A Measure of Aggregate Syntactic Distance
We compare vectors containing counts of trigrams of part-of-speech (POS) tags in order to obtain an aggregate measure of syntax difference. Since lexical syntactic categories reflect more abstract syntax as well, we argue that this procedure reflects more than just the basic syntactic categories. We tag the material automatically and analyze the frequency vectors for POS trigrams using a permutation test. A test analysis of a 305,000 word corpus containing the English of Finnish emigrants to Australia is promising in that the procedure proposed works well in distinguishing two different groups (adult vs. child emigrants) and also in highlighting syntactic deviations between the two groups.
Measuring Syntactic Distances between Dialects: A Web Application for Annotating Dialectal Data
Abstract Research in dialectal variation allows linguists to understand the fundamental principles that underlie language systems and gram- matical changes in time and space. Since different dialectal variants do not occur randomly on the territory and geographical patterns of variation are recognizable for an individual syntactic form, we believe that a systematic approach for studying these variations is required. In this paper, we present a Web application for annotating dialectal data; the annotated data will be adopted for investigating measures of the degree of syntactic differences between dialects.
Inquiring "Tree of Life" at Home: Persian Classic Literature in English Classes.
The recent decades of English Language Teaching (ELT) appear to be particularly concerned with the marginalisation caused by English linguistic, cultural, and academic colonisation and imperialism. Bold footprints of this academic monopoly can be seen in the wide incorporation of abridged or unabridged British and American literary works in foreign language settings. Such literary products are often legitimised as authentic materials authored by native speakers. Inspired by the idea of incorporating non-native literature and translated first language literature into English classes, the authors of this article sought to explore the possibilities of opening spaces for English translations of Persian classic works of literature in English as foreign language classrooms and tracing the language events that unfolded as a result of incorporating such literature. The participants of this two-semester long action research project were non-English major Iranian female university students, majoring in various fields at Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran. The sense of familiarity the students had with such national literary works led to the emergence of language instances lightened by sparks of virtue, vision, life and art.