Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Lexical access is the process in which basic components of meaning in language, the lexical entries (words) are activated. This activation is based on the organization and representational structure of the lexical entries. Semantic features of words, which are the prominent semantic characteristics of a word concept, provide important information because they mediate semantic access to words. An experiment was conducted to examine the importance of semantic feature distinctiveness and feature frequency in accessing the lexical representations of young and older adults in an off-line task using features of animals. The McRae, Cree, Seidenberg, and McNorgan (2005) feature norm corpus is the basis for the selection of stimuli for the current research project. Semantic features were utilized to explore the structure of the lexicon. Stimuli varied in feature distinctiveness based on the study by McRae, et al. (2005) in 3 broad stimulus groups: Distinctive (D), Low Frequency Non-Distinctive (LFND), and Non-Distinctive High Frequency (NDHF). Participants were asked to list all of the concepts that came to mind for a given feature in an untimed task. Distinctiveness was examined between stimulus groups for the number of concepts and variety of first concepts given to the presented feature. It was found that fewer concepts were given and there was less variety in first concepts given for the distinctive features and the most concepts and greater variety of first concepts were given for the high-frequency non-distinctive features. Distinctiveness appears to vary along a continuum, supporting theories of lexical access based on activation and competition between concept words. Additionally, participant age groups were compared for the number of concepts given and the variety of first concepts given. The older adult group produced more concepts and more variety of first concepts than the younger group, in all three feature categories. These results indicate that greater (lifetime) language experience of the participants in the older group was reflected in their performance. A continued interest in semantic features is important to our understanding of the influence of features on the retrieval of semantic concepts and the changes in those retrieval processes over the lifespan.
This study investigates how bilinguals use sublexical language membership information to speed up their word recognition process in different task situations. Norwegian-English bilinguals performed a Norwegian-English language decision task, a mixed English lexical decision task, or a mixed Norwegian lexical decision task. The mixed lexical decision experiments included words from the nontarget language that required a "no" response. The language specificity of the Bokmål (a Norwegian written norm) and English (non)words was varied by including language-specific letters ("smør", "hawk") or bigrams ("dusj", "veal"). Bilinguals were found to use both types of sublexical markedness to facilitate their decisions, language-specific letters leading to larger effects than language-specific bigrams. A cross-experimental comparison indicates that the use of sublexical language information was strategically dependent on the task at hand and that decisions were based on language membership information derived directly from sublexical (bigram) stimulus characteristics instead of indirectly via their lexical representations. Available models for bilingual word recognition fail to handle the observed marker effects, because all consider language membership as a lexical property only.
One of the most urgent desiderata in the study of Middle and Mixed Arabic is that of databases, or inventories, of linguistic features. A major problem with regard to the development of such research tools is the overwhelming abundance of the material and the highly general, nature of many of its features. This chapter offers some practical and methodological ideas on inventorying such data, with the focus on the issue of norms and standards. It examines a number of very common and widespread features taken from a limited corpus of texts Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi (Dayr Mar Musa al-?aba?i), in the Syrian Desert, near the town of Nabk. Systematical references are limited to five brief accounts of the common denominators of neo-Arabic features in the domains of orthography and phonetics, morphology and syntax and, to a lesser extent, lexical and cultural items. Keywords:Dayr Mār Mūsā al-Ḥabasī; Deir Mar Musa; Inventory; linguistic features; Mixed Arabic features; neo-Arabic features; orthography; phonetics; Syria
The present article looks at a section of Estonian translation history, through the criticism and practice of translation of an extremely prolific and well-known Estonian translator and reviewer of translations Marta Sillaots (1887–1969). Touching upon the issue of the aging of translational texts as well as the norms of translational behavior in the Estonia of the first half of the 20th century, the article makes use of Peeter Torop’s concepts of the explicit poetics of translation (theoretical ideas about translation expressed in paratexts) and implicit poetics of translation (translational choices inside translations) in an attempt to map the translational thought of Marta Sillaots. Firstly, the explicit poetics of translation of Marta Sillaots is analyzed by focusing on the recurring topics and keywords in Sillaots’ translation reviews, published in a monthly literary journal Eesti Kirjandus during the 1920s and 1930s. Secondly, the implicit poetics of Marta Sillaots’ translations is analyzed based on a comparative corpus of two novels translated by Sillaots and their later editions: Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe 1936 and 1958 (edited by Henno Rajandi) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield 1937 and 1991 (edited by Lia Rajandi). Although the originals are held close at hand, the translations are approached as facts in Estonian cultural space, and thus the focus is on the translation rather than on the original. In comparison with the first edition, the changes made by the editors reveal a pattern of movement towards greater fluency by standardizing the word order, adding linking devices and making the constructions confirm to the rules of target language.The comparison of the explicit and implicit poetics of Sillaots reveals certain conformities as well as inconsistencies. In reviewing translations by other translators, Sillaots traditionally balances between the terms good and bad translation. Firstly, for her, a precondition for a good translation is the connection between the translator and the original that can be expressed by a theoretical interest of the translator in the original author or in a similarity of their literary styles. Secondly, Sillaots emphasizes the need to lead the reader to the translational text by a comprehensive foreword, something that she, as a translator, always tried to do. But most importantly, Sillaots finds it necessary for the translators to educate the Estonian readers, first by the choice of authors to translate and second by the language of translation, which has to be in accordance with the norms of grammar and style of the target language.However, the comparative analysis of her translations to their later editions shows that, although never adding any lexical items, Sillaots often used sentence structure, word order as well as minimal collocation in order to convey what, according to her, was the style of the original author. This practice distanced her translations somewhat from what is regarded as adherence to the rules of Estonian text formation. Sillaots remains an important part of Estonian translation history because of the number of her translations as well as for her poetics of translation.
Summary: This paper is devoted to the inter- and intra-linguistic comparison of comics on the basis of the volume Le trésor de Rackham le Rouge (engl. Red Rackham’s Treasure) of the Franco-Belgian Tintin series and its two Catalan versions published in 1964 and 2002, respectively. These versions are analyzed with respect to morpho-syntactic (forms of address, clitic pronoun combinations, clause-initial que and future-oriented temporal adverbial clauses introduced by quan) and lexical criteria (technical vocabulary). The study reveals that the models for the reference variety applied by the translators diverge and that the translations reflect, to a certain extent, the sociolinguistic situation of Catalan at the moment of their creation. [Keywords: Tintin; inter- and intra-linguistic translation; linguistic norm; sociolinguistics of normativization; Joaquim Ventalló]
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.
This paper has two related purposes. First, our goal is to explain the results of recent research on twentieth century British (as well as American) English, using equivalent corpora of general written (published) English known as the ‘Brown Family’ of corpora. Limiting our attention to British corpora, the ‘Brown Family’ contains three matching corpora of a million words each, the BLOB, LOB and F-LOB corpora, sampled at roughly thirty-year intervals (1931±31 years, 1961 and 1991). (A fourth corpus from 1901±3 is under development, and one-third of it will be used in the latter part of this paper.) These enable us to trace the changing history of written (published) British English over a sixty-year period. Through changes in frequency in grammatical categories and constructions across a variety of genres, we observe largely consistent patterns of change which lend themselves to explanations in terms of what may be called general stylistic trends. To these trends we give such names as colloquialization (movement towards spoken norms of usage), densification (movement towards denser or more compact expression of meaning) and democratization (the trend towards avoidance of discrimination or inequality in the linguistic treatment of individuals). Only the first two of these trends will be explored in this paper. In the second part of the paper, we show how general stylistic norms, such as are provided by the ‘Brown Family’ corpora, can be used as a reference norm against which statistical deviations identify some of the characteristic features of style of an individual author or an individual text. For this we make use of Rayson’s Wmatrix software (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/) for comparing (groups of) texts in terms of lexical, grammatical and semantic characteristics. Although the comparison is in some respects lacking in accuracy, it identifies typical style markers of an individual text, ordering them in terms of their differentness from the reference norm. It remains to be seen how far this computational technique can place the elusive notion of authorial style on an objective footing, but results so far are promising.
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.
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.
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.
LOLspeak is a complex and systematic reimagining of the English language. It is most often associated with the popular, productive and long-lasting Internet meme ‘LOLcats’. This style of English is characterised by the simultaneous playful manipulation of multiple levels of language. Using community-generated web content as a corpus, we analyse some of the common language play strategies (Sherzer 2002) used in LOLspeak, which include morphological reanalysis, atypical sentence structure and lexical playfulness. The linguistic variety that emerges from these manipulations displays collaboratively constructed norms and tendencies providing a standard which may be meaningfully adhered to or subverted by users. We conclude with a discussion of why people may choose to participate in such language play, and suggest that the language play strategies used by participants allow for the construction of complex identity.
I discuss Paolo Casalegno's objections to my views about semantic normativity as presented in my book Lexical Competence (MIT Press, 1997) and in a later paper. I argue that, contrary to Casalegno's claim, the phenomenon of semantic deference can be accounted for without having to appeal to an “objective” notion of reference, i.e. to the view that words have the reference they have independently of whatever knowledge or ability is available to or within the linguistic community. Against both Casalegno and Timothy Williamson, I argue that a semantic norm based on objective reference would be really inapplicable, even though a speaker might believe to be guided by such a norm.
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.
The author analyzes the point of view of Vodjidali Mudjmali, the author of the well-known work “Matlat-ul-Ulum va Madjma-ul-Funun” dwelling on the ways of the right usage in regard to lexical units and grammatical constructions. In the tenth chapter of his hook Vodjidali Mudjmali registers numerous cases of violation of grammatical norms and proper combinability of words, he offers 11 factors which might promote smoothness and expressiveness of speech.
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.
The study presented in this article is dedicated to a syntactic parser for Romanian. The central goal of the presented technique is to learn a model which is able to discriminate between probability for a word to be head of another word in a dependency structure corresponding to a sentence in the considered language. The model described in this paper was trained on a dependency treebank linguistic resource and is intended to be used in order to develop a dependency syntactic parser.
The article focuses on some chosen axiological issues characteristic of homilies. The problems in question are considered from the philological point of view and with reference to a transdisciplinary perspective due to the status of the object of research. In homilies, which are considered by the believers as the Word of God present in the human word, the axiological horizon is outlined precisely. The axiological sphere exhibits permanence both in the respect of the set of values it comprises and in the respect of their hierarchy, the shape of this sphere being determined by the Gospel. The transcendent values are duly conceptualized and as such they remain the measure and the source of all other valuation procedures. It is in the light of these values, above all, that moral norms are interpreted. Particular values are given a more detailed aspectual reference in separate messages, or preaching units, yet it is always done in accordance with the doctrine. The process of more detailed value description involves the means of valuation which are to a large extent unchangeable (in particular the lexical ones). The hierarchy of values which is considered as model comprises significant revaluations, as it describes as good such vital values as old age, illness or death and such material ones as poverty, and in doing so invokes the authority of Christand his axiological judgments as they appear in the Gospel. While presenting various duties of the followers of Christ, preachers interpret particular elements of values typical of the individuals (functioning in particular conditions) within the axiological space laid out by God himself for the community of believers. Homilies as such happen to be better or worse as far as their stylistic and linguistic aspects are concerned. They are also subject to the norm of multi-sector propriety, so judgments pertaining to their correctness in the above-mentioned aspects need to be formulated carefully. Translated by Dorota Chabrajska
Background: Subitizing involves recognition mechanisms that allow effortless enumeration of up to four visual objects, however despite ample resolution experimental data suggest that only one pitch can be reliably enumerated. This may be due to the grouping of tones according to harmonic relationships by recognition mechanisms prior to fine pitch processing. Poorer frequency resolution of auditory information available to recognition mechanisms may lead to unrelated tones being grouped, resulting in underestimation of pitch number. Methods, Results and Conclusion: We tested whether pitch enumeration is better for chords of full harmonic complex tones, where grouping errors are less likely, than for complexes with fewer and less accurately tuned harmonics. Chords of low familiarity were used to mitigate the possibility that participants would recognize the chord itself and simply recall the number of pitches. We found that accuracy of pitch enumeration was less than the visual system o)
We have developed EyeMap, a freely available software system for visualizing and analyzing eye movement data specifically in the area of reading research. As compared with similar systems, including commercial ones, EyeMap has more advanced features for text stimulus presentation, interest area extraction, eye movement data visualization, and experimental variable calculation. It is unique in supporting binocular data analysis for unicode, proportional, and nonproportional fonts and spaced and unspaced scripts. Consequently, it is well suited for research on a wide range of writing systems. To date, it has been used with English, German, Thai, Korean, and Chinese. EyeMap is platform independent and can also work on mobile devices. An important contribution of the EyeMap project is a device-independent XML data format for describing data from a wide range of reading experiments. An online version of EyeMap allows researchers to analyze and visualize reading data through a standard Web browser. This facility could, for example, serve as a front-end for online eye movement data corpora.
Language processing is commonly characterized by an event-related increase in theta power (4-7 Hz) in scalp EEG. Oscillatory brain dynamics underlying alcohol's effects on language are poorly understood despite impairments on verbal tasks. To investigate how moderate alcohol intoxication modulates event-related theta activity during visual word processing, healthy social drinkers (N = 22, 11 females) participated in both alcohol (0.6 g/kg ethanol for men, 0.55 g/kg for women) and placebo conditions in a counterbalanced design. They performed a double-duty lexical decision task as they detected real words among non-words. An additional requirement to respond to all real words that also referred to animals induced response conflict. High density whole-head MEG signals and midline scalp EEG data were decomposed for each trial with Morlet wavelets. Each person's reconstructed cortical surface was used to constrain noise-normalized distributed minimum norm inverse solutions for theta frequencies. Alcohol intoxication increased reaction time and marginally affected accuracy. The overall spatio-temporal pattern is consistent with the left-lateralized fronto-temporal activation observed in language studies applying time-domain analysis. Event-related theta power was sensitive to the two functions manipulated by the task. First, theta estimated to the left-lateralized fronto-temporal areas reflected lexical-semantic retrieval, indicating that this measure is well suited for investigating the neural basis of language functions. While alcohol attenuated theta power overall, it was particularly deleterious to semantic retrieval since it reduced theta to real words but not pseudowords. Second, a highly overlapping prefrontal network comprising lateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex was sensitive to decision conflict and was also affected by intoxication, in agreement with previous studies indicating that executive functions are especially vulnerable to alcohol intoxication.
The present study explored different approaches for automatically scoring student essays that were written on the basis of multiple texts. Specifically, these approaches were developed to classify whether or not important elements of the texts were present in the essays. The first was a simple pattern-matching approach called “multi-word” that allowed for flexible matching of words and phrases in the sentences. The second technique was latent semantic analysis (LSA), which was used to compare student sentences to original source sentences using its high-dimensional vector-based representation. Finally, the third was a machine-learning technique, support vector machines, which learned a classification scheme from the corpus. The results of the study suggested that the LSA-based system was superior for detecting the presence of explicit content from the texts, but the multi-word pattern-matching approach was better for detecting inferences outside or across texts. These results suggest that the best approach for analyzing essays of this nature should draw upon multiple natural language processing approaches.
In many areas of the behavioral sciences, different groups of objects are measured on the same set of binary variables, resulting in coupled binary object × variable data blocks. Take, as an example, success/failure scores for different samples of testees, with each sample belonging to a different country, regarding a set of test items. When dealing with such data, a key challenge consists of uncovering the differences and similarities between the structural mechanisms that underlie the different blocks. To tackle this challenge for the case of a single data block, one may rely on HICLAS, in which the variables are reduced to a limited set of binary bundles that represent the underlying structural mechanisms, and the objects are given scores for these bundles. In the case of multiple binary data blocks, one may perform HICLAS on each data block separately. However, such an analysis strategy obscures the similarities and, in the case of many data blocks, also the differences between the blocks. To resolve this problem, we proposed the new Clusterwise HICLAS generic modeling strategy. In this strategy, the different data blocks are assumed to form a set of mutually exclusive clusters. For each cluster, different bundles are derived. As such, blocks belonging to the same cluster have the same bundles, whereas blocks of different clusters are modeled with different bundles. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of Clusterwise HICLAS by means of an extensive simulation study and by applying the strategy to coupled binary data regarding emotion differentiation and regulation.
Context enables readers to quickly recognize a related word but disturbs recognition of unrelated words. The relatedness of a final word to a sentence context has been estimated as the probability (cloze probability) that a participant will complete a sentence with a word. In four studies, I show that it is possible to estimate local context–word relatedness based on common language usage. Conditional probabilities were calculated for sentences with published cloze probabilities. Four-word contexts produced conditional probabilities significantly correlated with cloze probabilities, but usage statistics were unavailable for some sentence contexts. The present studies demonstrate that a composite context measure based on conditional probabilities for one- to four-word contexts and the presence of a final period represents all of the sentences and maintains significant correlations (.25, .52, .53) with cloze probabilities. Finally, the article provides evidence for the effectiveness of this measure by showing that local context varies in ways that are similar to the N400 effect and that are consistent with a role for local context in reading. The Supplemental materials include local context measures for three cloze probability data sets.
The paper deals with the issues of knowledge processing and transmission via metaphorical representation. It should be noted that within the cognitive paradigm in modern linguistics metaphor is considered to be a universal mental mechanism that uses previously acquired knowledge. Through preliminary theoretical literature review one can observe a trend to regards metaphors as ubiquitous components of any discourse. Due to their omnipresence metaphors are assumed to be indeliberate, subjective and therefore ruleless. The development of the conceptual metaphor theory and implementation of metaphor modelling (Lakoff, Johnson 1980) contributed greatly to the reevoluation of their (metaphors) state-of-the-art. We assume that it is of potentially high significance to reveal regularities in metaphorization using metaphor modelling in different discourse types. There is good reason to believe that the most effective method of metaphorization sudy is the composition of a metaphors thesaurus. The language material in this thesaurus is organized on the basis of two sense complexes (denotative descriptor and significative descriptor, or metaphor model), which build the lexical meaning. The metaphor model is determined as a conceptual domain (a source domain), which contains elements connected by different semantic relations (those of function, cause, example etc.). The name of the basic concept connecting all the elements of the taxons becomes the title of the whole metaphor model. Since the metaphor model results from the non-professional categorization but not from the scientific one, the distinction of metaphor models was made using the definitions of dictionaries. The basic category proves to be metaphor schemata of the discourse, that is the set of basic metaphor models including all metaphors revealed in the particular discourse. The dominating metaphor models comprise the central part of metaphor schemata of the discourse, the less representative metaphor models - its peripheral part. Metaphor schemata of the discourse is to give uniform treatment to the many different metaphor models so that different types of discourse can be contrasted and compared. Discourse is defined as verbally mediated human action represented by purpose-built text corpus (Mishlanova S. 2004), that results in creating a concept, that is specific knowledge of differen levels of abstraction, from naive, empirical to scientific, theoretical level. The concept has a vast array of verbal representation that permit a great number of differentiations. According to Ju. Karaulov they fall into three forms: "language-system", "language-text", "languagecompetence" (Karaulov Ju. 1999). The aim of this study is metaphor modelling of two ways of verbal representation of the concept (texts and associative field) in Russian and English medical discourses. Material. The volume of the thesaurus consists of 2,500 examples of metaphors chosen by the method of entire selection from scientific medical texts in the Russian and English language; 645 examples of metaphors from medical blogs in the Russian and English language; 328 responses from 164 participants (72 Russian and 92 American participants).Results.The scientific medical discourse showed the shift of the metaphor schemata nucleus to the right (Table 1).Table 1. Metaphor schemata in the scientific medical discourse in the Russian, English and German language compared (%) Scientific medical discourse Human Being Animate Nature Inanimate Nature Social Subject Russian 15* 10 15* 60** English 7 10 15* 68** ** - dominating metaphor model * - second most representative metaphor model In the scientific medical discourse Social Subject (60% in Russian, 68% in English) is the dominating metaphor model; Inanimate Nature (15% in Russian and English) is the second most representative metaphor model; Human Being and Animate Nature are the less representative metaphor models (Mishlanova S. 2004). The medical blog analysis showed parallelism of the metaphor schemata both in the Russian and English language (Table 2).Table 2. Metaphor schemata in the Russian and English medical blogs compared (%) Popular medical discourse Human Being Animate Nature Inanimate Nature Social Subject Russian 18* 1 6 75** English 15* 2 5 78** ** - dominating metaphor model * - second most representative metaphor model The dominating metaphor model Social Subject both in the Russian and English language (75% in Russian, 78% in English) is shifted to the right while the second most representative metaphor model Human Being is shifted to the left (18% in Russian, 15% in English). To study the representation of the basic medical concepts health and disease 164 participants were asked to complete the sentences: Health is similar to..., because...; Disease is similar to..., because.... The associative field was structured in the form of the metaphor schemata (Table3).Table 3. Metaphor schemata of associative field in Russian and American participants compared (%) Popular medical discourse Human Being Animate Nature Inanimate Nature Social Subject Russian participants 34** 28* 20 20 American participants 56** 5 11 28* ** - dominating metaphor model * - second most representative metaphor model In this case the popular medical discourse showed the shift of the metaphor schemata nucleus of the Russian participants to the left. The dominating metaphor model Human Being comprises 34% in the Russian participants and 56% in American participants whereas the second most representative metaphor model differs in the Russian participants (Animate Nature - 28%) and American participants (Social Subject - 28%), the latter taking up the very right position (Mishlanova S., Polyakova S. 2009). Conclusion. Different types of the medical discourse were studied. The comparative study was undertaken to analyse various ways of verbal representation of the concept - texts and associative field ("language-competence") in the Russian and English language. The research showed common characteristics of metaphorization in texts (in our study - scientific discourse and medical blogs) whereas metaphor modelling of the associative field revealed cultural differences.
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
Reviewed by: Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing Patrick Redding Matthew Hart. 2010. Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. New York: Oxford University Press. $55.00 hc. 256 pp. Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing But Poetry is the first volume in the new Oxford series "Modernist Literature and Culture" to focus primarily on poetry and to engage with issues of transnationalism. Hart's book, and the Oxford series more generally, are representative of what Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have called the "the New Modernist Studies." Two of the most distinctive features of this methodological shift in the study of modernism are an emphasis on approaching literary objects and languages from [End Page 143] beyond the confines of the nation state and a new openness to literature's engagement with mass media. Much of the intellectual energy of Hart's book derives from the ambitious and elegant way it conceives of modernism as a transnational formation. Hart's specific intervention in the field rests on his claim that modernist vernacular poetry—often associated with the regional or the local—is in fact deeply aware of its position within multinational and global networks of language, culture, and political power. In terms of its desire to sustain a rigorously comparative angle of vision, Hart's book succeeds at almost every turn. Hart builds on the work of Anita Patterson, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Charles Pollard to call our attention to a unique constellation of vernacular poets from Scotland, the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean who are nonetheless engaged in a common intellectual project. The central figures discussed in Nations of Nothing But Poetry are Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Kamau Brathwaite, Melvin B. Tolson, Harryette Mullen, and Mina Loy, though W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot also make significant cameos. Such an eclectic list of poets indicates the synoptic nature of Hart's interests and the surprising nature of his claims about relationships across national and temporal boundaries. His ambition is nothing less than an account of twentieth-century vernacular poetry as a social force across the globe. Fittingly enough for a book concerned with acts of synthesis, Nations of Nothing But Poetry fuses theoretical models from across several disciplines. Hart draws upon major currents in modernist and postcolonial studies: theories of the vernacular and "minor" literature, "Afro-modernity," and arguments about diasporic and world literature. The writings of philosophical critics of political power—Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson—as well as leading theorists of postcolonial and diasporic thought—K. Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frantz Fanon, Dilip Gaonkar, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak—are cited frequently and with great precision in this book. Unlike some academic studies with a prominent theoretical armature, Hart also has a good ear for the vernacular. He is a careful close reader, offering nuanced and pointed remarks about the lexical and formal elements of individual lines of poetry. His discussion of Pound's translation of Women of Trachis and Mullen's Muse & Drudge were particularly insightful to this reader, casting those works in an entirely new light. While attentive to details of poetic form, Nations of Nothing But Poetry persistently focuses its attention on the relation between different scales and temporalities of social analysis. Hart conceives this book not as a series of commentaries on diverse poets across the globe, but rather as a justification [End Page 144] for fresh conceptual frameworks that can attend to the experience of 'alternative modernities.' He argues that the uneven economic, spatial, and temporal developments of modern life must be understood without reference to a single norm (historically derived from the West). For this reason, the category of 'nation' receives extended critical treatment in Hart's analysis. Modernist vernacular writing, he explains, exposes the seams between "local identities, the redoubtable nation-state form of government, and the increasingly globalized nature of twentieth-century culture" (5). "Synthetic vernacular writing" is the central concept of the book. The phrase is derived from what MacDiarmid called "Synthetic Scots," a...
Universal logical relations of identity and opposition are reflected in such linguistic phenomena as synonymy and antonymy. The correlation of these phenomena becomes mostly apparent in analysing the structures of their lexical microparadigms. This research is made on ideographic dictionaries of synonyms. In those dictionaries the synonymic rows are distributed among denotative spheres. As the research shows the principle of opposition works at different levels of conversation. It can become system-generative for the denotative sphere as a whole. It is reflected, for instance, in the group names of the sphere ''emotions'': ''luck misfortune'', ''happiness sadness'', ''hope despair'', etc. For other spheres the opposition is not a system-generating principle. However, oppositional meanings play a very important role here. For example, in the sphere ''economy'' the meaning of the opposition is presented in every group specified in oppositional synonymic rows: ''rich poor'', ''profit loss'', ''profitable unprofitable''. Inside the denotative-ideographic groups, opposition relations of synonymic rows are realized in two different ways as symmetric and asymmetric ones. In the symmetric construction every member of one row is antonymic to every member of another row and to the entire row itself. For example: profitable, favourable, lucrative, paying, advantageous (colloquial style) unprofitable, unfavourable, non-lucrative, not paying, disadvantageous. In the asymmetric construction synonymic rows expressing the opposite meaning partly intersect. Most synonymic rows with opposite meanings forming antonymic groups realise the counter type of antonymy. As a rule, these are rows of graded synonyms. Complementary type of antonymy is realised when the norm is displaced to the side of positive evaluation. It happens, for instance, in the denotative sphere ''religion'' where synonymic rows characterizing the person and their behaviour reflect the idea of a religious norm. The contrast of some synonymic rows reflecting universal cultural oppositions refers to antonymic rows. For example, the archetypical opposition ''mine yours'' is reflected in contrasting rows ''co-religionist adherent of a different faith''. Thus, the ideographic principle of lexis description gives an opportunity to analyse the correlation of different types of paradigmatic groups.
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.
Background:Some previous studies have revealed that while congenitally blind people have a tendency to refer to visual attributes ('verbalism'), references to auditory and tactile attributes are scarcer. However, this statement may be challenged by current theories claiming that cognition is linked to the perceptions and actions from which it derives. Verbal productions by the blind could therefore differ from those of the sighted because of their specific perceptual experience. The relative weight of each sense in oral descriptions was compared in three groups with different visual experience Congenitally blind (CB), late blind (LB) and blindfolded sighted (BS) adults. Methodology/Principal Findings:Participants were asked to give an oral description of their mother and their father, and of four familiar manually- explored objects. The number of visual references obtained when describing people was relatively high, and was the same in the CB and BS groups ("verbalism" in )
The article focuses on the lexical, grammatical and stylistic features of the official texts. The main stylistic features of the official texts are determined.
This paper discusses the main challenges that face literary translation and literary translators. These challenges have been divided into three main categories: Linguistic, cultural, and human. The first type of challenges comes from the nature of the discipline itself since it involves the difficult task of dealing with phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, stylistic and pragmatic issues occurring in literary texts whose language is additionally characterized by its linguistic deviation from the norm, especially in its use of figurative language. The second source of challenges stems from the fact that literary translation is primarily concerned with translating culture-bound expressions and concepts which pose one of the most difficult tasks for translators when trying to render them into a foreign language. The third type of challenges is related to the barriers facing literary translation including lack of government funding, poor literary translator training, language and cultural hegemony, cultural insularity and indifference towards translated literature. The discussion focuses on the situation of literary translation in the Arab world and in the English-speaking world with some illustrative examples and statistics..
En psychologie tout comme en traitement automatique des langues, les normes qui portent sur des proprietes semantiques des mots, comme le degre d’abstraction, l’imagerie ou la polarite, sont importantes. Ces normes ont systematiquement ete obtenues en demandant a des juges d’evaluer les mots sur des echelles, allant par exemple de tres concret a tres abstrait. Ce mode de recolte etant lent et couteux, des methodes de construction automatique ont vu le jour. Elles peuvent etre divisees en deux types: celles qui se basent sur des ressources linguistiques et celles qui se basent sur des corpus. Notre objectif est de comparer, pour une meme methode d’accroissement de normes lexicales basee sur les similarites entre les mots, l’utilisation d’un corpus et d’une ressource lexicale (WordNet) pour estimer ces similarites. Nous montrons que les similarites calculees a partir d’informations sur les cooccurrences des mots dans les textes sont plus efficaces, et ce pour 4 des 5 normes etendues. Nous montrons egalement que le choix du corpus influence peu les resultats, du moins pour des corpus generaux.
The majority of fear conditioning studies in humans have focused on fear acquisition rather than fear extinction. For this reason only a few functional imaging studies on fear extinction are available. A large number of animal studies indicate the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as neuronal substrate of extinction. We therefore determined mPFC contribution during extinction learning after a discriminative fear conditioning in 34 healthy human subjects by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. During the extinction training, a previously conditioned neutral face (conditioned stimulus, CS+) no longer predicted an aversive scream (unconditioned stimulus, UCS). Considering differential valence and arousal ratings as well as skin conductance responses during the acquisition phase, we found a CS+ related increase in oxygenated haemoglobin concentration changes within the mPFC over the time course of extinction. Late CS+ trials further revealed higher activation than CS- trials in a cluster of probe set channels covering the mPFC. These results are in line with previous findings on extinction and further emphasize the mPFC as significant for associative learning processes. During extinction, the diminished fear association between a former CS+ and a UCS is inversely correlated with mPFC activity--a process presumably dysfunctional in anxiety disorders.
The paper studies Hausa film language through the analysis of three communication strategies, namely proverbs, imperatives and forms of address. It shows that Hausa film creates a new discourse by reflecting modern and traditional Hausa society. The films preserve some accepted cultural norms of behavior and norms of communication in order to please the more conservative public. On the other hand, combination of traditional and modern Hausa lifestyle evokes changes in the discourse. The paper shows that proverbs are commonly used as communication strategy for indirectness, rather than a specialized language. It also discovers that imperatives are used as communication strategy in close relations between interlocutors (no matter what their social status is) to express the direct message. As for forms of address, traditional and borrowed terms reflect the changing style of life. The examples extracted from the Hausa films are to show how the regular grammatical and lexical means change their discourse function in new social context.
In this paper we present and justify methodological principles and syntactic criteria to design an annotation scheme for a Persian Treebank. The advantages of the proposed scheme for annotation of the Persian Treebank will be discussed. At the same time, we present the way that different types of linguistic knowledge (morphological, syntactic and semantic) are encoded in the structures of the schema. We will show how this scheme can account for many of the syntactic constructions that appear to be unique to the Persian language.
Lexical databases following the wordnet paradigm capture information about words, word senses, and their relationships. A large number of existing tools and datasets are based on the original WordNet, so extending the landscape of resources aligned with WordNet leads to great potential for interoperability and to substantial synergies. Wordnets are being compiled for a considerable number of languages, however most have yet to reach a comparable level of coverage. We propose a method for automatically producing such resources for new languages based on WordNet, and analyse the implications of this approach both from a linguistic perspective as well as by considering natural language processing tasks. Our approach takes advantage of the original WordNet in conjunction with translation dictionaries. A small set of training associations is used to learn a statistical model for predicting associations between terms and senses. The associations are represented using a variety of scores that take into account structural properties as well as semantic relatedness and corpus frequency information. Although the resulting wordnets are imperfect in terms of their quality and coverage of language-specific phenomena, we show that they constitute a cheap and suitable alternative for many applications, both for monolingual tasks as well as for cross-lingual interoperability. Apart from analysing the resources directly, we conducted tests on semantic relatedness assessment and cross-lingual text classification with very promising results.
This paper will focus on recent and near-term future developments at FrameNet (FN) and the interoperability issues they raise. We begin by discussing the current state of the Berkeley FN database including major changes in the data format for the latest data release. We then briefly review two recent local projects, "Rapid Vanguarding”, which has created a new interface for the frame and lexical unit definition process based on the Word Sketch Engine of Kilgarriff et al. (2004), and “Beyond the Core”, which has developed tools for annotating constructions, and created a sample “construction” of especially “interesting” constructions which are neither simply lexical nor easy for the standard parsers to parse. We also cover two current collaborations, FN’s part in the development of the manually annotated subcorpus of the American National Corpus, and a pilot study on aligning WordNet and FrameNet, to exploit the complementary strengths of these quite different resources. We discuss FN-related research on Spanish, Japanese, German (SALSA), Chinese and other languages, and the language-independence of frames, along with interesting FN-related work by others, and a sketch of a large group of image-schematic frames which are now being added to FN. We close with some ideas about how FrameNet can be opened up, to allow broader participation in the development process without losing precision and coherence, including a small-scale study on acquiring data for FN using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing system.
This paper investigates how to best couple hand-annotated data with information extracted from an external lexical resource to improve part-of-speech tagging performance. Focusing mostly on French tagging, we introduce a maximum entropy Markov model-based tagging system that is enriched with information extracted from a morphological resource. This system gives a 97.75 % accuracy on the French Treebank, an error reduction of 25 % (38 % on unknown words) over the same tagger without lexical information. We perform a series of experiments that help understanding how this lexical information helps improving tagging accuracy. We also conduct experiments on datasets and lexicons of varying sizes in order to assess the best trade-off between annotating data versus developing a lexicon. We find that the use of a lexicon improves the quality of the tagger at any stage of development of either resource, and that for fixed performance levels the availability of the full lexicon consistently reduces the need for supervised data by at least one half.
This comprehensive book makes many original contributions to the field of genres on the web. The identification and characterization of genres is of obvious interest to “pure” linguistics, but as this book makes clear, there are some important practical applications. Chief amongst these will be the advent of genre-aware search engines, where users will be able to specify not only their topics of interest, but the desired genre of the returned web pages, as in the WEGA search engine described in this book by Stein et al. Crowston et al. give the example of someone wishing to buy a digital camera. A traditional search engine would return pages on the topic of the specified brand of digital cameras, most of which will just be the web sites of sellers. But what the buyer really wants is information about this type of camera in certain genres only, such as product reviews and opinion-bearing blogs, which provide the opinions of people who have already bought that camera. The...
The relationship between ontologies and natural language lexicons is a hotly debated one. An ontology is a formalized system of concepts (potentially of a specific domain) and the relations these concepts entertain. A lexicon, on the other hand, is the language component that contains the conventionalized knowledge of natural language speakers about lexical items (mostly words, but also morphemes and idioms). Ontologies ‘operate’ on the conceptual level, lexicons on the linguistic level. Ontologies systematize and relate concepts, lexicons systematize and relate words and other lexical items. However, as semantic relations between lexical items reflect meaning relatedness and meaning is essentially conceptual, both notions appear to be very close to one another (and are often wrongly used interchangeably). The interplay of and mapping between ontologies and lexical resources is therefore a vital and challenging field of research, one which has gained additional momentum and importance...
Many research questions require a within-class object recognition task matched for general cognitive requirements with a face recognition task. If the object task also has high internal reliability, it can improve accuracy and power in group analyses (e.g., mean inversion effects for faces vs. objects), individual-difference studies (e.g., correlations between certain perceptual abilities and face/object recognition), and case studies in neuropsychology (e.g., whether a prosopagnosic shows a face-specific or object-general deficit). Here, we present such a task. Our Cambridge Car Memory Test (CCMT) was matched in format to the established Cambridge Face Memory Test, requiring recognition of exemplars across view and lighting change. We tested 153 young adults (93 female). Results showed high reliability (Cronbach's alpha = .84) and a range of scores suitable both for normal-range individual-difference studies and, potentially, for diagnosis of impairment. The mean for males was much higher than the mean for females. We demonstrate independence between face memory and car memory (dissociation based on sex, plus a modest correlation between the two), including where participants have high relative expertise with cars. We also show that expertise with real car makes and models of the era used in the test significantly predicts CCMT performance. Surprisingly, however, regression analyses imply that there is an effect of sex per se on the CCMT that is not attributable to a stereotypical male advantage in car expertise.
The Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo) was introduced to evaluate pragmatic abilities in patients with cerebral lesions. The battery is organized into five evaluation scales focusing on separate components of pragmatic competence. In the present study, we present normative data for individuals 15–75 years of age (N = 300). The sample was stratified by age, sex, and years of education, according to Italian National Institute of Statistics indications in order to be representative of the general national population. Since performance on the ABaCo decreases with age and lower years of education, the norms were stratified for both age and education. The ABaCo is a valuable tool in clinical practice; the normative data provided here will enable clinicians to determine different kinds and specific levels of communicative impairments more precisely.
Because of wide disparities in college students’ math knowledge—that is, their math achievement—studies of cognitive processing in math tasks also need to assess their individual level of math achievement. For many research settings, however, using existing math achievement tests is either too costly or too time consuming. To solve this dilemma, we present three brief tests of math achievement here, two drawn from the Wide Range Achievement Test and one composed of noncopyrighted items. All three correlated substantially with the full achievement test and with math anxiety, our original focus, and all show acceptable to excellent reliability. When lengthy testing is not feasible, one of these brief tests can be substituted.
The measurement of executive function has a long history in clinical and experimental neuropsychology. The goal of the present report was to determine the profile of behavior across the lifespan on four computerized measures of executive function contained in the recently developed Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL) test battery http://pebl.sourceforge.net/ and evaluate whether this pattern is comparable to data previously obtained with the non-PEBL versions of these tests. Participants (N = 1,223; ages, 5–89 years) completed the PEBL Trail Making Test (pTMT), the Wisconsin Card Sort Test (pWCST; Berg, Journal of General Psychology, 39, 15–22, 1948; Grant & Berg, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 404–411, 1948), the Tower of London (pToL), or a time estimation task (Time-Wall). Age-related effects were found over all four tests, especially as age increased from young childhood through adulthood. For several tests and measures (including pToL and pTMT), age-related slowing was found as age increased in adulthood. Together, these findings indicate that the PEBL tests provide valid and versatile new research tools for measuring executive functions.
Psychologists, psycholinguists, and other researchers using language stimuli have been struggling for more than 30 years with the problem of how to analyze experimental data that contain two crossed random effects (items and participants). The classical analysis of variance does not apply; alternatives have been proposed but have failed to catch on, and a statistically unsatisfactory procedure of using two approximations (known as F 1 and F 2) has become the standard. A simple and elegant solution using mixed model analysis has been available for 15 years, and recent improvements in statistical software have made mixed models analysis widely available. The aim of this article is to increase the use of mixed models by giving a concise practical introduction and by giving clear directions for undertaking the analysis in the most popular statistical packages. The article also introduces the djmixed add-on package for SPSS, which makes entering the models and reporting their results as straightforward as possible.
Infants begin to segment novel words from speech by 7.5 months, demonstrating an ability to track, encode and retrieve words in the context of larger units. Although it is presumed that word recognition at this stage is a prerequisite to constructing a vocabulary, the continuity between these stages of development has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The goal of the present study is to investigate whether infant word segmentation skills are indeed related to later lexical development. Two word segmentation tasks, varying in complexity, were administered in infancy and related to childhood outcome measures. Outcome measures consisted of age-normed productive vocabulary percentiles and a measure of cognitive development. Results demonstrated a strong degree of association between infant word segmentation abilities at 7 months and productive vocabulary size at 24 months. In addition, outcome groups, as defined by median vocabulary size and growth trajectories at 24 months, showed distinct word segmentation abilities as infants. These findings provide the first prospective evidence supporting the predictive validity of infant word segmentation tasks and suggest that they are indeed associated with mature word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxzLi5oLZQ8.
Palmerston Island is a tiny isolated community in the Pacific. Over the past 140 years it has developed a unique linguistic and cultural identity, influenced by England, the Cook Islands, and more recently New Zealand. The islanders strongly identify with England and consider themselves very different from the rest of the Cook Islands, to which Palmerston Island officially belongs. This paper explores the relationship between Palmerston Islanders� conceptions of themselves and their linguistic ideologies. It is shown that the construction of linguistic and social norms is not entirely subconscious: the community is aware of the different origins of lexical items, and the cultural and social affiliations signalled by different linguistic choices. Subconscious co-evolution of culture and language also takes place and appears likely to be responsible for the substrate influences of Cook Island M�ori in both realms.