1,721,175 research outputs found
L'antonymie: fonctions sémantico-référentielles de la co-présence d'antonymes français
No full textEmphatic reflexives as part-structure modifiers
Full text linkThe standard analysis of emphatic reflexives assumes that they are focused expressions of identity in all their uses (e.g. Gast 2006). On the basis of semantic and prosodic data, I argue that exclusive adverbial emphatic reflexives in Dutch and English should instead be analyzed as expressions excluding certain participants from the modified event (“P-exclusives”). The proposed analysis is based on Moltmann’s (2004) account of the part-structure modifier ‘alone’, and avoids a number of problems that the standard analysis has when applied to these data
Evaluating the language development of newly arrived migrant pupils: Go beyond words!
No full textIt is a widespread practice to assess Newly Arrived Migrant pupilS (NAMS) with diagnostic tests, even though most tests have only been standardized for monolingual speakers. Sometimes tests are informally translated bilingual clinicians from L2 to L1, without being adapted to the targeted structures in the L1. According to the literature, the problem with these tests is that NAMS may then be erroneously be diagnosed as children with a language disorder even though their L1, L2 development and cultural background are not taken into account (e.g. Paradis, 2005; Paradis et al, 2013). Nowadays, most scholars recommend oral narratives to assess bilingual children (e.g. Uccelli & Páez, 2007). MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, Gagarina et al. 2012) tests the narrative abilities of bilingual children in L1 and L2. According to the authors, MAIN is more appropriate than previous narrative elicitation materials, e.g. Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004) and Frog where are you? (Mayer, 1969) because it takes into account the cultural, linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds of bilinguals and includes options with comparable structure and complexity for eliciting narratives in a bilingual context. In order to investigate the vocabulary development of young NAMS, I recorded the MAIN narratives of 52 NAMS aged 4 to 6 (mean = 5;3 years) twice in their first year in the Netherlands within four months. Even though the pupils just started to learn the school language, most of them were willing to communicate and showed active use of communicative strategies such as ‘asking for assistance’ and ‘mime’. I compared the use of nine different strategies (adapted from Dörnyei & Scott, 1997 among others) to the amount of words and the complexity of the sentences that were elicited. The hypothesis is that the use of some strategies may be linked to more gain in L2 learning than others (Chamot, 2001). In this presentation, I present an inventory of these communication strategies and I link them to the receptive as well as productive language performances of the pupils. The goal is to discover the link between the use of metacognitive strategies and school language development in young multilingual pupils
Categorial Symmetry
No full textThis thesis constitutes an exploration into categorial type logics, attempting the reduction of natural language grammar to proof theory. Originating in Lambek's proposal for a syntactic calculus, the field has since grown to accommodate various competing extensions. For while the suitability of Lambek's work as a logic of strings has remained unchallenged, the question as to how its expressivity is to be improved upon in accordance with the empirical facts, in light of its suspected (and later confirmed) context-freeness, has generated considerable less consensus. By far the most of the resulting proposals, however, share a striking asymmetry that traces back to Lambek. Roughly, derivability is considered a relation between a possible multitude of hypotheses (the categories assigned to the individual words) and a unique conclusion (the category of the phrase made up from the hypotheses). The possibility of dispensing with the asymmetric treatment of the concepts of hypothesis and conclusion that permeates categorial type logics was first put forward by Grishin. While meant as an exercise in abstract algebra, his proposals have recently been investigated for their linguistic applications by Moortgat and associates, culminating in their definition of the Lambek-Grishin calculus. Crucially, expressivity is gained through the very act of treating hypotheses and conclusions on par, lending empirical support to the recovery of symmetry. In this dissertation, we provide a thorough linguistic and proof-theoretic investigation into the Lambek-Grishin calculus, many whose formal properties have yet to be established due to its relative youth
Plural indefinite articles: The case of 'unos' and 'des'
Full text linkPlurality typically comes in two flavors: an inclusive and an exclusive one. We exploit these different plurality ‘flavors’ to argue that there are two types of plural indefinite articles, each with their own characteristics with respect to ‘blocking’ and aspect. We argue that French des instantiates the ‘inclusive’ plural indefinite article and Spanish unos the ‘exclusive’ plural indefinite article
Semantic Modeling of Textual Entailment: Proof-Based Annotation in a Compositional Framework
No full textThis thesis introduces a new computational framework and annotation methodology for investigating textual entailment in a theory-based paradigm. This paradigm is premised on the assumption that entailment recognizers could be made more accurate if an explicit linguistic theory explains at least some of the data that they are designed to cover. Thus it is possible to begin with a theory that models a small set of linguistic phenomena and then augment it to cover increasingly complex syntactic constructions and semantic inferences. The proposed framework and annotation methodology allow human annotators to create entailment data that can be accounted for by a standard truth-conditional semantic model. The framework is an annotation platform integrating a typed-lexicon, a standard stochastic parser, a part-of-speech tagger, a lambda calculus engine and a first-order theorem prover with a graphical user interface. It is shown to be a logically sound proof system with respect to the semantic theory. Hence, when the platform uses the annotation successfully for deduction, it indicates that the underlying semantic theory accounts for the entailment. The platform is used within a methodology of Annotating-By-Proving: A premise and a conclusion of an entailment pair are considered well-annotated only if the annotations lead to a deduction from the premise to the conclusion. An extension of this methodology also covers non-entailing pairs. The proposed strategy provides annotators with an immediate feedback on the ability to generate an inferential path based on their annotations. This general approach is used for developing a semantic model incorporating some of the most common inferential phenomena in the Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) corpora: appositive, intersective and restrictive modification, as well as simple existential and universal quantification. Human annotators used the annotation platform to generate a dataset of annotated entailments explained by this semantic model. The resulting corpus, entitled SemAnTE (Semantic Annotation of Textual Entailment), consists of 600 pairs in a positive-negative ratio of 2:1 and is publicly available online (http://logiccommonsense.wp.hum.uu.nl/resources). The explicitness of the semantic theory, the simplicity of its representations, and the standard conventions used for tagging parse trees all suggest that the model is learnable and holds promise for developing better performing entailment recognizers
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