The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics

Heritage languages are minority languages learned in a bilingual environment. These include immigrant languages, aboriginal or indigenous languages and historical minority languages. In the last two decades, heritage languages have become central to many areas of linguistic research, from bilingual language acquisition, education and language policies, to theoretical linguistics. Bringing together contributions from a team of internationally renowned experts, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art overview of this emerging area of study from a number of different perspectives, ranging from theoretical linguistics to language education and pedagogy. Presenting comprehensive data on heritage languages from around the world, it covers issues ranging from individual aspects of heritage language knowledge to broader societal, educational, and policy concerns in local, global and international contexts. Surveying the most current issues and trends in this exciting field, it is essential reading for graduate students and researchers, as well as language practitioners and other language professionals.

КАТЕГОРИАЛНОСТ И НЕКАТЕГОРИАЛНОСТ В СИСТЕМАТА НА РУСКИТЕ ЧИСЛИТЕЛНИ ИМЕНА (В СЪПОСТАВКА С БЪЛГАРСКИ) / CATEGORIALITY AND NON-CATEGORIALITY IN THE SYSTEM OF RUSSIAN NUMERALS (IN COMPARISION WITH BULGARIAN)

Few Indo-European languages categorize numerals as an independent part of speech. In all languages numerals are used to indicate the same extralinguistic quantity although in theoretical linguistics, researchers still argue for their correct classification. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look at some of the problems related to the categorical and non-categorial meanings of numerals in Russian and Bulgarian. The lexical peculiarity of the part of speech under study is intertwined with the functioning of the grammatical categories of case, number and gender. Although from a morphological point of view the grammatical categories are represented very sparsely, the available forms are characterized by exceptional originality and comprehensiveness, which is a further attestation to the connection between categoriality and noncategoriality. The analysis gives grounds to believe that numerals are the only part of speech in which non-categorial manifestations exceed categorial ones, which is a reason for further research within this class of words. Keywords: grammatical categoriality, noncategoriality, functional grammar, gram¬matical categories, Russian language, Bulgarian language, numerals

(What) Can Deep Learning Contribute to Theoretical Linguistics?

Deep learning (DL) techniques have revolutionised artificial systems’ performance on myriad tasks, from playing Go to medical diagnosis. Recent developments have extended such successes to natural language processing, an area once deemed beyond such systems’ reach. Despite their different goals (technological development vs. theoretical insight), these successes have suggested that such systems may be pertinent to theoretical linguistics. The competence/performance distinction presents a fundamental barrier to such inferences. While DL systems are trained on linguistic performance, linguistic theories are aimed at competence. Such a barrier has traditionally been sidestepped by assuming a fairly close correspondence: performance as competence plus noise. I argue this assumption is unmotivated. Competence and performance can differ arbitrarily. Thus, we should not expect DL models to illuminate linguistic theory.

Polynesian languages and their contributions to theoretical linguistics

This chapter introduces the volume on Polynesian syntax and its interfaces. It presents an overview of the Polynesian language family and outlines the key typological features of the languages. The history of research on Polynesian languages is reviewed, with a focus on modern research in theoretical syntax and semantics. This historical overview is followed by a summary of each chapter in the volume, in which the connecting theoretical issues are highlighted.

Are Ellipses important for Machine Translation?

This article describes an experiment to evaluate the impact of different types of ellipses discussed in theoretical linguistics on Neural Machine Translation (NMT), using English to Hindi/Telugu as source and target languages. Evaluation with manual methods shows that most of the errors made by Google NMT are located in the clause containing the ellipsis, the frequency of such errors is slightly more in Telugu than Hindi, and the translation adequacy shows improvement when ellipses are reconstructed with their antecedents. These findings not only confirm the importance of ellipses and their resolution for MT, but also hint towards a possible correlation between the translation of discourse devices like ellipses with the morphological incongruity of the source and target. We also observe that not all ellipses are translated poorly and benefit from reconstruction, advocating for a disparate treatment of different ellipses in MT research.

Automatic Extraction of Semantic Roles in Support Verb Constructions

This paper deals with paraphrastic relations in Italian. In the following sentences: (a) Max strappò delle lacrime a Sara 'Max moved Sara to tears' and (b) Max fece piangere Sara 'Max made Sara cry', the verbs differ syntactically and semantically. Strappare 'tear/rip/wring' is transitive, fare ‘have/make’ is a causative, and piangere 'cry' is intransitive. Despite this, a translation of (a) as (b) is legitimate and therefore (a) is a paraphrase of (b). In theoretical linguistics this raises an issue concerning the relationship between strappare and fare/piangere in Italian, and that in English between move and make. In computational linguistics, can such paraphrases be obtained automatically? Which apparatus should be deployed? The aim of this paper is to suggest a pathway with which to answer these questions.

Making good on a promise

Construction Grammar was founded on the promise of maximal empirical coverage without compromising on formal precision. Its main claim is that all linguistic knowledge can be represented as constructions, similar to the notion of constructions from traditional grammars. As such, Construction Grammar may finally reconcile the needs of descriptive and theoretical linguistics by establishing a common ground between them. Unfortunately, while the construction grammar community has developed a sophisticated understanding of what a construction is supposed to be, many critics still believe that a construction is simply a new jacket for traditional linguistic analyses and therefore inherits all of the problems of those analyses. The goal of this article is to refute such criticisms by showing how constructions can be formalized as open-ended and multidimensional linguistic representations that make no prior assumptions about the structure of a language. While this article’s proposal can be simply written down in a pen-and-paper style, it verifies the validity of its approach through a computational implementation of German field topology in Fluid Construction Grammar.

भाषा र पारिभाषिक शब्दावलीको कोशीय प्रारूपः एक विश्लेषण [Lexical Structures of Language and Linguistic Semantics: An Analysis]

यस शोधन आलेखमा भाषा, भाषा विज्ञानको परिचय तथा शाखाहरूबारे चिनारी प्रस्तुत गर्दै पारिभाषिक शब्दावली र कोशीय प्रारूपबारे खोज विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । भावाभिव्यक्तिको संस्कृति विचार विनिमयको आधार भाषाका बारेमा वैज्ञानिक ढङ्गले अध्ययन गर्ने ज्ञानको शाखा नै भाषा विज्ञान हो । व्याकरण, भाषाशास्त्र हुँदै विकसित भाषा विज्ञानको संरचक पक्षका आधारमा ध्वनि विज्ञान, वणर् विज्ञान, व्याकरण (रूप, रूप सन्धि र वाक्य) र अर्थ विज्ञान प्रमुख शाखाहरू हुन् । अध्ययन विश्लेषणको पद्धतिका आधारमा भाषा विज्ञानका ऐतिहासिक, तुलनात्मक र वणर्नात्मक प्रमुख तिन शाखाहरू छन् । सिद्धान्तकेन्द्री र प्रयोगकेन्द्री आधारमा भाषा विज्ञान सैद्धान्तिक र प्रायोगिक दुई प्रकारका हुन्छन् । भाषा शिक्षण, कोश विज्ञान, शैली विज्ञान, सामाजिक भाषा विज्ञान, मनोभाषा विज्ञान, अनुवाद विज्ञान, कम्प्युटर विज्ञान, व्यतिरेकी भाषा विज्ञान, सङ्कथन विश्लेषण आदि प्रायोगिक भाषा विज्ञानका प्रकारहरू हुन् । भाषाविज्ञानका यी शाखाहरूमा प्रयुक्त परिभाषाका माध्यमबाट बुझ्नु पर्ने सयांै पारिभाषिक तथा प्राविधिक शब्दावलीहरू छन् । यस्ता शब्दावलीहरूलाई शब्दकोशीय ढाँचामा पेस गर्न सकिने कोशीय प्रारूपको सीमित नमुना समेत यहाँ प्रस्तुत गरिएको छ । [Linguistic semantics and lexical structures have been discussed in this paper, introducing language, linguistics and its forms. Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structure that is associated with the knowledge systems while communicating across cultures. It is a developed form of grammar, including other aspects of language such as sound system, letters, words, sentences and meanings. It has three main branches such as historical linguistics, comparative linguistics and descriptive linguistics. It can also be categorized into two types: theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. There are other types of linguistics as well that include language teaching, lexicology, stylistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, computational linguistics and narratology are some examples of applied linguistics. Based on these branches of linguistics, there are hundreds of linguistic semantics to be leant in the study of language and its structure. In this paper, they are exemplified as lexical structures of language and linguistic semantics.]