Browsing by Subject "Negative concord"
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Item Negative concord in Levantine Arabic(2010-08) Hoyt, Frederick MacNeill; Baldridge, Jason; Beaver, David I.; Beavers, John; Abboud, Peter F.; Benmamoun, Abbas; Steedman, Mark J.This dissertation is a study of negative concord in Levantine Arabic (Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria), where negative concord is the failure of an n-word to express negative meaning distinctly when in syntagm with another negative expression . A set of n-words is identified, including the never-words <ʔɛbadan> and "never, not once, not at all," the negative minimizers and "nothing," and the negative scalar focus particle "not (even) (one), not a (single)." Each can be used to express negation in sentence fragments and other constructions with elliptical interpretations, such as gapping and coordination. Beyond that, the three categories differ syntactically and semantically. I present analyses of these expressions that treat them as having different morphological and semantic properties. The data support an ambiguity analysis for wala-phrases, and a syntactic analysis of it with never-words, indicating that a single, uniform theory of negative concord should be rejected for Levantine Arabic. The dissertation is the first such work to explicitly identify negative concord in Levantine Arabic, and to provide a detailed survey and analysis of it. The description includes subtle points of variation between regional varieties of Levantine, as well as in depth analysis of the usage of n-words. It also adds a large new data set to the body of data that has been reported on negative concord, and have several implications for theories on the subject. The dissertation also makes a contribution to computational linguistics as applied to Arabic, because the analyses are couched in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, a formalism that is used both for linguisic theorizing as well as for a variety of practical applications, including text parsing and text generaration. The semantic generalizations reported here are also important for practical computational tasks, because they provide a way to correctly calculate the negative or positive polarity of utterances in a negative concord language, which is essential for computational tasks such as machine translation or sentiment analysis.Item The role of L1 influence in the acquisition of negative concord in adult second language learning(2010-05) Alexandrino, Sandra Cidrao; Kelm, Orlando R., 1957-; Koike, Dale A.; Hensey, Frederick G.; Shumway, Nicolas; Schallert, DianeThe present study examines the L1 influence on the adult acquisition of the negative concord parameter (two negative elements that agree to form a sentential negation without canceling each other) between the following groups of learners: (1) two groups of second language learners whose first and target languages are typologically similar (Lusophone and Hispanophone learners of Spanish and Portuguese respectively), and (2) two groups of learners whose first and target languages are typologically different (Anglophone learners of Spanish and Portuguese). The study compares the scores of the groups, and focuses on two goals: (1) to investigate the influence of L1 transfer on the acquisition of the negative concord parameter in adult L2 learners when the first and target languages are typologically similar and different, and (2) to attempt to find a correlation between L2 learners’ level of awareness on the similarities and differences of the negative concord parameter between languages, and its effect on their overall performance of the task. A total of 135 participants responded to a grammaticality judgment task, and independent sample t tests were used to determine whether there were differences between the groups. The results indicate that adult L2 learners of languages that are typologically similar to their native languages perform better than those adult L2 learners whose languages are typologically different than their native languages. The results imply that L1 transfer facilitates the acquisition of the negative concord parameter for adult second language learners when languages are typologically similar, which is relevant to current research on the developmental stages of L2 acquisition. As far as their level of awareness during the task, the results could not indicate whether or not there was any correlation between learners’ awareness of the grammatical typological similarities and differences of the languages involved and their overall performance on the task. It was also observed that learners responded in unpredictable ways to the specific question of their state of awareness during the task, which left the study inconclusive with regards to the level of these L2 learners’ consciousness.