A Dynamic Network Approach to the Study of Syntax.

Ever since the advent of generative theory, there has been a dispute in linguistics between formalist and functionalist approaches. At stake in this controversy is the autonomy thesis: i.e. the claim that linguistic knowledge is independent from, and irreducible to, the facts of language use. Under the autonomist view, language is both arbitrary and self-contained. Currently, the radically autonomous vision of syntax that is being pursued in Chomskyan circles has lent new urgency to the question whether phonology and syntax can in fact possess autonomy to the same degree. This problem has a long history (e.g. Anderson 1981), but it has lately received new and radical answers, notably through the Representational Hypothesis advanced by Burton-Roberts (2000) and Carr (2000): in the Representational Hypothesis, the language faculty is assumed to be radically autonomous, whereas phonology is functionally based and stands outside UG. This dissertation is concerned with the intermediate grammars and the variability that emerge in the course of linguistic change. It is based on evidence from the acquisition of Hebrew phonology and morphology, and a case study of a historical change affecting the grammar of Modern Hebrew. I propose a unified formal model for intermediate grammars in both language acquisition and (historical) language change, from a synchronic point of view, using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The topics discussed in this work are based on two different studies: (i) the acquisition path of Hebrew prosodic structure; and (ii) the variation involved in stop-fricative alternation in Modern Hebrew, as a result of historical changes. For both topics I suggest an Optimality Theoretic account of the phenomena, their cause, and their consequences. The study of language acquisition is based on two interrelated acquisition paths: (a) of prosodic structure of words out of morphological context; and (b) of prosodic structure within paradigms with regular morphophonological alternation, where the acquisition of Hebrew verb inflectional paradigms are examined. The acquisition path of words out of morphological context shows a pattern of gradual increase in prosodic structure (e.g. the number of syllables), involving a gradual increase in prosodic contrasts (e.g. diverse stress patterns), up until the child’s production is phonologically identical to the target forms. The increase in structure and contrast indicates a gradual transition from unmarked structures with input-output disparities (indicating phonological dominance) to marked structures, lacking input-output disparities (indicating lexical dominance). In the acquisition path of alternating paradigms, not only the child-adult relations are examined, but also the relation between words, where the target language itself exhibits input-output disparities, namely words drawn from alternating paradigms. This acquisition path provides evidence for the child’s restructuring of a lexical representation, as well as evidence for the transition from child-adult relation to the child’s input-output relation. In addition, I show that the phonological account of the acquisition of inflectional paradigms provides evidence for morphological development. One of the interesting findings in this regard is the emergence of morphological knowledge before actual inflectional suffixes are produced by the children. This finding would not be available without examining the interaction between prosodic and morphological factors. Another crucial finding dealt with in my study of acquisition is the scope of variation in the course of acquisition. I found that variation in children’s production is limited to the acquisition of the lexical contrasts existing in the language, and is not found in the acquisition of alternation resulting from phonological restrictions. The model I suggest for change in the course of acquisition predicts and explains this finding, based on evidence that children do not violate universal restrictions respected in the target language. The study of language change deals with spirantization in Modern Hebrew, where the alternation between stops and fricatives involves a great deal of opacity and free variation. The analysis suggested is based on a set of paradigms co- existing in the language and contradicting each other. I show that variation is restricted only to certain types of paradigms, conditioned by certain phonological properties. However, I argue that the co-existence of different types of paradigms indicates a change in the language, where the variable grammar is an intermediate phase, and the invariable paradigms indicate the direction of change. Similar to the acquisition path of single forms, and unlike the acquisition path of alternation within a paradigm, the direction of change in the case of Modern Hebrew spirantization is towards a loss of phonological generalization (i.e. towards lexical dominance). Through the investigation of language acquisition and language change, I examine in this work central issues in phonological theory, such as morphophonemic alternation and prosodic structure, in conditions of change. The phenomena investigated here provide insight to the nature of linguistic change in the following aspects: (i) the distinction between phonological properties that undergo change vs. phonological properties that do not undergo change; (ii) the directionality of change; and (iii) the scope of variation in the course of change. I argue that both language acquisition and language change share similar patterns with respect to these issues. Moreover, the change, its directionality and the variation involved, are accounted for by the same theoretical terms that account for the linguistic knowledge of a single ideal native speaker. I show that Optimality Theory suggests an appropriate theoretical framework for a unified generative analysis of this type.

This thesis explores a perspective for explaining the origins of linguistic structure that is based on considerations beyond the constraints of the language acquisition device. In contrast to the theory of Universal Grammar proposed by Chomsky, this perspective considers how the processes of language acquisition and use create a dynamical system that is capable of adapting linguistic structure to the inductive biases of learners. In this view it is possible to conceive of language adapting to aid its own survival: those languages that are more reliably and easily acquired will tend to persist for longer than their less easily learned counterparts. Thus, linguistic structures are seen as emergent, adaptive phenomena rather than preordained features of language. The particular issue that this thesis investigates is the extent to which language adaptation can facilitate acquisition by general-purpose learners. In the Generative Grammar tradition much is made of the necessity for domain-specific constraints on the language acquisition device. (Indeed, that there must be a distinct mental component dedicated to language tasks.) This outlook is in contrast to the connectionist viewpoint, which posits far more moderately constrained, domain-general mechanisms. This thesis examines how language adaptation can give general-purpose, connectionist learners the appearance of being language-savvy learners. A simulation framework is proposed in which agents attempt to communicate simple concepts to one another using sequential utterances. In earlier simulations we aim to maximise the learnability of a language for the communication task. Later simulations show how the processes of language production and acquisition, when iterated, are capable oi producing such languages. In total, three series of simulations are performed. The first series of simulations addresses the question of how linguistic structure adapts when sender and receiver disagree on the form of language that is easiest to learn. Analysis reveals that, if necessary, the structural properties of language can take on forms that compromise between the competing constraints on sender and receiver. The second series of simulations considers the bottleneck of linguistic transmission: the requirement that learners generalise from a limited set of observed utterances to the entire language. Results show that generalisability can be boosted in a naive, domain-general learner by allowing language to adapt to the inductive biases present in the learner. The third and final series of simulations investigates how the dynamical characteristics of linguistic change depend on the properties that drive the dynamics. That is, we explore the range of conditions under which the iterated learning dynamic is sufficient to establish a learnable language throughout the population. The results of these simulations show that the iterated learning dynamic is indeed able to act as a generator of languages that general-purpose learners are capable of acquiring. The results from these studies suggest that through the dynamics of linguistic transmission, language can adapt to the capabilities and biases of its users. Furthermore, that language can exploit the inductive biases of general-purpose learning mechanisms to facilitate their own acquisition, contrary to Universal Grammar's hypothesised need for an innate, domain-specific acquisition mechanism.

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.

There may be no any meaningful spoken or written discourse in any human language without words because words are used to express thoughts, ideas and feelings. For one to use any word correctly, one requires among other things, the knowledge of its lexical or grammatical category. Several contemporary scholars of English grammar have identified certain criteria for classifying English words into grammatical categories. But some of these criteria are somewhat controversial. Hence this paper is a critique of the criteria identified by these contemporary English grammarians. However, it considers briefly traditional grammar approach to the classification of English words. The paper discusses both open set and closed set words which are randomly selected and analyzed. The study discovered that virtually all the grammatical categories have homophonous usage with one another. That is, their features tend to overlap. It also discovered that no single criterion is satisfactory enough for use in classifying English words into grammatical categories. The paper therefore posits that in classifying English words into lexical categories, we need to consider both the morphology and distribution (syntax) of words because none of them is self-sufficient in this regard.

Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a theory of language in which linguistic structures are accounted for in terms of the interplay of discourse, semantics and syntax. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this Handbook provides a field-defining overview of RRG. Assuming no prior knowledge, it introduces the framework step-by-step, and includes a pedagogical guide for instructors. It features in-depth discussions of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, including treatments of lexical and grammatical categories, the syntax of simple clauses and complex sentences, and how the linking of syntax with semantics and discourse works in each of these domains. It illustrates RRG's contribution to the study of language acquisition, language change and processing, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, and also contains five grammatical sketches which show how RRG analyses work in practice. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how grammar interfaces with meaning.

There has been a longstanding debate on the use of native language (L1) in second language acquisition (SLA). One important topic in language education to investigate is the use of language in the second language (L2) writing process. The majority of studies have focused on L2 writers in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings. Quantitative research approaches have been dominant. Nevertheless, the complexity of this issue cannot be comprehensively explored without qualitative analysis. This case study investigates the language use of a Chinese international college student in the United States throughout the L2 writing process. It adopts a qualitative research approach. The findings show that language learners draw upon their entire linguistic repertoire while writing; even those with a high proficiency level still rely upon their L1 in the L2 writing process. The findings also reveal the multiple functions of the L1 in facilitating L2 writing. Although this study primarily focuses on the linguistic influences of the L1, its implications can be generalized to a broader context. Teachers working with English learners (ELs) or bilingual students are highly recommended to acknowledge and gain a comprehensive understanding of the value of students’ linguistic knowledge, as well as embrace and strategically utilize students’ linguistic repertoires.

No nouns, no verbs: psycholinguistic arguments in favor of lexical underspecification

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a computational complexity and linguistic knowledge likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. This article shows that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating higher level structural properties of these languages. This article also presents a simple 2-layer connectionist model that, once trained with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel words using only word-edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging lexical categories in language development.

Reviewed by: Second language acquisition by Roumyana Slabakova Tania Ionin Second language acquisition. By Roumyana Slabakova. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xxi, 483. ISBN 9780199687275. $40. Introduction This book is a textbook of second language acquisition (SLA) written within the theoretical framework of the generative approach to SLA research. The intended readers are advanced undergraduate students and graduate students who have some background in linguistics, in particular in syntax and semantics. The text is intended first and foremost for students with a prior background in generative linguistics. While the main linguistic concepts are explained when they are introduced, such explanations are necessarily brief, and students with no prior background in linguistics would find the more technical parts of the text somewhat difficult to follow. However, students or other readers who have a general interest in language and/or language acquisition, but lack a background in generative linguistics, should still be able to follow the main concepts presented in the book. This textbook is quite unique in that, while its focus is on theoretical research on SLA, it explicitly makes the link to potential pedagogical relevance of the research findings. Brief summary The book consists of thirteen chapters, divided into three parts. Each chapter ends with a section of exercises; at the end of the book are a glossary, references, and an index. Part I, ‘Language’, provides a brief overview of the relevant background information that readers need to have in order to fully appreciate the rest of the book. Ch. 1, ‘Language architecture’, lays out the central argument of generative linguistics for the innateness of language and introduces the reader to several famous proposals on the structure of the language faculty. Ch. 1 then addresses the task faced by a second language learner and lays out the logic of the methodology used in generative SLA research. Ch. 2, ‘Language variation’, walks the reader through the history of the generative study of language variation, from principles and parameters through the minimalist program. Like Ch. 1, Ch. 2 ends by considering the implications of the theoretical linguistic research for the learning task of a second language learner. The goal of Ch. 3, ‘The psychological reality of language in use’, is to prepare the reader for later chapters that address second language processing by reviewing the central models and findings of the literature on language processing and psycholinguistics more generally. Part II, ‘Language acquisition’, has the goal of placing the study of SLA into the study of language acquisition as a whole by considering a number of different language-acquisition scenarios. The focus of this part is on the respective contributions of age of acquisition and of input quantity and quality to the task of language acquisition. Ch. 4, ‘The critical period hypothesis’, goes over the history of critical period studies and addresses the debate about the existence of critical or sensitive periods in SLA. This chapter also considers the role of input, bringing together a number of quite distinct phenomena, including variable input, comparisons between heritage speakers and second language learners, and variability among native speakers at different educational levels. Ch. 5, ‘First language acquisition, two first languages’, provides an overview of the process of first language acquisition; most of the chapter is devoted to monolingual first language acquisition, but the last section discusses simultaneous bilinguals, who form a natural link between monolinguals and adult second language learners. In Ch. 6, ‘Child second language, multilingual and heritage language acquisition, language attrition’, a variety of other types of language acquisition scenarios are discussed. Throughout this chapter, and especially in the last section, the focus is, once again, on the relative contributions of age of acquisition and input quantity and quality to the outcome of the language acquisition process. The position taken in this chapter, and [End Page e198] throughout the rest of the book, is that the effects of age can potentially be overridden by rich input, and that universal grammar remains active in SLA by adults. Part III, ‘Second language acquisition’, is the heart of the book. In addition to providing an overview of SLA research in the core areas of linguistics (with the one exception of...

Contents: Preface. J.L. Morgan, K. Demuth, to An Overview. Part I: The Nature, Perception, and Representation of Input Speech. P.D. Eimas, The Perception and Representation of Speech by Infants. B.E. Dresher, Introduction to Metrical and Phonology. P. Lieberman, Some Biological Constraints on the Analysis of Prosody. P. Price, M. Ostendorf, Combining Linguistic With Statistical Methods in Modeling Prosody. Part II: Speech and the Acquisition of Words. A. Cutler, Prosody and the Word Boundary Problem. J. Mehler, E. Dupoux, T. Nazzi, G. Dahaene-Lambertz, Coping With Linguistic Diversity: The Infant's Viewpoint. R.N. Aslin, J.Z. Woodward, N.P. LaMendola, T.G. Bever, Models of Word Segmentation in Fluent Maternal Speech to Infants. N.B. Ratner, From Signal to Syntax: But What Is the Nature of the Signal? C.H. Echols, A Role for Stress in Early Speech Segmentation. K. Demuth, The Structure of Early Words. Part III: Speech and the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphology & Form Classes. E. Selkirk, The Structure of Function Words. A.M. Peters, S. Stroemqvist, The Role of Prosody in the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes. L.B. Leonard, J.A. Eyer, Deficits of Grammatical Morphology in Children with Specific Language Impairment and Their Implications for Notions of Bootstrapping. M. Kelly, The Role of Phonology in Grammatical Category Assignments. J.L. Morgan, R. Shi, P. Allopena, Perceptual Bases of Rudimentary Grammatical Categories: Toward a Broader Conceptualization of Bootstrapping. Part IV: Speech and the Acquisition of Phrase Structure. J.J. Venditti, S-A. Jun, M.E. Beckman, Cues to Syntactic and Other Linguistic Structures in Japanese, Korean, and English. R. Mazuka, Can a Grammatical Parameter Be Set Before the First Word? Contributions to Early Setting of a Grammatical Parameter. M. Steedman, Phrasal Intonation and the Acquisition of Syntax. C. Fisher, H. Tokura, Prosody in Speech to Infants: Direct and Indirect Acoustic Cues to Syntactic Structure. A. Fernald, G. McRoberts, Bootstrapping: A Critical Analysis of the Argument and the Evidence. P. Jusczyk, D.G.K. Nelson, Syntactic Units, Prosody, and Psychological Reality During Infancy. Part V: Speech and the Acquisition of Language. L. Gerken, Phonological and Distributional Information in Sytnax Acquisition. J.F. Werker, V.L. Lloyd, J.E. Pegg, L. Polka, Putting the Baby in the Bootstraps: Toward a More Complete Understanding of the Role of the Input in Infant Speech Processing. K. Hirsh-Pasek, M. Tucker, R.M. Golinkoff, Dynamical Systems Theory: Reinterpreting Prosodic Bootstrapping and Its Role in Language Acquisition.

<p class="Abstract">This paper sets out an argument in favour of emergentism as an alternative theoretical paradigm to nativism, arguing that it offers a coherent, evidence-based account of language structure, language acquisition, language evolution, and language change. A number of key tenets of the nativist approach are summarised first, including the nature of the presumed complexity of language, the poverty of the input argument against the learnability of language, the assumption of parsimony, the view of language as innate, biological faculty, and the view of the primary function of language as cognitive representation rather than communication. This is followed by a presentation of the emergentist alternative, which is centred on the notion of the grammatical construction as central unit in the emergentist approach. The properties of constructions, and how they can come into being with recourse to only domain-general cognitive processes, are presented, before the implications of this view for language structure, language acquisition, language evolution and language change are discussed. Additional points of difference with the nativist position are highlighted, including the assumptions of non-parsimonious storage and the centrality of communicative interaction in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of language. Throughout the presentation, arguments are illustrated with reference to aspects of complementation in the Germanic languages. The article concludes with a detailed case study of the wh-extraction construction, drawing on an analysis of corpus data from Afrikaans, to demonstrate how the construction-based, emergentist approach leads to an insightful analysis of a well-known construction, without having to make extensive assumptions about the underlying linguistic complexity and the need for innate mechanisms to enable the acquisition of such a complex construction.

The purpose of the present study is to a) find the lexical features, b) discover the role of linguistic features in the text, c) examine the grammatical elements used in the novel, and d) check the sentence structure and patterns. The research design of this study was exploratory qualitative. The data for the study was derived from the novel Home Fire. After an in-depth study of the novel, the researcher gathered relevant lexical and grammatical categories from the text in the form of rough drafts and later utilized them while doing the analysis. The researcher has applied a modified Leech and Shorts (2007) model for grammatical and lexical categories to analyze the text. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are extracted from the text in linguistic features. At the same time, functional types of sentences and minor word classes like prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, and articles were analyzed under grammatical categories. The study's outcomes show that the writer has used mainly concrete nouns, descriptive adjectives, transitive verbs, and adverbs of manner in the mentioned text. The detailed knowledge of the text analysis can help the reader become more insightful and discerning. This study is expected to help the students and researchers in enhancing their academic writing and understanding.

Times of pandemics usually witness a remarkable surge of interest among various poets who, in response to the impending threats and anxiety brought about by the uninvited guest, provide multiple ways of portraying the crisis and its inevitable impact. Pandemic poetry provides a fertile source of data for relating language to its poetic artistic function in general and for studying some linguistic and stylistic features that characterize language in pandemic poems in particular. This study seeks to depict and analyze the stylistic features employed in four Covid-19 pandemic poems with the objective of linking poetic style to the specific representations of experience associated with the pandemic. The samples of the study are four English-language pandemic poems selected from online sources on Covid-19. The qualitative approach is employed to collect, classify and analyze the selected samples of poems inductively in order to find out the distinctive stylistic features of the selected Covid-19 pandemic poems. The framework of analysis employs Leech and Short's (2007) method of stylistic analysis in which four categories are tackled: lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech and context and cohesion. The foregrounding theory also serves as a strategy employed for analyzing the selected poems in order to highlight the prominent features in the text, thereby directing focus towards the thematic concerns linked to the pandemic. The stylistic analysis serves as a tool for readers to comprehend the themes of the selected poems in relation to linguistic choices while revealing deeper layers of interpretation and appreciation of language use in pandemic poems. The selected Covid-19 pandemic poems masterfully communicate medical themes through various stylistic elements, bringing together the fields of medicine, poetry and stylistics. The scientific examination of the virus and its physical and psychological consequences together with the representation of the healthcare system during the pandemic formed the subject matter of the four selected poems. Repetition, figures of speech, paradox, hyperbole and parallelism, are among the most frequently used stylistic devices that managed to underscore the ideas of uncertainty, confusion, anxiety, and pain associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Independent component analysis (ICA) (Hyvarinen et al., 2001) applied on word context data gives distinct features which reflect syntactic and semantic categories. The analysis gives features or categories that are both explicit and can easily be interpreted by humans. This result can be obtained without any human supervision or tagged corpora that would have some predetermined morphological, syntactic or semantic information. The results include both an emergence of clear distinctive categories or features and a distributed representation. This is based on the fact that a word may belong to several categories simultaneously in a graded manner. Within cognitive linguistics we wish that our model can provide additional understanding on potential cognitive mechanisms in natural language learning and understanding. Our approach is based on the assumption that much of the linguistic knowledge is emergent in nature and based on specific learning mechanisms. In the full paper, we will provide a brief introduction to independent component analysis, review the earlier published results (Honkela and Hyvarinen, 2004), provide the very latest results, compare our model with some other approaches based on unsupervised learning paradigm and discuss in general the potential of the ICA model within the theme of modelling language, cognition and action.

In this paper we want to focus on the so called vehicular use of second languages - i.e. the use of a second language in teaching knowledge in different fields -, in order to evaluate its effectiveness as an educational approach in early foreign language teaching. We will analyse the advantages of the vehicular use of languages in the perspective of teaching languages in the kindergarten school, considering in particular the parallelism between first and second language acquisition. Then, we will suggest some practical considerations to follow and implement this approach, also illustrating a concrete experience.