Writing grammar rather than tone

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Roberts ◽  
Stephen L. Walter
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Third Way ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Spontaneous Writing ◽  
Experimental Strategies

Some orthographies represent tone phonemically by means of diacritics; others favor zero marking. Neither solution is entirely satisfactory. The former leads to graphic overload; the latter to a profusion of homographs; both may reduce fluency. But there is a ‘third way’: to highlight the grammar rather than the tone system itself. To test this approach, we developed two experimental strategies for Kabiye: a grammar orthography and a tone orthography. Both are modifications of the standard orthography that does not mark tone. We tested these in a quantitative experiment involving literate L1 speakers that included dictation and spontaneous writing. Writers of the grammar orthography perform faster and more accurately than writers of the tone orthography, suggesting that they have an awareness of the morphological and syntactic structure of their language that may exceed their awareness of its phonology. This suggests that languages with grammatical tone might benefit from grammatical markers in the orthography. Keywords: tone; grammar; orthography; African languages; quantitative experiment

scholarly journals Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Laura J. Downing
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Subject

In spite of this long history, most work to date on the phonology-syntax interface in Bantu languages suffers from limitations, due to the range of expertise required: intonation, phonology, syntax. Quite generally, intonational studies on African languages are extremely rare. Most of the existing data has not been the subject of careful phonetic analysis, whether of the prosody of neutral sentences or of questions or other focus structures. There are important gaps in our knowledge of Bantu syntax which in turn limit our understanding of the phonology-syntax interface. Recent developments in syntactic theory have provided a new way of thinking about the type of syntactic information that phonology can refer to and have raised new questions: Do only syntactic constituent edges condition prosodic phrasing? Do larger domains such as syntactic phases, or even other factors, like argument and adjunct distinctions, play a role? Further, earlier studies looked at a limited range of syntactic constructions. Little research exists on the phonology of focus or of sentences with non-canonical word order in Bantu languages. Both the prosody and the syntax of complex sentences, questions and dislocations are understudied for Bantu languages. Our project aims to remedy these gaps in our knowledge by bringing together a research team with all the necessary expertise. Further, by undertaking the intonational, phonological and syntactic analysis of several languages we can investigate whether there is any correlation among differences in morphosyntactic and prosodic properties that might also explain differences in phrasing and intonation. It will also allow us to investigate whether there are cross-linguistically common prosodic patterns for particular morpho-syntactic structure.  

scholarly journals The structure and features of the SMS language used in the written work of Communication English I students at a university in South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaka Chaka ◽  
Mampa L. Mphahlele ◽  
Charles C. Mann
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Text Messages ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Black South African ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
English I

Employing an explanatory design, this study set out to investigate the morphosyntactic structures of the SMS language of Communication English I students, and the types of SMS language features used in their written work at a university of technology in South Africa. The study randomly sampled 90 undergraduate students (M = 40; F = 50) enrolled for a national diploma programme during the first academic semester in 2013. Their ages ranged from 19–22 years; they all spoke English as a second language, whilst having one of the five black South African languages as their home language. The study had two types of data: participants’ mobile phone text messages (in two sets), and their writing samples. Two of the findings of the study are: the morphological structure of the textisms used in the participants’ text messages deviated from that applicable to formal, standard English, whereas much of their syntactic structure did not; and, the frequency and proportion of textisms in participants’ writing samples were lower than that reported in studies by Freudenberg (2009) and Rosen et al. (2010).

Towards the Use of a Tree Branching Logic in the Environment of a Hospital Information System

1980 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 187-194
Author(s):  
J.-Ph. Berney ◽  
R. Baud ◽  
J.-R. Scherrer
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Large Data ◽  
Selection System ◽  
Frame Selection ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Medical Language ◽  
Selection Systems ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Man Machine Dialogue ◽  
Oriented System

It is well known that Frame Selection Systems (FFS) have proved both popular and effective in physician-machine and patient-machine dialogue. A formal algorithm for definition of a Frame Selection System for handling man-machine dialogue is presented here. Besides, it is shown how the natural medical language can be handled using the approach of a tree branching logic. This logic appears to be based upon ordered series of selections which enclose a syntactic structure. The external specifications are discussed with regard to convenience and efficiency. Knowing that all communication between the user and the application programmes is handled only by FSS software, FSS contributes to achieving modularity and, therefore, also maintainability in a transaction-oriented system with a large data base and concurrent accesses.

MOSE FOR EUS-GUIDED PANCREATIC TISSUE ACQUISITION: THE THIRD WAY

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
T Togliani ◽  
I Breoni ◽  
V Davì ◽  
N Mantovani ◽  
A Savioli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Pancreatic Tissue ◽  
Third Way ◽  
The Third ◽  
Tissue Acquisition

Overcoming “The Third Way” Concept

2006 ◽  
pp. 126-134
Author(s):  
L. Evstigneeva ◽  
R. Evstigneev
Keyword(s):  
Economic Research ◽  
Economic Uncertainty ◽  
Third Way ◽  
The Third ◽  
Linear Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Non Linear

“The Third Way” concept is still widespread all over the world. Growing socio-economic uncertainty makes the authors revise the concept. In the course of discussion with other authors they introduce a synergetic vision of the problem. That means in the first place changing a linear approach to the economic research for a non-linear one.

A Review and evaluation of Machine Translation methods for Lumasaaba

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Peter Nabende
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
East African ◽  
Data Set ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Translation Methods

Natural Language Processing for under-resourced languages is now a mainstream research area. However, there are limited studies on Natural Language Processing applications for many indigenous East African languages. As a contribution to covering the current gap of knowledge, this paper focuses on evaluating the application of well-established machine translation methods for one heavily under-resourced indigenous East African language called Lumasaaba. Specifically, we review the most common machine translation methods in the context of Lumasaaba including both rule-based and data-driven methods. Then we apply a state of the art data-driven machine translation method to learn models for automating translation between Lumasaaba and English using a very limited data set of parallel sentences. Automatic evaluation results show that a transformer-based Neural Machine Translation model architecture leads to consistently better BLEU scores than the recurrent neural network-based models. Moreover, the automatically generated translations can be comprehended to a reasonable extent and are usually associated with the source language input.

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