Search results for "Syntax"

Deriving Enhanced Universal Dependencies from a Hybrid Dependency-Constituency Treebank

2018

The treebanks provided by the Universal Dependencies (UD) initiative are a state-of-the-art resource for cross-lingual and monolingual syntax-based linguistic studies, as well as for multilingual dependency parsing. Creating a UD treebank for a language helps further the UD initiative by providing an important dataset for research and natural language processing in that language. In this paper, we describe how we created a UD treebank for Latvian, and how we obtained both the basic and enhanced UD representations from the data in Latvian Treebank which is annotated according to a hybrid dependency-constituency grammar model. The hybrid model was inspired by Lucien Tesniere’s dependency gram…

Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker (‘Boris I am in Becker’). Syntax, semantics and pragmatics of a special naming construction

2016

Constructions such as Germ. Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker (‘Boris I am in Becker’) follow a startling pattern. A quotation (“Ich bin drin”) is inserted in between two constituents of a complex personal-name construction (Boris Becker). The quotation relates to the person bearing this name. Therefore, the whole construction cannot be understood without massive contextual knowledge, i.e. knowing when, where, and why Boris Becker said so, and how this is relevant in the interpretation of the construction. In general, N “CP” N constructions such as Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker not only differ from canonical personal-name constructions such as Boris Becker in requiring the import of background know…

Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language

2017

AbstractThis paper investigates the interplay of constructed action and the clause in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Constructed action is a form of gestural enactment in which the signers use their hands, face and other parts of the body to represent the actions, thoughts or feelings of someone they are referring to in the discourse. With the help of frequencies calculated from corpus data, this article shows firstly that when FinSL signers are narrating a story, there are differences in how they use constructed action. Then the paper argues that there are differences also in the prototypical structure, linkage type and non-manual activity of clauses, depending on the presence or non-prese…

A. BARTOLOTTA (ed.), The Greek Verb. Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics. Proceedings of the 8th International Meeting on Greek Linguistics, Agrigento …

2019

The relictual woodlands with Laurus nobilis L. of Sicily (Italy): phytosociological, phytogeographical, ecological and distributional considerations

2011

Phytosociology and ecology of deciduous forests in Tajikistan (Middle Asia)

2017

Aims: To present the first syntaxonomical classification for the mesophilous deciduous forests of the PamirAlai Mountains in Tajikistan with some remarks on its environmental gradients. Location: Tajikistan. Methods: Altogether 201 relevés were sampled between 2008‒2013 using the seven-degree cover-abundance scale of Braun-Blanquet. They were classified by the modified TWINSPAN method using the four-step interval scale with cutoff levels of 0%, 2%, 5% and 10% and total inertia as a measure of cluster heterogeneity. Diagnostic species were identified using the phi coefficient as a fidelity measure. Detrendended Correspondence Analysis was used to determine the relation between samples, veget…

Think globally: Cross-linguistic variation in electrophysiological activity during sentence comprehension

2011

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (“semantic reversal anomalies”). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003 ; Kuperberg et al., 2003), but a biphasic N400 – late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identi…

When nominal features are marked on verbs: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study

2006

It has been claimed that verb processing (as opposed to noun processing) is subserved by specific neural circuits in the left prefrontal cortex. In this study, we took advantage of the unusual grammatical characteristics of clitic pronouns in Italian (e.g., lo and la in portalo and portala 'bring it [masculine]/[feminine]', respectively)-the fact that clitics have both nominal and verbal characteristics, to explore the neural correlates of verb and clitic processing. We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of the left prefrontal cortex and to assess its role in producing verb+det+noun and verb+clitic phrases. Results showed an interference ef…

Evidence for a spatial bias in the perception of sequences of brief tones

2013

Listeners are unable to report the physical order of particular sequences of brief tones. This phenomenon of temporal dislocation depends on tone durations and frequencies. The current study empirically shows that it also depends on the spatial location of the tones. Dichotically testing a three-tone sequence showed that the central tone tends to be reported as the first or the last element when it is perceived as part of a left-to-right motion. Since the central-tone dislocation does not occur for right-to-left sequences of the same tones, this indicates that there is a spatial bias in the perception of sequences. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.

Processing of Musical Syntax Tonic versus Subdominant: An Event-related Potential Study

2006

Abstract The present study investigates the effect of a change in syntactic-like musical function on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Eight-chord piano sequences were presented to musically expert and novice listeners. Instructed to watch a movie and to ignore the musical sequences, the participants had to react when a chord was played with a different instrument than the piano. Participants were not informed that the relevant manipulation was the musical function of the last chord (target) of the sequences. The target chord acted either as a syntactically stable tonic chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of C major) or as a less syntactically stable subdominant chord (i.e., a C ma…