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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.
This study investigated the effect of individual differences (IDs) like language proficiency, gender and age on careful, unpressured online planning on the production of speech act of apology in institutional discourse. For this purpose, one hundred and eighty-seven Persian EFL university students at three academic levels (undergraduates, postgraduates and PhD students) participated and cross-sectional data were collected to compare and analyze the apologies produced by learners at different proficiency levels. A three way between subject analyses (ANOVA) showed quantitative differences among the three groups according to individual differences. Further, in-depth qualitative analyses of test items and retrospective verbal reports (RVRs) taken from the participants revealed developmental information about the series of processes, language states and patterns followed by learners when making an apology in a second language. Sociocultural, socio-psychological and socio-affective aspects of the discourse situations influenced not only students’ pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic choices but also their negotiation of lexical and grammatical choices in planning the speech act of apology. Apparently, the degree of sociocultural accommodation to the L2 pragmatic norms may be a matter of choice as of ability. One major pedagogical implication of this study is that any account of the development of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) should take into consideration the interaction of ID variables that are likely to intervene between the stages of noticing and target like production.<br /> <strong> </strong><br />
Abstract The paper describes standardized instruments that researchers and practitioners can use for assessing receptive vocabulary development and expressive vocabulary development in both Brazilian Portuguese and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) in both hearing and deaf children from 2 to 14 years of age. It establishes comparisons among such instruments based on their characteristics and indications, and summarizes some data on their validity, reliability and norms. Norms provided herein permit distinguishing among five talker groups (very late talkers, late talkers, on-time talkers, early talkers, very early talkers) at each of five age levels (i.e., from 1 to 5 years of age), as well as five listener groups (very late listeners, late listeners, on-time listeners, early listeners, very early listeners) at each of nine school grade levels (i.e., from Kindergarten to 8th grade). Norms provided herein also permit distinguishing among five sign receiver deaf groups (very late receivers, late receivers, on-time receivers, early receivers, very early receivers) at each of seven school grade levels of deaf education (i.e., from 2nd to 8th grade). Keywords: vocabulary, speech comprehension, speech production, oral language, lexical development, PPVT
This study, drawing on insights from the Appraisal framework, the parameter-based approach to evaluation and corpus linguistics, investigates the evaluative language used in customer review texts. The primary goal of this investigation is to develop a framework of evaluation that can be used to account adequately for evaluative expressions in customer review texts, and the ultimate goal is to support the argument that the modelling and theorising of evaluation is context-specific. Based on the investigation into a corpus compiled of review texts retrieved from www.amazon.co.uk, this study proposes a data-driven, parameter-based and appraisal-informed framework of evaluation which comprises four parameters—Quality, Satisfactoriness, Recommendability and Worthiness. Since these parameters are not thought-up, but are generalised from real data, it is arguable that the proposed framework of evaluation is certainly valid and thus can be used to describe and analyse evaluative language used in this particular context. This in turn indicates that the description and theorising of evaluation is indeed highly dependent on the discourse type that is under examination.
Depending on the methodological choices made by the lexicographer, a lexical entry may vary considerably between dictionaries. Analyzing the treatment of diatopic variation comparing Portuguese and French dictionaries, one can distinguish at least three types of treatment: the description can be based i) on the maximal extension of the language, ii) on geographically limited extension of the language, Brazil, for example, or iii) on an abstract norm which is not perceived in terms of geographical extension but in terms of shared linguistic stock.
The aim of this study is to explore vocabulary used by representatives of different social classes. This objective involves the following tasks: consideration of the concepts of norm and social class; consideration functions of various layers of language used in different situations; identification the types of word's connotation in the speech of main characters; analysis of selection of language means in the speech of people who belong to different social classes. The level of scientific development is formed by the theoretical basis of scientific papers, giving a broad concept of class rules, and what they include, as well as involving consideration of lexical units of the language and stylistic means of expressiveness. The object of this study is the image of various social classes of the British society. The subject of the research are lexical stylistic means of creating this image in the cinema. The purpose of the study is to highlight the lexical-stylistic means, which are used to create the image of the representatives of the various classes of society on the material selected four films of different years of release and see how linguistic patterns have been changing over time.
Abstract The main goal of this chapter is to provide a comparative overview of some of the principal aspects of sociolinguistic variation in Romance, covering phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical variation among different groups of the speech community according to sociolinguistic variables such as age, gender, class, education, medium and register; the role of the nature, organization, and cohesion of particular social groups and networks in driving socially-determined variation and linguistic innovations; high and low prestige variants; normative forces, and reactions to, standardization. Specific topics dealt with include: French; Italo-Romance; Spanish; variationist studies; sociolinguistic models and categories; regional sociolinguistic variation; sociolinguistic variables; historical sociolinguistic variation; recent standardizing and convergence trends; forms of address; standards and norms; national norms; regional norms.
The article considers commercial urbanonyms, that is, the names of cafйs, restaurants, shops, residential complexes and other urban facilities, which may give rise to conflict situations in the society, cause a negative reaction of some citizens or a particular social group, as well as provoke a clash of interests of the rights holders. The article reveals the capabilities of naming examination (a new kind of forensic linguistic examination a new kind of forensic linguistic expertise arising at the intersection of linguistics, law, onomastics and forensic expertology) in identifying factors of urbanonyms’ conflictogenity, negative semantics of names, semantic and lexical ambiguity of urbanonyms, violation of the spelling or grammatical norm in the title, the use the vernacular language, jargon, slang expressions, professionalisms, borrowings (including barbarisms), incorrect use of precedent names.
This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until 2015; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the funding situation for LT topics. The article documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.
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.
Abstract. The ovarian hormone levels can affect subjective ratings and modulate late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes evoked by images of varying appeal. The present study examines how different progesterone levels influence the valence, arousal ratings and mean LPP amplitudes evoked by pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant images. Twenty-three healthy females were grouped by menstrual cycle days (estradiol and progesterone levels): 10 were included in the follicular phase group and 13 were included in the luteal phase group. Each female rated the affective images in terms of valence and arousal while event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured. The valence ratings of pleasant images were higher in follicular phase group than in luteal, but the same effect was not seen in the arousal ratings. The arousal ratings to unpleasant images were higher than those to pleasant in luteal, but not in follicular phase group. However, the mean amplitude of the early LPP (450–700 ms) was significantly greater to pleasant than to neutral and unpleasant stimuli, but did not differ between follicular and luteal phase groups. The mean amplitude of the late LPP (700–950 ms) was significantly larger to pleasant and unpleasant compared to neutral images, but did not differ between menstrual cycle phase groups. Correlation analysis showed a significant negative relationship between progesterone levels and arousal ratings of pleasant and unpleasant images in luteal phase group. Arousal scores for unpleasant images negatively correlated with mean LPP amplitudes to unpleasant images at Pz site in the luteal phase group. The present study provides evidence that subjective ratings of affective images of different attractiveness could be influenced by female menstrual cycle phase, but mean amplitudes of LPP (450–950 ms) are not affected. However, results of correlational analysis suggest that valence, arousal ratings and mean LPP amplitudes are susceptible to the influence of hormone progesterone in luteal phase.
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.
Referential translation machines (RTMs) are a computational model effective at judging monolingual and bilingual similarity while identifying translation acts between any two data sets with respect to interpretants, data close to the task instances. RTMs pioneer a language-independent approach to all similarity tasks and remove the need to access any task- or domain-specific information or resource. We use RTMs for predicting the semantic similarity of text and present state-of-the-art results showing that RTMs can achieve better results on the test set than on the training set. Interpretants are used to derive features measuring the closeness of the test sentences to the training data, the difficulty of translating them, and the presence of the acts of translation, which may ubiquitously be observed in communication. RTMs can achieve top performance at SemEval in various semantic similarity prediction tasks as well as similarity prediction tasks in bilingual settings. We obtain rankings of various prediction tasks using the performance of RTM and relative evaluation metrics, which can help identify which tasks and subtasks require more work by design.
У статті проаналізовано мову блогу в аспекті дотримання літературних норм на різних мовних рівнях. Приділено також увагу варваризмам як одному з найпоказовіших явищ в інтернет-комунікації. Ключові слова: інтернет-комунікація, блог, культура мови, норми літературної мови, варваризм. В статье анализируется язык блога в аспекте соблюдения литературных норм на разных языковых уровнях. Особое внимание уделено варваризмам как одному из наиболее показательных явлений в интернет-коммуникации. Ключев ые слова: интернет-коммуникация, блог, культура речи, нормы литературного языка, варваризм. The widest spectrum of lexical, stylistic and word-formative devices is represented in the blog as one of the most popular media. Both traditional devices and devices of virtual communication are actualized here. The article deals with the analysis of blog language in the aspect of adherence of literary norms on different language levels. The attention is also paid to barbarisms as one of the most significant phenomena in the internet communication. The peculiarity of lexical structure of blog language in Ukrainian part of the Internet is the large quantity of units used for representing the events of the social and political life, the processes connected with computer and network technologies. The large quantity of borrowings, most of those are barbarisms, and the obscene lexis are analyzed in the article. Despite the fact that multidimensional nature connected with the internet-communication study, the ortological component of Ukrainian-speaking blog characterization is insufficiently researched today. The relevance of our research is in the analysis of the language of Ukrainian blogosphere from this point of view. The subject of consideration in the presented article is the violation of language norms and barbarisms in blog texts. The task of our research is to evaluate the phenomena that characterize the up-to-date communication in the aspect of language culture. The actual material is picked up from the text resources of the blogs set on the blog-platforms ( LiveJournal, I. ua та ін.), journalistic websites and independent blogs. The prospects for further research of the language of Ukrainian blogosphere are in future analysis of lexical and stylistic peculiarities of this genre in the structure of mass media devices, in identification of word-formation dynamic processes which are in the Ukrainian-speaking blogs. Key words: Internet communication, blog, language culture, norms of the literary language, barbarism.
In recent years, the fast growth of Web pages and the constant evolution of internet technologies have lead to a significant increase in the number of pedagogical resources. Thus, the indexing and search problems have become crucial. To overcome this problem, it was proposed to use information coming from the norms and standards of educational metadata. However, this solution does not solve completely the problem. Previously, traditional information retrieval systems rely on indexing by keywords for representing pedagogical resources and queries content. This process, based on lexical matching, allows selecting pedagogical resources based on keywords shared with the query, which can reduce the accuracy of search results if the meaning of common words in the query and in the pedagogical resources is different. To overcome this issue and provide a more sophisticated search, adding semantics becomes necessary. Semantic Indexing offers a representation by the meaning of words in order to find pedagogical resources semantically relevant to the user request. We present in this paper the choice of the indexing approach used for the complementary educational resources. The main objective is to integrate this approach in the warehouse model that aims on one hand to store the complementary pedagogical resources, and on the other hand to help the user fill in the description fields of these resources.
[[abstract]]В статье приводятся примеры использования текстов газетно- публицистического стиля в качестве дидактического материала при изучении лексики и синтаксиса русского языка. В центре внимания автора нормативный аспект. Анализируются нарушения лексических норм в текстах СМИ, предлагаются способы их преодоления. Рассматриваются изменения, происходящие в синтаксическом строе газетно-публицистического стиля под влиянием разговорного синтаксиса. The article provides examples of the use of newspaper texts-journalistic style as a didactic material when learning vocabulary and syntax of the Russian language. The author focuses on the normative dimension. Analyze violations of lexical norms in media texts, suggests ways to overcome them. Discusses the changes occurring in the syntactic structure of newspaper-journalistic style under the influence of colloquial syntax.
У статті проаналізовано сучасний стан дотримання норм культури усного та писемного мовлення студентами-аграріями одного з вишів України. Окреслено деякі шляхи підвищення мовленнєвої культури серед студентів нефілологічних спеціальностей. Ключові слова: мовна норма, суржик, акцентуаційні норми, лексичні норми, граматичні норми, стилістичні норми. В статье проанализированы случаи соблюдения норм культуры устной и письменной речи студентами-аграриями одного из вузов Украины. Намечены некоторые направления повышения речевой культуры среди студентов нефилологических специальностей. Ключевые слова: языковая норма, суржик, акцентологические нормы, лексические нормы, грамматические нормы, стилистические нормы. The knowledge of the mother tongue is of great importance especially today when there is a reappraisal of values in our society and national consciousness is on the rise. There is an objective need to create and implement new professional business communication into language education. Nowadays linguists are working hard to improve speech culture of the society and students that are no linguists. It determines the relevance of this scientific investigation. This article intends to analyze the current state of following the standards of speaking and writing communication of no linguist students on the basis of lexical, grammatical, stylistic and pronouncing levels and determine ways to improve speech culture of students of technical universities. The main task is to present the linguistic analysis of speaking skills (practical training course « Ukrainian for Professional Purposes » ) and writing skills (term papers and dissertations) of future specialists in agriculture and recommendations for improvement of professional communication within future profession. One of the most important problems of teaching the course « Ukrainian for Professional Purposes » in higher school is the improvement of speech culture. Therefore, the main task of speech culture is to gain educational skills of communication, propaganda and mastering the literary standards of the language, correct grammar structures, in pronunciation and stress,the ability to ignore colloquial language. The task of higher school linguists is to teach students communicational skills, speech accuracy and standards, draw their attention to the culture of the language and culture of speech. Key words: language norm, surzhik, accentological rules, lexical rules, grammar rules, stylistic norms.
The studies in this issue of Studi e Saggi Linguistici show how variation and norm did coexist and contrast even in the classical world. The different sections find their pivot on the notion of variation, viewed in its relations with language contact and linguistic identity. Besides Ancient Greek and Latin (Sections I and II), Italic languages as well as other ancient Indo-European languages (Sections III and V) settle the empirical domain. The material investigated ranges from literary texts to tablets, inscriptions and other non-literary texts. The relevant patterns of linguistic variation emerge from an in-depth analysis of graphemic, morpho-phonological, syntactic and lexical markers. The grammatical tradition, especially rich in the case of Greek and Latin, makes up a supplementary as well as strong evidence for the study of linguistic variation (Section IV). We believe that models developed from the description and interpretation of contemporary realities may support the reconstruction of the sociohistorical contexts where ancient languages were used. The study of data derived from written sources may considerably benefit from the integration of the more traditional philological analysis with contemporary sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics. Such an integrated methodology might even overcome some inconsistency of the textual data available. In our wishes, the collection of studies in this issue of Studi e Saggi Linguistici should represent an adequate example of how modern and ancient notions, both theoretical and methodological, may proceed hand in hand.
Lexical units with reduplication of word-forming affixes in the texts of the 1114th centuries reflect the specificity of stylistic features of the Old Russian literature. They also serve as the means of promotion and fixation of important structural and semantic tendencies in the history of Russian. The reduplication of the affixes reflects peculiarity of literary speech, based on the intersection of the Church Slavonic and the original Russian linguistic traditions. It represents different genre-related norms of Old Russian, or norms with variation of expressive means as an inherent feature. Accordingly, the most active models of suffixal reduplication include genetically heterogeneous (Russian and Church Slavonic) synonymic affixes. The contamination of original Russian suffixes with their south Slavonic synonyms is considered to be an instrument of genre and stylistic adaptation of the derivatives to the specifics of a text. The semantic redundancy of words, being the result of the affixal reduplication, corresponds, first of all, to the general stylistic peculiarities of literary speech, and, secondly, is viewed as the basis of semantic development of some lexical and grammatical word classes: in the class of nomina abstracta the reduplication of suffixes contributs to concretization of the meanings of abstract names; in the sphere of verbal prefixation, the “threading” of synonymous affixes became the basis of development of new modifying meanings the modes of verbal action.
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.
The Danish term Eventyr derives from the Latin adventura and the French aventure. The Latin verb is advenire, meaning “to happen” or “occur.” The lexical meaning in Danish refers to an event or incident which to a significant degree is accidental or remarkable, especially one that is strange, surprising, or exciting. When used in the plural, the Danish may refer to erotic experiences or tales of love. Eventyr may also suggest a daring or even dangerous undertaking. In a third meaning, Eventyr refers to a story or tale about strange or marvelous events. These are usually fantastical stories, something that lies out of the norm. Eventyr may also refer to an implausible or untruthful story.1
Thanks to the proliferation of online social networks, it has become conventional for researchers to communicate and collaborate with each other. Meanwhile, one critical challenge arises, that is, how to find the most relevant and potential collaborators for each researcher? In this work, we propose a novel collaborator recommendation model called CCRec, which combines the information on researchers’ publications and collaboration network to generate better recommendation. In order to effectively identify the most potential collaborators for researchers, we adopt a topic clustering model to identify the academic domains, as well as a random walk model to compute researchers’ feature vectors. Using DBLP datasets, we conduct benchmarking experiments to examine the performance of CCRec. The experimental results show that CCRec outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, recall and F1 score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Libr)
This paper describes the SimpleNLG-IT realiser, i.e. the main features of the porting of the SimpleNLG API system The paper gives some details about the grammar and the lexicon employed by the system and reports some results about a first evaluation based on a dependency treebank for Italian. A comparison is developed with the previous projects developed for this task for English and French, which is based on the morpho-syntactical differences and similarities between Italian and these languages.
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.
The article gives a description and assessment of non-normative linguistic facts (misprints, typo errors, violations of the lexical rules) operating in the street space of Omsk and collected as part of a student project designed to improve the ecology of the city speech. On the basis of numerical calculations were obtained the data on three unstable sites of modern spelling rules. Revealed a wide range of blunders. It was concluded that the culture of street speech communication, which is media for the type of recipient, is being formed by native speakers with low literacy. Presented and commented on the results of the survey, the purpose of which was to study the perception of texts with a misprint, a typo error, a slang term by residents of Omsk and the Omsk region. Results of the survey show that norm violations were fixed by informants in proportion to the degree of how gross the mistakes are and give them the desire to correct the text. The latter point supports the position of the normative view of the language.
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.
Individuals with High functioning autism (HFA) are distinguished by relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive skills. However, problems with pragmatic language skills have been consistently reported across the autistic spectrum, even when structural language is intact. Our main goal was to investigate how highly verbal individuals with autism process figurative language and whether manipulation of the stimuli presentation modality had an impact on the processing. We were interested in the extent to which visual context, e.g., an image corresponding either to the literal meaning or the figurative meaning of the expression may facilitate responses to such expressions. Participants with HFA and their typically developing peers (matched on intelligence and language level) completed a cross-modal sentence-picture matching task for figurative expressions and their target figurative meaning represented in images. We expected that the individuals with autism would have difficulties in)
There is a growing body of research in psychology that attempts to extrapolate human lexical judgments from computational models of semantics. This research can be used to help develop comprehensive norm sets for experimental research, it has applications to large-scale statistical modelling of lexical access and has broad value within natural language processing and sentiment analysis. However, the value of extrapolated human judgments has recently been questioned within psychological research. Of primary concern is the fact that extrapolated judgments may not share the same pattern of statistical relationship with lexical and semantic variables as do actual human judgments; often the error component in extrapolated judgments is not psychologically inert, making such judgments problematic to use for psychological research. We present a new methodology for extrapolating human judgments that partially addresses prior concerns of validity. We use this methodology to extrapolate human judgments of valence, arousal, dominance, and concreteness for 78,286 words. We also provide resources for users to extrapolate these human judgments for three million English words and short phrases. Applications for large sets of extrapolated human judgments are demonstrated and discussed.
Culture-specific phenomena in Russian language — types, phenomena, perceptionWhen discussing culture-specific phenomena, most scholars typically refer to realia and lexical units of all kinds. This article, however, demonstrates that this focus is too narrow and that it is advisable to widen the range in the study of culture-specific phenomena. Such phenomena can be found in various areas, including semantics, morphology, and word formation. Moreover, norms concerning language usage can be shaped by cultural factors.Specyfika kulturowa w języku rosyjskim — typy, zjawiska, postrzeganieSpecyfika kulturowa ujmuje ogólnie prawdziwe, typowe określenia realiów, czyli leksemy określające wszelkie obiekty różnego rodzaju, które istnieją tylko w jednej kulturze. W niniejszym artykule udało się udowodnić, że specyfikę kulturową należy rozumieć o wiele szerzej, bo dotyczy ona różnych płaszczyzn, więc inne zjawiska językowe wykazują również kulturowo specyficzne zaznaczenie. Z tego powodu należałoby pożegnać się z dawnym wyobrażeniem o wąskim pojęciu specyfiki kulturowej, a na jego miejsce wprowadzić szersze rozumienie, aby móc przedstawiać jej całą różnorodność.W artykule pokazano, że specyfika kulturowa może dotyczyć też asocjacji niektórych jednostek leksykalnych. Poza tym występuje ona na płaszczyźnie morfologicznej, a także słowotwórczej. Ponadto specyfikę kulturową można zaobserwować w uzusie językowym i może ona dotyczyć norm językowych. Słowniki bardzo rzadko przekazują niezbędne informacje wskazujące na specyfikę kulturową, w szczególności dane pragmatyczne. Brak takich ilustrujących informacji pozwala wyciągnąć wniosek, że słowniki nie dają użytkownikom ani orientacji co do kontekstu i specyfiki jednostek językowych, ani nie pomagają w używaniu jednostek językowych.
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.
OBJECTIVES: Theoretical models of adult development suggest changes in emotion systems with age. This study determined how younger and older adults judged and classified 70 emotion terms that varied in valence and arousal, and that have been used in previous studies of adult aging and emotion. The terms were from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule - Expanded (PANAS-X) and the (KS) affect scales. METHOD: Older (n = 32) and younger adults (n = 111) engaged in a card sort task which determined how the 70 emotion terms were classified (i.e. grouped) in relation to one another. Activation and valence ratings of emotion terms were collected. RESULTS: There were 17 age group differences in item ratings for activation and 19 for valence. Older adults tended to rate emotion terms and scales as more positive and activating than younger persons. Card sort data indicated similarity in conceptualizations of emotion terms across groups with exceptions for serene, sad, and lonely. CONCLUSIONS: Research that utilizes self-report emotion data from older and younger persons should consider how perceptions of emotion terms may vary systematically with age. The constructs of sadness, loneliness, and serene may be age-variant and necessitate age-based adjustments in assessment and intervention. Further, older adults may perceive some emotion terms to be more activating and positive than younger persons.
Previous studies on children’s acquisition of depicting verbs in signed languages have chiefly studied the use of classifiers in verbs of motion and location, particularly the order in which the different classes of handshape are acquired. The age of the children in these studies have ranged from age three to thirteen, and an important finding has been that classifier constructions are not fully acquired until early adolescence. Most of these studies have used an elicitation tool to investigate the production and comprehension of classifiers, but have not provided any adult target norms of the test items when scoring children’s achievement. The present dissertation provides a detailed description of both adults’ and children’s verb constructions in descriptions of cutting and breaking events in Swedish Sign Language (SSL), specifically focusing on the number of hands used in signing, handshape category and hand activity, which has not been previously described for any sign language. As part of this study, 14 deaf adults (ages 20–72) and 11 deaf children (2;1–6;6) of deaf parents, all native-users of SSL, performed a task that involved describing 53 video clips of cutting and breaking events. The clips show an event in which an actor separates material, either with the aid of a tool or without. Additionally, some clips show an entity separating by itself without an actor being involved. The adults described the events with depicting verb constructions that are produced with two hands. The analysis of the handshapes produced three categories: substitutor, manipulator and descriptor. The most frequent construction in the description of events without a tool was two acting manipulators (depicting a hand handling an object), whereas in descriptions of events with a tool the combinations were acting substitutor or manipulator with a non-acting manipulator. The acting hand referred to the tool and the non-acting manipulator to the affected entity. In descriptions of events without an actor, either two substitutors or two manipulators were used. In addition to depicting verb constructions, the descriptions also contained resultative complements, i.e. signs carrying information about the result of the activity being carried out. The complements were either lexical signs or some form of depicting verb construction. Similar observations have not been noted for any other signed language. In the manner of the adults, the children used depicting verb constructions in descriptions of cutting and breaking events (681 tokens), but they also used pointing and lexical signs (64 tokens). Nearly half of the verb constructions that were used by the children corresponded to the adult target forms. The majority of the constructions describing events without a tool corresponded to the adult target forms using two acting manipulators, even among the youngest informants. In events with a tool, only a third of the constructions corresponded to the adult target forms (emerging at 4;8 – 5;0); the remaining two-thirds were deviating constructions in terms of number of hands, handshape category and hand activity. Resultative complement are sparsely used by children (57 tokens), the most chosen type of complement being lexical signs. Pervasive features of children’s constructions were the addition of contact between the hands and a preference for substitutors, something not found in adults’ constructions. These features were elucidated within the framework of Real Space blending theory, with the study showing that children first use visible blended entities and that invisible blended entities do not emerge until 4;8–5;0.
Sequential LSTM has been extended to model tree structures, giving competitive results for a number of tasks. Existing methods model constituent trees by bottom-up combinations of constituent nodes, making direct use of input word information only for leaf nodes. This is different from sequential LSTMs, which contain reference to input words for each node. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic head-lexicalization for tree-structure LSTMs, propagating head words from leaf nodes to every constituent node. In addition, enabled by head lexicalization, we build a tree LSTM in the top-down direction, which corresponds to bidirectional sequential LSTM structurally. Experiments show that both extensions give better representations of tree structures. Our final model gives the best results on the Standford Sentiment Treebank and highly competitive results on the TREC question type classification task.
Abstract The automatic interpretation of 3D point clouds for building reconstruction is a challenging task. The interpretation process requires highly structured models representing semantics. Formal grammars can describe structures as well as the parameters of buildings and their parts. We propose a novel approach for the automatic learning of weighted attributed context‐free grammar rules for 3D building reconstruction, supporting the laborious manual design of rules. We separate structure from parameter learning. Specific Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used to generate a weighted context‐free grammar and predict structured outputs such as parse trees. The grammar is extended by parameters and constraints, which are learned based on a statistical relational learning method using Markov Logic Networks (MLNs). MLNs enforce the topological and geometric constraints. MLNs address uncertainty explicitly and provide probabilistic inference. They are able to deal with partial observations caused by occlusions. Uncertain projective geometry is used to deal with the uncertainty of the observations. Learning is based on a large building database covering different building styles and façade structures. In particular, a treebank that has been derived from the database is employed for structure learning.
Many sequential processing tasks require complex nonlinear transition functions from one step to the next. However, recurrent neural networks with 'deep' transition functions remain difficult to train, even when using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. We introduce a novel theoretical analysis of recurrent networks based on Gersgorin's circle theorem that illuminates several modeling and optimization issues and improves our understanding of the LSTM cell. Based on this analysis we propose Recurrent Highway Networks, which extend the LSTM architecture to allow step-to-step transition depths larger than one. Several language modeling experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture results in powerful and efficient models. On the Penn Treebank corpus, solely increasing the transition depth from 1 to 10 improves word-level perplexity from 90.6 to 65.4 using the same number of parameters. On the larger Wikipedia datasets for character prediction (text8 and enwik8), RHNs outperform all previous results and achieve an entropy of 1.27 bits per character.
The growing work in multi-lingual parsing faces the challenge of fair comparative evaluation and performance analysis across languages and their treebanks. The difficulty lies in teasing apart the properties of treebanks, such as their size or average sentence length, from those of the annotation scheme, and from the linguistic properties of languages. We propose a method to evaluate the effects of word order of a language on dependency parsing performance, while controlling for confounding treebank properties. The method uses artificially-generated treebanks that are minimal permutations of actual treebanks with respect to two word order properties: word order variation and dependency lengths. Based on these artificial data on twelve languages, we show that longer dependencies and higher word order variability degrade parsing performance. Our method also extends to minimal pairs of individual sentences, leading to a finer-grained understanding of parsing errors.
Automatic metaphor detection usually relies on various features, incorporating e.g. selectional preference violations or concreteness ratings to detect metaphors in text. These features rely on background corpora, hand-coded rules or additional, manually created resources, all specific to the language the system is being used on. We present a novel approach to metaphor detection using a neural network in combination with word embeddings, a method that has already proven to yield promising results for other natural language processing tasks. We show that foregoing manual feature engineering by solely relying on word embeddings trained on large corpora produces comparable results to other systems, while removing the need for additional resources.
Various treebanks have been released for dependency parsing. Despite that treebanks may belong to different languages or have different annotation schemes, they contain common syntactic knowledge that is potential to benefit each other. This paper presents a universal framework for transfer parsing across multi-typed treebanks with deep multi-task learning. We consider two kinds of treebanks as source: the multilingual universal treebanks and the monolingual heterogeneous treebanks. Knowledge across the source and target treebanks are effectively transferred through multi-level parameter sharing. Experiments on several benchmark datasets in various languages demonstrate that our approach can make effective use of arbitrary source treebanks to improve target parsing models.
The tempo of modern living picks up day by day and the representatives of various professions should learn new information coming in various languages, including rare languages, from different parts of the world. Translators find themselves in the conditions of the necessity of more quick and qualitative translation what is not always possible when translating the rare language pair. The paper covers special aspects of appropriate translation using the intermediate language, which is required to increase the speed and the quality of translation from rare languages. Usually, the official international language (English) acts as the intermediate language, but other variants are possible as well. The paper describes as an example the experience of translation from Chinese to Russian using English as the intermediate language. The authors distinguished some special aspects of such translation. The experience of translation of Chinese novels from English (intermediate language) into Russian allowed the authors to find out that when working with the intermediate language, it is necessary to follow not only the general norms and rules of translation but some identified special aspects as well. The authors noted that while working with the intermediate language, a translator should take into account three cultural patterns (including various historical allusions) performed in three languages involved in the translation; select an appropriate translation strategy for appropriate translation of units of measure; take into account the specifics of proper names, which have not got any analogues in the intermediate and translating languages; give special attention to the use of both lexical and grammatical transformations.
In this paper, we describe the compilation of the Slovene Lexical Database; main focus being on developing the methodology to improve the tools used for lexicographic analysis and to introduce automatic data extraction in the lexicographic process. The semi-automated approach, which was devised in the last stages of database compilation, involved extracting corpus data, i.e. grammatical relations, collocations, examples, and grammatical labels, and conducting lexicographic analysis in the dictionary-writing system rather than in the corpus tool. An evaluation that compared the manual approach with the semi-automatic approach showed that the semi-automatic approach is much quicker and presents the lexicographers with almost all the information they identified as relevant during the manual analysis, as well as additional potentially relevant information for the dictionary entry. The final section of the paper proposes a few avenues for improvement of the semi-automated approach, including the implementation of crowdsourcing and additional post-processing of automatically extracted data.
Abstract: This technical note describes the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Arabic Dependency Treebank (AADT) for the purpose of documenting its release. The AADT was derived from existing Arabic treebanks distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium using constituent-to-dependency conversion software written at ARL. Earlier versions of the AADT, as well as parsers trained from it, have been used in several published ARL research efforts, and, by releasing the data, we hope to facilitate additional Arabic language processing research by the greater community.
We release Galactic Dependencies 1.0—a large set of synthetic languages not found on Earth, but annotated in Universal Dependencies format. This new resource aims to provide training and development data for NLP methods that aim to adapt to unfamiliar languages. Each synthetic treebank is produced from a real treebank by stochastically permuting the dependents of nouns and/or verbs to match the word order of other real languages. We discuss the usefulness, realism, parsability, perplexity, and diversity of the synthetic languages. As a simple demonstration of the use of Galactic Dependencies, we consider single-source transfer, which attempts to parse a real target language using a parser trained on a “nearby” source language. We find that including synthetic source languages somewhat increases the diversity of the source pool, which significantly improves results for most target languages.
Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsRatner, Steven R. The Thin Justice of International Law: A Moral Reckoning of the Law of Nations.New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 496. $85.00 (cloth).David LefkowitzDavid LefkowitzUniversity of Richmond Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTo write a book like this a person must be either brave or stupid. Steven R. Ratner is clearly not stupid; ergo, he must be brave. Why? Well first there is the general danger that accompanies any effort to not only write across but also speak to multiple disciplines. Carrying out such an enterprise is like standing on a plank between two ships at sea; at any moment, one or both ships may turn away to follow their own (disciplinary) pursuits, leaving one (and one’s work) to sink unnoticed beneath the waves. But second, Ratner does not limit his engagement with political philosophy to one topic or his philosophical interlocutors to one or two “big names.” Rather, he makes the courageous choice to dive into the deep end of contemporary political philosophy, to engage with arguments made by more than two dozen theorists on topics including war, self-determination and secession, state borders, sovereign equality, human rights, universal jurisdiction, global trade, and international investment. While philosophers who read this book will no doubt conclude at times that Ratner misrepresents a philosophical argument he deploys or contests, they should do so with full appreciation for the respect that Ratner has paid political philosophers by investing so much time and effort in engaging with our work.Ratner contends that philosophers who write on matters of global justice or ethics and international affairs too often ignore or disparage existing international law. As a result, they offer international actors impractical and frequently dangerous guidance, neglect important insights contained in social norms and practices that have evolved in response to the actual conduct of international affairs, and focus on an overly narrow set of options for promoting justice. At least for those concerned with advancing justice in the near term and not merely with elaborating an account of a perfectly just world, a better approach begins with a detailed understanding of the workings of our current global political order, one constituted by international law. On the basis of that understanding a critical assessment can then be made of the contributions that international law makes, or might soon make, to promoting at least a minimally, or thinly, just world.Thin justice consists of two pillars: peace and basic human rights. Ratner characterizes the former as the absence of armed conflict, while the latter consist of “those [rights] that guarantee a life free of external intrusion on the fundamental freedom of the individual vis-à-vis the state and other powerful actors that threaten him or her, coupled with [access to] the basic material goods and conditions necessary to a minimally flourishing life and thus addressing each individual’s most important vulnerabilities” (76–77). Ratner employs both the “logic of appropriateness” and the “logic of discovery” to defend his pillars of thin justice. For example, he defends his account of basic human rights by appeal to both Henry Shue’s analysis of such rights as “justified demands the denial of which no self-respecting person can reasonably be expected to accept” (75) and features of present-day international law such as jus cogens or peremptory norms (i.e., international laws from which no derogation is permitted) and a hierarchy of rights he maintains we can identify in treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. When deployed to assess the justice of various core features of contemporary international law, the pillars operate as follows: first, a legal norm such as the prohibition on the use of force except in self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council is evaluated in terms of the contribution it makes to advancing peace. If it performs reasonably well at that task, the rule is then assessed in terms of whether it interferes with basic human rights. Ratner makes clear that he does not accord peace lexical priority over noninterference with basic human rights; for instance, he defends the superiority of a legal norm permitting humanitarian intervention without UN authorization in exceptional circumstances to a categorical legal prohibition on such conduct. Nevertheless, given his claim that a legal rule that satisfies the peace pillar of thin justice counts as presumptively just, while a legal rule that does not counts as presumptively unjust, it appears that in general Ratner thinks we ought to give greater weight to promoting and preserving peace than to mitigating international law’s interference with basic human rights.Since his interest is in the contribution that specifically legal international norms and institutions make to the advancement of justice, Ratner identifies two further considerations that must be taken into account when conducting a moral assessment of international law. The first he labels fairness or procedural justice, which he characterizes in terms of the eight criteria that Lon Fuller identified as constitutive of the internal morality of the law. Whether satisfying (to some degree) these eight criteria is a distinctive feature of a legal order is a matter of debate, of course, but not one Ratner explores. The second consideration Ratner refers to as the compliance corollary, and he seems to have in mind H. L. A. Hart’s claim that a necessary condition for the existence of a legal order is that those it purports to rule generally comply with its directives. Thus, Ratner maintains that we ought to reject proposals for international legal norms to which states, especially powerful states, are unlikely to conform not only because they will be ineffective at advancing peace and basic human rights but also because they will fail to exist as law at all. Applied to individual legal norms, as Ratner occasionally does, this argument is too strong (and not what Hart maintained). Yet it may get some traction against certain institutional cosmopolitans who advocate for radical, comprehensive reform to the global legal order without paying sufficient attention to how we are to affect the transition to their envisioned new world order.As the above description of Ratner’s method for conducting a moral reckoning of international law implies, the thin justice of specific international legal rules and institutions is a function of their outcomes or consequences. Indeed, Ratner repeatedly refers to his argument as a consequentialist one and groups himself with theorists such as Robert Goodin and Brad Hooker, while treating nonconsequentialist philosophers such as David Miller, Simon Caney, Andrew Altman, and Christopher Wellman as his opponents. This classification is misleading, however. Ratner maintains that international legal rules and institutions ought to be assessed in terms of their consequences or, perhaps better, in terms of the worlds they produce. Yet this is a claim that the aforementioned nonconsequentialist interlocutors would likely also endorse, at least for purposes of nonideal theorizing. Moreover, Ratner explicitly rejects the use of consequentialist (or at least utilitarian) moral reasoning to rank the different states of affairs that would result from adopting alternative legal norms (81). The true differences between Ratner and his philosophical opponents largely either concern the kind of conclusions they defend, namely, prima facie or defeasible claims versus all-things-considered claims, or involve empirical disputes regarding the likely consequences of pursuing a particular reform to the existing international legal order.Ratner divides his assessment of the extent to which the core norms of international law satisfy thin justice into three sections. The first, composed of four chapters on the norms of statehood, includes illuminating discussions of both topics familiar to philosophers, such as secession, and ones to which philosophers have given relatively little attention. These include the permissibility of providing aid to rebel movements, the justifiability of extending the principle of uti possidetis (roughly, that the borders of new states be drawn according to preindependence administrative boundaries) beyond the context of decolonization, and the morally optimal design of the UN body charged with authorizing the use of force. The second section focuses largely on exceptions to international law’s territorially based approach to the protection of human rights and includes discussions of the applicability of human rights law to states when acting abroad, universal jurisdiction for certain violations of human rights, and armed humanitarian interventions not authorized by the United Nations. The thin justice of norms governing the global economy is the subject of the third section, which includes an assessment of various arguments challenging existing trade law on the grounds that it often interferes with individuals’ secure enjoyment of their basic human rights. While Ratner often comes down in defense of existing international legal rules, this is not always the case. For example, he calls for a reduction in the scope of sovereign immunity and for changes to the makeup of the states that enjoy permanent membership on the UN Security Council, as well as the rules governing the exercise of a veto by such states.Interestingly, Ratner maintains that thin justice does not provide a particularly useful tool for conducting a moral assessment of international humanitarian law (IHL), international criminal law (ICL), or international environmental law. With respect to IHL, for example, we lack the data we need to determine whether more or less permissive norms governing the killing of civilians in time of war would better serve to promote peace and basic human rights than does the current norm. Likewise, Ratner argues that the content of contemporary ICL is too haphazard, and its distinctive contribution to advancing peace and basic human rights too slight or speculative, to draw any meaningful conclusions regarding the impact it has on the realization of thin justice.In light of the approach Ratner takes to assessing international law and proposals for its reform, it is surprising how little space he devotes to an analysis of how international law contributes to the production of outcomes or worlds. Social scientific accounts of international law’s efficacy merit only a brief mention in the first chapter, and so for much of the book we are left with the “honestly held ‘seat-of-the-pants’ view [of] an international lawyer about the reactions of global actors to the rules or alternatives to them” (84). The judgment of an experienced international lawyer is a valuable source of knowledge. Nevertheless, in light of how often Ratner’s rebuttals to philosophers on specific issues of international law turn entirely on the effects of adopting one rule rather than another, we should ask for more. Indeed, there may be a general point here about how we should engage in the moral critique or construction of a legal order or regime. We should begin by asking why we need law and not just morality (or principles of justice). What is the work law does that morality does not; what is law’s distinctive contribution to realizing justice? To answer that question we must also consider how law performs the function or functions that we need it, or at least want it, to perform. A moral theory of a particular legal regime or system should be constructed on the basis of answers to these questions. In the case of international law, at least, these answers will likely include the facts of reasonable moral disagreement or pluralism, the inevitability and endogeneity of partial compliance, economic (or instrumental) and constructivist (or sociolegal) accounts of the ways in which law shapes actors’ deliberations, the importance of law’s de facto legitimacy, and much else besides.Any attempt to compare alternative legal norms on the basis of their consequences will also need to grapple with the paucity of data needed to draw a conclusion, or in cases when we have some data, our relatively low levels of confidence in its veracity or in our ability to generalize from it. Altman and Wellman, for example, repeatedly take these facts about the current state of our knowledge regarding international law’s impact on human conduct to block any inference from the existence of a moral right to a claim regarding the moral justifiability of an international legal norm that advances or interferes with the advancement of that moral right. While I think they often draw this conclusion too quickly, Ratner is likewise too quick to dismiss it. He does rightly press a related empirical objection against Altman and Wellman, however. Like many other political philosophers, they often call for an international legal institution to perform certain functions without any sensitivity to the larger context in which it operates or to its capacities. International law governs an anarchic society, a political order in which power and authority are largely distributed and exercised horizontally. Proposals that an international court exercise jurisdiction over groups’ claims to a plebiscitary right to secede, or determine in advance whether a state has a just cause for war, are not only impractical at present, but they presume that humanity has somehow transcended the environment that both structures and is structured by international law. They are not proposals for international law’s reform but its supersession.Ratner maintains that a legal norm that responds to institutional constraints, or better, to power and interest as well as to demands for moral treatment “is just, not a second-best alternative” (302). Many philosophers will demur; such a legal norm may be justifiable all things considered, but it is not just. One reason to adopt this second description is that conceding that a legal norm fails to accord some people the treatment they are due, but that this is necessary to prevent even more or worse immoral conduct, will generate greater acceptance and so make the norm more effective at advancing thin justice than will denying that the norm treats anyone unjustly at all. Some will also argue that an acknowledgment of wrongful treatment is called for even when that treatment is justified all things considered. An apology or expression of remorse is owed, if not compensation. Considering whether this is so or whether partial compliance is a fact that ought to figure in the very specification of our moral rights may be of little interest to international lawyers, but it strikes me as essential to a comprehensive moral reckoning of the law of nations.Ratner’s attempt to encourage political philosophers to engage in a deeper and more sustained dialogue with international law and international legal theorists will likely be only partially successful. Upon concluding the book, some philosophers will likely be convinced that its thick injustice, a product of the degree to which its content reflects power and interest, gives them little reason to engage with international law or those who practice it. Others, more practical in their orientation, more disposed to the development of truly interdisciplinary arguments, and perhaps more inclined to focus on mitigating the worst injustices than on elaborating a complete account of full or perfect justice, will likely find reading The Thin Justice of International Law very rewarding. If there are enough such philosophers, then Ratner’s book may mark an important step forward in the development of a semiautonomous subfield of philosophy of international law, one that may come to bear a relationship to the study of global justice analogous to the one that the philosophy of criminal law bears to the study of moral responsibility. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 127, Number 1October 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687348 Views: 453Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Стаття присвячена дослідженню особливостей вимовних норм у сучасному британському та американському кiнематографi, специфiки використання нацiональних стандартiв вимови в англомовному кінематографі, особливостей вживання рiзновидiв американського та британського варiантiв англiйської вимови у дослiджуваних фiльмах i серiалах. (The article deals with the study of pronunciation norms actualization in modern British and American cinematography, the specifics of national pronunciation standards use in English cinematography, the peculiarities of American and British pronunciation variants in the analyzed films and serials. The study of British and American pronunciation norms peculiarities allows us to make some conclusions. Their systemic, structural, and lexico-distributional differences are based on the phonological level. These differences arise from the quantity, combination, and lexical phoneme distribution. Realizational and systemic parameters occupy a prominent place in the hierarchy of diphthongal differences on the phonetic and phonological levels. Research results display a tendency for GA to be monophthongised. This permanent feature was frequently observed in the history of the English language and is characteristic of Germanic languages. The analysis results of British and American films allow us to state that in both variants of the English language there are many words of identical spelling but different pronunciation. These words confirm the difference in syllabification and the pronunciation of affixes. They enrich both pronunciation standards and make them truly unique. However, it is necessary to bear in mind that these words do not conform to any rules but are connected with their historical changes.)
Selon la litterature, les aphasies thalamiques se caracterisent par un manque du mot compense principalement par des paraphasies semantiques. Crosson, chercheur americain, propose le modele de l'engagement selectif qui expliquerait le manque du mot dans l'aphasie thalamique par un defaut d'appariement entre concepts et representations lexicales au niveau de l'interface lexico-semantique. Cette interface, pilotee par le thalamus, dependrait de mecanismes attentionnels et executifs. Notre etude a consiste a tester ce modele. Nous avons evalue en phase aigue puis a trois mois post-AVC des patients presentant une lesion thalamique gauche et des patients presentant une lesion sous-corticale non-thalamique gauche. Les protocoles d'evaluation etaient constitues d'epreuves orthophoniques et neuropsychologiques standards, et d'une tâche de generation de mots destinee a mesurer specifiquement le fonctionnement de l'interface lexico-semantique. Cette tâche, ne disposant pas de normes, a ete etalonnee par nos soins aupres de sujets sains. Nos resultats ont mis en evidence la participation de la memoire de travail verbale au fonctionnement de l'interface lexico-semantique. Nous avons egalement objective, par les resultats a la tâche de generation, un dysfonctionnement des patients au niveau de l'interface, de facon plus marque chez les patients avec lesion sous-corticale non-thalamique. Ce dysfonctionnement n'etait pas systematiquement associe a un manque du mot en langage spontane. La poursuite de l'etude aupres d'un plus grand nombre de patients permettrait de preciser ces premiers resultats.
SOME PROBLEMS OF THE FORMATION PROCESS OF THE LATVIAN LITERARY LANGUAGE Summary 0. Literary language is the most complete variety of language, manifesting its functions in the best way possible and unifying the nation, as well as representing national mentality among other nations and their languages. 0.1. When speaking about the Latvian literary language and its formation, it seems useful to acknowledge that the literary language is (1) the language of the entire nation, (2) is being consciously cultivated and (3) has written form. 0.2. When dealing with the Latvian literary language formation processes, one should take into consideration (a) the specific external (sociopolitical) conditions, (b) the sources of the literary language, (c) aspects of language development and its research. 1. Development of the Latvian language has been affected by external sociopolitical factors and factors of migration of representatives of various cultural layers; these factors have both stimulated and hampered the overall formation of the language both in space and time. 2. Research of the Latvian literary language is complicated, because the most reliable proofs of this process are written texts, which in Latvian appeared only in the 16th century. Therefore both folk-lore and the spoken language can be used as sources. 2.1. From the 16th to the 19th century written texts were mainly produced by German clergymen who in the beginning (in the 16th century) had a poor knowledge of Latvian. Therefore these texts must be properly handled by differentiating the sociopolitical and philological activities of the Germans. Beginning with the 17th century a normative approach has been consciously applied to the language and thus a common variety of the language is being created by maximally keeping aloof of various patois forms. 2.2. The source of analysis of the literary language and the process of its formation is the abundant Latvian folk-lore and especially the folk-songs (dainas), but the folk-lore language changes gradually from generation to generation. 2.3. In studying the formation of the literary language, the spoken language found in written monuments and recorded in special questionnaires can be used. 3. In inquiring about the Latvian literary language and its formation, definite layers of cognition can be traced: 1) statement and description of phonetic, lexical and grammatical phenomena found in the Latvian language and in the Latvian texts written by the German clergymen, 2) historical survey of language phenomena and their comparison with related languages, 3) analysis of the old-Latvian (and later also new-Latvian) written language, 4) analysis of colloquial Latvian and folk-lore, 5) fundamental synchronic and diachronic research in phonetics, word stock and grammar within the framework of the language norm, style and language culture aspects. 3.1. None of these layers give an all-embracing picture of the stages of the development of the Latvian literary language, because in those days no such task was formulated. 3.2. In Latvian linguistics the Latvian literary language formation problem became topical in the 50ies of the 20th century with the emergence of historical research of literary Latvian as an independent branch of linguistics.