Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
A linguistic analysis was performed on the Preschool Five Minute Speech Sample (PFMSS) of 42 parents. PFMSS is a validated measure for Expressed Emotion (EE) to assess parent-child relationship. Half of these parents (n = 21, clinical group) had preschool children with early symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the rest had typically developing children. Early symptoms of ADHD were identified with the Werry-Weiss Peters Rating Scale. The linguistic component of the PFMSS was analysed with keyword and linguistic pattern identification. The results of these two complementary analyses (i.e., EE and linguistic analysis) provided relevant recommendations that may improve the efficacy of psychological treatment for ADHD such as parenting interventions. We discuss the practical implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or post)
Online communities are both global in character, with potential members from all parts of the world, but also local in that the community itself decides on its practices, hence the coining of the term glocal. These practices include the adoption of discourse norms. There are many norms that characterise discourses, and the one focused on here is the reduction of the written form of a lexical item, which characterizes informal more spoken forms of language. This paper presents evidence that reductions are negotiated locally by online communities. The community analysed consists of students on an online MA programme in English Linguistics who are all non-native speakers of English. These students have little experience of Internet communication even in their native languages, and so they are unlikely to be greatly aware of native speaker norms for online discourse. The paper shows that the students negotiate these norms within the group and that crucially their native English-speaking teachers do not have a strong role to play in the adoption of reductions. A number of examples of reductions are presented that are under negotiation by the students. The role of the teacher is analysed as well, and it is shown that 28 students are more likely to adopt a different reduction from the one the teachers use. Thus, this is further evidence that English is not owned by native speakers, but by non-native ones.
Review of Patrick Hanks (2013) Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (MIT Press)
Bootstrap Effect Sizes (bootES; Gerlanc & Kirby, 2012) is a free, open-source software package for R (R Development Core Team, 2012), which is a language and environment for statistical computing. BootES computes both unstandardized and standardized effect sizes (such as Cohen’s d, Hedges’s g, and Pearson’s r) and makes easily available for the first time the computation of their bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs). In this article, we illustrate how to use bootES to find effect sizes for contrasts in between-subjects, within-subjects, and mixed factorial designs and to find bootstrap CIs for correlations and differences between correlations. An appendix gives a brief introduction to R that will allow readers to use bootES without having prior knowledge of R.
The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) that interact in natural language is to emulate the benefits that a well-trained human tutor provides to students, by interpreting student answers and appropriately responding in order to encourage elaboration. BRCA Gist is an ITS developed using AutoTutor Lite, a Web-based version of AutoTutor. Fuzzy-trace theory theoretically motivated the development of BRCA Gist, which engages people in tutorial dialogues to teach them about genetic breast cancer risk. We describe an empirical method to create tutorial dialogues and fine-tune the calibration of BRCA Gist’s semantic processing engine without a team of computer scientists. We created five interactive dialogues centered on pedagogic questions such as “What should someone do if she receives a positive result for genetic risk of breast cancer?” This method involved an iterative refinement process of repeated testing with different texts and successively making adjustments to the tutor’s expectations and settings in order to improve performance. The goal of this method was to enable BRCA Gist to interpret and respond to answers in a manner that best facilitated learning. We developed a method to analyze the efficacy of the tutor’s dialogues. We found that BRCA Gist’s assessment of participants’ answers was highly correlated with the quality of the answers found by trained human judges using a reliable rubric. The dialogue quality between users and BRCA Gist predicted performance on a breast cancer risk knowledge test completed after exposure to the tutor. The appropriateness of BRCA Gist’s feedback also predicted the quality of answers and breast cancer risk knowledge test scores.
English periphrastic causative constructions, i.e. constructions where a causative verb like make or get controls a non-finite complement clause, have been the subject of many studies representing different theoretical frameworks, among which generative grammar (e.g. Kastovsky 1973), the universal-typological theory (e.g. Wierzbicka 1998), cognitive linguistics (e.g. Hollmann 2006) and construction grammar (e.g. Stefanowitsch 2001). Most of the time these studies have focused on the way periphrastic causative constructions are used (or should be used) by native speakers of English. Fewer studies have considered the use of these constructions by non-native speakers of English (cf. Ziegeler & Lee 2009, Gilquin 2012). In this presentation, I adopt a constructionist approach to investigate the use of periphrastic causative constructions in two non-native varieties of English, namely English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL). While both of these varieties correspond to L2s that are acquired in addition to the L1, the settings of acquisition are different (mainly an instructional setting for EFL and mainly a natural one for ESL), which could lead to some differences in the way the causative construction behaves in the two varieties. The present study is based on corpus data coming from the International Corpus of Learner English for EFL and from the International Corpus of English for ESL, and representing different L1 populations among the two varieties. Relying on a corpus of native English as a reference, I examine the well-formedness of causative constructions in EFL and ESL, but also their idiomaticity, which is measured through a collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) of the lexemes occurring in the non-finite verb slot. For EFL, this investigation reveals, among others, that learners sometimes use non-standard patterns like [X cause Y Vprp] or [X make Y Vto-inf], and that they tend to produce certain infelicitous constructions, which display lexical preferences different from those of native speakers (e.g. make their norms legalised). These findings are compared with the results of the ESL corpus analysis. This study provides insights into the impact of the acquisitional setting on the behaviour of causative constructions, and hence helps to bridge the paradigm gap that exists between EFL and ESL (cf. Sridhar & Sridhar 1986, Mukherjee & Hundt 2011). More generally, it demonstrates the viability of construction grammar as a theoretical framework to conduct a corpus-based study of interlanguage since, given the right level of abstraction, this framework provides a tertium comparationis for the contrastive analysis of varieties that may not necessarily follow the same norms. The study also underlines the relevance of the collostructional method to perform a contrastive interlanguage analysis, by showing that in both native and non-native varieties words interact with constructions (though sometimes in different ways). Such considerations, hopefully, will contribute to a rapprochement between the constructionist approaches and second language acquisition.
У статті проаналізовано лексичні та граматичні особливості українських\nділових документів, зокрема грамот різних типів ХІV–ХV століть. Описанотематичні групи лексики, розглянуто слова й словотвірні варіанти, які за\nзначенням і формою відрізняються від сучасних. Простежено процеси\nформування у студентів-філологів історичної пам’яті, позитивного\nмнемонічного простору, відтворення ментальної історії України під час\nопрацювання текстів документів.The article was devoted to analysis of lexical and grammatical\nfeatures of Ukrainian business documents, including letters of different types of the\nXIV and XV centuries. It is established that the texts of letters designed in the style\nbusiness using the vocabulary of home and work life. Described the thematic group\nof lexicon words and considered word formation variants that differ in meaning and\nform of the modern ones. We characterized the local dialect features charters, which\nare especially spelling Ukrainian literary language of this period, denotes the value of\nlanguage literacy in the development and establishment of norms of the Ukrainian\nlanguage. In addition, traces the process of the formation of students-philologists of\nhistorical memory, the positive mnemonic space, reproduce the mental history of\nUkraine during word processing documents.
as the rudder for the ship of ethical conduct seems clear enough in the Aristotelian Ethics. most pronounced study offering the contrary is a work by J. Donald Monan, Moral Knowledge and Its Methodology in Aristotle. (1) Point by point commentary responding to such a developed thesis is absent in the time since that work. Sweeping, passing assertions (though they may be correct exegetically) in the literature that contradict Monan's claim do not give the lexical cross-examination due Monan's developed work. Carrie-Ann Biondi Khan's essay's title Moral Expert: Phronimos may lead one astray, in fact, from the conviction held from the Protrepticus to the Politics regarding Nature's role in ethical matters. (2) Karen Wilkes's essay The Good Man and the Good for Man, though it speaks of Aristotle's man does so with the aim of clarifying what at first appears to be a possible conflicts in his notion of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (3) Sarah Broadie's Craft, and Phronesis (4) is not to our point in that she deftly explains how the analogy between and craft works in Aristotle's teleology, freeing him from charges of psychologism. Her objective is not ours, which is establishing as Aristotelian norm for moral right. In the informative collection of essays Crossroads of Norm and Nature: Essays on Aristotle's Ethics and Metaphysics (5) one finds no exegesis, the book's title notwithstanding, on this tenet of Nature's importance in Aristotle; nor in Richard Bodeus's comments The Natural Foundations of Right and Aristotelian Philosophy. (6) Joseph Owens's The Grounds of Ethical Universality in Aristotle (7) and Nature and Ethical Norm in (8) though clearly acknowledging Nature's preeminence in ethical rule-making, do not work through the Aristotelian texts as this essay will. In his essay The [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Aristotelian (9) he repeats the Monan role of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Aristotle, but with the careful qualification: insofar as he is the standard and measure of truth in moral activity. textual effort that we will ply here, missing in superb book length studies of the Ethics since Monan's work, will give substance to that qualification by Owens. One cannot simply say, it seems to me, that the role of in the Ethics is too clear to dispute, and thus no studied response to Monan was really necessary. This way of thinking obviously was not present in Monan's scholarship. This essay seeks to redress what so far has not been forthcoming. I Moral Knowledge denies a role to in the evaluation of human conduct in Aristotle's later ethical theory. While Nature, Monan writes, grounds correct moral awareness in the Protrepticus, (10) in the later Ethics, loses this importance in ethical judgments for Aristotle. In the later Ethics according to Monan, there is no appeal to any pre-existing metaphysically elaborated absolute. (11) Ethical value in the Nicomachean Ethics can be realized only in human conduct, in actual concrete [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (12) It is in the lived situation where one's awareness of right and wrong now emerges. In the Nicomachean Ethics only through one's actions does one come to know right and wrong. With the Nicomachean Ethics, then, discards, according to Monan, any appeal to right or wrong that the findings of everyday human experience do not authorize. This experience becomes, in the later Ethics, the exclusive criterion for ethical reasoning and the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] the exclusive criterion for ethical right. (13) morally good man, through his repeated good actions, has acquired the eye to see immediately, without reflection or deliberation, how the good is to be realized in a particular instance. His actions and experience, embodying this intuition of the morally good, will provide for us then the guide to objectively good actions. …
This article presents two case studies to explore whether and how web corpora can be used to automatically acquire lexical-semantic knowledge from distributional information. For this purpose, we compare three German web corpora and a traditional newspaper corpus on modelling two types of semantic relatedness: (1) Assuming that free word associations are semantically related to their stimuli, we explore to which extent stimulus– associate pairs from various associations norms are available in the corpus data. (2) Assuming that the distributional similarity between a noun–noun compound and its nominal constituents corresponds to the compound’s degree of compositionality, we rely on simple corpus co-occurrence features to predict compositionality. The case studies demonstrate that the corpora can indeed be used to model semantic relatedness, (1) covering up to 73/77% of verb/noun–association types within a 5-word window of the corpora, and (2) predicting compositionality with a correlation of ρ = 0.65 against human ratings. Furthermore, our studies illustrate that the corpus parameters domain, size and cleanness all have an effect on the semantic tasks.
The article focuses on the moral and ethical code of the Abkhaz people, Apsuara, and on the meaning that the Abkhazians invest in such concepts as alamys, anamys and apatu as core components of the Apsuara, and how valuable these concepts are for them. The Apsuara has no lexical equivalent in Russian language. The term is difficult to describe, to define and to analyze, and its literal meaning — «abhazstvo» — is very conventional and fi gurative. The article analyzes the main components of the Apsuara structure: worldview of Abkhazians, norms of social behaviour, rules of life, a system of upbringing and etiquette, and prohibiting categories. It compares the Apsuara with the Circassians` ethical system, the Adygage (“dejstvo”). Since 1960 Abkhaz scholars such as Sh D. and Inal-Ipa, EK Adzhindzhal and others have been trying to interpret the concept of Apsuara and its system by providing their own interpretations. This article analyzes several interpretations of the concepts Apsuara.
The article discusses some inaccurate uses of pronominal forms, certain terms, syntactical and lexical mistakes in papers on welding. The article also provides the examples of mistakes found in welding papers. The use of nonpronominal forms in the denoted terms is one of the typical morphological mistakes in treating the process of welding. Another problem is the inaccurate use and wrong formation of terminology. The main lexical mistakes are semantic mistakes and calque. The article also focuses on the syntactical mistakes – the mistaken expression of purpose, the wrong use of preposition prie, redundant use of abstract nouns in treatises, also inaccurate use of infinitive with conjuction kad in dependant clauses. Causes for language mistakes and correction of errors are given.
Workload capacity, an important concept in many areas of psychology, describes processing efficiency across changes in workload. The capacity coefficient is a function across time that provides a useful measure of this construct. Until now, most analyses of the capacity coefficient have focused on the magnitude of this function, and often only in terms of a qualitative comparison (greater than or less than one). This work explains how a functional extension of principal components analysis can capture the time-extended information of these functional data, using a small number of scalar values chosen to emphasize the variance between participants and conditions. This approach provides many possibilities for a more fine-grained study of differences in workload capacity across tasks and individuals.
Purpose: this article discusses which implicit meanings can be uncovered by means of the etymological analysis of the lexical units containing a numerical component as seen in the example of the lexemes which describe the degree of drunkenness in the English language. Methodology: method of continuous sampling; descriptive method, etymological analysis of the lexical units. Results: The analysis of the numerical component in the DRINKING concept helps one to better study the inner form of the latter and understand its cultural meanings. The ideas taken as a basis for the nomination of some phrases are impossible to clarify, however all the expressions describe a different degree of violation of the norm. Practical implications: lectures on stylistics and lexicology; teaching English as a foreign language; dictionary compiling; interpreter preparation. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2013-7-6
Previous studies examining binocular coordination during reading have reported conflicting results in terms of the nature of disparity (e.g. Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert (Journal of Experimental Psychology General 135:12-35, 2006); Liversedge, White, Findlay, & Rayner (Vision Research 46:2363-2374, 2006). One potential cause of this inconsistency is differences in acquisition devices and associated analysis technologies. We tested this by directly comparing binocular eye movement recordings made using SR Research EyeLink 1000 and the Fourward Technologies Inc. DPI binocular eye-tracking systems. Participants read sentences or scanned horizontal rows of dot strings; for each participant, half the data were recorded with the EyeLink, and the other half with the DPIs. The viewing conditions in both testing laboratories were set to be very similar. Monocular calibrations were used. The majority of fixations recorded using either system were aligned, although data from the EyeLink system showed greater disparity magnitudes. Critically, for unaligned fixations, the data from both systems showed a majority of uncrossed fixations. These results suggest that variability in previous reports of binocular fixation alignment is attributable to the specific viewing conditions associated with a particular experiment (variables such as luminance and viewing distance), rather than acquisition and analysis software and hardware.
We evaluated the influence of speed–accuracy trade-offs on performance in the sustained attention to response task (SART), a task often used to evaluate the effectiveness of techniques designed to improve sustained attention. In the present study, we experimentally manipulated response delay in a variation of the SART and found that commission errors, which are commonly used as an index of lapses in sustained attention, were a systematic function of manipulated differences in response delay. Delaying responses to roughly 800 ms after stimulus onset reduced commission errors substantially. We suggest the possibility that any technique that affects response speed will indirectly alter error rates independently of improvements in sustained attention. Investigators therefore need to carefully explore, report, and correct for changes in response speed that accompany improvements in performance or, alternatively, to employ tasks that control for response speed.
The article aims at drawing the attention of language teachers to a huge number of phraseologisms which exist in every language and which are traditionally rarely used while teaching and learning languages and cultures. The fact that phraseology shows the features of folk culture is now widely accepted. The subject of the research is the experience of the author, namely, the investigation of phraseologisms related with lexicology, the stylistics of lexis and Latvian language for practical uses. These days a wide range of investigation is characteristic of linguistics. Lingvo-culturologic viewpoint to the learning of units of speech takes an important part in the investigations. The question of interaction between language and culture is nowadays relevant in our society, which experiences the growth of global problems, therefore, it is becoming essential to consider the versatility and particularity of behaviour of different nations. Looking at relations between different nations, it is important to foresee potential cultural misunderstandings. It is also important to determine cultural values which form the basis for communicational behaviour. In higher education institutions these skills are obligatory for students who, for various reasons, get into different cultural environments. Until 1990 students were encouraged to memorize word forms and to unpack the meaning of words (usually by means of translation) and only at the end of the 90’s the semantic and practical aspects of speech were highlighted in the process of teaching Latvian as a foreign language. The main unit of lingvo-culturologic viewpoint is lingvocultureme. Lingvocultureme belongs both to language and culture, as it unites the meaning of language and culture which exists outside the boundaries of the language system. Lingvocultureme may be the unit of both lexis and syntax: a word, a phrase, a sentence, a text (Gavrilina, Vulane, 2008, pp. 21). According to lingvo-culturologic language research, linguistic analysis allows to divide units of language into three types: words and sayings which totally coincide in the languages compared; words and sayings which partially coincide in the languages compared; words and languages which do not coincide in the language compared. Since 2005 various aspects of lingvo-culturology have also been the subject of the project which is carried out by the European Society of Phraseology. The aim of the project is to discover the similarities rather than differences, i.e. to find the part of phraseology which is common for European languages. The results of the previous project show that identical or similar phraseologisms can be found in nearly 50 languages. Idioms with similar lexical and semantic structure can be found even in languages which are not genetically connected and whose areas of usage are distant from each other. It is important to note that each nation has its own cultural vision of the world and a cultural-historic way. In the phraseologisms of each language the culture, the way of thinking and values of each nation are conveyed. Phraseologisms in texts encourage students to search for culturologic information, through which students can develop their communicative, language, socio-cultural and learning competences. These opportunities are important in the cases when students who get into different cultural environment for various reasons and who have different nationalities study in one group (in homogeneous cultural environment these opportunities are formal). Various problems are possible while learning phraseologisms: different theories on phraseologisms; students do not know phraseologisms; students know phraseologisms, but do not use them; it is impossible to translate the figurative sense of some words literally; different associations (e.g. sun); the same phraseologisms are used in different contexts (e.g. as brave as a lion, as angry as a lion); students need to learn the expressiveness of phraseologisms. While learning lingvoculturemes new opportunities are created: to develop lexis; to get familiarized with the heritage of your own language and culture; to know more about different cultural environment (the values, stereotypes, norms of behaviour, speech etiquette, customs, way of living, etc. of each nation); enrich intercommunion paying respect to cultural heritage; to motivate language users to take interest in linguistic and extralinguistic research. Such information will enrich both sides, as language users who share their experience learn from the cultural traditions of other nations. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.2.9
Many authors adhere to the rule that test reliabilities should be at least .70 or .80 in group research. This article introduces a new standard according to which reliabilities can be evaluated. This standard is based on the costs or time of the experiment and of administering the test. For example, if test administration costs are 7 % of the total experimental costs, the efficient value of the reliability is .93. If the actual reliability of a test is equal to this efficient reliability, the test size maximizes the statistical power of the experiment, given the costs. As a standard in experimental research, it is proposed that the reliability of the dependent variable be close to the efficient reliability. Adhering to this standard will enhance the statistical power and reduce the costs of experiments.
In a critical review of the heuristics used to deal with zero word frequencies, we show that four are suboptimal, one is good, and one may be acceptable. The four suboptimal strategies are discarding words with zero frequencies, giving words with zero frequencies a very low frequency, adding 1 to the frequency per million, and making use of the Good–Turing algorithm. The good algorithm is the Laplace transformation, which consists of adding 1 to each frequency count and increasing the total corpus size by the number of word types observed. A strategy that may be acceptable is to guess the frequency of absent words on the basis of other corpora and then increasing the total corpus size by the estimated summed frequency of the missing words. A comparison with the lexical decision times of the English Lexicon Project and the British Lexicon Project suggests that the Laplace transformation gives the most useful estimates (in addition to being easy to calculate). Therefore, we recommend it to researchers.
Researchers studying infants’ spontaneous allocation of attention have traditionally relied on hand-coding infants’ direction of gaze from videos; these techniques have low temporal and spatial resolution and are labor intensive. Eye-tracking technology potentially allows for much more precise measurement of how attention is allocated at the subsecond scale, but a number of technical and methodological issues have given rise to caution about the quality and reliability of high temporal resolution data obtained from infants. We present analyses suggesting that when standard dispersal-based fixation detection algorithms are used to parse eye-tracking data obtained from infants, the results appear to be heavily influenced by interindividual variations in data quality. We discuss the causes of these artifacts, including fragmentary fixations arising from flickery or unreliable contact with the eyetracker and variable degrees of imprecision in reported position of gaze. We also present new algorithms designed to cope with these problems by including a number of new post hoc verification checks to identify and eliminate fixations that may be artifactual. We assess the results of our algorithms by testing their reliability using a variety of methods and on several data sets. We contend that, with appropriate data analysis methods, fixation duration can be a reliable and stable measure in infants. We conclude by discussing ways in which studying fixation durations during unconstrained orienting may offer insights into the relationship between attention and learning in naturalistic settings.
The paper considers consequences of the unprecedented phenomenon in the world's system of languages, i.e. the transformation of the English language into the language of global communication as the result of information revolution and globalization of all aspects of human activities, which have changed generally accepted ideas about foreign languages and the notion of literacy. The emergence of a new educational paradigm according to which the English language is no longer considered as ''foreign'', but as a sine qua non of ensuring the participation of all Europeans in the new knowledge society has been recognized by the European Commission in its document issued in 2005, ''A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism''. The paper presents an analysis of reasons which have brought about the acquiring by the English language of the status of the language of world communication, and takes on the question of what the language of world communication is and in which way it differs from the national variants of the English language. One of the characteristic features of the English language as a lingua franca is its high variability, which is not confined to differences in grammatical and lexical structures of the two major variants of the English language that have developed historically in the course of the emergence of the North American standard of the English language. The paper next considers the problem of the world standard of English as the global language and argues the unfoundedness of the thesis about the need of recognizing the right of developing language norms by the users of English as the second language, even though their number at present significantly exceeds the number of native speakers. Summing up, a conclusion can be made that the transformation of English into the language of global communication calls forth a revision of the traditional approach to teaching foreign languages. English as the global lingua franca has lost its status as a foreign language. This demands a reorganization of language education based on a transition to multilingual teaching and learning in which English language teaching is envisioned not as traditional teaching of one of the national variants of English, which leads to acquiring the corresponding dominant cultures, but as teaching English as the language of world communication used for overcoming interlingual and intercultural barriers in the globalizing world. The transition to multilingual teaching is based on regarding English as a necessary condition for entry into the world economic, political and cultural areas and includes, alongside with the native (or state) language and English as a language of global communication, teaching at least one of the foreign languages offered by the educational system.
There are three ways in which regular patterns of usage in a language alternate with one another: Lexical alternations, semantic-type alternations, and syntactic alternations. In general, alternations reflect differences in focus rather than differences in overall clause meaning and may be found with some words but not with other words. The chapter discusses the meaning potential of a word and alternations within norms and different aspects of word meaning, along with the most common types of syntactic alternation of English verbs, including active/passive alternation, causative/inchoative alternation, and indirect object alternation. It also considers reciprocal verbs and ellipsis as alternation, ellipsis of adverbials and prepositions, clausal ellipsis, and resultative constructions, and, finally, looks at a couple of examples where semantic alternations border on exploitations.
Main issues of «Russian language and language culture» course teaching for foreign students reviewed. Justified requirement of the course adoption for foreign students’ perception. Basic types of lexical mistakes in foreign students’ speech analyzed. Methods of modern Russian language lexical norms teaching proposed.
Vicki Hamblin's Saints at Play makes an impressive addition to the growing list of critical and historical studies devoted to medieval performance practices. Her approach is best described as comparative analysis. Her first move is to select a ‘study-set’, which she does by making categorical exclusions from the extant corpus of French hagiographic mystery plays: she chooses only fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works (the period ‘when this kind of spectacle was at the height of its popularity’) and eliminates Occitan works (in order to ensure ‘a more consistent lexical focus’); works featuring biblical, rather than historical, saints (since scriptural sources might have entailed ‘perceived restrictions’); and works that fail to include episodes of ‘divine intervention’ and ‘devilish harassment’ (‘performance truisms […] [that] reiterate not only an acknowledged staging convention but the cosmic imperative of religious drama in the Middle Ages’) (pp. 3–5). The result is a manageable and coherent selection of twenty-eight works that does not constitute ‘a distinct literary genre’ (p. 6) but nonetheless allows for rigorous comparative study. Hamblin's methodology involves analysing these works, as well as their paratextual and ancillary materials, as ‘performance remnants’ that attest, often somewhat obliquely, the ‘cultural, social, political, and psychological’ factors governing theatrical performance and reception (p. 6). The book's five chapters examine the following topics: hagiographic mystery plays as a ‘community-driven and community-focused’ practice (p. 9); the plays' thematic and narrative features and how those relate to ‘participatory reenactment’ (p. 29) in highly diverse, socially stratified settings; the manuscript and print texts in which plays were preserved and the ways in which those texts reflect social norms, values, and hierarchies; theatre spaces and their relationship to staging, audience interpretation, and communal ‘resolving processes’ (p. 119); and, finally, the physical, visual, and musical aspects of performance, which, given the acoustic limitations of large, open-air performance spaces, may have had greater importance even than verbal expression. Scholars devoted to conceptual analysis and close reading may be disappointed by Hamblin's explicitly scientific and supratextual approach, which involved borrowing ‘a computational model from the social sciences in order to better integrate text, cultural community, and performance’ (p. 4). She is hardly disengaged from literary and theoretical scholarship, however; and her empirical perspective allows her to make many illuminating observations about the consistency and diversity of medieval performance practices. For instance, although many of the plays in her study-set ‘conceive of their community's societal structure in similar fashion’, thereby confirming hierarchical arrangements through theatrical fiction, their stylistic and socializing functions are ‘far more disparate than scholarship has traditionally recognized’, with ‘no two plays shar[ing] exactly the same features or perspectives, despite their overriding religiosity and even their similar staging styles’ (p. 227). For that matter, ‘their messages are not consistently religious, reflecting instead a diversity of points of view and varying commitments to faith’ (p. 229), and therefore anticipating secularization. Hamblin's meticulous, painstaking approach to a broad swathe of much-neglected medieval works allows her to make this claim with unusual force and ensures that her book is a signal achievement in the fields of medieval and performance studies.
Anticipating Computer Language — On Some Conventions in the Burmese Inscriptions Rudolf A. Yanson (bio) The problem of space was always a pressing one for Old Burmese scribes. For inscriptions, they used stone slabs or palm leaves. Stone slabs were difficult to carve while palm leaves were an expensive recording technology because turning palm leaves into materials to write upon required toilsome preparation. So it was natural that the scribes when writing tried to save space and therefore introduced different conventions into orthography. In the course of time, after orthography became more or less stabilized, and the practice of writing inscriptions became more widespread, scribes started to experiment with orthography, introducing into inscriptions their own judgment regarding spellings of some common words/markers. Some conventions these scribes implemented became the norm of present orthography, but some remain the peculiarity of Old Burmese. Those used in Modern Burmese (MB) unfortunately are never found in dictionaries. Although the origin of some of them is explained in different publications, in several cases I find the provided explanations unconvincing.1 Besides, the relevant publications contain just lists of abbreviations met in palm leaf manuscripts and parabaiks covering the period beginning in the 18th and subsequent centuries. [End Page 391] My analysis and examples are based on the analysis of inscriptions published in five volumes in Myanmar.2 In each case, after presenting an example, I will put in the number of the volume, page, and the line from above where the example appears. I shall start by describing the use of numerals in the context of some grammaticals and lexicals, as well as some peculiar cases. The first numeral to be described in an unusual function is 2. Besides its direct function, it was widely used for a variety of purposes, such as reduplication of verbs to intensify their meaning or to express the action as multiple one, e.g.,3 "who (whenever) comes to the monastery" (2,17,2). The verb la, "to come," is followed by the numeral 2. The phrase holds good without the numeral, but the meaning would change and sound like "whoever may come to the monastery." In the following example, the numeral is put after the word "very" to intensify its meaning: "very-very" (2,35,7). The numeral 2 was also used after nouns for emphatic plurality, e.g., "places where there is pure water" (1,289,12). The numeral is put after "place," and the context meaning of the phrase is "wherever one gets to, there will be pure water." Without the numeral, the meaning would be "a place where there is pure water." One more example: "worlds." Formal analysis leads to the meaning "the two worlds," but the contextual meaning is "whatever future worlds may be" (2,21,12). Usually this meaning is expressed by repeating the word "world," but quite often it is expressed with the numeral postponed to the word. [End Page 392] The described functions of the numeral 2 can be traced already in the earliest inscriptions, suggesting that this pattern dates to the early stages of the evolution of writing practices. Quite interesting is the following example: "cows and water buffaloes sacrificed in 3 groups" (3,35,10). Here the numeral is used instead of the word "to sacrifice." Words for "two" and "sacrifice" are spelled the same, so why not use the simple numeral in the place of though not so long but yet complicated for performing on stone word? Some more examples of the unusual use of the numeral 2 are as follows: "may (he) submerge in Hell" (4,113,9–10). The words "two" and "to submerge" are spelled the same. In the example, the word "to submerge" is spelled with numeral 2 and the last symbol of the words "two" and "to submerge", i.e., ca with virama. It appears that the numeral is used instead of symbol hna, which actually does not save space, but inscribing this last symbol is much more complicated than that of numeral. The next two examples also present the mixture in spelling of the word for "two" and the corresponding numeral: "two cows," "two pahsos (dress)" (4,113,4). The word "two...
We analyzed the generic features of 100 English abstracts of English and Chinese journals in information science.No significant differences were found in lexical density,nominal style and non-finite verb structures,therefore,Chinese journals were similar to English ones in concise,but the abstracts in the former were shorter than the latter,leading to the difference in information content.WE was more fre quently employed in English journals to assert the authors’positions.Chinese authors should perceive the changes in generic features of the academic papers and follow the international norms.
Reviewed by: Arguments as relations by John Bowers Diane Massam Arguments as relations. By John Bowers. (Linguistic inquiry monograph 58.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 239. ISBN 9780262514330. $25. We can get so comfortable with certain ideas that we forget why we hold them, until someone makes a proposal that turns things upside down: there is no D-structure, or control is raising, to mention two such proposals. John Bowers's proposal in this book fits into this category, literally turning some of our long-held views upside down. In sum, he argues that agents are merged very low, near the verb, with themes merged above them, and he explores the consequences of this idea. B's proposal appears to run counter to the Aristotelian view of sentences as consisting of a subject and a predicate [VO] (cf. Baker's 2001 verb object constraint), yet predication remains at the core of his work (Bowers 1993, 2001). The locus of predication has moved around over time. Since the VP-internal subject hypothesis (VPISH), there have been two potential sites for predication, one involving merge positions, with agent as the subject of a transitive verb, and the other involving grammatical positions, with an EPP-determined subject for the sentence. Some have suggested that the subject-predicate relation might exist only within vP in some languages (e.g. Massam 2001a), whereas B here is suggesting that what remains of D-structure is a verbal root with an upwardly extending ordered string of uniformly introduced arguments, so predication takes place only at the higher level through Agree and/or EPP. His view of argument structure evokes nonconfigurationality, in which there is also no VP, yet unlike such analyses (e.g. Jelinek 1984), for B, phrasal arguments constitute the true arguments of the clause and they are strictly ordered according to grammatical principles. B's work rests on two key points: first, that all argument structure is built through the ordered merging of functional heads, each taking a thematically specific argument in its specifier; and second, that the order of argument merge is universally fixed, with agents merging below themes. B's analysis of a basic transitive clause depends on his claim that the higher merged argument (theme) is local for the lower case relation (accusative from Voi (= Voice)), leaving the lower merged argument (agent) free to raise via EPP to PrP (Pr = Pred), and then undergo Agree with T (T = Tense), thus surfacing as the subject of the clause. His book is a set of arguments for this point of view, examining a range of constructions such as the passive (Ch. 2), affectee constructions (Ch. 3), applicative constructions (Ch. 4), and derived nominals (Ch. 5). The book also contains a brief appendix (Appendix A) that provides a compositional semantics for his analysis and another (Appendix B) that discusses the formal aspects of labeling and selection. In the rest of this review I outline each chapter of the book in turn, ending with some potential problems for B's view of argument structure. In his introductory chapter, B presents an overview of his 'radically different idea' (1) in which all arguments and modifiers are introduced uniformly by functional heads in accordance with a UNIVERSAL ORDER OF MERGE (UOM). Primary arguments are Agent, Theme, and Affectee, which are merged in this order, opposite to the norm. In addition to these arguments, there are secondary arguments (e.g. Instruments), and modifiers (e.g. Manner), also merged in accordance with the UOM. B outlines and counters the reasons why agents are traditionally merged high. His view is post-government and binding, in that syntactic structures provide the lexical semantics of the sentence, rather than being projected from it (as in Borer 2005). His approach here brings to mind construction grammar, where a given meaning is rigidly associated with a particular syntactic configuration. In the final section of this chapter B argues, against Marantz (1984), that subject idioms do exist (e.g. the lovebug bit NP, cf. Postal 2004). This chapter ends with a brief overview of the UOM and works through sample derivations of transitive, intransitive, passive, locative, [End Page 354] and expletive sentences, using...
Abstract This study assesses the effects of a parent-child reading project on the development of a variety of French prereading skills in Innu-speaking Kindergartners over the course of a school year. Phonological memory, expressive and receptive lexical knowledge, morphosyntactic knowledge, and basic arithmetic concepts were tested in two subgroups of a single cohort, one composed of participants in a parent-child reading project (experimental group) and the other composed of non-participants (control group). The results show that both groups made gains against French mother tongue age-level norms over the course of the year. The experimental group, whose members started the year with higher skill levels in a number of areas, improved more and on a greater variety of tasks than the control group. While the actual role the reading project played in the children’s gains cannot be determined because of intertwining of factors, bringing books into homes and informing parents about the importance of reading likely had a positive effect on project participants. Résumé Cette étude examine l’impact d’un projet de lecture parent-enfant sur le développement des habiletés préalables à l’apprentissage de la lecture chez les enfants innus inscrits à la maternelle. Nous avons comparé les résultats obtenus par deux groupes d’enfants—un dont les membres participaient au projet de lecture (groupe expérimental) et un dont les membres ne participaient pas (groupe de contrôle)—à une variété de tâches en utilisant un protocole expérimental pré-test, intervention, post-test. Alors que les deux groupes ont fait de bons progrès au cours de l’année scolaire, rattrapant une partie de leur retard initial par rapport aux normes francophones, le groupe expérimental a fait des gains plus importants. Le rôle exact joué par la lecture dyadique dans ces gains n’a pas pu être mesuré avec précision à cause d’un croisement de facteurs, mais certaines indications nous laissent croire que l’introduction de livres dans les foyers des participants a eu des retombées très positives.
This chapter explores the relationship between word meanings as events and word meanings as potentials. It also discusses the relationship between meaning potentials and phraseology, and shows how lexical analysis of phraseology and word meaning can offer insights into word use within the Gricean theory of conversational cooperation and relevance. The chapter argues that context, rather than the word in isolation, generates a substantial part of the meaning of a word in use. It presents a detailed theoretical and practical analysis of the verb climb to illustrate the mechanics of contextual implicatures and how prototypical uses relate to prototypical meanings in context. After discussing meanings as events and meanings as beliefs in the context of H. P. Grice's theory of communicative interaction, the chapter focuses on the distinction between norms and creative exploitations of norms. It concludes by looking at preference semantics and the relationship between the numbered senses in dictionaries and prototype theory.
Metaphor makes our thoughts more vivid and fills our communication with richer imagery. Furthermore, according to the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980), metaphor also plays an important structural role in the organization and processing of conceptual knowledge. According to this account, the phenomenon of metaphor is not restricted to similarity-based extensions of meanings of individual words, but instead involves activating fixed mappings that reconceptualize one whole area of experience in terms of another. CMT produced a significant resonance in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence and still underlies a large proportion of modern research on metaphor. However, there has to date been no comprehensive corpus-based study of conceptual metaphor, which would provide an empirical basis for evaluating the CMT using real-world linguistic data. The annotation scheme and the empirical study we present in this paper is a step towards filling this gap. We test our annotation procedure in an experimental setting involving multiple annotators and estimate their agreement on the task. The goal of the study is to investigate (1) how intuitive the conceptual metaphor explanation of linguistic metaphors is for human annotators and whether it is possible to consistently annotate interconceptual mappings; (2) what are the main difficulties that the annotators experience during the annotation process; (3) whether one conceptual metaphor is sufficient to explain a linguistic metaphor or whether a chain of conceptual metaphors is needed. The resulting corpus annotated for conceptual mappings provides a new, valuable dataset for linguistic, computational and cognitive experiments on metaphor.
During the project “Development of Communicative Competence in the Early Croatian Language Discourse”, a research on the mastering of Croatian as a second language was carried out among the children of Croatian emigrants to Germany. It needs to be stressed that the participants start learning Croatian systematically only within the program of the Croatian tuition abroad, when they encounter the standard Croatian idiom which is more or less different than their local Croatian idiom which the speakers were exposed to in their families. The input language is the individual organic idiom of the Croatian language, while the target language refers to the standard Croatian language. The process of the acquisition of the organic or first language (L1) differs from the process of the other or second language (L2) learning. This is due to the fact that in the process of the non-mother tongue mastering an interlanguage is created in which elements of the first and the second language interfere. In this process non-mother tongue learning can have a double meaning: learning a completely new and unfamiliar language system (foreign language), or acquiring a language idiom which the speakers had already partially mastered, usually in the early childhood. In that case we speak of the heritage language, the language of their parents, their cultural circle, and their national identity. Although all pupils who participated in this research had been born in the Federal Republic of Germany and have the German language as their dominant idiom, most of them consider Croatian to be their mother tongue. However, this research and the communicative practice have confirmed that the German language competence of the participants is higher than their Croatian language competence. Despite their personal attitudes towards Croatian as their mother tongue, the truth is that they learn Croatian as special kind of second language (heritage). The paper brings out the results of 150 pupils participated in the research, ranging from 6-18 years of age, and attending Croatian classes abroad in the German province Baden-Wurttenberg. A test of communicative competence was conducted and the written works of pupils were analyzed in order to examine their language competences in grammatical and lexical level of the Croatian language, according to age, cognitive development, communication, language exposure and language foreknowledge. The analysis of questionnaires was to determined the attitudes of pupils and teachers in Croatian tuition abroad (motivation, purpose and learning needs, socio-cultural environment ).The data were analyzed with the SPSS statistical analysis software. The method used was Pearson’s correlation coefficients to show correlation between the dependent variable (mastery of the language competences) and the independent variable (years they had spent learning Croatian). The Mean value, standard deviation, median-central value, and minimal and maximal score were used in the description and comparison of deviations from the standard language norm. Kolmogorov Smirnov z test was used to test the normal distribution, Kruskal Wallis test for differences between the different age groups of students and teachers, and the Mann Whitney test was used to assess the differences in the attitudes of teachers with regard to the degree and gender. Research results will be used for the analysis of language competences in pupils whose second (heritage) language is Croatian and for assessing the level of acqusition of Croatian language teaching abroad.
This study is aimed at exploring how the dictionary could describe the extensive phenomenon and various types of vernacular in detail, based on discussion on the concept of vernaculars. Such study starts with the idea that discussing the concept of ‘vernacular’ is a prerequisite of recognizing the value of everyday language, and identifying and describing its nature and phenomenons associated with it. First of all, this study confirmed the innate secularity and dailiness of everyday language and established the concept of vernacular. Historically, the process of individual languages including Korean being conceptualized demonstrated that ‘noble language’ separate from everyday communications become secularized, and such language turns into everyday language and norms, which is ironical and universal. Vernaculars are the result of such universal phenomenon involving secular, everyday language, showing various aspects and functions, based on secular effects, popularity and the nature of colloquial language. Based on such concept and nature of vernaculars, this study tried to explore ways of describing them in dictionaries, on the premise that vernaculars are an universal phenomenon as an everyday language. To achieve the goal, this study defined the phenomenon of vernaculars in terms of linguistic forms and various types of vernaculars for dictionary definition. Next, the method of describing diverse words and language phenomenons associated with ‘vernaculars’ in detail in dictionaries was discussed. Given the characteristics of vernaculars, they cannot be limited to words, which means phrases or sentences and non-segmental units should also be included in the description of vernaculars. In addition, since they have functional properties beyond the lexical meanings, relevant situations, nuances and causes of their occurrence should be described in detail, and separate register labels and metalanguages are needed for description of the environment and uses of vernaculars.
Translation is a kind of a trial for the target language, a test of its expressive possibilities, but also an exam of the abilities and skills of a translator. Even the best translators refrained from translating “holy books”, due to the challenges of uniqueness of the form and as a precaution of potential sin and (or) blasphemy which translation can cause. However, translating the Word of God, in this case, the Qur’an, is a necessity, and for Bosniaks, it is a national mission, it testifies to their religious tradition written in Bosnian language at a given time. Therefore, translations of the Qur'an deserve a serious scientific analysis and a responsible, multifaceted research approach, about which we have not had a chance to read a lot in linguistics, in particular Bosnistics. The exceptions are the books of Dž. Latić, PhD, and his scientific and professional papers published in the Proceedings of FIS. This study comprises a corpus of four well-known Bosnian translations of the Qur’an, as follows: Besim Korkut, Mustafa Mlivo (whose authenticity is disputed, i.e. its direct translation from the Arabic original), Enes Karić and Esad Duraković. Furthermore, due to the volume of the material, objects of interest are focused on the first and thirtieth juz (first twenty and last twenty pages of translations of the Qur'an) from which all examples of specific linguistic phenomena and regularities have been taken. The main objectives of this paper are: initiation and actualisation of lexicological and general semantic research of translations of the sacred text, which are grammatically interesting and stylogenic, the research of specific lexical-semantic level of linguistic structure of the translations of the Qur'an and a scientific contribution to the study of this kind of discourse. The task of the paper is to describe, or reinterpret the theoretical principles of lexical semantics of Bosnian language by using examples from the corpus, then to affirm the Bosnian language standard by highlighting examples which contribute to the strengthening of linguistic norm in all segments. For the purpose of achieving the objectives and tasks, different methods have been used: monographic, descriptive, comparative, contrastive and lexical-stylistic method. The Qur'anic text is a real repository for stylistic interpretation as well (and not only stylistic, of course) and its literary perfection is a proof of its divine origin. In this paper, a repertoire of semantic figures – tropes, typical contexts in which they operate, their meaning and use have been noted. Stylistics, no matter how successful it is, cannot penetrate into the secret of Qur’anic ijaza (supernatural origin), “as anatomy cannot penetrate into the mystery of creation.” Keywords: tropes, lexical-semantic figures, stylem, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, periphrasis, epithet, personification, simile
In this paper we investigate the differences in risk-averse behavior in translated versus non-translated texts by comparing lexical normalization in various registers of translated and non-translated Dutch. We want to verify: (i) to what extent normalization is register dependent; (ii) whether normalizing behavior is similar in translated and non-translated texts of the same register, and (iii) to what extent normalization is source-language dependent. We relied on the Dutch Parallel Corpus to investigate the dispersion of 10 profiles, i.e. sets of synonymous lexical alternatives consisting of a Standard Dutch and a Belgian Standard Dutch alternative. Using an exploratory, multivariate technique we visualized and measured the degrees to which a number of registers of translated and non-translated Dutch conform to linguistic norms.
The French words relating to everyday, colloquial, popular, vulgar and argo: notional and \nterminological correlations \nThe language is one of the elements of the culture. Cités, which are mainly located in the suburbs of the major \ncities of France are often theater production of specific cultural norms. This language is called familiar, \ndomestic, popular, vulgar, slang. It is good to mark that language and vocabulary, in particular, arise from the \nsame natural sources, that is to say French and Latin, provincial and foreign. A choice of vocabulary is realized, \nof course, depending on the situation of communication. But there exists some ambiguity in identifying the words \nthat make up spoken French. These lexemes are nominated as current (courants), conversational (familiers), folk \n(populaires), vulgar (vulgaires), argo (argotiques). The paper interprets of the terms: vocabulary, \nconversational vocabulary, everyday language, slang, taking into consideration the development of linguistic \nresearch in the field of French lexicology. Clarifying this problematic issue to students of higher educational \nestablishments is up to date as vocabulary competence is always relevant for would-be linguists. However, it is \nnecessary to know how to identify these words for linguistic research students who are keenly interested in the \nstudy of language of young French. This is based on the language of the suburb city and is a mixture of slang, \nwords borrowed from French, slang old or different cultures that coexist in the city. Thus, clarify the status of \ncolloquial language in contemporary French, define the place of familiar lexicon in the lexical system of \ncontemporary French vocabulary, to differentiate the language of cities in France, different from standard \nvocabulary, will be the subject of study in this article. The structural and semantic peculiarities of the French \nlexicon constitute the scope of the search. Its purpose is, therefore, to define the linguistic properties of words \nbelonging to the familiar register. \nKey words: conversational French, vocabulary, slang, vulgar vocabulary, argo.
Main issues of «Russian language and language culture» course teaching for foreign students reviewed. Justified requirement of the course adoption for foreign students’ perception. Basic types of lexical mistakes in foreign students’ speech analyzed. Methods of modern Russian language lexical norms teaching proposed.
Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how codin
Abstract for the 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics<br/><br/>Some remarks on wordformation in Danish<br/><br/>Some Danish word formation phenomena pose a problem for the linguist, being a predicament for analysis. In Danish a train leaves the station when it afgår ‘leaves’, while a minister may gå af ‘resign’, whereas a Swedish minister may resign by (att) avgå ‘(to) resign’. Especially tricky are pairs like afholde ‘arrange, organise’ and holde af ‘like’ because of their abstract, but different, meanings, and because the phrasal verb also differs from concrete meanings of holde ‘hold’. In general, there are some patterns for these Danish compounds concerning their internal semantics, in that the same lexical items may be used for different purposes depending on whether they are formed as a straightforward linear sequence (a word formation) or a reversed sequence (a phrase). The problem is (i) how the two kinds of combinations should be analysed, and (ii) what patterns emerge from the potential combinations, and (iii) why there are differences between closely related languages like Danish and Swedish?<br/><br/>It seems to have to do with the semantics of the combinations and not with the basic lexical materials, and that raises the question how to explain the combinatorial patterns by a specific approach in semantics.<br/><br/>The problem may be illustrated by Danish deadjectival nominal conversions like (en) døvstum ‘(a) deaf-mute’. They may be considered copulatives (dvandvas) or may be regarded as appositional compounds depending on whether you focus on their extensional or their intensional meanings. As a copulative (deadjectival noun) døvstum denotes an entity (a person) that represents the union set of the properties (attributes) døv and stum (in that the person represents both all the people constituting the set of the deaf and all the people constituting the set of the mute; i.e. the sum of all entities with either of those properties), whereas as an appositional (deadjectival adjective) compound the expression døvstum denotes the intersection of the sets of the properties (attributes) døv and stum respectively; i.e. individuals with both properties. This kind of analysis may be controversial, but the basic claim is that a primitive set-theoretical notion may be a way of handling adjectival combinations like these.<br/><br/>This kind of approach may also be appropriate when dealing with the formation vs phrase problem illustrated above (afgå vs gå af), in that specific combinations seem to be based on special semantic perceptions of the language users – which can be explained set-theoretically – and in that one may invoke a particular notion called “normative”. If “formative” is the Chomskyan notion of an articulated expressions (in a sentence or phrase) then one might propose a technical term for expressions found in parallel in related languages (like Danish and Swedish) and, crucially, mutually understandable (a minister may ‘gå af’ or ‘afgå’ in both languages and be understood) but with different norms regulating what is licensed in each language. The term ‘normative’ may be suggested for this phenomenon.<br/><br/>The presentation will elaborate on the theoretical and the analytic problems of the approach, and illustrate this by a fair number of excerpts and examples.<br/>
This paper explores the feasibility of modelling concept concreteness perceived by humans and representing it in computational semantic lexicons, addressing an issue at the crossroads of computational linguistics, lexicography, and psycholinguistics. The inherent distinction between concrete words and abstract words in psychology has relied mostly on subjective human ratings. This practice is hardly scalable and does not consider the effect of polysemy. In view of this, we attempt to obtain a measure of concreteness from dictionary definitions comparable to human judgement, capitalising on conventional lexicographic assumptions and the regularities exhibited in the surface structures of sense definitions. The structural pattern of a definition is analysed and scored on a 7-point scale of concreteness ratings. The definition scores turned out to be quite effective for a dichotomous distinction between concrete and abstract concepts and more consistent with human ratings for the former. Beyond the two-way distinction, however, the results were more variable. The study has thus revealed the potentials and limitations of our approach, suggesting that different defining styles probably reflect the describability of concepts, and describability alone may not be sufficient for differentiating the degree of concreteness. The range of definition patterns has to be reconsidered, in combination with other inseparable factors constituting our perception of concreteness, for better modelling on a finer scale of concreteness distinction to enrich semantic lexicons for natural language processing.
This paper presents a detailed analysis of the use of crowdsourcing services for the Text Summarization task in the context of the tourist domain. In particular, our aim is to retrieve relevant information about a place or an object pictured in an image in order to provide a short summary which will be of great help for a tourist. For tackling this task, we proposed a broad set of experiments using crowdsourcing services that could be useful as a reference for others who want to rely also on crowdsourcing. From the analysis carried out through our experimental setup and the results obtained, we can conclude that although crowdsourcing services were not good to simply gather gold-standard summaries (i.e., from the results obtained for experiments 1, 2 and 4), the encouraging results obtained in the third and sixth experiments motivate us to strongly believe that they can be successfully employed for finding some patterns of behaviour humans have when generating summaries, and for validating and checking other tasks. Furthermore, this analysis serves as a guideline for the types of experiments that might or might not work when using crowdsourcing in the context of text summarization.
In recent years, collective intelligence has become a field of active research due to the rise of Web 2.0 and the availability of Web-based technologies that support distributed collaboration. Malone et al. (2009) define collective intelligence broadly as “groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent.” The applications of this phenomenon are wide-reaching: recent publications (Malone 2004; Howe 2008; Surowiecki 2004; Benkler 2006; Tapscott and Williams 2006), and a compendium of nearly 250 examples of Web-based collective intelligence collected by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence 1 clearly demonstrate the diversity of ways in which collective intelligence can be applied. The field is now about to consolidate itself and launch its own conference which will be held for the first time in 2012. 2
This article presents a comparative study on how textbooks of Portuguese and Spanish language handle mode and tense variation.. We took as theoretical background both studies on variation and teaching by Labov (1972, 1978 and 2003), and what official documents states about the teaching of foreign languages in Brazil. The research followed explicit instructions we developed for the analysis of norm/use, change, linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints, the use of authentic texts and variation between verbal tenses. The results obtained underlined that the themes in question were handled only partially by the textbooks: the text is still used as a pretext; when there is a theoretical explanation on variation, it appears only in the chapter at issue, not been applied throughout the book; the effects of meanings of the diverse verbal forms in the communicative context are also not substantiated. However, in the textbook Hacia el español, we were able to verify an effort in the sense of making students aware of the linguistic variation in phonetic and phonologic, lexical and morphosyntactic levels.
Wordnets are built of synsets, not of words. A synset consists of words. Synonymy is a relation between words. Words go into a synset because they are synonyms. Later, a wordnet treats words as synonymous because they belong in the same synset\(\ldots\) Such circularity, a well-known problem, poses a practical difficulty in wordnet construction, notably when it comes to maintaining consistency. We propose to make a wordnet a net of words or, to be more precise, lexical units. We discuss our assumptions and present their implementation in a steadily growing Polish wordnet. A small set of constitutive relations allows us to construct synsets automatically out of groups of lexical units with the same connectivity. Our analysis includes a thorough comparative overview of systems of relations in several influential wordnets. The additional synset-forming mechanisms include stylistic registers and verb aspect.
In assignment initially theorethical context of linguistic expressions is defined.First part continues to place the theory of language stratification, started in 1932 in Prague Linguistic Circle and in the second half of 20th century assumed in Slovene linguistic.First part also discusses about creation of slovene literary language and literary norm, continuing with arrangement of expressions in slovene theory of language stratification by Toporii (1971).Next to this contemporary definition of social stratification by Andrej E. Skubic ( 2005) is presented, concentrating on speeches of social groups (sociolects).Second part of assignment -based od research about elements of sociolects in discourse of slovene literature by Skubic (2006) and the concept of script by Roland Barthes (1971)places analised literary works, Fuinski bluz (Skubic, 2001) and efurji raus! (Vojnovi, 2008) into the fifth degree of development script as speech (Barthes, 1971).After presentation of literary works the analysis of communicative situations, where non-literary elements are used in speeches of all five literary figures, is discussed.At the beginning of the third part the treoretical description of reflextion of prague theory of linguistic stratification in SSKJ is presented.Moreover the presentation of activities during the time when SSKJ was published to SP 2001 is described, concluding with discussion about inclusion of linguistic stratification and sociolects in SP 2001.In the second, practical part linguistic analysis of elements of sociolects and speeches of literary figures are presented.The analysis is concentrated on lexical linguistic level and try to determine the relation between literary and non-literary language in works of contemporary slovene urban prose.
The given article touches on the problem of coordination between lexical nominations of speech etiquette in modern English and Lezghin languages, on examples of sentences of greeting and farewell. Differences in speech etiquette tactics in the situations of greeting and farewell in the mentioned cultures are found on verbal and nonverbal levels. They depend on norms of politeness and special dominating traditions of communication culture in a certain society.
‘Lexical bundles’ as a category of word combinations are words which follow each other more frequently than expected by chance. This corpus-based study attempts to compare the frequencies of three- and four-word lexical bundles in research articles of three disciplines: physics, computer engineering, and applied linguistics. Moreover, it aims to scrutinize them between native and nonnative research articles of applied linguistics to see whether Iranian authors who publish articles in English, use lexical bundles in the same way as native authors. To this end, three native corpora and a non-native corpus of research articles were collected, each including approximately one million words. All the analyses were conducted through Wordsmith Tools (Scott, 2010) and Hyland’s (2008) taxonomy of most frequent academic lexical bundles. The results show that there are relatively significant differences between the frequencies of the lexical bundles employed across the disciplines. In addition, they differ significantly between the native and nonnative articles of applied linguistics. It is also revealed that lexical bundles are realized differently across different disciplines and that non-natives do not follow the norms of natives appropriately. Findings can be used to improve writing in different disciplines and create more cohesive and coherent texts.
The article deals with the functional treatment of the concept of number in the English noun system and looks into semantic features of substantive units, their lexical and grammatical collocation and ability to express the linguacultural peculiarities of communication. The authors focus on extralinguistic parametres aimed at better understanding the semantics of the unit and construing more effectively one’s own statement in accordance with the aim set and keeping within the varieties of the Modern English norm.
The translation of the “Linguoterritorial Dictionary of Latgale” into the Latgalian language (one of 4 languages of the dictionary) is the biggest large-volume comprehensive set of existent Latgalian texts in the Latgalian orthography of 2007. The subject matter of the entries of this dictionary covers almost all spheres of life and even reveals style nuances within the framework of popular science texts, so the texts may sometimes seem to be radical and unprecedentedly innovative. The translators would be happy to keep to the current orthographic norms and practice-fixed options of Latgalian, however, answers to the numerous problematic issues (the display of Latvian personal names, palatalization/ softening of foreign words, suffix endings of less- used nouns, etc.) cannot be found in the sources known to specialists working with Latgalian literary/ written language, and sometimes may be resolved through individual consultations with experts of the Latgalian language This shows the need to resume / renew the work of the subcomission of Latgalian written language, as well as the necessity of a modern Latgalian spelling dictionary. Regarding lexical issues, the translators are aware that Latgalian texts may always be "pulled in one specific direction”, and then the right arguments are found: 1) in the direction of Lithuanian culture layer (understanding of the basis of the Balts parent language), in the direction of Slavic culture layer (recognition of the natural historical reality when Polish or Russian dominated in Latgale, retaining their influence), in the direction of Latvian (definition of the national identity), 2) it is possible to “fall into the ditch” of neologisms or archaisms, 3) it is also possible to overestimate the role of the recipient (understanding or non-acceptance). The observation of the “golden midway” seemed to be the most difficult challenge. During the search for more accurate equivalents, the synonym group was always determined, as well as compliance of the dominated seme with any context was weighted. The choice of equivalents is made easy not by the richness of the synonym group, but by the oppositional character of their meanings (Rozenbergs 1995: 153). This paper describes the realized principles and most typical cases during the translator work. First, individual style of translators is preserved, therefore in the use of neutral lexemes in the “Linguoterritorial Dictionary of Latgale” synonymy is allowed, which is non-determined by other criteria, such as: saulis grīžki / saulis meitovys ‘solstice’, ci/voi ‘or’, nedeļa/savaite ‘week’, gastēt/cīmuotīs ‘to be visiting’. Second, in other cases, when a number of Latgalian equivalents correspond to only one Latvian equivalent, the qualitative difference of synonyms was searched for (on the functional level and seme level). For example: 1) there are three Latgalian equivalents to Latvian "tulkot” ‘translate, interpret’, one of which “tulkuot” (respectively tulkuojums, tulkuotuojs ‘translation, translator’) is used to denote professional translation, however “puorlikt” (calque of germanism “übersetzen”) is used, when speaking about the translations of sacred/ spiritual texts of the 18th century. In its turn, “atvērst” (compare with Lithuanian “versti”) is not used due to the misleading homonymy with Latvian “vērst” ‘to turn, direct, point); 2) Latvian word "saimniecība” ‘economy, industry, farm, housekeeping’ in Latgalian texts corresponds to saimnīceiba "zyvu saimnīceiba” ‘fish industry’ as well as to saimisteiba "zemnīku saimesteiba” (farm, resp. economic entity); 3) Latvian "deja” ‘dance’ - Latgalian "dzyga" as an ethnographic dance, "daņcs” as any dance, "deja” in usual compound names (e.g. Dzīšmu i deju svātki) 4) Latvian "virsnieks” ‘military officer’ – Latgalian "oficers” and not "viersnīks” in order to avoid the misunderstood homonymy with the Latgalian lexeme “vierseiba / vierseibnīks” ‘management, authorities / boss’. Third, etymological specificity of Latgalian equivalent may limit its use, and in other contexts another lexeme has to be used, e. g. the denotative seme of the Latvian lexeme "zupa” is - ‘liquid food, meal’, but Latgalian “virīņs” – 'cooked food/meal’, so in the word combination "soltuo zupa” ‘cold soup’ another lexeme "zupa” is necessary. It is usual, that “behavior” against occasionalisms is favorable in artistic texts, but they are irrelevant/ impertinent in scientific and popular style. However, translators took the liberty to use not only widely accepted neologisms (e. g. “škārsteiklys” ‘internet’), but also to offer their own occasional neologisms (dreizynuot, mudrynuot ‘to accelerate, to speed on’, tuoļuokuot ‘to continue’, parūceibys ‘advantage’, sasprīdums ‘decision’, pasavierieji ‘spectators, onlookers’, ītums ‘course of life; annual, day, week set’, apdzeive ‘ancient settlement’, breinuojums ‘astonishment, wonder’, pasūlejumu palete ‘a set of offers’, zeimyns ‘brand, trade mark’, makšariešona ‘fishing, angling’, daīmameiba ‘accessibility, availability’, seneiba ‘ancient times’, augzeme ‘top soil’, perekļuot ‘to nest’, svešlītyns ‘foreign body’). However, the following principle, that is firmly adhered, is that new word / formation/derivation is recognizable by the root and experimental by affixes.
Parser Evaluation using Textual Entailments (PETE) is a shared task in the SemEval-2010 Evaluation Exercises on Semantic Evaluation. The task involves recognizing textual entailments based on syntactic information alone. PETE introduces a new parser evaluation scheme that is formalism independent, less prone to annotation error, and focused on semantically relevant distinctions. This paper describes the PETE task, gives an error analysis of the top-performing Cambridge system, and introduces a standard entailment module that can be used with any parser that outputs Stanford typed dependencies.
Since 1999, the Dutch Language Union (NTU) fosters the exchange of plans and policy initiatives amongst government officials of Flanders and the Netherlands on human language technology for Dutch (HLTD). One of the outcomes is the STEVIN R&D programme for HLTD, coordinated by the NTU and funded by the Flemish and Dutch governments. STEVIN is an example of successful joint research programming. Its set-up, highlights and scientific results are presented as well as an outlook to future initiatives.
Reviewed by: Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity by Peter Trudgill Sali A. Tagliamonte Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity. By Peter Trudgill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 288. ISBN 9780199604357. $35. In this book Peter Trudgill tells the story of what he has been wondering about most of his academic career: to what extent do 'different types of human society produce different types of language and, if this is the case, what [does] this mean for the future typology of human languages' (viii)? T is a master linguist and a consummate storyteller, making this book not only a culminating piece of scholarship but also a page-turner. You get a hint at the magnitude of the story he wants to tell when you see that his book is dedicated to William Labov and the sheer number of famous researchers that are thanked for contributing to its telling (xii-xiii). T has synthesized a linguistic treasure trove-data from all over the globe and an amalgamation of insights from sociolinguistics, dialectology, historical linguistics, and typology. T's story begins with an overview of innumerable 'Social correlates of linguistic structures' (xv). From the thirty Sami words for types of snow through the honorifics of Korean, the directional prefixes of Tibeto-Burman and the lexicon of British carpenters, readers are led through a dizzying array of correlations between language phenomena and climate, geography, and culture. The relationship between a language's lexis and grammar and its social circumstances is strong.\ But curiously, there are also many examples where there is no correlation at all. T proposes to 'get a grip' on this dilemma by looking at other aspects of human societies that may offer insight. Here begins the exploration of what factors 'might be promising to look at in our search for explanations for why certain languages select certain structures and not others' (1). T naturally turns to the sociolinguistic literature where it is well known that sociocultural phenomena are critically linked to linguistic change, transmission, diffusion, incrementation, and lifespan change (Labov 1972, 2007). Cataclysmic events and economic upheavals accelerate the rate of linguistic change. Different levels of language structure change at different rates. Change in phonology and in features that are pragmatically sensitive proceed relatively rapidly. In contrast, grammatical features can remain stable for centuries. Yet some languages and dialects change faster than others. Why? In fact, there is good evidence to argue that linguistic change is strongly influenced by: (i) the relative degree of contact vs. isolation of a speech community, and (ii) the relative social stability vs. instability of a community. In low-contact, socially stable circumstances, change proceeds slowly, in fact very slowly. Language change is also influenced by contact, which leads to simplification in linguistic phenomena and processes such as regularization, increasing lexical and morphological transparency, and loss of redundancy. Yet complexification [End Page 378] may also occur under the same circumstances, such as when there is transfer of features from one language to another, borrowing, and the like. This leads to a conundrum: 'what are the circumstances in which contact leads to simplification, and what are the circumstances when it leads to complexification' (33)? T argues that there is a solution to this paradox because there are different types of contact, which in turn impact the way language learning and acquisition evolve within the speech community; that is, who are the people in contact with each other, adults or children (see e.g. Kerswill 1996)? Complexification develops in low-contact situations where there is long-term transmission from parent to child, there are shared norms, and change proceeds down an uninterrupted path. Simplification arises in high-contact situations where there is a significant history of the language having been acquired by adult nonnative speakers, and individuals may not have much in common. There is yet another factor implicated in language change-community size. When a population is relatively small, tight social networks can 'push through, enforce, and sustain linguistic changes which would have a much smaller chance of success in larger, more fluid communities' (103). In high-contact communities, leveling and the loss of arbitrary distinctions develop in order to accommodate communication among...