A statistical model of the grammatical choices in child production of dative sentences

Marneffe, Marie-Catherine de; Grimm, Scott; Arnon, Inbal; Kirby, Susannah; Bresnan, Joan

doi:10.1080/01690965.2010.542651

Cited by 38 publications

(52 citation statements)

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“…A robust finding accross studies is that inanimate, indefinite, nominal, or longer arguments tend to be placed in the final complement position of the dative construction, while animate, definite, pronominal, or shorter arguments are placed next to the verb, preceding the other complement (de Marneffe et al, 2012). This means, for instance, that if a recipient of the dative construction is pronominal, such as me, it will tend to occur immediately after the verb, triggering a double object dative.…”

Section: The Dative Construction In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, the present contribution continues a line of research introduced by de Marneffe et al (2012), who formulate three research questions:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The present study addresses this question by applying a well-developed exemplar-based machine learning model incrementally to children's linguistic experiences, represented by samples of child and caregiver productions from the CHILDES corpora (MacWhinney, 2000), gathered for the prior study of de Marneffe et al (2012). In terms of computational theory, the model used in the present study is one of the class of mathematical kernel methods from Machine Learning theory, which encompass classical learning models such as exemplar theory (Jäkel et al, 2009;Nosofsky, 1986).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We do so on the basis of a case study with the dative alternation in English, building on a study by de Marneffe et al (2012) who model the production of the dative alternation by seven young children, using data from the Child Language Data Exchange System corpus. Using mixed-effects logistic modelling on the aggregated data of these children, De Marneffe et al report that the children's choices can be predicted both by their own utterances and by child-directed speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Modeling dative alternations of individual children

Bosch

Bresnan²

2015

Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

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We address the question whether children can acquire mature use of higher-level grammatical choices from the linguistic input, given only general prior knowledge and learning biases. We do so on the basis of a case study with the dative alternation in English, building on a study by de Marneffe et al. (2012) who model the production of the dative alternation by seven young children, using data from the Child Language Data Exchange System corpus. Using mixed-effects logistic modelling on the aggregated data of these children, De Marneffe et al. report that the children's choices can be predicted both by their own utterances and by child-directed speech. Here we bring the computational modeling down to the individual child, using memory-based learning and incremental learning curve studies. We observe that for all children, their dative choices are best predicted by a model trained on childdirected speech. Yet, models trained on two individual children for which sufficient data is available are about as accurate. Furthermore, models trained on the dative alternations of these children provide approximations of dative alternations in caregiver speech that are about as accurate as training and testing on caregiver data only.

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Section: The Dative Construction In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, the present contribution continues a line of research introduced by de Marneffe et al (2012), who formulate three research questions:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Modeling dative alternations of individual children

Bosch

Bresnan²

2015

Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning

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“…There is solid evidence that the speaker"s choice for one of the two constructions is motivated by verbal semantics as well as discourse-pragmatic and semantic factors associated with the two objects involved (Thompson 1995, Bresnan & Hay 2008, Bresnan 2007, Bresnan & Nikitina 2009, Kendall, Bresnan & Van Herk 2011, de Marneffe, et al 2012, Theijssen 2012. The results of recent studies further suggest that the extra-linguistic factors modality (written vs. spoken) and macro-linguistic region may also be involved in the choice of order (Bresnan & Ford 2010, Wolk, et al 2012, Theijssen, et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Old Englishto-dative construction

Cuypere¹

2014

English Language and Linguistics

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1 Acknowledgements: I wish to acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions by Cynthia Allen and Harold Koch. I am grateful to Daan Van den Nest for assisting me with the retrieval of the corpus data I also thank Joan Bresnan for providing me with an R script to perform the crossvalidation test. Finally, I am grateful to the editor and the referees for several comments and suggestions that helped to improve the paper. 2 AbstractIn Present Day English (PDE), the to-dative construction refers to clauses like John told/offered/mentioned/gave the books to Mary, in which a ditransitive verb takes a Recipient that is expressed as a to-Prepositional Phrase (to-PP). This study examines the to-dative construction in Old English (OE). I show, first of all, that this construction was not rare in OE, in contrast to what has been suggested in the literature. Second, I report on two corpus studies in which I examined the ordering behaviour of the NP and the to-PP. The results of the first study suggest that the same ordering tendencies already existed in OE as in PDE: both the NP-to-PP and the to-PP-NP orders were grammatical, but the NP-to-PP was the most frequently used one. However, in OE, the to-PP-NP was more common than in PDE, where its use is heavily restricted. My second corpus study is informed by the multifactorial approach to the English dative alternation and uses a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis to evaluate the effects of various linguistic (verbal semantics, pronominality, animacy, definiteness, number, person and length) and extralinguistic variables (translation status, time of completion/manuscript) on the ordering of NP and to-PP. The main finding is that, generally speaking, the same factors that motivate the dative alternation in PDE were involved in OE as well. No evidence was found for the influence of verbal semantics nor of the extra-linguistic variables. Finally, I argue against the view that to was semantically reanalysed from a Goal to a Recipient marker from OE to ME. Building on evidence that the Recipient use of to was already embryonically present in OE, I make the case that this semantic change was far more gradual than traditionally assumed. 1 BACKGROUNDThis study examines the Old English (OE) roots of the to-dative construction, defined as the clausal pattern given in (1) and as illustrated in (2): (1) [ditransitive verb + NP + to-P(repositional) P(hrase)](2) I offer/give/sell/send/show/donate the books to Mary.The to-dative construction features a to-PP referring to a third participant in a state of affairs that generally involves some kind of transfer and an NP referring to the object of transfer. Note, however, that the same pattern can also be used, however, with a verb that denotes the denial of a transfer, as in (3), or the deprivation of a possession, as in (4) The IRS is unionized, and the union apparently has the fear that outsourcing will cost jobs to their members.In PDE, the to-dative construction alternates with the Double Object Construction (DOC), as illustrated in ...

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Product online review analysis using fuzzy ontology

Yao

Jin

2022

Syst Res Behav Sci

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This paper analyses the online text comments in the online trading platform and identifies the abnormal and contradictory comments. Firstly, the abnormal contradiction detection and analysis model of online text reviews is constructed based on fuzzy ontology to identify the abnormal and contradictory online text reviews. Secondly, the fuzzy emotional ontology and emotional tendency analysis method identify abnormal and contradictory online text reviews. The online text review anomaly detection and analysis model constructed enriches the process and method of online review anomaly identification.

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A statistical model of the grammatical choices in child production of dative sentences

Cited by 38 publications

References 81 publications

Modeling dative alternations of individual children

Modeling dative alternations of individual children

The Old Englishto-dative construction

Product online review analysis using fuzzy ontology

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