Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
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.
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.
Orthographic neighborhood size (N size) effect in Chinese character naming has been studied in adults. In the present study, we aimed to explore the developmental characteristics of Chinese N size effect. One hundred and seventeen students (40 from the 3rd grade with mean age of 9 years; 40 from the 5th grade with mean age of 11 years; 37 from the 7th grade with mean age of 13 years) were recruited in the study. A naming task of Chinese characters was adopted to elucidate Nsize- effect development. Reaction times and error rates were recorded. Results showed that children in the 3rd grade named characters from large neighborhoods faster than named those from small neighborhoods, revealing a facilitatory N size effect; the 5th graders showed null N size effect; while the 7th graders showed an inhibitory N size effect, with longer reaction times for the characters from large neighborhoods than for those from small neighborhoods. The change from facilitation to inhibition of neighborhood)
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.
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)
Watson, C. 2012. Tradition and Translation: Maciej Stryjkowski's Polish Chronicle in Seventeenth-Century Russian Manuscripts. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Slavica Upsaliensia 46. 358 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-554-8308-1. The object of this study is a translation from Polish to Russian of the Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski’s Kronika Polska, Litewska, Żmodzka i wszystkiej Rusi, made at the Diplomatic Chancellery in Moscow in 1673–79. The original of the chronicle, which relates the origin and early history of the Slavs, was published in 1582. This Russian translation, as well as the other East Slavic translations that are also discussed here, is preserved only in manuscripts, and only small excerpts have previously been published. In the thesis, the twelve extant manuscripts of the 1673–79 translation are described and divided into three groups based on variant readings. It also includes an edition of three chapters of the translation, based on a manuscript kept in Uppsala University Library. There was no standardized written language in 17 th -century Russia. Instead, there were several co-existing norms, and the choice depended on the text genre. This study shows that the language of the edited chapters contains both originally Church Slavonic and East Slavic linguistic features, distributed in a way that is typical of the so-called hybrid register. Furthermore, some features vary greatly between Slovo. Journal of Slavic Languages and Literatures No. 53, 2012 130 manuscripts and between scribes within the manuscripts, which shows that the hybrid register allowed a certain degree of variation. The translation was probably the joint work of several translators. Some minor changes were made in the text during the translation work, syntactic structures not found in the Polish original were occasionally used to emphasize the bookish character of the text, and measurements, names etc. were adapted to Russian norms. Nevertheless, influence from the Polish original can sometimes be noticed on the lexical and syntactic levels. All in all, this thesis is a comprehensive study of the language of the translated chronicle, which is a representative 17 th -century text.
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.
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.
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.
Synonyms are usually defined as words coinciding in their core meanings. The number of common semantic features should prevail over the number of distinctive features (cf. Apresjan 2009: 539). In this research tradition, synonyms proper are defined as lexical units revealing peripheral, insignificant distinctive features. Otherwise we are dealing with near-synonyms. One task of lexical semantics is to identify and describe semantic features that distinguish between synonymic words. Conventional dictionaries are rarely capable of fulfilling this task. Exceptions are special dictionaries of synonyms such as NOSS (2004) based on a solid semantic theory. All methods of synonymy research are based on the analysis of relevant contexts, although each method focuses on specific aspects of the contextual behavior of synonyms.Within the semantic theory developed by Apresjan (1995, 2000, 2009), contexts profiling semantic differences between synonyms play the central role. If a lexical unit cannot be replaced by its (near-)synonym in a given context it proves that the synonyms are not identical semantically. This approach makes it possible to single out all relevant distinctive semantic features of every lexeme in question by analyzing diagnostic contexts.The basic idea of Fillmore’s theory of frame semantics (1982, 1985) is that the meaning of a single word cannot be understood without access both to the essential knowledge that relates to the word and its combinatorial properties. In order to describe a word’s semantics and to distinguish between (near-)synonyms, one has to study the range of its semantic and syntactic valences, i.e. its combinatorial profile. This enables us to fill the slots of corresponding frames, i.e. to postulate all obligatory and facultative participants in the situation pointed to by the lexeme in question.The third method can be labeled the constructional approach. It has been developed since large text corpora became available. Its basic assumption is that (near-)synonyms are sensitive to specific constructions. The method is based on corpus evidence (cf. Janda & Solovyev 2009, Divjak 2010, Divjak & Gries 2008). Examples are the words революция ‘revolution’ and переворот ‘coup’. Both words are sensitive to constructions [во имя N] ‘for the sake of N’ and [на благо N] ‘for the benefit of N’. In the Russian National Corpus the construction во имя революции ‘for the sake of revolution’ occurs 35 times, and на благо революции ‘for the benefit of revolution’ 2 times, whereas there are no hits for на благо переворота ‘for the benefit of coup’, and only one hit for во имя переворота ‘for the sake of coup’ dated 1880, i.e. a context that obviously does not conform to the present-day usage norms. The difference in constructional embedding can be explained by the fact that революция is directed towards noble long-term objectives, which is not the case with переворот.In our talk we will develop this approach to lexical synonymy by analyzing the constructional behavior of the words восстание ‘uprising’, бунт ‘riot’ and мятеж ‘mutiny’.
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
Principal component analysis identifies uncorrelated components from correlated variables, and a few of these uncorrelated components usually account for most of the information in the input variables. Researchers interpret each component as a separate entity representing a latent trait or profile in a population. However, the components are guaranteed to be independent and uncorrelated only when the multivariate normality of the variables is assumed. If the normality assumption does not hold, components are guaranteed to be uncorrelated, but not independent. If the independence assumption is violated, each component cannot be uniquely interpreted because of contamination by other components. Therefore, in the present study, we introduced independent component analysis, whose components are uncorrelated and independent even when the multivariate normality assumption is violated, and each component carries unique information.
Cet article constitue une version réduite de l'article "The French Social Media Bank: a Treebank of Noisy User Generated Content" (mêmes auteurs)
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.
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.
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]
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
In this talk, I will outline some of the myriad of challenges and opportunities that social media offer for natural language processing. I will present analysis of how pre-processing can be used to make social media data more amenable to natural language processing, and review a selection of tasks which attempt to harness the considerable potential of different social media services. There is no question that social media are fantastically popular and varied in form — ranging from user forums, to microblogs such as Twitter, to social networking sites such as Facebook — and that much of the content they host is in the form of natural language. This would suggest a myriad of opportunities for natural language processing (NLP), and yet much of the applied research on social media which uses language data is based on superficial analysis, often in the form of simple keyword search. This begs the question: Are NLP methods not suited to social media analysis? Conversely, is social media data too challenging for modern-day NLP? Alternatively, are simple term search-based methods sufficient for social media analysis, i.e. is NLP overkill for social media? In exploring these questions, I attempt to answer the overarching question of whether social media data is the friend or foe of NLP. I approach the question first from the perspective of what challenges social media language poses for NLP. The most immediate answer is the infamously free-form nature of language in social media, encompassing spelling inconsistencies, the free-form adoption of new terms, and regular violations of English grammar norms. Unsurprisingly, when NLP tools are applied directly to social media data, the results tend to be miserable when compared to data sets such as the Wall Street Journal component of the Penn Treebank. However, there have been recent successes in adapting parsers and POS taggers to social media data (Foster et al., 2011; Gimpel et al., 2011). Additionally, lexical normalisation and other preprocessing strategies have been shown to enhance the performance of NLP tools over social media data (Lui and Baldwin, 2012; Han et al., to appear). Furthermore, social media posts tend to be short and the content highly varied, meaning it is difficult to adapt a tool to the domain, or harness textual context to disambiguate the content. There is also the engineering challenge of real-time processing of the text stream, as much of NLP research is carried out offline with only secondary concern for throughput. As such, we might conclude that social media data is a foe of NLP, in that it challenges traditional assumptions made in NLP research on the nature of the target text and the requirements for real-time responsiveness. However, if we look beyond the immediate text content of social media, we quickly realise that there are various non-textual data sources that can be used to enhance the robustness and accuracy of NLP models, in a way which is not possible with static text corpora. For example, simple information on the author of a post can be used to develop authoradapted models based on the previous posts of the same individual (at least for users who post sufficiently large volumes of data). Links in the post can be used to disambiguate the textual content of the post, whether in the form of URLs and the content contained in the target document(s), hashtags and the content of other similarly-tagged posts, thread-
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 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.
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.
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.
The increasing number of experimental studies on second language (L2) processing, frequently with English as the L2, calls for a practical and valid measure of English vocabulary knowledge and proficiency. In a large-scale study with Dutch and Korean speakers of L2 English, we tested whether LexTALE, a 5-min vocabulary test, is a valid predictor of English vocabulary knowledge and, possibly, even of general English proficiency. Furthermore, the validity of LexTALE was compared with that of self-ratings of proficiency, a measure frequently used by L2 researchers. The results showed the following in both speaker groups: (1) LexTALE was a good predictor of English vocabulary knowledge; 2) it also correlated substantially with a measure of general English proficiency; and 3) LexTALE was generally superior to self-ratings in its predictions. LexTALE, but not self-ratings, also correlated highly with previous experimental data on two word recognition paradigms. The test can be carried out on or downloaded from www.lextale.com.
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.
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.
Student-constructed responses, such as essays, short-answer questions, and think-aloud protocols, provide a valuable opportunity to gauge student learning outcomes and comprehension strategies. However, given the challenges of grading student-constructed responses, instructors may be hesitant to use them. There have been major advances in the application of natural language processing of student-constructed responses. This literature review focuses on two dimensions that need to be considered when developing new systems. The first is type of response provided by the student—namely, meaning-making responses (e.g., think-aloud protocols, tutorial dialogue) and products of comprehension (e.g., essays, open-ended questions). The second corresponds to considerations of the type of natural language processing systems used and how they are applied to analyze the student responses. We argue that the appropriateness of the assessment protocols is, in part, constrained by the type of response and researchers should use hybrid systems that rely on multiple, convergent natural language algorithms.
The paper offers an overview of the key issues raised during the 8 years’ activity of the Multilingual Question Answering Track at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The general aim of the track has been to test both monolingual and cross-language Question Answering (QA) systems that process queries and documents in several European languages, also drawing attention to a number of challenging issues for research in multilingual QA. The paper gives a brief description of how the task has evolved over the years and of the way in which the data sets have been created, presenting also a short summary of the different types of questions developed. The document collections adopted in the competitions are outlined as well, and data about participation is provided. Moreover, the main measures used to evaluate system performances are explained and an overall analysis of the results achieved is presented.
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.
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 contains analysis of the norm concept in the base of the semantic category of the same name. The research is carried out on the material of Russian lexical units and derivatives. In the article the norm concept and the norm semantic category are considered in the aspects of quantity and quality. Some category characteristics and certain varieties of norms are described. The article consists of four parts. In the beginning of the article the norm category semantics is described and conditions for its formation are indicated. The universal category characteristics of the norm are described and the main principles of the norm semantic category are given. The universal category characteristics are systems organization, distribution, formal definition, stability, reproducibility, optimality and bilaterality. The main principles of the norm semantic category organization are employment of antonyms and evaluation. Accounting for these principles, it is possible to select four groups, indicating the norm and anomalies of lexical units. Each group is discussed in the article. In the first part of the paper the semantics of the word норма (norm, standard) and its derivates is analysed. It is established that the norm concept has quantitative and qualitative aspects. The word норма and its derivates acquire evaluation semantics when naming anomalies or when parts of phraseological units. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the semantics of the word порядок (order) and its derivates. In this part of the paper, synonyms of this word are studied. These lexical units are actively used for naming anomalies. It is conditioned by this words meaning. In the third part of the paper a comparative analysis of synonyms правильный (correct) and верный (right) and its derivates is carried out with the purpose of revealing reasons of their evaluative meanings formation. The word правильный and its derivates indicate mainly technical norms; the word верный is more connected with logical truths. The fourth part of the article contains a description of the semantics of the word лад (harmony, concord) and its derivates. The derivates generally have evaluative semantics of positive connotation and an ability to indicate a large number of various situations. In the article some types of norms are named and the role of the analysed words for these norms indications is described. In the final part of the paper specific features of the norm category characteristics in word meanings are described.
Reviewed by: Nova gramática do português brasileiro Gláucia Silva Castilho, Ataliba T. de. Nova gramática do português brasileiro. São Paulo: Contexto, 2010. Pp. 768. ISBN 978-85-7244-462-0. Innovative. The adjective, used in the preface (25), accurately describes this grammar, which does not resemble any other that I have seen. “Impressive” would be another good descriptor for this 768-page volume—not because of the number of pages, but because of its richness and its depth. This is a comprehensive volume dedicated exclusively to the grammar of Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP). Here, “grammar” does not mean a book or a discipline that dictates norms, but a set of natural rules found in spoken language. Castilho sets out to describe and explain these rules, based, in great part, on corpora of spoken BP. He does it successfully and clearly (more on this point below), but not before laying out, in chapter 1, what language and grammar are, from different points of view. In this chapter, besides explaining different theories and views of grammar, the author discusses linguistic policies for BP, not only as a first language, but also as a foreign language (calling for the Brazilian government to create an organization that could be in charge of implementing such a policy, as Instituto Camões does for Portugal or Instituto Cervantes for Spain). [End Page 181] As if an in-depth discussion of what constitutes grammar were not enough, Castilho dedicates several more chapters to different subdisciplines of linguistics. He delves into the language as a multisystem in chapter 2, in which he discusses the lexicon/lexicalization, semantics/semanticization, discourse/discursivization, and grammar/grammaticalization. Next we find a chapter on the history of BP, in which a discussion of the social history of the language is included. Chapter 4 tackles variation in BP, both geographical and social, while chapter 5 discusses conversational and textual analysis. All of these are elements not found in a traditional grammar. It is true that this is a “new grammar” as stated in the title, but it is much more than that: it is an introduction to linguistics, where the reader is not only presented with accounts based on theory, but also invited to conduct research. Castilho dedicates the last chapter (chapter 15) to a call for continuing research on BP, laying out several possible areas that might interest the reader, along with suggested texts that would jump start research in each area. The “more traditional” (28) topics in this grammar start with the sentence, which is the subject of four chapters (chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9). In these, the author examines just about everything at the sentence level: from grammatical, semantic, and discursive properties to modality and typology. Naturally, we find analyses of expected categories, such as the subject, complements, and adjuncts. However, these are presented in light of research, providing linguistic accounts of the facts related to each of these categories. The examination of the sentence is followed by chapters on the verb phrase, the noun phrase, the adjective phrase, the adverbial phrase, and the prepositional phrase. As with the other topics presented in the grammar, these chapters contain in-depth explorations carried out in light of linguistic theory. In this grammar, the solid theoretical underpinnings are illustrated with citations of relevant research that support each point discussed, always based on examples from spoken language. Throughout the book, Castilho invites the reader to continue studying each topic, providing lists of pertinent readings. All of this is done in a clear style that addresses the reader directly, as if the author were talking to her/him. Castilho’s style is truly refreshing and can make the reading quite fun—a quality not normally associated with grammar treatises. In spite of the lengthy discussions (this is not a quick reference grammar), the author’s writing style is key to the success of his explanations. Through questions that he supposes the reader might ask, he makes the reader a type of coauthor (33), thus engaging her/him in the quest for answers. Contributing to the clarity of the text are the tables that we find in most chapters...
Annotating linguistic data has become a major field of interest, both for supplying the necessary data for machine learning approaches to NLP applications, and as a research issue in its own right. This comprises issues of technical formats, tools, and methodologies of annotation. We provide a brief overview of these notions and then introduce the papers assembled in this special issue.
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 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 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.
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.
This paper explores interoperability for data represented using the Graph Annotation Framework (GrAF) (Ide and Suderman, 2007) and the data formats utilized by two general-purpose annotation systems: the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) (Cunningham et al., 2002) and the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) (Ferrucci and Lally in Nat Lang Eng 10(3–4):327–348, 2004). GrAF is intended to serve as a “pivot” to enable interoperability among different formats, and both GATE and UIMA are at least implicitly designed with an eye toward interoperability with other formats and tools. We describe the steps required to perform a round-trip rendering from GrAF to GATE and GrAF to UIMA CAS and back again, and outline the commonalities as well as the differences and gaps that came to light in the process.
The goal of the presented parallel phrase extraction algorithm is to provide rich and robust set of translation syntactic patterns. To make this approach feasible, we consider the phrase-to-phrase alignments of a bilingual treebank annotated with syntactic constituents. For the intended purpose, the extracted phrasal nodes are encoded by the syntactical information of their components, highlighting some special constructs such as the functional words.
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.
This paper is a stylistic study of the major aspects of lexis and grammar which exemplify the dialectics of genderlectal linguistics in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Hume-Sotomi’s The General’s Wife. Both texts are separated in period and culture by about a hundred and seventy eight years as well as sub genre, the former being explicitly fictional whereas the latter belongs to the genre of faction. Employing the postulations of feminine stylisticians such as Virginia Woolf, Sara Mills, Deidre Burton as well as those of French feminists such as Jacques Lacan, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, supported by Halliday’s scale and category grammar as its theoretical basis, the study appraises the major lexical and grammatical components of the ‘female sentence’ or ‘ecriture feminine’. In doing this, the research attempts to discover whether it is indeed the case that women’s writing is stylistically unique or just a deviation from men’s writing considered as the norm. On the evidence in both texts, the research concludes affirmatively that ‘ecriture feminine’ is at once unique and androgynous.
На матеріалі словотворчості поетів Рівненщини проаналізовано причини порушення мовних норм під час творення авторських лексичних інновацій як естетичних репрезентантів письменницького ідіостилю. (The article is devoted to analysis of reasons of breaking of language norms during creation of author lexical new-formations as the representatives of writer’s individual style. The investigation is based on language creation of Rivnenshchyna’s poets.)
Abstract Peace is arguably the problem of the 21st century. Peacefulness is not uniquely human, but a dearth of it among humans disproportionately threatens people and other animals around the globe. The urgent need for peace—if not immediately, everywhere, at any cost, then soon, as a pervasive norm—coincides with unprecedented scholarly attention to peace and to the implications of evolution for psychological functioning in the context of complex sociality. The time is ripe to integrate evolutionary perspectives into peace studies. Toward that end, this chapter describes potential impediments to an evolutionary peace project, provides a basic lexical and conceptual tool kit, and identifies some promising research directions.
This is a pilot study investigating the role of phrasal fixedness in the development of a standardised text type. The linguistic material comes from the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots (ECOS), consisting of samples of administrative records from 15th-century Scotland. The corpus has been searched for re-occurring lemmatic bundles, which are the indicators of emerging patterns and standardising usage in the records, developing in the context of linguistic standardisation of Scots. The findings are interpreted with regard to their semantics and function in the records, and indicate that the text type as such was not yet fully standardised in its repertoire of fixed phrases serving a specific purpose. In individual locations, however, one finds a greater degree of consistency and a tendency to develop a local norm. Similarly, in some specific textual functions the lexical fixedness may be present to a larger extent than in others.
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.
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...
The subject of the article is the actual state and functioning of modern Brasilian Portuguese language norm. The European Portuguese language norm, considered as a standard in Brasil, in the recent decades has been losing its social base, while the national (Brasilian) forms of speech are being actively recognized in grammatical and lexical descriptions.
The article covers analysis of lexical units, which represent the concept of the child in folk culture. At present dialectal cultural linguistics, called to model dialectal linguistic world-image, is quickly developing. The urgency of studying folk dialects and dialectal word's cultural meanings is caused by social aspiration for self-cognition, which among other things is achieved by means of traditional culture exploration. The present research has been based on the material of Middle Priobie dialects. The object of the research is a dialectal word, which contains a cultural component in its semantic structure. The approach to the lexical dialect system is realized through characterizing the concept of the child from the positions of cultural linguistics. The choice of this concept as the research object is caused by the fact that from the scientific point of view childhood is a particular phenomenon, which, when studied, shows the world of ''adult'' culture and makes it possible to remodel its world-view principles. In the peasants' world family is the basic community unit, which explains the village society's great attention to inter-family relationship. Families, in which parents have children together, are considered the standard. The deviation from the norm is registered by means of the language. The article covers lexical representation of three situations closely connected with the child's family status: belonging to one of the spouses only, orphanhood and illegitimacy. On traditional mind's mental level there is an opposition of related and unrelated children, which is realized in syntagmatic expansion. The ''related unrelated'' opposition is a special case of ''one's own somebody else's'' opposition, according to which everything that is not ''one's own'' or ''together'' is estranged. The idea of ''extraneity'' models stereotyped images of the unjustly oppressed stepson and stepdaughter. The denomination ''orphan'' marks a child who lost parents out of other children's mass. In folk mind the image of the orphan is closely connected with the notion of fate. Orphan's emotional deprivation is explained by his loneliness. Compassionate treatment of orphans is represented on the language level through the ability of this word to have a diminutive form and its semantic support. The natural child in traditional culture is a marginal creature by birth. Since he was born out of wedlock, outside the law, he is unprotected before the society. Negative attitude towards the woman who gave birth out of wedlock and her child is realized in abusive, insulting designations. There are also denominations formed from reputed loci of the natural child's conception or birth. Their semantics is opposed to the idea of the house as ''one's own'' space. It is remarkable that there are no particular appellations for legitimate children since legitimacy is considered as a norm and is not marked by linguistic means. Thus, the consideration of linguistic realisation of the notion of the child's family status allows us model a fragment of the native dialect speaker's value worldimage. It is possible to make a conclusion that family occupies one of the fundamental places in the world-view constants of traditional culture.