Linguistic Descriptions (linguistic + description)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Connecting linguistic description and language teaching: native and learner use of existential there1

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2006
Ignacio Palacios-Martínez
construcciones existenciales; corpus de estudiantes; enseñanza de lenguas; lingüística contrastiva; lingüística de corpus This article emerges from the need to connect linguistic theory and language teaching to find concrete solutions to problems Spanish students confront when learning English. This study looks at existential there constructions taken from the following native and non-native written English corpora: the International Corpus of Learner English and the Santiago University Learner of English Cor-pus for the non-native set, and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays, Biber et al. (1999) and a subcorpus of the BNC for the native English group. This contrastive study reveals important differences in the use of there constructions as regards their frequency, structural complexity, polarity and pragmatic value. Important implications for the presentation and the pedagogical treatment of the there constructions can be derived from the results. El presente artículo surge de la necesidad de conectar la teoría lingüística y la práctica pedagógica, tratando de encontrar soluciones concretas a problemas con los que se enfrentan alumnos españoles de inglés como lengua extranjera. Este trabajo estudia las construcciones existenciales con there (CTs) a partir de los siguientes corpus de textos escritos de hablantes nativos y no nativos: International Corpus of Learner English y Santiago University Learner of English Corpus para los no nativos, y Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays, Biber et al. (1999) y un subcorpus del BNC para los nativos. Este estudio contrastivo constata diferencias importantes en el uso de las CTs relativas a su frecuencia, complejidad estructural, polaridad y valor pragmático. De todos estos resultados se derivan importantes implicaciones para la presentación y tratamiento pedagógico de las CTs. [source]


On the semantics of perception-based fuzzy logic deduction

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, Issue 11 2004
Vilém Novák
In this article, we return to the problem of the derivation of a conclusion on the basis of fuzzy IF,THEN rules. The so-called Mamdani method is well elaborated and widely applied. In this article, we present an alternative to it. The fuzzy IF,THEN rules are here interpreted as genuine linguistic sentences consisting of the so-called evaluating linguistic expressions. Sets of fuzzy IF,THEN rules are called linguistic descriptions. Linguistic expressions derived on the basis of an observation in a concrete context are called perceptions. Together with the linguistic description, they can be used in logical deduction, which we will call a perception-based logical deduction. We focus on semantics only and confine ourselves to one specific model. If the perception-based deduction is repeated and the result interpreted in an appropriate model, we obtain a piecewise continuous and monotonous function. Though the method has already proved to work well in many applications, the nonsmoothness of the output may sometimes lead to problems. We propose in this article a method for how the resulting function can be made smooth so that the output preserves its good properties. The idea consists of postprocessing the output using a special fuzzy approximation method called F-transform. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 19: 1007,1031, 2004. [source]


Social Constructionism as Cognitive Science

JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 4 2004
THOMAS E. DICKINS
Social constructionism is a broad position that emphasizes the importance of human social processes in psychology. These processes are generally associated with language and the ability to construct stories that conform to the emergent rules of "language games". This view allows one to espouse a variety of critical postures with regard to realist commitments within the social and behavioural sciences, ranging from outright relativism (language constructs all of our concepts) to a more moderate respect for the "barrier" that linguistic descriptions can place between us and reality. This paper first outlines some possible social construction-ist viewpoints and then goes on to show how each of them conforms to the basic principles of information theory. After establishing this relation the paper then argues that this leads to a great deal of commonality between social construction-ist positions and the baseline aims of cognitive science. Finally, the paper argues that, if information theory is held in common, this both suggests future research collaborations and helps to "mop up" some of the arguments surrounding realist commitments. [source]


Input and SLA: Adults' Sensitivity to Different Sorts of Cues to French Gender

LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue S1 2005
Susanne E. Carroll
All second language (L2) learning theories presuppose that learners learn the target language from the speech signal (or written material, when learners are reading), so an understanding of learners' ability to detect and represent novel patterns in linguistic stimuli will constitute a major building block in an adequate theory of second language acquisition (SLA) input. Pattern detection, a mainstay of current connectionist modeling of language learning, presupposes a sensitivity to particular properties of the signal. Learning abstract grammatical knowledge from the signal presupposes, as well, the capacity to map phonetic properties of the signal onto properties of another type (segments and syllables, morpheme categories, and so on). Thus, even seemingly "simple" grammatical phenomena may embody complex structural knowledge and be instantiated by a plethora of diverse cues. Moreover, cues have no a priori status; a phenomenon of a given sort takes on a value as a cue when acquisition of the grammatical system reveals it to be useful. My study deals with initial sensitivity to cues to gender attribution in French. Andersen (1984) asked: "What's gender good for anyway?" One answer comes from a number of studies, done mostly in the last 20 years, of gender processing by both monolingual and bilingual speakers (among many others, Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996; Bates & Liu, 1997; Friederici & Jacobsen, 1990; Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, Guillemon, & Besson, 1994; Guillemon & Grosjean, 2001; Taft & Meunier, 1998). These studies provide evidence that in monolinguals and early (but not late) L2 learners, prenominal morphosyntactic exponents of gender prime noun activation and speed up noun recognition. Over the same period, a growing number of studies detailing the course of L2 gender acquisition for a variety of different target languages and learner types (e.g., Bartning, 2000; Chini, 1995; Dewaele & Véronique, 2000; Granfeldt, 2003; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004) have provided support for the hypothesis that developmental paths differ for early and later learners of gender. Yet despite its obvious importance to SLA theorizing, few studies have dealt directly with adult learners' ability to detect and analyze potential cues to gender at the initial stage of exposure to the L2 (and this despite considerable discussion in recent years of the nature of the "initial state" of L2 learning). The study reported on in this article, which was actually conducted in the late 1980s, was an attempt to shed some light on what the beginning learner can do with the gender attribution problem. This study was, at that time, and is even now, an anomaly; most research dealing with "input" provided descriptions of what people say to learners, not what learners can perceive and represent. Indeed, most studies that shed light on the initial analytical capacities of absolute beginners were concerned with "perceptual" learning, that is, with the acquisition of phonetic or phonological distinctions (e.g., Broselow, Hurtig, & Ringen's [1987] study of tone learning or various studies on the perception of the /r/ vs. /l/ phonemes in American English by Japanese speakers). In this update, it is therefore worth mentioning Rast's (2003) dissertation and Rast and Dommergues (2003), which is based on it, which examined the results of the first 8 hr of instructed learning of Polish by francophone adults. My study asked if anglophone adults, with little or no prior exposure to French, given auditory stimuli, were equally sensitive to phonological, morphosyntactic, or semantic cues to French gender classes. The issue of what learners can detect in the signal and encode is an empirical one. I presented 88 adult English speakers with highly patterned data in list form, namely, auditory sequences of [Det + N]French + translation equivalentEnglish forms. The patterns, all true generalizations, were drawn from linguistic descriptions of French. These cues are believed by grammarians of the language to be "psychologically real" to native speakers. I then measured in 3 different ways what my participants had acquired. Given the extreme limitations on the input (no visual supports to identify referents of names), the participants performed pretty well. Moreover, they proved to be highly sensitive to "natural" semantic and morphological patterns and could generalize accurately from learned instances to novel exemplars. These patterns, however, are not directly instantiated in the speech signal; they are abstractions imposed on the stimuli by human linguistic cognition. Moreover, although it would be inaccurate to describe the learning patterns as "transfer"(because English nouns have no gender feature), prior knowledge seemed to be implicated in the results. Above all, these Anglophones appear to perceive the gender learning problem as a semantic one and to make use of "top-down" information in solving it. It follows that the pattern detection that they can do when listening to speech is clearly biased by what they already know. These results, therefore, provide support for hypotheses that the initial state is to be defined in terms of the transfer of first language (L1) grammatical knowledge and/or the transfer of L1-based processing procedures. [source]