From Theoretical Grammar to Grammatical Competence:An Empirical Study

In China,English teachers usually take a three-step approach to grammar teaching,namely,the presentation—practice—production principle(3P Principle).This method consists of both“morphology”and“syntax.”It adopts the traditional mode of grammar teaching,including knowledge presentation,grammar exercises,and grammatical competence production,which will inevitably lead to time consumption and low efficiency in grammar learning.This study is about cultivating English majors'grammatical competence through the theoretical mode of grammar teaching.The research results show that the theoretical mode of grammar teaching helps cultivate learners'grammatical competence.

The Grammatical Categorization of Mandarin在/zài:Spatiality,Temporality and Semantic Construal

Mandarin在(pinyin:zài)is the most frequently used character in representing spatial and temporal relationship.Current studies mostly focus on its lexical meaning and syntactic structure while cognitive features of its grammatical categories have been neglected.This paper investigates into the categorization of zài by conducting a morphosyntactic test among College English majors in China.The results show that:prototypes are organizing the grammatical categories of zài at all levels in terms of intra-categorial gradience;the semantic construal of zài construction could significantly influence the accuracy of the grammatical categorization of zài;the syntactic structure can provide viable cue for the identification of grammatical categories of zài;spatiality,temporality and the status of existing are three essential semantic features encoded by zài,the concurrence of which leads to various degree of inter-categorial vagueness,indicating a conflict between the rigid grammatical classification and the indeterminate nature of the grammatical functions of zai,suggesting the necessity to reconsider the efficacy of applying indiscriminately the Anglo-Saxon grammar into the study of Chinese spatial-temporal constructions.

The Correlation between Explicit Grammatical Knowledge,Implicit Grammatical Knowledge and Reading Comprehension Ability of Senior High School Students

The role of grammar in language teaching has always been the question that researchers debate.In recent years,grammar knowledge has been distinguished in the foreign language acquisition research,namely the implicit knowledge and the explicit knowledge(Dai Manchun 2005;Gu Qiyi 2005).As to the reaserch of implicit and explicit grammar knowledge as well as their measurement,it is easy to find that many scholars have studied the role of two different kinds of grammar knowledge in second language development.But the research on the role of implicit and explicit grammar knowledge in second language reading comprehension is too few,not to mention the research on the role of implicit and explicit grammar knowledge in English reading comprehension in the senior high school.The purpose of this study is to find the relationship between implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge and English reading comprehension ability of senior high school students.In addition,since the vocabulary is important to reading comprehension,this factor will also be considered in the study.

语法一致(grammatical conaord)与概念一致(notional concord)

根据“概念一致”的原则,there's+复数名词是“'s”用法的一种发展趋势。

On the Cognitive Mechanism of Grammatical Metaphor

The previous studies of grammatical metaphor mainly emphasized its metafunctions or the classifications and identifications in discourse, and treated rankshift as its mechanism of occurrence. However, the question is ＂Why does the rankshift make it possible？＂ This paper is going to study grammatical metaphor from a cognitive perspective and will treat cross-grammatical domain mapping as its mechanism of occurrence.

The Study of Chinese Poem Translation from the Perspective of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor

The study aims to make a comparative study of 3 translated versions of Niao Ming Chien written by Chinese ancient poet Wang Wei from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor for the purpose of finding out how grammatical metaphor can provide a peculiar insight to the translation of Chinese poems.

The analysis of grammatical metaphor in the two translations of A Dream of Red Mansion

Despite the various perspectives of the study of the two English translations of A Dream of Red Mansion, very few studies probe into them from the angle of grammatical metaphor. The paper attempts to conduct a qualitative and quantitative study of the two English translations based on the three grammatical metaphors, trying to prove that grammatical metaphor can be used to decipher and unveil some phenomena in translation as well as being used as a criterion to assess the translation.

The Grammatical Features of Song Lyrics of Bruno Mars——On Examples of4 Number-one Singles on the Billboard Hot 100

Music,as an informal variety of language,is an indispensable component of culture,which has permeated into every corner of society,with an extreme intimate tie with people’s everyday life.Song lyrics,the carrier of music,are the representation of the style of this language variety,music.Once song lyrics are written,not matched with the melody,they acquire the independent value of literature.As a result,stylistic features of song lyrics are certainly different from those features of poetry,prose,novel,etc.Therefore,it is of necessity and importance to study the stylistic features of song lyrics.Bruno Mars,as a singer and songwriter,is now regarded as one of the most successful solo artists in all over the world.He participates in the creation of his songs.This paper,from the point of stylistics,aims at the analysis of the grammatical features of the pop songs of Bruno Mars on examples of 4 number-one singles on th e Billboard Hot 100.

Understanding the Gap between Grammatical Knowledge and Competence: An Exploratory Practice

As an Exploratory Practice conducted in the micro-context of language classrooms,this study aims to establish an ex?plicit understanding of the gap between students’grammatical knowledge and competence.Through integrating the“work for understanding”into the existing pedagogical procedures,both students and the teacher contributed some insightful explanations to this puzzle.With these underling reasons brought to surface,the main players of the classrooms can make some contextually ap?propriate changes to their classroom life.

Grammatical and Lexical Errors in Students＇ English Composition Writing： The Case of Three Senior High Schools （SHS） in the Central Region of Ghana

This is a qualitative study aimed at finding the lexical and grammatical errors students of three Senior High Schoolsin the Central Region of Ghana commit in their essay writing. The study also sought to examine the frequency ofthe errors and what can be done to improve the teaching of L2 （English） writing in the Senior High School. Thestudy used a corpus of essay writings of 150 second year students. The schools and the participants werepurposively selected. The data were analyzed using the content analysis approach. The study identified that thelexical errors in the students＇ writing were due to homophone problems and semantic lexical errors. Thegrammatical errors identified were agreement errors, tense errors, singular-plural （number） errors, prepositionalerrors, and article errors. The study also found that the most frequently committed grammatical error was tenseerrors followed by agreement errors. The implications of these findings to the teaching of English writing are thatteachers where possible should have understanding of both the L1 and L2 of the students and teachers shouldexplicitly teach for transfer, have adequate knowledge of how to identify students＇ writing errors, and use effectiveteaching strategies to improve students＇ English writing. Additionally, teachers should serve as models of usingappropriate English for students to emulate and also create a conducive classroom environment for students toparticipate in class activities. Lastly, teachers should create more opportunities for students to write.

Second Language Learners＇ Intuitions of Grammaticality

The cornerstone and the single most fundamental change in perspective on the nature of language and language learning is, perhaps, the focus on learners as active creators in their learning process, not as passive recipients. The study aims at investigating some second language learners＇ meta-linguistic ability in solving multidimensional grammatical problems. The subjects of the present study were 40 Egyptian students who were in their fourth year of academic study in the Department of English and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Menufia University, Egypt. The instrument of this study consisted of pre-test, post-test and individual interviews. Two tasks were used： （1） ＂Sentence Completion＂ task; and （2） ＂Error Recognition and Correction＂ task. Finally, students were interviewed to explain and comment on their performance in the previous tasks. The data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Results were obtained and conclusions were made.

Grammatical Differences in National Standards of English

English is a world-wide language, while it is not all the same in English-speaking countries. This paper analyzes the difference of English among several English-speaking countries from the viewpoints of grammar.

Grammatical Ambiguity in English

In English, ambiguity often causes trouble and difficulty. This paper aims at introducing some strategies for dealing with various cases of ambiguity by its grammatical characters and some methods to absolve the grammatical ambiguity.

Analysis of Common Grammatical“Errors”in Learner English of China's Mainland

By examining twenty TOEFL mock writings from Shenzhen high school students,this paper attempts to have a further analysis on learner English in China with regard to its common grammatical"errors"and their possible underlying causes.Some common grammatical errors include misuse of past tense,word class,existential structure,and also topic comment sentence,most of which are due to transfer of Chinese.

Rapid Prototype Development Approach for Genetic Programming

Genetic Programming (GP) is an important approach to deal with complex problem analysis and modeling, and has been applied in a wide range of areas. The development of GP involves various aspects, including design of genetic operators, evolutionary controls and implementations of heuristic strategy, evaluations and other mechanisms. When designing genetic operators, it is necessary to consider the possible limitations of encoding methods of individuals. And when selecting evolutionary control strategies, it is also necessary to balance search efficiency and diversity based on representation characteristics as well as the problem itself. More importantly, all of these matters, among others, have to be implemented through tedious coding work. Therefore, GP development is both complex and time-consuming. To overcome some of these difficulties that hinder the enhancement of GP development efficiency, we explore the feasibility of mutual assistance among GP variants, and then propose a rapid GP prototyping development method based on πGrammatical Evolution (πGE). It is demonstrated through regression analysis experiments that not only is this method beneficial for the GP developers to get rid of some tedious implementations, but also enables them to concentrate on the essence of the referred problem, such as individual representation, decoding means and evaluation. Additionally, it provides new insights into the roles of individual delineations in phenotypes and semantic research of individuals.

COMMUNICATION ON-LINE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMATICAL COMPETENCE

It is questioned whether network-based communication aids the development of grammatical competence in teaching English as a foreign language. We studied the on-line communication between students of a Chinese university and a Japanese university and found that network-based communication holds similar potential for the development of grammatical competence as does oral interaction.

Exploiting Unlabeled Data for Neural Grammatical Error Detection

Identifying and correcting grammatical errors in the text written by non-native writers have received increasing attention in recent years. Although a number of annotated corpora have been established to facilitate data-driven grammatical error detection and correction approaches, they are still limited in terms of quantity and coverage because human annotation is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. In this work, we propose to utilize unlabeled data to train neural network based grammatical error detection models. The basic idea is to cast error detection as a binary classification problem and derive positive and negative training examples from unlabeled data. We introduce an attention-based neural network to capture long-distance dependencies that influence the word being detected. Experiments show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms SVM and convolutional networks with fixed-size context window.

The Influence of L2 on L1 Lexical Competence and Grammatical Properties in Written Expressions

This article reports a study on the impact of L2 Korean on L1 Chinese lexical diversity and grammar in written expressions by Chinese bilinguals proficient in Korean. The statistical analysis showed that the cross-linguistic effects of L2 on L1 were significant although such impact was bidirectional. There were significantly more grammar errors and longer retrieval time committed by the bilingual group which implied negative L2 transfer to L1. Meanwhile, L2 also showed a positive influence on lexical diversity as there was no decline in lexical richness but an increase in lexical variations, and this indicated that L2-induced patterns did not replace or deteriorate L1 but instead added additional options to L1 expressions. This phenomenon can be characterized as the addition of new concepts and linguistic options to the already-existing L1 and conceptual repertoire. Specifically, meta-linguistic competence was enhanced. This research supports the theory of interference on L1 by the use of L2 （negative transfer）, but it could also be enhanced by L2 （positive transfer）.

Controllable data synthesis method for grammatical error correction

Due to the lack of parallel data in current grammatical error correction(GEC)task,models based on sequence to sequence framework cannot be adequately trained to obtain higher performance.We propose two data synthesis methods which can control the error rate and the ratio of error types on synthetic data.The first approach is to corrupt each word in the monolingual corpus with a fixed probability,including replacement,insertion and deletion.Another approach is to train error generation models and further filtering the decoding results of the models.The experiments on different synthetic data show that the error rate is 40%and that the ratio of error types is the same can improve the model performance better.Finally,we synthesize about 100 million data and achieve comparable performance as the state of the art,which uses twice as much data as we use.

The Inverted Spectrum,Qualia,and Wittgenstein’s Grammatical Analysis

In“Wittgenstein and Qualia,”Ned Block presents an inversion argument for qualia.Taking Wittgenstein’s notes as the starting point,Block argues that if we admit the possibility of the“innocuous”inverted spectrum,we will have to accept the“dangerous”inverted spectrum,where qualia are ineffable contents of experience contents that cannot be fully captured by public language.In my opinion,Block’s argument merits suspicion as it begs the question.While claiming to oppose the inner arena model like Wittgenstein,he presupposes its validity in his argument.I will finally examine how Wittgenstein dissolves confusion about qualia by the way of grammatical analysis.