Argument Structure and Word Order in Saudi Sign Language

Reviewed by: Particle verbs in English: Syntax, information structure and intonation by Nicole Dehé Timothy Baldwin Particle verbs in English: Syntax, information structure and intonation. By Nicole Dehé. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 59.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. 305. ISBN 1588113086. $144 (Hb). This book, an expanded and reworked version of Nicole Dehé’s 2001 dissertation, analyzes the syntax of transitive particle verbs (PVs) in English. D observes that PVs can occur with either continuous (I gave up my job) or discontinuous (I gave my job up) word order, and analyzes factors that govern which of these word orders is adopted in a given context. Through an impressive survey of the data and two speech-production experiments, D motivates the claim that the continuous word order is the unmarked order, and goes on to propose a syntactic analysis of PVs which uses information-structure theory to capture the effects of word-order variation. The book consists of six chapters. Ch. 1 (1–14) presents a basic overview of the data and existing PV classifications. Ch. 2 (15–74) outlines and extensively critiques proposed syntactic analyses of PVs, drawing particularly on modification, coordination, and nominalization data in identifying shortcomings in the different approaches. Ch. 3 (75–102) reviews syntactic factors that have been suggested as affecting PV word order, notably the category of the direct object, length/syntactic complexity of the direct object, and particle modification. Ch. 4 (103–207) introduces information-structure theory and topiccomment structure, and details their relevance to the determination of PV word order. D then presents two speech-production experiments, in which information-structure theory is shown to be a reliable predictor of PV stress and word order. Ch. 5 (209–78) details D’s proposed analysis of PVs, which encodes D’s claim that the continuous word order is basic, and derives the discontinuous word order from it based on interaction with information structure, avoiding arbitrary ‘rearrangement’-type movement in doing so. The proposed analysis is extensively tested over examples cited in the PV literature, and information structure is shown to be a powerful holistic predictor of PV word order. The book is well written and provides a one-stop shop for those interested in PVs, reviewing a broad section of the literature and also covering the phonological, syntactic, and focus/information aspects of PVs. It assumes a high level of familiarity with the minimalist program, but through data-intensive argumentation remains accessible to those lacking this background knowledge. D touches upon but fails to reach a definite conclusion about the syntax-semantics interface. D dismisses claims that existing classifications of semantic compositionality can be used to predict word order, but at the same time acknowledges that compositionality appears to have an impact on the determination of word order with some PVs. Given the interaction with word-order effects, the book would have benefited from a developed discourse on the precise nature of the syntax-semantics interface and its implications for D’s information-theoretic analysis of PVs. This minor reservation aside, the book is characterized by clear argumentation, an extensive bibliography, and excellent use of examples, and is a valuable contribution to the PV literature. Timothy Baldwin University of Melbourne Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

IntroductionEarly linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers.MethodsIn the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested.ResultsHard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found.DiscussionOur results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.

This chapter considers relative clause data from sign languages in light of their variation with respect to basic word order, nonmanual marking, and presence/absence of internally-headed and externally-headed relative clauses. Syntactically, a double merge cartographic model (Cinque 2005a; b), following Brunelli (2011), is adopted. The differences across sign languages are suggested to result from differences in raising requirements with respect to the relative clauses themselves and with respect to their heads, rather than basic word order, use of complementizers, relative pronouns, or nominalizers, or (type of) nonmanual marking. Typologically, it is noted that several of the SVO SLs have IHRCs, that at least one SOV SL does not have IHRCs, and that three of the SLs have both internally-headed (IHRCs) and externally-headed (EHRCs) relative clauses.This article is part of the special collection: Internally-headed Relative Clauses

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence, and is a computational technique which analyzes and synthesizes the natural language written and spoken by humans. The human brain can recognize natural language instantly, but for a machine to understand it, this raw data needs to be processed. Computer applications which work for varying structures of languages can be built using NLP. This process will take unstructured data (human language) as input, and after processing, it will be converted to computer-readable languages. This complex process must follow various attributes and the grammatical structure of natural language. NLP performs syntactic and semantic analysis to identify data patterns hidden in natural language. Syntactic analysis, also called parsing, is a phase whose purpose is to draw the exact meaning of an NLP statement. Formal grammar rules of the underlying language are considered while processing the input. The main aim of parsing is to ensure that the string symbols in natural language comply with the grammar rules. The Graph of Words model is an approach that can be used as a better alternative to the Bag of Words model for text processing. A graph representation of the input documents focuses on word independence by considering the order of words and the distance between relevant words.

Language is used for more than communication of referential information. Grammar serves to fulfill communicative needs as well as to express propositional content directly. In order to be effective, verbal communication must be appropriate, selective, and expressive. Therefore, language must provide the speaker with ways to express ideas effectively: to focus the listener's attention on certain parts of the message while downgrading others; to account for his prior knowledge and expectations; to distinguish between old and new information; to take shared information into account. The grammar of a language must provide the means whereby the speaker can program his message for maximal effectiveness and intelligibility.1 This view of grammar allows us to examine word order not simply as a linear arrangement of elements, but also as a device for guiding the listener through the message. In a language such as Russian, where grammatical relations are expressed by morphological markers, word order is freed for these purposes, as opposed to English where the relatively fixed word order serves to mark grammatical relations.2 Since Russian and English word order differ in such a fundamental way, the mastery of the former presents a problem to English speakers, yet an overwhelming majority of Russian language textbooks do not address the problem adequately.3 In order to understand the nature of the difficulty English speakers experience with Russian word order, it is necessary to examine some of the uses to which it is put. Although the position of a word in a sentence does not necessarily denote its grammatical function, there are many sentences in Russian where word order marks grammatical relations: Tovaris'am xotelos' pomogat' Petru 'The comrades wanted to help Peter' and Petru xotelos' pomogat' tovari''am 'Peter wanted to help his comrades'; Mat' ijubit doe' 'The mother loves the daughter' and Doc' liubit mat' 'The daughter loves the mother'; Ja znaju professora brata 'I know the professor of my brother' and Ja znaju brata professora 'I know the brother of the professor.' Word order is recruited in these sentences to encode underlying phrase marker constituency which the morphology marks ambiguously. The speaker typically assumes that some of the information is new to

The article introduces a comparative analysis of the word order in the communicative structure of the sentence in Russian and Persian. The research also covered means and methods of expressing communicative structure, as well as the rules and patterns of word order on the communicative level. In both languages, the communicative aspect of the sentence is closely related to the word order, which is the main tool of expressing the semantic division of the sentence. However, the communicative word order patterns are different. In the neutral speech, both languages put the theme (background information) in front of the rheme (actual information). In expressive speech, the Russian rheme is placed at the beginning of the sentence while the theme follows it. In other words, the thought moves from the actual information to the background information. When the communicative division of the sentence changes, the word order also changes. Based on the analysis of the word order in neutral and expressive speech, direct and inverted word orders are associated with the function that these components perform in the theme-rheme relationship. Persian, however, has a fixed word order, and allows for no inversion: the theme and the rheme are fixed, and the background information always precedes the new one. In the Russian language, any part of the sentence can be the theme or the rheme. In Persian, the function of the theme or the rheme belongs to particular sentence components.

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.

Age of acquisition effects differ across linguistic domains in sign language: EEG evidence

The current study focuses on the acquisition of classifier constructions in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) by a group of Deaf children of hearing parents, aided or implanted. These children have been mainstreamed together since kindergarten; but their learning environment supports dual language input in Cantonese and HKSL on a daily basis. Classifier constructions were chosen because previous research suggested full mastery at a late age when compared with other verb types, due to their morphosyntactic complexity. Also, crosslinguistic comparison between HKSL and Cantonese reveals differences in verb morphology as well as word order of the structures under investigation. We predicted that verb root and word order were the two domains for crosslingusitic interaction to occur. At the general level, given the specific learning environment and dual input condition, we examined if these Deaf child learners could ultimately acquire classifier constructions. Fifteen Deaf children divided into four groups based on duration of exposure to HKSL participated in the study. Two Deaf children born to Deaf parents and three native HKSL signers served as controls. A picture description task was designed to elicit classifier constructions containing either a transitive, a locative existential or a motion directional predicate. The findings revealed Deaf children's gradual convergence on the adult grammar despite late exposure to HKSL. Evidence of crosslinguistic influence on word order came from the Deaf children's initial adoption of a Cantonese structure for locative existential and motion directional predicates. There was also a prolonged period of adherence to the SVO order across all grades. However, within this SVO structure, the verb revealed increasing morphological complexity as a function of longer duration of exposure. We interpreted the findings using Language Synthesis, arguing that it was the selection of morphosyntactic features in Numeration that triggered crosslinguistic interaction between Cantonese and HKSL with bimodal bilinguals.

Sign languages are visual-gestural communication systems with a great potential for iconic structures and indeed, in sign languages iconicity is pervasive, both on the lexical and the grammical levels. However, in early sign language research the role of iconicity was downplayed in order to stress the similarities in structure between sign languages and spoken languages. For some authors, on the other hand, iconicity has been a reason for claiming that sign languages are organised in a fundamentally different way from spoken languages. Looking at sign languages from a phonological perspective, important questions remain unanswered in both these approaches. In this paper we try to provide answers to two questions. First, does iconicity play a part in the linguistic structure of sign languages and are sign language users aware of it? Second, what is the status of the sublexical elements in sign languages, and more specifically, should they be considered as phonemes or as morphemes? In the first section of the paper we shall explore the various forms of iconicity in sign languages, using the framework of Taub’s Analogue Building Model (2001). In the second and third sections we shall confront two approaches of sign language phonology, Cuxac’s sign language differential view with a focus on iconicity as the fundamental organising principle (1996, 2000) and the more spoken language compatible concepts of phonetic and semantic implementation by Van der Kooij (2002). These two accounts are the point of departure for the fourth section in which we shall put forward a proposal of an iconic superstructure which addresses iconicity in both the spoken and signed modalities and which offers an answer to both above-mentioned questions.

Several studies found cross‐linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order, for transitive and ditransitive structures. We varied these features in an artificial language learning paradigm, using three different artificial language versions in a between‐subjects design. Priming was assessed between Dutch (no overt case marking, SVO word order) and a) an SVO order version, b) a case marking version, and c) an SOV order version. Similar within‐language and cross‐linguistic priming was found in all versions for transitives, indicating that cross‐linguistic structural priming was not hindered. In contrast, for ditransitives we found similar within‐language priming for all versions, but no cross‐linguistic priming. The finding that cross‐linguistic priming is possible between languages that vary in morphological marking or word order, is compatible with studies showing cross‐linguistic priming between natural languages that differ on these dimensions.

In a well-known book, Hawkins (1986), expanding on an original idea by Sapir (1921), attributes a number of typological differences between German and English to the fact that German uses morphological means (i.e. case) to distinguish grammatical relations, whereas English makes use of a strict-SVO word order. Dutch seems problematic to Hawkins’ generalisation, in that neither case nor word order can be used consistently to express the basic grammatical relations. Using verb agreement as an extra parameter, Dutch can be integrated in Hawkins’ typology. In addition, data from Scandinavian languages and Afrikaans indicate that Hawkins’ notion of ‘grammatical word order’ can be replaced by a more precise word order feature, viz. the possibility to place verbs in between subjects and objects in all sentence types.

Objectives: Spanish and English contrast in adjective–noun word order: for example, brown dress (English) vs. vestido marrón (‘dress brown’, Spanish). According to the Matrix Language model ( MLF) word order in code-switched sentences must be compatible with the word order of the matrix language, but working within the minimalist program (MP), Cantone and MacSwan arrived at the descriptive generalization that the position of the noun phrase relative to the adjective is determined by the adjective’s language. Our aim is to evaluate the predictions derived from these two models regarding adjective–noun order in Spanish–English code-switched sentences. Methodology: We contrasted the predictions from both models regarding the acceptability of code-switched sentences with different adjective–noun orders that were compatible with the MP, the MLF, both, or none. Acceptability was assessed in Experiment 1 with a 5-point Likert and in Experiment 2 with a 2-Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) task. Data and analysis: Data from both experiments were subjected to linear mixed model analyses. Results from the 2AFC task were also analyzed using Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment. Conclusions: We found an additive effect in which both the language of the verb and the language of the adjective determine word order. Originality: Both experiments examine adjective–noun word order in English–Spanish code-switched sentences. Experiment 2 represents a novel application of Thurstone’s law of comparative judgements to the study of linguistic acceptability which yielded clearer results than Likert scales. We found convincing evidence that neither the MLF nor the MP can fully account for the acceptability of adjective–noun switches. Implications: We suggest that advances in our understanding of grammaticality in code-switching will be achieved by combining the insights of the two frameworks instead of considering them in isolation, or by espousing a probabilistic model of code-switching.

Reviewed by: Sign languages Donna Jo Napoli Sign languages. Ed. by Diane Brentari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xxi, 691. ISBN 9780521883702. $160 (Hb). Twenty-five chapters (including an instructive introduction) by fifty-two scholars offer information about over forty sign languages. Assessing how many sign languages there are in the world is difficult both because countries rarely include information about sign in censuses and because the determination of what counts as a language versus a less-developed gestural system is tricky. Still, the number of sign languages studied here is impressive, particularly since most here are genetically unrelated. This book is a treasure trove. Many early studies of sign languages aimed to establish their status as bona fide natural languages and, thus, focused on properties in common with spoken languages. Once that basic issue was confirmed, attention turned to how modality differences affect grammar and the behavior of language communities, thus allowing us to advance our knowledge both of cognitive aspects of language and psychosocial factors pertinent to language use. The introduction to this volume beautifully lays out three advantages of considering sign languages in this regard. First, analysis [End Page 890] of a sign language can make clear what visual properties of the phonetic system motivate structural linguistic properties, opening the door for linguists to seek out what auditory properties of the phonetic system do the same in spoken languages. Second, iconicity in sign languages is readily accessible and apparent in a much wider range of data than generally found in spoken language, so its role can be examined closely. I would add that studying the ways in which sign iconicity yields to grammatical properties over time and the ways in which it yields to randomness over time (due to the inherent limitations of iconicity with respect to conveying isolated lexical items) can help us better understand the ways in which spoken language iconicity changes over time, as well as offer a perspective on the development and evolution of writing systems. Third, since new sign languages are emerging around the globe, study of sign languages offers data about the emergence of language that are otherwise unavailable. Already, study of sign languages (e.g. Nicaraguan Sign Language) has taught us that language evolution can proceed far more rapidly than had previously been hypothesized. To all these, one could add the advantage that studying sign languages offers us information on typology of language. Since sign languages use different articulators with different capabilities from those of spoken language and since their organization involves visual parameters as opposed to auditory parameters, possibilities for variation among sign languages come up that do not arise in spoken language. By looking at the ways that sign languages group together, we can enrich our inventory of the factors around which languages typologize in general and thus enhance our knowledge of language in general. In sum, if you are not already convinced that we no longer have to let the lingu(a) of linguistics limit our vision of our field, this volume will help remove remaining blinders, with articles written by renowned scholars (the contributors list is almost a who’s who of sign linguistics) and touching on so many issues that linguists of any ilk can find something to dig into here. Part 1 is on the history of sign languages and their generational transmission. From around World War I until the 1950s, Switzerland practiced sterilization of deaf people, forbade marriage among the deaf, and put deaf women in institutions, all in an effort to eradicate deafness. Today, eighty percent of deaf children get cochlear implants (CI), and typically do not sign. While deaf groups advocate use of sign, oral-only deaf people contradict them. Schools for the deaf have produced few graduates who qualify to enter universities. No universities have faculty positions specializing in sign language so little research has been done on Swiss sign languages. While sign languages are not officially oppressed, they are not officially recognized, and deafness is still considered a malady in need of cure. All this information is just part of the first article, by Penny Boyes Braem and Christian Rathmann, which goes on...

Purpose. This paper reports on an investigation of Arabic word order acquisition by twelve Jordanian children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and the reasons for this order of acquisition. This study researched the following questions: (1). Which word order do Jordanian Arabic speaking children with ASD prefer? (2). Why do children with ASD prefer this word order? Methods and Procedure. The study sample consisted of 12 autistic children (mean age of nine, two females, ten males) attending Tawasul Center for Autism, Amman, Jordan. Such a ratio is logical since there are more male than female autistic children, as concluded in multiple studies. In the present study, the participants’ native language is JA, which facilitated communication between the children and researchers since the latter are also JA native speakers. The sample’s ASD severity level was moderate with a nonverbal IQ of around 45. These 12 children were selected because their L1 proficiency was approximately the same and their mental age was around 6, based on an annual test conducted by the center. In addition, none of these children had any specific language impairments, suggesting that the sample was homogenous and heterogeneous regarding language skills. Concerning ethical approval, consent was obtained from the center and the children’s parents to conduct the tests on the children in the center. Participants from the Tawasul Center for Autism in Amman, Jordan, were asked to describe what they saw in ten different pictures and their responses were recorded. These responses can be divided into two types: SV word order and VS word order. Results. The results indicate that SV word order structures were used more often than VS structures. The results of the t-test revealed a statistically significant difference between the two in favor of subject-verb-object (SVO) order. We argue that the SVO word order is used more frequently by children with ASD due to the noun bias principle. Conclusions. Based on the analysis, SVO sentences were used more than VSO sentences for many reasons; namely, the basic word order of the linguistic input in the surrounding community, the noun bias principle, and the type of message being conveyed, i.e., entity-oriented messages. After administering a t-test, statistically significant differences were found between the results of the two word orders in favor of SVO word order.