Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
How does linguistic structure affect children’s acquisition of early number word meanings? Previous studies have tested this question by comparing how children learning languages with different grammatical representations of number learn the meanings of labels for small numbers, like 1, 2, and 3. For example, children who acquire a language with singular-plural marking, like English, are faster to learn the word for 1 than children learning a language that lacks the singular-plural distinction, perhaps because the word for 1 is always used in singular contexts, highlighting its meaning. These studies are problematic, however, because reported differences in number word learning may be due to unmeasured cross-cultural differences rather than specific linguistic differences. To address this problem, we investigated number word learning in four groups of children from a single culture who spoke different dialects of the same language that differed chiefly with respect to how they grammat)
Previous studies demonstrated the positive effects of smiling on interpersonal outcomes. The present research examined if enhancing one’s smile in a virtual environment could lead to a more positive communication experience. In the current study, participants’ facial expressions were tracked and mapped on a digital avatar during a real-time dyadic conversation. The avatar’s smile was rendered such that it was either a slightly enhanced version or a veridical version of the participant’s actual smile. Linguistic analyses using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) revealed that participants who communicated with each other via avatars that exhibited enhanced smiles used more positive words to describe their interaction experience compared to those who communicated via avatars that displayed smiling behavior reflecting the participants’ actual smiles. In addition, self-report measures showed that participants in the ‘enhanced smile’ condition felt more positive affect after the conve)
Whether using two languages enhances executive functions is a matter of debate. Here, we take a novel perspective to examine the bilingual advantage hypothesis by comparing bi-dialect with mono-dialect speakers’ performance on a non-linguistic task that requires executive control. Two groups of native Chinese speakers, one speaking only the standard Chinese Mandarin and the other also speaking the Southern-Min dialect, which differs from the standard Chinese Mandarin primarily in phonology, performed a classic Flanker task. Behavioural results showed no difference between the two groups, but event-related potentials recorded simultaneously revealed a number of differences, including an earlier P2 effect in the bi-dialect as compared to the mono-dialect group, suggesting that the two groups engage different underlying neural processes. Despite differences in the early ERP component, no between-group differences in the magnitude of the Flanker effects, which is an index of conflict reso)
Music, like languages, is one of the key components of our culture, yet musical evolution is still poorly known. Numerous studies using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology have been successfully applied to varied subset of linguistic data. One of the major drawback regarding musical studies is the lack of suitable coded musical data that can be analysed using such evolutionary tools. Here we present for the first time an original set of musical data coded in a way that enables construction of trees classically used in evolutionary approaches. Using phylogenetic methods, we test two competing theories on musical evolution: vertical versus horizontal transmission. We show that, contrary to what is currently believed, vertical transmission plays a key role in shaping musical diversity. The signal of vertical transmission is particularly strong for intrinsic musical characters such as metrics, rhythm, and melody. Our findings reveal some of the evolutionary mechanisms )
Kelong is a kind of genre belongs to society in Maccasarese (Bantaeng) which is popular in Maccasarese culture and language background. Kelong is used as a kind of tool intended for increasing teaching and education social norms and values effectively in this writing, the writer will describe concerning expression of sense that expressed from ”Kelongs” that is still in use by the people of Bantaeng in wedding ceremony. Several of Kelong terms of wedding ceremony belonged to Bantaeng society are the any uttered at lekok caddi and marrital contract. In order to describe the sense contained in those Kelongs, lexical and gramatical senses analysis should be used.
Natural sleep provides a powerful model system for studying the neuronal correlates of awareness and state changes in the human brain. To quantitatively map the nature of sleep-induced modulations in sensory responses we presented participants with auditory stimuli possessing different levels of linguistic complexity. Ten participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during the waking state and after falling asleep. Sleep staging was based on heart rate measures validated independently on 20 participants using concurrent EEG and heart rate measurements and the results were confirmed using permutation analysis. Participants were exposed to three types of auditory stimuli: scrambled sounds, meaningless word sentences and comprehensible sentences. During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, we found diminishing brain activation along the hierarchy of language processing, more pronounced in higher processing regions. Specifically, the auditory thalamus showe)
The present study examines the effect of language experience on vocal emotion perception in a second language. Native speakers of French with varying levels of self-reported English ability were asked to identify emotions from vocal expressions produced by American actors in a forced-choice task, and to rate their pleasantness, power, alertness and intensity on continuous scales. Stimuli included emotionally expressive English speech (emotional prosody) and non-linguistic vocalizations (affect bursts), and a baseline condition with Swiss-French pseudo-speech. Results revealed effects of English ability on the recognition of emotions in English speech but not in non-linguistic vocalizations. Specifically, higher English ability was associated with less accurate identification of positive emotions, but not with the interpretation of negative emotions. Moreover, higher English ability was associated with lower ratings of pleasantness and power, again only for emotional prosody. This sugg)
In this paper and the associated system demo, we present an advanced search system that allows to perform a joint search over a (bilingual) valency lexicon and a correspondingly annotated linked parallel corpus. This search tool has been developed on the basis of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, but its ideas are applicable in principle to any bilingual parallel corpus that is annotated for dependencies and valency (i.e., predicate-argument structure), and where verbs are linked to appropriate entries in an associated valency lexicon. Our online search tool consolidates more search interfaces into one, providing expanded structured search capability and a more efficient advanced way to search, allowing users to search for verb pairs, verbal argument pairs, their surface realization as recorded in the lexicon, or for their surface form actually appearing in the linked parallel corpus. The search system is currently under development, and is replacing our current search tool available at http://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/CzEngVallex, which could search the lexicon but the queries cannot take advantage of the underlying corpus nor use the additional surface form information from the lexicon(s). The system is available as open source.
The claim that Eskimo languages have words for different types of snow is well-known among the public, but has been greatly exaggerated through popularization and is therefore viewed with skepticism by many scholars of language. Despite the prominence of this claim, to our knowledge the line of reasoning behind it has not been tested broadly across languages. Here, we note that this reasoning is a special case of the more general view that language is shaped by the need for efficient communication, and we empirically test a variant of it against multiple sources of data, including library reference works, Twitter, and large digital collections of linguistic and meteorological data. Consistent with the hypothesis of efficient communication, we find that languages that use the same linguistic form for snow and ice tend to be spoken in warmer climates, and that this association appears to be mediated by lower communicative need to talk about snow and ice. Our results confirm that variati)
We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical mechanics. This description allows us to demonstrate that the rank-frequency relations for phonemes of a text do depend on its author. The author-dependency effect is not caused by the author’s vocabulary (common words used in different texts), and is confirmed by several alternative means. This suggests that it can be directly related to phonemes. These features contrast to rank-frequency relations for words, which are both author and text independent and are governed by the Zipf’s law. [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 without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, dow)
Multilingualism is common offline, but we have a more limited understanding of the ways multilingualism is displayed online and the roles that multilinguals play in the spread of content between speakers of different languages. We take a computational approach to studying multilingualism using one of the largest user-generated content platforms, Wikipedia. We study multilingualism by collecting and analyzing a large dataset of the content written by multilingual editors of the English, German, and Spanish editions of Wikipedia. This dataset contains over two million paragraphs edited by over 15,000 multilingual users from July 8 to August 9, 2013. We analyze these multilingual editors in terms of their engagement, interests, and language proficiency in their primary and non-primary (secondary) languages and find that the English edition of Wikipedia displays different dynamics from the Spanish and German editions. Users primarily editing the Spanish and German editions make more compl)
Abstract Ever since the very beginning of the European Economic Community, the EU has regulated European linguistic diversity through a policy of multilingualism (Art. 217 of the E.C. Treaty and Council Regulation No 1 April 15, 1958). Within this policy, the legislator introduced the right of EU citizens to communicate with the EU institutions in each one of the official languages. The possibility of multilingual communication with the EU institutions is not only a practical solution, but a real “core” right, recognized even in the Lisbon Treaty. In this framework, it is worth providing practical solutions as well as considering whether or not, the European Union is also favoring the enactment of rights at the European level, by formulating, enforcing and even communicating the same rule to all EU citizens, with the aid of a multilingual drafting. The EU legal terminology providing rights comes into being through specific mechanisms of lexical creation, which chiefly consist of coining semantic neologisms. Moreover, all legal texts must be written in accordance with EU drafting guidelines, prescribing that “rules have to be drafted bearing in mind their translation in all the official languages”. The consequence of these drafting techniques is that multilingualism influences not only the translation, but the actual structure and content of the rule: very often the result of this praxis is a pragmatic, detailed, concrete regulation of legal instruments, rather than a system of rights. A clear example is given by the directives on consumer protection – nowadays “Directive on Consumer Rights” – and particularly the well known “right of withdrawal”; a consumer opportunity to withdraw from a contract within seven (now fourteen) days is undeniably a proper “right”. However, the regulation provided in the directives is more focused on the procedure of withdrawal (the instrument) than on the effect of the withdrawal from the contract (the right). In general, the multilingual drafting of EU norms – and consequently of EU rights – is not automatically functional to the effective transposition of rights in the Member States and to the substantive equality of EU citizens before European law. The paper argues that this problem – causing a lack of communication between the EU institutions in charge of the formulation of European rule of law and the citizens – might be approached through different methodologies: linguistic, anthropological, juridical. Particularly in the analysis of the legal language of the EU comparative law science is equipped with methods and instruments which proved to be useful for breaking down the legal discourse of the European Union going beyond its words and highlighting the various “formants” (norms), some of which exist and come to light directly or indirectly as a consequence of the multilingual formulation of EU law.
Continuous spontaneous alternation behavior (SAB) in a Y-maze is used for evaluating working memory in rodents. Here, the design of an automated Y-maze equipped with three infrared optocouplers per arm, and commanded by a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microcontroller is described. The software was devised for recording only true entries and exits to the arms. Experimental settings are programmed via a keyboard with three buttons and a display. The sequence of arm entries and the time spent in each arm and the neutral zone (NZ) are saved as a text file in a non-volatile memory for later transfer to a USB flash memory. Data files are analyzed with a program developed under LabVIEW® environment, and the results are exported to an Excel® spreadsheet file. Variables measured are: latency to exit the starting arm, sequence and number of arm entries, number of alternations, alternation percentage, and cumulative times spent in each arm and NZ. The automated Y-maze accurately detected the SAB decrease produced in rats by the muscarinic antagonist trihexyphenidyl, and its reversal by caffeine, having 100 % concordance with the alternation percentages calculated by two trained observers who independently watched videos of the same experiments. Although the values of time spent in the arms and NZ measured by the automated system had small discrepancies with those calculated by the observers, Bland-Altman analysis showed 95 % concordance in three pairs of comparisons, while in one it was 90 %, indicating that this system is a reliable and inexpensive alternative for the study of continuous SAB in rodents.
The doublecortin domain-containing 2 (DCDC2) gene, which is located on chromosome 6p22.1, has been widely suggested to be a candidate gene for dyslexia, but its role in typical reading development over time remains to be clarified. In the present study, we explored the role of DCDC2 in contributing to the individual differences in reading development from ages 6 to 11 years by analysing data from 284 unrelated children who were participating in the Chinese Longitudinal Study of Reading Development (CLSRD). The associations of eight single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in DCDC2 with the latent intercept and slope of children’s reading scores were examined in the first step. There was significant support for an association of rs807724 with the intercept for the reading comprehension measure of reading fluency, and the minor “G” allele was associated with poor reading performance. Next, we further tested the rs807724 SNP in association with the reading ability at each tested time and r)
This paper analyzes the content of the proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) over the past 17 years (1998–2014), with the goal of gaining a picture of the LREC community and the topics that are most relevant to the field. We follow the methodology used in similar studies, including the survey of the IEEE ICASSP conference proceedings from 1976 to 1990, the survey of the Association of Computational Linguistics conference proceedings over 50 years, and the survey of the proceedings of the conferences contained in the ISCA Archive over 25 years (1987–2012). We expand on results originally presented at LREC 2014, but include the proceedings of LREC 2014 itself in the study together with an analysis of various citation graphs. We show the evolution over time of the number of papers and authors, including their distribution by gender and affiliation, as well as collaborations and citation patterns among authors and papers, funding sources for reported research, and plagiarism and reuse in LREC papers; results for LREC are compared with similar results for major conferences in related fields. We also consider the evolution of research topics over time and identify the authors who introduced key terms. Finally, we propose and apply a measure of a researcher’s notability and provide the results for LREC authors. The study uses NLP methods that have been published in the corpus considered in the study. In addition to providing a revealing characterization of the LRE community, the study also demonstrates the need for establishing a system for unique identification of authors, papers and other sources to facilitate this type of analysis.
Unprincipled modeling decisions in large-domain ontologies, such as SNOMED CT, are problematic and might act as a barrier for their quality assurance and successful use in electronic health records. Most previous work has focused on clustering problematic concepts, which is helpful for quality control but faces difficulties in pinpointing the origin of those modeling problems. In this study, we examined the underlying structural patterns in SNOMED CT’s data model as such patterns directly reflect the modeling strategies of editors. Our results showed that 92% of all structural patterns found accumulated in the Procedure and Clinical finding sub-hierarchies, and pattern reuse was low; over 30% of patterns were only used once. A qualitative analysis of a sample of 50 such singleton patterns revealed modeling problems, including redundancy, omission, and inconsistency. The problems detected in the sample suggest that the analysis of structural patterns is a valuable technique for reveali)
Translating from English into American Sign Language holds a number of challenges, particularly when the English source text is a formal, high profile, scripted speech. This study examined perspectives of Deaf bilinguals on translating President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address into American Sign Language. We conducted a microanalysis of translations of the opening line – ‘my fellow citizens’ – to investigate the product and processes employed by Deaf translators. Five Deaf ASL-English bilinguals who are ASL teachers or interpreters/translators were asked to translate the opening paragraph of the address and were interviewed about the processes they used to render their translations. Findings revealed a lack of standard translations for the phrase among the participants, but with some overlap in lexical terms. The Deaf translators discussed the challenges in creating the translation, including how to meet the needs of a national, but unknown, Deaf audience; the lack of standard ASL correspondents for English lexical items; incorporating cultural and sociolinguistic norms of ASL; and conveying semantic intent and register. The findings provide insights into the processes of the Deaf translators, which may be helpful to both Deaf and hearing individuals when rendering interpretations and translations.
This paper combines an empirical argument about the lexical semantics of might with a preliminary description and theoretical account of a novel variety of implicatures. Empirically, I introduce the DISMISSIVE AGREEMENT paradigm, which shows that might semantically encodes nothing stronger than nonzero probability. Theoretically, I derive the fact that might often seems to suggest something stronger from the pragmatic norm that cooperative speakers will make claims that are strong enough to be relevant to the Question Under Discussion, which gives rise to LOWER BOUND IMPLICATURES.
Images: EEG montage used, beside international type; experiment overview; waveforms; difference topographies. For a more detailed view of the waveforms per group and electrode, visit: <b>https://pablobernabeu.shinyapps.io/export_files/</b><b>Abstract. </b>The engagement of sensory systems during word comprehension has been extensively documented; yet, the precise relevance of those remains unclear. We probed into this with an event-related potential (ERP) experiment which implemented the conceptual modality switch. This paradigm works as follows. In each trial, participants judge whether a property word can describe a concept word. However, the critical manipulation is the conceptual modality of the trials—e.g., haptic or visual—, as enabled by modality-normed stimuli. Switching across trials in different modalities, compared to maintaining a modality, incurs a switching cost. So far, experiments have measured this either on-line, from ERPs time-locked to the second word of the target trials, or off-line, from response times at the end of those trials. Problematically, both measurements fail to control a possible switch at the first word, as well as the semantic relation between the first and second words. In tackling the actual time frame of lexical and semantic access, we time-locked ERPs to the first word of target trials. Then, the experiment included different types of switch—from auditory to visual, and from haptic to visual—, which were compared to the non-switch—visual to visual. Further, we had a quick response group (<i>n</i> = 21), and a self-paced group (<i>n</i> = 21), alongside a few participants with no speed instructions (<i>n</i> = 5). The results, analyzed with mixed effects models, reveal ERP effects of modality-switching in four typical time windows between 160 and 750 ms after word onset. The effects are generally characterized by a more negative amplitude for modality-switching than not switching, and they arise with both types of switch, in both groups, and in anterior as well as posterior brain regions. In sum, the early start and broad scope of this effect suggest that perceptual simulation contributes fundamentally to word comprehension.
Prior research has examined how distributional properties of contexts (number of unique contexts or their informativeness) influence the effort of word recognition. These properties do not directly interrogate the semantic properties of contexts. We evaluated the influence of average concreteness, valence (positivity) and arousal of the contexts in which a word occurs on response times in the lexical decision task, age of acquisition of the word, and word recognition memory performance. Using large corpora and norming mega-studies we quantified semantics of contexts for thousands of words and demonstrated that contextual factors were predictive of lexical representation and processing above and beyond the influence shown by concreteness, valence and arousal of the word itself. Our findings indicate that lexical representations are influenced not only by how diverse the word's contexts are, but also by the embodied experiences they elicit.
Certains « écrivains de la deuxième génération » sont accusés de rompre d’avec les normes canoniques occidentales. Tel est le cas de Kourouma dont les écrits comporteraient des distorsions morphosyntaxiques, des ruptures syntaxico-énonciatives à même de nuire à la compréhension du message. Avec Madeleine Borgomano, on trouve une justification en ces termes: « Les littératures nées dans ces pays [africains] éloignés et très différents de la France à tout point de vue, se sont développées de façon originale et de plus en plus autonomes. » Cette spécificité de la littérature africaine est diversement interprétée comme une interférence linguistique sinon, une transgression faite à la norme. Ce fait linguistique explicite le thème de la transfrontalité que nous abordons selon une linguistique du discours mettant en œuvre des paradigmes lexicaux.
Conference abstract: Recent years have seen the appearance of a new use of language in the French postcolonial novel: the French urban youth vernacular or francais contemporain des cites (FCC). This linguistic variety allows underprivileged youths from the banlieues to express their rebellion against the authorities by deliberately violating the norms of standard language. They consequently use lexical input from immigrant languages, in particular Arabic and English, verlan (a kind of coded backslang based on syllabic inversion) and an un-French pronunciation, in which the first rather than the last syllable is stressed. In view of the societal rejection of this non-standard variety, it has had difficulty penetrating literature. However, this is now beginning to change, with FCC appearing in a number of novels, mostly by young “beur” authors such as Faiza Guene, Mohammed Razane and Rachid Djaidani. Literary scholars might therefore consider broadening their scope to include this aspect, which until now has been almost exclusively studied in sociolinguistics. Moreover, now that the translation of some of these novels is called for, it is also becoming a relevant research topic in translation studies. The transfer of this genre does indeed raise a number of questions. For example, if we assume that translation is a “cultural political practice” (Venuti 2008, 19), which options do translators have to convey the resistant discourse of young immigrant slang users? In what way will the relationship between language use and social identity affect the target text? Is it possible to compensate for translation loss? And how are source and target texts received in their respective cultures? I will draw on a small corpus of French novels that have been partially translated into Dutch in an attempt to answer these questions.
This thesis studies how sick leave legitimacy is managed in interaction and develops an empirically driven conceptualization of ‘legitimacy work’. The thesis applies an ethnomethodological framework that draws on conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis. Naturally occurring interaction is examined in two settings: (1) multi-party meetings at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, in which participants assess and discuss the ‘status’ of the sick leave and plan for work rehabilitation; (2) peer-based online text-in-interaction in a Swedish forum thread that gathers people on sick leave. The thesis shows how mental states, activities and alternative categories function as resources for legitimacy work. However, such invocations are no straight-forward matter, but impose additional contingencies. It is thus crucial how they are invoked. By detailed analyses of the interaction, with attention to aspects such as lexicality and delivery, the thesis identifies a range of discursive features that manage sick leave legitimacy. Deployed resources are also subtle enough to be deniable as legitimacy work, that is, they also manage the risk of an utterance being seen as invested or biased. While legitimate sick leave is a core concern for Swedish policy-making, administration, and public debate on sick leave, previous research has for the most part been explanatory in orientation, minding legitimacy rather than studying it in its own right. By providing detailed knowledge about the legitimacy work that people on long-term sick leave do as part of both institutional and mundane encounters, the thesis contributes not only new empirical knowledge, but a new kind of empirical knowledge, shedding light on how the complexities of sick leave play out in real-life situations. Traditional sociological approaches have to a significant extent treated legitimacy as an entity with beginnings and ends that in more or less direct ways relate to external norms and cognitive states, or that focus on institutions, authority or government. By contrast, the herein emerging concept ‘legitimacy work’ understands legitimacy as a locally contingent practicality – a collaborative categorially oriented accomplishment that is integral to the interactional situation.
It is a well-accepted view that the prior semantic (general) knowledge that readers possess plays a central role in reading comprehension. Nevertheless, computational models of reading comprehension have not integrated the simulation of semantic knowledge and online comprehension processes under a unified mathematical algorithm. The present article introduces a computational model that integrates the landscape model of comprehension processes with latent semantic analysis representation of semantic knowledge. In three sets of simulations of previous behavioral findings, the integrated model successfully simulated the activation and attenuation of predictive and bridging inferences during reading, as well as centrality estimations and recall of textual information after reading. Analyses of the computational results revealed new theoretical insights regarding the underlying mechanisms of the various comprehension phenomena.
This special issue of Language Resources and Evaluation includes a selection of extended papers from the Ninth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, held in Reykjavik, Iceland, in May 2014. The conference drew a record number of participants, reflecting the steadily increasing interest and activity in the field of language resource creation, enhancement, management, and evaluation since the first LREC was held in 1998. The selection of articles for this special issue was made on the basis of recommendations from LREC reviewers, who were asked to indicate suitability for publication of an extended version in LRE for each paper they reviewed.
Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), which predicts users’ dialects. For 16 linguistic variables, users select a dialectal variant from a drop-down menu. DÄ then geographically locates the user’s dialect by suggesting a list of communes where dialect variants most similar to their choices are used. Underlying this prediction are 16 maps from the historical Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland, which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. Where users disagree with the prediction, they can indicate what they consider to be their dialect’s location. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for languag)
The issue of determining the components of the language and communicative competence of studentsfuture professionals of forestry is considered. The relevance of the study is determined by the need for forming the proper level of professionally oriented language and communicative abilities and skills in students majoring in forestry. The aim of the article is to identify and describe the components needed to build an effective model of the formation of students' language and communicative competence. The following main components of it are named and described: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic. The orthoepic, orthographic, lexical, grammatical and stylistic competencies were distinguished within the linguistic component. Value-semantic and socio-cultural competencies are the content of the sociolinguistic component. The pragmatic component consists of terminological, speech text, culture and language, lexicographic competencies. The speech text component, in its turn, is divided into text-interpreting and text-creating ones. The required level of the professional language and communicative competence of student majoring in forestry can be formed under the condition of the development of his/her language and communicative professionally oriented skills. The basic skills are the following: the choice of the language means depending on the conditions of communication in different styles and genres; reasonable use of language means (including terms) according to the norms of modern Ukrainian standard language; building texts of different genres of scientific and educational substyle belonging to the style of scientific prose; effective communication when performing professional activities. The parallel development of a student's environmental and professional competences we consider as another condition for the formation of the proper level of the language and communicative competence of a studentfuture professional of forestry industry. The formation of language and communicative competence will facilitate the increase of the level of general competencies of students majoring in forestry, in particular: the ability to communicate in the official language both orally and in writing; the ability to study and master modern profession-related knowledge; the ability for search, processing and analysis of the information from different sources.
This paper presents a novel approach to improve the interoperability between four semantic resources that incorporate predicate information. Our proposal defines a set of automatic methods for mapping the semantic knowledge included in WordNet, VerbNet, PropBank and FrameNet. We use advanced graph-based word sense disambiguation algorithms and corpus alignment methods to automatically establish the appropriate mappings among their lexical entries and roles. We study different settings for each method using SemLink as a gold-standard for evaluation. The results show that the new approach provides productive and reliable mappings. In fact, the mappings obtained automatically outnumber the set of original mappings in SemLink. Finally, we also present a new version of the Predicate Matrix, a lexical-semantic resource resulting from the integration of the mappings obtained by our automatic methods and SemLink.
Quantitative analysis of organismal form is an important component for almost every branch of biology. Although generally considered an easily-measurable structure, the quantification of gastropod shell form is still a challenge because many shells lack homologous structures and have a spiral form that is difficult to capture with linear measurements. In view of this, we adopt the idea of theoretical modelling of shell form, in which the shell form is the product of aperture ontogeny profiles in terms of aperture growth trajectory that is quantified as curvature and torsion, and of aperture form that is represented by size and shape. We develop a workflow for the analysis of shell forms based on the aperture ontogeny profile, starting from the procedure of data preparation (retopologising the shell model), via data acquisition (calculation of aperture growth trajectory, aperture form and ontogeny axis), and data presentation (qualitative comparison between shell forms) and ending with)
In the process of constructing an academic edition for old and pre-modern texts, although they thoroughly record and comment the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical variants of a text, its omissions and interpolations, etc., the Romanian philologists tend to deal tacitly with the problem of punctuation, by adding rational, syntactic punctuation, according to the contemporary norm. This method has certain advantages for the general public, but, in fact, falsifies the text, because it puts the actions of a secondary agent—the editor—on the author. Moreover, the lack of perfect archæological relevations of the Romanian old and pre-modern texts—which would show, in this respect, the more or less consequent working habits of our early writers—leads, at least for the moment, to the impossibility of presenting the scientific community with a history of the Romanian punctuation. This is, nevertheless, an idea whose achievement depends on an objective re-evaluation of our contemporary editorial practice.
Background: Due to their increased vulnerability, immigrants are considered a priority group for communicable disease prevention and control in Europe. This study aims to compare influenza vaccination coverage (IVC) between regular immigrants and Italian citizens at risk for its complications and evaluate factors affecting differences. Methods: Based on data collected by the National Institute of Statistics during a population-based cross-sectional survey conducted in Italy in 2012–2013, we analysed information on 42,048 adult residents (≥ 18 years) at risk for influenza-related complications and with free access to vaccination (elderly residents ≥ 65 years and residents with specific chronic diseases). We compared IVC between 885 regular immigrants and 41,163 Italian citizens using log-binomial models and stratifying immigrants by area of origin and length of stay in Italy (recent: < 10 years; long-term: ≥ 10 years). Results: IVC among all immigrants was 16.9% compared to 40.2% am)
Objective: This study examines reading aloud in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and those with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in order to determine whether differences in patterns of speaking and pausing exist between patients with primary motor vs. primary cognitive-linguistic deficits, and in contrast to healthy controls. Design: 136 participants were included in the study: 33 controls, 85 patients with ALS, and 18 patients with either the behavioural variant of FTD (FTD-BV) or progressive nonfluent aphasia (FTD-PNFA). Participants with ALS were further divided into 4 non-overlapping subgroups—mild, respiratory, bulbar (with oral-motor deficit) and bulbar-respiratory—based on the presence and severity of motor bulbar or respiratory signs. All participants read a passage aloud. Custom-made software was used to perform speech and pause analyses, and this provided measures of speaking and articulatory rates, duration of speech, and number and duration of pauses. Thes)
This dissertation examines the heritage language (HL) ability of school-aged Mandarin HL children (age range = 6;5 – 10;10) living in Edmonton, a Canadian English majority city, and the factors contributing to their HL development and maintenance. Children’s language data were collected via various tasks, including comprehension, production, grammaticality judgment, psycholinguistic experiments, and narratives. A parental questionnaire was also included to collect Mandarin HL children’s information about the onset of English exposure, home language use, the richness of language environment, and the maternal education level. The results from three independent studies showed that Mandarin HL children were different from their monolingual peers regarding acquiring the lexically-driven classifier system and aspect morphemes. However, they were comparable to monolingual norms in comprehending and producing various syntactic structures (e.g. post-verbal clauses, relative clauses). These results indicate that the phenomenon of incomplete acquisition does not occur in every linguistic subdomain. Moreover, the longitudinal results revealed that Mandarin HL children’s L1 was convergent with the target grammar over time, suggesting that the reduced exposure to the HL does not necessarily lead to incomplete acquisition and attrition in the HL. Regarding various language environmental factors, the results demonstrated that older age of arrival, a rich and diverse HL environment, higher maternal education level and bilingual education contribute to stronger HL abilities, pointing to an important role for input in HL acquisition. Taken together, this dissertation offers insights relating to the debates between incomplete acquisition, attrition and the protracted acquisition in the acquisition of the HL during the early developmental stages. The research has practical contributions regarding the implications for policy and pedagogical decision-makings on HL education.
Abstract Stylistics is a critical approach focusing lexically, intellectually, and literally on the text to extract main literary elements of the text. As a result, literary text can be supposed as its basis and in fact, stylistics is originated from the text. This analytic-descriptive study is to analyze a poem by â¦â¦.(1983-1940) as one of the outstanding pioneers of literary movement in Egypt. Donqul is one of the Arab contemporary poets which following the innovation movement, offers a specific attitude towards innovation in poetic language and meaning. As a consequence, due to his concern about this poetic language and meaning, he has been criticized by literary critics. Also, he is particularly concerned about presenting his poems quite extraordinarily, unfamiliarly, and against the norms. This denotes his uniqueness, innovation, and tensile strength. Of the main results of this study is that D. attempted to objectify his political and social concerns in the audience. His poems convey some sort of consistency an balance between the poetâs intention and work. D. symbolizes warriors and revolutionaries in resorting to homeland. However, he rushes those with speculation and fear against enemies. Therefore, he offers such sort of contemporary experiences to the audience in a symbolic way so as to stimulate them against oppression andtyranny.
The French post-colonial novel has recently been witnessing the emergence of urban youth language or français contemporain des cités (Goudaillier 2001). This linguistic variety allows underprivileged youths from multi-ethnic suburbs to rebel against authority by deliberately violating standard language norms. Its characteristics include frequent lexical input from immigrant languages, in particular Arabic and English, and the use of verlan at the morphological level, with the latter involving a form of back slangusing syllabic inversion, which can be recurrently applied to heighten its coding function. In view of the social rejection of this ‘antilanguage’ (Halliday 1978), it has had difficulty penetrating into literature. However, this is now beginning to change, with urban youth discourse appearing in a number of novels, mostly by young ‘post-migration’ writers (Geiser 2008), such as Faïza Guène, Insa Sané and Rachid Djaïdani. While this language variety has mainly been dealt with by sociolinguists, some of the novels concerned are now crossing borders, and a multi-disciplinary approach to this phenomenon is now called for, combining linguistic, literary and translatological tools.The transfer of this heterolingual genre does indeed raise a number of issues. For example, if we assume that translation is a cultural-political practice (Venuti 2008), what options do translators have to convey the resistant discourse of young immigrant slang users? How will the relationship between language use and social identity manifest itself in the target text? And how can a contrastive linguistic analysis of the features of urban youth language help to resolve translation problems? I will draw on a corpus of French and Dutch novels as well as some translations from French in an attempt to answer these questions.
Network models of language provide a systematic way of linking a childâs current vocabulary knowledge processes to the structure and connectivity of properties of language which promote future lexical learning. Using network growth models, we explore the relational role of language and the influence of linguistic structure on language learning. Previous research has proposed that language is learned by a process of semantic differentiation that can be modeled through a network process of preferential attachment, with highly connected nodes being learned earliest. This model accounts for high-level lexical network structure and also captures empirical age of acquisition reports. Alternately, language learning may be driven by contextual diversity, or the diverse contexts and meanings of unknown words in the environment. In this thesis, we test these and other ideas by extending these models to acquisition trajectories of individual children, predicting the individual words a child is likely to learn next. We explore how the definition of a graph, the assumed network growth process, and measures of node importance affect our ability to model acquisition. We not only construct a theoretical framework for network models of acquisition but also test the ability of these models to account for learning and development. This work suggests that network models provide a framework for understanding the cognitive and developmental processes of language acquisition.\nNeural network models, often called connectionist models, offer another independent approach to modeling learning and development. We focus on associations in a childâs current vocabulary that might be relevant and even facilitatory to the learning process of young children by constructing predictive models. The associative learning framework of our neural network models allow for different types and timescales of learning to be captured. A key idea to data-driven neural network models of acquisition is that there are strong similarities among the way in which children learn, but the differences between children are also predictive. Assuming that there are different types of language learners and that the vocabulary (together with child age) at any time point reflects the type of learner a particular child is, machine learning models can provide a powerful and predictive tool to aid with classification and diagnostics of a childâs learning trajectory. Focusing specifically on using a childâs vocabulary to predict future lexical learning. We explore a variety of representations of a childâs current vocabulary knowledge, including those from a productive vocabulary report as well as representations based on natural language processing algorithms, adult norms, and phonemic content. We find that individual words in a childâs vocabulary are informative in predicting future vocabulary growth using a neural network model. These results additionally suggest the need to consider differences amongst learners. Our best performing model has information not only about a childâs own vocabulary knowledge but also about the normative acquisition trends of words in that childâs vocabulary. These two types of information improve predictive accuracy and suggest potential diagnostic and interventional tools for helping bridge the lexical differences of language delayed children and their age-matched peers.
Recognizing speech in adverse listening conditions is a significant cognitive, perceptual, and linguistic challenge, especially for children. Prior studies have yielded mixed results on the impact of bilingualism on speech perception in noise. Methodological variations across studies make it difficult to converge on a conclusion regarding the effect of bilingualism on speech-in-noise performance. Moreover, there is a dearth of speech-in-noise evidence for bilingual children who learn two languages simultaneously. The aim of the present study was to examine the extent to which various adverse listening conditions modulate differences in speech-in-noise performance between monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children. To that end, sentence recognition was assessed in twenty-four school-aged children (12 monolinguals; 12 simultaneous bilinguals, age of English acquisition ≤ 3 yrs.). We implemented a comprehensive speech-in-noise battery to examine recognition of English sentences acro)
The analysis of vocal expression is a critical endeavor for psychological and clinical sciences and is an increasingly popular application for computer–human interfaces. Despite this, and despite advances in the efficiency, affordability, and sophistication of vocal analytic technologies, there is considerable variability across studies regarding what aspects of vocal expression are studied. Vocal signals can be quantified in a myriad of ways, and their underlying structure, at least with respect to “macroscopic” measures from extended speech, is presently unclear. To address this issue, we evaluated the psychometric properties—notably, the structural and construct validity—of a systematically defined set of global vocal features. Our analytic strategy focused on (a) identifying redundant variables among this set, (b) employing principal components analysis (PCA) to identify nonoverlapping domains of vocal expression, (c) examining the degrees to which the vocal variables are modulated as a function of changes in speech task, and (d) evaluating the relationship between the vocal variables and cognitive (i.e., verbal fluency) and clinical (i.e., depression, anxiety, and hostility) variables. Spontaneous speech samples from 11 independent studies of young adults (>60 s in length), employing one of three different speaking tasks, were examined (N = 1,350). Confounding variables (i.e., sex, ethnicity) were statistically controlled for. The PCA identified six distinct domains of vocal expression. Collectively, vocal expression (defined in terms of these domains) was modulated as a function of speech task and was related to the cognitive and clinical variables. These findings provide empirically grounded implications for the study of vocal expression in psychological and clinical sciences.
This study examined the neural substrates underlying the implementation of phonological rule in lexical tone by the Tone 3 sandhi phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese. Tone 3 sandhi is traditionally described as the substitution of Tone 3 with Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (33 →23) during speech production. Tone 3 sandhi enables the examination of tone processing in the phonological level with the least involvement of segments. Using the fMRI technique, we measured brain activations corresponding to the monosyllable and disyllable sequences of the four Chinese lexical tones, while manipulating the requirement on overt oral response. The application of Tone 3 sandhi to disyllable sequence of Tone 3 was confirmed by our behavioral results. Larger brain responses to overtly produced disyllable Tone 3 (33 > 11, 22, and 44) were found in right posterior IFG by both whole-brain and ROI analyses. We suggest that the right IFG was responsible for the processing of Tone 3 sandhi. Intense te)
This fMRI study aimed to identify the neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of Chinese multi-character words by partialling out the confounding effect of reaction time (RT). For this purpose, a special type of nonword—transposable nonword—was created by reversing the character orders of real words. These nonwords were included in a lexical decision task along with regular (non-transposable) nonwords and real words. Through conjunction analysis on the contrasts of transposable nonwords versus regular nonwords and words versus regular nonwords, the confounding effect of RT was eliminated, and the regions involved in word recognition were reliably identified. The word-frequency effect was also examined in emerged regions to further assess their functional roles in word processing. Results showed significant conjunctional effect and positive word-frequency effect in the bilateral inferior parietal lobules and posterior cingulate cortex, whereas only conjunctional effect was found i)
In Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), the constraints on word reorderings have a great impact on the set of potential translations that is explored during search. Notwithstanding computational issues, the reordering space of a SMT system needs to be designed with great care: if a larger search space is likely to yield better translations, it may also lead to more decoding errors, because of the added ambiguity and the interaction with the pruning strategy. In this paper, we study the reordering search space, using a state-of-the art translation system, where all reorderings are represented in a permutation lattice prior to decoding. This allows us to directly explore and compare different reordering schemes and oracle settings. We also study in detail a rule-based preordering system, varying the length and number of rules, the tagset used, as well as contrasting with purely combinatorial subsets of permutations. We carry out experiments on three language pairs in both directions: English-French, a close language pair; English-German and English-Czech, two much more challenging pairs. We show that even though it might be desirable to design better reordering spaces, model and search errors seem to be the most important issues. Therefore, improvements of the reordering space should come along with improvements of the associated models to be really effective.
Theories of embodied language comprehension have proposed that language processing includes perception simulation and activation of sensorimotor representation. Previous studies have used a numerical priming paradigm to test the priming effect of semantic size, and the negative result showed that the sensorimotor representation has not been activated during the encoding phase. Considering that the size property is unstable, here we changed the target property to examine the priming effect of semantic shape using the same paradigm. The participants would see three different object names successively, and then they were asked to decide whether the shape of the second referent was more similar to the first one or the third one. In the eye-movement experiment, the encoding time showed a distance-priming effect, as the similarity of shapes between the first referent and the second referent increased, the encoding time of the second word gradually decreased. In the event-related potentials )
Lexical access in bilinguals has been considered either selective or non-selective and evidence exists in favor of both hypotheses. We conducted a linguistic experiment to assess whether a bilingual’s language mode influences the processing of first language information. We recorded event related potentials during a semantic priming paradigm with a covert manipulation of the second language (L2) using two types of stimulus presentations (short and long). We observed a significant facilitation of word pairs related in L2 in the short version reflected by a decrease in N400 amplitude in response to target words related to the English meaning of an inter-lingual homograph (homograph-unrelated group). This was absent in the long version, as the N400 amplitude for this group was similar to the one for the control-unrelated group. We also interviewed the participants whether they were aware of the importance of L2 in the experiment. We conclude that subjects participating in the long and sh)
Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback )
Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsChrisman, Matthew. The Meaning of ‘Ought’: Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 280. $65.00 (cloth).Jack WoodsJack WoodsUniversity of Leeds Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreChrisman’s recent book develops an account of the semantics and metasemantics of the modal verb and normative expression par excellence, ‘ought’. Arguing for his preferred semantic rule for ‘ought’ occupies the majority of the book, chapters 2–5. Chapter 1 gives a brief tour of the argumentative landscape, including a valuable discussion of the distinction between semantics and metasemantics, chapter 6 sketches Chrisman’s own metasemantic picture, and in chapter 7, we get a brief tour of additional issues such as the connection of his view to issues in moral psychology and epistemology as well as discussions of other normative expressions like ‘wrong’ and ‘good’.Chrisman emphasizes throughout the difference between giving a metasemantics for normative language and giving a compositional semantics for it. For Chrisman, a (formal) compositional semantics is a theory of the content of complex constructions in terms of the content of simpler expressions. A metasemantics interprets notions like content and mechanisms like composition in terms of the function of the relevant bit of language. Model-theoretic possible worlds semantics —“worlds” really being mathematical structures of some type—is a compositional semantics; that possible worlds represent ways things could have been and that sets of possible worlds represent states of information are part of a representationalist metasemantical interpretation of it. Compositional semantics imposes some constraints on metasemantics—since semantic structure partially explains our understanding of language, a proper semantics will demand of a metasemantics the ability to interpret this structure in a reasonable fashion. Even so, Chrisman argues compellingly that standard compositional semantics takes no stand on which metasemantical picture is correct.Chrisman claims that some accounts of normative language, like expressivism, are best interpreted as metasemantical views. I am broadly sympathetic, though it is combinations of semantics and metasemantics—interpreted compositional semantics—that are, have been, and should be of primary philosophical interest. Emphasizing the distinction between metasemantics and formal semantics is most important as a corrective to the perennial mistake of treating algebraic structures, like bare possible worlds semantics, as accounts of meaning instead of structure on which to hang a proper account of linguistic meaning. Chrisman’s metasemantical aim is to develop an alternative to orthodox representationalist and expressivist options. His own view is that ought-talk makes explicit certain positions in a “space of implications” (187). As I will suggest, this metasemantical picture faces trouble in providing a natural interpretation of a formal semantics, at least given the picture’s current stage of development.His preferred semantics takes ‘ought’ to be a necessity modal. ‘Barry ought to be pirouetting’ is semantically composed of an operator ought applied to the proposition Barry is pirouetting (the ‘prejacent’). Following Kratzer, Chrisman presumes that context fills in two aspects of the meaning of ‘ought’. First, we only consider certain salient possibilities when we evaluate ‘ought’-claims. When we’re evaluating whether Barry ought to be pirouetting, we’re usually pointedly ignoring possibilities where his legs will shortly fall off. We thus presume that context specifies a presupposed body of information which holds in all salient worlds, which we can represent formally as a function f from a world t to a set of relevant worlds f(t). Likewise, ‘oughts’ come in different flavors: moral, prudential, evaluative, teleological, and epistemic. Again, following Kratzer, Chrisman presumes that context specifies a body of information about how to evaluate the relevant flavor of ‘ought’ which in turn induces a partial order g on the salient worlds.I will use ‘correct’, instead of Chrisman’s ‘1ʹ, as a metasemantically neutral analogue for ‘true’. Correctness, for simple nonnormative propositions, is treated in the usual fashion as truth-at-a-world. Chrisman takes as half of his analysis of ‘ought’-claims (represented here as Op) that:(R10d) Op is correct at t just in case p is correct at every g(t)-maximal world w in f(t).That is, when Barry is pirouetting in every salient possibility which is maximal (not maximum!) in the g(t)-ranking. Presumably, for ‘Barry ought to be pirouetting’, g ranks worlds according to their desirability. For epistemic ‘ought’-claims, like ‘He ought to be there now’, g ranks worlds according to something like their likelihood.Chrisman is sensitive to the difference between agentive ‘oughts’ like ‘You ought to give more to charity’ and nonagentive ‘oughts’ like ‘He ought to be home by now’. To analyze the former, Chrisman makes use of Castañeda’s imperatival analogue to propositions, practitions (Hector-Neri Castañeda, Thinking and Doing: The Philosophical Foundations of Institutions [Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1975]). These can be thought of as connecting an action to an agent in terms of a practical, not a predicative, copula—<Barry to φ> instead of <Barry is F>. Using pairs of worlds and sets of norms (indicated <w, n>), instead of simply worlds, Chrisman explains a practition p as being correct at <w, n> just in case n demands p at w. For example, if t is a world in which Devrim’s house is on fire and k demands that Devrim care for her property, then <Devrim to go home> is correct at <t, k>.Chrisman extends the analysis of ‘ought’ to practitions by taking g to rank world-norm pairs in f(t), the set of world-norm pairs specified by background conditions. Then:(R10p) Op, for p a practition, is correct at t just in case p is required by n at w at every g(t)- maximal <w, n> in f(t).(I ignore some complications about how the ranking function g interacts with n.) So, ‘Devrim (morally) ought to go home’ is correct at t just in case p is required at every morally best pair <w, n> in the set of world-norm pairs specified by the background conditions in t. (R10d) and (R10p) together yield:(R10) Op is correct at a world t just in case p is correct at every g(t)-maximal <w, n> in f(t).The discussion of semantics for ‘ought’ which precedes the discussion of R10 is useful, if not entirely surprising, to those familiar with recent work on modal verbs. Chrisman’s main objections to alternatives are that they (a) stumble on dilemmas about obligation, (b) lack the ability to capture both agentive and nonagentive senses of ‘ought’ in a natural and nondisjunctive fashion, and (c) have trouble with nonideal contexts. Chrisman’s analysis, designed explicitly to satisfy (b), has the additional virtue of avoiding both (a) and (c) in a natural fashion. Following Kratzer, the ranking function g might rank highest world-norm pairs which are nonideal, solving (c). We can solve (a) for agentive ‘ought’ claims since g might rank highest world-norm pairs whose norms demand inconsistent actions.There is a slight technical problem here. According to Chrisman, g ranks world-norm pairs in terms of how well the relevant standard is met when the relevant agent does what is required of them by n (148). However, if n demands impossible things, there is no case where the agent does all of what is required of them. Presumably, g should evaluate how well the consequences of what the relevant agent does meets the standard, whether or not they satisfy all of n’s demands. Putting this aside, this account pushes the question of whether dilemmas exist out of formal semantics and into the domain of substantive ethics, as we are not required by Chrisman’s solution to think that any g would so rank world-norm pairs. This is a nice result in keeping with Chrisman’s goal of distinguishing substantive ethical and metasemantical projects from the project of developing a linguistically adequate compositional semantics for ‘ought’. His solution does not generalize to nonagentive ‘oughts’ since their prejacents are typically propositions which are evaluated for truth at possible worlds. Some will find this a good result as agentive ‘oughts’ are the natural source of normative dilemmas. Some will want more.Chrisman claims as a crucial advantage of his semantics that R10, applying to both propositions and practitions, is not an ambiguity or polysemous analysis, unlike accounts which explicitly provide distinct lexical rules for different uses of ‘ought’ (149, secs. 2.3, 5.2). However, the ability to formulate a compositional rule which applies to both practitions and propositions is not sufficient to avoid polysemy. After all, some ‘ought’ claims are really evaluated by R10 in terms of what is required by a set of norms whereas others are really evaluated in terms of what is true at a world. R10 is thus intuitively, if covertly, polysemous as it is naturally factorable into two distinct, but related, lexical entries.Variations on R10 are possible as well. It isn’t clear to me, for example, that Chrisman’s detour through Castañeda-style practitions is required. As far as the linguistic argument of the book is concerned, we could posit a semantic distinction between suitably structured agentive and nonagentive propositions, replacing R10p with something like:(R10pa) Op, for p an agentive proposition, is true at t just in case the agent of p is required by n to bring it about that p in w at every g(t)-maximal <w, n> in f(t).Chrisman might claim that R10pa and R10d together constitute a less unified analysis of ‘ought’ than R10. But, even if true, this seems outweighed by the theoretical gain in using only propositions in analyzing ‘ought’. ‘Barry ought to be pirouetting’ doesn’t intuitively encode imperatival content of the type practitions are meant to capture, unlike the statement of intention ‘I will go to Istanbul’, so making use of practitions to capture the former requires, perhaps unnecessarily, disrespecting or explaining away these intuitions.Overall, chapters 2–5 constitute an extremely useful and slightly idiosyncratic introduction to the semantic analysis of ‘ought’ in both philosophy and linguistic semantics as well as a fairly convincing abductive argument in favor of something like R10—R10 (or a close cognate) looks significantly less theoretically costly than alternatives. I have not detailed his criticisms of the alternatives, but the reader will find the discussion sensible and the landscape well surveyed. The reader is cautioned to read the footnotes carefully since they contain much substantive material.Turning now to metasemantics, Chrisman quickly dismisses two alternatives to his view: global representationalism and expressivism. The former interprets R10’s structure as more or less directly representing the world as containing moral properties, possible worlds, and so on. I am broadly sympathetic to his reasons for rejecting this view—it is difficult to accept that R10 commits us to actual possibilities and normative properties—though this is more a matter of philosophical taste than principled argument. Chrisman is more sympathetic to a local version of representationalism which acknowledges that some expressions, such as ‘ought’, encode what Chrisman glosses as “conceptual manipulations”(166). He does complain that the notion of a conceptual manipulation is underspecified and vague, though both expressivism and his own preferred metasemantics seem to be local representationalist views where ‘conceptual manipulation’ is further specified. More would have been appreciated here; in particular, exploration of other local representationalist options would have been illuminating.Chrisman glosses expressivism as an ideationalist metasemantics—semantic rules like R10 are articulations of how we should think when uttering ‘ought’-claims—along with the claim that what we ought to think when uttering ‘ought’ claims involves directive instead of descriptive content. In my view, this recent trend of interpreting metaethical expressivism as an ideationalist view is a serious mistake, conflating a program in linguistic (meta-)semantics dating back to Grice with the radical picture of the constitutive function of normative thought and talk expressivists have championed. Expressivism claims that the function of normative discourse is to express our evaluative or directive attitudes, ideationalism claims that the content of normative claims is derived from what we should think when so claiming. Expressivism, by itself, makes no claims about the content of normative claims and ideationalism, by itself, makes no claim about the function of normative discourse. The two should be separated, even if some theorists accept both.Chrisman briefly raises (but does not discuss in detail) some standard issues for this kind of expressivist metasemantics, such as the Frege-Geach problem. More interesting is his suggestion that expressivists have trouble accommodating the distinction between agentive and nonagentive readings of ‘ought’-claims since not all ‘ought’-thoughts are intuitively directive. Just consider ‘Erdoğan ought to be in jail’. This is a nice problem, but one affecting primarily the plan-oriented expressivism developed by Gibbard. Those who treat the function of normative thought and talk as the expression of evaluative attitudes like approval and disapproval instead of directive attitudes like plans or intentions will welcome this problem for their competition.Chrisman’s own metasemantics takes a middle path between global representationalism and expressivism, preserving the valuable aspects of each. On the one hand, he wants to be able to respect the most sophisticated work in linguistic semantics about the meaning of ‘ought’. This is easiest to do on the local representationalist metasemantic picture since it interprets nonnormative propositions standardly as truth-apt representations of the world. On the other hand, he wants his metasemantics to be resolutely antidescriptivist about normative claims and respect the motivational and psychological aspects of normative thought taken seriously by expressivists. The result is a version of inferentialism where certain bits of language make explicit commitments to implicational connections. ‘Ought’ claims are “an articulation of what one is committed to in virtue of using the [‘ought’-sentence] to make an assertion in ordinary discursive practice” (186).Semantic rules like R10 articulate ‘a position in the space of implications’—a set of implications—which we are committed to in virtue of our use of ‘ought’ claims. That is, ‘ought’ gets “its content from being usable to acknowledge inferential connections between more basic items rather than to refer to things in the world” (197). Chrisman only gives a couple of tentative examples of such connections and neglects the difference between the action of inference and the relation of implication, so it is difficult to evaluate this part of his metasemantical view. Still, I worry that there is far too little agreement about what we are committed to doing when accepting ‘ought’ claims to support an inferentialist metasemantics for ‘ought’, unlike ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘not’.Unlike the global representationalist view, we are never told explicitly how to interpret the semantic machinery involved in R10 in terms of the inferentialist metasemantics. On the representationalist picture, there is a specifiable real content of ‘ought’ claims—representations of normative reality—which interpret the machinery in R10. Similarly, for the expressivist, the real content of ‘ought’-claims, so far as there is such a thing, can be described in terms of plans or endorsements. In both cases, it is possible to explain why R10 is the way it is in terms of the underlying metasemantics (though adequately matching an expressivist metasemantics to something like R10 is nontrivial.)We are not told how the inferentialist metasemantics interprets mechanisms like the ranking function g or ‘being required by n’. Since it isn’t clear how to interpret R10 in terms of an underlying space of implications, it’s not clear what the inferentialist picture takes the real content of ‘ought’-claims to be. One might worry that the gap between the favored formal semantics and an inferentialist metasemantics is simply too wide. This is the reason that inferentialists in the logical tradition—such as the intuitionists—have often treated formal semantics as a useful tool for modeling real content, but one which plays no substantive role in the explanation of our actual understanding of the meaning of the relevant fragments of language. Chrisman seemingly wants his formal semantics to do more, but it is unclear exactly how to connect it to his favored metasemantical picture. If it is to do more, then the formal machinery needs precise interpretation in terms of the underlying metasemantics.One potential way of filling this gap without directly interpreting the machinery in R10 treats notions like ‘correct’ as insubstantial placeholders, using a few constitutive rules or entire sets of implications governing the behavior of expressions like ‘ought’ (207) and the requirement that rules or implications be correctness-preserving to implicitly define the meaning of ‘ought’ and thereby specify rules like R10. Historically, this approach has been beset with tremendous difficulties, even for logical expressions like ‘or’ and ‘not’. The problem, in brief, is that it is difficult to pin down a unique semantic rule like R10 in terms of an underlying set of implications or constitutive rules. Even in the simplest cases, any of many pairwise inconsistent semantic rules validates the relevant rules or implications. For example, without disrespecting the classical consequence relation, we can either treat a disjunction with two false disjuncts as sometimes true or, alternatively, as always false. If Chrisman favors the approach just described, then it would be useful to have some discussion of how he intends to finesse this problem. (For the logical case, see James Garson, What Logics Mean: From Proof Theory to Model-Theoretic Semantics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013] and the references therein.)Given this lack of detail, it is hard to evaluate the overall plausibility of Chrisman’s metasemantical suggestion. I have focused on places I disagree with Chrisman, but there is also much to agree with. Chapters 2–5 are a useful propaedeutic to modal verbs, especially for metaethicists unfamiliar with work in linguistic semantics, as well as a corrective to the idea that language-oriented metaethics can ignore this work. Chrisman’s emphasis on the distinction between semantics and metasemantics is both useful and timely. If his metasemantic picture is sketchy, it is nonetheless intriguing and worthy of further detailed development. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the debate about the meaning of normative expressions. It may frustrate, but the reader will be well compensated with probative questions and worries for their own favorite account of ‘ought’. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 127, Number 1October 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687340 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Abstract Over the decades there have been discussions regarding the ownership and definition of texts written for children. The paper discusses the term "childlike language" as the one distinguished from other types of language through its connection to the image of a child and children's culture, but generated by adults. Accordingly, childlike language is marked by a distinct deviation/aberration from the norm and is produced by adult authors who often engage in literary experimentation and exhibit a propensity for identifying with their child audience. In their strong association with the "semiotic", as defined by Julia Kristeva, denoting the prosody and sound of language, such literary works for children exhibit deviant nature linguistically/lexically, phonetically, semantically, orthographically, and grammatically through their use of neologisms, word play, sound patterns, hyperbole, nonsense, and other stylistic and structural elements. Therefore, authors for children express their childlike nature by means of language which defies common rules, challenges status quo, and which results in playfulness, humor, subversiveness and grotesque. For this purpose, the research focuses on the examples of popular works by children's authors belonging to the English-speaking literary tradition, such as Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, A. A. Milne, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie and others, in order to detect and illustrate the categories of childlike language. However, though the analysis will stick to its designated focus, the childlike expression is universal regardless of age and location. It is a source of freedom and divergent thinking, it makes us want to read, and it lets us grow up to be very powerful people. Key words: children's culture and literature; humor; nonsense; the semiotic; word play.---Sažetak O definiciji i autorstvu tekstova pisanih za djecu raspravlja se već desetljećima. U izlaganju će se govoriti o pojmu "djecolikoga jezika" kao jezika koji se razlikuje od ostalih vrsta izričaja svojom povezanošću s pojmom djeteta i dječjom kulturom, no čiji su izvor odrasli. U skladu s tim djecoliki se jezik odlikuje izrazitim odstupanjem/zastranjivanjem od norme, a stvaraju ga odrasli autori koji pokazuju naklonost prema književnom eksperimentiranju te se često poistovjećuju sa svojom dječjom publikom. Povezanošću sa "semiotičkim" oblikom jezika kako ga definira Julia Kristeva, a koji se odnosi na prozodiju, zvuk i melodiju jezika, takva djela dječje književnosti ukazuju na devijantnost lingvističkih/leksičkih, fonetičkih, semantičkih, pravopisnih, gramatičkih i ostalih stilskih i strukturnih elemenata, specifičnu uporabu neologizama, igru riječi, glasovne figure, hiperbole, nonsense. Na taj način autori tekstova za djecu stvaraju posebnu vrstu izričaja jezikom koji se opire standardnim pravilima i ne trpi status quo, a čiji su rezultat zaigranost, humor, subverzivnost i groteska. Sa svrhom određivanja i opisivanja kategorija djecolikoga jezika ovo se istraživanje bavi primjerima popularne dječje književnosti autora engleskoga govornog područja kao što su Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, A. A. Milne, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie i drugi. Iako analiza primarno obraća pozornost na primjere specifičnoga govornog područja, djecoliki je jezik univerzalan bez obzira na dob ili područje. On je izvor slobode i divergentnoga mišljenja, potiče nas da čitamo i omogućava nam da izrastemo u vrlo moćne ljude. Ključne riječi: dječja kultura; humor; igra riječima; neologizam; nonsens; semiotičko.
Study 3 Image Rating Support for Welfare
We live busy, social lives, and meeting the challenges of our complex environments puts strain on our cognitive systems. However, cognitive resources are limited. It is unclear how cognitive load affects social decision making. Previous findings on the effects of cognitive load on other-regarding preferences have been ambiguous, allowing no coherent opinion whether cognitive load increases, decreases or does not affect prosocial considerations. Here, we suggest that social distance between individuals modulates whether generosity towards a recipient increases or decreases under cognitive load conditions. Participants played a financial social discounting task with several recipients at variable social distance levels. In this task, they could choose between generous alternatives, yielding medium financial rewards for the participant and recipient at variable social distances, or between a selfish alternative, yielding larger rewards for the participant alone. We show that the social d)