• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1047-1065
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• 2010

English inversion constructions are not only hard for non-native speakers to learn but also difficult to teach mainly because of their intriguing grammatical and discourse properties. This paper addresses grammatical issues in learning or teaching the so-called 'predicate inversion (PI)' construction (e.g., Equally important in terms of forest depletion is the continuous logging of the forests). In particular, we chart the grammatical (distributional, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) properties of the PI construction, and argue for adata-driven teaching for English grammar. To depart from the arm-chaired style of grammar teaching (relying on author-made simple sentences), our teaching method introduces a datadriven teaching. With total 25 university students in a grammar-related class, students together have analyzed the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), containing about one million words distributed across a variety of textual categories. We have identified total 290 PI sentences (206 from spoken and 87 from written texts). The preposed syntactic categories of the PI involve five main types: AdvP, PP, VP(ed/ing), NP, AP, and so, all of which function as the complement of the copula. In terms of discourse, we have observed, supporting Birner and Ward's (1998) observation that these preposed phrases represent more familiar information than the postposed subject. The corpus examples gave us the three possible types: The preposed element is discourse-old whereas the postposed one is discourse-new as in Putting wire mesh over a few bricks is a good idea. Both preposed and postposed elements can also be discourse new as in But a fly in the ointment is inflation. These two elements can also be discourse old as in Racing with him on the near-side is Rinus. The dominant occurrence of the PI in the spoken texts also supports the view that the balance (or scene-setting) in information structure is the main trigger for the use of the PI construction. After being exposed to the real data and in-depth syntactic as well as informationstructure analysis of the PI construction, it is proved that the class students have had a farmore clear understanding of the construction in question and have realized that grammar does not mean to live on by itself but tightly interacts with other important grammatical components such as information structure. The study directs us toward both a datadriven and interactive grammar teaching.

• Language and Information
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.77-96
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• 2007

This paper investigates syntactic variations in English such as Dative Alternation, Particle Inversion, and Object Postposition (Heavy NP Shift) within the framework of Optimality Theory, and shows that the same set of morphological, informational, and processing constraints affect all these variations. In particular, it shows that the variants that used to be regarded as ungrammatical are in fact used fairly often in reality, especially when processing or informational conditions are met, and therefore, grammatical judgment may not be always categorical but sometimes gradient. It is argued that the notion of distance in constraint ranking in stochastic OT can effectively explain the gradience and variability of grammaticality in the variation phenomena.

• MALSORI
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• no.63
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• pp.23-46
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to compare linguistic features of meter in Amoretti and Sonnets from the Portuguese. Amoretti was composed in the 16th century and Sonnets from the Portuguese in the 19th century. Two poems are very strict in satisfying $^*<_I$(LS that makes a lexical stress matched on a strong position. But they allow a peaked monosyllabic word to be matched on a weak position only if it does not violate $^*(\dot{\sigma}\;{\sigma})$. Syntactic inversions which are found in two poems occur to satisfy metrical constraints and rhyme. Particularly, syntactic inversions for rhyme are mainly found in Amoretti, but are rare in Sonnets from the Portuguese which includes many enjambment lines. Furthermore, this paper shows that syntactic inversions can be explained by the interaction of constraints, such as metrical constraints, SCI, and Binary Foot.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• summer
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• pp.382-386
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• 2004

Recently, with the machine learning trend, most of the machine translation systems on over the world use two syntax tree sets of two relevant languages to learn syntactic tree transfer rules. However, for the English-Vietnamese language pair, this approach is impossible because until now we have not had a Vietnamese syntactic tree set which is correspondent to English one. Building of a very large correspondent Vietnamese syntactic tree set (thousands of trees) requires so much work and take the investment of specialists in linguistics. To take advantage from our available English-Vietnamese Corpus (EVC) which was tagged in word alignment, we choose the SITG (Stochastic Inversion Transduction Grammar) model to construct English- Vietnamese syntactic tree sets automatically. This model is used to parse two languages at the same time and then carry out the syntactic tree transfer. This English-Vietnamese bilingual syntactic tree set is the basic training data to carry out transferring automatically from English syntactic trees to Vietnamese ones by machine learning models. We tested the syntax analysis by comparing over 10,000 sentences in the amount of 500,000 sentences of our English-Vietnamese bilingual corpus and first stage got encouraging result $(analyzed\;about\;80\%)[5].$ We have made use the TBL algorithm (Transformation Based Learning) to carry out automatic transformations from English syntactic trees to Vietnamese ones based on that parallel syntactic tree transfer set[6].

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.37-54
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phenomena of preposing and inversion in English from the discourse-pragmatic perspectives. We claim that different types of preposing can be unified to a single process of topicalization. We also show that diverse discourse functions of inversion can be subsumed under the ‘linking’ function with the prior discourse. It is followed a comparative discussion between preposing and inversion to find what similarities the two constructions share and what differences there exist between the two. It is concluded that the choice of a syntactic forms ultimately depends on the speaker's evaluation of the information status of the knowledge store of the hearer.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.28 no.11
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• pp.822-832
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• 2001

We have implemented an inductive learning system that learns PROSPECTOR-rule-style classification rules from sets of examples. In our a approach, a genetic algorithm is used in which a population consists of rule-sets and rule-sets generate offspring through the exchange of rules relying on genetic operators such as crossover, mutation, and inversion operators. In this paper, we describe our learning environment centering on the syntactic structure and meaning of classification rules, the structure of a population, and the implementation of genetic operators. We also present a method to evaluate the performance of rules and a heuristic approach to generate rules, which are developed to implement mutation operators more efficiently. Moreover, a method to construct a classification system using multiple learned rule-sets to enhance the performance of a classification system is also explained. The performance of our learning system is compared with other learning algorithms, such as neural networks and decision tree algorithms, using various data sets.