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Developing syntactic complexity in writing is an important goal for many adult language learners. However, little is known about the effect of different writing practice tasks on the development of syntactic complexity. Furthermore, it is unclear to what degree syntactic complexity is related to writing quality. The main purpose of this study was to compare the longitudinal effects of three types of writing tasks on the development of syntactic complexity and writing quality. In order to investigate these relationships, a mixed-methods design was used. A quantitative component that was a quasi-experimental, longitudinal investigation was combined with an embedded qualitative component which involved eliciting stimulated recalls from participants from two of the experimental groups in the study. For the quantitative component, the participants (N = 105) were first-year, non-English majors at a four-year, co-educational university in western Japan. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: a sentence-combining group and a translation group. These two experimental groups were compared to an intact timed-writing group, which served as a comparison group. Writing samples were collected at three points throughout the year and analyzed based on five measures of syntactic complexity: mean length of sentence, mean length of T-unit, mean length of clause, clauses per T-unit, and T-units per sentence. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were used to analyze the five measures to investigate statistical differences across time for each group. One-way ANOVAs were used to analyze the five measures to ascertain differences between groups at each time. Furthermore, all the writing samples were evaluated by human raters for writing quality using an analytic rubric. Ratings were analyzed and investigated for changes in quality across time and between groups, as well as to examine the overall relationship between syntactic complexity and quality. For the qualitative component, seven participants were selected from the experimental groups to participate in stimulated recalls. The data were analyzed and coded to investigate the cognitive processes underlying each task. The results of the quantitative study indicated that the participants in the translation and sentence-combining groups made small, but significant gains in syntactic complexity across time. The translation group made significant growth on clauses per T-unit while the sentence-combining group made significant growth across time on mean length of sentence, mean length of T-unit, and T-units per sentence. The timed-writing group was not able to sustain significant growth across time. In the between-groups analyses, there were significant differences between the sentence-combining group and the other groups on mean length of sentence and T-units per sentence, indicating that the participants in that group demonstrated more coordination, and to a lesser degree, more subordination in their writing. In terms of quality of writing, the results indicated an overall weak, statistically significant positive correlation between measures of syntactic complexity and human rating judgments. Among all of the syntactic measures, T-units per sentence correlated the strongest with rating scores. The results of the qualitative component indicated that the participants practicing sentence-combining tasks focused most of their attention toward syntactic aspects of language while the participants in the translation group focused their attention on lexical aspects of language while performing the tasks. The findings of this study show that the development of syntactic complexity is influenced by writing practice tasks and that tasks that direct learners’ attention toward features of the language are more likely to hasten the development of syntactic complexity. Among the tasks, sentence-combining showed the most potential in developing syntactic complexity, particularly for increasing the use of compound sentences. However, none of the writing practice tasks led to significant gains in writing quality, in part because syntactic complexity was shown to have a moderately weak relationship to overall writing quality. / Teaching & Learning

Στην παρούσα ερευνητική εργασία, θα μελετηθεί η επίδραση διαφόρων παραγόντων, όπως η ικανότητα στην αποκωδικοποίηση, η εργαζόμενη μνήμη, η προσωδιακή ευαισθησία και η συντακτική επίγνωση, στη συντακτική επεξεργασία προτάσεων από παιδιά και ενήλικες, που έχουν ως μητρική γλώσσα την ελληνική. Σκοπό της έρευνας αποτελεί η διερεύνηση της φύσης της δυσκολίας που αντιμετωπίζουν οι φτωχοί αναγνώστες της Στ΄ Δημοτικού, οι οποίοι αποτελούν την πειραματική ομάδα, στη συντακτική επεξεργασία προτάσεων. Χρησιμοποιήθηκαν δύο ομάδες ελέγχου: μια εξισωμένη ηλικιακά με την πειραματική ομάδα (Στ΄ Δημοτικού) και μια εξισωμένη αναγνωστικά (Δ΄ Δημοτικού). Στα έργα που χορηγήθηκαν για την αξιολόγηση της συντακτικής επίγνωσης (έργο αξιολόγησης συντακτικής επίγνωσης, έργο αποκατάστασης αποδομημένων προτάσεων, έργο επισύναψης κατηγορούμενου σε υποκείμενο με ανάγνωση), οι μαθητές με δυσκολία στην ανάγνωση σημείωσαν χαμηλότερη επίδοση από την ηλικιακά εξισωμένη ομάδα ελέγχου. Με συγκρίσεις των επιδόσεων της πειραματικής ομάδας και της αναγνωστικά εξισωμένης ομάδα ελέγχου, δε βρέθηκε διαφορά στη συντακτική επεξεργασία ανάμεσα στις δύο αυτές ομάδες. Η επίδραση των διαφόρων παραγόντων βρέθηκε ότι ήταν διαφορετική ανάλογα με τη φύση του έργου. Τέλος, βρέθηκε ότι οι φτωχοί αναγνώστες δεν παρουσιάζουν κάποια διαφορά, σε σύγκριση με την ηλικιακά εξισωμένη ομάδα ελέγχου, όσον αφορά στον τρόπο με τον οποίο χειρίζονται τους προσωδιακούς δείκτες, κατά τη επεξεργασία συντακτικά αμφίσημων εκφωνημάτων. / In the current study, the effect of various factors, such as decoding, working memory, prosodic sensitivity and syntactic awareness, on the syntactic processing of sentences will be investigated on children and adults, whose native language is Greek. The purpose of this research is to investigate the nature of the difficulty of sixth-grader poor readers, who constituted the experimental group, in syntactic processing. Two control groups were used, one age matched (sixth-graders) and one reading matched (fourth graders) with the experimental group. In the tasks used to evaluate syntactic processing (syntactic awareness task, word ordering task, attachment reading task), students with reading difficulty had lower performance than the age matched control group. Comparisons of the performance of the experimental group with the reading control group, showed that there is not significant difference in syntactic processing between these groups . Τhe influence of various factors on performance was found to be differentiated, according to the nature of each task. Finally, no difference concerning poor readers’ handling of prosodic information as compared to the age control group was found, during the processing of syntactically ambiguous utterances.

This thesis addresses the problem of the development of Natural Language Processing techniques for the extraction and generalization of compositional and functional relations from specialized written texts and, in particular, from patent claims. One of the most demanding tasks tackled in the thesis is, according to the state of the art, the semantic generalization of linguistic denominations of relations between object components and processes described in the texts. These denominations are usually verbal expressions or nominalizations that are too concrete to be used as standard labels in knowledge representation forms -as, for example, “A leads to B”, and “C provokes D”, where “leads to” and “provokes” both express, in abstract terms, a cause, such that in both cases “A CAUSE B” and “C CAUSE D” would be more appropriate. A semantic generalization of the relations allows us to achieve a higher degree of abstraction of the relationships between objects and processes described in the claims and reduces their number to a limited set that is oriented towards relations as commonly used in the generic field of knowledge representation. / Esta tesis se centra en el del desarrollo de tecnologías del Procesamiento del Lenguage Natural para la extracción y generalización de relaciones encontradas en textos especializados; concretamente en las reivindicaciones de patentes. Una de las tareas más demandadas de nuestro trabajo, desde el punto vista del estado de la cuestión, es la generalización de las denominaciones lingüísticas de las relaciones. Estas denominaciones, usualmente verbos, son demasiado concretas para ser usadas como etiquetas de relaciones en el contexto de la representación del conocimiento; por ejemplo, “A lleva a B”, “B es el resultado de A” están mejor representadas por “A causa B”. La generalización de relaciones permite reducir el n\'umero de relaciones a un conjunto limitado, orientado al tipo de relaciones utilizadas en el campo de la representación del conocimiento.

Un nombre réduit, mais croissant de recherches étudie le développement de la complexité syntaxique pour l’anglais et le français européen, mais à notre connaissance aucune ne s’est intéressée au français québécois. Ce projet a donc pour ambition d’analyser la production de constructions complexes chez des enfants franco-québécois âgés de 3 à 6 ans, à partir d’un corpus composé de 30 échantillons de langage spontané répartis en trois groupes d’âge de 3-4 ans, 4-5 ans et 5-6 ans. Les échantillons ont été recueillis pendant que chaque enfant s’amusait avec des jouets standards. Des enregistrements audio-visuels ont été effectués pendant l’activité et ensuite transcrits sous forme de corpus écrits. Enfin, le logiciel SALT a été utilisé pour coder les transcriptions. La présente étude se veut développementale, dans le sens qu’elle cherche à généraliser le processus de développement des complexités syntaxique en fonction de l’âge. Les constructions complexes considérées s’appuient sur la liste revisitée des introducteurs de complexité de Lentin (1998). À des fins d’analyse, elles ont été réparties en quatre catégories syntaxiques : les complétives, les coordonnées, les circonstancielles, et les relatives. Une analyse descriptive des constructions complexes basée sur des pourcentages a d’abord été effectuée suivie d’analyses statistiques pour vérifier la significativité des évolutions observées. Les principales conclusions de cette étude se résument comme suit. La proportion de constructions complexes est invariante entre 3 et 6 ans, laissant croire que le développement de la complexité syntaxique s’effectue au-delà de l’âge de 6 ans. Néanmoins, comme pour l’anglais, les complétives sont les constructions les plus fréquentes dans le langage de l’enfant et ce, pour chaque groupe d’âge. Viennent ensuite les coordonnées, les circonstancielles et enfin les relatives. L’ordre de développement suit ainsi l’ordre d’émergence des constructions complexes. À l’intérieur des quatre catégories syntaxiques, certains sous-types de constructions apparaissent plus fréquemment que d’autres. Dans les complétives, ce sont les infinitives prépositionnelles et les complétives introduites par la conjonction « que ». Dans les circonstancielles, ce sont les propositions introduites par « parce que » qui sont les plus utilisés, dans les coordonnées, ce sont les juxtapositions de propositions et enfin dans les relatives, les relatives sujet en « qui ». Une analyse plus détaillée du développement des sous-types de constructions complexes révèle une augmentation significative des circonstancielles exprimant la conséquence à partir de 4 ans et du discours indirect à partir de 5 ans. Toutefois, une diminution significative de l’interrogative indirecte a été relevée à partir de 5 ans. Des différences individuelles substantielles ont été observées entre les enfants d’un même groupe d’âge, en particulier dans le groupe de 4-5 ans. Les résultats obtenus mériteraient d’être vérifiés sur un corpus plus large et plus homogène afin de dégager des généralisations sur le processus de développement de la complexité syntaxique. Autre que l’âge, d’autres facteurs, tel que les facteurs cognitifs (comme la capacité de l’enfant à traiter l’information, la mémoire de travail) et les facteurs environnementaux (comme le type de discours, le langage adressé à l’enfant) seraient à considérer dans des travaux futurs. / A small but growing of research studies the development of syntactic complexity for English and European French, but to our knowledge none has focused on Quebec French. This project aims to analyze the production of complex constructions in Franco-Quebecer children aged 3 to 6, from a corpus composed of 30 samples of spontaneous language divided into three age groups of 3-4 years, 4-5 years and 5-6 years. The samples were collected while each child was playing with standard toys. Audio-visual recordings were made during the activity and then transcribed into a written corpus. Finally, SALT software was used to code the transcripts. The present study is developmental, in the sense that it seeks to generalize the process of production of syntactic complexities according to age. The complex constructions considered are based on Lentin's revisited list of complexity introducer, and for analysis purposes, they have been divided into four syntactic categories: complements, coordinates, circumstantials, and relatives. A descriptive analysis of the complex constructions based on percentages was first carried out, followed by statistical analyzes to test the significance of the changes observed. The main conclusions of this work can be summarized as follows. The proportion of complex constructions is invariant between 3 and 6 years, suggesting the development of syntactic complexity takes place beyond the age of 6 years. Nevertheless, as for English, complements are the most frequent constructions in child language, and this for each age group. This is followed respectively by coordinates, circumstantials and relatives. The order of development thus follows the order of emergence of complex constructions. Within these four syntactic categories, certain subtypes of constructions appear more frequently than others. In the category of complements, these are prepositional infinitives and the conjunction “que”. In circumstantials, "because" structures are the most used, and in coordinates, it is juxtapositions, and finally in relatives, the relative subject "qui” (who/which). A more detailed analysis of the development of complex construction subtypes reveals a significant increase in circumstantials expressing consequence from age 4, and indirect speech from age 5. However, a significant decrease in indirect questions was noted from the age of 5 years. Substantial individual differences were observed between children within the same age group, particularly in the 4-5 year one. Results obtained should be verified on a larger and more homogeneous corpus in order to draw generalizations on the process of syntactic complexity development. Other than age, other factors, such as cognitive factors (such as the child's ability to process information and working memory) and environmental factors (such as type of speech, language addressed to the child) should be considered in future work.

This thesis tells the tales of auxiliation in Swedish. It describes how the auxiliary features of the aspectual auxiliaries bruka ‘use to’, tendera ‘tend to’, börja ‘begin, start’, fortsätta ‘continue’, sluta ‘stop, cease’ och hota ‘threaten’ evolve, as seen in a text corpora covering the 11th to the 21st century. A grammaticalization perspective is employed, which not unexpectedly has implications for the way data is interpreted and presented, but also less expectedly for how the method is understood and applied. The method consists of Swedish auxiliary tests, designed to reveal auxiliary features. The discussion of their validity involves auxiliation theory as well as a more general theoretical discussion of how the category and the function of auxiliaries have been conceived. The main point made is that a valid test should have an explicit link to auxiliary function. Establishing the nature of such a link, however, is no trivial matter and so the plausibility of the link turns out to be the main factor in judging the validity of auxiliary tests. In the early stages of the auxiliation processes, action nominals were often used as complements of the verbs under study. Later on these verbs started taking infinitive complements, lost their semantic restrictions on their subjects and started occurring in a type of passive construction where the nonfinite verb carries the semantic relationship to the arguments of the clause. The occurrence in this type of passive construction is perceived as the most plausible indication of auxiliary function available for subject raising auxiliaries, since the auxiliary and the nonfinite verb in these clauses do function together as one single predicate. The evolution of these aspectual auxiliaries essentially follows the predictions made by auxiliation theory. That said, they all show individual deviations from those predictions, depending on such factors as their semantics, their source construction and during which period in the history of Swedish their auxiliation took place.

Der W-Fragen-Erwerb stellt einen Teilbereich der kindlichen Syntaxentwicklung dar, die sich maßgeblich innerhalb der ersten drei Lebensjahre eines Kindes vollzieht. Eine wesentliche Rolle spielen dabei zwei Bewegungsoperationen, die sich auf die Position des Interrogativpronomens an die erste Stelle der W-Frage sowie die Position des Verbs an die zweite Stelle beziehen. In drei Studien wurde einerseits untersucht, ob deutschsprachige Kinder, die noch keine W-Fragen produzieren können, in der Lage sind, grammatische von ungrammatischen W-Fragen zu unterscheiden und andererseits, welche Leistungen sprachunauffällige und sprachauffällige deutschsprachige Kinder beim Verstehen und Korrigieren unterschiedlich komplexer W-Fragen (positive und negative W-Fragen) zeigen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf ein frühes syntaktisches Wissen über W-Fragen im Spracherwerb hin und stützen damit die Annahme einer Kontinuität der kindlichen Grammatik zur Standardsprache. Auch scheinen sprachauffällige Kinder sich beim Erwerb von W-Fragen nicht qualitativ von sprachgesunden Kindern zu unterscheiden, sondern W-Fragen lediglich später korrekt umzusetzen. In beiden Populationen konnte ein syntaktischer Ökonomieeffekt beobachtet werden, der für eine spätere Umsetzung der Verbbewegung im Vergleich zur Bewegung des W-Elementes spricht. / Wh-questions represent one important step in the acquisition of children's syntax which generally takes place within the first three years. Two syntactic operations which are related to the position of the pronoun and the position of the verb play an essential role in this process. In three studies it was examined if children acquiring German could distinguish grammatical and non-grammatical wh-questions before being able to produce wh-questions themselves. Furthermore children with typical and atypical language acquisition were compared in their ability to comprehend and correct wh-questions of different complexity (positive and negative wh-questions). The results indicate an early syntactic knowledge about wh-questions in language acquisition and support the hypothesis of continuity between children's and adults speech. Children with typical and atypical language acquisition do not show any qualitative differences in their way to acquire wh-questions. Much rather the time point of acquisition is delayed. An effect of syntactic economy was found in both populations. Children seem to realize syntactic violations against the movement of the wh-element earlier than those against the movement of the verb.

[pt] A busca orientada a idéia é um novo paradigma para mecanismos de busca em acervos compostos por arquivos de texto. Esse paradigma visa resolver um problema comum aos mecanismos de busca: exigir que o usuário preveja as palavras contidas nos documentos que possam conter a informação que procura, impossibilitando-o, assim, de se concentrar diretamente na informação desejada. Buscando solucionar esse problema, são propostas as bases lingüísticas para o desenvolvimento de um modelo teórico preliminar que acrescente dados semânticos aos arquivos de texto. Nesse modelo, a informação semântica de um texto é representada através do que se chamou de estrutura de conceitos. O principal intuito das estruturas de conceitos é representar de uma mesma maneira frases que expressem o mesmo significado, ou seja, as paráfrases apresentam a mesma estrutura de conceitos. Serão expostos nesta dissertação os primeiros elementos do modelo em suas partes semântica, sintática e textual, além da integração entre as mesmas. A dissertação apresenta ainda um estudo de caso a fim de exemplificar o desenvolvimento de uma aplicação para busca de arquivos de texto em que essa tecnologia seria usada. / [en] The idea-oriented search is a new pattern for search engines whose databases are composed by text files. This pattern sets out to solve a usual problem for search engines: demanding that users foresee which words are contained in the desired document, keeping them from focusing on the information they are indeed seeking. To solve this problem, the linguistic bases for the development of a theoretical model that can add semantical data to the text files are laid down. In this model, the semantical information of a text is represented by what has been referred to as structure of concepts. The main goal of the structure of concepts is to give one single representation to sentences that express the same meaning. Thus, paraphrases present the same structure of concepts. In this dissertation, the first elements of this model are exposed in its semantical, syntactic and textual parts. Also present are the integration of these elements. A small case study is presented as well, with the intention of illustrating the development of an application for text files databases search engines in which this technology is used.

A teoria das linguagens formais é amplamente utilizada nos processos de solução de problemas de naturezas diversas, uma vez que tem poder de lidar tanto com as linguagens artifiais quanto com as linguagens naturais. As gramáticas, formalismos capazes de sintetizar as linguagens, podem também ser utilizadas no âmbito do problema de reconhecimento de padrões por poderem modelar as hierarquias dos componentes da linguagem, decompondo padrões em subestruturas. Seguindo essa linha, o arcabouço GrammarLab, cujo objetivo é facilitar a implementação, geração e testes de diferentes classificadores de sequências baseados em gramáticas, permitia em sua implementação anterior o uso de gramáticas regulares e livres de contexto. No entanto, alguns problemas necessitam de formalismos presentes apenas em gramáticas de níveis superiores na hierarquia de Chomsky. O problema encontrado ao se subir a hierarquia de gramáticas é a complexidade de tempo necessária para a análise sintática. Enquanto o reconhecimento de sequências por gramáticas regulares e livres de contexto pode ser feito em tempo polinomial, o problema geral de reconhecimento por gramáticas sensíveis ao contexto é um problema NP-completo e o de gramáticas irrestritas é considerado indecidível no caso geral. No entanto, o uso de métodos adaptativos possibilita que uma gramática altere seu conjunto de regras de produção durante a geração de sentenças, adicionando sensibilidade ao contexto a gramáticas originalmente livres de contexto, sem prejudicar a complexidade de análise polinomial. Desta forma, este trabalho teve como foco a inserção de métodos adaptativos no arcabouço GrammarLab e a criação de uma versão adaptativa do algoritmo de Earley de análise sintática. Como forma de verificar sua aplicação em problemas reais, foi realizado um estudo preliminar do uso do arcabouço na caracterização de famílias funcionais de RNAs com estrutura conservada, incluindo pseudonós. Os pseudonós apresentam relações de dependências cruzadas entre os nucleotídeos de uma sequência de RNA, relação esta que exemplifica dependência de contexto, sendo portanto um bom caso para o uso do modelo com adaptatividade em sua constituição. Os resultados obtidos com duas famílias de RNAs com pseudonós mostraram que a abordagem é altamente promissora / The theory of formal languages is widely used to solve problems of different natures as it can deal with artificial and natural languages. The grammars, formalisms able to synthesize languages, can also be used in pattern recognition problems due to the ability to model the language components hierarchies, decomposing patterns in substructures. Based on this idea, the framework GrammarLab was designed to facilitate the work involved in implementing, generating and testing different grammar based sequence classifiers, providing regular and context free grammar in the prior version. However, some problems need a formalism that can be found only in higher classes of grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy. The problem of using a higher class of grammar is the high computational time complexity for parsing. While the problem of recognizing sequences using regular and context free grammars is solved at polynomial time, the same problem in general case is NP-Complete for context sensitive grammars and undecidable for unrestricted grammars. Nevertheless, the use of adaptive methods allows a grammar to alter the set of production rules during sentences generation, including context sensitivity even to grammars that were designed to be context free, without increasing the polynomial parsing complexity. This work was focused in improving the GrammarLab framework by including the ability to deal with adaptive methods and in the creation of an adaptive version of Earleys algorithm. To test the solution in real world problems, it was conducted a preliminary study of the use of the framework in characterizing RNA functional families with conserved secondary structure, including pseudoknots. The pseudoknot pattern, represented by crossing dependences among RNA sequence nucleotides, is an example of context dependence, so it is a good test case for the use of a model that consider adaptability in the constitution. The obtained results with two families of RNAs with pseudoknots show that the approach is promising