The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Syntax

Categories
Experimental Syntax

New Recursion Grant: Tom Roeper and Joonkoo Park (Psychology)

Tom Roeper and Joonkoo Park (Psychology Professor) have received a  $12,000 Seed grant, beginning Sept 1,  from the Developmental Science Initiative (Center for Research on Families) on:

Recursion as an Underlying Mechanism for children’s acquisition of language and mathematics

The grant was developed with assistance from Jaieun Kim, Rong Yin, Michael Wilson, andDiego Lopez (Pyschology Doctoral Candidate) and it will continue acquisition research on connections between different sorts of Self-embedding recurison (PP, Poss, Relative clause, compounds) and the emergence of knowledge of the Successor Principle.  Preliminary evidencesuggests all of these abilities emerge around 5-7yrs.  We will focus on whether they are linked in individuals. The topic is a large one and we hope this Seed Grant will lead to a larger more comprehensive one.

Anyone interested in the grant and/or participating, should let us know!

Categories
Computational Corpus Linguistics Parsing Syntax

TGrep2

In response to Lyn’s query about possible positional effects for distributive phrases, I thought I’d post a short bit on how that information might be found with tools that are readily available. TGrep2 is a utility that allows you to conduct a regexp-like search of corpus that’s parsed in Penn Treebank style, and it’s really useful for asking these sorts of questions. Doug Roland has very helpfully posted some executables of TGrep2. For people using intel-based Macs, this is the probably the simplest way to install the tool on your computer. Download the executable, name it tgrep2, make sure it has the right permissions with chmod (executable), and put it in /usr/local/bin. If it’s installed correctly, you should be able to type tgrep2 from a command prompt and have it display some help.

Continue reading “TGrep2”
Categories
Corpus Linguistics Experimental Semantics Syntax

positional effects for distributives?

Chuck and I have a little study of subjects with split antecedents, including the distributive “neither of them”. Thinking about the issues involved in arriving at distributive interpretations, I started wondering if distributively biased phrases tend to occur in subject position. Does anyone know of a corpus count that might be relevant?

Categories
Computational Experimental Other Parsing Phonetics Phonology Resources Semantics Syntax

LSA online Courses access

Some of the LSA Summer institute courses have been added to the following worksheet – courtesy of one of the attending students:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsAWzrlsDdxTdGZUSU5oejRFWC1Ea05xVGdhNnpMMFE&hl=en_US#gid=0

Note: Not all of them are public – some are accessible only if you have a CU account.