Search results for "grammatical category"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Effects of reading proficiency and of base and whole-word frequency on reading noun- and verb-derived words: An eye-tracking study in Italian primary…
2018
The aim of this study is to assess the role of readers’ proficiency and of the base-word distributional properties on eye-movement behavior. Sixty-two typically developing children, attending 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, were asked to read derived words in a sentence context. Target words were nouns derived from noun bases (e.g., umorista, ‘humorist’), which in Italian are shared by few derived words, and nouns derived from verb bases (e.g., punizione, ‘punishment’), which are shared by about 50 different inflected forms and several derived words. Data shows that base and word frequency affected first-fixation duration for nouns derived from noun bases, but in an opposite way: base frequency ha…
GreekLex 2: A comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information
2017
Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stre…
Southeast Asia as a Linguistic Area
2006
The languages belonging to the families of Mon-Khmer, Tai, Sinitic, Hmong-Mien, and Chamic (Malayo-Polynesian) spoken in mainland Southeast Asia share a considerable number of properties due to contact-induced convergence. General characteristics of the languages in this area are the lack of obligatory grammatical categories and the central role of pragmatics (indeterminateness), syllabic morphology, and relatively flexible correlations between word class and syntactic positions (versatility). The following properties will be described in some more detail: word order, numeral classifiers, cooccurrence patterns of the verb with coverbs, tense-aspect-modality markers and directional verbs, an…
All Talk and No Action: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study of Motor Cortex Activation during Action Word Production
2004
AbstractA number of researchers have proposed that the premotor and motor areas are critical for the representation of words that refer to actions, but not objects. Recent evidence against this hypothesis indicates that the left premotor cortex is more sensitive to grammatical differences than to conceptual differences between words. However, it may still be the case that other anterior motor regions are engaged in processing a word's sensorimotor features. In the present study, we used singleand paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the hypothesis that left primary motor cortex is activated during the retrieval of words (nouns and verbs) associated with specific actions. W…
Revisión del sistema pronominal español
2002
This article offers a critical review of the Spanish pronominal system (personal, possessive and demonstrative pronouns) as described in Nebrija's works and in those of the 16th and 17th century grammarians. These texts show that the history of grammatics is frequently a history of errors. In fact, the methodology conveniences they chose to establish regular models, led grammarians to false the reality of the language. Quite frequently also, as they intended to develop the grammatical thinking establishing certain categories or divisions among them, these authors originated errors that have been perpetuated in their texts. From my point of view, that is the case for pronouns. As has been de…
Revisión de la categoría «adverbio» en español
2009
Among all word classes, the adverb is the worst defined and studied grammatical category. All grammarians accept that this category includes very heterogeneous elements, which come from very different origins and have very different functions. There is thus an urgent need to review this grammatical category. With this work, I intend to find an answer to the following questions: How the grammatical theory on the adverb has been developed? Which have been the mistakes of the grammatical tradition by producing a theory on the adverb? What should we actually understand by an adverb? How can we order, in a proper and reasonable way, the elements which are presently grouped in the so called «adve…
Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European
2009
This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with re…
Knowledge Representation and Cognitive Skills in Problem Solving
2017
This paper offers a programmatic view on the study of cross-linguistic variation and its effects on human cognitive skills. Based on Linguistic Typology and its methodology to account for cross-linguistic differences (section 2), it will show how the presence or absence of certain grammatical categories enhances or inhibits specific skills in the domain of quantification (section 3). In its main part (section 4), it will show how to describe structural differences between the source and the target language in translation and how to find out if these differences affect the performance of students in knowledge assessment tests. For that purpose, it will compare the English and the Japanese ve…
Grammatical distinctions in the left frontal cortex
2001
Abstract Selective deficits in producing verbs relative to nouns in speech are well documented in neuropsychology and have been associated with left hemisphere frontal cortical lesions resulting from stroke and other neurological disorders. The basis for these impairments is unresolved: Do they arise because of differences in the way grammatical categories of words are organized in the brain, or because of differences in the neural representation of actions and objects? We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of a portion of left prefrontal cortex and to assess its role in producing nouns and verbs. In one experiment subjects generated real w…
Performance in Knowledge Assessment Tests from the Perspective of Linguistic Typology
2019
An important part of cross-linguistic variation manifests itself in the grammatical categories which are available in the grammar of a language, their semantic fine-grainedness and the obligatoriness of their use. The present paper will focus on three domains of grammar: (1) information structure and topicality, (2) converbs and clause combining and (3) modality and evidentiality. These domains are known to be prominent in Japanese and Korean grammar while they are clearly less relevant in English. The paper will first give a detailed account of these structures with examples from the US Test of Understanding in College Economics (TUCE). As will become quite clear, the versions of the test …