Syntactic Form and Discourse Function in Natural Language Generation
Syntactic Form and Discourse Function in Natural Language Generation

Author: Cassandre Creswell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-12-24

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1135876207

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Users of natural languages have many word orders with which to encode the same truth-conditional meaning. They choose contextually appropriate strings from these many ways with little conscious effort and with effective communicative results. Previous computational models of when English speakers produce non-canonical word orders, like topicalization, left-dislocation and clefts, fail. The primary goal of this book is to present a better model of when speakers choose to produce certain non-canonical word orders by incorporating the effects of discourse context and speaker goals on syntactic choice. This book makes extensive use of previously unexamined naturally occurring corpus data of non-canonical word order in English, both to illustrate the points of the theoretical model and to train the statistical model.

Artificial Hearing, Natural Speech
Artificial Hearing, Natural Speech

Author: Joanna Hart Lowenstein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1135922349

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This book explores the interface between speech perception and production through a longitudinal acoustic analysis of the speech of postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (electrode and computer prostheses for the inner ear in cases of nerve deafness). The methodology is based on the work of Joseph Perkell at MIT, replicating and extending analysis to subjects with modern digital cochlear implants and processor technology. Lowenstein also examines how cochlear implants are portrayed in dramatic and documentary television programs, the scientific accuracy of those portrayals, and what expectations might be taken away by viewers, particularly given modern society's view that technology can overcome the frailties of the human body.

Structural Markedness and Syntactic Structure
Structural Markedness and Syntactic Structure

Author: Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1135500207

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This book investigates a number of word order phenomena in Spanish, concentrating on this language's unmarked word order and the perturbations of this order that result from topicalization and wh-movement.

The Syntax of Negation and the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Hindi
The Syntax of Negation and the Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Hindi

Author: Rajesh Kumar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 113550475X

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This books studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. It outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. In addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, it outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. The book argues that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivation by a c-commanding negative marker. The bulk of the evidence presented in this book argues against previous theoretical accounts that claim that NPI licensing involves covert syntactic operations such as LF movement or reconstruction. With respect to the classification of NPIs , this book also shows the existence of two different types of NPIs in Hindi; namely, strong NPIs and weak NPIs. Strong NPIs require a clause mate c-commanding negative licensor, whereas weak NPIs are quantifiers and are similar to free choice 'any' in English that are interpreted as NPIs in the presence of a c-commanding negative licensor.

Reassessing the Role of the Syllable in Italian Phonology
Reassessing the Role of the Syllable in Italian Phonology

Author: Kristie McCrary Kambourakis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1000143791

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This book evaluates the predictions of syllable-based analyses of Italian in three domains: native speaker intuition of consonant cluster syllabification, definite article allomorphy, and segment duration, and tests the claimed convergence of multiple phenomena on the same syllable structure.

Discourse Adjectives
Discourse Adjectives

Author: Gina Taranto

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1135500487

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First Published in 2006. This volume introduces and provides a semantic analysis of Discourse Adjectives, a natural class of adjectives that the author argues includes apparent, clear, evident, and obvious among its prototypical members. With a main claim that Discourse Adjectives do not provide information about the facts of the world. Rather, they are used by interlocutors to negotiate the status of propositions in a discourse.

Challenging Change
Challenging Change

Author: Biljana Mišić Ilić

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2012-04-25

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1443839523

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This book, Challenging Change: Literary and Linguistic Responses, is a collection of twenty-three articles which examine change – understood in the broadest sense – as the need of the modern man to redefine, revise, deconstruct and reconstruct previous theories, histories, moralities, social relationships, forms of language and language use. In these times of great change, when the only constant seems to be change itself, the authors of these essays respond to the challenge and approach the notion of change from the perspectives of literary studies and linguistics. The book opens with an introductory overview, followed by twenty-three articles divided into two sections. The authors of the articles come from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Norway.

Telicity and Durativity
Telicity and Durativity

Author: Andrea Luise Wilhelm

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-01-22

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1135921717

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This book studies the linguistic representation of events by examining the relevance of two salient event characteristics-- telicity and durativity-- to the grammatical system of natural language. The study of events, and of event characteristics, is an important testing ground for theories on the boundary between extralinguistic and linguistic knowledge, and on the relation between semantics and syntax. Telicity and durativity are notions which have become increasingly influential in both the semantic and the syntactic, i.e., grammaticalized, representation of events. The book furthers the understanding of events through the comparison of two genetically and typologically distinct languages, German and Dëne Suliné (Chipewyan/Athapaskan), an indigenous language of Northwestern Canada. It contains the first in-depth documentation of the aspectual system of Dëne Suliné, and a careful analysis of the aspectual behaviour of German particle verbs. A stringent methodology considers semantic, pragmatic, and grammatical factors in both languages. The data reveal that telicity and durativity belong to profoundly different semantic and grammatical domains, and that neither notion is grammaticalized universally. While both notions are represented semantically in German as well as in Dëne Suliné, telicity is grammaticalized only in the former and durativity is grammaticalized only in the latter.

Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change
Quantitative Approaches to Grammar and Grammatical Change

Author: Sam Featherston

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-07-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 3110401924

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The newly-emerging field of theoretically informed but simultaneously empirically based syntax is dynamic but little-represented in the literature. This volume addresses this need. While there has previously been something of a gulf between theoretical linguists in the generative tradition and those linguists who work with quantitative data types, this gap is narrowing. In the light of the empirical revolution in the study of syntax, even people whose primary concern is grammatical theory take note of processing effects and attribute certain effects to them. Correspondingly, workers focusing on the surface evidence can relate more to the concepts of the theoreticians, because the two layers of explanation have been brought into contact. And these workers too must account for the data gathered by the theoreticians. An additional innovation is the generative analysis of historical data – this is now seen as psycholinguistic theory-relevant data like any other. These papers are thus a snapshot of some of the work currently being done in evidence-based grammar, using both experimental and historical data.