This thesis is primarily concerned with language production. In particular it investigates two issues: First, it explores some of the processing mechanisms underlying the production of different syntactic structures and word orders. Second, it explores the production of different syntactic structures and word order from a developmental perspective. These two issues are investigated experimentally and from a cross-linguistic point of view. First, a description is given of the possible word order permutations that Catalan allows and under which circumstances these word orders are produced. This is extended with a corpus analysis of spoken Catalan. The aim of this study is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to present the different positions where subjects and complements of the verb can appear in a sentence. On the other, it aims to compare the use of passivization between spoken and newspaper text in Catalan. Second, my experimental work in language production in four languages is presented. These languages include English, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish. The main aim of this study is to explore the effects of the non-linguistic factors of animacy and frequency upon the production of different word orders. The results of four experiments in the four languages mentioned yield evidence that these non-linguistic factors affect the on-line processing of language production. In the four languages, participants tend to prefer to produce syntactic structures which allow animate entities to be realised as the sentential subject, even if this means producing a passive structure rather than a (usually preferred) active structure. I have also found evidence that in some languages (e.g. Catalan and Spanish) animate/frequent entities appear at initial sentence position in the grammatical category of object (in dislocated active constructions). These results are explained on the light of some of the models of language production (e.g. Bock 1987a; Bock and Levelt 1994). Third, further cross-linguistic experiments in three languages (English, Catalan and Spanish) are presented. There I show that one particular contextual factor, discourse salience, can also affect the realisation of different syntactic structures during production. Entities which have been made more salient by the preceding context are more likely to appear as sentential subjects or in early sentential positions than entities which have also been introduced in previous discourse but are less salient. I suggest that these effects can be explained using the same mechanisms that explain other non-linguistic factors (e.g. animacy). The results also suggest that in the absence of context, animacy is a strong determinant of syntactic structure and word order, whereas in context, discourse salience may largely override animacy effects. Finally, these results suggest that from a processing point of view, the Given/New partition is not enough to account for the information structure of a sentence, but a more fine-grained distinction is need, in keeping with some recent pragmatic theories (e.g. Prince 1981, 1992; Sgall et al. 1986). Finally, I investigate the production of different word orders from a developmental point of view. In particular I examine the relationship between age and the production of different word orders by Catalan children, ranging from 4;11 to 11;11 years. The results of an experiment run with these children show that a dislocated active is a construction already consolidated at age 5. In contrast, the passive clause is a construction still not fully acquired at age 11. These results seem to suggest that for Catalan children, a dislocated active is a syntactic structure that is available earlier than the passive structure. Conversely, the placement of a patient in subject position and the creation of a verbal passive voice occurs later than simple word order permutation. Finally, a comparison between these results and existing results from English children shows that there are cross-linguistic differences on the age of production of passive clauses: while English children already produce passives at age 5, Catalan children start producing passives at age 11. I suggest some possible explanations for the cross-linguistic differences in the production of different syntactic structures. Overall, the main aim for this study is to gain insight into the production of different syntactic structures and word orders from a psycholinguistic and developmental point of view.

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<p>The purpose of this essay is to study how the major syntactic structure is affected when a literary text is translated from English into Swedish. That is, to study what operations take place and the frequency of the different operations in a translation. The purpose is also to see how much the freedom of translation varies between different translators.</p>

This dissertation investigates Slavic collective numerals and their syntactic structure from descriptive and structural perspectives on the basis of the operation Agree. The headedness of Slavic collective numeral phrases will be focused on with three Slavic languages: Russian, Bosnian/ Croatian/Serbian, and Polish. To analyze the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of Slavic collective numeral phrases, I adopted two important concepts proposed by Rappaport (2002, 2006): i) Minimal Lexical Representation (MLR) and ii) pre-valued abstract Quantitative Case (QC). MLR represents the semantic and formal features of nouns, which selectively combine with collective numerals, while the idea of QC can predict the heterogeneous and homogeneous patterns of case assignment. The presence of pre-valued abstract QC triggers heterogeneous morphosyntax, while the absence of QC triggers homogeneous morphosyntax. The spell-out forms of collective numerals are the direct result of morphological syncretic rules. In regard of the headedness of Slavic collective numeral phrases, this research claims that nouns are the heads of Slavic numeral phrases on the grounds that numerals, adjectives, and other modifiers agree with nouns, which functions as the locus of morphosyntax (Zwicky 1985). The use of collective numerals is determined by the properties of nouns. In each chapter, Slavic collective numerals will be analyzed from the three points of view: i) semantics, ii) morphology, and iii) syntax. Collective numerals can emphasize the meaning of collectivity, totality, and cohesiveness as an aggregate. BCS and Polish collective numerals strictly specify a group of mixed gender, while Russian does not. BCS is characterized by three different types of collective numerals: i) collective numeral substantives (dvojica ‘two’, trojica ‘three’, četvorica ’four’, petorica ’five’, etc.), collective numerals (dvoje ‘two’, troje ‘three’, četvoro ’four’, petoro ’five’, etc.), and collective numeral adjectives (dvoji (m.)/ dvoje (f.)/ dvoja (n.) ’two’, etc.). Moreover, indeclinability of numerals is one of the characteristics of BCS numerals. Polish has secondary gender, so-called virile marking, which does not apply to collective numerals. Polish collective numerals are strictly used to express a group of mixed gender. / text

At the present there is no software for Lithuanian language that could form the Lithuanian language structure necessary for translation of words from one language to another. The aim of this paper was to create a program that could form a graph of syntactic structure of Lithuanian sentence. For this purpose the algorithm that could make a graphical presentation of syntactic sentence structure of Lithuanian words sequence in sentence and syntactic structure of each word should be formed.

<p> </p><p>Languages rely on grammatical rules, by which even such variable constituents as adverbials are affected. However, due to the many different positions in Old English sentences taken up by adverbials, it is easy to wrongfully assume that there is an absence of grammatical rules regarding adverbials in Old English. Hence, it may be possible to detect patterns of behaviour among Old English adverbs if their different position and movement within various clauses is studied systematically. This paper has been focused on examining two conjunct adverbs, and two disjunct adverbs, functioning as sentence adverbials in prose, in order to contribute information of where they are base-generated within the syntactic structure of Old English clauses, and thus hopefully contribute to a better understanding of the grammatical system of Old English. 120 sentences of prose containing sentence adverbials have been examined according to the Government and Binding Theory, as introduced in <em>Stæfcræft: An Introduction to Old English Syntax</em>, in order to establish where the different textual constituents of Old English are base-generated.</p>

The purpose of this essay is to study how the major syntactic structure is affected when a literary text is translated from English into Swedish. That is, to study what operations take place and the frequency of the different operations in a translation. The purpose is also to see how much the freedom of translation varies between different translators.

In recent years, a significant surge has occurred in the amount of children who are being diagnosed with a disorder on the autism spectrum. Current statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2011) show that 1 in 110 children in the United States have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and that the diagnosis of such is estimated to grow prodigiously due to a variety of different aspects, such as an ever-increasing broadening definition of autism, an inclusion of autism as a disability category under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990, improved diagnostic methods, and some other unknown factors (In Nickel's work as cited by Nickels in 2010). Also, because a lack of or weakness in communication skills is a common characteristic for students who have an ASD, receiving early intervention to increase communication is imperative for this population. In consideration of this premise, this study looks at whether using a blended, balanced mode of reading instruction, the Language Experience Approach (Stauffer, 1970; Van Allen, 1970) and the work of Patricia Oelwein (1995), through written means can improve oral language fluency output and syntactical structure concurrently for a student who has suffered from many of the symptoms of ASD, but has not been clinically diagnosed. Along with the collection of qualitative data aggregated throughout this study through observational means, quantitative data was also collected before, during, and after the intervention to measure the effects on the subject. Quantitative data was obtained from a Letter-Identification Assessment (Clay 2005), the QRI-5 (Leslie & Caldwell, 2011), the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 1997) , and Mean Length of Utterance (MLU).; Results obtained from this study showed that the interventions had a positive effect on the subject in terms of listening, speaking, reading, and writing where the fluency and complexity of the subject's speech patterns and ability to read and write improved over the course of the intervention period.

Current representation schemes for automatic text classification treat documents as syntactically unstructured collections of words (Bag-of-Words) or `concepts' (Bag-of-Concepts). Past attempts to encode syntactic structure have treated part-of-speech information as another word-like feature, but have been shown to be less effective than non-structural approaches. We propose a new representation scheme using Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) as a technique to encode both semantic and syntactic structure, though in very different ways. This method is unique in the literature in that it encodes the structure across all features of the document vector while preserving text semantics. Our method does not increase the dimensionality of the document vectors, allowing for efficient computation and storage. We present the results of various Support Vector Machine classification experiments that demonstrate the superiority of this method over Bag-of-Concepts representations and improvement over Bag-of-Words in certain classification contexts.

Current representation schemes for automatic text classification treat documents as syntactically unstructured collections of words (Bag-of-Words) or `concepts' (Bag-of-Concepts). Past attempts to encode syntactic structure have treated part-of-speech information as another word-like feature, but have been shown to be less effective than non-structural approaches. We propose a new representation scheme using Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) as a technique to encode both semantic and syntactic structure, though in very different ways. This method is unique in the literature in that it encodes the structure across all features of the document vector while preserving text semantics. Our method does not increase the dimensionality of the document vectors, allowing for efficient computation and storage. We present the results of various Support Vector Machine classification experiments that demonstrate the superiority of this method over Bag-of-Concepts representations and improvement over Bag-of-Words in certain classification contexts.