Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
The main goal of this research is to build a sentiment analysis system which automatically determines user opinions of the Stanford Sentiment Treebank in terms of three sentiments such as positive, negative, and neutral. Firstly, sentiment sentences are POS tagged and parsed to dependency structures. All nodes of the Treebank and their polarities are automatically extracted from the Treebank. We train two Support Vector Machines models. One is for a node level classification and the other is for a sentence level. We have tried various type of features such as word lexicons, POS tags, Sentiment lexicons, head-modifier relations, and sibling relations. Though we acquired 74.2% in accuracy on the test set for 3 class node level classification and 67.0% for 3 class sentence level classification, our experimental results for 2 class classification are comparable to those of the state of art system using the same corpus.
Developing an app version of a printed dictionary is a new challenge faced by lexicographers. Lexicographers involved in the app development process must consider fundamental lexicographic aspects as well as learn to understand technological and usage issues inherent to the new media. An inevitable question is how closely the content and layout can be made to match the printed dictionary while still offering ‘digital’ functionality such as linking, collapsed sections, audio, etc. Only a few reports discussing these issues have so far been published. The aim of our paper is to further advance the exchange of knowledge and experience by sharing our observations made during the development of a new app corresponding to the comprehensive printed dictionary, Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien (the Contemporary Dictionary of the Swedish Academy, 2009). The app is the result of close cooperation between the financer The Swedish Academy, lexicographers and system developers at the Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg and Isolve AB, a Stockholm-based app development agency specializing in dictionary apps.
Recent years have seen an increased interest in and availability of many different kinds of corpora. These range from small, but carefully annotated treebanks to large parallel corpora and very lar...
BACKGROUND: Impaired emotion regulation is increasingly recognized as a core feature of depressive disorders. Indeed, currently and previously depressed adults both report greater problems in attenuating sadness (mood repair) in daily life than healthy controls. In contrast, studies of various strategies to attenuate sad affect have mostly found that currently or previously depressed adults and controls were similarly successful at mood repair in the laboratory. But few studies have examined mood repair among depression-prone youths or the effects of trait characteristics on mood repair outcomes in the laboratory. METHODS: Adolescents, whose first episode of major depressive disorder (MDD) had onset at age 9, on average (probands), and were either in remission or depressed, and control peers, watched a sad film clip. Then, they were instructed to engage in refocusing attention (distraction) or recalling happy memories. Using affect ratings provided by the youths, we tested two developmentally informed hypotheses about whether the subject groups would be similarly able to attenuate sadness via the two mood repair strategies. We also explored if self-reported habitual (trait) mood repair influenced laboratory performance. RESULTS: Contrary to expectations, attention refocusing and recall of happy memories led to comparable mood benefits across subjects. Control adolescents reported significantly greater reductions in sadness than did depressed (Cohen's d =.48) or remitted (Cohen's d =.32) probands, regardless of mood repair strategy, while currently depressed probands remained the saddest after mood repair. Habitual mood repair styles moderated the effects of instructed (state) mood repair in the laboratory. CONCLUSIONS: Whether depressed or in remission, adolescents with MDD histories are not as efficient at mood repair in the laboratory as controls. But proband-control group differences in mood repair outcomes were modest in scope, suggesting that the abilities that subserve affect regulation have been preserved in probands to some degree. Further information about the nature of mood repair problems among youths with depression histories would help to better understand the clinical course of MDD and to design personalized interventions for depression.
International audience
We describe a simple neural language model that relies only on character-level inputs. Predictions are still made at the word-level. Our model employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a highway network over characters, whose output is given to a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network language model (RNN-LM). On the English Penn Treebank the model is on par with the existing state-of-the-art despite having 60% fewer parameters. On languages with rich morphology (Arabic, Czech, French, German, Spanish, Russian), the model outperforms word-level/morpheme-level LSTM baselines, again with fewer parameters. The results suggest that on many languages, character inputs are sufficient for language modeling. Analysis of word representations obtained from the character composition part of the model reveals that the model is able to encode, from characters only, both semantic and orthographic information.
The article deals with the factors defining the creative potential of child speech. Special significance is assigned to heuristic mechanisms responsible for the system’s sharp “nose”, typical of a child at the stage of self-learning a language (in the period of pre-school ontogenesis). The article substantiates the idea about a close relationship between the compensatory function (compensating for the lexical deficit) and the conventional game function of child speech innovations. The experimental nature of child speech discloses the spontaneous quick wit of the child by potential semantic filling of “ready-made” and “invented” words, including the ability “to think by means of imagery analogy”. Object standards that lie at the basis of intentional or unintentional metaphors are characterized in the light of child mentality (“personification of everything”, dominants of personal meaning, etc.). In the situation of “ignoring” the norm, intuition, as a heuristic vector of child linguistic mentality, “prompts” them a non-standard solution. The article describes the strategy of word manipulation in the child’s communication with grown-ups as one of the early forms of manifestation of intention to language games. Literal interpretation of phraseological units is analyzed as the language game resource. The article presents a fragment of the vocabulary of “aphoristic literalisms” of child speech. Transition of child heuristics into a “conscious” state is considered to be the basic principle of organization of training verbal creativity.
The critical role first aid responders, relief workers, and other medical personnel play in crisis and disaster settings cannot be understated. Especially in conflict areas, medical personnel face numerous threats to their security and physical well-being, putting them at risk of developing psychiatric symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Because lay medics frequently function as the primary health providers in low-resource conflict situations, their mental health is crucial to the delivery of services to afflicted populations. In this chapter we examine the experiences of community health workers who serve displaced and war-affected populations in Karen State, eastern Burma. The evidence presented is based on the authors' previous qualitative research with this population. Though it is impossible to neatly deconstruct the myriad experiences of suffering, perseverance, and survivorship intrinsic to these medics' lives into the academic frameworks of psychology and psychiatry, an attempt at finding patterns in their narratives that parallel concepts in mental health literature may be helpful in developing evidence-based interventions. Incongruities are implicit in generalizations, and constant awareness of cultural relativism among widely different societal and linguistic norms must be maintained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
In our paper, we take a constructivist approach to early forms of ‘academic language’, based on a conversation analytic framework. Adopting an interactional linguistic framework that is based on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic theoretical thinking, we aim to describe the social and linguistic norms that emerge in so-called ‘morning circles’, a highly ritualised interactional routine that transfers part of the interactional responsibility to the children and at the same time teaches the prerequisites for specific communicative practices. As morning circles are turned into language teaching lessons on a regular basis, we describe the linguistic features that emerge as learning objects, and some of the learning practices in which they are embedded. We will argue that language learning practices are situated practices, connecting the use of linguistic forms with ideologies of linguistic and social appropriateness. Our analysis is based on video recordings of three sessions in a first grade class in a primary school in a medium sized town in Germany, which have been transcribed and qualitatively analysed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Artikeln presenterar en ny och framväxande genre vid svenska myndigheter, nämligen värdegrunder. Värdegrundstexterna ses här som en del i en förändrad diskurs, där det blir allt viktigare att presentera den egna myndigheten positivt. I så måtto liknar värdegrunderna marknadsföringstexter, men de kan också betraktas som styrinstrument. Eftersom texterna artikulerar ett förväntat beteende, till exempel att myndigheten är effektiv och engagerad, erbjuder de ett subtilt sätt att reglera beteende hos de anställda. Artikelns fokus är värde-grundstexternas relation till klarspråksnormen. Analyser av tre värdegrundstexter visar att texterna knappast innebär begriplighetsproblem, även om de många abstrakta orden kan innebära problem. Andra problematiska aspekter med värdegrunderna är att de bidrar till att utöka myndigheternas textrepertoar, och därmed kostar arbetstid och pengar. De har också en tendens att vara kommunikativt oklara, och kan i värsta fall dölja problem, eftersom de är skrivna som påståenden (vi är effektiva) snarare än som uppmaningar (vi ska vara effektiva). Ur språkvårdsperspektiv innebär texterna en möjlighet att diskutera vilka texter som ska om-fattas av kravet på klarspråk, och kan på så sätt möjligen bidra till att begreppet klarspråk blir snävare och skarpare.Abstract:This article presents a relatively new and evolving genre at public authorities, the platform of values (värdegrund). The platform of values is presented as part of a changing discourse, where presenting the public authority in question in a positive manner is getting increasingly more important. In this respect, the platforms of values resemble marketing texts, but they are also regarded as tools for governing. Since the texts articulate an expected manner of behaviour, for example that the authority is efficient and committed, they offer a subtle way of imposing a code of conduct on employees. The main focus in the article is on the relation between plain language norms and the genre of platform of values. Textual analysis of three platforms of values reveals that there are not many problems of comprehensibility, but that the level of lexical abstraction might pose a problem for readers. There are also other problems related to the platforms of values. They increase the amount of texts and genres within the public authorities, which increases costs in time and money. They also tend to be unclear communicatively, and might gloss over problems of behaviour, since they are written in a declarative mode. From a language policy perspective, they offer an opportunity to discuss the boundaries of plain language, and possible sharpen the concept of plain language practice.
At every level of the language (phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic), Mateiu Caragiale's prose and poetry display features of the standard norm of the epoch (often dialectal) as well as to the dominant norm of the epoch, the author oscillating permanently between the two of them. To adequately interpret the language peculiarities of the author's works, one needs to distinguish clearly between the epoch norm (the literary norm of a certain period, subsequently turned into archaism) and the dominant norm.
Recent evidence suggests that lexical-semantic activation spread during language production can be dynamically shaped by contextual factors. In this study we investigated whether semantic processing modes can also affect lexical-semantic activation during word production. Specifically, we tested whether the processing of linguistic ambiguities, presented in the form of puns, has an influence on the co-activation of unrelated meanings of homophones in a subsequent language production task. In a picture-word interference paradigm with word distractors that were semantically related or unrelated to the non-depicted meanings of homophones we found facilitation induced by related words only when participants listened to puns before object naming, but not when they heard jokes with unambiguous linguistic stimuli. This finding suggests that a semantic processing mode of ambiguity perception can induce the co-activation of alternative homophone meanings during speech planning. [ABSTRACT FROM )
Bilingual dictionaries for technical terms such as biomedical terms are an important resource for machine translation systems as well as for humans who would like to understand a concept described in a foreign language. Often a biomedical term is first proposed in English and later it is manually translated to other languages. Despite the fact that there are large monolingual lexicons of biomedical terms, only a fraction of those term lexicons are translated to other languages. Manually compiling large-scale bilingual dictionaries for technical domains is a challenging task because it is difficult to find a sufficiently large number of bilingual experts. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting most similar translation candidates for a biomedical term specified in one language (source) from another language (target). Specifically, a biomedical term in a language is represented using two types of features: (a) intrinsic features that consist of character n-grams extr)
Do principles of language processing in the brain affect the way grammar evolves over time or is language change just a matter of socio-historical contingency? While the balance of evidence has been ambiguous and controversial, we identify here a neurophysiological constraint on the processing of language that has a systematic effect on the evolution of how noun phrases are marked by case (i.e. by such contrasts as between the English base form she and the object form her). In neurophysiological experiments across diverse languages we found that during processing, participants initially interpret the first base-form noun phrase they hear (e.g. she…) as an agent (which would fit a continuation like … greeted him), even when the sentence later requires the interpretation of a patient role (as in … was greeted). We show that this processing principle is also operative in Hindi, a language where initial base-form noun phrases most commonly denote patients because many agents receive a spe)
We highlight the main changes recently undergone by the Italian Dependency Treebank in the transition to an extended and revised edition, compliant with the annotation schema of Universal Dependencies. We explore how these changes affect the accuracy of dependency parsers, performing comparative tests on various versions of the treebank. Despite significant changes in the annotation style, statistical parsers seem to cope well and mostly improve.
Playing certain types of video games for a long time can improve a wide range of mental processes, from visual acuity to cognitive control. Frequent gamers have also displayed generalized improvements in perceptual learning. In the Texture Discrimination Task (TDT), a widely used perceptual learning paradigm, participants report the orientation of a target embedded in a field of lines and demonstrate robust over-night improvement. However, changing the orientation of the background lines midway through TDT training interferes with overnight improvements in overall performance on TDT. Interestingly, prior research has suggested that this effect will not occur if a one-hour break is allowed in between the changes. These results have suggested that after training is over, it may take some time for learning to become stabilized and resilient against interference. Here, we tested whether frequent gamers have faster stabilization of perceptual learning compared to non-gamers and examined th)
Objectives: The analysis of categorization of everyday sounds is a crucial aspect of the perception of our surrounding world. However, it constitutes a poorly explored domain in developmental studies. The aim of our study was to understand the nature and the logic of the construction of auditory cognitive categories for natural sounds during development. We have developed an original approach based on a free sorting task (FST). Indeed, categorization is fundamental for structuring the world and cognitive skills related to, without having any need of the use of language. Our project explored the ability of children to structure their acoustic world, and to investigate how such structuration matures during normal development. We hypothesized that age affects the listening strategy and the category decision, as well as the number and the content of individual categories. Design: Eighty-two French children (6–9 years), 20 teenagers (12–13 years), and 24 young adults participated in the )
Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest developmental stages of word learning, because it potentially provides a way of bootstrapping word meaning from perceptual information. Using an associative word learning paradigm, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhler-type (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish a word-referent association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv w)
The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in investigating the functional and neural architecture of language. However, most studies have examined the regular/irregular distinction in non-agglutinative Indo-European languages (primarily English) with relatively simple morphology. Additionally, the majority of research has focused on verbal rather than nominal inflectional morphology. The present study attempts to address these gaps by introducing both plural and past tense production tasks in Hungarian, an agglutinative non-Indo-European language with complex morphology. Here we report results on these tasks from healthy Hungarian native-speaking adults, in whom we examine regular and irregular nominal and verbal inflection in a within-subjects design. Regular and irregular nouns and verbs were stem on frequency, word length, and phonological structure, and both accuracy and response times were acquired. The results revealed that the regular/ir)
Multilevel linguistic features have been proposed for discourse analysis, but there have been few applications of multilevel linguistic features to readability models and also few validations of such models. Most traditional readability formulae are based on generalized linear models (GLMs; e.g., discriminant analysis and multiple regression), but these models have to comply with certain statistical assumptions about data properties and include all of the data in formulae construction without pruning the outliers in advance. The use of such readability formulae tends to produce a low text classification accuracy, while using a support vector machine (SVM) in machine learning can enhance the classification outcome. The present study constructed readability models by integrating multilevel linguistic features with SVM, which is more appropriate for text classification. Taking the Chinese language as an example, this study developed 31 linguistic features as the predicting variables at the word, semantic, syntax, and cohesion levels, with grade levels of texts as the criterion variable. The study compared four types of readability models by integrating unilevel and multilevel linguistic features with GLMs and an SVM. The results indicate that adopting a multilevel approach in readability analysis provides a better representation of the complexities of both texts and the reading comprehension process.
Genetic diversity of present American populations results from very complex demographic events involving different types and degrees of admixture. Through the analysis of lineage markers such as mtDNA and Y chromosome it is possible to recover the original Native American haplotypes, which remained identical since the admixture events due to the absence of recombination. However, the decrease in the effective population sizes and the consequent genetic drift effects suffered by these populations during the European colonization resulted in the loss or under-representation of a substantial fraction of the Native American lineages. In this study, we aim to clarify how the diversity and distribution of uniparental lineages vary with the different demographic characteristics (size, degree of isolation) and the different levels of admixture of extant Native groups in Colombia. We present new data resulting from the analyses of mtDNA whole control region, Y chromosome SNP haplogroups and ST)
This paper presents Xigt, an extensible storage format for interlinear glossed text (IGT). We review design desiderata for such a format based on our own use cases as well as general best practices, and then explore existing representations of IGT through the lens of those desiderata. We give an overview of the data model and XML serialization of Xigt, and then describe its application to the use case of representing a large, noisy, heterogeneous set of IGT.
Aims: To assess the association of social determinants on the performance of health systems around the world. Methods: A transnational ecological study was conducted with an observation level focused on the country. In order to research on the strength of the association between the annual maternal and child mortality in 154 countries and social determinants: corruption, democratization, income inequality and cultural fragmentation, we used a mixed linear regression model for repeated measures with random intercepts and a conglomerate-based geographical analysis, between 2000 and 2010. Results: Health determinants with a significant association on child mortality(<1year): higher access to water (βa Quartile 4(Q4) vs Quartile 1(Q1) = -6,14; 95%CI: -11,63 to -0,73), sanitation systems, (Q4 vs Q1 = -25,58; 95%CI: -31,91 to -19,25), % measles vaccination coverage (Q4 vs Q1 = -7.35; 95%CI: -10,18 to -4,52), % of births attended by a healthcare professional (Q4 vs Q1 = -7,91; 95%CI: -11,)
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a primed visual lexical decision task, we investigated the neural and functional mechanisms underlying modulations of semantic word processing through hypnotic suggestions aimed at altering lexical processing of primes. The priming task was to discriminate between target words and pseudowords presented 200 ms after the prime word which was semantically related or unrelated to the target. In a counterbalanced study design, each participant performed the task once at normal wakefulness and once after the administration of hypnotic suggestions to perceive the prime as a meaningless symbol of a foreign language. Neural correlates of priming were defined as significantly lower activations upon semantically related compared to unrelated trials. We found significant suggestive treatment-induced reductions in neural priming, albeit irrespective of the degree of suggestibility. Neural priming was attenuated upon suggestive treatment compared w)
Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between 2-year-old children’s exposure to TV and language delay. Methods: The subjects of this study were 1,778 toddlers (906 males and 872 females) who participated in the Panel Study on Korean Children conducted in 2010. The linguistic ability of the toddlers was measured with the K-ASQ (Korean-Ages and Stages Questionnaire). The relationship between the amount of young children’s exposure to TV and language delay was analyzed with Poisson regression. Results: The average daily TV watching time of 2-year-old Korean toddlers in this study was 1.21 hours. After all confounding variables were adjusted, toddlers with over 2 hours and less than 3 hours of TV watching time had 2.7 times more risk (RR = 2.74, 95% CI: 1.13–6.65) of language delay than those with less than 1 hour of TV watching time. Those with more than 3 hours of TV watching time had approximately 3 times (RR = 3.03, 95% CI: 1.12–8.21) more risk (p<0.05). In addition, th)
Background: Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a multifactorial disease, where the host genetics play a significant role in determining the disease outcome. The immunological role of anti-inflammatory cytokine, Interleukin 10 (IL10), has been well-documented in parasite infections and considered as a key regulatory cytokine for VL. Although VL patients in India display high level of IL10 in blood serum, no genetic study has been conducted to assess the VL susceptibility / resistance. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of IL10 variations in Indian VL; and to estimate the distribution of disease associated allele in diverse Indian populations. Methodology: All the exons and exon-intron boundaries of IL10 were sequenced in 184 VL patients along with 172 ethnically matched controls from VL endemic region of India. Result and Discussion: Our analysis revealed four variations; rs1518111 (2195 A>G, intron), rs1554286 (2607 C>T, intron), rs3024496 (4976 T>C, 3’ UTR) an)
A continental-scale model of Holocene Australian hunter-gatherer demography and mobility is generated using radiocarbon data and geospatial techniques. Results show a delayed expansion and settlement of much of Australia following the termination of the late Pleistocene until after 9,000 years ago (or 9ka). The onset of the Holocene climatic optimum (9-6ka) coincides with rapid expansion, growth and establishment of regional populations across ~75% of Australia, including much of the arid zone. This diffusion from isolated Pleistocene refugia provides a mechanism for the synchronous spread of pan-continental archaeological and linguistic attributes at this time (e.g. Pama-Nyungan language, Panaramitee art style, backed artefacts). We argue longer patch residence times were possible at the end of the optimum, resulting in a shift to more sedentary lifestyles and establishment of low-level food production in some parts of the continent. The onset of El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO;)
The genetic characterization of Native American groups provides insights into their history and demographic events. We sequenced the mitochondrial D-loop region (control region) of 520 samples from eight Mexican indigenous groups. In addition to an analysis of the genetic diversity, structure and genetic relationship between 28 Native American populations, we applied Bayesian skyline methodology for a deeper insight into the history of Mesoamerica. AMOVA tests applying cultural, linguistic and geographic criteria were performed. MDS plots showed a central cluster of Oaxaca and Maya populations, whereas those from the North and West were located on the periphery. Demographic reconstruction indicates higher values of the effective number of breeding females (Nef) in Central Mesoamerica during the Preclassic period, whereas this pattern moves toward the Classic period for groups in the North and West. Conversely, Nef minimum values are distributed either in the Lithic period (i.e. founde)
The Slavic branch of the Balto-Slavic sub-family of Indo-European languages underwent rapid divergence as a result of the spatial expansion of its speakers from Central-East Europe, in early medieval times. This expansion–mainly to East Europe and the northern Balkans–resulted in the incorporation of genetic components from numerous autochthonous populations into the Slavic gene pools. Here, we characterize genetic variation in all extant ethnic groups speaking Balto-Slavic languages by analyzing mitochondrial DNA (n = 6,876), Y-chromosomes (n = 6,079) and genome-wide SNP profiles (n = 296), within the context of other European populations. We also reassess the phylogeny of Slavic languages within the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. We find that genetic distances among Balto-Slavic populations, based on autosomal and Y-chromosomal loci, show a high correlation (0.9) both with each other and with geography, but a slightly lower correlation (0.7) with mitochondrial DNA and linguis)
Common walnut (Juglans regia L) is an economically important species cultivated worldwide for its wood and nuts. It is generally accepted that J. regia survived and grew spontaneously in almost completely isolated stands in its Asian native range after the Last Glacial Maximum. Despite its natural geographic isolation, J. regia evolved over many centuries under the influence of human management and exploitation. We evaluated the hypothesis that the current distribution of natural genetic resources of common walnut in Asia is, at least in part, the product of ancient anthropogenic dispersal, human cultural interactions, and afforestation. Genetic analysis combined with ethno-linguistic and historical data indicated that ancient trade routes such as the Persian Royal Road and Silk Road enabled long-distance dispersal of J. regia from Iran and Trans-Caucasus to Central Asia, and from Western to Eastern China. Ancient commerce also disrupted the local spatial genetic structure of autochth)
Globalization of business and competitiveness in manufacturing has forced companies to improve their manufacturing facilities to respond to market requirements. Machine tool evaluation involves an essential decision using imprecise and vague information, and plays a major role to improve the productivity and flexibility in manufacturing. The aim of this study is to present an integrated approach for decision-making in machine tool selection. This paper is focused on the integration of a consistent fuzzy AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and a fuzzy COmplex PRoportional ASsessment (COPRAS) for multi-attribute decision-making in selecting the most suitable machine tool. In this method, the fuzzy linguistic reference relation is integrated into AHP to handle the imprecise and vague information, and to simplify the data collection for the pair-wise comparison matrix of the AHP which determines the weights of attributes. The output of the fuzzy AHP is imported into the fuzzy COPRAS method f)
Charles E. Townsend In Memoriam Laura A. Janda Charles E. Townsend (1932–2015) was an exceptional scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a loyal friend, who we will dearly miss. Townsend the Scholar Townsend’s career as a Slavist began when he was drafted and spent a year at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, studying Russian. Upon his release from the Army, Charlie enrolled in graduate studies at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1962. From Harvard, Townsend moved on to Princeton, where he served as Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures for 32 years. Townsend’s dissertation, written under the supervision of Horace Lunt, was a linguistic analysis of the 18th-century memoirs of Princess Natal’ja Borisovna Dolgorukaja, which he later published as a book. The Townsend edition of Dolgorukaja’s memoirs is now considered a pioneering document in Russian autobiographical and gender studies. The graduate program that Townsend had been hired to help build was discontinued in 1970, only to be reinstated—thanks largely to Townsend’s tenacity—in 1991. For twenty years he managed to continue a research scholar’s productivity in the absence of a graduate program. Townsend’s lifetime of achievements is remarkable in its quantity, quality, and scope. Townsend went on to author eight more books and over 50 scholarly articles addressing an impressive range of issues in Slavic phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics and exploring the form-function dynamic across the contexts of various literary and spoken registers. A dual purpose prevailed throughout his work, combining intellectual precision with pedagogical application, demonstrating the role that linguistic description can play in the language classroom. The range of languages in Townsend’s mastery provided [End Page 181] the means for his sustained commitment to contrastive analysis of languages. Townsend spent a year in Prague in 1968, and that marked the beginning of his fascination with Czech. Although he was invited by the East-Slavic Institute for a project focused on Russian, Townsend was giving lectures in Czech within three months of his arrival. That year was of course pivotal in Czech history, with both the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion, which he and his family witnessed, cementing his affinity for the Czech language and people. Townsend’s A description of spoken Prague Czech (1990) was a brave piece of scholarship, documenting the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical differences between the official Czech literary language (spisovná čeština, a rather artificial code) and the language spoken in Prague (běžně mluvená pražština). Though there had been some prior descriptions of spoken Czech, none were as comprehensive or specifically targeted at the Prague norm. It is hard for people today to imagine how daring it was for an American to undertake a survey of any kind in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. At that time the government saw the spoken language as an unruly force and did not approve of such research. Townsend created a book that brought to life the language of the people of Prague in a way that was impossible for local linguists of the time. A native Czech and Bohemist living in the west proclaimed “This is an amazing book. As I read it, I discovered what my mother tongue really is.” Townsend coauthored Common and comparative Slavic (1996), a book that tracked the evolution of Slavic from Indo-European and detailed the relationships among all of the Slavic languages. This volume grew from Townsend’s trove of handouts, reflecting decades of research, and has become a classic in the field. It was republished in both German (2000) and Korean (2011). A reference grammar of Czech coauthored by Townsend was published in 2000 and released in digital format by the Duke University Slavic and East European Language Resource Center in 2002, where it is available at: http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/mainframe.jsp?nLanguageID=2. To celebrate his scholarly accomplishments, and to mark his seventieth birthday and the year of his retirement from Princeton, in 2002 Townsend’s colleagues presented him with Where one’s tongue rules well: A Festschrift for Charles E. Townsend (Indiana Slavic studies, 13...