Frequencies and discourse functions of grammatical subject types were investigated in a corpus of forty results and discussion sections selected from four disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Psychology, Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering). The results and discussion sections were selected from research articles that were published in 2008-2012 issues of prestigious high journals of ...

Assessment  of  grammatical  knowledge  is  a  rather  neglected  area  of  research  in  the  field with  many  open  questions  (Purpura,  2004).  The  present  research  incorporates  recent proposals  about  the  nature  of  grammatical  development  to  create  a  framework  consisting of dimensions of complexity, range and strength, and studies which dimension(s) can best predict the stat...

While recent studies of Athabaskan middle verbs have attempted to find a unified semantic motivation for their presence, iterative verbs, which are a subset of middle verbs, have generally been analyzed as divergent, having a grammatical, rather than semantic, motivation. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of iteratives from traditional Dena'ina (Athabaskan, Alaska) narratives. T...

Ravignani et al. (2013) habituated squirrel monkeys to sound sequences conforming to an ABnA grammar (n = 1, 2, 3), then tested them for their reactions to novel grammatical and non-grammatical sequences. Although they conclude that the monkeys "consistently recognized and generalized the sequence ABnA," I remark that this conclusion is not robust. The statistical significance of results depend...

We present STARLET, a new compiler compiler which compiles Extended Affix G r a m m a r s defining a translation into an executable program : the translator. We look at its operational semantics and we focus on the points which are close to or different from Prolog procedural semantics. We discuss the two interwoven issues which are Program Reliability (due to many static checks) and Program Ef...

This paper describes a system to define and evaluate development stages in second language French. The identification of such stages can be formulated as determining the frequency of some lexical and grammatical features in the learners’ production and how they vary over time. The problems in this procedure are threefold: identify the relevant features, decide on cutoff points for the stages, a...

The longitudinal effects of repeating a timed writing activity on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ second language (L2) writing development were investigated. Data for 46 students in two university classes (23 in each class), each with a different course objective, were collected 30 times in the same way over one year. The students’ compositions were analyzed for fluency, grammatic...

This article introduces a tool for data fitting that is based on genetic programming and especially on the grammatical evolution technique. The user needs to input a series of points and the accompanied dimensionality n and the tool will produce via the genetic programming paradigm a function f :Rn → R which is an approximate solution to the symbolic regression problem. The tool is entirely wri...

This study aimed at investigating the effects of grammatical error correction on EFL learners’ accuracy. Twenty-two male and female senior students were chosen randomly to respond to a questionnaire investigating their beliefs about immediate grammatical error correction.  Actually, the study was conducted in order to answer this question: what is the effect of grammatical error feedback on stu...