This post contains the resources for students taking the UCL English Linguistics MA, all in one place.
Tag: graph plot
Verb Phrase book published
Why should you read this book?
The grammar of English is often thought to be stable over time. However a new book, edited by Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis, The Verb Phrase in English: investigating recent language change with corpora (Cambridge University Press, 2013) presents a body of research from linguists that shows that using natural language corpora one can find changes within a core element of grammar, the Verb Phrase, over a span of decades rather than centuries.
The book draws from papers first presented at a symposium on the verb phrase organised for the Survey of English Usage’s 50th anniversary and on research from the Changing English Verb Phrase project.
Capturing patterns of linguistic interaction
This paper is an earlier, and longer, version of the study published in IJCL 24:4. A couple of results have been superseded by a reanalysis. It is presented in its 2012 form in this blog post for historical interest and because it may have been cited. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the paper, but a discrepancy in the results of Experiment 4 was identified (highlighted in the PDF).
Abstract Full Paper (PDF)
Numerous competing grammatical frameworks exist on paper, as algorithms and embodied in parsed corpora. However, not only is there little agreement about grammars among linguists, but there is no agreed methodology for demonstrating the benefits of one grammar over another. Consequently the status of parsed corpora or ‘treebanks’ is suspect.
The most common approach to empirically comparing frameworks is based on the reliable retrieval of individual linguistic events from an annotated corpus. However this method risks circularity, permits redundant terms to be added as a ‘solution’ and fails to reflect the broader structural decisions embodied in the grammar. In this paper we introduce a new methodology based on the ability of a grammar to reliably capture patterns of linguistic interaction along grammatical axes. Retrieving such patterns of interaction does not rely on atomic retrieval alone, does not risk redundancy and is no more circular than a conventional scientific reliance on auxiliary assumptions. It is also a valid experimental perspective in its own right.
We demonstrate our approach with a series of natural experiments. We find an interaction captured by a phrase structure analysis between attributive adjective phrases under a noun phrase with a noun head, such that the probability of adding successive adjective phrases falls. We note that a similar interaction (between adjectives preceding a noun) can also be found with a simple part-of-speech analysis alone. On the other hand, preverbal adverb phrases do not exhibit this interaction, a result anticipated in the literature, confirming our method.
Turning to cases of embedded postmodifying clauses, we find a similar fall in the additive probability of both successive clauses modifying the same NP and embedding clauses where the NP head is the most recent one. Sequential postmodification of the same head reveals a fall and then a rise in this additive probability. Reviewing cases, we argue that this result can only be explained as a natural phenomenon acting on language production which is expressed by the distribution of cases on an embedding axis, and that this is in fact empirical evidence for a grammatical structure embodying a series of speaker choices.
We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this methodology for a series of applications, including optimising and evaluating grammars, modelling case interaction, contrasting the grammar of multiple languages and language periods, and investigating the impact of psycholinguistic constraints on language production.
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