The main focus of the study is to analyze the simple sentence structure and its word-order patterns of Standard Arabic syntactically. Main methods concern description and comparison of word-order ...patterns observed. Primarily the current study deals with some differentiations of the terms on sentence types and word-order patterns described by both medieval grammarians and modern linguists. Moreover, the so called Sībawayhian theory of ʿamil’ also provides some explanations of sentence structures and word-order patterns in Standard Arabic. Simple sentences are highlighted to examine the occasions for using different patterns and where they are commonly found, along with examples to facilitate the explanation and use of these patterns. It is essential to point out that Standard Arabic is considered to be a language with a flexible word-order, which is why there exist word-order patterns of both VOS and SVO languages, though the latter is more frequently used.
This paper discusses the structure and hierarchy of sentence-endings in Tibetan language. Tibetan sentence-endings are hierarchical. They can be divided into two levels from the perspectives of ...structure, distribution and expressive function. The first level comes after the predicate or verb phrase, indicating the category of tense/aspect/mood (TAM). The second level, which follows a self-sufficient sentence, mainly expresses the meaning of the speaker’s hint, inference, evaluation and attitude to the information. Each level includes several different types of endings, which act on different syntactic categories or manifest different degrees of subjectivity. The lower the degree of correlation between the endings and the information of the self-sufficient sentence is, the higher the corresponding semantic category and the speaker’s subjective participation are. Some lower-level endings can also express the grammatical meaning of the higher level in certain context with increasing subjectivity.
Recently processed syntactic information is likely to play a fundamental role in online sentence comprehension. For example, there is now a good deal of evidence that the processing of a syntactic ...structure (the target) is facilitated if the same structure was processed on the immediately preceding trial (the prime), a phenomenon known as structural priming. However, compared with structural priming in production, structural priming in comprehension remains relatively understudied. We investigate an aspect of structural priming in comprehension that is comparatively well understood in production but has received little attention in comprehension: the cumulative effect of structural primes on subsequently processed sentences. We further ask whether this effect is modulated by lexical overlap between preceding primes and the target. In 3 self-paced reading experiments, we find that structural priming effects in comprehension are cumulative and of similar magnitude both with and without lexical overlap. We discuss the relevance of our results to questions about the relationship between recent experience and online language processing.
One of the defining properties of human language is the abundance of potentially unbounded dependencies between elements in a sentence. And yet, how speakers formulate dependencies in sentence ...production is still poorly understood. Here we examine the timing of verb planning in sentences involving across-the-board and parasitic gap constructions. Using a new task we call the Sentence-Word Interference task, we show that speakers plan the verb of a secondary clause before sentence onset, but selectively when producing across-the-board sentences and not when producing parasitic gap sentences. Based on this timing contrast, we argue that speakers plan verbs predominantly before the production of their dependents, but only when verbs and their dependents engage in both conceptual and direct syntactic relationships. More broadly, the current study suggests that sentence planning is constrained by syntactic relationships that are not reducible to conceptual relationships or to surface word order.
There is still much debate about the nature of the experiential and maturational changes that take place during childhood to bring about the sophisticated language abilities of an adult. The present ...study investigated text exposure as a possible source of linguistic experience that plays a role in the development of adult-like language abilities. Corpus analyses of object and passive relative clauses (Object: The book that the woman carried; Passive: The book that was carried by the woman) established the frequencies of these sentence types in child-directed speech and children's literature. We found that relative clauses of either type were more frequent in the written corpus, and that the ratio of passive to object relatives was much higher in the written corpus as well. This analysis suggests that passive relative clauses are much more frequent in a child's linguistic environment if they have high rates of text exposure. We then elicited object and passive relative clauses using a picture-description production task with 8- and 12-year-old children and adults. Both group and individual differences were consistent with the corpus analyses, such that older individuals and individuals with more text exposure produced more passive relative clauses. These findings suggest that the qualitatively different patterns of text versus speech may be an important source of linguistic experience for the development of adult-like language behavior.
Recent studies have revealed the instability of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE). The current study was designed to demonstrate the hypothesis that the instability of the ACE may be ...attributed to the instability of focused information in a sentence. A pilot study indicated that the focused information of sentences was relatively stable in the sentence-picture verification task but exhibited significant interindividual variability in the action-sentence compatibility paradigm in previous studies. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effect of sentence focus on the shape match effect and the ACE by manipulating the focused information of sentences using the focus marker word "" (is). Experiment 1 found that the shape match effect occurred in the original sentence, while it disappeared when the word "" (is) was used to make an object noun no longer the focus of a sentence. Experiment 2 failed to observe the ACE regardless of whether the sentence focus was on the action information. Experiment 3 modified the focus manipulation to observe its impact on the ACE using different fonts and underlines to highlight the focused information. The results indicated that the ACE only occurred when the action information was the sentence focus. These findings suggest that sentence focus influences mental simulation, and the instability of the ACE is likely to be associated with the instability of sentence focus in previous studies. This outcome highlights the crucial role of identifying specific information as the critical element expressed in the current linguistic context for successful simulation.
The present work proposes a scheme for multi-document abstractive text summarization using node-aligned Word Graph based representation of clustered sentences. In the first step, the proposed scheme ...uses SBERT embedding for representing the sentences as fixed-size vectors. The sentences belonging to the same cluster are then represented using Word Graph, in which words of different sentences are aligned based on their semantic and syntactic similarities. The advantage of the above representation is that it utilizes alignment information of words between pairs of similar sentences to merge nodes in the Word Graph, and thereby facilitating the generation of sentences with multiple chunks of information. A sentence scoring function assisted by an intensification function is used to measure the grammaticality and informativeness of the generated sentences. Integer Linear Programming has been used to make the final selection of the scored sentences for generating the abstract. Experiments conducted for the task of sentence fusion and multi-document summarization demonstrate superior performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art techniques available in the literature.
•Word Graph based representation of clusters of similar sentences.•The nodes of the Word Graph are aligned to fuse multiple chunks of information.•Similar sentences are compressed by traversing between fixed nodes of the graph.•Integer Linear Programming based maximization of grammaticality and informativeness.•Improved results are obtained for Sentence Fusion and Multi-Document Summarization.
Sentence studies that are rarely discussed in the realm of linguistics are complex sentences. This article aims to describe the construction and types of complex sentences based on their clause ...formation in the novel Mā Lā Nabūh Bih based on Kenneth L. Pike's Tagmemic theory. This research was a qualitative and descriptive study, with the primary data source were the novel Mā Lā Nabūh Bih by Sandra Serag. Each type of complex sentence was selected and described according to Tagmemic theory. The results of this study found that four ‘harf’ functions were used as subordinating conjunctions based on the formation of the clauses, which consists of the arrangement of musnad (subject), musnad ilaih (predicate), and maf'ul bih (object). The distinguishes among four ‘harf’ functions are in the form and position of the subordinating conjunctions that separate the main sentence and its subordinate clauses, namely time relations (mundzu/since), causal relationship (lianna/because), complementary relationships (anna/really), comparative relationship (kaanna/as if). Complex sentences in the Tagmemic perspective are more complex than other types of sentence structures since they may consist of two slots, two classes, two roles, or two cohesions. In contrast, other sentence structure types have only one slot, class, role, and cohesion.
We present a self‐organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., a bottle of ...pills). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in pseudopartitives, in line with the “Marking” component of the Marking and Morphing theory of agreement processing. However, no account to date has derived notional plurality values from independently needed principles of language processing. We argue on the basis of new experimental evidence and a dynamical systems model that the theoretical black box of notional plurality can be unpacked into objectively measurable semantic features. With these semantic features driving structure formation (and hence agreement choice), our model reproduces the human verb production patterns as a byproduct of normal processing. Finally, we discuss how the self‐organizing approach might be extended to other agreement attraction phenomena.
Studies on agreement production consistently report an increase in production errors in the presence of an attractor mismatching the agreement feature of the target. In contrast, results from ...comprehension studies are mixed, ranging from lack of effect to facilitation. We report 2 forced-choice experiments and 2 self-paced reading experiments on number and gender object-verb agreement in French to systematically explore the effect of a mismatching subject in the production and comprehension of object relatives. Results show that the presence of a mismatching subject penalizes sentence production, in line with reports of attraction, but consistently improves sentence comprehension in off-line comprehension measures, in line with similarity-based interference effects. We discuss the limits of classical models of sentence production and comprehension (Marking and Morphing and ACT-R), and favor a self-organizing sentence processing approach (SOSP), which accounts for both production and comprehension results through a single similarity-based mechanism of structure building.
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