Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Стаття присвячена основним аспектам перекладу медичної термінології на українську мову. Розглядаються домінантні шляхи утворення медичних термінів та особливості їх відтворення українською мовою. Наведено приклади та проаналізовано найуживаніші способи перекладу лексики наукового медичного дискурсу. (The article is dedicated to the basic aspects of medical terminology translation into Ukrainian. In the research paper the main aspects of such language concepts as «discourse», «academic discourse» and «medical terminology» are analyzed and identified; the structural and semantic aspects of borrowed medical terminology are determined; dominant ways of medical terms formation and peculiarities of their rendering into Ukrainian are examined; the examples and the most common ways of scientific vocabulary of medical discourse translation are illustrated. It is stated, that in the process of medical terms translation it is important to find out the interconnection between term and context, which is the only way to render lexical meaning. In the article great attention is paid to the compound medical terms rendering that is one of the most controversial sides of medical English-Ukrainian translation. It is defined that according to the translation situation and/or to the textual genre, it is necessary to take into account the different register levels and possible changes in vocabulary. It is important to remember that translation of borrowed medical terms demands from translator sufficient level of knowledge in this sphere and also following the strict norms of Ukrainian language. According to the investigation done, meaning of borrowed suffixes and prefixes in medical discourse coincide in both languages. Hence the main techniques of their translation into Ukrainian are either transliteration, or finding functional equivalent.)
The overall aim of this dissertation is to generate a theory explaining the variation in the way the Spaniards, particularly the Spanish women, designate female professionals. Three different studies are included, the first one a quantitative survey on how the use of the three main strategies for referring to female professionals (the feminine: la abogada; the common gender: la abogado; lexical modification: mujer abogado) is determined by the sex, the age and the educational level of the speakers. The material consists of 40 professions and includes job titles of various types, representing different socioeconomic levels in the Spanish society.\nThe results show that 18 of the 40 professsions are used in the feminine, 22 in the common gender and, consequently, no profession is used in the third variant by the majority of the informants. The conclusions regarding the impact of the social factors confirm a majority use of feminine designations by the women, the oldest age group and the speakers with the highest level of education, respectively. However, the differences between the groups are marginal counted in absolute numbers.\nThe analysis of the extent to which the informants are ready to accept the feminine of the professions demonstrate the highest values in the following groups: the women, the youngest age group and the informants with the lowest educational level. \nThe results of the qualitative study show that several factors influence the election of variant in the 22 cases not used in the feminine according to the first study, which indicates the predomination of idiosyncrasy in this field.\nDue to the small differences between the groups concerning the feminine use, the aim of the third study is to find out what factors determine the female use. In 31 in-depth interviews, cards illustrating different professions, practised by both men and women, are presented and discussed. The analysis of this study is couched within the Grounded Theory framework, according to which the aim is to generate a new theory, not to confirm an existing one. Such a theory is entirely grounded in the empiric data that emerge throughout the analysis, when data are compared for similarities and formed into categories. The core category – existence in our study – is the one which accounts for most of the variation around the concern. Thus, the prerequisite of the use of a feminine title is its approval by the Royal Spanish Academy. However, its power is twofold. The academic norm is prescriptive only in non-existing cases, since nobody uses, unless in very specific contexts, a feminine title that is not accepted. In the opposite case, the use of the feminine is optional and determined by the factors awareness, presence, habit, aesthetics, attitude and idiosyncrasy.\nTo ensure the highest degree of reliability and validity of our final conclusions, the last step consists of triangulating the three studies. \nKeywords: Female professional designations, European Spanish, gender, linguistic sexism, sociolinguistics, survey, in-depth interviews, Grounded Theory, triangulation.
Painful events are suggested to elicit two opponent responses: a negatively valenced and a positively valenced process triggered by their onset and termination, respectively. Consequently, stimuli (conditioned stimulus, CS) associated with pain onset (unconditioned stimulus, US) provoke defensive responses like startle potentiation, while stimuli associated with pain termination elicit appetitive responses like startle attenuation. Here we summarize four studies elucidating the time course of the relief following the termination of a painful US. In these studies, the timing of a relief-associated stimulus (reliefCS) presented after a painful US was varied from immediately (Study1), 3 seconds (Study4), or 6 seconds (Study2 and 3) after the US. Responses to these relief CSs were compared also with responses to a stimulus presented before the US (fearCS), and a third stimulus (safetyCS) that was never associated with the US. The synopsis of these studies reveals that the timing of the reliefCS is crucial to turn a defensive response into an appetitive response. Namely, the reliefCS immediately following the US-induced startle potentiation and negative valence (Study1); 3 seconds later, the startle response was slightly less potentiated and the ratings a little less negative (Study4); finally, the reliefCS presented 6 seconds after the US caused startle attenuation (Study2 and 3) and positively valenced ratings (Study3). In sum, the observed time course of relief closely follows the predictions of opponent process theory. This means that relief may be a reinforcer that elicits conditioned appetitive behavior, but its reinforcing properties strongly depend on its temporal relation to the aversive event.
Guy Bertrand's « Capsules linguistiques » are broadcast daily on Radio-Canada. Each « Capsule » contains a French word or expression Bertrand considers erroneous or incorrectly used. Reviewing the literature, I found that although Bertrand is a public figure, studies of his work remain scarce. Furthermore, the transcriptions of the Capsules in published form were neither organized by theme nor by type of judgment, and contain a general bibliography rather than systematic citations. In this study, I sought to address these problems by reorganizing the prescriptive and descriptive information contained in Bertrand's work. The corpus consisted of 19 expressions employing the preposition « à », in order to analyze both lexical « errors » and syntactic « errors ». Next, I compared this information to findings in dictionaries (notably, Le Petit Robert 2014 and Le Dictionnaire québécois-français by Lionel Meney) as well as to other linguistic publications in order to also include the following: origin, etymology, semantic changes over time, other related expressions and any judgments on acceptability or register. To synthesize my findings, I established categories to answer the question of what types of errors were recurrent in our corpus. My synthesis regrouped these categories into four themes: judgments on structure; vocabulary; prescriptive or descriptive approaches; language registers. While I had predicted the presence of judgments on the influence of English and archaic terms, I had not expected the rejection of specialized terms extended to general use. Furthermore, Bertrand accepts regionalisms but generally relegates them to the familiar or popular registers. I also observed that Bertrand rejected changes to idiomatic expressions. These trends reflect a censorship of figures of speech in the standard register. For future study, it would be interesting to see which categories remain prevalent in an extended corpus of Capsules. As a point of comparison, Dire, ne pas dire… from the Académie Française website would provide insight from France. Finally, an acceptability or grammaticality judgment study with native speakers of French would provide insight as to whether the proposed alternatives reflect popular norms.
Abstract The tension in the sixteenth century between Christian institutions, viewed as corrupt, and the Scriptures, taken to be the unsullied source of spiritual renewal, gives rise to an energetic biblical erudition intended to transmit this clarity--an effort that ironically ends up obscuring that supposedly limpid source. Spinoza subjects the Book to norms of reason that distinguish sharply between the intended meaning (sensus) and truth (veritas). The truth of the text, for Erasmus, is either above it (in a philosophy of the revelation) or below (in lexical, historical and grammatical knowledge). In the seventeenth century, the logic of Port-Royal sunders the text into pre-existent concepts or ideas, and signifiants, or phonetic signs that are meaningless in themselves. The distinction between metaphor (and musicality) and strict meaning (stripped of rhetoric and affect) makes translation a battlefield between beauty and truth. The remainder of the chapter gives a detailed account and assessment of the two major seventeenth-century biblical translators: Sacy, whose focus is the intended meaning of the Author (the spirit of God); and Simon, who treats the text as an object. The text itself must first be "established," and then its obscurities elucidated by compared versions and an abundant critical apparatus.
In this paper we present the annotation scheme of constructions at the argument-structure level in the Spanish and Catalan Corpora SenSem. Constructions are accounted for as form-meaning pairs following the theoretical underpinning of Construction Grammar. Regarding meaning, we propose a hierarchy of constructions taking into account, at the highest level, the prominence of the logical subject in the sentence. Thus, we differentiate between topicalized and detopicalized sentences, which is an innovative proposal to solve some terminological issues related to pronominal constructions in Spanish. We further develop this classification taking into account the semantic relation of the logical subject with the verb and its coindexation, if any, with other participants. As regards form, the basic features we consider are syntagmatic categories and syntactic functions. Furthermore, we annotate the form the verb requires, that is, if it requires a pronoun in order to convey a particular meaning. Other relevant contributions are the annotation of some linguistic phenomena not taken into account in other similar resources, such as reciprocal, dative or impersonal constructions. Finally, we present the frequencies of all these constructions in Spanish.
The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs: Standardization and Lexical Bundles 1380-1560. Joanna Kopaczyk. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013. ISBN 9780199945153, 51 [pounds sterling], 368pp. The subject-matter of this book is so distinctive and unexpected as to arouse a potential reader's interest from the start: the language of the Scottish burgh records in the period from the first use of Scots as their medium to the Reformation. Yet the fact that this topic is unusual at once points to a glaring lacuna in the historical study of the Scots language. Poetry in Early and Middle Scots has, deservedly and most rewardingly, provided extensive material which has been the basis of many excellent studies: to this extent, pre-modern Scots has been fertile soil for historical linguists. With the development of corpus linguistics, other literary genres, notably correspondence, have been opened to fruitful investigations. But though the socio-historical and linguistic interest of prose texts, particularly utilitarian ones, may be great, it is not hard to understand that the works of Dunbar should be more enticing to many researchers than the Peebles burgh records of 1499; and the enormous field of Early and Middle Scots prose writing is still under-examined. And since the field of legal writings in particular has a linguistic dimension, given the long-standing tradition of Scots law and the distinctive lexical and stylistic features associated with it, some of which survive to the present day, the surprising thing is not that we now have a full-length monograph on the topic but that we have had to wait so long for one. This is particularly true in view of the fact, amply demonstrated in the preliminary chapters of the book, that legal language as a general subject has received extensive and detailed examination; much of which is summarily discussed in this section. The present study of the legal register of Middle Scots is thus an important contribution to a flourishing branch of linguistics. The author has an established reputation as a historical linguist, with several groundbreaking works on Scots already to her credit; and the range and depth of her reading on the topic is impressively shown here. An important distinction introduced in this section is that between language standardisation and linguistic standardisation, the former being the elevation of one particular dialect, because of extra-linguistic factors such as demographic strength or social prestige, to the status of a supra-regional norm; the latter, the settling of specific phonological, orthographic and grammatical features as the norms within a dialect. Examination of linguistic standardisation in Scots, the author points out, has always focused on the Anglicisation which took place in the post-Reformation period; the linguistic standardisation which was proceeding prior to this having so far received almost no attention. Having placed her study precisely in its academic context, Kopaczyk proceeds with a historical examination of the burghs and their place in Scottish history. As often, a widespread and long-term process common to all of northern Europe, in this case the evolution of areas where the population happened to be denser than in their hinterlands to legally-defined communities with formally established privileges and responsibilities binding on the community and its individual members, is shown to have taken a distinctive form in Scotland. …
Розглядаються питання, які стосуються перекладу газетних текстів з французької мови на російську, визначається статус мови преси, аналізуються різні класифікація відомих лінгвістів щодо типів текстів публіцистичної спрямованості. Вивчаються прийоми і способи перекладу газетно-журнальної публіцистики, проводиться порів- няльна характеристика мови французької і російської преси. Визначаються основні особливості стилю періодики: її інформативність, експресивно-емоційний характер, використання розмовної, ненормативної лексики, скорочених слів, алюзії, а також залучення реальних політичних і громадських подій. Детально розглядається питання вживання фразеологізмів, прислів’їв, приказок, інших стилістичних прийомів. Визначається поняття «фразеологізм» і досліджуються його види, а також вивчаються окрім фразеологізмів, які вказані в словниках, окказіональні фразеологізми. (The article considers the problems of newspaper texts translation from French into Russian that are characterized by definite lexical and grammatical structures, typical only for press language expressions and formulas understandable for native speakers, but are not always explainable from the viewpoint of language norms. The French press language status is determined, which is part of the journalistic style, the analysis of the approaches to the language study is carried on. Different classifications of journalistic text types offered by well-known linguists are analyzed. On the basis of the text classification in L.S. Barhudarov edition the approach in solution of tasks put in the article is determined: to define the peculiarities of journalistic style. The methods and ways of translation of newspaper and magazine texts are examined; the comparative analysis of French and Russian press is conducted. The basic features of the style of the periodic press are determined: its informativeness, expressively emotional character, the use of colloquial and substandard vocabulary, abbreviated words, and allusion. The typical feature of press texts is the coverage of real political and meaningful for public events. The problem of the use of phraseological units, proverbs, sayings and other stylistic devices is examined in detail. The notion «phraseological unit» is determined here and its types are investigated profoundly. Besides phraseological units indicated in dictionaries the author analyses nonce phraseological units.)
The paper is about the modern nicknames of the residents of Perm Land of the 20th-early 21st centuries. Russian as well as Komi-Permyak and Tatar anthroponomy which is motivated by the lexemes of thematic group “Animals” is analyzed. The lexicalsemantic groups which are topical for Perm nicknames are determined (“Names of the animals and their kinds”, “Names of the regions of the animals”, “Names of the young animals”, “Nicknames of the animals”, “Names and nicknames of the animals which are the personages of the folklore / author’s works”, “Names of the groups of the animals”, “Onomatopoeia (imitations of the sounds producing by the animals”, “Words to beckon the animals”). Types and kinds of the nicknames are identified: 1) from the point of view of spontaneity / consciousness of appearance: natural and artificial nominations which are proposed to distinguish from the standpoint of language (in the linguistic opposition “norm” / “usage”) and from the standpoint of onomastics (in the extra-linguistic opposition “own” / “alien”); 2) by the subject of the nomination: “auto-nicknames” and “allo-nicknames”; 3) by the Extension: individual (family; social-group, at-school, youth, teacher’s, nicknames of adults) and collective (family, family-tribal, “family-group”; socialgroup; territorial). The factors which determine language tools of derivation of the nicknames of this group are revealed: language which is a source of the nomination, motivation of nomination (structural, phonetic, lexical, semantic, multiple), evaluation, social conditions, territorial conditions, temporal conditions. Structurally, the central (not formally distorted), transitional (derivative) and peripheral (occasional, barbarism) lexemes of this group are identified. Multiplicity of characteristics and properties of the animals which motivate the nicknames is noted. The perspectives of research of the modern Perm nicknames in lingualcultural and cognitive aspects are defined.
Units of the Russian word family with the root -gordoriginate in the Proto-Slavic etymological word family * gbrdb, which has reflexes gord/ gardin East Slavic languages, grd-, grd-, hrdin South Slavic and hrd-, hord-, hard-, gardin West Slavic. These units express the concept pride almost in all Slavic languages (with the exception of Slovenian). In Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Sorbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian units of etymological word family * gbrdb are the main expression means of the concept pride. In the Slovak and Belarusian languages there are also units with other roots (Belarusian gonar-, Slovakianpych-) in the nucleus of the lexical semantic field pride. In the western group of South Slavic languages (Serbian, Slovenian) and Polish the basic units expressing the concept pride are lexemes of a word family with root ponos-. The semantic field of Proto-Slavic etymological word family * gbrdb includes four semantic centers: 1) pride and related concepts (obstinacy, insolence, scorn, impudence, abuse); 2) social status, which includes words with meanings 'grandeur', 'majestic', 'nobility', 'loftiness', 'hero', 'glory', 'fame', 'importance', the Russian dialect ritual wedding lexis and Old-Russian units with meanings 'austerity', which contain negative connotations. The units of the following two semantic centers are registered in all Slavic language groups: 3) common and aesthetic evaluation: a) common negative and negative aesthetic evaluation: units expressing common and aesthetic negative evaluation with meanings 'ugly', 'hideous', 'bad' are registered in South Slavic, Old Slovak, Old Russian and Upper Sorbian languages; b) positive aesthetic evaluation; such units are recorded in West Slavic and East Slavic languages; 4) exceeding norms in size and strength; the units of the etymological word family * gbrdb expressing meanings 'big', 'heavy' exist in Serbian and Upper Sorbian languages and Russian dialects. So, first and second semantic centers are common for all Slavic languages, while third and fourth are local. The units of the third center are registered in South and West Slavic languages. The fourth center is characteristic for South Slavic languages mostly. A.A. Kretov and L. Kralik suggested two well-founded etymology versions of Russian gord-. Both explain its semantics 'pride/proud/to be proud' as an extension of the meaning 'having high social status'. The main divergence of the two versions applies to the primary meaning of Proto-Slavic *gbrdb. A.A.Kretov supposes that Proto-Slavic *gbrdb primary meaning is 'dimensional height', while L. Kralik considers Proto Slavic *gbrdb as derived from Indo-European *gwher 'hot' and believes that its primary meaning is 'furious'. Detailed Slavic lexis analysis and the structure of the etymological word family semantic field corroborates Kretov's version and shows that the meaning 'pride/proud/to be proud' of Proto-Slavic *gbrdb is related genetically to meanings 'high social level' and 'dimensional height'.
This study arises from recent research within the context of a new Sicily, where the various ethnic groups inhabiting it have become EFL users who have different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and appropriate English without necessarily conforming to its grammatical and lexical norms. This phenomenon places Sicily in a complex position with regard to the construction of EFL speakers and English itself becomes the language which is used for everyday conversation and social interaction within and outside the migrant communities in Sicily. Though Sicily is not a former British colony, a high number of immigrants living there speak one of the so-called new Englishes as a result of British colonisation. In this perspective, their usage of English acquires peculiar linguistic and cultural connotations, which define the language they speak for communication as a hybrid global English, which is spoken by non-native English immigrant speakers in a variety of Anglo-English mixed with other languages and dialects. This chapter brings into focus two levels of communication that involve on the one hand, that of immigration that is to say, non-native English speakers who communicate with one another in a double mixed linguistic variety which is the sum of their native language/dialect (French, Indian, Arab, etc.) and English and, on the other hand, that of societal and cultural contacts between immigrants and Sicilians in a triple mixed linguistic variety which is the combination between each immigrant's native language/dialect, a hybrid Sicilian/Italian language and a hybrid form of English which derives from colonial and postcolonial history. Specific case-studies will support this paper to testify to the use of English as a relexified, hybridised and cannibilised language, which is adapted to the immigrants' phonological, syntactical, lexical and semantic necessities as a result of EFL practice which, apparently, subverts the binary oppositions centre/margin, self/other, national/international, local/global.
Undoubtedly the difficulty of translating culture-bound elements will be be much more challenging when the audience are children who do not have any perspective on cultural diversity of different nations. The culture-bound elements can be consists of a wide range of elements, i.e. proper names, religion terms, food and drink items and so on. Dealing with each of these items will be a real challenge when translators have this perception that most probably their audiences do not have any idea about the in hand culturebound element, and it will be their choice to present the new items to the child reader or replace it with a familiar one. With this perspective, the present textual analysis study, aims to explore the lexical choices that translator's of children's literature in Iran made, facing such elements. The present effort restricts itself to the "food and drink" items and illustrates the way that Persian translators approach these culturebound elements in a 70 years period and discusses their lexical choices following the socio-cultural norms of the time.
This work introduces SYMPAThy, a data representation model in which the combinatorial properties of a lexical item are described by merging surface and deeper linguistic information. The proposed approach is then evaluated by comparing, for a sample list of verbal idioms, a set of SYMPAThy-based fixedness indexes against the relevant speaker-elicited indexes available in the descriptive norms collected by Tabossi et al. (2011)
The aim of this study was to analyse the psycholinguistic variables of the attributes and concepts involved in the recall of a concept. One hundred and twenty adults (18�40 years old) participated. A lexical recall task was administered by presenting a successive list of defining attributes. Forty concepts from different semantic categories were used. The attributes were obtained empirically from local Semantic Features Production Norms. The influence of the characteristics and attributes of the concepts on the number of participants who accessed the name of the concept and the correct guess trend was analysed. Significant values for Age of Acquisition, Presence of Distinctive Attributes and Presence of Taxonomic Attributes were observed. Results show that concepts which are acquired earliest are more easily recalled; presenting taxonomic categories narrows the search and the presence of distinctive attributes allow differentiating between such concepts within a category.
Despite extensive research on the neural basis of empathic responses for pain and disgust, there is limited data about the brain regions that underpin affective response to other people's emotional facial expressions. Here, we addressed this question using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess neural responses to emotional faces, combined with online ratings of subjective state. When instructed to rate their own affective response to others' faces, participants recruited anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate, inferior frontal gyrus, and amygdala, regions consistently implicated in studies investigating empathy for disgust and pain, as well as emotional saliency. Importantly, responses in anterior insula and amygdala were modulated by trial-by-trial variations in subjective affective responses to the emotional facial stimuli. Furthermore, overall task-elicited activations in these regions were negatively associated with psychopathic personality traits, which are characterized by low affective empathy. Our findings suggest that anterior insula and amygdala play important roles in the generation of affective internal states in response to others' emotional cues and that attenuated function in these regions may underlie reduced empathy in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits.
In this paper, we introduce an ongoing project for the development of a parallel treebank for Italian, English and French. The treebank is annotated in a dependency format, namely the one designed in the Turin University Treebank (TUT), hence the choice to call such new resource Par(allel)TUT. The project aims at creating a resource which can be useful in particular for translation research. Therefore, beyond constantly enriching the treebank with new and heterogeneous data, so as to build a dynamic and balanced multilingual treebank, the current stage of the project is devoted to the design of a tool for the alignment of data, which takes into account syntactic knowledge as annotated in this kind of resource. The paper focuses in particular on the study of translational divergences and their implications for the development of the alignment tool. The paper provides an overview of the treebank, with its current content and the peculiarities of the annotation format, the description of the classes of translational divergences which could be encountered in the treebank, together with a proposal for their alignment.
The present paper investigates linguistic norm-adherence in Belgian Dutch written and audiovisual translation. More particularly, it is measured to what extent language use in subtitles, in comparison to regular written translations and non-translations, conforms to explicit linguistic norms. Additionally, we analyze which effect different contextual parameters have on the extent of norm-adherence in Belgian Dutch subtitles. We use the Dutch Parallel Corpus and the SoNaR Corpus, and we analyze the data by means of profile-based correspondence analysis, yielding a visualization of norm-adherence distances between the different translation modes and non-translations. The results reveal that the parameters speaker type and source language significantly affect the degree of linguistic normadherence, whereas program genre has no influence. It is also shown that norm-adherence in subtitles holds a middle position between written translations and non-translations, which is explained in terms of target audience and communicative risk.
The research objective is to disclose the subject matter of speech therapy work focused on fluidity speech formation of preschool age children, suffering stutter. Stutter is a difficult disorder of articulation organs such that the tempo-rhythmical organisation of statements is distressed that leads to defects and failures of dialogue system, negatively influences on individual development of the child; more specifically it generates the mental stratifications, specific features of emotional-volitional sphere, and causes undesirable qualities of character such as shyness, indecision, isolation, negativism. The author notes that the problem of early stutter correction among junior preschool-aged children considered as topical and immediate issue. Methods. Concerning the clinical, physiological, psychological and psychologic-pedagogical positions, the author summarizes theoretical framework; an experimentally-practical approbation of an author's method of speech fluidity and stutter abolition of preschool children is described. Stage-by-stage process of correction, spontaneous and non-convulsive speech formation: 1. restraint mode application in order to decrease incorrect verbal output; 2. training exercises to long phonatory and speech expiration; 3. development of coordination and movements rhythm helping to pronounce words and phrases; 4. formation of situational speech, at first consisted of short sentences, then passing to long ones; 5. training to coherent text statements. The research demonstrates data analyses of postexperimental diagnostic examination of stuttering preschool children, proving the efficiency of the author’s applied method. Scientific novelty. The research findings demonstrate a specific approach to correction and stutter abolition of preschool children. Proposed author’s approach consists of complementary to each other directions of speech therapy work which are combines in the following way: coherent speech formation corresponding to age norms; the assistance in development of lexical and grammatical means of language; development of communicative skills. Practical significance. The identified methodological recommendations while correction-pedagogical process can be used for formation of communicative children readiness to school training and gaining experience of positive interaction with people around them. Timely measures aimed at speech acquisition of stuttering preschool children can warn possible deviations in mental development and prevent many difficulties due to their social adaptation. It is especially underlined that the guarantee of successful speech therapy work on stutter correction should be aimed at active interaction of experts with teachers of preschool educational institutions and parents.
Although the distinction between positive and negative facial expressions is assumed to be clear and robust, recent research with intense real-life faces has shown that viewers are unable to reliably differentiate the valence of such expressions (Aviezer, Trope, & Todorov, 2012). Yet, the fact that viewers fail to distinguish these expressions does not in itself testify that the faces are physically identical. In Experiment 1, the muscular activity of victorious and defeated faces was analyzed. Higher numbers of individually coded facial actions--particularly smiling and mouth opening--were more common among winners than losers, indicating an objective difference in facial activity. In Experiment 2, we asked whether supplying participants with valid or invalid information about objective facial activity and valence would alter their ratings. Notwithstanding these manipulations, valence ratings were virtually identical in all groups, and participants failed to differentiate between positive and negative faces. While objective differences between intense positive and negative faces are detectable, human viewers do not utilize these differences in determining valence. These results suggest a surprising dissociation between information present in expressions and information used by perceivers.
Sometime around the year 589, the scholar Lu Deming 陸德明 presented to the Chinese imperial library a new and important work: his Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文, or "Glosses on the Classics". It contained Lu's word-by-word exegeses, glosses and phonetic annotations (in the form of fanqie 反切 phonetic spellings) of fourteen of the greatest classics of ancient China. As the Jingdian shiwen predates all known extant Chinese rhyme dictionaries, it contains a wealth of extremely valuable information for modem scholars and linguists. Unfortunately, the Jingdian shiwen has remained largely understudied, partly because it was composed in an expository style (rather than as a dictionary), and partly because until now the only proofed digital edition of the work has been the version included in the digital Siku quanshu 四庫全書 collectanea, accessible solely by subscription and via its own user interface which presents very limited search options. Our project has thus been to create a plain-text Unicode edition of the entire Jingdian shiwen (all 30 volumes), fully annotated, systematized and designed specifically for inclusion in the online Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (edoc.uchicago.edu) database so scholars will begin to be able to do targeted searches of its contents and compare Lu Deming's glosses and exegeses with those of other early Chinese dictionaries and reference works.
The article studies such phenomenon of mass communication as the language of advertisement. The author gives definitions to such concepts as the “language of advertisement”, “text of advertisement”, and makes an attempt to differentiate between these concepts. The article presents a review of Russian and translated foreign literature researching this issue, outlines scientific areas which study advertising. The article describes basic characteristics peculiar for advertisement texts: both linguistic and extra-linguistic. It considers functional characteristics of advertisement text, goals for its creation, and the mission it has – to influence a consumer using various psychological, linguistic, visual (graphic) and other means. The language of advertisement is considered as a specific linguistic structure that develops according to its on laws, breaking sometimes standard norms to emphasize influence on the addressee because it pursues its own non-linguistic objectives. The main communicative aim of an advertisement is to force the consumer to choose the products, goods or services advertised. The article tells about specifics of advertising texts which consists of using both verbal and non-verbal elements regardless of the type of advertisement. Linguistic peculiarities of advertisement texts are studied in the article. The author distinguishes a number of linguistic means used in creation of an advertisement that are grouped as phonetic, lexical, syntactic, morphological, stylistic and the other. The main consideration is given to the use of stylistic and lexical linguistic means. In particular, the paper gives examples of using such linguistic means in advertisements as metaphor, hyperbola, personification, repetition, idiomatic expressions, neologism, jargon, etc.
It is in PropBank's ARGM annotation of clausal adjuncts that sentential semantics meets discourse relation annotation in the Penn Discourse TreeBank. This paper discusses complementarities between the two annotation systems: How PropBank ARGM annotation can be used to seed annotation of additional discourse relations in the PDTB, and how PDTB annotation can be used to refine or enrich PropBank ARGM annotation.
Treebanks are essential resources for both data-driven approaches to natural language processing (NLP) and empirical linguistic researches. Developing these resources is time- and cost-consuming and requires specialized expertise. Therefore, they should be designed to be reused for different purposes. Currently, there are several dependency treebanks for some languages which are annotated in CoNLL format. For some languages, such as Persian, they are the few available linguistic resources. These treebanks are more suitable for the input of data-driven parsers, and querying linguistic data in them is not easy. In recent years, XML has been widely used for formatting treebanks, and there are various tools available for querying and annotating a linguistic croups in this format. In this paper, we present a tool for converting a dependency treebank in CoNLL format to an appropriate XML format. We designed the XML scheme to be particularly suitable for writing linguistic queries in XQuery syntax.
The paper presents the strategies and conversion principles of BulTreeBank into Universal Dependencies annotation scheme. The mappings are discussed from linguistic and technical point of view. The mapping from the original resource to the new one has been done on morphological and syntactic level. The first release of the treebank was issued in May 2015. It contains 125 000 tokens, which cover roughly half of the corpus data.
Cooperation is central to human existence, forming the bedrock of everyday social relationships and larger societal structures. Thus, understanding the psychological underpinnings of cooperation is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work using a dual-process framework suggests that intuitive processing can promote cooperation while deliberative processing can undermine it. Here we add to this line of research by more specifically identifying deliberative and intuitive processes that affect cooperation. To do so, we applied automated text analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to investigate the association between behavior in one-shot anonymous economic cooperation games and the presence inhibition (a deliberative process) and positive emotion (an intuitive process) in free-response narratives written after (Study 1, N = 4,218) or during (Study 2, N = 236) the decision-making process. Consistent with previous results, across both studies )
The article deals with the factors defining the creative potential of child speech. Special significance is assigned to heuristic mechanisms responsible for the system’s sharp “nose”, typical of a child at the stage of self-learning a language (in the period of pre-school ontogenesis). The article substantiates the idea about a close relationship between the compensatory function (compensating for the lexical deficit) and the conventional game function of child speech innovations. The experimental nature of child speech discloses the spontaneous quick wit of the child by potential semantic filling of “ready-made” and “invented” words, including the ability “to think by means of imagery analogy”. Object standards that lie at the basis of intentional or unintentional metaphors are characterized in the light of child mentality (“personification of everything”, dominants of personal meaning, etc.). In the situation of “ignoring” the norm, intuition, as a heuristic vector of child linguistic mentality, “prompts” them a non-standard solution. The article describes the strategy of word manipulation in the child’s communication with grown-ups as one of the early forms of manifestation of intention to language games. Literal interpretation of phraseological units is analyzed as the language game resource. The article presents a fragment of the vocabulary of “aphoristic literalisms” of child speech. Transition of child heuristics into a “conscious” state is considered to be the basic principle of organization of training verbal creativity.
This paper presents an overview of the linguistic analyses developed in the MULTILIT project and the processing of the oral and written texts collected. The project investigates the language abilities of multilingual children and adolescents, in particular, those who have Turkish and/or Kurdish as a mother tongue. A further aim of the project is to examine from a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective the extent to which competence in academic registers is achieved on the basis of the languages spoken by the children, including the language(s) spoken at the home, the language of the country of residence and the first foreign language. To be able to examine these questions using corpus linguistic parameters, we created categories of analysis in MULTILIT. The data collection comprises texts from bilingual and monolingual children and adolescents in Germany in their first language Turkish, their second language German und their foreign language English. Pupils aged between nine and twenty years of age produced monologue oral and written texts in the two genres of narrative and discursive. On the basis of these samples, we examine linguistic features such as lexical expression (lexical density, lexical diversity), syntactic complexity (syntactic and discursive packaging) as well as phonology in the oral texts and orthography in the written texts, with the aim of investigating the pupils’ growing mastery of these features in academic and informal registers. To this end the raw data have been transcribed by the use of transcription conventions developed especially for the needs of the MULTILIT data. They are based on the commonly used HIAT and GAT transcription conventions and supplemented with conventions that provide additional information such as features at the graphic level. The categories of analysis comprise a large number of linguistic categories such as word classes, syntax, noun phrase complexity, complex verbal morphology, direct speech and text structures. We also annotate errors and norm deviations at a wide range of levels (orthographic, morphological, lexical, syntactic and textual). In view of the different language systems, these criteria are considered separately for all languages investigated in the project.
Manually annotated corpora are indispensable resources, yet for many annotation tasks, such as the creation of treebanks, there exist multiple corpora with different and incompatible annotation guidelines. This leads to an inefficient use of human expertise, but it could be remedied by integrating knowledge across corpora with different annotation guidelines. In this article we describe the problem of annotation adaptation and the intrinsic principles of the solutions, and present a series of successively enhanced models that can automatically adapt the divergence between different annotation formats. We evaluate our algorithms on the tasks of Chinese word segmentation and dependency parsing. For word segmentation, where there are no universal segmentation guidelines because of the lack of morphology in Chinese, we perform annotation adaptation from the much larger People's Daily corpus to the smaller but more popular Penn Chinese Treebank. For dependency parsing, we perform annotation adaptation from the Penn Chinese Treebank to a semantics-oriented Dependency Treebank, which is annotated using significantly different annotation guidelines. In both experiments, automatic annotation adaptation brings significant improvement, achieving state-of-the-art performance despite the use of purely local features in training.
Emotion research has benefited from standardized sets of emotional expressions. Compared to the wealth of research on the recognition of static displays of emotion, only a few studies have examined dynamic information presentation. The Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES) is a set of emotion stimuli that contains video clips of standardized expressions of emotions (Van der Schalk et al., 2011). In the Phase 1 pilot study, psychometric properties of the ADFES were examined with a sample of 110 college students. The most accurate and reliable emotion stimuli were used in Phase 2, in which the link between blood pressure and emotion response and recognition was examined. One perspective of this link emphasizes an overall dampening of emotional responses to affect-laden stimuli (McCubbin et al., 2011), whereas another emphasizes perceiving emotions in a way that maximizes positive affect and minimizes negative affect (Jorgensen Johnson, Kolodziej, & Schreer, 1996). To compare these theoretical perspectives, Phase 2 sought to examine the relationships between resting BP and the recognition and response to dynamic facial stimuli. Analyses showed that systolic BP (β =.26; t = 2.30, p =.02) was a significant predictor of the valance rating assigned to surprise stimuli, and diastolic BP (β =.22; t = 2.02, p =.05) was a significant predictor of the arousal rating assigned to joy stimuli. Further, regression analyses revealed that diastolic BP (β = -.30; t = -2.84, p =.006) was inversely associated with the accuracy of the appraisal fear stimuli. Finally, regression analyses also revealed that systolic BP (β =.34; t = 2.92, p <.01) was a significant predictor of reaction time when viewing anger stimuli and disgust stimuli (β =.29; t = 2.59, p =.01). These results are consistent with a bias toward accentuating positive emotions while minimizing acknowledgement of negative emotions. Research directions related to response dampening versus positive response bias are discussed.
Recent years have seen a serious increase in the number and the quality of available online linguistic databases. Yet the use of databases for research purposes is still in its infancy. I intend to show how, by using different databases, one can test scientific hypotheses and how different databases can be used for different purposes. The examples will be drawn from phonology, the domain where the most comprehensive datasets are to be found. Specifically, I will examine in some details the distribution of labial-velars in Africa, since this feature has been considered typical of the 'Macro-Sudan Belt' (Clements & Rialland 2008, Guldemann 2008), hence showing an areal distribution pattern instead of a genealogical one. The following online databases have been explored: WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures), PHOIBLE, LAPSyD (Lyon-Albuquerque Phonological Systems Databases, Version 1.0.). All of them are freely available and provide maps for selected features. First I will show how these databases differ from each other: scope and quantity of data, their quality (i.e. reliability), presence vs absence of explicit curation, query interface, etc. Then the specific case of labial-velars will be explored through these databases. The geographical distribution of labial-velars is known to be restricted to an area that has been labelled ‘Macro-Sudan Belt’ (Guldemann 2008). Languages that have one or more labial-velar consonant(s) in their inventory are all situated within this area, and no language outside the area seem to exhibit any labial-velar consonant (though there probably are a handful of exceptions in the Pacific region). The use of various online databases to assess this claim yields no big surprise, if one considers the general pattern only. In the details, though, lie a few interesting things, not every one of which are captured by online databases. The most important is the local prevalence of labial-velars, i.e. their status in each language. If the actual distribution of labial-velars is the result of contact and diffusion, one would expect that their status be more marginal at the edges of the domain. The goals of this talk will therefore be: i) to present arguments to verify (or not) the above prediction; to show that even when the use of databases is not in itself enough to answer some scientific questions, they can be most helpful in suggesting directions that could have been very difficult to take without these tools.
HamleDT (HArmonized Multi-LanguagE Dependency Treebank) is a compilation of existing dependency treebanks (or dependency conversions of other treebanks), transformed so that they all conform to the same annotation style. This version uses Universal Dependencies as the common annotation style. Update (November 1017): for a current collection of harmonized dependency treebanks, we recommend using the Universal Dependencies (UD). All of the corpora that are distributed in HamleDT in full are also part of the UD project; only some corpora from the Patch group (where HamleDT provides only the harmonizing scripts but not the full corpus data) are available in HamleDT but not in UD.
Increasingly audacious steps in advertising are made to affect the customer and to encourage them to buy the advertised goods. Advertising is highly important in gaining a foothold in the business environment. Usually, the advertising texts fail to meet the norms of the standard Lithuanian language. The aim of this article is to compare the language of the advertising booklets of two pharmacies.The linguistic analysis of the advertising booklets of Camelia and Euro Pharmacy for March 2014 showed that in terms of language errors the booklets of the two pharmacies were similar, and the character of the errors was identical in both cases. The advertising booklets of both pharmacies contained lexical, syntactic, morphological, and logical errors. The advertising booklet of the Camelia pharmacy presents 121 items, which advertising descriptions contain 55.3% of language errors. The advertising booklet of the EuroPharmacy presents advertising descriptions of 103 items, where language errors comprise 57.2%. The majority of the errors detected in the advertising booklets of the two pharmacies are lexical (Camelia – 33.8%, and Euro Pharmacy – 37.3%) or syntactic (Camelia – 27.9%, and Euro Pharmacy – 37.3%). Both publications contain nearly equal numbers of lexical errors (Camelia – 17.6%, and Euro Pharmacy – 18.7%). The greatest difference was observed in the number of morphological errors (Camelia – 20.7%, and Euro Pharmacy – 5.7%).In addition to that, the name of the Camelia pharmacy is in conflict with the norms of both Lithuanian and Latin languages.
There is an obvious interest in capturing general trends in the structure of phonological systems of the world's extant languages.These may hint at overall design properties of human language, which in turn may have origins in basic human cognitive properties or characteristics inherited from the earliest human language(s).One tool that can be used to study such trends is a broadly-based crosslinguistic database on phonological systems.Four of the principal challenges to providing this will be discussed in this paper, which describes the thinking behind the compilation of the LAPSyD database and draws some comparisons with other somewhat similar projects, such as PHOIBLE, SAPhon and Segrer's African consonant inventory database.
Lexical norms, normative and usually numeric, ratings of word meaning are popular tools in research domains relating to human expression and perception of language, especially with regards to emotion. In this paper we are proposing an algorithm of psycholinguistic norm expansion capable of generating high quality norms representing aspects of language beyond emotion, including language concreteness and indicators of age and gender association. Starting from small manually annotated norm lexica, continuous norms for new words are estimated using semantic similarity and a simple linear model along eleven expression-related dimensions. The model is shown to achieve state of the art level performance of word norm estimation. To investigate the potential of these norms as analysis tools of more complex phenomena we use them to investigate the differences in therapist speech in sessions conducted by practitioners adhering to the psychoanalytic and client-centered schools of therapy.
We present evidence that individual variation in grammatical ability can be predicted by individual variation in inhibitory control. We tested 81 5-year-olds using two classic tests from linguistics and psychology (Past Tense and the Stroop). Inhibitory control was a better predicator of grammatical ability than either vocabulary or age. Our explanation is that giving the correct response in both tests requires using a common cognitive capacity to inhibit unwanted competition. The implications are that understanding the developmental trajectory of language acquisition can benefit from integrating the developmental trajectory of non-linguistic faculties, such as executive control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.)
A learner’s linguistic input is more variable if it comes from a greater number of speakers. Higher speaker input variability has been shown to facilitate the acquisition of phonemic boundaries, since data drawn from multiple speakers provides more information about the distribution of phonemes in a speech community. It has also been proposed that speaker input variability may have a systematic influence on individual-level learning of morphology, which can in turn influence the group-level characteristics of a language. Languages spoken by larger groups of people have less complex morphology than those spoken in smaller communities. While a mechanism by which the number of speakers could have such an effect is yet to be convincingly identified, differences in speaker input variability, which is thought to be larger in larger groups, may provide an explanation. By hindering the acquisition, and hence faithful cross-generational transfer, of complex morphology, higher speaker input var)
We demonstrate a substantial evidence that the word length can be an essential lexical structural feature for word evolution in written Chinese. The data used in this study are diachronic Chinese short narrative texts with a time span of over 2000-years. We show that the increase of word length is an essential regularity in word evolution. On the one hand, word frequency is found to depend on word length, and their relation is in line with the Power law function y = ax-b. On the other hand, our deeper analyses show that the increase of word length results in the simplification in characters for balance in written Chinese. Moreover, the correspondence between written and spoken Chinese is discussed. We conclude that the disyllabic trend may account for the increase of word length, and its impacts can be explained in "the principle of least effort". [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 )
Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between ico)
Purpose: This study examined the contribution of metalinguistic awareness including morphological awareness, phonological awareness and orthographical awareness to reading comprehension, and the role of reading fluency as a mediator of the effects of metalinguistic awareness on reading comprehension from grades 2 to 4. Methods: Four hundred and fifteen elementary students in China mainland were administered a test battery that included measures of morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographical awareness, reading fluency, reading comprehension and IQ. Hierarchical regression and structural equation models (SEM) were used to analyze the data. Results: Morphological awareness uniquely explained 9%, 10% and 13% variance of reading comprehension respectively from grade 2 to grade 4, however, phonological awareness and orthographical awareness did not contribute to reading comprehension; Reading fluency partially mediated the effect of morphological awareness on reading )
A handwritten signature is the final response to a complex cognitive and neuromuscular process which is the result of the learning process. Because of the many factors involved in signing, it is possible to study the signature from many points of view: graphologists, forensic experts, neurologists and computer vision experts have all examined them. Researchers study written signatures for psychiatric, penal, health and automatic verification purposes. As a potentially useful, multi-purpose study, this paper is focused on the lexical morphology of handwritten signatures. This we understand to mean the identification, analysis, and description of the signature structures of a given signer. In this work we analyze different public datasets involving 1533 signers from different Western geographical areas. Some relevant characteristics of signature lexical morphology have been selected, examined in terms of their probability distribution functions and modeled through a General Extreme Valu)
The aim of the study is to identify the relationship between notions of derivational deductibility and lexical usage of derived words in the linguistic consciousness and their actual functioning in speech. Suffixed nouns with the meaning “person” formed by productive word-formation models of quality adjectives served as language material. The study was performed on the basis of the derivatives obtained by the linguistic experiment with Russian native speakers. We also controlled the frequency of use of these words in the speech, which was obtained with the help of Google search engine. As a result of the research we have identified several patterns. Firstly, the data about the functioning of such words obtained in different experimental conditions correlated. Secondly, the nouns with the meaning of “person” significantly exceed the lexical norm for the diversity of their use in speech (in quantitative and qualitative indicators), which was reflected in codified dictionaries.
This study examines whether non-tone language listeners can acquire lexical tone categories distributionally and whether attention in the training phase modulates the effect of distributional learning. Native Australian English listeners were trained on a Thai lexical tone minimal pair and their performance was assessed using a discrimination task before and after training. During Training, participants either heard a Unimodal distribution that would induce a single central category, which should hinder their discrimination of that minimal pair, or a Bimodal distribution that would induce two separate categories that should facilitate their discrimination. The participants either heard the distribution passively (Experiments 1A and 1B) or performed a cover task during training designed to encourage auditory attention to the entire distribution (Experiment 2). In passive listening (Experiments 1A and 1B), results indicated no effect of distributional learning: the Bimodal group did not)
A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress “deafness” is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite)
En):The paper, a case study in modern French usage and style, deals with the question of the linguistic norm in Muriel Barbery's novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006).The point is to show how the self-educated main character, Renée Michel, concierge in an elegant Parisian block of flats, refutes the stereotyped image of her social position through her immense culture and her refined usage of French.The study gives a detailed survey of lexical and grammatical forms of usage in various registers of speech in Renée's linguistic performance and concludes with the idea that Renée's deep respect for the norms of standard French is a special form of revolt against the intellectual negligence characterizing the rich inhabitants always ready to show their superiority over her.