Three des, as structural particles in Chinese, are phonologically the same, but written differently. Through analyzing the written forms of these three homophonous particles, the research has come to some valuable conclusions that cannot be obtained by only observing the speaking language of Chinese. This paper studies the relationships among three “des” (de1 as “的”; de2 as “地”; de3 as “得”), which function as structural particles in the written language of Chinese, by examining their mutual replacements in blogs. The research regards every living language as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) with continuing changes. So this study’s perspective not only helps us understand more deeply the structures with three des, but also opens a new window to explore the variation of Chinese on the cognitive linguistic layer, including syntactic and semantic aspects. Through analyzing the authentic data, which is obtained from a corpus built of articles in personal blogs including 400,000 Chinese characters, there are several worthy findings. First, the mutual replacements are asymmetric along with the generalization of de1. Secondly, there is a positive correlation between the frequency of replacements and the linguistic positive relevance among the three des, especially the syntactic and semantic aspects. Finally, the replacements among the vii three des present a diverse and complicated situation when investigating the written forms of idiolects. The syntactic factor plays the main role in the replacements among the three des. The related degree of de1 & de2 is significantly higher than the one of de1 & de3, which is especially obvious on the writers with relatively frequent replacements.

This paper is a study of the noun phrase construction in L2 learner language and the base for the study are the tools for measuring syntactic maturity presented by Kellog W. Hunt (1966). Hunt and other scholars have used T-units, the smallest terminable unit in language, to analyze L2 learner language. This study however, analyzes the construction of the noun phrase instead of T-units. Although the focus differs there are many similarities between the method used in this study and in those analyzing T-units. This means that the study tries to create indexes which we can use as tools for measuring syntactic maturity and complexity among L2 learners, by measuring consolidation and postmodification. The outcome of the study shows that it is possible to measure consolidation of the noun phrase and that this figure may very well function as a tool for measuring language development. Furthermore this paper investigates opportunities for teachers to teach syntax and concludes that there are ways of improving L2 teaching by utilizing knowledge about L2 learner syntax.

During the production of language, speakers tend to use the same structural patterns from one utterance to the next if it is possible to do so. For example, if a speaker uses a passive or dative construction, he/she is relatively more likely to use the same construction again in the next utterance (e.g., Bock, 1986; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998): the sentence structure "persists".The current study investigates syntactic persistence in first and second language speakers of English and Korean using within-language primes (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and across-language primes (Experiment 3). The target structures were transitive alternate structures (active and passive) and dative alternate structures (double object dative/DAT-ACC dative and prepositional dative/ACC-DAT dative). The experimental paradigm involved repetition of an auditory stimulus, followed by picture description. Overall, syntactic priming effects were found, although various magnitudes were observed as a function of structure; strong effects were found for "shared" syntactic constructions across languages (e.g., active vs. passive) and weak priming effects were found for syntactic constructions not shared (e.g., double object dative vs. prepositional dative) between English and Korean. Other asymmetrical priming effects were observed, reflecting differences between Korean and English such that reliable priming effects were found from L1 to L2, but not from L2 to L1 for Korean-as-L2 speakers (English-as-L1) These patterns of asymmetrical priming imply that cross-linguistic differences might interfere with syntactic persistence in production process unless speakers are highly advanced proficient bilinguals. Also, the present study showed that syntactic priming appears to be sensitive to the order of case-marked phrases in the cross-language priming condition. This finding indicates that the order of case-marked arguments is involved in syntactic repetition. It shed lights on further universal accounts of syntactic priming.

The first aim of this work is to describe the way in which the term apposition is defined in French and Czech linguistics. The second aim is to examine the use of one type of French apposition in journalistic and legal texts and to find out which equivalents are used in the Czech language for these expressions. The work is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part includes a description of different approaches of apposition in the French and Czech language. The practical part begins with a choice of one definition of apposition which will be further used in the corpus analysis. The corpus analysis is conducted by using the corpus InterCorp and its subject is to examine the function and frequency of French apposition in journalistic and legal texts and furthermore to analyse its Czech equivalents.

No description available.

This thesis contends that the human parser has a repair mechanism. It is further contended that the human parser uses this mechanism to alter previously built structure in the case of unexpected disambiguation of temporary syntactic ambiguity. This position stands in opposition to the claim that unexpected disambiguation of temporary syntactic ambiguity is accomplished by the usual first pass parsing routines, a claim that arises from the relatively extraordinary capabilities of computational parsers, capabilities which have recently been extended by hypothesis to be available to the human sentence processing mechanism. The thesis argues that, while these capabilities have been demonstrated in computational parsers, the human parser is best explained in the terms of a repair based framework, and that this argument is demonstrated by examining eye movement behaviour in reading. In support of the thesis, evidence is provided from a set of eye tracking studies of reading. It is argued that these studies show that eye movement behaviours at disambiguation include purposeful visual search for linguistically relevant material, and that the form and structure of these searches vary reliably according to the nature of the repairs that the sentences necessitate.

This is a corpus-based study on adjective use in eighty written compositions by Swedish learners of English from Grade 7 and Grade 9 in junior high school, and from Year 1 and Year 3 in senior high school. The aims of the study are to conduct an analysis of the use of attributive adjectives in noun phrases, and to investigate how attributive adjective use contributes to the syntactic complexity of noun phrases. This study proposes a hypothesis of the complexity of noun phrases in relation to different types of attributive adjectives, that is to say, an assumption that more complex types of attributive adjectives contain more compact information that requires more effort to learn and use.  The investigation shows that Swedish learners of English in junior and senior high school use an overwhelming number of noun phrases without premodifiers. The findings confirm that less proficient students use more adjectives as premodifiers in noun phrases than nouns as premodifiers. The results of the examination also reveal that students from the four school levels investigated use the most common attributive adjectives frequently, which accouts for more than half of the attributive adjectives used. However, a positive trend is that the use of more complex types of adjectives, such as derivational and participial adjectives, steadily increases in number when students advance in school level.  The comparision of the most common attributive adjectives in proportion to other adjectives used in the data from each grade shows that more proficient students use a richer variety of adjectives than less proficient students. Some pedagogical implications in this connection are the need to raise Swedish students’ awareness of different types of adjectives in language teaching and learning. Other pedagogical suggestions are the need to develop students’ skills in elaborating ideas and consolidating syntactic structures in their writing.       Keywords: syntactic development, noun premodification, attributive adjective, Swedish learners of English

This thesis investigates children’s mental representation of syntactic structure and how their acquisition and production of syntax is affected by lexical and semantic factors, focusing on three- and four-year-old children. It focuses on a construction that has been a frequent subject of language acquisition research: the passive. It is often claimed that English-speaking children acquire the passive relatively late in language development (e.g. Horgan, 1978): previous studies have typically found unreliable comprehension and infrequent production of passives by children younger than five (e.g. Fraser et al., 1963). However, there is some evidence from studies providing an appropriate pragmatic context for passives (e.g. Crain et al., 1987) and studies which increase children’s exposure to passives (e.g. Whitehurst et al., 1974) to suggest that children can produce this structure at a younger age. Converging evidence comes from studies of syntactic priming, or the tendency to repeat syntactic structure (e.g. Bencini & Valian, 2008). Syntactic priming effects are potentially informative about the nature of syntactic representation, as they are assumed to reflect the repeated use of the same syntactic representation across successive utterances. With respect to language acquisition, syntactic priming effects can be informative about the extent to which children have acquired an abstract representation of a structure. Specifically, if children have a syntactic representation of the passive, then it should be possible to prime their production of passives, such that they should be more likely to produce passives after hearing passives than after hearing actives. Furthermore, by examining the conditions under which such priming occurs, it is possible to draw inferences about the nature of their passive representation. This thesis presents seven experiments, six using a syntactic priming paradigm, to examine children’s knowledge of passives. Experiment 1 establishes a syntactic priming effect for actives and passives in three- and four-year-old children, and shows that priming occurs for both structures within an experimental session, using a withinparticipants design. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 examine whether young children’s acquisition of the passive is semantically constrained. Experiments 2 and 3 show that children can be primed to produce passive responses by actional and non-actional passive primes. Experiment 4, a picture-sentence matching task, replicates the results of other studies, however, showing that children find subject-experiencer non-actional verb passives more difficult to understand than actional verb passives; this mis-match between the results from the different tasks suggests that some effects of verb-type may be task-related. Experiments 5 and 6 examine whether the observed priming effect could be a lexically-driven effect that is dependent on the repetition of function words (the preposition by or the passive auxiliary). They show that this explanation can be ruled out: children are more likely to produce passives following both passive primes that do not express the agent using a by-phrase and passive primes involving a different auxiliary verb. Experiment 7 examines the later development of passive structures by testing passive production in six- and nine-year-old children. It finds evidence that at six, they still have difficulties with the construction, however by nine, children have an adult-like representation of the passive. I conclude that by four, children have begun to develop a syntactic representation for the passive which is already common to a range of different possible forms(short, full, get and be), and which is not restricted to particular semantic classes of verb. However, these results also suggest that children do not fully master the passive construction before six: young children make morphological errors and errors mapping thematic roles to syntactic positions, even following passive primes. Hence children may acquire the purely syntactic aspects of the passive, leading to a syntactic priming effect, before they acquire other aspects of this structure, hence the children’s occasional errors producing passives.

The practical utility of a syntactic pattern recognizer depends on an automatic learning of pattern class grammars from a sample of patterns. The basic idea is to devise a learning process based on induction of repeated subs rings. Several techniques based on formal lattice structures, structural derivatives, information, k – tails, lattice structures, structural information sequence, inductive inference and heuristic approach are widely found in the literature. The purpose of this research is to first devise a minimal finite state automaton which recognizes all patterns. The automaton is then manipulated so that the induction of repetition is captured by cycles or loops. The final phase consists of converting the reduced automaton into a context - free grammar. Now, an automatic parser for this grammar can recognize patterns which are in the respective class.

O Processamento de Línguas Naturais é uma área interdisciplinar cujas pesquisas podem ser divididas em duas grandes linhas: análise e síntese da língua. Esta pesquisa de doutorado traz contribuições para ambas. Para a análise da língua, um modelo integrativo capaz de unir diferentes níveis linguísticos é apresentado e avaliado em relação aos níveis morfológico, (incluindo subníveis léxico e morfossintático), sintático e semântico. Enquanto análises tradicionais são feitas dos níveis mais baixos da língua para os mais altos, em uma estratégia em cascata, na qual erros dos níveis mais baixos são propagados para os níveis mais altos, o modelo de análise proposto é capaz de unificar a análise de diferentes níveis a partir de uma abordagem bidirecional. O modelo é baseado em uma grande rede neural, treinada em córpus, cujos padrões de treinamento são extraídos de tokens presentes nas orações. Um tipo de recorrência denominado coativação é aplicado no modelo para permitir que a análise de um padrão modifique e seja modificada pela análise de outros padrões em um mesmo contexto. O modelo de análise permite investigações para as quais não foi originalmente planejado, além de apresentar resultados considerados satisfatórios em lematização e análise morfossintática, porém ainda demandando aprimoramento para a tarefa de análise sintática. A ferramenta associada a esse modelo permitiu investigar a recorrência proposta e a interação bidirecional entre níveis da língua, incluindo seus subníveis. Experimentos para coativação e bidirecionalidade foram realizados e considerados satisfatórios. Para a área de síntese da língua, um modelo de simplificação sintática, tarefa considerada como adaptação de texto para texto, baseado em regras manuais é aplicado em textos analisados sintaticamente, tendo como objetivo tornar os textos sintaticamente mais simples para leitores com letramento rudimentar ou básico. A ferramenta associada a esse modelo permitiu realizar simplificação sintática com medida-f de 77,2%, simplificando aproximadamente 16% de orações em textos do gênero enciclopédico / Natural Language Processing is an interdisciplinary research area that encompasses two large research avenues: language analysis and language synthesis. This thesis contributes for both of them. In what concerns language analysis, it presents an integrative model that links different levels of linguistic analysis. The evaluation of such model takes into consideration several levels: morphologic (including lexical and morph-syntactic sub-levels), syntactic and semantic. Whereas traditional analysis are undertaken from the lower levels to the upper ones, propagating errors in such direction, the model proposed herein is able to unify different levels of analysis using a bidirectional approach. The model is based on a large-scale neural network trained in corpus, which extracts its training features from tokens within the sentences. A type of recurrence denominated co-activation is applied to the model to make the analysis of a pattern able to modify (and to be modified by) the analysis of other patterns in a same context. This model may be used for purposes different from those for which it was conceived and yields satisfactory results in lemmatization and part-of-speech analysis, but still needs work on syntactic analysis. The tool associated to this model makes it possible to analyze the proposed recurrence language and the bidirectional influence of different levels on each other, including sub-level interaction. Experiments on both co-activation and bidirectional level integration were performed, and the results were considered satisfactory. On the other hand, in what concerns language synthesis, this thesis presents a rule-based model of syntactic simplification (one of text adaptation techniques), applicable to syntactically parsed texts in order to render them simpler for low literacy readers. The tool associated to this model makes it possible to carry out the task of syntactic simplification in Portuguese language. Such tool achieved 77.2% of f-measure in a task that simplified approximately 16% of the sentences of an encyclopedic text