Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Theoretical linguists claim that the notorious reflexive ziji ‘self’ in Mandarin Chinese, if occurring more than once in a single sentence, can take distinct antecedents. This study tackles possibly the most interesting puzzle in the linguistic literature, investigating how two occurrences of ziji in a single sentence are interpreted and whether or not there are mixed readings, i.e., these zijis are interpretively bound by distinct antecedents. Using 15 Chinese sentences each having two zijis, we conducted two sentence reading experiments based on a modified self-paced reading paradigm. The general interpretation patterns observed showed that the majority of participants associated both zijis with the same local antecedent, which was consistent with Principle A of the Standard Binding Theory and previous experimental findings involving a single ziji. In addition, mixed readings also occurred, but did not pattern as claimed in the theoretical linguistic literature (i.e., one ziji is bo)
Grammatical agreement means that features associated with one linguistic unit (for example number or gender) become associated with another unit and then possibly overtly expressed, typically with morphological markers. It is one of the key mechanisms used in many languages to show that certain linguistic units within an utterance grammatically depend on each other. Agreement systems are puzzling because they can be highly complex in terms of what features they use and how they are expressed. Moreover, agreement systems have undergone considerable change in the historical evolution of languages. This article presents language game models with populations of agents in order to find out for what reasons and by what cultural processes and cognitive strategies agreement systems arise. It demonstrates that agreement systems are motivated by the need to minimize combinatorial search and semantic ambiguity, and it shows, for the first time, that once a population of agents adopts a strategy )
This study explored the relation between visual processing and word-decoding ability in a normal reading population. Forty participants were recruited at Arizona State University. Flicker fusion thresholds were assessed with an optical chopper using the method of limits by a 1-deg diameter green (543 nm) test field. Word decoding was measured using reading-word and nonsense-word decoding tests. A non-linguistic decoding measure was obtained using a computer program that consisted of Landolt C targets randomly presented in four cardinal orientations, at 3-radial distances from a focus point, for eight compass points, in a circular pattern. Participants responded by pressing the arrow key on the keyboard that matched the direction the target was facing. The results show a strong correlation between critical flicker fusion thresholds and scores on the reading-word, nonsense-word, and non-linguistic decoding measures. The data suggests that the functional elements of the visual system inv)
Evenks and Evens, Tungusic-speaking reindeer herders and hunter-gatherers, are spread over a wide area of northern Asia, whereas their linguistic relatives the Udegey, sedentary fishermen and hunter-gatherers, are settled to the south of the lower Amur River. The prehistory and relationships of these Tungusic peoples are as yet poorly investigated, especially with respect to their interactions with neighbouring populations. In this study, we analyse over 500 complete mtDNA genome sequences from nine different Evenk and even subgroups as well as their geographic neighbours from Siberia and their linguistic relatives the Udegey from the Amur-Ussuri region in order to investigate the prehistory of the Tungusic populations. These data are supplemented with analyses of Y-chromosomal haplogroups and STR haplotypes in the Evenks, Evens, and neighbouring Siberian populations. We demonstrate that whereas the North Tungusic Evenks and Evens show evidence of shared ancestry both in the maternal )
The body-specificity hypothesis (BSH) predicts that right-handers and left-handers allocate positive and negative concepts differently on the horizontal plane, i.e., while left-handers allocate negative concepts on the right-hand side of their bodily space, right-handers allocate such concepts to the left-hand side. Similar research shows that people, in general, tend to allocate positive and negative concepts in upper and lower areas, respectively, in relation to the vertical plane. Further research shows a higher salience of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the performance of sensorimotor tasks. The aim of the paper is to examine whether there should be a dominance of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane, not only at a sensorimotor level but also at a conceptual level. In Experiment 1, various participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds were asked to rate the words “up”, “down”, “left”, and “right”. In Experiment 2, right-handed participants from two ling)
Spoken words carry linguistic and indexical information to listeners. Abstractionist models of spoken word recognition suggest that indexical information is stripped away in a process called normalization to allow processing of the linguistic message to proceed. In contrast, exemplar models of the lexicon suggest that indexical information is retained in memory, and influences the process of spoken word recognition. In the present study native Spanish listeners heard Spanish words that varied in grammatical gender (masculine, ending in -o, or feminine, ending in -a) produced by either a male or a female speaker. When asked to indicate the grammatical gender of the words, listeners were faster and more accurate when the sex of the speaker “matched” the grammatical gender than when the sex of the speaker and the grammatical gender “mismatched.” No such interference was observed when listeners heard the same stimuli, but identified whether the speaker was male or female. This finding sug)
Background:The composite abuse scale (CAS) is a comprehensive tool used to measure intimate partner violence (IPV). The aim of the present study is to translate the CAS from English to Arabic. Methods:The translation of the CAS was conducted in four stages using a multi-method approach: 1) preliminary forward translation, 2) discussion with a panel of bilingual experts, 3) focus groups discussion, and 4) back-translation of the CAS. The discussion included a linguistic validation by a comparison of the Arabic translation with the original English by assessing conceptual and content equivalence. Findings:In all the stages of translation, there was an agreement to remove the question from the CAS that asked women about the use of objects in the vagina. Wording, format and order of the items were refined according to comments and suggestions made by the experts’ panel and focus groups’ members. The back-translated CAS showed similar wording and language of the original English version. C)
Evidence that the motor and the linguistic systems share common syntactic representations would open new perspectives on language evolution. Here, crossing disciplinary boundaries, we explore potential parallels between the structure of simple actions and that of sentences. First, examining Typically Developing (TD) children displacing a bottle with or without knowledge of its weight prior to movement onset, we provide kinematic evidence that the sub-phases of this displacing action (reaching + moving the bottle) manifest a structure akin to linguistic embedded dependencies. Then, using the same motor task, we reveal that children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI), whose core deficit affects syntactic embedding and dependencies, manifest specific structural motor anomalies parallel to their linguistic deficits. In contrast to TD children, SLI children performed the displacing-action as if its sub-phases were juxtaposed rather than embedded. The specificity of SLI’s str)
We investigated whether and how comprehending sentences that describe a social context influences our motor behaviour. Our stimuli were sentences that referred to objects having different connotations (e.g., attractive/ugly vs. smooth/prickly) and that could be directed towards the self or towards “another person” target (e.g., “The object is ugly/smooth. Bring it to you/Give it to another person”). Participants judged whether each sentence was sensible or non-sensible by moving the mouse towards or away from their body. Mouse movements were analysed according to behavioral and kinematics parameters. In order to enhance the social meaning of the linguistic stimuli, participants performed the task either individually (Individual condition) or in a social setting, in co-presence with the experimenter. The experimenter could either act as a mere observer (Social condition) or as a confederate, interacting with participants in an off-line modality at the end of task execution (Joint condi)
This article considers dictionaries as lexical information / knowledge sources to be derived from a deeper, underlying, lexical database. These dictionary-tokens or -instantiations are inter alia specified by the users' needs. As a case in point of such a derivation meeting the needs of a multilingual society, a bidirectional bilingual learner dictionary is presented. Specific tools, such as editors with reversal function, and models, such as the hub-and-spoke model, are discussed as means to function within the lexicographical infrastructure of a multilingual society.
Online content analysis employs algorithmic methods to identify entities in unstructured text. Both machine learning and knowledge-base approaches lie at the foundation of contemporary named entities extraction systems. However, the progress in deploying these approaches on web-scale has been been hampered by the computational cost of NLP over massive text corpora. We present SpeedRead (SR), a named entity recognition pipeline that runs at least 10 times faster than Stanford NLP pipeline. This pipeline consists of a high performance Penn Treebank- compliant tokenizer, close to state-of-art part-of-speech (POS) tagger and knowledge-based named entity recognizer.
Empty elements (EEs) play a critical role in Chinese syntactic, semantic and discourse analysis. Previous studies employ a language-independent sentence-level approach to EE recovery, by casting it as a linear tagging or structured parsing problem. In comparison, this paper proposes a clause-level hybrid approach to address specific problems in Chinese EE recovery, which recovers EEs in Chinese language from the clause perspective and integrates the advantages of both linear tagging and structured parsing. In particular, a comma disambiguation method is employed to improve syntactic parsing and help determine clauses in Chinese. In this way, the noise introduced by sentence-level syntactic parsing and multiple EEs in the same position of a linear sentence can be well addressed. Evaluation on Chinese Treebank 6.0 shows the significant performance improvement of our clause-level hybrid approach over the state-of-the-art sentence-level baselines, and its great impact on a state-of-the-art Chinese syntactic parser.
Participants viewed dynamic facial expressions that moved from a neutral expression to varying degrees of angry, happy, or sad or from these emotionally expressive faces to neutral.A contrast effect was observed for expressions that moved to a neutral state. That is, a neutral expression that began as angry was rated as having a mildly positive expression, whereas the same neutral expression was rated as negatively valenced when it began with a smile. In Experiment 2, static expressions presented sequentially elicited contrast effects, but they were weaker than those following dynamic expressions. Experiment 3 assessed a broad range of facial movements across varying degrees of angry and happy expressions. We observed momentum effects for movements that ended at mildly expressive points (25% and 50% expressive). For such movements, affect ratings were higher, as if the perceived expression moved beyond their endpoint. Experiment 4 assessed sad facial expressions and found both contrast and momentum effects for dynamic expressions to and from sad faces. These findings demonstrate new and potent contextual influences on dynamic facial expressions and highlight the importance of facial movements in social-emotional communication.
ABSTRACT. In this article, we describe our research on wide-coverage semantics for Frenchlanguage texts and on its application to produce detailed semantic descriptions of itineraries. Using a categorial grammar semi-automatically extracted from the French Treebank and a manually constructed semantic lexicon, the resulting parser computes discourse representation structures representing the meaning of arbitrary text. The main goal of this paper is to apply and specialize this general framework of wide-coverage semantics to the spatial and temporal organization of the Itipy corpus — a set of 19th century texts discussing voyages through the Pyrenees mountains. The implemented system gives satisfying results and opens the door to the integration with specialized extensions, such as a separate module computing the discourse relations between the textual units. RÉSUMÉ. Dans cet article, nous donnons une description de notre recherche sur la sémantique à large couverture pour le français et, plus précisément, de la façon dont ces expressions sémantiques sont utilisées pour donner l’interprétation spatio-temporelle des itinéraires. En utilisant une grammaire catégorielle extraite semi-automatiquement du French Treebank et un lexique sémantique construit manuellement, l’analyseur convertit les analyses syntaxiques en DRS (discourse representation structures). Le but principal de cet article est l’application et la spécialisation de cette méthodologie générale au corpus Itipy contenant des récits de voyage du 19e siècle. La chaîne de traitement complète donne des résultats tout à fait satisfaisants et laisse l’opportunité d’y ajouter des extensions spécialisées, comme un composant qui calculerait les relations discursives entre les parties du texte.
We propose a new variant of Tree-Adjoining Grammar that allows adjunction of full wrapping trees but still bears only context-free expressivity. We provide a transformation to context-free form, and a further reduction in probabilistic model size through factorization and pooling of parameters. This collapsed context-free form is used to implement efficient grammar estimation and parsing algorithms. We perform parsing experiments the Penn Treebank and draw comparisons to Tree-Substitution Grammars and between different variations in probabilistic model design. Examination of the most probable derivations reveals examples of the linguistically relevant structure that our variant makes possible. 1
Nous présenterons les différentes couches d'annotation du treebank Rhapsodie, un corpus de français parlé richement annoté. Le corpus contient plusieurs niveaux de segmentation indépendants: en unités illocutoires pour la macrosyntaxe, en unités rectionnelles pour la microsyntaxe, en périodes, paquets intonatifs et groupes accentuels pour la prosodie. Les unités rectionnelles sont analysées en dépendance, avec un traitement fin des phénomènes d'entassements (coordination, reformulation, négo...
Large-scale unlabeled data contains abundant lexical information for NLP tasks such as Chinese word segmentation and POS tagging.This work extracted high-dimensional distributional lexical information from a largescale unlabeled Chinese corpus.An auto-encoder then performed the unsupervised dimension reduction.The learned low-dimensional lexicon features were used as new lexical features for a joint Chinese word segmentation and POS tagging task.Experiments on the Chinese Treebank 5corpus showed that the additional lexicon features improve the performance and are better than those features learned by using the principal component analysis and the k-means algorithm.
El objetivo del trabajo consiste en reutilizar el Treebank de dependencias EPEC-DEP (BDT) para construir el gold standard de la sintaxis superficial del euskera. El paso basico consiste en el estudio comparativo de los dos formalismos aplicados sobre el mismo corpus: el formalismo de la Gramatica de Restricciones (Constraint Grammar, CG) y la Gramatica de Dependencias (Dependency Grammar, DP). Como resultado de dicho estudio hemos establecido los criterios linguisticos necesarios para derivar la funciones sintacticas en estilo CG. Dichos criterios han sido implementados y evaluados, asi en el 75% de los casos somos capaces de derivar automaticamente las funciones sintacticas para construir el gold standard.
Four different patterns of biased ratings of facial expressions of emotions have been found in socially anxious participants: higher negative ratings of (1) negative, (2) neutral, and (3) positive facial expressions than nonanxious controls. As a fourth pattern, some studies have found no group differences in ratings of facial expressions of emotion. However, these studies usually employed valence and arousal ratings that arguably may be less able to reflect processing of social information. We examined the relationship between social anxiety and face ratings for perceived trustworthiness given that trustworthiness is an inherently socially relevant construct. Improving on earlier analytical strategies, we evaluated the four previously found result patterns using a Bayesian approach. Ninety-eight undergraduates rated 198 face stimuli on perceived trustworthiness. Subsequently, participants completed social anxiety questionnaires to assess the severity of social fears. Bayesian modeling indicated that the probability that social anxiety did not influence judgments of trustworthiness had at least three times more empirical support in our sample than assuming any kind of negative interpretation bias in social anxiety. We concluded that the deviant interpretation of facial trustworthiness is not a relevant aspect in social anxiety.
I am deeply grateful—certainly far more grateful than a brief response such as this can signal—to Zachary Braiterman, Marc Ellis, and Richard L. Rubenstein for having taken the time to respond to my essay. I have learned a great deal from all of them in the past, and I continue to learn from them when reading their responses. I especially thank Professor Rubenstein for correcting some of the finer points in my interpretation of his relationship with Thomas Altizer; I remain in awe of his personal closeness to someone who sees the Holocaust as a cosmic event.All of the respondents envision a radical theology that is different from what I have offered in this essay, a model that strikes them (albeit in different ways) as too ensconced in a certain contemporary understanding of tradition. Marc Ellis argues that radical Jewish theology must move “outside the rabbinic framework” that has too much pull today in determining which Jewish positions count as normatively Jewish, and move toward the prophetic. Zachary Braiterman agrees with Ellis and argues that a radical Jewish theology must not only move beyond nomos, but also goes further than Ellis in the claim that radical Jewish theology must also move beyond kindness and other forms of ethics. Indeed, for Braiterman radical Jewish theology must embody the monstrousness that lies at the core of all radicality; it is essentially an apocalyptics that can unleash all of the violent energies that have been associated with apocalyptic movements in history. Richard Rubenstein agrees with Braiterman on what radical theology must entail, yet while Braiterman finally must leave radicality behind, Rubenstein embraces it, and in so doing steps beyond Jewish theological tradition and especially the Jewish philosophical-theological tradition to which Braiterman is committed. Jewish radicalism, for Rubenstein, is no longer necessarily Jewish radical theology, since the social sciences and political theory are better tools by which to build Jewish power and avoid the horror of a second Holocaust. While Rubenstein's comments are brief, I find it worthy of note that in his self-description as an “accidental theologian” there seems to be a turn away from the call for a religious transformation of humans to “an inclusive vision appropriate to a global civilization in which Moses and Mohammed, Christ, Buddha, and Confucius all play a role” with which Rubenstein ended The Age of Triage (1983, 240).I find all of these options tempting, yet unsatisfying, although I am also well aware that my dissatisfaction is something that threatens to torpedo the sentiment behind the essay. Let me explain.Like Rubenstein, Braiterman, and Ellis, I find much lacking in the texts of modern Jewish philosophical theology that were handed down to us, texts for us to comment on (and thereby gain tenure) and then pass on to our students. What is lacking is, in a word, historicity. This too is a theme of a subcanon in twentieth-century Jewish thought, including that of Rubenstein, Fackenheim, and Arendt. But in the work of Herberg, Heschel, Rosenzweig, and even parts of Cohen and Levinas, God is described only in terms of transcendence. The task for humans (so says Jewish philosophical theology) is to assent to various divinely ordained practices that are beyond knowledge, and wait for redemption and/or death. This is the purpose of ethical action in Cohen and Levinas, of ritual action in Rosenzweig, and of a generally Sinai-centered view of the world in Herberg and Heschel. Yet how could these figures have known to assent? Perhaps there was a chain of revelation from Sinai to them; this is how Moses Mendelssohn defended the need to maintain halakhic observance in his 1783 Jerusalem. Yet if so, why would these figures’ arguments have had any effect on their audience? If a chain of revelation were authoritative, wouldn't a people have already returned to, or never left, the mitzvot? Yet if these figures were giving nonrevealed arguments for their conclusions, how could they be making arguments about a transcendent God? For these reasons, I—along with Ellis and Braiterman, and perhaps to a degree with Rubenstein—read the Jewish tradition for its currents of immanence, for the ways in which human action is understood to be expressing divine power.This is all that radicality requires: a coincidentia oppositorum between heaven and earth. It need not be politically radical. Neither need it be politically liberal, if by that word one means a code of thought determining how a polity organizes itself. But if human action—if all human action—expresses divine power, then radical theology is democratic, along the lines that Jeffrey Stout has articulated in his 2004 Democracy and Tradition and, more concretely, in his 2010 Blessed Are the Organized. It is this openness to pragmatism—and perhaps to a conversation that might never actually get around to doing anything—that I understand dismays my respondents. For a certain kind of pragmatism that takes norms as always potentially revisable, there is neither the righteousness that leads to successful protest, nor the monstrousness of upending convention, nor a secure knowledge that current immigration patterns in Europe must be stopped.And yet, I wonder how Ellis and Rubenstein are to convince their audiences. Is it obvious that the prophetic is the “originating core of Jewishness,” as Ellis suggests? Certainly, this is a problematic historical claim. Moreover, this antithesis between prophecy and mitzvot seems to me to go against the nature of the prophetic texts in general, which called the people back to the mitzvot so that God would remain with them. (If Heschel was a prophetic thinker, then his writing shows the breadth of the prophets’ goals. Take for example, his parting shot to his readers in Man's Quest for God, playing off of B. Shabbat 88a: “The mountain of history is over our heads again. Shall we renew the covenant with God?” [1954, 151].)1 If Ellis's invocation of prophecy as something opposed to the covenantal, or the legal, or the rabbinic, is to take hold of his readers—which I hope it does—then why not stress those aspects of the tradition that his opponents hold dear? The category of the “stranger” is a matter of law, after all, not of prophecy. And the first Hebrew word of Exodus 22:21, kol ‘almanah ve-yatom lo’ te‘annun (“you shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan”), lexically transgresses the ethnic boundaries that bedevil so much of Biblical law. If radical theology shows that the boundary between heaven and earth is fluid, it can also show that the boundary between the texts cited by “empire Jews” and “prophetic Jews” is just as fluid, in order to have confidence that the relationship between those Jews will not forever be antithetical. In this way and other ways, it can give reasons for why its views should be taken by the reader as authoritative. The benefit of this approach—to cite tradition whether one might happen to believe in its divine origin or not—is that it moves beyond the strictly private realm of the affect of horror, on which Rubenstein places so much emphasis in his response. This is not to say that I do not share at least the broad contours of Rubenstein's reaction to learning about the Holocaust in 1944. Yet it is the case that what strikes Rubenstein as horrifying and what strikes Ellis as horrifying are different. Why is Ellis sensitive to the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1948, and to various unjust actions of the Israeli army since that time, while Rubenstein seems less so? Why does Rubenstein seem immune to something like Ellis's deeply moving story of his friendship with the murdered Palestinian health worker Naela Ayad (Ellis 2007, 70–72)? My point is not to convert either to the other's position, but to say only that reasons must be given, and in that conversation between the two of them—in which they would make their normative commitments explicit and show which other normative commitments must therefore be included or excluded—the realm of affect would be left behind. Power would cohere with wisdom, as it did for the rabbis.For Braiterman, this simply is not enough. I am talking about kindness, in his eyes. And in a mark of the kindness that is typical of his friendship, he tells me that as much as he approves of my position, it is by no means radical. Perhaps this is true, but I would deeply hope that it is not. Recently, Braiterman's colleague Vincent Lloyd was deeply involved in activists’ attempts to get the city of Syracuse to rebudget so that it could find $120,000 per annum to keep the Ida Benderson Senior Center open for service, to between sixty and ninety people per day. These attempts failed; the center closed, and about half of the seniors once served by the center will now be served by Salvation Army programs.2 Would the activists have been successful had they been more apocalyptic, and tried to upend the order of things? Such counterfactual questions cannot be answered. Yet when the mayor of Syracuse, Stephanie Miner, refused a check that would keep the center open for two more months, it became clear that what the activists were protesting was not simply the mayor's actions, but more broadly, a notion of power that is content to refuse to give justifying reasons for its actions. This has been what “radicals” have always protested. They can only gain power when they see their interpretations of what makes a good polity as being just as well-grounded as (and actually better grounded than) the interpretations of those in power. This ethos, which I take to be the sine qua non of classical Jewish discourse about the nature of right authority, is about something more than mere kindness. Radicalism ain't what it used to be, but from that premise there is no reason to infer that it ain't radical anymore. I hope that other self-styled radical theologians might agree. Although I cannot prove this point here, I think that only on such an account of radical theology can radical theologians be effective in the public sphere.
This special section of Language Resources and Evaluation contains a selection of presentations from ICGL that focus on interoperability for lexical and semantic databases and ontologies. These resources in effect constitute the “hub” of semantic interoperability by providing means to link language resources such as corpora to common categories and concepts. As such, interoperability within and among these databases is the necessary next step to enable semantic compatibility for language data.
The present study explores the role of Pakistani English newspapers in promoting lexical innovations that deviate from the standard British norms. For this exploration, a descriptive causal comparative research was conducted in which a sample of 473 participants was selected through stratified sampling method. The participants were given an open book test based on the lexical innovations made by the newspapers. The analysis of the data shows that the readers reflected a number of lexical deviations. Thus the impact of language of newspapers was found in the form of a new variety that is Pakistani English.
Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may differ in French-learning 10-month-olds raised in bilingual as opposed to monolingual environments. Experiment 1 shows that monolinguals can discriminate stress patterns following a long familiarization to one of two patterns, but not after a short familiarization. In Experiment 2, two subgroups of bilingual infants growing up learning both French and another language (varying across infants) in which stress is used lexically were tested under the more difficult short familiarization condition: one with balanced input, and one receiving more input in the language other than French. Discrimination wa)
A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information )
In order to understand the style of the original author, the translation of the text should be the true reproduction of it. One aspect which helps translators to achieve the author style is accomplished by the translation of neologisms. Newmark (7) defined neologisms as newly coined lexical units or existing lexical units that acquire a new sense. The present study was an attempt to consider the most common translational norm and procedure ap- plied in the translation of computer neologisms from English into Persian in 2000s. To achieve the aims, a parallel corpus of computer texts was se- lected; the instances of neologisms were identified in them and compared with their Persian counterparts. The findings of the research suggested that transference and lexical synonymy were the major translational norms and transference was also the most frequent translation procedure in the transla- tion of neologisms in this specific period.
Language change takes place primarily via diffusion of linguistic variants in a population of individuals. Identifying selective pressures on this process is important not only to construe and predict changes, but also to inform theories of evolutionary dynamics of socio-cultural factors. In this paper, we advocate the Price equation from evolutionary biology and the Pó lyaurn dynamics from contagion studies as efficient ways to discover selective pressures. Using the Price equation to process the simulation results of a computer model that follows the Pó lya-urn dynamics, we analyze theoretically a variety of factors that could affect language change, including variant prestige, transmission error, individual influence and preference, and social structure. Among these factors, variant prestige is identified as the sole selective pressure, whereas others help modulate the degree of diffusion only if variant prestige is involved. This multidisciplinary study discerns the primary and co)
The objective of the present work is to show the most significant actions and results of the Cuban linguistic policy, which is directed towards increasing the standards of the culture and the linguistic knowledge of all the citizens by legitimating the high norms of the Cuban variant of the Spanish in its lexical, phonic and grammatical levels. It also aims to keep its union with the Spanish world respecting and acknowledging the diversity. Furthermore, it states the acknowledgement and respect to other languages which coexist with Spanish in the Cuban territory, through the assumption of linguistic strategies which favor everyone.
The current work aims to validate, by means of a computational model, an empirical database of free word association norms of Mexican Spanish. Specifically, this work has two main goals: (1) to detect the associated weight of word word pairs, and (2) to provide an understanding of a lexical network formed beyond an input-output word pair, similar to the mediated priming effect reported experimentally. We used the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency weighting (TFIDF) to obtain the associated weight between an input output word pair and to calculate the TFIDF-Matrix which is used as an input in the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) Model. The LSA model is a semantic representation at the lexical level that allows us to understand semantic relationships beyond input-output word pairs. Our computational model replicates and further explains previous experimental work on lexical networks.
Autori istražuju otvorena pitanja leksickoga normiranja u hrvatskoj maritimoloskoj leksikografiji. S jedne strane, hrvatska leksicka norma u 19. st. u velikoj mjeri određena je kriterijima hrvatskih vukovaca, koji su leksicku “cistocu” određivali po mjeri pripadnosti leksika ruralnim novostokavskim organskim idiomima, a s druge strane golem i izuzetno bogat maritimni leksik bio je prokazan kao tuđ, tj. kao talijanski. Na taj nacin nastala je praznina u hrvatskoj normativnoj maritimoloskoj leksikografiji koja nije ni do danas popunjena, unatoc tome sto je Anicev Rjecnik hrvatskoga jezika prvi put u znatnijoj mjeri uveo brojne hrvatske maritimizme i dao im leksicki normativni legitimitet.
This paper foregrounds one argument in Rawls's work that is crucial to his case for one, determinate, form of political economy: a property-owning democracy.1 Section one traces the evolution of this idea from the seminal work of Cambridge economist James Meade; section two demonstrates how a commitment to a property-owning democracy flows from Rawls's own principles; section three focuses on Rawls's striking critique of orthodox welfare state capitalism. This all sets the stage for an argument, presented in section four, from the complexity of economic interactions to the strategy of making markets fair in the only feasible way that they can be made fair, namely, by “patterning” their effects. Section five concludes by asking whether any scheme of this general type is a realistic form of utopianism for a society such as ours.Many early readers of A Theory of Justice took Rawls to be advocating a form of “Keynesian capitalist liberalism.”2 However, if we define a capitalist society as one where people who do not own capital work for wages paid to them by capitalists (those who exclusively hold property and other forms of capital), then Rawls's conception of a property-owning democracy would involve the rejection of capitalism. James Meade, the proximate influence on Rawls's ideas, was indeed a Keynesian. However, given the working definition of a capitalist society that I have noted, it seems that liberal Keynesianism can reasonably be characterized as anti-capitalist in both Meade's and Rawls's variants.Meade's conception of a property-owning democracy emerged when he sought new avenues for egalitarianism in Britain given that the achievements of the Attlee government of 1945 were receding into the past.3 His aim was to combine Keynesian demand management with the public ownership of natural monopolies and the institutions of a property-owning democracy. Meade further proposed educational reform, a publicly funded unit trust, and state investment funds to supply an unconditional basic income. In a break with the policies of the then Labour government, Meade believed that welfare state redistribution was a threat to overall economic efficiency. Furthermore, relying on trade unions to redress the balance between labour and capital generated constant inflationary pressure in a way that explained the perceived “failure” of post-war Keynesian demand management: [G]radually, as in our imperfectly competitive society separate groups learned to press their monopolistic bargaining powers to obtain each for itself the best possible share of the available income, the system broke down.4 Meade's new strategy for redressing the balance between labour and capital was to rely on market prices to protect individual liberties and economic efficiency, but to increase the bargaining strength of labour by giving workers capital: If private property were much more equally divided we should achieve the mixed citizen—both worker and property owner at the same time—to live in the ‘mixed economy’ of public and private enterprise. The ownership of private property could then fulfill its useful function of providing a basis for private enterprise and for individual security and independence without carrying with it the curse of social inequality as it now does.5 Rawls's adaptation of Meade's ideas contains a cleaner break with welfare state capitalism, particularly in his late, summative statement of his views in Justice as Fairness where welfare state capitalism is unequivocally described as unjust.6 In the first edition of A Theory of Justice Rawls stated that: The aim of the branches of government is to establish a democratic regime in which land and capital are widely though not presumably equally held. Society is not so divided that one small sector controls the preponderance of productive resources.7 The branches of government dealing with the economy are the Allocative branch that deals with externalities, competition, and anti-trust. The Stabilisation branch is the most Keynesian branch of government, concerned with demand management and full employment. The Transfer Branch ensures the payment of a decent social minimum compatible with economic efficiency overall, via a negative income tax. Finally, the Distributive Branch raises money for transfer and for the regulation of the top end of distributions via a flat rate expenditure tax and the imposition of inheritance tax.The upshot, then, is this: in Rawls's ideal property-owning democracy, markets operate in a context structured pervasively by fairness. The state intervenes not only to supply public goods and to counter negative externalities, but also to impose that which Rawls called “adjusted procedural justice.” Some effects are the unintended outcomes of intended behaviour; the “invisible hand” part of Rawls's view is that the market, of its nature, decentralises economic power and protects freedom of occupational choice. It does the former by protecting free association and free equality of opportunity and does the latter by giving rise to differential earnings.8The main difference between Rawls's and Meade's version of property-owning democracy, then, concerns the strategic role of progressive taxation. In the first edition of A Theory of Justice, Rawls states that steeply progressive taxes may very well be justified “given the injustice of existing institutions.”9 But in ideal theory the role of progressive taxation is minimal. Equally striking is the residual “invisible hand” role, in both Meade's and Rawls's ideal, played by markets. This is an important point to which I will return below. In order to explain why progressive taxation plays such a marginal role in the ideally just society we need a better grasp on how a property-owning democracy is justified by Rawls's principles interpreted as working together as an interlocking group.Which of Rawls's principles make the case for a property-owning democracy? All of them, but in different ways. One of the most interesting aspects of Justice as Fairness is that in his comparison of a property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism, to the detriment of the latter, Rawls interprets the build up of private concentrations of wealth permitted in welfare state capitalism as a potential threat to basic liberty. In his earlier work, Rawls had indeed conceded that on any view that has permissible inequality, the equal basic liberties would be of different worth to different people. But that thought was not troubling if people had a broadly comparable fair value in their political liberties: their ability to hold office and to participate, broadly, in the political determination of office. The political liberties, here, are the gatekeeper for the liberties as a whole.10 Martin O'Neill has objected that this argument is overdone: there are a variety of insulation strategies that a liberal democracy can pursue that can prevent accumulations of private wealth influencing the political process. So if Rawls objects to welfare state capitalism not because of bad effects that it brings about directly, but on the grounds of a general exposure to a political risk that it does not prevent, that part of his argument is implausible.11This is not the place to discuss my disagreement with O'Neill in any detail, but in fact I think that Rawls was not only right to emphasise this argument, but also that he needed to do more within the ambit of his own theory to address it.12 The measures he actually suggests to protect the fair value of the political liberties are disappointingly thin. My answer, unsurprisingly, is that Rawls is here demonstrating that his first principle of equal basic liberty, if it is to be implemented in conjunction with the fair value proviso for the political liberties, demands implementation in a property-owning democracy. The latter is the only way to prevent the concentration of private wealth that will lead to illegitimate interference with the political process.13What of the first part of the second principle, governing equality of opportunity? Here the case for a property-owning democracy is even clearer when one notes that “property” in this phrase is standing in for capital as a whole, and human capital counts as a form of capital. Fair equality of opportunity requires an adequately funded and free public education system that brings everyone's marketable talents up to their full potential, given that education is a public good not likely to be promoted in an unconstrained capitalist market. This measure, if fully implemented, would have a transformatory effect on the labour market by substantially increasing the supply of qualified labour, thus reducing the unearned rents currently accruing to the limited supply of labour for particular occupations.14I think it is important to bear in mind that this restructuring of the labour market by the full implementation of measures genuinely designed to protect the fair value of the political liberties, liberty as a whole, and the fair equality of opportunity forms the context for the introduction of the difference principle.15 The distinctive way in which Rawls makes the labour market fair, namely, by structuring the context in which it operates in order to pattern its effects has been very insightfully highlighted by Paul Smith: The idea that the equalization of property ownership would transform the labour market, by equalizing bargaining power and eliminating the economic coercion to accept drudge jobs at low pay and thus forcing employers to make all jobs attractive, all things considered, is crucial to Rawls's idea that, in a competitive labour market located in a just basic structure, income inequalities would tend just to compensate the costs of different jobs, that is, tend to equality, all things considered.16 Smith believes that this explains some of the distinctive features of Rawls's egalitarian strategy: Economic equalization is more likely and reliably to be effected, as Rawls thinks, by institutions and policies that equalize bargaining power than by an egalitarian ethos restraining the exercise of unequal bargaining power (and egalitarian institutions and their distributional results are what, if anything, could produce an egalitarian ethos).17 I will say more about this Rawlsian strategy and its underlying rationale below. But the basic idea is to structure the labour market so that what looks like the introduction of special incentives under the difference principle works under a of that make such incentives tend to be This is crucial to any to the that such incentives within that counter to and lead to Rawls's theory as a to my point about the of Rawls's principles; the case for a property-owning democracy is I would that it is by the first principle, even if it were not and it only on the with the principle of fair equality of two principles would be by an unconstrained difference principle that not operate in a context structured by the of capital implemented by a property-owning democracy. is in of for the argument that only a equality that is then by his own critique of Rawlsian incentives can be in that The introduction of the difference principle would to the first principle and the value for the basic is in order to critique of we to all three principles as as a as and making an case for a property-owning then, for the case for a property-owning democracy from within Rawls's own But was he Rawls in about the of a property-owning democracy to the welfare state capitalism with which we are most critique of welfare state capitalism as capitalism the fair value of the political liberties, and it has some for equality of the policies to achieve that are not It very inequalities in the ownership of property and natural so that the of the economy and much of political in as the welfare may be and a decent social minimum the basic a principle of to economic and social inequalities is not I think this contains an interesting of and a critique of existing social The the of the that the idea of a property-owning democracy which made it the of the political from to the idea of a property-owning democracy is a between the of private in the form of and the here is it has been to different and to the and of the ideal of property-owning view was that the of private property the of the of political some have justified private property via its to but in the case of of capital the is, with security of and the of mind that that security of in of the ideal to Meade and to One of that is particularly of is not the to the in but also the security that it them in from the that is a standing risk for on income. In our from it is the who are to at The here, not just welfare but also the James who has with how it is to be is a case where the difference between and ideal is One of of welfare state capitalism is that it welfare and the of a welfare critique seems in a currently society where who are and are in that of their that people are without it is to impose justified by the fact that welfare to and social However, to Rawls's views it that the of comparison is a just society that has implemented his principles in the form of a property-owning democracy. the of the payment of the social minimum to make a a of at what role is there for welfare state in such an Rawls other than social security in its of providing believed that there was good to welfare state as such and that the context in which they operate is because it concentrations of wealth in private A property-owning democracy, on the other in the of such concentrations of wealth just as political aim to state capitalism an context I would a are in which a society to make a democratic to a society that is just by Rawls's But I think Rawls is right to about a society an between the very and a of the well who their to be by the of and even well welfare state Rawls's ideal of a society of free and equal is not compatible with the of a of and who are not of any scheme for likely to be even if they are of a decent social This is Rawls's that welfare state capitalism the of a principle of The under welfare state capitalism live in a society that is both and to just via any feasible democratic would like to one from Rawls's to on an of argument is a very interesting strategy in Rawls that does not on a property-owning democracy in but on a general way of that is to lead to a property-owning democracy, very much like I have in mind are Rawlsian that from the and complexity of a economy that the implementation of principles of can work only by structuring the context in which market so as to impose a pattern on their Justice Fairness Rawls his own with a of the latter general up fair and for fair individual and that all outcomes the are made Rawls that this view the to individual that may fair, but which are actually by concentrations of wealth that are to equality of the fair value of the political liberties, and so is in order to we to procedural This an of which Rawls as is one Justice as focuses first on the basic structure and on the to for all equally we rely on an of between principles to and principles that to particular between and this of is and are then free to their within the of the basic structure, in the that in the social system the to are in is a point about complexity this I it Rawls is we do not a realistic on the one the context in which a market operates in order to make its effects fair, and the of each in a market one at a to the same is a an has that Smith was right to the value by as generated by the underlying of economic in society that makes This any individual in a of Smith the of in which a in economic society as all Economic a for is best explained as in the of that both to and in progressive to Smith also the differential talents and in this system as of education and that from ideas are that it is to individual productive The income that from talents is an from a of social that of the economy is by working The for an that are the of in a that is a in a of This of argument seems to of the particular form that Rawls's egalitarian strategy it is not feasible to individual market because the very idea of an individual market is a is why Rawls believed that the only way to make a market fair is to make its effects achieve that by structuring the context in which that market operates to pattern its is how a property-owning democracy think a of this of Rawls's overall strategy critique of Rawlsian special incentives to which I have this strategy to make Rawls a latter in his of to that a society that the to all would do so as the unintended effect of by that was and I think that is a if as an of the point is that if this restructuring of the market is the only feasible way to be an egalitarian then there is feasible way to a conception of as fairness. in a political economy structured in this way and their in their labour this commitment to and do not is in the phrase in the from Rawls where he notes that are free to pursue their permissible within a just also on to point of between Rawls and namely, their of can have that are not intended by any in the market. I the phrase “invisible hand” with given of of this phrase that is of But like believes that markets involve a of externalities, and some some In particular Rawls a between his first principle the basic liberties, equality of and the of a think this point is important as it has a on the between a property-owning democracy and a market Rawls his own in ideas about political economy in an economy of One of the in Rawls's between property-owning democracy and liberal is whether the latter is to a property-owning democracy as it democratic of Rawls's for a property-owning democracy on this point as a liberal Rawls was to idea that there was an function to in the and the of the democratic ideal into a place for good we most of our of argument seems to Rawls is right to the of if was an economy not to be made up of such given that they are such to The is to be in the that Rawls makes between the regime of liberty by his first principle and market It seems to that and are also that, if worker have for society as a whole, there is a rationale for giving them tax to their further and the of a they were equally to emphasise that given competitive and a regime of liberty, we can that some people will trade democratic of their for other that Rawls is a political liberal with for the of Rawls then he is to the idea that political is itself a part of the good do not have to lead in which political is one of their they have to their role as a of when it to of public this it does not then, if a works in a that does not democratic there is in the context of society as a the the political liberal people to work in that their for but it is not that a mixed economy of both worker and need have this Furthermore, there is unintended in a property-owning democracy by Paul namely, that employers are to have to more for given the supply of labour and the of in a property-owning democracy will not be on to the market by drudge jobs, and as part of making jobs will have to increase for making at work make if they do that Rawls makes between a regime of liberty and the market via explains as and we can a property-owning democracy to a of of both I not here to competitive as Rawls argument that a society as a could a and not concerned with of capital a regime of liberty we can people to trade other for the value of democratic of his so does in my any of the of political do not political all of the even democratic of where they If they to trade this value this is not to say that it is not a but that the regime of liberty by Rawls's first principle them to do need be overall of the of if it is in and more only is this of worker ownership not a point between a property-owning democracy and market it also seems to a point in of property-owning democracy. This is because the capital given to each in the latter people to more in where they to work with their on income from labour more likely to to work in a that them democratic would like to by one important to the idea of property-owning democracy and a as a for The is that all that can be by an property-owning democracy is giving people a in their own more we are to the of the It is to that the in to ownership to with in other a at The then, is this: everyone's exposure to the of the first point to make is that this view the role played in a property-owning democracy by human capital. It the way in which the of the principle of equality of opportunity requires the of of So a property-owning democracy is not just about ownership and share even if it there is the of whether the to a property-owning democracy just all to risk to the of of the in that very Rawls's is in the we are working here in ideal it will be free from the generated on the of regulation from the very concentrations of wealth that a property democracy to The role played by a of regulation in the is a The to this is that part of Meade's was a publicly unit that share ownership the of the market thus a of from its However, my main is that it is not who is to do any better in capital and that most of are in this notes the of of the public funds in the and Meade's a striking to how the capital of some of are and In I think on is the most realistic way to to make a property-owning democracy a would like to with a very much at the that would the first a property-owning democracy. The some in this with the introduction of the and the but both of were in My is much more and comparable to and for a payment of to My is but in one way more and in way more A in the is a way of people to by their with a from a of government, and private when the its are to a first a small for a capital that is I think a good place to is with the in most that do not to on the market The first is to make a state for of hold an capital for by unit by This capital is, up My is to the as part of a to the potential of a property-owning democracy for at the state would a capital on their state to and This capital like a would the form of only for limited for education enterprise the of a first property as a in a The is that and to the money at this up on a will that by an In my are up part of own underlying in the that will be adequately by the security and it brings the of to The can their capital in to an investment in The will have all the of a capital at a when it can make a difference to whether they a own will also them a of from In with the full implementation of Rawls's this will both make a property-owning democracy a and also address the of how a like this is to be
Morphological segmentation data for the METU-Sabanci Turkish Treebank is provided in this paper. The generalized lexical forms of the morphemes which the treebank previously lacked are added to the treebank. This data maybe used to train POS-taggers that use stemmer outputs to map these lexical forms to morphological tags.
The variety described here is representative of colloquial Assamese spoken in the eastern districts of Assam. Assam is a North-Eastern state of India, therefore Assamese and creoles of Assamese like Nagamese are spoken in the different North-Eastern states of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and also the neighbouring country of Bhutan. Approximately 15 million people speak Assamese in India (see Ethnologue, Gordon 2005, which lists 15,374,000 speakers including those in Bhutan and Bangladesh). In the pre-British era (until 1826), the kingdom of Assam was ruled by Ahom kings and the then capital was based in the Eastern district of Sibsagar and later in Jorhat. American missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar and in the year 1846 published a monthly periodical Arunodoi using the variety spoken in and around Sibsagar as the point of departure. This is the immediate reason which led to the acceptance of the formal variety spoken in eastern Assam (which roughly comprises of all the districts of Upper Assam). Having said that, the language spoken in these regions of Assam also show a certain degree of variation from the written form of the ‘standard’ language. As against the relative homogeneity of the variety spoken in eastern Assam, variation is considerable in certain other districts which would constitute the western part of Assam, comprising of the district of Kamrup up to Goalpara and Dhubri (see also Kakati 1962 and Grierson 1968). In contemporary Assam, for the purposes of mass media and communication, a certain neutral blend of eastern Assamese, without too many distinctive eastern features, like /ɹ/ deletion, which is a robust phenomenon in the eastern varieties, is still considered to be the norm. The lexis of Assamese is mainly Indo-Aryan, but it also has a sizeable amount of lexical items related to Bodo among other Tibeto-Burman languages (Kakati 1962), and there are a substantial number of items borrowed from Hindi, English and Bengali in recent times.
Both the ventral and dorsal visual streams in the human brain are known to be involved in reading. However, the interaction of these two pathways and their responses to different cognitive demands remains unclear. In this study, activation of neural pathways during Chinese character reading was acquired by using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. Visual-spatial analysis (mediated by the dorsal pathway) was disassociated from lexical recognition (mediated by the ventral pathway) via a spatial-based lexical decision task and effective connectivity analysis. Connectivity results revealed that, during spatial processing, the left superior parietal lobule (SPL) positively modulated the left fusiform gyrus (FG), while during lexical processing, the left SPL received positive modulatory input from the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and sent negative modulatory output to the left FG. These findings suggest that the dorsal stream is highly involved in lexical recognit)
Wordnets have been created in many languages, revealing both their lexical commonalities and diversity. The next challenge is to make multilingual wordnets fully interoperable. The EuroWordNet experience revealed the shortcomings of an interlingua based on a natural language. Instead, we propose a model based on the division of the lexicon and a language-independent, formal ontology that serves as the hub interlinking the language-specific lexicons. The ontology avoids the idiosyncracies of the lexicon and furthermore allows formal reasoning about the concepts it contains. We address the division of labor between ontology and lexicon. Finally, we illustrate our model in the context of a domain-specific multilingual information system based on a central ontology and interconnected wordnets in seven languages.
Surveys on sensitive issues provide distorted prevalence estimates when participants fail to respond truthfully. The randomized-response technique (RRT) encourages more honest responding by adding random noise to responses, thereby removing any direct link between a participant’s response and his or her true status with regard to a sensitive attribute. However, in spite of the increased confidentiality, some respondents still refuse to disclose sensitive attitudes or behaviors. To remedy this problem, we propose an extension of Mangat’s (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 56, 93–95, 1994) variant of the RRT that allows for determining whether participants respond truthfully. This method offers the genuine advantage of providing undistorted prevalence estimates for sensitive attributes even if respondents fail to respond truthfully. We show how to implement the method using both closed-form equations and easily accessible free software for multinomial processing tree models. Moreover, we report the results of two survey experiments that provide evidence for the validity of our extension of Mangat’s RRT approach.
Lexica and terminology databases play a vital role in many NLP applications, but currently most such resources are published in application-specific formats, or with custom access interfaces, leading to the problem that much of this data is in “data silos” and hence difficult to access. The Semantic Web and in particular the Linked Data initiative provide effective solutions to this problem, as well as possibilities for data reuse by inter-lexicon linking, and incorporation of data categories by dereferencable URIs. The Semantic Web focuses on the use of ontologies to describe semantics on the Web, but currently there is no standard for providing complex lexical information for such ontologies and for describing the relationship between the lexicon and the ontology. We present our model, lemon, which aims to address these gaps while building on existing work, in particular the Lexical Markup Framework, the ISOcat Data Category Registry, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) and the LexInfo and LIR ontology-lexicon models.
This paper deals with an exploration of the poetry world of E. E. Cummings’ (Edward Estlin Cummings, October 14, 1894- September 3, 1962) from a linguistic perspective. For limitations of time and space, a couple of his representative poems are selected with the purpose of conducting a stylistic analysis of his poetry in the light of discourse analysis with particular reference to lexical and syntactic features that help make Cummings’ style a peculiar example of style as deviation from the norm.
One of the fundamental elements in the economy of any novel the writer's handling of language. Before any other feature of the finished work, language the medium by means of which the writer operates his fictional in-put.There a close interconnection between form and meaning in the case of poetic language, which can be also extended to poetic prose. possible because, in both cases, meaning can be analyzed and explained only in relation to other elements of poetic organization. requirement that the components of a structure be analyzed with relation to each other, that the problems of form be constantly correlated to problems of meaning indispensable in the study of language1, and, we consider, this indispensable in the analysis of poetic prose, too.The study of expressive language deals with the description of the elements of the linguistic code that are endowed with an emotive function, that is, elements that serve to express the writer's attitude towards his reader or to the thing spoken about. The expressive elements cannot be studied outside their relation to the distinctive elements of language. In other words, this means speaking about the problem of the linguistic code in poetic language, which by extension means referring to peculiarities of the linguistic code in poetic prose. As in the case of poetry, that operates with some linguistic features which do not occur in casual language (phonemic, lexical or grammatical), poetic prose also operates with various differences on the lexical or syntactic level. Deviations from the accepted norms frequently occur in poetry, in particular, and they must be viewed as the result of manipulations of available linguistic material and of the skilful use of the multiple possibilities existent in the standard language. When speaking about a recognized standard language, any departure from the norm may be restricted to one of its levels or to some of its elements. Quite common the use of lexical items that pertain to different systems or to different strata of one system. This achieved by the introduction of dialects, archaic words, of foreignisms or of specialized, technical terms.2 Few of these are applicable in the case of Lawrence's novelistic prose; his use of non standard language and his peculiar style (in his later novels in particular) are obviously due to an original handling of the lexical strata.Our analysis here will be focused on one particular lexical device - lexical repetition - otherwise frequently exploited and peculiarly employed by Lawrence, as it one which he paradoxically makes responsible for varied poetic effects in his novels.Among the most recurrent poetic effects in his late novels, in particular, that of rhythmic pattern. According to Stankiewicz, verse is the highest form of poetic organization, differing from prose in its rhythmic pattern.3 We may say Lawrence's prose contains certain distinctive elements that are responsible for rhythmic patterns which provide a poetic quality to his prose.The purpose of our linguistic investigation twofold: on the one hand, we intend to highlight on Lawrence's peculiar use and variation of lexical elements and, on the other hand, to prove to what extent these changes or deviations from the norm constitute daring innovations.We start from the premise that any great poet the man (and Lawrence can rightly be considered one of the greatest stylists in English prose) who possesses an intuitive mastery of the rules that are obligatory within his own poetic tradition and language, but who also can manipulate these rules4, thus going far beyond the traditional linguistic norms.D.H. Lawrence had strong opinions and clear ideas about the proper use of literary language. He quite explicitly saw himself as inventing language, both in terms of the functions he expected language to perform from novel to novel, and in the ways he adapted, refined and reinvented language and linguistic forms over the years. …
The rat visual system is structured such that the large (>90 %) majority of retinal ganglion axons reach the contralateral lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and visual cortex (V1). This anatomical design allows for the relatively selective activation of one cerebral hemisphere under monocular viewing conditions. Here, we describe the design of a harness and face mask allowing simple and noninvasive monocular occlusion in rats. The harness is constructed from synthetic fiber (shoelace-type material) and fits around the girth region and neck, allowing for easy adjustments to fit rats of various weights. The face mask consists of soft rubber material that is attached to the harness by Velcro strips. Eyeholes in the mask can be covered by additional Velcro patches to occlude either one or both eyes. Rats readily adapt to wearing the device, allowing behavioral testing under different types of viewing conditions. We show that rats successfully acquire a water-maze-based visual discrimination task under monocular viewing conditions. Following task acquisition, interocular transfer was assessed. Performance with the previously occluded, “untrained” eye was impaired, suggesting that training effects were partially confined to one cerebral hemisphere. The method described herein provides a simple and noninvasive means to restrict visual input for studies of visual processing and learning in various rodent species.
Cohesion and coherence are inseparable features of any text and discourse. There are several grammatical and lexical devices by which cohesion can be reached. Conjunction is one of them and it is assigned to the intermediate — lexico-grammatical category. Usage of conjunctions and other connecting words for expressing the logic-semantic relations in different languages can vary due to different reasons. One of them is the common norms of a language and certain types of discourse that are not necessarily equally settled among languages. The analysis has been based on the purposeful selection of the scientific (linguistic) English (3articles — 28815 words) and Lithuanian (10 articles — 29421 word) articles. In order to count the average value of the units of the conjunctive relations in the articles, the quantitative measurements have been performed. The investigation of such issues requires performing an interlanguage analysis of these elements, which has shown such general trends: within the English academic discourse additive conjunction has had the largest expansion, and organizational conjunction — the smallest; conjunctive devices have been used less frequently in Lithuanian research articles; the largest index of variety of connectives in both languages belongs to additive conjunction, the lowest diversity has been demonstrated by adversative conjunctions. The analysis of connectives found in English and Lithuanian research articles has led to some certain conclusions about their use preferences in the field of linguistic academic discourse. It has been revealed that the constitutional conjunctions is the biggest (42 %) and the most variable group of all cohesion relations both in English and Lithuanian articles. The opposing conjunctions of the semantic subgroup in the English articles (27 %) is bigger than in the Lithuanian (14 %) ones. The conjunctions of reason comprise 33 % in the Lithuanian and 17 % in the English texts. The scientific discourse of both languages has expletive means of the sentence conjunctions that make the text coherent and logical.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.20.1188
In the present study we investigate the communication of different large scale brain sites during an overt language production task with state of the art methods for the estimation of EEG functional connectivity. Participants performed a semantic blocking task in which objects were named in semantically homogeneous blocks of trials consisting of members of a semantic category (e.g., all objects are tools) or in heterogeneous blocks, consisting of unrelated objects. The classic pattern of slower naming times in the homogeneous relative to heterogeneous blocks is assumed to reflect the duration of lexical selection. For the collected data in the homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions the imaginary part of coherency (ImC) was evaluated at different frequencies. The ImC is a measure for detecting the coupling of different brain sites acting on sensor level. Most importantly, the ImC is robust to the artifact of volume conduction. We analyzed the ImC at all pairs of 56 EEG channels across all frequencies. Contrasting the two experimental conditions we found pronounced differences in the theta band at 7 Hz and estimated the most dominant underlying brain sources via a minimum norm inverse solution based on the ImC. As a result of the source localization, we observed connectivity between occipito-temporal and frontal areas, which are well-known to play a major role in lexical-semantic language processes. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of investigating interactive brain activity during overt language production.
The study was carried out in the mainstream of linguistic phenomena in philology. The article is devoted to the study of the speech of the tatars, enduring in the cities of Urumqi and Kuldja of the People´s Republic of China. Studied the general characteristic of the tatar speech of China diaspora and considered the features of the use of the tatar language in the region Investigated some of the lexical phenomenon, an old vocabulary, drawing, and synonyms in the language of the China tatars. Discusses some of the phonetic phenomena in the field of substitution of vowels and changes consonants in a speech, which are directly connected with lexical norms of the tatar literary language and its dialects. The same examples as from the oral speech of the inhabitants of Kuldja and Urumqi, as well as from folklore material of the Tatar Diaspora in China. Identified preconditions of use of the tatar language, similarities and peculiarities of use of native Turkic tokens and borrowed words in the speech of the tatars, living in the PRC.
French Sign Language has a far smaller specialised lexicon than French, which poses regular problems to interpreters working between the two. Four management control sessions attended by a deaf student and interpreted for him by four professional interpreters were recorded, and the interpreters' tactics when encountering the problems of missing signs in French Sign Language ('lexical gaps') were identified, counted and analyzed. Lexical gaps were found to be numerous in the corpus. The tactics often used elements of French spoken language, in contradiction with a strong sociolinguistic norm in the French deaf community. This can be explained by the interpreters' wish to cater to the needs of the deaf student, who needed to know the French terms when taking exams, and is in line with skopos theory.
Given the contemporary trend to modular NLP architectures and multiple annotation frameworks, the existence of concurrent tokenizations of the same text represents a pervasive problem in everyday’s NLP practice and poses a non-trivial theoretical problem to the integration of linguistic annotations and their interpretability in general. This paper describes a solution for integrating different tokenizations using a standoff XML format, and discusses the consequences from a corpus-linguistic perspective.
The volume Semantic Processing of Legal Texts contains a total of thirteen papers that share the common theme of processing legal documents. One undisputable merit of the book is that of being the first collection to focus specifically on computational linguistic aspects of this task. Otherwise the papers in the collection represent a variety of topics as distinct as ontology engineering, multi-label classification, and translation quality assurance. They deal with theoretical foundations as well as commercial applications, and the authors’ affiliations range from universities to industry. The book is based on selected papers presented at the first workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (held at LREC 2008 in Marrakech) but comprises further, invited contributions.
This paper explores the lexical semantic properties of five near-synonymous Chinese words expressing the emotion of SHAME. The concept of self-construal is vital in understanding emotions such as shame as it relies on the reflections of oneself. The interdependent self-construal is a view of the self through relationship with others and it is related to the characteristics of SHAME in Chinese context. The current study carried out an in-depth examination of how interdependent self-construal shapes the shame concept in Chinese, and how features concerning "self versus others" are encoded in Chinese shame words. The "self versus others" features that we look at include cause attribution (to self vs. others), probable relevant outcome (affect self vs. others), social relations (between self and others that cause shame), social norm (personal values vs. social norms), and presence (or absence) of audience. We examine whether and how these features play a crucial role in the Chinese SHAME concept and how they contribute to the differences between the shame words in Mandarin Chinese. The features can be described as a dimension that is implicit in the denotative meaning of these words.
Existing logic-based querying tools for dependency treebanks use first order logic or monadic second order logic. We introduce a very fast model checker based on hybrid logic with operators ↓, @ and A and show that it is much faster than an existing querying tool for dependency treebanks based on first order logic, and much faster than an existing general purpose hybrid logic model checker. The querying tool is made publicly available.
The social and cultural ‘turn’ in language education of recent years has helped move language teaching and curriculum design away from many of the more rigid dogmas of earlier generations, but the issue of the roles of the learners’ first language (L1) in language pedagogy and classroom interaction is far from settled. Some follow a strict ‘exclusive target language’ pedagogy, while others ‘resort to’ the use of the L1 for a variety of purposes (see ACTFL 2008). Underlying these competing views is the perspective of the L1 as an impediment to second language learning. Following sociocultural theory and ecological perspectives of language and learning and based on the findings of research on classroom code-switching and code choice, this paper lays out an approach to the language classroom as a multilingual social space in which learners and teacher study, negotiate, and co-construct code choice norms toward the dynamic, creative, and pedagogically effective use of both the target language and the learners’ L1(s). Learner use of the L1 for the purpose of grammatical or lexical learning is also considered, and some examples for instruction are offered.
The amino acid sequences of proteins determine their three-dimensional structures and functions. However, how sequence information is related to structures and functions is still enigmatic. In this study, we show that at least a part of the sequence information can be extracted by treating amino acid sequences of proteins as a collection of English words, based on a working hypothesis that amino acid sequences of proteins are composed of short constituent amino acid sequences (SCSs) or "words". We first confirmed that the English language highly likely follows Zipf's law, a special case of power law. We found that the rank-frequency plot of SCSs in proteins exhibits a similar distribution when low-rank tails are excluded. In comparison with natural English and "compressed" English without spaces between words, amino acid sequences of proteins show larger linear ranges and smaller exponents with heavier low-rank tails, demonstrating that the SCS distribution in proteins is largely scal)