Formal languages theory is useful for the study of natural language. In particular, it is of interest to study the adequacy of the grammatical formalisms to express syntactic phenomena present in natural language. First, it helps to draw hypothesis about the nature and complexity of the speaker-hearer linguistic competence, a fundamental question in linguistics and other cognitive sciences. Mor...

A deeper analysis on Comparative Quality Estimation is presented by extending the stateof-the-art methods with adequacy and grammatical features from other Quality Estimation tasks. The previously used linear method, unable to cope with the augmented features, is replaced with a boosting classifier assisted by feature selection. The methods indicated show improved performance for 6 language pai...

This paper describes a method for detecting impossible bigrams from a space of V 2 bigrams where V is the size of the vocabulary. The idea is to discard all the ungrammatical events which are impossible in a well written text and consequently to expect an improvement of the language model. We expect also, in speech recognition, to reduce the complexity of the search algorithm by making less com...

A large body of research shows that vocabulary does not develop independently of grammar, representing a better predictor of the grammatical complexity of toddlers' utterances than age. This study examines for the first time the characteristics of vocabulary and grammar development in Slovenian-speaking infants and toddlers using the Slovenian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Dev...

Patients with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia commonly present with impaired language. Here we investigate language in schizophrenia with a focus on inflectional morphology, using an intensively studied and relatively well-understood linguistic paradigm. Patients with schizophrenia (n=43) and age-matched healthy control subjects (n=42) were asked to produce past tenses of regular (s...

This work proposes a new approach to the alignment of multiple sequences. We take profit from some results on Grammatical Inference that allow us to build iteratively an abstract machine that considers in each inference step an increasing amount of sequences. The obtained machine compile the common features of the sequences, and can be used to align these sequences. This method improves the tim...

This paper describes and evaluates the automatic grammatical annotation of a chat and an e-mail corpus of together 117 million words, using a modular Constraint Grammar system. We discuss a number of genre-specific issues, such as emoticons and personal pronouns, and offer a linguistic comparison of the two corpora with corresponding annotations of the Europarl corpus and the spoken and written...

Unlike Lexical Projections, Functional Projections (Extended Projections) are more of an ‘abstract’ in nature. Therefore, Functional Projections seem to be acquired later than Lexical Projections by the L2 learners. The present study investigates Iranian L2 learners’ acquisition of English Extended Projections taking into account their level of grammatical proficiency. Specifically, the aim is ...

Systemic functional grammar constructs a grammar for the purpose of text analysis to investigate how grammar is used as a means of making meaning. Grammatical metaphor is one of the language phenomena introduced by Halliday (2004) in the framework of functional grammar. The present work focuses on the application of Halliday’s metafunctional framework in health texts of English newspapers. The ...

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 ...