The field of linguistics has seen a growing interest in the statistics of everyday language. In studying how we acquire language and why some of its aspects are more difficult for us than others, it is critical to understand the linguistic environment to which we are exposed. However, gathering statistics over syntactic structures, even with a syntactically tagged corpus, can be difficult and t...

At the end of the twentieth century , the Late Modern period still had to be described as ‘the Cinderella of English historical linguistic study’ (Jones 1989 : 279). Fortunately, this scenario has changed over the last fi fteen years or so. Among other things, the change of emphasis within historical linguistics to socio-historical and corpus-based approaches led to a surge of interest in Late ...

A corpus of read American English was designed as a research tool for speech synthesis and prosody research with an emphasis on concept-to-speech research. The total duration of the corpus is two hours. It was recorded with two native speakers who also provide the voices of the VERBMOBIL American English speech synthesis. The corpus was annotated linguistically on several levels (syntax, semant...

In this paper we give an overview of the ILLC-UvA(Institute for Logic, Language and Computation University of Amsterdam) submission to the 7th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation evaluation campaign. It outlines the architecture and configuration of the novel feature we are introducing: a syntax-based model for source-side reordering via tree transduction. We have concentrated...

We address the problem of translating from morphologically poor to morphologically rich languages by adding per-word linguistic information to the source language. We use the syntax of the source sentence to extract information for noun cases and verb persons and annotate the corresponding words accordingly. In experiments, we show improved performance for translating from English into Greek an...

While phrase-based statistical machine translation systems currently deliver state-of-theart performance, they remain weak on word order changes. Current phrase reordering models can properly handle swaps between adjacent phrases, but they typically lack the ability to perform the kind of long-distance reorderings possible with syntax-based systems. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchica...

When presented with an entity (e.g., a wooden honey-dipper) labeled with a novel noun, how does a listener know that the noun refers to an instance of an object kind (honey-dipper) rather than to a substance kind (wood)? While English speakers draw upon count-mass syntax for clues to the noun’s meaning, linguists have proposed that classifier languages, which lack count-mass syntax, provide oth...

Previous work [Bowman et al., 2016] has shown that variational autoencoders (VAEs) can create distributed representations of natural language that capture different linguistic levels such as syntax, semantics, and style in a holistic manner. I investigate to what extent VAEs, when trained on different languages, result in comparable representations. To this end, I train VAEs for English and Fre...

Park, Sang-Hee. 2009. Resolving Multiple fdo.fragments in English: A Syntax-Pragmatics Approach. SNU Working Papers in English Lingnistics and Langnage 8, 16-27. This study attempts to provide a new analysis of multiple wh·fragments, the so-called 'multiple sluicing', in English. Against previous approaches which resort to a reconslruction-based resolution or gapping, the proposed analysis capt...

An analysis of English restrictive relative clauses is developed that accounts for many of the differences between them and three other clause types having the same internal structure, namely nonrestrictive relative clauses, cleft clauses, and ‘pscudorelative’ clauses as in Tllt~ ~1’11 ttwtt_r Attwictrtts who like hshll. Section I is devoted to establishing the surface constituent structures of...