Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account )
Boris Vian est universellement réputé comme un des auteurs français dont l’écriture est le plus riche en prouesses lexicales et en jeux de mots: Jacques Bens a parlé, à ce propos, d’un véritable « langage-univers ». Ses romans ont été traduits en de nombreuses langues et ont joui – ils jouissent encore – d’un succès considérable. Si la production romanesque de cet écrivain est connue dans le monde entier, le Vian dramaturge joue par contre, en traduction du moins, un rôle marginal. Et si, parmi les pièces de cet auteur, il en existe quelques-unes qui ont atteint une certaine renommée internationale, une bonne partie de son œuvre théâtrale n’a guère suscité l’intérêt des traducteurs étrangers. Ce manque d’intérêt apparent ne dépend pas, toutefois, seulement de la marginalité relative des textes de théâtre de Vian à l’intérieur de sa production. Les défis que certaines de ses pièces imposent au traducteur sont, à eux seuls, une raison suffisante pour décourager la plupart des spécialistes. Aux difficultés de la traduction théâtrale s’ajoutent, tour à tour, des obstacles ultérieurs, tels que la transposition des chansons, des jeux de mots, de l’intertextualité. Dans mon article je vais m’occuper d’un texte qui, plus que tout autre, présente une multiplicité de contraintes auxquelles le traducteur doit faire face: la pièce Série Blême, écrite par Vian entre 1952 et 1954. La définition que son auteur en donne, « tragédie en trois actes et en vers », ne rend pas compte de sa spécificité: l’utilisation de l’alexandrin, de la rime et, surtout, de l’argot ont posé un écueil jusqu’à présent insurmontable à toute tentative de traduction. Le point central de cet article – qui traitera, de façon assez rapide, des enjeux théoriques de la question aussi – consiste dans l’explication des stratégies utilisées pour la traduction-recréation en italien de ce texte vianien. Les problèmes que cette opération met en place sont nombreux. Ils dépendent: - de la forme métrique du texte (reproduction de l’alexandrin? adaptation au soi-disant « mètre correspondant » en Italie, l’endécasyllabe? Traduction en prose? Cette troisième stratégie semble peu adaptée, étant donnée la période d’écriture de la pièce: l’utilisation du vers constitue une violation évidente aux normes théâtrales de l’époque, et par cela une caractéristique primordiale du texte); - du langage utilisé. Les problèmes que l’argot pose à une traduction italienne sont liés surtout à la sociolinguistique comparée: aucun correspondant fonctionnel de l’argot est compréhensible dans toute la péninsule, son rôle étant joué en Italie surtout par des jargons qui tirent la plupart de leur lexique des dialectes; - de l’essence théâtrale du texte. Comme il a été souligné par plusieurs théoriciens, le théâtre présuppose une approche à la traduction différente par rapport à une sorte de « degré zéro » de la traduction littéraire, des questions telles que la « jouabilité » ou l’impossibilité de recourir à des compensations paratextuelles (dont le spectateur, au contraire du lecteur, ne pourraît pas se servir) faisant forcément surface. La présentation des différents problèmes de traduction s’appuiera sur plusieurs exemples pratiques illustrant les différentes caractéristiques du texte et les possibilités que celui-ci offre à la traduction.
Nativists have postulated fundamental geometric knowledge that predates linguistic and symbolic thought. Central to these claims is the proposal for an isolated cognitive system dedicated to processing geometric information. Testing such hypotheses presents challenges due to difficulties in eliminating the combination of geometric and non-geometric information through language. We present evidence using a modified matching interference paradigm that an incongruent shape word interferes with identifying a two-dimensional geometric shape, but an incongruent two-dimensional geometric shape does not interfere with identifying a shape word. This asymmetry in interference effects between two-dimensional geometric shapes and their corresponding shape words suggests that shape words activate spatial representations of shapes but shapes do not activate linguistic representations of shape words. These results appear consistent with hypotheses concerning a cognitive system dedicated to processin)
Three experiments provide evidence of an incipient sense of fairness in preverbal infants. Ten-month-old infants were shown cartoon videos with two agents, the ‘donors’, who distributed resources to two identical recipients. One donor always distributed the goods equally, while the other performed unequal distributions by giving everything to one recipient. In the test phase, a third agent hit or took resources away from either the fair or the unfair donor. We found that infants looked longer when the antisocial actions were directed towards the unfair rather than the fair donor. These findings support the view that infants are able to evaluate agents based on their distributive actions and suggest that the foundations of human socio-moral competence are acquired independently of parental feedback and linguistic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted)
Lewis Carroll's English word game Doublets is represented as a system of networks with each node being an English word and each connectivity edge confirming that its two ending words are equal in letter length, but different by exactly one letter. We show that this system, which we call the Doublets net, constitutes a complex body of linguistic knowledge concerning English word structure that has computable multiscale features. Distributed morphological, phonological and orthographic constraints and the language's local redundancy are seen at the node level. Phonological communities are seen at the network level. And a balancing act between the language's global efficiency and redundancy is seen at the system level. We develop a new measure of intrinsic node-to-node distance and a computational algorithm, called community geometry, which reveal the implicit multiscale structure within binary networks. Because the Doublets net is a modular complex cognitive system, the community geomet)
Objective: To investigate factors associated with engagement of U.S. Federal Health Agencies via Twitter. Our specific goals are to study factors related to a) numbers of retweets, b) time between the agency tweet and first retweet and c) time between the agency tweet and last retweet. Methods: We collect 164,104 tweets from 25 Federal Health Agencies and their 130 accounts. We use negative binomial hurdle regression models and Cox proportional hazards models to explore the influence of 26 factors on agency engagement. Account features include network centrality, tweet count, numbers of friends, followers, and favorites. Tweet features include age, the use of hashtags, user-mentions, URLs, sentiment measured using Sentistrength, and tweet content represented by fifteen semantic groups. Results: A third of the tweets (53,556) had zero retweets. Less than 1% (613) had more than 100 retweets (mean = 284). The hurdle analysis shows that hashtags, URLs and user-mentions are positively )
Culture is a phenomenon shared by all humans. Attempts to understand how dynamic factors affect the origin and distribution of cultural elements are, therefore, of interest to all humanity. As case studies go, understanding the distribution of cultural elements in Native American communities during the historical period of the Great Plains would seem a most challenging one. Famously, there is a mixture of powerful internal and external factors, creating-for a relatively brief period in time-a seemingly distinctive set of shared elements from a linguistically diverse set of peoples. This is known across the world as the “Great Plains culture.” Here, quantitative analyses show how different processes operated on two sets of cultural traits among nine High Plains groups. Moccasin decorations exhibit a pattern consistent with geographically-mediated between-group interaction. However, group variations in the religious ceremony of the Sun Dance also reveal evidence of purifying cultural se)
Background: Evidence from a number of countries in Europe and North America point towards the secular declining trend in menarcheal age with considerable spatial variations over the past two centuries. Similar trends were reported in several developing countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America. However, data corroborating any secular trend in the menarcheal age of the Indian population remained sparse and inadequately verified. Methods: We examined secular trends, regional heterogeneity and association of socioeconomic, anthropometric and contextual factors with menarcheal age among ever-married women (15–49 years) in India. Using the pseudo cohort data approach, we fit multiple linear regression models to estimate secular trends in menarcheal age of 91394 ever-married women using the Indian Human Development Survey. Results: The mean age at menarche among Indian women was 13.76 years (95 % CI: 13.75, 13.77) in 2005. It declined by three months from 13.83 years (95% CI: 13.81, )
An intricate history of human dispersal and geographic colonization has strongly affected the distribution of human pathogens. The pig tapeworm Taenia solium occurs throughout the world as the causative agent of cysticercosis, one of the most serious neglected tropical diseases. Discrete genetic lineages of T. solium in Asia and Africa/Latin America are geographically disjunct; only in Madagascar are they sympatric. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence has indicated that the people in Madagascar have mixed ancestry from Island Southeast Asia and East Africa. Hence, anthropogenic introduction of the tapeworm from Southeast Asia and Africa had been postulated. This study shows that the major mitochondrial haplotype of T. solium in Madagascar is closely related to those from the Indian Subcontinent. Parasitological evidence presented here, and human genetics previously reported, support the hypothesis of an Indian influence on Malagasy culture coinciding with periods of early )
The present study was carried out in the Indo-European speaking tribal population groups of Southern Gujarat, India to investigate and reconstruct their paternal population structure and population histories. The role of language, ethnicity and geography in determining the observed pattern of Y haplogroup clustering in the study populations was also examined. A set of 48 bi-allelic markers on the non-recombining region of Y chromosome (NRY) were analysed in 284 males; representing nine Indo-European speaking tribal populations. The genetic structure of the populations revealed that none of these groups was overtly admixed or completely isolated. However, elevated haplogroup diversity and FST value point towards greater diversity and differentiation which suggests the possibility of early demographic expansion of the study groups. The phylogenetic analysis revealed 13 paternal lineages, of which six haplogroups: C5, H1a*, H2, J2, R1a1* and R2 accounted for a major portion of the Y chro)
A fundamental principle of brain organization is bilateral symmetry of structures and functions. For spatial sensory and motor information processing, this organization is generally plausible subserving orientation and coordination of a bilaterally symmetric body. However, breaking of the symmetry principle is often seen for functions that depend on convergent information processing and lateralized output control, e.g. left hemispheric dominance for the linguistic speech system. Conversely, a subtle splitting of functions into hemispheres may occur if peripheral information from symmetric sense organs is partly redundant, e.g. auditory pattern recognition, and therefore allows central conceptualizations of complex stimuli from different feature viewpoints, as demonstrated e.g. for hemispheric analysis of frequency modulations in auditory cortex (AC) of mammals including humans. Here we demonstrate that discrimination learning of rapidly but not of slowly amplitude modulated tones is n)
In this paper, we conduct a study about differences between female and male discursive strategies when posting in the microblogging service Twitter, with a particular focus on the hashtag designation process during political debate. The fact that men and women use language in distinct ways, reverberating practices linked to their expected roles in the social groups, is a linguistic phenomenon known to happen in several cultures and that can now be studied on the Web and on online social networks in a large scale enabled by computing power. Here, for instance, after analyzing tweets with political content posted during Brazilian presidential campaign,we found out that male Twitter users, when expressing their attitude toward a given candidate, are more prone to use imperative verbal forms in hashtags, while female users tend to employ declarative forms. This difference can be interpreted as a sign of distinct approaches in relation to other network members: for example, if political ha)
Words are built from smaller meaning bearing parts, called morphemes. As one word can contain multiple morphemes, one morpheme can be present in different words. The number of distinct words a morpheme can be found in is its family size. Here we used Birth-Death-Innovation Models (BDIMs) to analyze the distribution of morpheme family sizes in English and German vocabulary over the last 200 years. Rather than just fitting to a probability distribution, these mechanistic models allow for the direct interpretation of identified parameters. Despite the complexity of language change, we indeed found that a specific variant of this pure stochastic model, the second order linear balanced BDIM, significantly fitted the observed distributions. In this model, birth and death rates are increased for smaller morpheme families. This finding indicates an influence of morpheme family sizes on vocabulary changes. This could be an effect of word formation, perception or both. On a more general level, )
One of the most well studied ecological patterns is Rapoport's rule, which posits that the geographical extent of species ranges increases at higher latitudes. However, studies to date have been limited in their geographic scope and results have been equivocal. In turn, much debate exists over potential links between Rapoport's rule and latitudinal patterns in species richness. Humans collectively speak nearly 7000 different languages, which are spread unevenly across the globe, with loci in the tropics. Causes of this skewed distribution have received only limited study. We analyze the extent of Rapoport's rule in human languages at a global scale and within each region of the globe separately. We test the relationship between Rapoport's rule and the richness of languages spoken in different regions. We also explore the frequency distribution of language-range sizes. The language-range area distribution is strongly right-skewed, with 87% of languages having range areas less than 10,0)
The grounded cognition framework proposes that sensorimotor brain areas, which are typically involved in perception and action, also play a role in linguistic processing. We assessed oscillatory modulation during visual presentation of single verbs and localized cortical motor regions by means of isometric contraction of hand and foot muscles. Analogously to oscillatory activation patterns accompanying voluntary movements, we expected a somatotopically distributed suppression of beta and alpha frequencies in the motor cortex during processing of body-related action verbs. Magnetoencephalographic data were collected during presentation of verbs that express actions performed using the hands (H) or feet (F). Verbs denoting no bodily movement (N) were used as a control. Between 150 and 500 msec after visual word onset, beta rhythms were suppressed in H and F in comparison with N in the left hemisphere. Similarly, alpha oscillations showed left-lateralized power suppression in the H-N con)
This article is dedicated to “Diálogo de la lengua” (1535) by a Spanish grammarian of the Renaissance Juan de Valdés whose personality and works are not so widely known in Russia. “Diálogo de la lengua” represents the Renaissance dialogue, heir to the Greek-Latin traditions and is dedicated to the Castilian language, the interrelation of its norms and Language Usage, stylistic and lexical issues. The attention is focused on the genre features of “Diálogo” and the relationship of the author and the character to represent him in the dialogue. The analysis is conducted in terms of a combination of various stylistic and genres features of the language in the “Diálogo” making it possible to distinguish the traits of scientific style in the work (and to consider the “Diálogo de la lengua” as a grammar of the Castilian language and linguistic comment), as well as a work of art (scenic or philosophical Socratic dialogue).
We investigate the effect of spatial categories on visual perception. In three experiments, participants made same/different judgments on pairs of simultaneously presented dot-cross configurations. For different trials, the position of the dot within each cross could differ with respect to either categorical spatial relations (the dots occupied different quadrants) or coordinate spatial relations (the dots occupied different positions within the same quadrant). The dot-cross configurations also varied in how readily the dot position could be lexicalized. In harder-to-name trials, crosses formed a “+” shape such that each quadrant was associated with two discrete lexicalized spatial categories (e.g., “above” and “left”). In easier-to-name trials, both crosses were rotated 45° to form an “×” shape such that quadrants were unambiguously associated with a single lexicalized spatial category (e.g., “above” or “left”). In Experiment 1, participants were more accurate when discriminating cat)
This paper explores young children’s and parents’ use of color words and animal names in two published studies. The aim is to compare the ranges and kinds of these words in parent-child interaction and to consider the implications of these findings for our understanding of early lexical development. Color term data were drawn from the Gleason corpus in CHILDES: 12 boys and 12 girls ranging in age from 25-62 months, and their parents. Results showed that parents used and emphasized only the same 10 most basic colors, with many teaching episodes. Parents’ most frequent terms, red, blue, and green were also children’s most frequent terms and are the ones acquired earliest according to MacArthur Bates lexical norms. In the second study CLAN programs were used to identify animal names in corpora from a variety of families in CHILDES, with 44 children ranging in age from 1;6-6;2. Children and parents produced a remarkable number and range of animal terms, with individual preschoolers naming as many as 96 different, often rare, animals, such as crocodile and pelican. Parents and children thus attend to the same limited set of basic color terms. By contrast, biophilia, our shared human love of the living world is reflected in children’s extensive animal lexicon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)
We present a novel algorithm for inducing Combinatory Categorial Grammars from dependency treebanks, along with initial experiments showing that it can be used to achieve competitive realization results using an enhanced version of the surface realization shared task data.
This paper provides evidence for the identification of the language of the uncontacted indigenous group called Carabayo, who live in voluntary isolation in the Colombian Amazon region. The only linguistic data available from this group is a set of about 50 words, most of them without reliable translations, that were collected in 1969 during a brief encounter with one Carabayo family. We compare this material with various languages (once) spoken in the region, showing that four attested Carabayo forms (a first person singular prefix and words for ‘warm’, ‘father’, and ‘boy’) display striking similarities with Yurí and at least 13 Carabayo forms display clear correspondences with contemporary Tikuna. Tikuna and Yurí are the only two known members of the Tikuna-Yurí linguistic family. Yurí was documented in the 19th century but has been thought to have become extinct since. We conclude that the Carabayo – directly or indirectly – descend from the Yurí people whose language and customs we)
In this study, we examine the neural substrates underlying Tone 3 sandhi and tone sequencing in Mandarin Chinese using fMRI. Tone 3 sandhi is traditionally described as the substitution of Tone 3 with Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (i.e., 33→23). According to current speech production models, target substitution is expected to engage the posterior inferior frontal gyrus. Since Tone 3 sandhi is, to some extent, independent of segments, which makes it more similar to singing, right-lateralized activation in this region was predicted. As for tone sequencing, based on studies in sequencing, we expected the involvement of the supplementary motor area. In the experiments, participants were asked to produce twelve four-syllable sequences with the same tone assignment (the repeated sequences) or a different tone assignment (the mixed sequences). We found right-lateralized posterior inferior frontal gyrus activation for the sequence 3333 (Tone 3 sandhi) and left-lateralized activation )
We use archaeological data and spatial methods to reconstruct the dispersal of farming into areas of sub-Saharan Africa now occupied by Bantu language speakers, and introduce a new large-scale radiocarbon database and a new suite of spatial modelling techniques. We also introduce a method of estimating phylogeographic relationships from archaeologically-modelled dispersal maps, with results produced in a format that enables comparison with linguistic and genetic phylogenies. Several hypotheses are explored. The ‘deep split’ hypothesis suggests that an early-branching eastern Bantu stream spread around the northern boundary of the equatorial rainforest, but recent linguistic and genetic work tends not to support this. An alternative riverine/littoral hypothesis suggests that rivers and coastlines facilitated the migration of the first farmers/horticulturalists, with some extending this to include rivers through the rainforest as conduits to East Africa. More recently, research has show)
Linguistic expressions in every language have established patterns with meanings that can be inferred by linguistic conventions. Languages have their own norms and expressing systems that make transferred linguistic formulas seem odd. Any deviation from the established patterns can be referred to as interference. Interference in translation is the transfer of some linguistic aspect of the source text (ST) into the target text (TT). The term includes any kind of influence that is exerted by the linguistic properties of the ST on the linguistic properties of the TT. Lexical items and syntactic structures of the source language are copied into the TT, resulting in the phenomenon called ‘translationese’. As a result of interference, translation has introduced a plethora of words, expressions, and constructions into Arabic, resulting in a change in modern Arabic style. One phenomenon that Arabic has witnessed in modern times is linguistic recycle. This term refers to the re-utilization of translated expressions and syntactic structures in Arabic in its intra-linguistic operation (opposed to the inter-linguistic event of translation). The language community has been using these translation-introduced formulations although they do not conform to the canonical patterns of Arabic. Being unaware of this fact, speakers of Arabic use the translation-introduced expressions and constructions instead of the native ones although they have at their disposal a variety of formulations to express the same ideas. Linguistic recycle can be categorized into the three areas of lexis, syntax, and culture. Using a contrastive approach, the paper investigates the areas of lexis and syntax, demonstrating the pervasiveness of this phenomenon and its impact on Arabic. Corpora of Arabic have been used to detect and verify occurrences of expressions and structures.
An eye-tracking paradigm was developed for use in audiology in order to enable online analysis of the speech comprehension process. This paradigm should be useful in assessing impediments in speech processing. In this paradigm, two scenes, a target picture and a competitor picture, were presented simultaneously with an aurally presented sentence that corresponded to the target picture. At the same time, eye fixations were recorded using an eye-tracking device. The effect of linguistic complexity on language processing time was assessed from eye fixation information by systematically varying linguistic complexity. This was achieved with a sentence corpus containing seven German sentence structures. A novel data analysis method computed the average tendency to fixate the target picture as a function of time during sentence processing. This allowed identification of the point in time at which the participant understood the sentence, referred to as the decision moment. Systematic differen)
Recent arguments connecting Na-Dene languages of North America with Yeniseian languages of Siberia have been used to assert proof for the origin of Native Americans in central or western Asia. We apply phylogenetic methods to test support for this hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis that Yeniseian represents a back-migration to Asia from a Beringian ancestral population. We coded a linguistic dataset of typological features and used neighbor-joining network algorithms and Bayesian model comparison based on Bayes factors to test the fit between the data and the linguistic phylogenies modeling two dispersal hypotheses. Our results support that a Dene-Yeniseian connection more likely represents radiation out of Beringia with back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or post)
Studies in sleeping newborns and infants propose that the superior temporal sulcus is involved in speech processing soon after birth. Speech processing also implicitly requires the analysis of the human voice, which conveys both linguistic and extra-linguistic information. However, due to technical and practical challenges when neuroimaging young children, evidence of neural correlates of speech and/or voice processing in toddlers and young children remains scarce. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 typically developing preschool children (average age = 5.8 y; range 5.2–6.8 y) to investigate brain activation during judgments about vocal identity versus the initial speech sound of spoken object words. FMRI results reveal common brain regions responsible for voice-specific and speech-sound specific processing of spoken object words including bilateral primary and secondary language areas of the brain. Contrasting voice-specific with speech-)
Information-intensive Web services such as price comparison sites have recently been gaining popularity. However, most users including novice shoppers have difficulty in browsing such sites because of the massive amount of information gathered and the uncertainty surrounding Web environments. Even conventional price comparison sites face various problems, which suggests the necessity of a new approach to address these problems. Therefore, for this study, an intelligent product search system was developed that enables price comparisons for online shoppers in a more effective manner. In particular, the developed system adopts linguistic price ratings based on fuzzy logic to accommodate user-defined price ranges, and personalizes product recommendations based on linguistic product clusters, which help online shoppers find desired items in a convenient manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or em)
In this paper we present the development of a text simplification system for Spanish. Text simplification is the adaptation of a text for the special needs of certain groups of readers, such as language learners, people with cognitive difficulties, and elderly people, among others. There is a clear need for simplified texts, but manual production and adaptation of existing text is labour-intensive and costly. Automatic simplification is a field which attracts growing attention in Natural Language Processing, but, to the best of our knowledge, there are no existing simplification tools for Spanish. We present a corpus study which aims to identify the operations a text simplification system needs to carry out in order to produce an output similar to what human editors produce when they simplify news texts. We also present a first prototype for automatic simplification, which shows that the most important simplification operations can be successfully treated.
Background: For word production, we may consciously pursue semantic or phonological search strategies, but it is uncertain whether we can retrieve the different aspects of lexical information independently from each other. We therefore studied the spread of semantic information into words produced under exclusively phonemic task demands. Methods: 42 subjects participated in a letter verbal fluency task, demanding the production of as many s-words as possible in two minutes. Based on curve fittings for the time courses of word production, output spurts (temporal clusters) considered to reflect rapid lexical retrieval based on automatic activation spread, were identified. Semantic and phonemic word relatedness within versus between these clusters was assessed by respective scores (0 meaning no relation, 4 maximum relation). Results: Subjects produced 27.5 (±9.4) words belonging to 6.7 (±2.4) clusters. Both phonemically and semantically words were more related within clusters than bet)
This thesis examines mood selection in Argentine Spanish with epistemic adverbs considering the independent variables of certainty, temporal reference, and epistemic adverb. It is the first known study to investigate mood selection with the epistemic adverb capaz. A sentence completion task included 24 written contexts, each followed by a sentence with an epistemic adverbial to be completed with a verb, either in the indicative or subjunctive. The contexts contained information that made participants Certain (N = 12) or Not Certain (N = 12). Within the Certain and Not Certain contexts, four contexts expressed events in the future, four in the present, and four in the past. The level of certainty in the future, present, and past contexts was verified through a norming procedure. Finally, two epistemic adverbials, capaz and quizás, were tested in each context. All 117 participants completed a sentence in each context, half with capaz and half with quizás, without repetition of contexts. Results from a mixed model, examining the main effects, supported prior studies of mood in clauses with epistemic adverbs by indicating that temporal reference had a significant effect on mood selection. Mood was used distinctly in contexts with future, present, and past temporal reference, with the most subjunctive selected in future contexts (62%), less subjunctive selected in present contexts (42%), and the least subjunctive selected in past contexts (18%). Results also indicated that certainty did not have a significant effect suggesting that the cognition of mood selection with epistemic adverbs does not take into account certainty. There was no difference found between the sentences with capaz and quizás, indicating that the two lexical items exhibit comparable mood selection.
This thesis offers an insight into a discursive construction of Roma minority in the Czech and British press coverage in 2013. The current problematization of the “Roma issue” in Europe, ranging from a fear of Roma immigration into Western countries to the open demonstrations of hatred in their countries of origin, begs the question whether media play a role in this escalated situation. The aim of this thesis has been to uncover and compare discursive practises, which can contribute to the reproduction of racist ideology against Roma in the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. The critical discourse analysis employed to the newspaper articles from six different titles has indeed uncovered subtle manifestations of racist ideology, gained an insight into the ideological effects of the language use on the portrayal of Roma, and juxtaposed these two discourses in view of the countries’ different political and media contexts. In both datasets, Roma are portrayed as an essentialized group with innate characteristics and constructed as a threat to the majority on the basis of economical abuse, criminality and social deviation, while these negative attributes nourish and legitimize the larger narratives of individualistic neoliberalism and of exclusive idea of a society consisting of people with identical values, which are considered the norm. Roma, even though in different environments, discursively become strangers both abroad and at home, being left with no option but to change into non-Roma or explain themselves in a defensive mode when given the occasion for expression. The acknowledgement of the dominant social system’s responsibility for their marginalized position within society is often concealed, mitigated, transferred or reversed. The similar lexical and semantic strategies in the studied press further testify the standardized approach to portraying Roma as the Other in the European press landscape.
Corpus-based research suggests quite strongly that a significant proportion of native-speaker English comes in the form of phraseological units of one sort or another. Phraseology, however, does not yet have the role it deserves within ELT methodology or syllabuses, despite the many professionals who have worked in this direction, from Palmer and Hornby, through to the ‘corpus age’ and the ‘lexical approach’, to the very recent work on pedagogically motivated ‘phrase lists’ (Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, AL 31/4; Martinez & Schmitt, AL 33/4). There are a number of reasons for the slow progress made by phraseology. These include conservatism, and the very heterogenous, disorderly nature of phraseology. Another very simple, though extremely powerful reason is‘the printed word’. We have all seen and read ‘words’ from a very early age, and words are therefore the norm, both in written text and, by extension, in speech, while phraseology is something which needs to be pointed out separately, and sometimes is. This paper focuses on one way in which the user’s perception of text can be altered, so that phraseology can win back some of the ground currently held by words. The method involves presenting text on PowerPoint displays in such a way as to highlight phraseological relationships, using features such asitalics, underlining, square brackets, bold type, spacing, and (notably) colour. The presentation will illustrate how awareness-raising methodology of this sort can be used either as part of a language lesson, or as a main ingredient in a specifically designed module on teachers’ training courses. The role of corpus-based dictionaries in such teaching will also be discussed.
Technology is today considered to be an enabler by most of us because of the ease with which we can do most of our work. But when it comes to academics and that too English language, it is technology which has caused the most serious damage as it has destabilising the established norms of the language. Keeping this as the focal point the paper has been broadly divided into three parts. The first one focuses on providing a brief background of the status of English before advancements in technology picked up pace. This is followed by a description of the technological changes that came up in the past couple of decades through the media, the internet, the mobile and computer gaming and influenced English, leading to a spurt in the number of users. This widespread use of language and language user has side lined the prescriptive grammar. English language users, especially in the second language and foreign language situation have become more careless, more carefree and more audacious. In a commercially governed world this has resulted into orthographical, syntactical and lexical innovations and code mixing to catch the attention of English readers, viewers, listeners and consumers. After citing the reasons for these distortions and innovations the paper concludes by suggesting the need to adapt according to the changing scenario and ensure sticking to standards along with being aware of the new standards created by technology. Suggestion has also been given about the future scope of study in this area.
This chapter identifies two different categories of judicial response to increasingly common religious-based claims for recognition, accommodation, and exemption in constitutional democracies: (i) “diversity as inclusion”; and (ii) “non-state law as competition.” The chapter argues that as long as legal claims for accommodation are not seen as challenging the lexical superiority of the constitutional order itself (“diversity as inclusion”), they stand a fair chance of success. By contrast, constitutional courts exhibit unyielding reluctance to accept as binding or even cognizable any potentially competing legal order that originates in sacred or customary sources of identity and authority, where the legal challenge at issue is interpreted as raising doubts regarding which set of norms and institutions, or what set of high priests, should have the final word in authoritatively resolving legal disputes within a given society (“non-state law as competition”). Drawing upon recent constitutional jurisprudence from Canada and South Africa, the chapter shows that even the most accommodating polities, those that are constitutionally committed to a version of multicultural or “differentiated” citizenship, are not keen on autonomous, rival adjudicative systems that derive their authority and morality from sources external to, and in some cases insulated from, the constitutional order.
Due to globalization there is an increase in the appearances of languages in the multilingual linguistic landscape in urban spaces. Commentators have described this state of affairs as super-, mega- or complex diversity. Mainstream sociolinguists have argued that languages have no fixed boundaries and that they are "fluid" in fact. The output of speech production and language use is actually referred to as "languaging". The terms implies that languages are rather resources but not fixed tools for communication. In this paper, I will argue that this theory to which I will refer as the superdiversity/languaging theory cannot cover multilingual data in terms of resources only, if phenomena of multilingual linguistic landscape are studied more carefully. It turns out that constructions that look like "languaging" are from a linguistic point of view in fact well-known cases of code-switching (or -mixing) with separate languages involved, a dominant language and clearly targeted messages for the speakers of the "underlying" language. Hence, I will conclude that linguistic data in multilingual urban spaces are not necessarily arranged in terms of resources but rather in terms of Fishmanian diglossia, triglossia, and so on. This implies that even in these cases of languaging there is no reason to operate with concepts of language other than recognizable languages that are characterized by a prototypical grammatical and lexical basic core. Hence, languages in this sense and not code-switched variants, like "English as a Lingua Franca" feed into strategies of transnational communication, although the output of transnational communication can<br/>be a code-switched variant of English as well. However, I agree with the proponents of the<br/>superdiversity/languaging theory that it is highly relevant to study the proliferation of all sorts of multilingualism in the context of complex linguistic diversity. This reveals not only the structures and rules of language and languages that I will define as linguistic categories in accordance with Chomskyan grammar but also provides insight into the quickly changing semantic and world view concepts due to globalization. However, the code-switched variants appearing in multilingual complex spaces are not suitable for linguistic diversity management that includes institutions. Institutions are by definition the outcome of norm-based governance strategies and will implement norm-based entities, like languages that are recognizable and make possible contextualized, sophisticated language use. This rules out highly individual, spontaneous production of language, like languaging-phenomena.
A review of published work in clinical natural language processing (NLP) may suggest that the negation detection task has been “solved.” This work proposes that an optimizable solution does not equal a generalizable solution. We introduce a new machine learning-based Polarity Module for detecting negation in clinical text, and extensively compare its performance across domains. Using four manually annotated corpora of clinical text, we show that negation detection performance suffers when there is no in-domain development (for manual methods) or training data (for machine learning-based methods). Various factors (e.g., annotation guidelines, named entity characteristics, the amount of data, and lexical and syntactic context) play a role in making generalizability difficult, but none completely explains the phenomenon. Furthermore, generalizability remains challenging because it is unclear whether to use a single source for accurate data, combine all sources into a single model, or app)
espanolEste articulo tiene como objetivo analizar el motivo de la �ahospitalidad�â (�I�A�E.�?) en la obra Alcestis de Euripides. Para ello, se parte de un estudio lexico y semantico del termino 'senia'. y de otros terminos afines atestiguados en la obra; seguidamente se describen las relaciones de hospitalidad documentadas en la obra asi como los mecanismos mediante los cuales el poeta subraya la importancia de la hospitalidad como norma social y religiosa. EnglishThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the theme of hospitality (senia) in Euripides�f play, �eAlcestis�f. To do so, the paper begins with a lexical and semantic study of the word �I.�E�I. and other related terms in the play, and continues describing the relationships of hospitality as well as analysing the mechanisms through which the poet emphasizes the importance of hospitality as a social and religious norm.
This article deals with some of the spelling changes that occurred in the 1640s. Many changes began before Meletius Smotrytsky’s Grammar was published in 1648, and the spelling rules of the Grammar 1648 were formed as a result of corrections in texts produced in the 1640s. At this time, demonstration of word border in writing manifested in clitics separation from autosemantic words, in the appearance of broad grapheme Є and Ѻ, and in changes in the spelling of the conjunction i. The stable orthographic opposition “beginning / not beginning of the word” begins to appear at this time as follows: in the beginning there were Є, Ѻ, ІА, not in the beginning-е, о, ѧ. The distribution of the graphemes ѹ/ȣ was associated with the accent and the position after the vowel o. The article also touches upon the appearance of the lexical homonyms ɪазыкъ ‘nation’-ѧзыкъ ‘tongue’ distinction, changes in the spelling of some borrowed words, and use of the letter Ѕ. Spelling changes of the 1640s are compared with the orthographic norms fixed in the various grammars, as well as in the advice of the Azbukovniks of the early 17th century.
The notion that linguistic forms and meanings are related only by convention and not by any direct relationship between sounds and semantic concepts is a foundational principle of modern linguistics. Though the principle generally holds across the lexicon, systematic exceptions have been identified. These “sound symbolic” forms have been identified in lexical items and linguistic processes in many individual languages. This paper examines sound symbolism in the languages of Australia. We conduct a statistical investigation of the evidence for several common patterns of sound symbolism, using data from a sample of 120 languages. The patterns examined here include the association of meanings denoting “smallness” or “nearness” with front vowels or palatal consonants, and the association of meanings denoting “largeness” or “distance” with back vowels or velar consonants. Our results provide evidence for the expected associations of vowels and consonants with meanings of “smallness” and “p)
This special issue of Language Resources and Evaluation is devoted to Resources and Tools for Language Learners.
The ability to identify the second of two targets (T2) is impaired if that target is presented less than ∼500 ms after the first (T1). This transient deficit is known as attentional blink (AB). Previous studies have suggested that the magnitude of the AB effect can be modulated by manipulating the allocation of attentional resources to T1 or T2. However, few experiments have used Chinese characters and words to explore this phenomenon. The existence of lexical, semantic, phonological and morphological connections between Chinese characters has been well established, and understanding these connections may improve our knowledge of reading Chinese. In this study, we employed varying connections between T1 and T2 and examined how these connections modulate the AB effect. We found that the strongest AB was observed when the two Chinese characters were completely unrelated, while the AB was reduced when T1 and T2 were phonologically, orthographically or semantically related and was almost )
Laboratory phonology has been widely employed to understand the interactional relationship between the acoustic cues of English Lexical Stress (ELS)—duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity. However, research on ELS production in polysyllabic words is limited, and cross-linguistic research in this domain even more so. Hence, the impacts of second language (L2) experience and first language (L1) background on ELS acquisition have not been fully explored. This study of 100 adult Mandarin (Chinese), Arabic (Saudi Arabian), and English (Midwest American) speakers examines their ELS productions in tokens containing seven different stress-moving suffixes; i.e., Level 1 [ + cyclic] derivations according to lexical phonology. Speech samples were systematically analyzed using Praat and compared using statistical sampling. Native-speaker productions provided norm values for cross-reference to yield insights into the proposed Salience Hierarchy of the Acoustic Correlates of Stress (SHACS). The author recently reported the main findings which support the idea that SHACS exists in L1 sound schemes, and that native-like command of these systems can be acquired by L2 learners through increased L2 input. Other results are expected to reveal the role of tonic accent shift, the idiosyncrasies of individual suffixes, conflicts with standard dictionary pronunciations, and the effects of frequency perception scales on SHACS.