Showing papers on "Phrase published in 1984"

Language learnability and language development

Abstract: Language learnability and language devlopment revisited the acquisition theory - assumptions and postulates phrase structure rules phrase stucture rules - developmental considerations inflection complementation and control auxiliaries lexical entries and lexical rules.

Analysis of voice fundamental frequency contours for declarative sentences of Japanese

Abstract: A model for the generation of fundamental frequency contours (F0 contours) of spoken, sentences is presented for the purpose of elucidating the relationship between the sentence F0 contour and the linguistic and non-linguistic information. It is based on a quantitative formulation of the process whereby the logarithmic fundamental frequency is controlled in proportion to the sum of two components corresponding respectively to the effects of phrase and accent. The model's parameters were determined to give the best approximation to an observed F0 contour on the basis of the mean squared error. Analysis of natural utterances of various declarative sentences of Japanese revealedthat the model can generate close approximations to observed F0 contours from a set of discrete commands and a small number of parameters. The extracted parameters were found to be closely related to linguistic factors and factors constituting thenaturalness of speech. These results provide a means for generating natural F0 contours from a small set of parameters and rules for synthesis.

Lexical decision in sentences: Effects of syntactic structure

Abstract: A lexical decision paradigm was used to examine syntactic influence on word recognition in sentences. Initial fragments of sentences were presented visually (CRT display) one word at a time (at reading speeds), from left to right. The string terminated with the appearance of a lexical decision target. The grammatical structure of the incomplete sentence affected lexical decision reaction time (RT). In Experiment 1, modal verb contexts followed by main verb targets and preposition contexts followed by noun targets produced lower RTs than did the opposite pairings (i.e., modal/noun and preposition/verb). In Experiment 2, transitive verb contexts followed by noun targets and subject noun phrase contexts followed by verb targets yielded lower RTs than did the opposite pairings. Similar contrasts for adjective targets did not yield comparable effects in Experiment 2, but did when the adjective was the head of a predictable phrase (Experiment 4). In Experiment 3, noun targets yielded lower RTs than did verb targets after contexts of a transitive verb followed by a prepositional phrase. An account of these effects is offered in terms of parsing constraints on phrasal categories.

On representations in morphology case, agreement and inversion in Georgian

Abstract: In the preceding sections, we have developed the principal components of an analysis of verbal agreement, case-marking, inversion, and related phenomena in Georgian. The most important aspect of this treatment throughout has been the extent to which it is a description of the morphology of the language, employing mechanisms necessary for the description of inflectional morphology rather than the mechanisms of syntax. In particular, no alterations of syntactic structure are posited to account for the inversion construction (or for the difference between Series I and Series II tenses). To the extent to which this account is well-motivated, it establishes our basic descriptive points: ‘Inversion’ in Georgian is a fact about morphology, not a rule of the syntax. While the morphological analysis of this paper differs in fundamental ways from the syntactic treatment of Harris (1981, 1982, 1983), there are also many obvious similarities. For example, both analyses make use of a rule of ‘Unaccusative’, with somewhat similar functions. Both differentiate the subjects of class II and class III verbs by treating the former as having similarities to direct objects of other verbs, where the subjects of class III verbs are similar to transitive subjects. Other parallels could be added; the major difference remains the fact that the present analysis locates these parts of the grammar of Georgian in the inflectional morphology of the language, while Harris locates them in syntactic rules and structures. This difference is hardly surprising. The theory of Relational Grammar, within which her analysis is formulated, cannot be said to contain an explicit theory of morphology, in the sense of a set of systematic mechanisms for relating the inflectional properties of words and their role in a syntactic structure to their surface form. Once we provide a morphological framework in which to discuss these issues we see that Harris' insights about the structure of the language are fundamentally correct, and can be maintained in larger part, but that they pertain to the morphology rather than to the syntax. Beyond the basic descriptive issue of how to treat inversion, however, the analysis above justifies a certain number of broader conclusions, not limited to Georgian. We take up some of these below, in increasing order of their generality. In the analysis defended here, the several classes of Georgian verbs are differentiated lexically in terms of independently motivated morphosyntactic (or inflectional) representations, rather than by arbitrary ‘conjugation-class’ markers. For example, a ‘class IV’ diacritic is no longer necessary, since such verbs are uniquely identified by the combination of subcategorization requirements and inflectional properties for which they are lexically specified. In fact, all of the various Georgian verb classes are now uniquely specified in this way, and no separate arbitrary markers of conjugation class membership are necessary at all in the lexicon. On Harris' analysis, she argues (1981, pp. 228ff.) that conjugation class markers are similarly unnecessary, though they are used throughout her description as a purely expository convenience. The inflectional pattern of a given verb is supposed to follow from the set of arguments it takes, together with the locations of these in (underlying the surface) syntactic structure. While this is surely true (given her syntactic assumptions) for membership in classes 1, 2, and 3, the fact that a verb belongs to class 4 is not similarly deducible from the pattern of its arguments: rather, this is related to the fact that it undergoes inversion. The morphological property of class 4 inflection must thus be accessible to the syntactic rule of Inversion, or else the specific derivational history of the structure in which a verb appears must be accessible to the rules of inflection. Either of these is a variety of interaction between word formation processes and syntactic structure which a restrictive theory would like to exclude; they are unnecessary on an analysis like the present one, in which the locality of reference of inflectional properties is preserved. Naturally, the elimination of arbitrary markers of inflectional class membership (other than structurally motivated aspects of the form of words belonging to such classes) is defended here only for Georgian; but it remains to be seen whether, in other languages where arbitrary partitions of the lexicon are generally posited to account for differences in inflectional properties, it may not be possible to reduce this arbitrariness in light of independently motivated properties of lexical entries. For example, in those Romance languages where verbs are traditionally organized into arbitrary classes (‘first conjugation’, ‘second conjugation’, etc.), it seems quite likely that representations of verb stems provided with a thematic vowel in the lexicon could eliminate the need for such an unilluminating division (cf. Platt 1981 for one such attempt). The point is a moderately subtle one, since it could be maintained that the theme vowels simply act as diacritics on such an analysis of Romance verb classes. It can be argued, however, that the morphology must contain some principle to insert these vowels in any event, and that prohibiting any subdivision of verb stems other than one which is substantively motivated in such a way yields a more restrictive theory than one which allows explicit diacritics unrelated to any unitary structural characteristic of the forms they categorize. Naturally, the validity of this suggestion is impossible to assess clearly until it has been explored in more concrete detail in actual analyses. The rules above make crucial use not only of agreement in inflectional features between a verb and its arguments, but also of (some sort of) ‘co-indexing’ relation between the morpho-syntactic representations in INFL, which eventually determine agreement in verbs, and the NPs they agree with. Such co-indexing is familiar in the case of subject agreement, and in fact plays a crucial role in the Government/Binding theory in governing the subject position in finite clauses; it is less obvious for non-subjects. Stowell (1981), however, has proposed that verbs are co-indexed with all of their subcategorized arguments in order to yield a unified definition of ‘proper government’. In the case of Georgian, one prediction which results from this is that all positions reflected in agreement are automatically properly governed, from which it follows (correctly) that such positions may be unfilled phonetically. One could express this in current idiom by saying that Georgian is a generalized ‘Pro-drop’ language. A further instance in which coindexing between non-subjects and agreement is necessary is cited in Anderson (1974). In the Abkhaz-Abaza languages, a verb-initial agreement marker /y/ (marking third person plural or neuter singular intransitive subjects or transitive objects) is deleted if and only if the verb is immediately preceded in linear order by the NP with which it is co-indexed. In fact, when one considers inflectional systems of even moderate complexity, the plausibility of the position that all agreeing arguments (and not only the subject) are co-indexed in the verb is considerable. The relation of co-indexing that is involved, however, is clearly different from that obtaining between freely occurring NPs. In sentences containing a reflexive phrase, it is clear that the agreement element related to the subject must be kept separate from that relating to the object, despite the fact that the ‘reference’ of the two is the same. If the subject is first or second person, for example, the reflexive will have different agreement features (namely, third person singular) from those of its antecedent, and the two must be kept separated in the morpho-syntactic representation of the verb. It is for such reasons that we have referred to ‘co-superscripting’ rather than ‘co-indexing’ as the relation obtaining between an argument and the morphosyntactic representation of agreement in the clause. Finally, we conclude that analyses such as that presented here validate the notion of a morphosyntactic representation with significant internal structure, and of rules which create and manipulate such representations without effecting other syntactic structure. As long as one confines one's attention to languages with relatively simple inflection, it is possible to sweep inflectional morphology under the rug to a considerable extent, assuming that the formal categories of inflected words bear a rather straightforward relation to the syntactic structures in which they appear. Just as it would be extremely dangerous to generalize about the theory of segmental phonology on the basis solely of analyses of Chinese (however extensive), though, it is unlikely that an adequate picture of inflectional morphology can be derived from the study of languages like English, German, and French in which this aspect of grammatical structure is relatively impoverished. A closer study of a language like Georgian suggests richer possibilities for the apparatus describing the traditional domain of inflection — possibilities which might be productively explored even in languages like English, where the data are not rich enough to motivate them by themselves.

Distribution of Stuttering in Sentences: Relationship to Sentence Length and Clause Position

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to analyze the influence of sentence length and clause position on stuttering in the complex sentences of two languages—English and Kannada. Ten monolingual adult stut...

Satir Step by Step: A Guide to Creating Change in Families

Abstract: Annotated transcript of Satir conducting family therapy -- showing what she's thinking and how she selects a particular phrase or intervention -- and then an account of her theoretical foundations and methods.

Reagan's safety net for the truly needy: The rhetorical uses of definition

Abstract: Faced with the need to appeal simultaneously for continuity and change, Ronald Reagan dissociated the concept of need, producing the phrase “truly needy.” Successive redefinitions of this term and the phrase “safety net” are examined by the authors, as they trace the persuasive definitions whose connotative dimensions remain constant while their denotative meanings change in successive administration messages.

Error Correction in Oral Reading: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Three Procedures.

Abstract: The correction of oral reading errors is viewed differently from alternative perspectives on the process of reading. Proponents of the psycholinguistic perspective view error correction as detrimental to the "hypothesis testing" process while supporters of direct instruction view error correction as an aid to word recognition. Based upon the latter view point, the effects of three error correction procedures on word recognition and fluency were examined. The results indicate that word drill and phrase drill procedures are similarly better than word supply on the recognition of words in isolation, but that phrase drill is superior to word drill and word supply for recognition of words in context. No differences were found between the word drill and phrase drill procedures in improving fluency rates.

Multi-tone cancellation phrase and background

Abstract: A protected document has a cancellation phrase, normally invisible to the human eye, which will appear if the document is copied on a color copier. The protection of these documents is improved in the following protected document. The document is made up of a substrate, first and second cancellation phrase images which form a combined cancellation phrase image printed on the substrate, first and second background images forming a combined background image printed on the substrate and a camouflage overlay image (merged with) the combined cancellation and combined background images. The first and second cancellation phrase images appear on the document when it is copied on a color copier. The two images extend the range of protection for color copy machines having multiple darkness settings.

The Universal Consistency Hypothesis and the Prediction of Word Order Acquisition Stages in the Speech of Bilingual Children

Abstract: Quechua-speaking children in Peru speak Spanish with variable word order in the VP and the NP; the alternative patterns stem from Quechua and Spanish. The younger the child, the more predominant are the V-final and N-final phrases, as in Quechua. Here we investigate whether the newly acquired Spanish V-medial clause and N-initial phrase patterns are learned in a sequence predicted by a theory of linguistic change. Several plausible alternatives that are consistent with the Trigger-Chain Theory or Universal Violation Hypothesis, and with the Universal Consistency Hypothesis (UCH) of Hawkins 1979, were checked against recorded speech by Peruvian bilingual children of three different ages. Our quantitative analysis strongly supports the UCH-in particular, Hawkins' Universals I and III. These predict that the V-medial clause pattern emerges before the postnominal genitive, and this in turn precedes the use of the postnominal adjective. Our data also justify strengthening two of the principles in the UCH.*

Synthesis by rule of voice fundamental frequency contours of spoken Japanese from linguistic information

Abstract: A number of utterance samples of complex sentences of Japanese were analyzed using the model for the process of fundamental frequency contour generation, with special emphasis on the relationship between a fundamental frequency contour and its underlying lexical, syntax and semantic information. Phrase commands of the model were found to be roughly classified into three groups according to the level of corresponding node of the syntactic tree of a sentence, while accent commands were found to be roughly classified into two groups according to the type of accentuation. A set of rules was constructed for generating fundamental frequency contours of complex sentences of Japanese from linguistic information. Perceptual tests of naturalness of intonation using synthetic speech with rule-generated fundamental frequency contours indicated the validity of the rules.

Pragmatic assessment: analysis of a highly frequent repeated utterance.

Abstract: The present study examined the pragmatic role of a frequently repeated utterance, "it's gone," within the multiple context conversational interactions of a 4-year-old specifically language-impaired boy. The data indicate that the phrase was an interactive access strategy to engage his partners in a nonexistence/disappearance game, a frequent type of early mother-child interaction. The assessment and intervention implications of these data are discussed.

The effects of cohesive conjunctions, reference, response rhetorical predicates, and topic on reading rate and written free recall

Abstract: This study investigated the effects of four textual variables on two dependent measures. Subjects, 240 university freshmen, each read one of 24 passage versions. The 24 versions included all possible combinations of four variables: topic (Neanderthals, Pre-Neolithic Farming), cohesive conjunctions (low, moderate, high), reference (high, low), and response rhetorical predicates (present, absent). The two dependent measures employed were reading rate and written free recall. Results revealed statistically significant differences in recall due to topic and cohesive conjunctions. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed. Among those linguistic features given serious consideration as textforming devices are cohesive elements, elements which have been most thoroughly discussed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), who define cohesion as a semantic relationship between two elements in a text, a presupposing element and a presupposed element. These two elements, which may be words, phrases, or even clauses, must occur in the same text, of course, but they need not occur within the same sentence or even within adjacent sentences. According to Halliday and Hasan, textual cohesion may be achieved through five devices: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Three of those devices—reference, lexical cohesion, and conjunction—were under consideration in the present study. In reference, a word's interpretation depends on some other item (a word, phrase, clause, or sentence) to which it refers. While demonstratives and com

An operational system for subject switching between controlled vocabularies: A computational linguistics approach

Abstract: The NASA Lexical Dictionary (NLD), a system that automatically translates input subject terms to those of NASA, was developed in four phases. Phase One provided Phrase Matching, a context sensitive word-matching process that matches input phrase words with any NASA Thesaurus posting (i.e., index) term or Use reference. Other Use references have been added to enable the matching of synonyms, variant spellings, and some words with the same root. Phase Two provided the capability of translating any individual DTIC term to one or more NASA terms having the same meaning. Phase Three provided NASA terms having equivalent concepts for two or more DTIC terms, i.e., coordinations of DTIC terms. Phase Four was concerned with indexer feedback and maintenance. Although the original NLD construction involved much manual data entry, ways were found to automate nearly all but the intellectual decision-making processes. In addition to finding improved ways to construct a lexical dictionary, applications for the NLD have been found and are being developed.

Consistency of effects of slow rate and pauses on aphasic listeners' comprehension of spoken sentences.

Abstract: The effects of intrasentence pauses and slow speaking rate on aphasic listeners' comprehension of spoken low- and high-difficulty sentences were investigated. Aphasic subjects heard commands spoken...

Word categories in Southern Bantu

Abstract: INTRODUCTION No longer need one study a Bantu language like a cryptogram. The existence of language universals is common knowledge today. Most languages have nouns and verbs, but how they are used depends on their typology. Morphology is accepted again as a distinctive level in linguistics, cf. Halle (1973). He relates it to the lexicon, one of the components of the rule system of grammar according to Chomsky (1982: 4). As any Bantu linguist knows, the occurrence of a single free morpheme as a word is not so common in these languages as in English. A word category is usually a concatenation of morphemes. Chomsky has lately broadened the base of his theory and has brought it closer to the more general principles of grammar as practised by linguists in the past. In his latest work (1982:15) he queries the possibility that phrase markers may be represented by tree structures. This is made clear by what is said by him earlier (op. cit.:9) that in a VP there is only a head and that all other specifications are redundant: this is true for any other type of phrase. For the Bantu language this is a most important statement where so many single phrases are sentences consisting only of a verb, or rather a word belonging to the predicative category. Chomsky (1981:5) has accepted an abstract CASE system for the noun. His abstract CASE theory is developed within the framework of a government theory. CASE and 0 theory are closely related. 9 theory has to do with the thematic relationship assigned to nouns, e.g., agents of action. This does not imply that all thematic relations can be subsumed under CASE. Louw (1972) expressed doubts about this when he dealt with relational semantic features which are basically the same as the thematic relations of Chomsky. Chomsky (1982) gives a full exposition of his componential principles of grammar, but we shall make use of it only now and then, because it is still more of a linguistic hypothesis than a set of well-tested linguistic principles.

Document processing system

Abstract: PURPOSE:To edit a high-grade book with an index automatically, by allowing a document processing system to deform a keyword candidate into a keyword and generate the index together with given pages only by specifying the keyword candidate at the stage wherein a document is inputted to the document processing system CONSTITUTION:An sentence or phrase to be employed as a keyword in the document is specified by an operator during input operation together with added control codes (the starting and ending of the document, starting and ending of reading, coined word, and word to be modified) A word dictionary 18 is used to make a grammatical analysis of an extracted sentence (keyword) specified by the control codes The dictionary contains keywords arranged in reverse reading order, a concatenation table of annexed words, derivative nouns of terms, and an inflection table The extracted sentence is divided into clauses by the grammatical analysis and then the deformation into the keyword is performed by two kinds of deformation pont, ie deformation into a derivative noun and deformation by the specification of a word to be modified

Phrase searching system

Abstract: PURPOSE:To obtain assuredly the translation of a phrase with the same input operation as a word, by searching a phrase starting at an input word out of a dictionary memory, and comparing successively the searched results with each other including the input word to obtain a phrase having a largest number of coincident words. CONSTITUTION:A searching circuit 3 searches words from a dictionary memory 5 and then searches a phrase starting at the corresponding word if exists. Then this phrase and its translation are delivered to a phrase stack 9. The storage data of a word stack 7 is also supplied to a comparator 10. The comparator 10 compares contents of storage between stacks 7 and 9, and a phrase having largest number of coincident words is left at the stack 9. When the storage contents of the stack 9 is limited to one phrase, the translation data held at the stack 7 is read out to an output register 11.

Subject and Predicate

Abstract: A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. Unlike a phrase, it can stand alone and make full sense without the help of any additional words.

Phrase speech recognition of large vocabulary using feature in articulatory domain

Abstract: A phrase unit speech recognition system is discussed, which is applicable for a large vocabulary and is independent of the task. In the case of large vocabulary, it is desirable to express the words in the dictionary by the sequence of phonemes or phoneme-like units. Therefore, the recognition of phonemes in continuous speech is essential to achieve a flexible speech understanding system. In this paper, a technique to recognize phrases based on the phoneme recognition is introduced. The system is composed of the phoneme recognition part and the phrase recognition part. In the phoneme recognition part, the features in the articulatory domain are extracted and applied to compensate coarticulation. In the phrase recognition part, a word sequence corresponding to the phoneme sequence is determined by using two-level DP matching with automaton control, in which words are processed symbolically to attain the acceptable processing speed.

Comment on Gewirth Constructing an Epistemology of Human Rights: a Pseudo Problem?

Abstract: Those rights are human rights which, in Professor Gewirth's phrase, “all persons equally have simply insofar as they are human.” His task is to demonstrate that there are human rights, and to demonstrate that such demonstration is necessary to the very existence of these rights. “That human rights exist…is a proposition whose truth depends upon the possibility, in principle, of constructing a body of moral justificatory argument from which that proposition follows as a logical consequence.” As philosophers we should no doubt like to be able to prove the existence of human rights – prove that there are such rights in the event that the fool shall have said in his heart that there are none, even using his folly against him by showing his denial to entail its denial – but it is a bold claim that rights are things whose esse est demonstrari .

A Shift from Phonological Recoding to Direct Access in Reading as a Result of Previous Exposure

Abstract: The present study examined the effect of repeated exposures of a visually presented phrase on the mode of lexical access (phonological recoding vs. visual mediation) used. Subjects made meaningfulness decisions about two- and three-word phrases. Following five exposures to each phrase, some of which sounded meaningful but were not (“drops of do”), and others which were neither (“nut and bout”), the significant reaction time advantage on the first exposure for rejecting the latter phrase type was eliminated. Results supported the dual access hypothesis that subjects use phonological recoding upon initial exposure to a phrase, but following repeated exposures are able to use direct visual access. A dual access model compatible with these results is discussed.

Forecasting conversion system

Abstract: PURPOSE:To improve the text processing speed and reduce the input burden of the operator, by forecasting and outputting a phrase, which is next inputted most probably, each time when the conversion processing of one phrase is completed in a Japanese language information processor. CONSTITUTION:Each time a phrase is decided by the conversion processing, phrase information is stored in a forecasting buffer 51 provided in a storage device 5. Each time, the conversion of one phrase is completed, it is retrieved and collated to check whether the same phrase is already stored in the forecasting buffer 51 or not, and it is discriminated whether a forecasted candidate exists or not. If it exists, this phrase is forecasted as phrase to be next inputted and is displayed on a display part 2. Consequently, the next Kana (Japanese syllabary) input and conversion processing operation are omitted.

Processing device of data base retrieval

Abstract: PURPOSE:To decrease useless record access by accessing only a record represented by a preserved record address set if one condition is designated by different retrieval commands. CONSTITUTION:An address set A1 of a record satisfying a retrieval condition phrase C1 of a retrieval command Q1 exists in an address holding means 2 at the start operation and a condition phrase C1 in a command analyzing means 1. Then, a retrieval command Q2 is inputted via a signal line 11 and a condition phrase C2 of the command Q2 is the OR between a selecting condition equal to the said condition phrase C1 and other selecting conditions, then a record retrieval means 3 reads the address set A1 of the address holding means 2. Further, the record corresponding to this set A1 is read from a data base storage means 4 to extract the set R2 of the record satisfying the other selecting condition and the corresponding set A2. Moreover, only the column value designated by the object column phrase is set as the reply to the retrieval command Q2 with respect to the record of the set R2.

Extending Grammars to New Domains.

Abstract: : This is the report of an undertaking to extend and adapt an existing grammar, DIAGRAM, to provide the syntactic analysis of sentences in a new domain. DIAGRAM is an augmented phrase-structure grammar whose rules provide a means for associating semantic and domain dependent interpretations with a syntatic analysis. An earlier version, used for the syntactic analysis and the interpretation of spoken English, covered the vocabulary and basic phrase types needed to query a static data base of information about naval ships. The new domain in which the extended and adapted version has been tested is represented by a set of eighteen dialogues, called Helper dialogues, in which computer users present their problems to the operator and ask for help. Extending the syntax to cover the new words and phrase types exhibited in these sample texts raises a number of questions of general theoretical interest along with problems that can properly be construed as artifacts of the particular grammar that is being extended or of the limitations of the parsing program and the computer system in which the grammar is applied to input sentences. This report therefore can be read with both a broad and a narrow scope. The narrow scope reading is concerned with the additions and revisions that were made to DIAGRAM in order to parse the sentences in the dialogues selected from the new domain. The broad scope reading is concerned with the kinds of problems encountered in extending syntatic coverage generally and with strategies for coping with them. (Author)

Translation processing system

Abstract: PURPOSE:To improve the processing efficiency by separating grammatical rules into conventional rules and rules depending on words and combining the conventional grammatical rules with the word dependent rules in syntax analysis and executing it to decrease the number of application of the grammatical rules at the execution of translation. CONSTITUTION:A dictionary processing section 9 processes dictionary consulting for an original sentence inputted from an input section 8 by using a word dictionary file 10 and a phrase dictionary file 11. In this case, when a word includes a word dependent rule 10a, its label, priority, and the rule are applied together to a syntax analysis section 12. The label of a partial set of the conventional rules and a label of the word dependent rule applied from the dictionary processing section 9 are matched. When the matching between the labels are successful, the word dependent rule is inserted into the partial set of the conventional rules according to the display of priority and the grammatical rules are executed according to the partial set.