Academic literature on the topic 'Language acquisition. Semantics'

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2003.<br>Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-318).<br>This thesis examines article choice and parameter-setting in second language (L2) acquisition. It argues, on the basis of L2-English elicitation and production data, that L2- learners have access to UG-based semantic distinctions governing article choice, but do not know which distinction is appropriate for English. A Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) is proposed, according to which L2-learners fluctuate between different parameter settings until the input leads them to set the parameter to the target value. The thesis proposes that articles cross-linguistically may encode definiteness or specificity. The definition of specificity that is adopted is based on Fodor and Sag's (1982) view of specificity as speaker intent to refer. The behavior of referential this, a specificity marker in colloquial English, is examined, and it is proposed that the definition of specificity incorporates the concept of noteworthy property. An Article Choice Parameter is next proposed, which governs whether articles in a given language are distinguished on the basis of definiteness or on the basis of specificity. While English has the Definiteness setting of this parameter, it is suggested, on the basis of data from Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992), that Samoan has the Specificity setting. It is hypothesized, in accordance with the FH, that L2-learners fluctuate between the two settings of the Article Choice Parameter. This hypothesis leads to the prediction that L2- English errors of article use should come in two types: overuse of the with specific indefinites and overuse of a with non-specific definites. These predictions are examined in a series of studies with adult speakers of Russian and Korean, two languages with no<br>(cont.) articles. The empirical data confirm the predictions, and show that L2-English article choice is not random but reflects access to the two settings of the Article Choice Parameter. The same patterns of results are found for L-Russian and L-Korean speakers, and it is shown that the results are not attributable to LI-transfer. On the basis of these findings, it is concluded that L2-learners have direct UG-access to semantic distinctions underlying article choice. The data also provide evidence for the existence of a specificity distinction which cross-cuts the definiteness distinction.<br>bu Tania Ruth Ionin.<br>Ph.D.

Linguistic patterns have been used widely in shallow methods to develop numerous NLP applications. Approaches for acquiring linguistic patterns can be broadly categorised into three groups: supervised learning, unsupervised learning and manual methods. In supervised learning approaches, a large annotated training corpus is required for the learning algorithms to achieve decent results. However, annotated corpora are expensive to obtain and usually available only for established tasks. Unsupervised learning approaches usually start with a few seed examples and gather some statistics based on a large unannotated corpus to detect new examples that are similar to the seed ones. Most of these approaches either populate lexicons for predefined patterns or learn new patterns for extracting general factual information; hence they are applicable to only a limited number of tasks. Manually creating linguistic patterns has the advantage of utilising an expert's knowledge to overcome the scarcity of annotated data. In tasks with no annotated data available, the manual way seems to be the only choice. One typical problem that occurs with manual approaches is that the combination of multiple patterns, possibly being used at different stages of processing, often causes unintended side effects. Existing approaches, however, do not focus on the practical problem of acquiring those patterns but rather on how to use linguistic patterns for processing text. A systematic way to support the process of manually acquiring linguistic patterns in an efficient manner is long overdue. This thesis presents KAFTIE, an incremental knowledge acquisition framework that strongly supports experts in creating linguistic patterns manually for various NLP tasks. KAFTIE addresses difficulties in manually constructing knowledge bases of linguistic patterns, or rules in general, often faced in existing approaches by: (1) offering a systematic way to create new patterns while ensuring they are consistent; (2) alleviating the difficulty in choosing the right level of generality when creating a new pattern; (3) suggesting how existing patterns can be modified to improve the knowledge base's performance; (4) making the effort in creating a new pattern, or modifying an existing pattern, independent of the knowledge base's size. KAFTIE, therefore, makes it possible for experts to efficiently build large knowledge bases for complex tasks. This thesis also presents the KAFDIS framework for discourse processing using new representation formalisms: the level-of-detail tree and the discourse structure graph.

Suivant la proposition de Tarski (1936), la sémantique vériconditionnelle associeà une phrase déclarative des conditions de vérité. Ainsi, comprendre le sens dela phrase “Il pleut”, c’est pouvoir dire après avoir regardé par la fenêtre si elle estvraie ou fausse. Toutefois, ceci ne permet de rendre compte que des phrases déclaratives,et pas des questions puisqu’aucune situation ne rendra jamais la question“Qui a appelé ce matin ?” vraie ou fausse. Hamblin (1973) propose la premièrethéorie des questions dans le cadre de la sémantique véri-conditionnelle, et proposede leur associer des conditions de résolutions, c’est-à-dire des ensembles deréponses. Comprendre le sens de la question “Qui a appelé ce matin ?” c’est alorssavoir que “Jean a appelé” est une réponse possible, tandis que “il pleuvait” n’enest pas une.Très rapidement, l’étude de la sémantique des questions s’est tournée versles questions enchâssées dans des phrases déclaratives (questions indirectes). Eneffet, il est beaucoup plus aisé de juger des conditions de vérité d’une phrasesdéclarative que des conditions de résolution d’une question. Or moyennant deshypothèses sur la sémantique des verbes enchâssant des questions (‘savoir’, ‘oublier’.. . ), on peut relier les conditions de vérité d’une phrase déclarative au sensde la question qu’elle enchâsse. Cette approche, proposée par Karttunen (1977), adonné lieu à une littérature théorique très riche<br>Two important questions arise from the recent literature on embedded questions.First, Heim (1994) proposed that embedded questions are ambiguous betweena weakly and strongly exhaustive reading. Spector (2005) recently proposedan intermediate exhaustive reading as well. Second, adverbs of quantity such as’mostly’ can quantify over answers to an embedded questions (Berman, 1991). Ananalysis of this phenomena reveals an analogy between embedded questions andplural determiner phrases, and suggests a fine-grained structures for the denotationof questions (Lahiri, 2002).The first part of the dissertation consist of three psycholinguistic studies on theexhaustive readings of questions under ‘know’ in English, the acquisition of thesereadings under ‘savoir’ by French 5-to-6-ear-olds, and the properties of emotivefactivepredicates such as ‘surprise’. The second part presents a theory of embeddedquestions built on Klinedinst and Rothschild’s (2011) proposal to derive exhaustivereadings as implicatures, although it differs in the fine-grained structureit adopts for questions denotations in order to account for plurality effects as well.The theory solves problem raised by B. R. George (2013) and makes predictions fora larger range of sentences

In the present dissertation we compared monolingual and bilingual language acquisition by exploring two main topics of the early bilingual language acquisition: the establishment of the phoneme system and the establishment of the lexico-semantic system. The first topic was addressed by assessing the possible influence of word-level information on phonetic learning in both monolinguals and bilinguals (both adults and infants). The development of the bilingual lexico-semantic semantic system has been approached by assessing the emergence of inhibitory semantic links in monolingual and bilingual toddlers. Our results showed an impact of bilingualism concerning the use of word-level information in adults but not in infants. For this latter group, our results suggested more an impact of bilingualism on the discrimination abilities. Unfortunately our results for the last study did not allow us to conclude on the emergence of inhibitory semantic effects in the bilingual lexicon.<br>En esta tesis doctoral comparamos la adquisición del lenguaje en monolingües y bilingües investigando dos temas centrales de la adquisición bilingüe temprana: el establecimiento del sistema fonético y el establecimiento del sistema léxico-semántico. El primer tema se ha abordado evaluando la posible influencia de información léxica (forma) sobre el aprendizaje fonético, la investigación ha estudiado tanto bebés y adultos monolingües y bilingües. Para el estudio del desarrollo del sistema léxico-semántico bilingüe se ha evaluado la aparición de conexiones semánticas inhibitorias en niños monolingües y bilingües. Los resultados sugieren un impacto del bilingüismo en el uso de información léxica (forma) en adultos, pero no en bebés. El estudio con bebés ha mostrado un impacto del bilingüismo en las capacidades discriminatorias. Los resultados del último estudio no permiten extraer conclusiones sobre la aparición de conexiones semánticas inhibitorias en el léxico bilingüe.

This thesis by publication presents a study on English adpositions (e.g. to, in, at, from, in frontof, through). It attempts to offer a solution to the following three outstanding problems, whichare presented in each of the three parts making up the thesis, preceded by a general introduction(chapter 1) and followed by the general conclusions (chapter 7). The first part includes chapter2, and discusses the problem of What is the relation between adpositions and the non-linguistic,visual content they represent. The second part includes chapters 3 and 4, and discusses theproblem ofwhat is a proper compositional theory of the Syntax and Semantics of adpositions.The third part includes chapters 5 and 6, and discusses the problem of what is the psychologicalreality of this theory, regarding adults and children’s data.The following three solutions are suggested. First, the relation between adpositions and theircorresponding visual information is an isomorphism: adpositions capture how we “see” possiblespatio-temporal relations between objects, at a flexible level of fine-grainedness. Second, aproper compositional treatment of adpositions treats each syntactic unit (in front, of ) as offeringa distinct semantic contribution, hence spelling out a restricted instance of a spatio-temporalpart-of relation. Third, this compositional treatment of adpositions can also stand as a theory ofon-line interpretation in adults and a theory of their acquisition in children.These three answers are couched within a single theoretical approach, that of Discourse Representation Theory, and offer a unified solution to three apparently distinct problems regardingspatial adpositions and their linguistic properties.

This thesis investigates the knowledge of semantics-syntax correspondences in second language acquisition (SLA) within the Principles and Parameters framework. A parameter of semantic structure is proposed to account for crosslinguistic syntactic differences between two previously unrelated, and superficially distinct, verb classes: change of state locatives and 'psychological' verbs. Chinese and English contrast in terms of the parameter setting. Experimental evidence indicates that adult Chinese learners of English L2 initially transfer parameter settings, but are able to reset the proposed parameter. However, they only acquire L2 lexical properties and concomitant syntactic privileges with ease when L2 input adds a representation to their grammar. When positive L2 input should pre-empt overgeneralizations based on representation transferred from the L1, it is shown that L1 influence may persist until quite advanced stages of acquisition. The implications of the results are discussed for the parameter setting model of SLA.

The Japanese imperfective aspect marker –teiru is one of the most widely researched tense/aspect markers because of its multiple semantic functions. It has been claimed that the –teiru form can describe two main aspectual meanings, progressive and resultative, depending on the lexical aspect of the attached verb. The present study aims to empirically investigate native speakers’ interpretations of the –teiru meaning with different verb and sentence types through a judgment test. It compares them with the predicted semantic categories from the previous studies, which based their conclusion upon introspective analysis, as well as perceptions of L2 Japanese learners. The results suggest that overall perceptional patterns are consistent with predicted descriptions but also that interpretations of the meaning are flexible to some extent. As for learners’ perceptions, the results indicate that L2 learners develop progressive semantic processing in Japanese faster than resultative semantic processing in Japanese.