Analysis of the Role of Syntactic Complexity in Students’ Reading Comprehension: A Teacher’s Perspective

This study examines the role of the syntactic complexity of the text in the reading comprehension skills of students.Utilizing the qualitative method of research,this paper used structured interview questions as the main data-gathering instruments.English language teachers from Coral na Munti National High School were selected as the respondents of the study.Finding of the study suggests that the syntactic complexity of the text affects the reading comprehension of the students.Students found it challenging to understand the message that the author conveyed if he or she used a large number of phrases and clauses in one sentence.Furthermore,the complex sentence syntactic structure was deemed the most challenging for students to understand.To overcome said challenges in comprehending text,various reading intervention programs were utilized by teachers.These interventions include focused or targeted instruction and the implementation of the Project Dear,suggested by the Department of Education.These programs were proven to help students improve their comprehension as well as their knowledge in syntactical structure of sentences.This study underscores the importance of selecting appropriate reading materials and implementing suitable reading intervention programs to enhance students’comprehension skills.

Effects of Topic Structure and Syntax on Boundary Pitch Variations

This paper reported an acoustic experiment examining the effect of topic structure and syntax on boundary pitch parameters. Simple discourses containing three sentences were constructed and the boundary between the first sentence and the second sentence of each discourse varied along the following parameters： （1） topic internal, clause; （2） topic shift, clause; （3） topic internal, sentence; and （4） topic shift, sentence. Seven native speakers of Standard Chinese read the short discourses aloud. The offset f0, f0 Max, and f0 Min of the first sentence and the onset f0, f0 Max, and f0 Min of the second sentence were measured. It was found that relative to topic internal condition, topic shift condition induced higher onset f0 following the boundary. Moreover, this higher onset f0 was caused by the raising of both f0 max and f0 min, suggesting pitch register raising rather than pitch range expansion following the boundary. Syntactic structure as index by clause or sentence was found to have no effect on boundary pitch parameters. These results provide strong evidence for a role of topic strucutre in speech production

On the Syntactic Structure of English Get-passive

We summarized the interpretations of syntactic structure of English get-passive based on the analyses of passive get and the get-passive. We conclude that the passive get in get-passive equals to a lexical verb considering its syntactic representation and the get-passive represent itself as an actional passive of which the subject is responsible for the event denoted by the action.Concerning the interpretation, we consider get-passive as a reflexive ECM(exceptional case-marking)-construction.

The Transformation of Thought Patterns in English-Chinese Translation

Translation involves not only formal transformation of two languages concerned, but also conversion of thought patterns. The oriental thought pattern is considered ＂concrete＂, ＂man-centered＂, and ＂ordinal＂; while the western one is believed to be ＂abstract＂, ＂object-centered＂, and ＂conversed＂. These are the decisive factors for the existence of the differences in language expressing. It is of great importance to study these differences and make some adjustments in terms of syntactic structure, semantic focus, and time order so as to achieve a natural rending.

A Hybrid Method of Domain Lexicon Construction for Opinion Targets Extraction Using Syntax and Semantics

Opinion targets extraction of Chinese microblogs plays an important role in opinion mining. There has been a significant progress in this area recently, especially the method based on conditional random field （CRF）. However, this method only takes lexicon-related features into consideration and does not excavate the implied syntactic and semantic knowledge. We propose a novel approach which incorporates domain lexicon with groups of syntactical and semantic features. The approach acquires domain lexicon through a novel way which explores syntactic and semantic information through Part- of-Speech, dependency structure, phrase structure, semantic role and semantic similarity based on word embedding. And then we combine the domain lexicon with opinion targets extracted from CRF with groups of features for opinion targets extraction. Experimental results on COAE2014 dataset show the outperformance of the approach compared with other well-known methods on the task of opinion targets extraction.