Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Open-vocabulary image classification can recognize arbitrary textual categories but often fails to capture hierarchical relationships, for example, a Ragdoll cat should also be recognized as both cat and animal. Therefore, we introduce OpenHier, a comprehensive framework for open-vocabulary hierarchical classification that encompasses a hierarchical structure, a dataset, a benchmark, and a model. To capture hierarchical relationships, we construct a systematic real-world hierarchical structure based on the linguistic lexical database WordNet and Vision-Language Large Model. Building upon this structure, we develop a large-scale dataset with 4M annotated images, as well as a benchmark with 50K annotated images. Meanwhile, we design an evaluation pipeline to assess open-vocabulary hierarchical classification performance using several curated metrics. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical consistency constraint method and multimodal alignment strategy to build a hierarchical classification model. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance on both multi-label image classification and hierarchical image classification tasks in the open-vocabulary setting.
These data contain three rows of data: 1. The unique identifier of the video and its order shown; 2. The subject's Likert rating of engagement, where 1-5 from least to most; 3. The subject's Likert rating of familiarity with the video's subject matter, also likert 1-5 from least to most.
Modern NLP models deliver strong performance but demand heavy computation and exhibit slow, brittle optimization over high-dimensional, non-convex objectives. Quantum computing offers an alternative by exploiting superposition and entanglement to explore parameter spaces more efficiently. This work develops a theoretical mapping from classical loss minimization to quantum cost expectations and evaluates quantum variational approaches (e.g., QAOA/VQE) for NLP optimization alongside classical and hybrid baselines. Methods: we adopt a comparative, simulation-based design using public datasets (IMDb, SemCor, Stanford Sentiment Treebank, WMT). Baselines include TF-IDF+Logistic Regression, LSTM, and BERT; quantum models use Qiskit QuantumKernel SVM with reduced 4-feature encodings on Aer; hybrids combine classical vectorization with quantum kernels. Results: classical models lead in Sentiment Classification (87%) and Semantic Analysis (86%), while quantum and hybrid models show resilience on ambiguity-heavy data. In Word Sense Disambiguation, the hybrid model attains 76% accuracy, outperforming classical (68%) and quantum (73%); in sentiment tasks the quantum and hybrid models reach 70% and 72%, respectively, and 66%/71% on semantic analysis. Confusion matrices indicate fewer boundary errors for hybrid configurations and suggest implicit regularization and faster convergence under low-resource settings. Conclusion: hybrid quantum–classical pipelines offer a practical route to near-term gains in ambiguity resolution and optimization efficiency, with full benefits contingent on advances in quantum hardware and native quantum embeddings/attention.
Abstract The legal language has been extensively studied due to its profound and far-reaching impact on society. Among the various research areas, the complexity of legal language has received particular attention due to its implications for legal practice and societal access to justice. Relevant studies seek to identify the factors contributing to the difficulty of legal language and explore potential methods of simplification. However, despite extensive qualitative research, a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the essential linguistic features distinguishing legal language from everyday language remains underexplored. The present study fills this gap and quantitatively examines the key features of German legal language by comparing it to journalistic language as a benchmark for everyday discourse, providing a rigorous, corpus-based perspective on the lexical, syntactic, and typological features of legal texts. Using data from the HDT-UD and DGT-UD treebanks, the study analyzes 18 quantitative indicators across three linguistic domains – lexicon, syntax, and word-order typology. The results indicate that legal language is characterized by a limited vocabulary, a higher frequency of long words and dependent clauses, increased syntactic and structural complexity, and a predominance of SV and OV word order patterns. By providing a detailed comparison of legal and journalistic registers, this study advances the understanding of legal language through objective, empirical analysis. The findings have practical implications for legal communication, suggesting that greater attention to lexical simplification and syntactic clarity could improve accessibility and comprehension.
Decision-making in economic and moral contexts involves complex affective processes that shape judgments of fairness, responsibility, and conflict resolution. While previous studies have primarily examined behavioral choices in economic games and moral dilemmas, less is known about the underlying affective structure of these decisions. This study investigated how individuals emotionally represent economic (ultimatum game) and moral (trolley dilemma) decision-making scenarios using multidimensional scaling (MDS) and classification. Participants rated their emotional responses, including positive (pleased, calm, happy, peaceful) and negative (irritated, angry, gloomy, sad, fearful, anxious) affective states, to 16 scenarios varying by game type, the presence or absence of conflict, and intensity. MDS revealed two primary affective dimensions of distinguishing conflict from no-conflict and economic from moral scenarios. No-conflict-economic scenarios were strongly associated with positive affective responses, while the no-conflict-moral scenarios elicited heightened fear and anxiety rather than positive emotions. Increasing unfairness in the ultimatum game affected affective representation, while variations in the number of lives at stake in the trolley dilemma did not. Cross-participant classification analyses demonstrated that game type and conflict conditions could be reliably predicted from affective ratings, indicating systematic and shared emotional representations across participants. These findings suggest that economic and moral decisions evoke distinct affective structures, with fairness modulating conflict perception in economic contexts, while moral decisions remain affectively stable despite changes in intensity.
ObjectiveAssess the patient compliance rate for nasopharyngoscopy as documented in clinical reports.DesignCross-sectional.SettingThirteen cleft teams in North America.PatientsPatients aged 3 to 21 years old with a repaired cleft palate.InterventionsNasopharyngoscopy.Main Outcome MeasurePatient compliance rate for nasopharyngoscopy.ResultsPatient compliance was documented in 128 of 158 reports (81%). Of the 128 reports, patient compliance was reported as "good/excellent" in 65% (n = 83), "marginal/fair" across 10% (n = 13), "poor" in 16% (n = 20), and "other" in 9% (n = 12). Patients with "poor" compliance had lower rates of documented imaging ratings, however 55% (n = 11) of reports included a surgical recommendation.ConclusionsAmong children completing nasopharyngoscopy for velopharyngeal insufficiency surgery planning, at least one-fourth of reports indicate significant compliance issues that limits velopharyngeal port imaging. These findings suggest that some cleft teams and surgeons may be proceeding with surgical management of velopharyngeal insufficiency without adequate visualization or ratings of velopharyngeal anatomy.
Violation of lexical norms in primary school textbooks is a serious problem and negatively affects the development of students' language skills. Also, violations of lexical norms in textbooks weaken children's thinking and communication skills. Therefore, special attention should be paid to the lexical norms of the language when preparing textbooks, and each word and expression should be selected purposefully. Teachers should be provided with methodological support and their language teaching skills should be improved. By taking these steps, correct language habits can be formed at the primary education level and support can be provided for the development of literary language in the future.
This study aims to analyze the gender dynamics reflected in the film Boston Strangler (2023) using a qualitative by feminist stylistics approach. The research examines how the film's linguistic representation reflects the challenges and progress of women in investigative journalism. By employing linguistic and stylistic analysis, the study identifies language choices, sentence structures, and discourse patterns that either reinforce or challenge traditional gender constructs in the media. The findings reveal that at the lexical level, the film often depicts men as authoritative figures, while women are portrayed as emotional or excessive in asserting their professionalism. Sentence structures further emphasize gender inequalities, with female characters frequently having to justify their abilities in the workplace. On a broader discourse level, while the film highlights the structural barriers faced by women in male-dominated fields, it also showcases their resilience in challenging societal expectations. This study underscores the significance of language in shaping gender perceptions and provides deeper insights into the representation of women in the media. It also contributes to broader discussions on the portrayal of women on screen and the role of media in shaping social norms. Future research could explore similar linguistic patterns in other films within the same genre to observe the evolving portrayal of gender in cinema.
Psychological research increasingly relies on high-dimensional data, yet it remains challenging to determine whether patterns of representation are independent across experimental contexts. Traditional multivariate approaches, such as decoding, are sensitive to pattern differences but do not directly test factorial hypotheses. In contrast, analysis of variance (ANOVA) provides inferential clarity but is limited to univariate measures. To address this gap, we introduce Multivariate Interaction Classification (MIC), a framework that combines the logic of factorial interaction tests with the sensitivity of multivariate pattern analysis. MIC evaluates representational independence by comparing within-context and cross-context decoding performance. Through simulation studies, we show that MIC reliably distinguishes modality-specific, modality-general, and hybrid representational structures. We then validate the method with affective ratings of gustatory and auditory stimuli, demonstrating how MIC can reveal the coexistence of specific and general codes. By providing a statistically grounded and easily implemented tool, MIC enables researchers to move beyond descriptive decoding toward confirmatory tests of representational hypotheses. All code and materials are openly available to ensure transparency and reproducibility.
Passive voice remains a key grammatical structure for English learners, particularly in academic writing, yet many students struggle to use it accurately. This study analyzes the types of passive voice errors made by 19 fifth-semester students in the English Education Study Program at Tadulako University. Specifically, it addresses two questions: (1) How do classroom interaction patterns such as teacher-centered grammar instruction, limited student negotiation of meaning, or feedback practices shape students’ understanding and use of passive voice, and to what extent might these dynamics contribute to the dominance of developmental errors? (2) In what ways do students’ sociocultural backgrounds, prior educational experiences, and exposure to English outside the classroom influence their difficulties with auxiliary verbs and tense agreement, and how do these factors mediate tensions between Indonesian linguistic norms and English academic writing conventions? A quantitative design was employed, with a test focusing on passive constructions in present continuous, past continuous, and past perfect tenses. Students’ responses were categorized using Dulay et al.'s (1982) comparative taxonomy of developmental and interlingual errors. Results revealed developmental errors as the most prevalent (89.9%), mainly involving incorrect auxiliary verbs (is, am, are, being, been), past participle formation, and tense agreement. These findings highlight the need for targeted grammar instruction on auxiliary patterns and participles, alongside enhanced practice, corrective feedback, and adjustments to classroom interactions and sociocultural considerations to boost accuracy.
As non-native users of English, multilinguals sometimes produce discourses that seemingly deviate from the English norm. One dispute on Facebook, for instance, tagged someone being linguistically incompetent for using double comparatives (DCs), seeing that its use (e.g. more taller) violates the English grammar. Hence this study directs its attention to DC’s emergence in online discourses to explore its acceptability and practicality. As a qualitative content inquiry informed by Chomsky’s (1961) generative grammar and theory of linguistic structure, this study found 9 DC structures, which at a glance, deviate the English norms, suggesting a variation in the application of comparative forms in English. Surprisingly, at a closer look, DCs are linguistic innovations characterizing users’ creativity and practical intent and their way to maximize the flexibility of English to serve a practical purpose. Understanding the purpose of Facebook discourses (e.g. to influence decisions) is crucial in this study to explain the use of DCs. As a result, promotional is the main purpose that justifies the use of DCs as it contains transactional and practical details to influence decisions (e.g. customers to grab discounted services). Significantly, this study introduces three types of DCs used in online discourses not yet explored in linguistics, namely: 1) intralingual (coreference) which coreferences with other lexical items composing units of linguistic references that denote meaning of an entire discourse in semantic level, 2) interlingual (intensifier) which intensifies the presentation of meaning according to how they are intended by users, and 3) extra-lingual (meaning marker) which adds related ideas not explicitly conveyed in a discourse. Although DCs appear to be acceptable in practical uses, particularly in online discourses, applying them in formal writing (where grammar accuracy is crucial) needs consensus among language experts because its usage may not be acceptable to convey technical information.
Abstract. The article deals with the peculiarities of teaching translation of specialized texts of non-linguistic specialties students. When teaching a foreign language, it is necessary to develop translation skills, as well as pay special attention to the tools used for its implementation. The author emphasizes that there are many lexical and grammatical transformations that are used to correctly construct specialized texts from the point of view of grammar and vocabulary. Some of the most common in the translation of specialized texts in-clude antonymic translation and compensation. The necessity of using antonymic transformation is caused by the necessity of precisely convey the semantic content of the original statement. The presence of close interrelation in speech and mutual influence can some-times change the meaning of the translated text. This is stipulated by the peculiarities of the words meaning in the context of using its direct, rather than figurative equivalence. Another widely used technique in specialized texts translation of various subjects is compensation. This translation technique is contextual, i.e. its use in the translation process serves to fully convey the meaning of the original. The success of its application also depends on understanding the emotional coloring of the state-ment itself, the character and features of the speaker’s speech, the initial situation and the specifics of the translation topic. Explication is also used in teaching translation of specialized texts and is a process of explaining and in-terpreting a text, which includes the analysis of lexical, grammatical and stylistic features. Explication is an important tool in teaching translation of specialized texts. It helps students develop a deep understanding of the text, improve their analytical and critical thinking skills, and take into account cultural features in the process of translation. The author comes to the conclusion that antonymic translation, explication and compensation contribute to achieving maximum equivalence and adequacy of translation, and the translated text reflects all the stylistic features of the original, while strictly following the language norms.
LOGIQ+ — Cognitive Diagnostic Assistant (TRL-8 Candidate) Version: 1.1 Date: December 01, 2025 Author: Anne Povie (Independent Research) Related DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17770976 Abstract LOGIQ+ is a research-grade cognitive diagnostic system that leverages a dual-engine architecture—semantic and non-semantic—to generate detailed, scientifically interpretable cognitive profiles. Based on the Skopein AI framework, LOGIQ+ integrates linguistic and symbolic reasoning with fractal and topological modeling to provide probabilistic assessments across cognitive, psychological, and sociological dimensions. This white paper outlines the theoretical framework, scoring architecture, and institutional use potential in education, sociology, public health, and policy-making. 1. System Architecture LOGIQ+ is powered by the Skopein AI dual-engine model: - Semantic Engine: handles symbolic reasoning, lexical abstraction, analogical transfer, and narrative patterning. - Non-Semantic Engine: analyzes dynamic response variation, fractal coherence, and topological relationality. 2. Scoring Methodology All outputs are derived using a three-tiered evidence framework: - H1: Direct linguistic and conceptual signals - H2: Recurrent cognitive structures and motifs - H3: Emergent patterns of convergence and abstraction Scores are expressed probabilistically (0.00–1.00), reflecting model confidence. 3. Cognitive Taxonomy LOGIQ+ detects four primary cognitive orientations: - Analytical - Organizational - Creative Structured - Critical Synthesizer 4. Psychosocial and Anthropological Dimensions The system includes optional interpretation layers for: - Openness to experience - Narrative identity strength - Cultural cognition and relational framing - Symbolic engagement and future orientation 5. Use Cases and Societal Impact LOGIQ+ is designed for: - Educational guidance and inclusion - Social resilience diagnostics - Cognitive readiness mapping for societal roles - Evidence-based program design and targeting 6. Ethical Position and Usage All data and scores are intended for institutional use and research. No score is used for exclusion or stigmatization. The system adheres to open science ethics and complies with PRISMA, STROBE, and RoB2 documentation norms. 7. Example Output See attached file: LOGIQ_CompleteInstitutional_Profile.json 8. Licensing and Repository Compatibility LOGIQ+ is distributed under CC BY 4.0. All files are compatible with Zenodo, HAL, and ReScience C repositories, and prepared for institutional archival referencing.
The article explores the phenomenon of descriptions of clothes in the English-language publicistic discourse of the 21st century as an important object of contemporary linguistics and media studies. The relevance of this research is determined by the increasing role of mass media in shaping public opinion and cultural codes, where descriptions of clothes perform not only an informative function but also evaluative, social-identification, and symbolic functions. In the 21st century, fashion emerges as a semiotic system reflecting social transformations, ideological priorities, and globalization processes, which heightens the scientific interest in the analysis of linguistic means of representation. The purpose of the study is to identify lexical, stylistic, and discursive features of descriptions of clothes in English-language publicistic texts and to determine their communicative functions in the modern media space. The research methods combine content analysis, linguistic-stylistic analysis, and elements of discourse analysis. The empirical base includes texts from English-language publications (“The Guardian”, “The New York Times”, “Vogue”, “The Independent”) reflecting contemporary socio-cultural processes. The results demonstrate that descriptions of clothes function as a multifunctional tool: they represent characters’ appearance, emphasize social status, convey cultural trends, and realize the evaluative-expressive potential of publicistic discourse. The study’s theoretical significance lies in deepening knowledge about the functioning of fashion language in media, while its practical significance is determined by the potential interdisciplinary application in linguistics, cultural studies, and media studies. In conclusion, descriptions of clothes are an important means of meaning-making in contemporary English-language media, as they reflect fashion changes and shape social perceptions of norms, gender roles, status, and ideals of beauty, thus contributing to the construction of 21st-century discourse.
Using network representations of the lexicon has expanded our understanding of vocabulary growth processes and vocabulary structure during early development. These models of vocabulary development have used multiple types of sources to create lexical representations. More recently, Weber and Colunga (2022) demonstrated that predictions of early vocabulary norms can be improved by using network representations based on a corpus incorporating language a young child might typically hear. The present work goes a step further by evaluating the accuracy of network representations for predicting individual children's word learning that are based on embeddings that are readily available or embeddings gathered from the same child language corpus. We predicted the specific words that individual children add to their vocabulary over time, using a longitudinal data set of 86 monolingual English-speaking toddler's changing vocabulary from 18 to 30 months of age. The toddler-based network predicted word learning more accurately than the off-the-shelf network. Further, there was an advantage for prediction methods that took into account the individual child's particular network structure rather than overall network connectivity. These results highlight the importance of tailoring representational and processing choices to the population of interest. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
The article discusses the issues of establishing the categorical apparatus of criminal law as exemplified by the crime under Article 238 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The disposition of the norm in question is stated in a general way and as a reference: it contains the indication of breach of security requirements for life and health of citizens as a principal crime sign. In this regard, when qualifying an act, questions often arise related to the definition of the content of the category "security requirements", including the mandatory requirements for their regulatory consolidation as a prerequisite for criminal prosecution. Investigating the issue of the content of the criminal law category "security requirements", the author first of all turns to the lexical content of the linguistic construction, establishing its literal meaning, and later, based on the analysis of the doctrine of criminal law and law enforcement practice, fills it with a specific criminal law meaning.
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Narrative discourse is a useful means to organize ideas and create shared understandings. Clinically, performing discourse analysis on disordered spoken language could facilitate researchers and clinicians not only to evaluate one's language abilities but also to foreshadow his/her communication in real-life situations. Given the normative reference data of a specific discourse task, less-biased judgement and evaluation could be made, which could further facilitate assessment and intervention planning. This study aims to first develop norms by analysing the language samples produced by neurotypical Cantonese speakers on two well-familiarized narrative stories, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and The Tortoise and Hare. Second, we aim to investigate the potential age and education effects on a wide range of micro- and macro-structural linguistics measures. METHOD: Two semi-spontaneous story narratives from the Cantonese AphasiaBank were selected for scoring. A total of 150 neurotypical Cantonese adult speakers produced the spoken discourse samples for each story narrative. All speakers were native Cantonese speakers living in Hong Kong; they were divided into three age groups: young (18-39 years old), middle-aged (40-59 years old), and older (> 60 years old). Audio recordings were transcribed, segmented, and annotated using CHAT conventions. RESULTS: Normative references of various micro- and macro-structural linguistics measures and the standard scoring references for the two narrative stories were established. For the age effect on narrative discourse, the older adults produced less complex, coherent and thematic-related concepts compared to the young group. However, lexical diversity was preserved in the older group, resulting in no significant differences across the three age groups. For education effect, the higher education group outperformed the lower education group in verbal productiveness and content informativeness. Lastly, the two stories were found to be non-comparable to each other, thereby they should not interchange in pre- and post-test arrangements or in monitoring discourse performance. CONCLUSIONS: The Cantonese discourse norms presented here can be applied in both research and clinical settings, facilitating a more objective review of language impairment and treatment planning. Second, this study demonstrated the effect of normal ageing on both the linguistics and conceptual levels specific to discourse production. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject Discourse analysis is a critical part of evaluating and understanding a person's communication abilities. Studies indicated that narrative discourse is more sensitive to specific linguistic parameters than other genres, and people with stronger narrative skills tended to have more social communication opportunities. An increasing number of studies had been working on setting norms for discourse tasks. Locally, Kong et al. (2025) have recently reported the normative references for descriptive tasks of the Cantonese AphasiaBank. What this study adds to the existing knowledge First, this study completed the norms establishment for all discourse tasks of the Cantonese AphasiaBank. Second, our analysis of the impact of different factors on narrative discourse offers significant value for clinical applications. We found that ageing was not manifested across all microstructural linguistics consistently, while lexical diversity was found to be tolerant to ageing. However, ageing was found to be adversely affecting propositional parameters and discourse informativeness. What are the clinical implications of this study? Narrative discourse, being one of the most popular tasks in clinical assessment but often faced the challenges of a lack of objective references. This study analysed two well-familiarized narrative stories, provides a complete set of norm data readily for front line clinicians and researchers, which could be used for intervention planning, monitoring progress (e.g., used them as control probes for tracking generalization effects) or as an input for investigating the interplay between linguistics and cognitive abilities.
This paper undertakes a Marxist literary analysis of Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry series, with a specific focus on the short stories Horrid Henry Robs the Bank (2003), Horrid Henry’s Christmas (1994) and Horrid Henry and the Scary Sitter (1997). It studies the construction of class struggle, alienation and superstructure through the lens of comedy. This is done by positioning Henry as the subaltern figure, whose humorous behavioural transgressions expose and are simultaneously contained by prevailing parental, i.e. capitalist state, ideologies. The study is structured around three comic modalities: farce, lexico-semantics and satirical characterisation. The farcical narrative foregrounds the grotesque inequalities embedded in the superstructure; lexical humour is deployed to represent resistance to conformity to bourgeois norms linguistically; authority figures, like parents, teachers, and even babysitters, are portrayed satirically to expose the arbitrariness of ‘disciplinary’ mechanisms (which mirror marginalisation and propaganda to maintain false consciousness) at the heart of the capitalist state’s apparatus. The Horrid Henry series operates as a discursive site wherein the ideological tensions of capitalism are encoded, negotiated, and pedagogically transmitted through the comic form. Stories from three distinct quinquenniums have been selected for this study to explore the consistency in Simon’s political messages across time. Ultimately, by situating Simon’s series within broader debates on the political function of children’s literature, this research underscores the genre’s consequential role in constructing youth perspectives on class, power and justice.
Cognitive reappraisal and attentional distraction constitute two core strategies for regulating emotions. Prior studies have largely focused on young adults regulating simple laboratory stimuli, with few direct comparisons of brain regions that differentiate or mutually implement these strategies. Here, we expanded the typical age range of participants, compared reappraisal and distraction within participants, and used ecologically valid autobiographical memories as regulatory targets. Sixty-two healthy adults aged 35-75 years generated cue words for negative and neutral autobiographical memories and were trained to either reappraise, distract, or let their emotions flow naturally in response to cued memories. Strategy-specific contrasts were derived from whole-brain fMRI data using univariate analyses. For reappraisal, relative to flow, we observed activity in bilateral occipital cortex, right cerebellum, and cingulate cortex and primarily left-sided frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices. Distraction, relative to flow, engaged bilateral lateral prefrontal, medial parietal, cingulate, occipital, and retrosplenial regions and left cerebellum. Common areas of activation included midline occipital and posterior cingulate cortices. Direct comparisons yielded strategy differences across multiple cortical areas: distraction engaged paralimbic areas (insula and left parahippocampal gyrus), dorsolateral and ventrolateral PFC, and right inferior frontoparietal cortex, whereas reappraisal engaged dorsomedial PFC, left ventrolateral PFC, anterior temporal cortex, and left posterolateral PFC. In-scanner valence ratings verified the efficacy of the experimental manipulation and revealed a negative impact of age on reappraisal success, which was correlated with greater visual cortical processing. These findings extend knowledge regarding the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation across the adult lifespan for autobiographical events.
The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the translation of new language norms that emerge in social networks.The main interpretations and characteristics of these units were analysed.In addition, four main methods of translating such items, proposed by P. Newmark, were identified and illustrated with examples.The active spread of digital communication and the rapid formation of Internet-based vocabulary determined the main purpose of the investigationto analyse the features of functioning and translation of new lexical units from English into Ukrainian in the context of social media.The object of the research is the peculiarities of the translation and functioning of new language norms in digital discourse.The subject of the research is the specifics of translation of new lexical units from English into Ukrainian.The novelty of this research lies in a comprehensive analysis of how new lexical units that emerge in social networks are translated and function in Ukrainian digital discourse.It provides a systematic classification of translation methods: borrowing, transcription, transliteration; naturalisation; cultural equivalent; descriptive method.Their quantitative distribution was determined based on 50 authentic examples from popular platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, WeChat, TikTok).The scientific novelty also consists in identifying the tendencies of adaptation of English neologisms to Ukrainian linguistic and cultural norms, which reflects the ongoing influence of digital communication on the evolution of modern Ukrainian vocabulary.The material of the research is 50 lexical units selected from popular social media platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, WeChat, and TikTok.
This article presents a comprehensive linguistic analysis of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi’s epistle «To my beloved Hutsuls!» (1900), which is written in the Hutsul dialect. The introduction outlines the study’s purpose: to determine the extent to which dialectal norms are integrated into this confessional text. The research objectives include identifying the phonetic features of the Hutsul dialect within the epistle, analyzing its grammatical characteristics, and characterizing its lexical corpus. The primary source for this study is the text of the pastoral letter, published in the 1935 edition of Metropolitan A. Sheptytskyi’s works. The article examines the historical context surrounding the creation of «To my beloved Hutsuls!», which influenced the author's linguistic choices. Sheptytsky wrote this message in 1900 following his visit to the faithful of the Kosiv Deanery. A review of relevant literature is provided, including lexicographic sources that describe the norms of the Hutsul dialect. During this period, there was a cultural opposition between «yazychiie» (a Church Slavonic-based literary language) and the vernacular, with Sheptytskyi opting for the latter. His innovative approach as the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) received high praise from Ivan Franko. In the section titled «Phonetic features of the hutsul dialect in the epistle», the characteristic manifestations of the Hutsul vocalic and consonantal systems in the text are examined. It is established that the author accurately conveys the sound profile of the Hutsul dialect, with only a few minor exceptions. The section «Morphological features of the epistle» identifies noun, adjective, verb, pronoun, and numeral inflectional forms typical of the Hutsul dialect. Additionally, several common word-formation patterns are outlined. The author generally adheres to the key grammatical norms of the dialect, although some deviations in inflection compared to documented forms in lexicographic sources are noted. In the section «Lexical corpus of the epistle», typical lexical dialectisms are described, along with the presence of theological terminology and internationalisms. It is argued that the author skillfully combined diverse layers of vocabulary, ensuring comprehensibility for the Hutsul community. A. Sheptytskyi did not write the pastoral letter in the Hutsul dialect as a philological experiment; instead, he intended for it to have a significant educational and pastoral impact. Today, with Standard Ukrainian serving as a common means of communication known to nearly all speakers through the education system, there is little need to develop a confessional style based on individual dialects. While the potential of dialects is broad, as demonstrated by A. Sheptytskyi’s epistle, their societal relevance is currently low or largely absent. In the conclusions, it is noted that A. Sheptytskyi’s epistle «To my beloved Hutsuls!» captures the essential features of the Hutsul dialect and stands as an important linguistic document of the early 20th c. The epistle demonstrates an expansion of the dialect’s functional possibilities beyond its usual sphere.
This paper seeks to unravel the intricacies involved when translating English collective nouns into Arabic by Palestinian undergraduate translation students. In English, collective nouns like government, jury, and committee allow both singular and plural verb agreement depending on notional or grammatical concord. On the other hand, Arabic places strict grammatical concord on collective nouns by considering them as singular entities despite their semantic plurality. Hence, this cross-linguistic difference poses translation and pedagogical concerns for translators. For the purpose of this study, a structured questionnaire was distributed to 30 students of different academic levels at Al-Najah University. The questionnaire consists of demographic questions, ten English to Arabic trans¬lation tasks involving collective nouns, and reflective questions regarding students’ strategies and their perceptions about the difficulties involved. The data was analyzed thematically and demonstrated that although most students followed Arabic grammatical norms and used singular verb agreement, a minority resorted to notional translation using plural subjects (e.g., members of the committee) together with a plural verb agreement. However, difficulties that arise for students involve the singular and plural agreement, and lexical gaps. Senior students as well as students who had prior exposure to political texts tended to have more syntactic awareness and accuracy. Based on the findings of this paper, explicit instruction is needed on collective noun behavior, and notional versus grammatical agreement. In concordance with these linguistic aspects, this study contributes to translation pedagogy by focusing on context-sensitive equivalence and grammatical awareness in dealing with collective noun constructions between two typologically different languages.
The future of healthcare delivery across the cancer continuum holds great promise and challenge. U.S. cancer mortality across all cancers combined decreased ~2% annually from 2015 to 2019 thanks to a range of factors including clinical and delivery innovations in cancer prevention, control, treatment, supportive care, and efforts to improve clinical trial access [1]. However, long-standing cancer health disparities remain. Accelerated progress is vital to reduce cancer deaths for all Americans and achieve National Cancer Plan goals [2-4]. Additionally, COVID-19 impacts on cancer are still emerging [5, 6] and the long-term cancer survivor population is growing—increasing sustained surveillance for recurrence, new cancers, late effects, and other long-term health concerns [7]. These and other individual, institutional, and societal trends are shaping cancer care delivery, treatment, and research. Cancer health services research has a role in tracking and understanding how such trends influence health service design, delivery, and outcomes, to inform care approaches, health system decisions, and policy innovation across the cancer continuum. Such trends also beg the question, what measurement and methodological innovations are needed for timely, valid evaluation of their impact on cancer-related health services and outcomes important to patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, payers, and policy makers? Continued measurement and methodological development only stand to improve scientific quality, reproducibility, and practical impact. Therefore, in this commentary, we briefly summarize 10 trends in cancer care delivery, treatment, and research and explore potential implications for health services research measurement and methods. Our intent is not to comprehensively address all possible opportunities or ideas presented here, but to highlight pressing, foundational needs and promising directions for measurement and methods focused science. Our focus is cancer health services research. However, the challenges and opportunities discussed clearly have broader implications. Rededication to strengthening our research methods and measures is an investment in the foundational T0 basic science [8] of cancer health services research and, therefore, essential to generating and translating future evidence into practice and policy. A universe of trends influences health services at-large at any given moment, however, we highlight 10 trends elevating the necessity of methods and measures research in cancer-focused health services research, including: (1) precision oncology; (2) whole-person perspectives; (3) health technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence (AI), mobile health, telehealth); (4) expanding in-home and community-based services; (5) health system integration and efforts addressing care fragmentation; (6) workforce capacity and evolving roles; (7) population aging; (8) improving safety, quality, value and access while controlling costs and addressing financial toxicity; (9) addressing social drivers of health; and (10) leveraging data oceans with unstructured, semi-structured, and structured elements. Deep discussion of each is beyond our scope, but we discuss several of these trends with examples and then give focused attention to measurement and methodological implications. One trend with significant measurement and methodological implications is the rapid advancement of precision oncology paradigms. Precision paradigms are fundamentally changing the understanding of cancer risk, diagnosis, disease profiling, treatment monitoring, therapeutic development, trial eligibility, and have birthed new health services (e.g., genetic counseling, in-house molecular pathology) [9-11]. Precision approaches highlight potential pitfalls of analyses by organ site (e.g., lung, breast) that lump together variations in genetic or social risks, different genomic signatures, treatments, and implications for prognosis and quality of life (QOL) [12-14]. Population aging and movement toward whole-person health similarly underscore opportunities to assess and model a broader constellation of factors (e.g., multiple chronic conditions, functional status, degrees of caregiver support) and understand the effects of incentivizing wholistic care approaches on cancer-related outcomes [15, 16]. Paralleling rapid clinical advancements is increasing attention on controlling costs, including addressing financial toxicity and financial distress [17, 18]. Cancer care costs increasingly outpace other areas; for example, they comprised 43% of 2020 Medicare Part B spending [19]. Additionally, recent analyses found cancer survivors were nearly 4 times more likely to declare bankruptcy and experienced credit score declines persisting up to nearly 10 years post-diagnosis [20]. Financial distress is associated with higher symptom burden, worse QOL, and lower adherence to recommended care [21-23]. Challenges quantifying costs or balancing cost with access to high-quality care and clinical innovations are certainly not new [24]. However, the scope and duration of cancer care costs at individual, family, and population levels beget opportunities for multilevel measure development, innovative modeling approaches, and data linkages, as well as interventions that integrate financial considerations into goals of care discussions and financial navigation [25-27]. The speed of cancer care innovation is also matched by rapid transformations in the healthcare system landscape across the cancer continuum. For example, in 2017 more oncology physician practices (50%–55%) reported vertical integration with a hospital or health system compared with any other specialty, up from ~20% in 2007 [28, 29]. Trends toward greater health system integration, new affiliation models, expansion of non-traditional players into the care delivery sector, and pervasive care fragmentation underscore opportunities to develop and adopt richer measures of organizational structure, functioning, policies, norms, and coordination across the cancer continuum [30]. Similarly, evolving roles and approaches to care are arising from clinical innovation (e.g., home-based screening, oral anti-cancer agents) paired with patient volumes rapidly outpacing oncology workforce capacity. For example, some care delivery models, state policies, and billing guidelines are enabling Advanced Practice Professionals, community health workers, patient navigators, home care, and other care team members to practice at the top of their license or certification [16]. These trends challenge future research to more precisely assess where and who is delivering care and to advance methods suitable for evaluating contributions of a growing constellation of collaborators and settings to cancer-related outcomes of interest. Additionally, the field has seen increased focus on understanding and addressing adverse social drivers of health, financial hardship, and social risks (e.g., transportation, food, housing instability) and their influence on persistent cancer health disparities [31]. For example, eliminating cancer health disparities was one of eight goals in the 2024 National Cancer Plan [32, 33]. NCI has a long history of supporting efforts to improve cancer health disparity measurement [34] given quantifying heterogeneity in cancer incidence and mortality is part of the Annual Report to the Nation on Cancer. However, efforts to address social risks and drivers of health via the healthcare system—as well as related measures and approaches for tracing impact on cancer outcomes—are still nascent. Collectively, these trends and others noted at the opening of this section underscore numerous opportunities for cancer health services scientists to address persistent and emerging measurement and methodological challenges. We highlight several opportunities for future measurement and methods development or refinement below. We simultaneously encourage the field to identify and pursue numerous others not discussed here. Many trends above may necessitate new measurement paradigms (e.g., whole-person cancer care, measurement-based care). Others underscore the need for dedicated attention toward solving persistent, yet fundamental measurement challenges (e.g., evolving care delivery settings, usual care, organizational characteristics). Given these trends, we discuss five example areas for measurement-focused research attention below. Evidence exists for the benefit of whole-person care models, yet defining components of whole-person cancer care requires conceptual elaboration, refinement, and standardization [35]. Both new measures and novel person-centered methods are essential to designing and optimizing whole-person focused systems of cancer care. In 2024, building from work in primary care, the Integrative Oncology Leadership Collaborative (IOLC) defined whole-person cancer care as an approach that integrates conventional cancer treatments with evidence-based complementary therapies and/or lifestyle interventions, addresses the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of a person's life, and focuses on what matters most to the patient [36, 37]. The IOLC definition and related minimal-required elements are based on the Two-Circle Model of Whole-Person Care [38], which reframes current disease-focused approaches toward one that is person-centered, relationship-based, and recovery and health-promotion focused. An emphasis on person-centered care, coordination, continuity and integration, and relationships are distinguishing characteristics of the whole-person paradigm and are conceptualized as features most likely to improve population health, access, quality, and lower costs. The Two-Circle framework also highlights roles, services, and workforce changes needed to implement, scale up, and sustain this type of care. New payment models are also important to support and incentivize a transition to whole-person care. Many health services measurement and methodological approaches developed or operationalized around a single disease, organ system, specific health care setting, or payer will continue to be useful in evaluating models of whole-person cancer care (e.g., cancer registries, Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems [CAHPS]) [39-41]. However, person-centered measures of unmet needs, experiences of care involving larger care teams, well-being (physical, emotional, social), care costs, and medical financial hardship will require further conceptual, lexical, and methodologic development in the context of whole-person care [42]. Ensuring such measures are accessible and meaningful for all patients, and interpretable as predictors and moderators of whole-person health outcomes will require mixed methods studies that go beyond traditional psychometric approaches to establish validity and interpretation [43]. Measurement of whole-person outcomes also requires accommodating, sometimes simultaneously, for within-person and group-level change, and methods able to address differences between individuals on a collection of measures or scale dimensions (e.g., almost matching exactly methods) [44]. The NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health's 2021 Workshop on Methodological Approaches for Whole Person Research discussed several such measurement and methodological opportunities [45]. Measurement-based care (MBC) is an emerging approach in chronic disease management, including cancer care [46], generally defined as “systematic evaluation of patient symptoms before or during an encounter to inform” [47](p324) care-related decisions. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) form MBC's foundation, providing critical tools for assessing targeted needs for distinct populations (e.g., older adults, adolescents), tumor and treatment types, and care phase [48]. Well-validated instruments essential for MBC in oncology exist (e.g., needs assessment, symptoms, functional status, social risks) [49-51]. However, some domains remain underdeveloped, including measurement of treatment burden, patient engagement, and care experiences. Both existing and newly developed measures also require adaptation and validation to meet accessibility needs of all patients, including groups understudied in measure development research such as older adults and people with differing degrees of English language proficiency. Additionally, integrating these measures into feasible, efficacious MBC interventions and coupling them with evidence-based decision support necessary to prioritize and comprehensively address the constellation of needs identified, requires further development. Alternative settings of care beyond traditional inpatient-outpatient distinctions are also rapidly arising, including: telehealth, remote patient monitoring, home-based care (e.g., hospital-in-the-home, self-management support), distributed clinical trials, and consumer-oriented platforms (e.g., Amazon Care, CVS MinuteClinic). These settings offer new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, improved efficiency, and access. However, the field lacks screening measures to match these settings to patient needs and resources, risk stratify, and predict clinical complications. Also needed are bespoke measures demonstrating solid measurement properties in these settings for care quality, safety, clinical outcomes, budget impact, costs, value, and experiences of patients, caregivers, and staff [52-54]. Measuring strategies and contextual factors contributing to the adoption and sustainment of delivery models employing alternative care settings are also important for dissemination and adaptation [54, 55]. 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This study investigates the impact of social media-induced neologisms on the linguistic proficiency of university students in Cameroon. With the widespread use of platforms like Twitter (now X), TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, an increasing number of slang terms and abbreviations—collectively termed neologisms—have become part of students’ daily communication. While these terms foster informal expression and social bonding, their use in academic writing undermines grammatical accuracy, lexical appropriateness, spelling, coherence, and formal tone. Drawing on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly Register Theory, this research analyses the written output of 200 first and second year university students, identifying 645 neologism occurrences across 55 distinct types. A coding scheme tracks the frequency, form, and syntactic roles of these neologisms, with attention to their ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions. Additionally, a structured survey explores students’ metalinguistic awareness, language habits on social media, and ability to distinguish between formal and informal registers. Findings show a strong presence of neologisms such as “4u,” “ghosted,” “vibes”, “nerve” and “low-key” in formal assignments, leading to inappropriate register use and reduced clarity. Many students demonstrate "register flattening," struggling to shift between informal digital language and formal academic expression. While the study recognizes the creative and identity-shaping value of social media neologisms, it highlights their unintended negative effects on academic writing standards in the digital age. The research recommends targeted pedagogical interventions to build students’ awareness of language register and promote formal writing skills. Though linguistic innovation reflects cultural change, academic successrequires mastery of formal communication norms; promoting register awareness is therefore essential for maintaining academic standards.
This paper explores the application of Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory in the English subtitle translation of the Chinese film Hidden Blade (2023). By analyzing specific translation strategies and challenges, the study aims to evaluate how functional equivalence theory enhances cross-cultural communication and audience comprehension. Through qualitative analysis of selected dialogue excerpts, the research identifies key practices in achieving lexical, syntactic, textual,and stylistic equivalence. The findings reveal that adaptations in cultural references, sentence restructuring and pragmatic adjustments are critical to preserving the original intent and emotional resonance of the film. This study contributes to the discourse on audiovisual translation by emphasizing the balance between fidelity to source content and adaptability to target-language norms.
Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Persian presents unique challenges due to its complex phonological features, particularly homographs and Ezafe, which exist in formal and informal language contexts. This paper introduces an intermediate language specifically designed for Persian language processing that addresses these challenges through a multi-faceted approach. Our methodology combines two key components: Large Language Model (LLM) prompting techniques and a specialized sequence-to-sequence machine transliteration architecture. We developed and implemented a systematic approach for constructing a comprehensive lexical database for homographs with multiple pronunciations disambiguation often termed polyphones, utilizing formal concept analysis for semantic differentiation. We train our model using two distinct datasets: the LLM-generated dataset for formal and informal Persian and the B-Plus podcasts for informal language variants. The experimental results demonstrate superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in handling the complexities of Persian phoneme conversion. Our model significantly improves Phoneme Error Rate (PER) metrics, establishing a new benchmark for Persian G2P conversion accuracy. This work contributes to the growing research in low-resource language processing and provides a robust solution for Persian text-to-speech systems and demonstrating its applicability beyond Persian. Specifically, the approach can extend to languages with rich homographic phenomena such as Chinese and Arabic
This paper investigates the intralingual dubbing (from American English (AmE) to British English (BrE)) of two recent animated series for children: Daniel Tiger's Neighbo [u] rhood (2012) and Vida the Vet (2024).It discusses the historical reasons behind English's current status as a global lingua franca, and also the observable shift in dominance within that from BrE to AmE, both within traditional EFL teaching and culture more generally.After a brief discussion of the role of dubbing within Audiovisual Translation (AVT), the two series are briefly introduced, including their prosocial aims.The costly and perhaps counterintuitive AVT decision to redub is considered through lexical examples (principally "Trolley/Trammie" and "hustle/hurry"), raising the possibility that preservation of accent is another motivating factor.It asks whether localising the text and voices denies speakers of British English -still a powerful setter of norms -an early opportunity to encounter linguistic difference, or whether the existence of both an AmE and a BrE version in fact represents exactly that.Finally, it returns to the prosocial aims of the programmes, and reflects on the irony that one of the most obvious differences between American and British English is announced by the absence or presence of "u" in the word "neighbo[u]r/hood".
Despite their potential as sustainable protein sources, insect-based food products are facing slow acceptance by European consumers. The study investigated societal attitudes toward insect-based foods according to a survey of Italian consumers. Employing the Theory of Social Representation (SR) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) the study adopted a quali-quatitative approach to identify the interplay between cultural factors and determinants of behavioral intentions to consume insect-based foods. The study sample ( N = 380) responded to a two-part online survey: a free word association task to the stimulus “insect-based food” and a structured questionnaire of TPB variables (attitude toward insect-based food, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, behavioral intention) and its pertinent extensions, i.e., disgust, food neophobia, and positive moral attitudes. The lexical corpus derived from free associations was analyzed with ALCESTE and the resulting lexical classes were illustrated by means of quantitative measures. Three social representations of insect-based food, varying in their degree of abstraction/concreteness and perceived safety and effectiveness, were identified and labeled as “Simply Disgusting,” “Nutritious and Sustainable,” and “Curiosity and Caution.” Each representation was associated with a well-defined profile of participants and was clearly linked to participants' beliefs about insect-based food, the moral implications of these dietary choices, and consumers' intentions to purchase such products. The study suggests the need for targeted interventions to address societal misconception and foster a more favorable perception of insect-based food products as viable food options in European diets. Our findings provide insights for policymakers and producers seeking to promote sustainable dietary choices. • Social Representations of Insect-Based Foods and the Theory of Planned Behavior. • Consumer Perspectives on Insect-Based Foods: Curiosity and Positive Moral Attitudes Beyond Disgust. • Targeted Interventions to Overcome Societal Skepticism Toward Insect-Based Foods. • From Free Associations to Social Representations: How Consumers Perceive Insect-Based Food.
The obligatory use of third-person honorifics is a distinctive feature of several South Asian languages, encoding nuanced socio-pragmatic cues such as power, age, gender, fame, and social distance. In this work, (i) We present the first large-scale study of third-person honorific pronoun and verb usage across 10,000 Hindi and Bengali Wikipedia articles with annotations linked to key socio-demographic attributes of the subjects, including gender, age group, fame, and cultural origin. (ii) Our analysis uncovers systematic intra-language regularities but notable cross-linguistic differences: honorifics are more prevalent in Bengali than in Hindi, while non-honorifics dominate while referring to infamous, juvenile, and culturally exotic entities. Notably, in both languages, and more prominently in Hindi, men are more frequently addressed with honorifics than women. (iii) To examine whether large language models (LLMs) internalize similar socio-pragmatic norms, we probe six LLMs using controlled generation and translation tasks over 1,000 culturally balanced entities. We find that LLMs diverge from Wikipedia usage, exhibiting alternative preferences in honorific selection across tasks, languages, and socio-demographic attributes. These discrepancies highlight gaps in the socio-cultural alignment of LLMs and open new directions for studying how LLMs acquire, adapt, or distort social-linguistic norms. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/souro/honorific-wiki-llm
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly, understanding how concreteness is represented in our mind and brain is a central question in psychology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. While the advent of powerful language models has allowed for quantitative inquiries into the nature of semantic representations, it remains largely underexplored how they represent concreteness. Here, we used behavioral judgments to estimate semantic distances implicitly used by humans, for a set of carefully selected abstract and concrete nouns. Using Representational Similarity Analysis, we find that the implicit representational space of participants and the semantic representations of language models are significantly aligned. We also find that both representational spaces are implicitly aligned to an explicit representation of concreteness, which was obtained from our participants using an additional concreteness rating task. Importantly, using ablation experiments, we demonstrate that the human-to-model alignment is substantially driven by concreteness, but not by other important word characteristics established in psycholinguistics. These results indicate that humans and language models converge on the concreteness dimension, but not on other dimensions.
Understanding the nuances in everyday language is pivotal for advancements in computational linguistics & emotions research. Traditional lexicon-based tools such as LIWC and Pattern have long served as foundational instruments in this domain. LIWC is the most extensively validated word count based text analysis tool in the social sciences and Pattern is an open source Python library offering functionalities for NLP. However, everyday language is inherently spontaneous, richly expressive, & deeply context dependent. To explore the capabilities of LLMs in capturing the valences of daily narratives in Flemish, we first conducted a study involving approximately 25,000 textual responses from 102 Dutch-speaking participants. Each participant provided narratives prompted by the question, "What is happening right now and how do you feel about it?", accompanied by self-assessed valence ratings on a continuous scale from -50 to +50. We then assessed the performance of three Dutch-specific LLMs in predicting these valence scores, and compared their outputs to those generated by LIWC and Pattern. Our findings indicate that, despite advancements in LLM architectures, these Dutch tuned models currently fall short in accurately capturing the emotional valence present in spontaneous, real-world narratives. This study underscores the imperative for developing culturally and linguistically tailored models/tools that can adeptly handle the complexities of natural language use. Enhancing automated valence analysis is not only pivotal for advancing computational methodologies but also holds significant promise for psychological research with ecologically valid insights into human daily experiences. We advocate for increased efforts in creating comprehensive datasets & finetuning LLMs for low-resource languages like Flemish, aiming to bridge the gap between computational linguistics & emotion research.
Online media has become the primary source of information for modern society due to its quick access and ease of news presentation. However, this development also poses challenges, particularly in maintaining writing quality, such as diction accuracy. Appropriate diction plays a crucial role in delivering clear messages, avoiding misunderstandings, and preserving media credibility. This study aims to analyze diction errors in the daily online news jateng.akurat.co edition of November 12, 2024, including non-standard word usage and word mismatches. This research employs a qualitative descriptive method to identify the types of errors, their causes, and their impacts on readers. Data were collected using documentation techniques by observing, recording, and analyzing the news texts published in the selected edition. The analysis process involved comparing diction usage with applicable linguistic norms and relevant contexts. The findings reveal several common errors, such as the use of terms that do not align with formal language norms, inappropriate word choices, and the improper adaptation of foreign words. Diction errors can create reader confusion, diminish media credibility, and affect perceptions of the information conveyed. This study highlights the importance of accurate diction selection in journalism, especially for regionally based media, which must consider cultural contexts and local values. These findings are expected to serve as a guideline for enhancing linguistic accuracy in digital journalism, maintaining media credibility, and supporting journalism's role as a pillar of a healthy democracy.
The study aimed to explore the effectiveness of employing AI Praat acoustic analysis to investigate the challenges Omani EFL college students face in producing English prosodic features, particularly sentence intonation and lexical stress. The test was developed and applied to thirty students from foundation programs at a university level. Students' audio-recordings were analyzed using Praat acoustic analysis. Findings indicated that Praat acoustic analysis are very effective as it provided precise and objective methods for examining prosodic features of sentence intonation and lexical stress. The detailed acoustic data generated by Praat helped in diagnosing phonetic acoustic issues and enabled the comparison of learners' speech with native speakers' norms, fostering a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by Omani EFL learners in mastering English prosody. The results revealed significant differences between the students' intonation patterns and lexical stress placement compared to native English speakers, likely influenced by mother tongue.
Modern lifestyles demonstrably influence language as a social construct. The Russian language is not exempt from the constant evolution of its lexical units; some terms lose their original meanings and acquire new ones, while others become obsolete, replaced by newer vocabulary. Certain situations may necessitate deviations from established linguistic conventions, potentially creating legal grounds for subsequent litigation. The purpose of the study is to analyze some challenging issues of spelling and using words in the Russian language that are reflected in judicial practice. The present study was carried out based on traditional general scientific methods (analysis and synthesis, etc.) and methods of legal science (system analysis, formal-legal, etc.). Analysis of regular and irregular spelling and using words, including foreign ones, in the Russian language tellingly reveals the complexity of linguistic issues facing courts. Notably, challenges arise from the lack of a unified legal and linguistic definition of the word “obscene”, hindering its subsequent legislative consolidation, and from misuse of technology in drafting court documents, leading to repeated mistakes. It is concluded that it is necessary to expand the List of grammars, dictionaries and reference books approved by Order of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation No. 195 dated 8 June 2009, containing the norms of the modern Russian literary language when used as the state language of the Russian Federation, including because of the need to legislatively consolidate the new vocabulary appearing in the reference literature.
The issue concerning the appropriate manner of addressing women in contemporary Northern India serves as a reflection of the response of established socio-cultural norms to the evolving role of women within Indian society. The primary objective of this study is to ascertain the patterns associated with the selection of both traditional and borrowed forms of address for women in present-day Northern Indian society, examined through the lens of linguistic affiliation. The specific research objectives include: the compilation of samples of forms of address for women that are prevalent in the Hindu-speaking regions of Northern India, specifically within the states of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh; the analysis of the sociolinguistic characteristics pertaining to the contexts in which traditional and borrowed forms of address for women are utilized; and the development of a classification scheme for these forms of address based on their type (traditional, hybrid, borrowed). Furthermore, utilizing both the sociolinguistic characteristics of the context and formal classification, algorithms for the application of forms of address to women within a multilingual context will be constructed.The methods employed in the research were systematically implemented in stages. In the initial stage, a diagnostic survey was conducted to gather samples of the linguistic units employed in etiquette for addressing women. The subsequent stage involved the analysis of language materials. Two types of materials were utilized: questionnaires and video recordings. The analysis of the video materials revealed a notable discrepancy between the formally stated list of address forms and the actual etiquette units employed in addressing women. This discrepancy is primarily characterized by the observation that certain forms of address initially identified by speakers as intended for men are also used to address women. This trend was consistently observed across all three formal categories of address: traditional, hybrid, and borrowed.In the Hindi-speaking regions of Northern India, forms of address for women comprise a diverse array of lexemes, including those from Hindi as well as hybrid forms integrating English vocabulary. The choice of address directed towards women is influenced by the type of addressee and the social context, which may be formal, informal, friendly, or familial. The inclination to amalgamate lexical units into words of a ‘common gender’ represents a linguistic strategy that reflects the new social roles of women in contemporary Northern Indian society. This trend may be regarded as one of several mechanisms for the linguistic representation of women's social roles within the domain of etiquette.
This paper offers new insights into the philological and linguistic investigation of the earliest Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) translation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Homily 38 “On the Theophany” (Εἰς τὰ Θεοφάνια, CPG 3010.38; BHG, 1921-1921b; PG 36, 312A-333A). This anonymous ecclesiastical sermon is transmitted by two manuscripts: one of East Slavic provenance (St Petersburg, Russian National Library, Q.п.I.16, second half of late 11th century), while the other is of South Slavic origin (Sofia, SS. Cyril and Methodius National Library, № 674, mid-14th century). The work comprises two main parts. First, it presents a text-critical analysis of the textual transmission, demonstrating that the surviving codices derive from a common archetype. Second, it provides scholars with a study of the language and of some aspects of the translation techiques, offering compelling evidence of both a marked analogy with the Didactic Gospel of Constantine, Bishop of Preslav, and of the presence of a number of lexical and grammatical archaisms. These features suggest the translation likely dates to between the late 9th and early 10th centuries, a period prior to the consolidation and standardisation of the Preslav school’s literary norm. The paper’s second part contains a new, significantly revised critical edition of the Old Church Slavonic translation of Homily 38.
This article examines the sociolinguistic features of the language used in contemporary Kazakh cinema and provides a scholarly rationale for the role of the Kazakh language within the film industry. The aim of the study is to identify the mixed linguistic structures characteristic of Kazakh cinema (such as code-switching, slang, jargon, pidginization, and creolization) and to determine their impact on national language policy and the public prestige of the Kazakh language. Deviations from linguistic norms recorded in cinematic works directly affect language purity, emotional connection with the audience, and the linguistic identification of youth. More than twenty comedic and dramatic films were analyzed as part of the language corpus, and a content analysis was conducted to determine the frequency of code-switching, grammatical inconsistencies, lexical hybrids, and the presence of obscene language. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that Kazakh cinema constitutes a significant component of national culture, and its language practices have a direct impact on how the language is perceived by audiences and on the development of the Kazakh language itself. In the context of globalization and increasing foreign cultural influence, the preservation and advancement of the national language face new challenges. Therefore, the language of Kazakh cinema is considered not only a creative medium but also a crucial tool for language policy and the preservation of cultural heritage. The findings of the study may be useful for screenwriters, directors, and linguists working in the field of cinema. The analysis of linguistic practices in Kazakh filmmaking can inform strategies to enhance the status of the Kazakh language, as well as its preservation and development. Additionally, the research may serve as educational material for students and scholars interested in Kazakh cinema and is aimed at expanding opportunities for linguistic revitalization through cinema, while also advancing the use of language as a means of ideological and cultural representation.
This article explores the role of lexical stylistic devices in enhancing narrative depth in three seminal short stories: Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face," and Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace." Through qualitative textual and comparative analysis, the study investigates how these devices contribute to emotional resonance, characterization, thematic exploration, and reader engagement. The findings reveal that lexical choices significantly shape the emotional arcs and moral lessons of each narrative. Dickens employs metaphor and personification to illustrate transformation and redemption, while Hawthorne uses symbolism to probe the nature of true greatness. Maupassant’s ironic twist critiques societal norms surrounding wealth and status. The study concludes that lexical stylistic devices are essential for creating meaningful connections between readers and texts, highlighting their pivotal role in the literary landscape.
In the past decade, social media has revolutionized communication patterns across the globe, playing a transformative role in language usage and vocabulary development. In Pakistan, a linguistically diverse nation where English functions as both a second language and a marker of social capital, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp have become not only communication tools but also agents of lexical innovation. This research explores the influence of social media on English vocabulary acquisition, adaptation, and hybridization among Pakistani youth and young adults. By employing a mixed-methods approach—comprising surveys, content analysis, and semi-structured interviews—the study investigates how social media contributes to the incorporation of neologisms, abbreviation culture, hashtags, emojis as semantic tools, and the phenomenon of code-switching between English, Urdu, and regional languages. The results indicate that frequent social media users develop a distinct digital lexicon that deviates from conventional English norms, marked by informality, technological metaphors, and sociolects. English vocabulary on social media is shaped not only by global trends but also by localized cultural expressions, creating a dynamic linguistic ecosystem. The findings further reveal that while social media enriches vocabulary and enhances expressive range, it also contributes to the erosion of grammatical structures and the rise of linguistic hybridity. This paper argues that English in Pakistan is undergoing a shift, influenced by digital communication, with long-term implications for language teaching, cultural identity, and intergenerational communication. The study contributes to sociolinguistic literature by contextualizing English vocabulary change within a South Asian digital environment and suggests pedagogical strategies for integrating socially relevant vocabulary into formal English education. Recommendations are made for educators, linguists, and policymakers to bridge the gap between formal English instruction and digital language realities.
Исследование посвящено совершенствованию метрик релевантности эмоционального контекста в системах извлечения контекста для Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Современные подходы фокусируются на семантическом сходстве текстов, пропуская эмоциональную составляющую, когерентность, что критично для задач наиболее точного поиска в эмоционально окрашенных данных. Предложена композитная метрика, объединяющая семантическое сходство векторных эмбеддингов и эмоциональную когерентность, оцениваемую как косинусное сходство текстов. Описана методология вычисления компонент метрики и их взвешивания, на основе которой проведен ряд экспериментов с целью выяснения способности предложенной метрики находить текст более точно, чем модель, основывающаяся на поиске только семантической составляющей. Оценка эффективности проведена на сэмплированном подмножестве датасета Stanford Sentiment Treebank 2 (SST-2). Композитная метрика продемонстрировала более высокую эффективность по метрикам Precision@5, Recall@5, NDCG@5 и MAP по сравнению с методами поиска, основанными исключительно на семантической составляющей. Проведенные эксперименты показали значительный прирост метрик для позитивных и негативных запросов. Проведен дальнейший анализ влияния коэффициентов предложенной метрики. При рассмотрении полученных результатов было установлено, что учет эмоциональной когерентности необходим для достижения оптимальной производительности метрики.
This article examines the pragmatic functions of intensifiers in English and Uzbek media texts, focusing on how lexical and phraseological means are used to strengthen meaning, guide interpretation, and influence audience perception. Intensifiers such as scalar adverbs, extreme adjectives, reduplication, evaluative expressions, and emotionally loaded phraseological units are analyzed within their communicative contexts. The study reveals that English media typically employs controlled, graded forms of intensification to shape evaluative tone subtly, while Uzbek media relies more heavily on expressive and culturally embedded intensifiers to create emotional resonance. By comparing these patterns, the research highlights how linguistic structure, cultural norms, and media strategies determine the pragmatic roles of intensifiers in shaping stance, persuasion, dramatization, and ideological framing.
The exponential growth of Portuguese-language legal documents has renewed interest in Question Answering (QA) systems capable of returning concise, legally sound answers to natural-language queries. This study presents a systematic literature review, conducted according to PRISMA 2020 guidelines, that synthesises current evidence on QA techniques applied to Lusophone legal texts. Searches, without temporal restrictions, were executed in nine databases (ACM, El Compendex, ISI Web of Science, Periódico Capes, Scielo, Science@Direct, Scopus, Sol SBC and Springer Link) using a string that combine jurisprudential, linguistic and methodological terms. After duplicate removal, independent screening and quality appraisal, ten primary studies met the inclusion criteria (peer-reviewed publications developing or evaluating QA pipelines over Brazilian or Portuguese legislation). Publication activity is recent: more than 70% of the papers appeared between 2023 and 2025 and focus on Brazilian statutes and court decisions. Most pipelines adopt hybrid retrieval—BM25 or symbolic regex filters coupled with BERT-family dense encoders fine-tuned on legal corpora, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation with GPT-class models emerges in the latest research. Reported exact-match scores range from 0.60 to 0.83 and F1 from 0.75 to 0.87; however, only a quarter of the studies release code or data, hindering reproducibility. Common gaps include limited handling of the temporal validity of norms, scarce evaluation by legal specialists, and the absence of benchmark datasets for Portuguese. Overall, QA research for Lusophone law is accelerating yet remains fragmented; future work should prioritize shared resources, temporally aware models, and metrics that capture legal soundness beyond lexical overlap.
Verb fluency task is a screening test that shows sensitivity to lexical retrieval abilities. This study aims to establish a baseline for verb fluency in Japanese by comparing data from 61 younger and elderly Japanese speakers. The results show that the elderly group produced fewer verbs than the younger group, but compared to Lee et al. (2013), many more correct responses were produced by both groups. An analysis using the Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms found that the number of clusters and switches was smaller for the elderly participants, although the cluster size did not show any difference.
The study explores the linguistic patterns in Pakistani TEDx Talks. It is based on gender-based language use. It consists of ten talks selected from YouTube and applies both quantitative analysis with the help of AntConc 3.4.4w and qualitative interpretations by researchers. Based on modern professional speaking contexts, this study examines two models including Lakoff’s Deficit Model (1975) and Tannen’s Difference Model (1990). Findings demonstrate that Lakoff’s model presents a more simplified gendered language and inadequately explain power relations in formal speech. Tannen’s model is more flexible but limited by binary gender assumptions. It fails to capture situational variation in speaking strategies. This research examines how cultural and contextual factors, along with global conditions, influence the use of the Pakistani language in TEDx Talks. Professional interaction requires speakers to use language strategically, rather than adhering to rules defined by gender norms. 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In the middle of the summer of 2020, a group of journalists, academics, and self-styled thought leaders signed the now-infamous free speech letter in Harper's Magazine. The letter proclaimed a new epidemic: “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open date and toleration.” Such forces of “illiberalism” were constraining the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society.” To oppose this rising tide of so-called cancel culture, the signatories insisted that all ideas, including bad ideas, deserve “exposure, argument, and persuasion” rather than “trying to silence or wish them away.”1 More recently, a number of universities faced condemnation for tolerating displays of antisemitism. Contrary to the earlier claims of Harper’s that we need more free speech on campus, think pieces and media personalities condemned anti-genocide protests as the wrong kind of speech. Most people broadly accept that free speech is a democratic value and good for democracy. But those signatories of Harper’s letter in the summer of 2020 and the more recent outcry against antisemitism both suggest that campus activists are practicing the value of free speech incorrectly. What is it about the liberal democratic notion of speech that seeks, on the one hand, to encourage a proliferation of some speech while, on the other hand, to limit other speech? What discursive legacy gives the current pejorative heirs of “political correctness”—“cancel culture,” “woke,” and “DEI”—their political salience in maintaining the boundaries of democratic speech? In looking at the demographics for whom these phrases are most valuable, we can glean an anti-egalitarian tendency in their invocations. To “cancel” does not mean “to silence.” Neither recent anti-Trans legislation in the United States nor opposition to queer book displays in public libraries has meaningfully been perceived as attempts to “cancel.” Relatedly, anti-Zionist Jews engaged in opposing the foreign policy situation in Gaza are also not legibly targets of “being canceled” when city councils and boards of trustees institutionally pressure them into silence. Instead, “canceling” seems only to occur when speech derived from traditional hierarchies and sources of authority is challenged. Refusing to host anti-abortion Christians is to “silence” them (Bruce 2021). To refuse an audience to trans-exclusionary feminists is to reject “civilized debate.”2 It is rejecting both the free market of ideas and “standards of moral judgement” to not hear out “an argument” against “same-sex marriage or transgenderism” (Arkes 2018). Tradition is entitled to free speech; challengers are not. The liberal democratic imaginary of speech lends itself to the preservation of hierarchies even while it theoretically insists on the power of critique. Herein, I want to frame respect for traditional authority as constitutive of the liberal democratic imaginary of free speech. The authority owed to speech can be seen by the way certain thinkers in the liberal canon have theorized the role of the listening audience. In tracing the role of speech and listening through Hobbes and Locke, we glean that speech is the entitled prerogative of the sovereign or of citizens constituting the sovereign; listening is the obedience owed to such persons. Listening is a passive position that is not merely a choice but a necessary function without which the speaker cannot exist. Mill, perhaps the patriarch of free speech, pushes the burden of listening further: it is active listening that all speech, even bad speech, is entitled to. For all three thinkers, speech expressed from a position of power is owed a receptive audience. The refusal to listen is tantamount to a disregard for either the sovereign or society at large. In what follows, I contextualize the politics of free speech in the present moment. I juxtapose the progressive and rightwing rhetoric around free speech before clarifying the crux of the issue: that certain rightwing actors demand institutional respect and legitimization of inegalitarian speech, which requires the presence of an audience to hear it. Refusing to listen is thus an act of disrespect and delegitimization. Such a perception of delegitimization follows from the way Western political theory traditionally conceives of the listener: as passive or effete in contrast to the assertive and authoritative role of the speaker. 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Gillian Russell’s new book Barriers to Entailment (hereafter BE) takes on the ambitious project of formulating and proving five barriers of entailment in a unified framework. Each barrier states that a certain class of sentences does not follow from another class of sentences:The particular/universal barrier: no universal claims from particular ones.The past/future barrier: no claims about the future from those about the past.The is/must barrier: no claims about how things must be from those about how things are.The indexical barrier: no indexical claims from nonindexical ones.The is/ought barrier: no normative claims from descriptive ones. The last barrier is known as Hume’s law, a controversial thesis in logic and metaethics. BE makes a compelling case for studying these barriers together and developing a general account of them. It begins with an extensive survey of formal and informal counterexamples to Hume’s law found in the literature and convincingly demonstrates that they can be reconstructed to challenge the other barriers (chap. 1).The primary technical feature of this book is Russell’s model-theoretic approach to sentence classification for each barrier, developed and expanded from her previous work (Restall and Russell 2010). This original approach allows a systematic and generalizable sentence classification method, which is an important novel alternative to syntactic or lexical methods that classify sentences based on the mere presence or absence of particular logical operators or linguistic items. To illustrate the central idea of the model-theoretic approach, consider a pair of particular and universal sentences, Fa and ∀xFx, in first-order logic (FOL). Suppose that both Fa and ∀xFx are true in a certain model. When adding a new object, such as b where ¬Fb, in the domain of the model, the truth value of Fa does not change, while that of ∀xFx does. Thus, the truth value of a particular sentence is not sensitive to model-extension, whereas that of a universal sentence is. This method is easily applicable to other classes of sentences with respect to different types of changes in models. Roughly, the truth value of a future sentence is sensitive to changing what will hold in the future in a model of tense logic, but that of a past sentence is not. Unlike contingent sentences, the truth value of □P would change when adding a ¬P-world to a model. Indexical sentences are sensitive to context-change. Unlike descriptive sentences, normative sentences are sensitive to norm-shifting. Each kind of change in models is represented as a binary relation R over the set of admissible models.Russell introduces two model-theoretic concepts, fragility and breakability, that capture a sentence’s sensitivity with respect to R in two different ways (chap. 2). So there are two ways of classifying sentences. Using fragility, for example, FOL-sentences are classified as universal if they are fragile with respect to model-extension and as particular if they are antifragile with respect to model-extension. We get a breakability-based taxonomy for particular/universal sentences using breakability in the place of fragility. One important difference between the two is that a breakability-based taxonomy classifies sentences in two kinds, R-breakable and R-unbreakable sentences, while a fragility-based taxonomy is not dichotomous. For example, a mixed sentence like ∀xGx∨Fa is neither particular nor universal (neither model-extension fragile nor model-extension antifragile) in the fragility-based taxonomy for particular/universal sentences.Russell formulates and proves the first three barriers using respective fragility-based taxonomies and then generalizes them to the following theorem.The GBT states that an argument is invalid when the set of its premises (premise set) is of one class and the set of its premises and the conclusion (argument set) is of another class. Note that the class of the conclusion itself is not at issue here. As Russell herself admits, this is not a naturally expected form of a barrier (78), but this particular formulation is adopted to deal with some of the prominent counterexamples in the literature. Take the particular/universal version of Prior’s dilemma (1960) as an example:(1) Fa⊧Fa∨∀xGx(2) Fa∨∀xGx, ¬Fa⊧∀xGxIf the particular/universal barrier is formulated as the thesis that an argument from particular premises to a universal conclusion is invalid, then one of the above arguments is a counterexample to the barrier regardless of how we classify Fa∨∀xGx. If Fa∨∀xGx is universal, then (1) is a counterexample. If it is particular, then (2) is a counterexample. So either classification would result in disproving the particular/universal barrier. However, Prior’s dilemma does not pose a threat to the particular/universal barrier when it is formulated in terms of a particular premise set and a universal argument set as in the GBT. The argument set {Fa,Fa∨∀xGx} in (1) is particular. The premise set {Fa∨∀xGx,¬Fa} in (2) is not particular. Therefore, neither argument is a counterexample to the particular/universal barrier according to the GBT.However, Russell rejects the GBT as her defense of all five barriers because of its limitations in handling arguments involving modal necessity claims:(3) □P⊧OP(It is necessarily that φ. Therefore, it is obligatory that P.)(4) □P⊧FP(It is necessarily that φ. Therefore, it will be the case that P.)These arguments threaten to be counterexamples to the is/ought and the past/future barriers respectively because intuitively □P is neither an ought-sentence nor a future sentence. Russell puts forward the following tetralemma for the defenders of the past/future barrier (chap. 6.5):1. Accept that □P is a future sentence.2. Accept that FP isn’t a future sentence.3. Accept that □P⊧FP isn’t valid.4. Rework the theorem to allow a limited class of exceptions.Russell argues for option 4 through a process of elimination (chap. 6.5): clearly, option 3 is not desirable, and options 1 and 2 would result in unsatisfactory sentence classifications. Avoiding options 1 and 2 turns out to be somewhat challenging because the fragility-based taxonomy does not allow us to classify □P and FP into different sentence classes (chap. 6.4). Analogous tetralemmas hold for the indexical and is/ought barriers (chaps. 7 and 8). So Russell concludes that the barriers must not only allow exceptions but also be formulated using breakability.Here is Russell’s final general formulation of the barriers:Russell shows that all five barriers are instances of the LBT proved in one big quantified-deontic-modal-temporal-indexical logic (chap. 9).I believe it would have been worth discussing further whether the LBT is a better defense of the five barriers than the GBT. The major issue Russell takes with the GBT is its unsatisfactory taxonomical consequences. On the other hand, the LBT, formulated using breakability, intuitively classifies sentences but allows exceptions. I think proponents of the barriers, particularly those of Hume’s law, have good reason to want both: getting the taxonomy right and formulating a barrier without exceptions. Unfortunately, they cannot have both in Russell’s model-theoretic framework. So there is a dilemma between two options: (1) a barrier theorem without exception using a fragility-based taxonomy which has some unintuitive results in sentence classification and (2) a limited barrier theorem with exceptions using a breakability-based taxonomy which results in more intuitive sentence classification. Russell advocates (2) using the tetralemmas, but it’s not obvious to me that the taxonomical cost is greater than allowing exceptions as Russell assumes. Is it really implausible to classify □φ as a future sentence? And normativism about □φ is not an undefendable position. For example, Amie Thomasson (2020) argues that □φ is normative in that it instructs us what to infer from what. The indexical tetralemma discussed in chapter 7.5 sounds more compelling than others because it seems harder to defend classifying ∀xFx as indexical. Consequently, some might wonder if formulating and proving the barriers in a limited form is the best defense of all five barriers. At least, two horns of the dilemma may have to be weighed more carefully.In the last two chapters, Russell proves informal versions of the barriers by defending them against informal counterexamples, such as arguments involving speech acts, propositional attitude verbs, truth predicates, or thick normative expressions. The key idea of Russell’s informal approach is combinations. Combinations are the different ways the world could have been (different possible worlds) and the different ways our language could have been (different interpretations). This ingenious informal counterpart of a model in a formal system allows Russell to apply her model-theoretic approach to informal counterexamples without formally representing them and to sidestep controversial formal or theoretical issues. For example, regardless of which theory about thick normative terms is accepted, the limited informal is/ought barrier holds because any natural language argument from descriptive premises to a normative conclusion is either invalid or satisfies the unless-clause of the barrier (chap. 11.4).Despite BE’s formal and informal defense of the five barriers in a unified framework, readers might find it unsatisfactory regarding Hume’s law. Consider the following arguments:(3) □P⊧OP(5) P⊧P∨OP1(6) ∀x(Ax→Bx)⊧∀x(Bx→OCx)→∀x(Ax→OCx)2These are just a few examples of valid arguments from descriptive premises to a normative conclusion in quantified deontic modal logic but satisfy the unless-clause of the limited is/ought barrier, Russell’s final formulation of Hume’s law (chap. 8). Therefore, they are exceptions. I think it is natural to wonder why they are exceptions, not counterexamples, to Hume’s law. One person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens. The contraposition of the limited is/ought barrier says: if an argument from descriptive premises to a normative conclusion is valid, then it satisfies the unless-clause. For skeptics, thus, proving the limited is/ought barrier is nothing but identifying a specific model-theoretic property of working counterexamples to Hume’s law. And, in fact, many proposed counterexamples much discussed in the literature share this property. However, I believe it is meaningful progress to shift the focus of the debates on Hume’s law to a critical examination of the model-theoretic aspects of the exception class of the barrier.Overall, BE is an excellent showcase of how careful formal work can shed new light on classic problems and how philosophical questions can be sharpened through formalism. BE also carefully explores classification issues in tense logic (chap. 3), clarifies different versions of the modal barriers (chap. 4) and the is/ought barriers (chaps. 8.1 and 9.7), and develops indexical logic through synthesizing important insights on indexicals in the literature (chap. 7). Despite its innovative formal approach and broad coverage of various logics, anyone familiar with elementary FOL and some modal logic should be able to follow and appreciate Russell’s thorough and rigorous work in BE. BE might leave us wondering how effective it is to prove the limited version of the barriers to defend them since they are free of counterexamples at the cost of allowing exceptions. But because it provides a rigorous recasting of some issues surrounding proposed barriers, including Hume’s law, and promotes the study of barriers to entailment in general, BE is an important contribution.
The article explores irony as a complex linguistic and pragmatic phenomenon that plays a significant role in creating satirical effect within the sketch genre. The object of analysis is the sketch «Les Flics» by French comedian Coluche, in which irony functions as a tool of social critique, particularly through the ridicule of flaws within the institution of police. The study identifies the main linguistic, stylistic, and pragmatic means used to construct irony. It demonstrates that the central communicative strategy shaping the critical attitude toward the police system is the deliberate provocation of the audience and the emphasis on the absurdity of the depicted social conditions. The comic effect arises from the contrast between socially expected norms of behavior (including verbal conduct) and the reality represented by the narrator-character. Stylistic devices such as antiphrasis, metaphor, metonymy, grotesque, and sarcasm, along with linguistic features such as colloquial register, slang, and violations of linguistic norms, are shown to contribute to the portrayal of deep linguistic and social deviation in the police character. The article draws on contemporary linguistic theories, including pragmatics, speech act theory, polyphony theory, and relevance theory. It concludes that irony in the sketch is both staged and situational, with the comic effect emerging from the conflict between expectation and reality. Special attention is given to implicature, polyphonic structure of the utterance, and the satirical function of the narrator. The study shows that irony not only enhances the aesthetic dimension of the text but also performs a socially critical function by shaping a discourse of resistance. Future research directions include the analysis of other Coluche sketches in the context of linguistic critique of society.
This study compares AI-generated texts (via ChatGPT) and student-written essays in terms of lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and readability. Grounded in Communication Theory—especially Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Relevance Theory—the research investigates how well AI-generated content aligns with human norms of cooperative communication. Using a corpus of 50 student essays and 50 AI-generated texts, the study applies measures such as Type-Token Ratio (TTR), Mean Length of T-Unit (MLT), and readability indices like Flesch–Kincaid and Gunning-Fog. Results indicate that while ChatGPT produces texts with greater lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, its output tends to be less readable and often falls short in communicative appropriateness. These findings carry important implications for educators seeking to integrate AI tools into writing instruction, particularly for second-language (L2) learners. The study concludes by calling for improvements to AI systems that would better balance linguistic complexity with clarity and accessibility.