The non-literary Latin letters. A study of their syntax and pragmatics

This dissertation studies the language of Latin letters that were written in Egypt and Vindolanda (in northern Britain) during the period 1st century BC 3rd century AD on papyri, ostraca, and wooden tablets. The majority of the texts is, in one way or another, connected with the Roman army. The focus of the study is on syntax and pragmatics. Besides traditional philological methods, modern syntactic theory is used as well, especially in the pragmatic analysis. The study begins with a critical survey of certain concepts that are current in the research on the Latin language, most importantly the concept of vulgar Latin , which, it is argued, seems to be used as an abstract noun for variation and change in Latin . Further, it is necessary to treat even the non-literary material primarily as written texts and not as straightforward reflections of spoken language. An examination of letter phraseology shows that there is considerable variation between the two major geographical areas of provenance. Latin letter writing in Egypt was influenced by Greek. The study highlights the importance of seeing the letters as a text type, with recurring phraseological elements appearing in the body text as well. It is argued that recognising these elements is essential for the correct analysis of the syntax. Three areas of syntax are discussed in detail: sentence connection (mainly parataxis), syntactically incoherent structures and word order (the order of the object and the verb). For certain types of sentence connection we may plausibly posit an origin in spoken Latin, but for many other linguistic phenomena attested in this material the issue of spoken Latin is anything but simple. Concerning the study of historical syntax, the letters offer information about the changing status of the accusative case. Incoherent structures may reflect contaminations in spoken language but usually the reason for them is the inability of the writer to put his thoughts into writing, especially when there is something more complicated to be expressed. Many incoherent expressions reflect the need to start the predication with a thematic constituent. Latin word order is seen as resulting from an interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors. The preference for an order where the topic is placed sentence-initially can be seen in word order more generally as well. Furthermore, there appears a difference between Egypt and Vindolanda. The letters from Vindolanda show the order O(bject) V(erb) clearly more often than the letters from Egypt. Interestingly, this difference correlates with another, namely the use of the anaphoric pronoun is. This is an interesting observation in view of the fact that both of these are traditional Latin features, as opposed to those that foreshadow the Romance development (VO order and use of the anaphoric ille). However, it is difficult to say whether this is an indication of social or regional variation.

EUSMT: incorporating linguistic information to SMT for a morphologically rich language. Its use in SMT-RBMT-EBMT hybridation

148 p.: graf.

Astarloaren sintaxia eta hitz ordena naturala

[EN] This paper examines the syntactic ideas of Pablo Pedro Astarloa (1752-1806) as he explained in his Discursos filosóficos sobre la lengua primitiva (1805), and tries to put them in the context of the debate between rationalists and sensualists, who argued whether there is a «natural order» of words. Astarloa developed a system for accounting the word order in the primitive language of mankind (and hence in the Basque language) founded in three types of «nobleness», and in the principle that the noblest element precedes the less noble one. The first type (nobleza de origen) orders words according to their meaning. The second type (nobleza de ministerio) orders words according to the part of speech they belong to, or the semantic function they have. Finally, the third type (nobleza de mérito or de movilidad) considers the will for communication and, as a result, word order reflects the information structure. Moreover Astarloa ’s three types of nobleness are arranged in a hierarchy of superiority: movilidad > ministerio > origen. So Astarloa ’s syntax appears near to sensualists ’ conceptions on word order because it did not appeal for a fixed natural order of words; instead he proposed a variable word order based mainly on the communicative process.

Euskal Gramatika prozesatzen: Hastapenetako zenbait emaitza

Beñat Oihartzabali Gorazarre: Festschrift for Bernard Oyharçabal / Ricardo Etxepare, Ricardo Gómez, Joseba Andoni Lakarra (arg./eds)

Processing Facilitation Strategies in OV and VO Languages: A Corpus Study

The present corpus study aimed to examine whether Basque (OV) resorts more often than Spanish (VO) to certain grammatical operations, in order to minimi ze the number of arguments to be processed before the verb. Ueno & Polinsky (2009) argue that VO/OV languages use certain grammatical resources with different frequencies in order to facilitate real-time processing. They observe that both OV and VO languages in their sample (Japanese, Turkish and Spanish) have a similar frequency of use of subject pro-drop; however, they find that OV languages (Japanese, Turkish) use more intransitive sentences than VO languages (English, Spanish), and conclude this is an OV-specific strategy to facilitate processing. We conducted a comparative corpus study of Spanish (VO) and Basque (OV). Results show (a) that the fre- quency of use of subject pro-drop is higher in Basque than in Spanish; and (b) Basque does not use more intransitive sentences than Spanish; both languages have a similar frequency of intransitive sentences. Based on these findings, we conclude that the frequency of use of grammatical resources to facilitate the processing does not depend on a single typological trait (VO/OV) but it is modulated by the concurrence of other grammatical feature.

Syntactic change

[ES] En este trabajo se define el cambio sintáctico, se analizan los factores que lo causan o facilitan y se estudian sus tipos principales en griego antiguo.

Darrigolen gramatikaz

Published in 2008.

Optionality in L2 grammars: the acquisition of SV/VS contrast in Spanish

This study examines the L2 acquisition of word order variation in Spanish by three groups of L1 English learners in an instructed setting. The three groups represent learners at three different L2 proficiencies: beginners, intermediate and advanced. The aim of the study is to analyse the acquisition of word order variation in a situation where the target input is highly ambiguous, since two apparent optional forms exist in the target grammar, in order to examine how the optionality is disambiguated by learners from the earlier stages of learning to the more advanced. Our results support the hypothesis that an account based on a discourse-pragmatics deficit cannot satisfactorily explain learners’ non-targetlike representations in the contexts analysed in our study.

Design and Development of an Adaptable Frame -Based System for Dravidian Language Processing

This work is aimed at building an adaptable frame-based system for processing Dravidian languages. There are about 17 languages in this family and they are spoken by the people of South India.Karaka relations are one of the most important features of Indian languages. They are the semabtuco-syntactic relations between verbs and other related constituents in a sentence. The karaka relations and surface case endings are analyzed for meaning extraction. This approach is comparable with the borad class of case based grammars.The efficiency of this approach is put into test in two applications. One is machine translation and the other is a natural language interface (NLI) for information retrieval from databases. The system mainly consists of a morphological analyzer, local word grouper, a parser for the source language and a sentence generator for the target language. This work make contributios like, it gives an elegant account of the relation between vibhakthi and karaka roles in Dravidian languages. This mapping is elegant and compact. The same basic thing also explains simple and complex sentence in these languages. This suggests that the solution is not just ad hoc but has a deeper underlying unity. This methodology could be extended to other free word order languages. Since the frame designed for meaning representation is general, they are adaptable to other languages coming in this group and to other applications.

Design And Development Of A Named Entity Based Question Answering System For Malayalam Language

This is a Named Entity Based Question Answering System for Malayalam Language. Although a vast amount of information is available today in digital form, no effective information access mechanism exists to provide humans with convenient information access. Information Retrieval and Question Answering systems are the two mechanisms available now for information access. Information systems typically return a long list of documents in response to a user’s query which are to be skimmed by the user to determine whether they contain an answer. But a Question Answering System allows the user to state his/her information need as a natural language question and receives most appropriate answer in a word or a sentence or a paragraph. This system is based on Named Entity Tagging and Question Classification. Document tagging extracts useful information from the documents which will be used in finding the answer to the question. Question Classification extracts useful information from the question to determine the type of the question and the way in which the question is to be answered. Various Machine Learning methods are used to tag the documents. Rule-Based Approach is used for Question Classification. Malayalam belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is one of the four major languages of this family. It is one of the 22 Scheduled Languages of India with official language status in the state of Kerala. It is spoken by 40 million people. Malayalam is a morphologically rich agglutinative language and relatively of free word order. Also Malayalam has a productive morphology that allows the creation of complex words which are often highly ambiguous. Document tagging tools such as Parts-of-Speech Tagger, Phrase Chunker, Named Entity Tagger, and Compound Word Splitter are developed as a part of this research work. No such tools were available for Malayalam language. Finite State Transducer, High Order Conditional Random Field, Artificial Immunity System Principles, and Support Vector Machines are the techniques used for the design of these document preprocessing tools. This research work describes how the Named Entity is used to represent the documents. Single sentence questions are used to test the system. Overall Precision and Recall obtained are 88.5% and 85.9% respectively. This work can be extended in several directions. The coverage of non-factoid questions can be increased and also it can be extended to include open domain applications. Reference Resolution and Word Sense Disambiguation techniques are suggested as the future enhancements

Comparison of Statistical and Semantic Similarity Techniques for Paraphrase Identification

This paper compares statistical technique of paraphrase identification to semantic technique of paraphrase identification. The statistical techniques used for comparison are word set and word-order based methods where as the semantic technique used is the WordNet similarity matrix method described by Stevenson and Fernando in [3].

La enseñanza de Inglés mediante ordenador.

El proyecto intenta, a partir de un enfoque comunicativo, unir enseñanza de idiomas y tecnología, la segunda como aplicación coherente de las ventajas del ordenador para este tipo de enseñanza. Pretende además, despertar el interés del alumno por el uso del ordenador y desarrollar en él destrezas operativas y manipulativas respecto de éste como instrumento de trabajo. Otro de los objetivos era mejorar las destrezas comunicativas y secuenciar la adquisición de otras destrezas de lecto-escritura acercando el proceso de adquisición de la L2 al de la L1 (lengua materna). A comienzos del curso 93-94 se comenzó la progresiva integración del CALL dentro del programa de Inglés del curso con una dedicación de una o dos horas semanales de las cinco dedicadas al idioma. Se llevó a cabo en la sala de ordenadores del centro a la que acudían en grupos de 22 personas y 2 alumnos por ordenador. Se aplicó a un total de 200 alumnos de quinto, sexto,séptimo, octavo y primero de BUP que ya conocían la metodología desde su incorporación al centro y a otros grupos especiales de preparación de los exámenes Cambridge. Se seleccionaron 11 temas : People, Inventions and Discoveries, Travelling, Ecology, Animals, Sports, Future, Free Time, Cinema, Music and Nature. Los contenidos seleccionados eran de dos tipos: los que proporcionaban los programas adquiridos, en la mayoría de los casos secuenciados por niveles y por temas, y los que el profesor y los alumnos incorporaban con el editor. Una vez elegido el vocabulario que se consideraba que los alumnos debían trabajar en estos niveles educativos, se procedió a la elaboración de los ejercicios donde se incluían los items seleccionados. Para ello se recogieron 6 actividades tipo, relacionadas con la adquisición de vocabulario y con su evaluación. Estos fueron básicamente: definición, palabras que faltan, ordenar una frase, verdad-mentira, elección múltiple, cloze. Se comprobó que la individualización e interacción de alumnos con el ordenador repercute en la eficacia, y el CALL es especialmente efectivo en el caso de la lecto-escritura, y para la adquisición de vocabulario y la transferencia de vocabulario pasivo a activo. Queda demostrado que el CALL es un medio de enseñanza que debe tener un lugar integrado en el conjunto de recursos didácticos del programa. Se utilizaron los programas: Striptext, Time, Numbers and Prepositions, Reading Exercices, Fast Fingers, Coptone Down, Nought and Crosses, Rank Order, Multitester, Dealing with texts, Comparative and Superlative, First Certificate, Which Word, Anagrams, Alphagrame, Mind Word, Word Order, Vocabulary WordStore.

Foco oracional y polaridad: en torno a una asimetría entre el español y el catalán

En aquest estudi s’examina la perifèria esquerra del català antic en comparació amb la del castellà antic, i es descriuen les diferències més rellevants

Ordre de mots i estructura informativa a la llengua de Francesc Eiximenis

En aquest estudi s’examina la llengua d’alguns textos de Francesc Eiximenis (concretament, el ‘Dotzè del Crestià’ i les cartes autògrafes publicades per Martí 2002) per tal d’aprofundir en la distribució de l’estructura informativa i el consegüent ordre de mots que utilitza l’autor. L’objectiu d’aquesta comunicació és aprofundir en els casos d’ avantposició del català antic que correspon a una estructura de focalització feble (no contrastiva)