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Multi-faceted alignment. Toward automatic detection of textual similarity in Gospel-derived texts
(2015)
Ancient Germanic Bible-derived texts stand in as test material for producing computational means for automatically determining where textual contamination and linguistic interference have influenced the translation process. This paper reports on the results of research efforts that produced a text corpus; a method for decomposing the texts involved into smaller, more directly comparable thematically-related chunks; a database of relationships between these chunks; and a user-interface allowing for searches based on various referential criteria. Finally, the state of the product at the end of the project is discussed, namely as it was handed over to another researcher who has extended it to automatically find semantic and syntactic similarities within comparable chunks.
Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories concerned with different notional facets of the event or situation conveyed by a given clause. They are prototypically expressed by the verbal system. Tense can be defined as a category that relates points or intervals in time to one another; in a most basic model, those include the time of the event or situation referred to and the speech time. The former may precede the latter (“past”), follow it (“future”), or be simultaneous with it (or at least overlap with it; “present”). Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of the event or situation, which may be viewed as a single whole (“perfective”) or with particular reference to its internal structure (“imperfective”), including its being ongoing at a certain point in time (“progressive”). Mood, in a narrow, morphological sense, refers to the inflectional realization of modality, with modality encompassing a large and varying set of sub-concepts such as possibility, necessity, probability, obligation, permission, ability, and volition. In the domain of tense, all Germanic languages make a distinction between non-past and past. In most languages, the opposition can be expressed inflectionally, namely, by the present and preterite (indicative). All modern languages also have a periphrastic perfect as well as periphrastic forms that can be used to refer to future events. Aspect is characteristically absent as a morphological category across the entire family, but most, if not all, modern languages have periphrastic forms for the expression of aspectual categories such as progressiveness. Regarding mood, Germanic languages are commonly described as distinguishing up to three such form paradigms, namely, indicative, imperative, and a third one referred to here as subjunctive. Morphologically distinct subjunctive forms are, however, more typical of earlier stages of Germanic than they are of most present-day languages.
Introduction
(2023)
We argue that properties with a nominal origin get transferred regularly in certain Gentian particle verb constructions to properties that are propositional insofar as they characterize the temporal structure of eventualities, understood to be described by propositional (= truth-assessable) representations of state changes. Accordingly, the oft-noted perfectivizing function of certain verbal particles like ein- in einfahren ('pull in', cf. Kühnhold 1972) is the effect of redressing a conflict at the syntax-semantics interface: On the one hand, constructions like in [die Grube]acc einfahren ('pull into the mine’) exhibit transitive syntax (Gehrke 2008), requiring that the syntactic arguments be mapped onto well-distinguished or DIFFERENT referents in the semantics (Kemmer 1993). On the other hand, in/ein codes a spatio-temporal inclusion relation between its relata, contradicting the requirement imposed by the transitive syntax. Following Brandt (2019), we submit that the interface executes a manoeuvre that delays the interpretation of part of the contradiction-inducing DIFFERENCE feature. It is not locally interpreted (semantically represented) in toto but in part passed on to the next syntactic-semantic computational cycle. Here, the passed-on meaning is interpreted in the locally customary terms, in the case at hand, as a temporal index where the post-state of the depicted eventuality does not hold.
Die grammatische Kategorie eingebetteter Sätze zählt seit über 50 Jahren zu den zentralen Themen der theoretischen Syntax. Dabei dreht sich die Diskussion speziell um die Frage, ob manche oder vielleicht alle eingebetteten Sätze als Nominalphrasen zu behandeln sind, sei es, weil sie einen (stummen) nominalen Kopf haben (D oder N), oder sei es, weil der Satzeinleiter selbst als nominal zu betrachten ist. Die Beiträge des Sonderhefts nehmen diese Fragestellung erneut auf und explorieren sie unter verschiedenen, syntaktischen wie semantischen Aspekten im Lichte neuerer theoretischer Ansätze. Das Spektrum an Sprachen, die genauer untersucht oder argumentativ für die Zwecke der Analyse herangezogen werden, umfasst neben Deutsch – einschließlich dialektaler Varietäten wie Bairisch und Alemannisch – Englisch, Niederländisch (einschließlich der Brabanter Varietät), Alt- und Neugriechisch, Jula (Niger-Kongo), Schwedisch, Baskisch sowie eine Reihe anderer genetisch und typologisch unterschiedlicher Sprachen.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Mayan.
The present article proposes a syntactic and semantic analysis of assertive clauses that comprises their truth-conditional aspects and their speech act potential in communication. What is commonly called “illocutionary force” is differentiated into three structurally and functionally distinct layers: a judgement phrase, representing subjective epistemic and evidential attitudes; a commitment phrase, representing the social commitment related to assertions; and an act phrase, representing the relation to the common ground of the conversation. The article provides several pieces of evidence for this structure: from the interpretation and syntactic position of various classes of epistemic, evidential, affirmative and speech act-related operators, from clausal complements embedded by different types of predicates, from embedded root clauses, and from anaphora referring to different clausal projections. The syntactic assumptions are phrased within X-bar theory, and the semantic interpretation makes use of dynamic update of common ground, differentiating between informative and performative updates. The object language is German, with particular reference to verb final and verb second structure.
This paper presents the IVK-Ler corpus, a longitudinal, annotated learner corpus of weekly writings produced by a group of 18 adolescents in a preparatory class. The corpus consists of 117 student texts collected between 2020 and 2021 and has a structure layered by student and text number. It includes metadata that enables researchers to analyze and track individual student progress in terms of syntactic competence and literacy. The annotation schema, manual and automatic annotation processes, and corpus representation are described in detail. The corpus currently includes target hypotheses and gold standard part-of-speech tags. Future work could include additional annotation layers for topological fields and dependency relations, as well as semantic and discourse annotations to make the corpus usable for tasks beyond syntactic evaluations.
In 2010, ISO published a standard for syntactic annotation, ISO 24615:2010 (SynAF). Back then, the document specified a comprehensive reference model for the representation of syntactic annotations, but no accompanying XML serialisation. ISO’s subcommittee on language resource management (ISO TC 37/SC 4) is working on making the SynAF serialisation ISOTiger an additional part of the standard. This contribution addresses the current state of development of ISOTiger, along with a number of open issues on which we are seeking community feedback in order to ensure that ISOTiger becomes a useful extension to the SynAF reference model.