Empirical Study of the Form and Function of Linguistic Elements

This empirical study will use human subjects to assess the form and function of linguistics elements. The study consists of three parts. In Part 1, subjects will be presented with sentences and expressions and asked to identify (by circling and connecting together circles) meaningful groups of words within the sentences and expressions. The goal of Part 1 is to identify the structure of simple sentences and expressions based on the identification of meaningful groups. In Part 2, subjects will be presented with sentences and expressions and asked to rank the words in terms of their contribution to the overall meaning of the sentence or expression. The goal of Part 2 is to identify the head, or most important word or words, of each sentence or expression. In Part 3, subjects will be presented with sentences and expressions with one word already circled and asked to identify the Part of Speech (POS) of the circled word. The goal of Part 3 is to see what impact the linguistic context of a word has on its POS.