A number of issues arise when trying to scaleup natural language understanding (NLU) tools designed for relatively simple domains (e.g., flight information) to domains such as medical advising or tutoring where deep understanding of user utterances is necessary. Because the subject matter is richer, the range of vocabulary and grammatical structures is larger meaning NLU tools are more likely t...

This paper discusses a developmental paradox, namely that children’s performance in language production sometimes exceeds their performance in language comprehension. This yields a puzzle for most theories of language acquisition. If a child produces a linguistic form correctly, this is considered to be evidence that the child possesses the relevant grammatical knowledge. However, if the child ...

The success of long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks in language processing is typically attributed to their ability to capture long-distance statistical regularities. Linguistic regularities are often sensitive to syntactic structure; can such dependencies be captured by LSTMs, which do not have explicit structural representations? We begin addressing this question using number agreeme...

The main subject in this research is to analyse analytical causatives Serbian, or predicate constructions with causative meaning. Apart from pointing out the basic typological characteristics of constructions, paper highlights two topics which deserve our attention, namely structural features construction and semantic resources controlling verb, performs operator function. Depending on grammati...

The ability to use language effectively is critical for communication, and possessing a large vocabulary, perfect pronunciation, grammatical understanding not sufficient fluency in English. Pragmatic competence, which encompasses knowledge of social, cultural, discourse conventions, essential success. However, many students lack this affects their communicative ability. While classroom-based ed...

Many studies have used a neuroscience-based approach towards examination of writing and reading skills and how these might differ between languages. However, few studies have focused on differences in grammatical processing that may be specific to certain languages. Studies have shown that grammar for active and passive sentences differs between Chinese and English. Chinese, a morphologically n...

Pronoun interpretation in English has been demonstrated to be sensitive to an interaction between grammatical and pragmatically-driven factors. This study investigated the interpretation of pronouns in Japanese, which has both null and overt forms. Thirty-two native speakers of Japanese per experiment participated in passage completion studies with transfer-of-possession contexts (Experiment 1)...

In this paper, we present a new corpus resource that has been constructed specially for the study of the syntactic characteristics of terminologies. The corpus is based on the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), comprising four parallel subject domains from two text categories (i.e. academic vs. popular prose) with a total of about 200,000 running word tokens. The...

Abstract: This chapter reviews fifty years of literature on switch-reference (SR), a grammatical phenomenon found in more than 70 North American languages and at least six South American families, in which one clause is morphologically marked to show whether or its subject refers to the same entity or entities as the subject of a structurally nearby clause. Our review is organized around three ...

• ABSTRACT: In standard FG (DIK, 1997) grammatical functions are assigned directly to the underlying representation in a more or less across the board fashion, only taking into consideration the language dependent semantic function hierarchy. This approach bypasses a number of constraints on subject assignment that may be gathered from typological data, and observed from the actual behaviour of...