Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the process of generating natural language text from an input, which is a communicative goal and a database or knowledge base. Informally, the architecture of a standard NLG system consists of the following modules (Reiter and Dale, 2000): content determination, sentence planning (or microplanning) and surface…

The major portion of this paper is devoted to delineate the types of errors made by Arab learners of English in the area of the article system. By so doing, the paper classifies learners' errors according to the Surface Structure Taxonomies of errors, and illustrates the possible sources of these errors. In order to overcome learners' difficulties…

Prosodic features in spontaneous speech help disambiguate implied meaning not explicit in linguistic surface structure, but little research has examined how these signals manifest themselves in real conversations. Spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between familiar speakers in conversational dyads were acoustically analyzed…

Within linguistics, words with a complex internal structure are commonly assumed to be decomposed into their constituent morphemes (e.g., un-help-ful). Nevertheless, an ongoing debate concerns the brain structures that subserve this process. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study varied the internal complexity of derived…

"Trope" comes from a Greek word meaning "turn." In the rhetorical sense, a trope refers to a "turn" in the way that words are being used to communicate something more than--or different from--a literal or straightforward message. Tropes are part of "deep structure" meanings and include such rhetorical devices as allegories, allusions, euphemisms,…

M. Singh and B. L. Anderson proposed a perceptual theory of achromatic transparency in which the perceived transmittance of a perceived transparent filter is determined by the ratio of the Michelson contrast seen in the region of transparency to that of the background seen directly. Subsequently, B. L. Anderson, M. Singh, and J. Meng proposed that…

All of the data reported in Robilotto, Khang, and Zaidi (2002) Robilotto and Zaidi (2004), and Singh and Anderson (2002) are consistent with Robilotto and Zaidi's theory that perceived transparency (or opacity) is determined by the perceived contrast of the filter region. Kasrai and Kingdom's (2001) results also appear largely consistent with the…

In M. Singh and B. L. Anderson, the authors proposed a model based on ratios of Michelson contrasts to explain how human observers quantitatively scale the perceived opacity of transparent surfaces. In subsequent work by B. L. Anderson, M. Singh, & J. Meng, the authors found that this model failed to generalize to other contexts and replaced it…

One of the main theoretical challenges of vision science is to explain how the visual system interpolates missing structure. Two forms of visual completion have been distinguished on the basis of the phenomenological states that they induce. "Modal" completion refers to the formation of visible surfaces and/or contours in image regions where these…

The purpose of this paper is to examine process- and agent-oriented sentences from the point of view of two theories of grammatical description: case grammar after Fillmore and tranformational grammar with modifications introduced by Chomsky. Subject and object functions are reflected in the initial structures of sentence derivation, regardless of…

A significant discovery of generative theory is that the features present in a lexical entry in a sentence's deep structure influence choice and arrangement of words in the surface structure. The systemic and nonsystemic functions of Spanish count and measure entity nouns are elaborated and analyzed. (CHK)

Explains Spanish pronominalization as one simple process, and notes its application the teaching and learning of Spanish. (CHK)

Although Japanese word order is considered flexible and can often be changed without causing semantic change, there is consistent regidity in the language, as explained here. (CHK)

Proposes an analysis of the impersonal sentence in Russian based on the Fillmorian case grammar model and intended for use in second language instruction. (CHK)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)