We consider the reference-based approach for Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) that involves scoring a textual constructed student answer comparing to a teacher-provided reference answer. The reference answer does not cover the variety of student answers as it contains only specific examples of correct answers. Considering other language…

The use of present and past participles and gerunds was summarized and illustrated from various examples cited or given, on the basis of the writer's teaching experience, and extensive review of different English grammar books, reference books, magazines, newspapers, books, English dictionaries, and online articles, in order for English language…

In the thesis a coherent text is defined as a continuity of senses of the outcome of combining concepts and relations into a network composed of knowledge space centered around main topics. And the author maintains that in order to obtain the coherence of a target language text from a source text during the process of translation, a translator can…

The academic demands of classroom English require students to think about language structure in ways that they are not used to. Everybody "knows" much English grammar intuitively but the academic rules themselves can be difficult to articulate. This goes for punctuation, too: errors often reflect students' lack of explicit knowledge of grammatical…

Presents clues for determining whether "short passives," passive sentences from which the "by"-phrase has been deleted, are actually passive or stative. The clues include intensifiers, the verb "seems," contrasts, present tense, past tense, progressive aspect, and confirmation by examples. (CB)

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in…

All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs--more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any…

Compares and contrasts the progressive constructions in English and Japanese, concluding that whereas an English sentence of this type refers to a dynamic state, this need not be the case in Japanese. The article argues that the progressive operators in both English (be-ing) and Japanese (-teiru) can be characterized as stativizer. (18 references)…

Presents two different types of progressive construction in Spanish and Catalan, one referring to a state or event, and the other to the development of an event. The article argues that the first is predicated of a homogenous period of time, whereas the other is predicated of a period of time divided into consecutive phases. (23 references)…

Analyzes numerous examples of English and German verbs with respect to alternations they undergo and concludes that the semantic classes of verbs that undergo a particular alternation differ between these two languages but that there are some semantic constraints on this variation. The article stresses the limited nature of the study. (Seven…

Examines "it"-clefts and "wh"-clefts in English and their Chinese equivalents in a universal, functional perspective that consists of assigning "participant roles" in processing a clause. The analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focusing constructions provides greater insight into the discourse…

This paper offers evidence for the Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis, which holds that individuals with agrammatic aphasia tend to have difficulty comprehending sentences in which the order of NPs is not aligned with the structure of the corresponding event. We begin by identifying a set of constructions in English and Korean for which the IMH makes…

Demonstrates the similarities between English and Farsi with respect to discourse-functional constraints on inversion. It is argued that this phenomenon is significant because these two languages exhibit different canonical word order and thus expectations can be raised from some functional-syntactic universals. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Some differences between Western and Chinese thought patterns are highlighted to help language teachers better prepare teaching strategies for Chinese-speaking students. Differences discussed include emphasis given to bigger/smaller units, tense, direct/indirect expression, individualism, appropriate behavior, linear vs. circular thinking…

Presents a comparative semantic analysis of English, French, and Dutch transitive constructions that takes into account the entity that sets the event in motion, the object it affects, and the process that links both. (18 references) (Author/CK)