to transfer effects. The aim of this article is to argue that, to some extent, functional categories instantiated in the learner's first language (L1) transfer to the initial state of L2 syntactic development. On the basis of Zulu interlanguage (IL) data on the acquisition of the obligatory declarative complementizer ukuthi(‘that’) by English native speakers, it is argued that Comp contains a null complementizer system which has sufficient syntactic content to generate subordination in the learners' initial Zulu IL grammar. Regarding transfer of functional categories, it is suggested that null Comp evident at the Zulu L2 initial state is transferred from English, the subjects' L1.
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McCawley, James D. "Syntactic concepts and terminology in mid-20th century American Linguistics." Historiographia Linguistica 26, no. 3 (December 31, 1999): 407–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.26.3.13mcc.
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Summary This paper deals with the notions and terminology that figure in the syntactic works of Bloomfield, Fries, Hockett, Gleason, and early Chomsky. Notwithstanding Bloomfield’s commitment to constituent structure and his profound influence on syntactic research in the United States, constituency had a surprisingly peripheral role in such works as Fries (1952) “Immediate constituents” (is the last of its syntactic chapters) and notions of dependency structure a much more central role. Many false generalizations by descriptivists (e.g., treatments of Therer-insertion as inversion) result from a failure to consider complex expressions as constituents of the various constructions. Notwithstanding descriptivists’ denunciations and generativists’ endorsements of traditional grammar, it is the descriptivists whose syntactic category notions came closer to those of traditional grammar. The unusual category scheme of Fries did not deviate all that much from traditional schemes, and its innovations were not applied consistently. 1960s generative syntax shared with Fries’s approach a conception of gender features and referential indices in English as borne by Ns rather than by NPs, and a failure to treat inter- and intra-saentential anaphora uniformly. Gleason (1965) is the most honorable exception to the dismal quality of this era’s literature on parts of speech.
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Westergaard, Marit. "Linguistic variation and micro-cues in first language acquisition." Linguistic Variation 14, no. 1 (November 25, 2014): 26–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lv.14.1.02wes.
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Children are often exposed to considerable variation in the input. Nevertheless, there is very little overgeneralization in child language data and children are typically found to make errors of omission, not errors of commission, a fact which is often referred to as conservative learning. In this paper, these findings are accounted for by a model of micro-cues, a generative approach to language acquisition arguing that children are sensitive to fine syntactic distinctions from early on. The micro-cues are small pieces of abstract syntactic structure resulting from parsing the input. This means that UG provides children with principles, features, and the ability to parse, but not the micro-cues themselves, which are considered to be part of the knowledge of a specific language. The model also considers children’s errors to generally be due to economy and the language acquisition process to be development in small steps, from specific to more general knowledge. Keywords: Conservative learning; economy; English; grammar competition; Norwegian; (over- and under)generalization; parameter; rule “size”; word order
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Fonseca, Hely Dutra Cabral da. "A noção default e a sintaxe da negação (The default notion and the syntax of negation)." Estudos da Língua(gem) 7, no. 2 (December 1, 2009): 109. http://dx.doi.org/10.22481/el.v7i2.1093.
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A idéia de uma gramática default nos estágios iniciais da aquisição da linguagem tem sido defendida por vários lingüistas. Hyams (1983) foi quem primeiro observou que a criança demonstra ter o parâmetro do sujeito nulo, mudando-o mais tarde para o padrão não pro-drop, no caso da língua inglesa. O principal objetivo do presente estudo, com base nos dados examinados, é o de divulgar a existência de um parâmetro em default para a negação no Português Brasileiro (PB).PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Teoria gerativa. Princípios e Parâmetros. Gramática. default.
ABSTRACT The idea of a default grammar in early stages of language acquisition has been put forward by several linguists. Hyams (1983) was one of the first who observed that children shows up first a null subject parameter, changing it later for the non-drop pattern, in the case of the English language acquisition. The main objective of the present study, based on the data examined, is to spread the news about the existence of a parameter in a default status for negation in Brazilian Portuguese.KEYWORD: Generative theory. Principles and Parameters. Grammar. default.
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Et. al., Pooja P. Walke. "A Survey on “Machine translation Approaches for Indian Languages”." Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT) 12, no. 3 (April 10, 2021): 4792–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.17762/turcomat.v12i3.1941.
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Translation has always helped India to knit Indians together with respect to its rich culture and literature. Ideas and concepts like ‘Indian ancient literature’,’Indian rich culture’,’Indian philosophy’ and ‘Indian knowledgeable systems’ would have been impossible in the absence of translations with their natural integrationist mission.Machine Translation assist to translate Information presented in one language to other language. Information can be present in form of text, speech and image translating this information helps for sharing of information and ultimately information gain.Translation process is an extremely complex & challenging process. It requires an in-depth knowledge about grammar of both the languages i.e. Source language and Target language to frame the rules for target language generation. Marathi is a regional Indian language and consists of a lot of literature that could be useful if projected in the universal English language. As manual translation is a tedious task, we propose a literature survey about machine translation systems that translates Indian Languages into English Language using various Machine translation approaches like RBMT, SMT, NMT, Hybrid translation
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Collins, James N. "Reasoning about definiteness in a language without articles." Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26 (October 15, 2016): 82. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/salt.v26i0.3821.
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Most theories of implicature make reference to a notion of alternatives. Interlocutors reason about what the speaker could have said. In this paper, I investigate the structure of these alternatives. In particular, I ask how these alternative utterances are constrained by the interlocutors' grammar. I argue that in order to derive certain implicatures, alternative utterances must be analyzed like actual utterances, as fully compositional structures appropriately generated by the grammar. The data supporting this position come from implicatures generated by indefinite bare noun phrases in Tagalog. I show that Tagalog indefinites give rise to non-uniqueness implicatures via competition with definites, as in English. However, unlike English, definite and indefinite interpretations of Tagalog NPs are not signalled by dedicated articles, but by verbal affixes. Therefore, in order to generate the observed implicatures, pragmatic competition must take into consideration the NP's broader syntactic context. Supporting the view that implicature calculation is sensitive to the morphosyntactic structure of alternative utterances, I show that in cases where the alternative is not grammatically well-formed, the implicature does not arise. These data provide evidence that only grammatically well-formed structures are able to enter into pragmatic competition.
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Johnson, David E., and Hideo Watanabe. "Relational-grammar-based generation in the JETS Japanese-English machine translation system." Machine Translation 6, no. 1 (March 1991): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf00570614.
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Lavid, Julia, and Jorge Arús Hita. "Nuclear transitivity in English and Spanish." Languages in Contrast 4, no. 1 (April 14, 2004): 75–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lic.4.1.05lav.
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This paper presents a contrastive overview of nuclear transitivity in English and Spanish from a systemic-functional perspective. The study attempts to achieve two main goals. Firstly, we investigate the usefulness of the transitive/ergative distinction developed by Davidse (1992) for material processes in English, when applied to different process types in both English and Spanish. Secondly, we attempt to provide a fine-grained specification of these linguistic resources which might form the basis for computational treatment in the applied context of Multilingual Generation (MLG), the automatic production of texts in various languages from a single underlying data source. We first review the specifications provided for English in the computational grammar Nigel (Mann 1983; Matthiessen 1988; Matthiessen and Bateman 1991), and in the extensive reference grammar developed by Matthiessen (1995), showing that, though useful for practical generation purposes, they conflate the notions of agency and causation under the same system. These specifications thus blur the transitive/ergative distinction, which is also fundamental to observe how semantically related verbs may behave differently in English and in Spanish (Lavid and Arús 1998a, 1998b; Arús and Lavid 2001). We propose, instead, a model of nuclear transitivity consisting of three simultaneous systems: a system of agency (concerned with the presence or absence of the feature Agent), a system of process type (concerned with the semantic type of process involved), and a system of causation (concerned with the variable of instigation). This latter system establishes the paradigmatic distinction between transitive and ergative processes which we claim to be fundamental for an accurate contrastive description of English and Spanish. It is expected that the proposed model, which captures the common semantic potential of nuclear transitivity in English and Spanish, will prove useful as the linguistic basis for a more detailed computational specification in the context of MLG.
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Yang, Charles, and Silvina Montrul. "Learning datives: The Tolerance Principle in monolingual and bilingual acquisition." Second Language Research 33, no. 1 (October 15, 2016): 119–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658316673686.
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We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ( give the book to library/ give the library the book), while excluding negative exceptions ( donate the book to the library/* donate the library the book). Our solution for first language acquisition is based on The Tolerance Principle, a formal model that detects productivity from the distributional properties of the input data (Yang, 2005, 2016). This principle predicts an acquisition stage where the constructions are productive, followed by a stage where learners retreat from overgeneralization and form more finely grained rules. This work calls for a formally rigorous model of acquisition, which can incorporate input effects and retain the benefits of an abstract generative grammar without resorting to piecemeal learning. We provide an analysis of child-directed speech in the CHILDES database to support the learning proposal for first language acquisition, while considering its potential applicability to second language (L2) acquisition and first language (L1) attrition.
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Grümpel, Claudia. "Interlanguage studies in a cross cultural context: the interlanguage of Spanish speakers (L1) in an approach English (L2), German (L3)." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 22 (November 15, 2009): 315. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.2009.22.18.
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This paper focuses on the acquisition of word order in German by adult native speakers of Spanish in an institutional context (longitudinal study) and a contrastive study on children and adolescent acquisition using transversal tests. The theoretical framework is based on generative grammar analysis proposed for verb placement in German and a review of recent acquisition studies. Analyses of verb movement account for an underlying subject-verb-object order for all languages proposed by Zwart (1993, 1997) based on parallel works by Kayne (1993, 1994) and Chomsky (1993, 1995).
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Liskinasih, Ayu. "CORRECTIVE FEEDBACKS INTERACTION IN CLT-ADOPTED CLASSROOMS." Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics 6, no. 1 (July 29, 2016): 60. http://dx.doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v6i1.2662.
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<p>This case study aimed to examine corrective feedback (CF) pattern in the interactions of Indonesian EFL (English as Foreign Language) classrooms (a speaking and a grammar classrooms) which adopt CLT (Communicative Language Teaching). Two lecturers and twenty undergraduate English department students of an A-class university in Indonesia were involved as research participants. The findings revealed that the lecturers employed all types of CF to treat all types of errors. Explicit corrections were dominant in Speaking class as well as other explicit CF; whereas reformulations and prompt were equally distributed. Elicitation was dominant in Grammar class as well as other prompts; meanwhile, explicit and implicit CFs had similar proportion. The lecturers’ preferences were based on their beliefs on how their students learn foreign language and some factors such as the importance of CF to the instructional focus of the lesson, the possibility to generate student’s uptake, and also their empathetic values about students’ current language development. It was concluded that the provisions of CF in EFL classrooms reflect the application of CLT.</p>