Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
In recent years, sentiment analysis (SA) has emerged as a rapidly expanding field of application and research in the area of information retrieval. In order to facilitate the task of selecting lexical resources for automated SA systems, this paper sets out a detailed analysis of four widely used sentiment lexica. The analysis provides an overview of the coverage of each lexicon individually, the overlap and consistency of the four resources and a corpus analysis of the distribution of the resources’ lexical contents in general and specialised language. This work aims to explore the characteristics of affective language as represented by these lexica and the implications of the findings for developers of SA systems.
Since 1999, the Dutch Language Union (NTU) fosters the exchange of plans and policy initiatives amongst government officials of Flanders and the Netherlands on human language technology for Dutch (HLTD). One of the outcomes is the STEVIN R&D programme for HLTD, coordinated by the NTU and funded by the Flemish and Dutch governments. STEVIN is an example of successful joint research programming. Its set-up, highlights and scientific results are presented as well as an outlook to future initiatives.
Main issues of «Russian language and language culture» course teaching for foreign students reviewed. Justified requirement of the course adoption for foreign students’ perception. Basic types of lexical mistakes in foreign students’ speech analyzed. Methods of modern Russian language lexical norms teaching proposed.
Reviewed by: Arguments as relations by John Bowers Diane Massam Arguments as relations. By John Bowers. (Linguistic inquiry monograph 58.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 239. ISBN 9780262514330. $25. We can get so comfortable with certain ideas that we forget why we hold them, until someone makes a proposal that turns things upside down: there is no D-structure, or control is raising, to mention two such proposals. John Bowers's proposal in this book fits into this category, literally turning some of our long-held views upside down. In sum, he argues that agents are merged very low, near the verb, with themes merged above them, and he explores the consequences of this idea. B's proposal appears to run counter to the Aristotelian view of sentences as consisting of a subject and a predicate [VO] (cf. Baker's 2001 verb object constraint), yet predication remains at the core of his work (Bowers 1993, 2001). The locus of predication has moved around over time. Since the VP-internal subject hypothesis (VPISH), there have been two potential sites for predication, one involving merge positions, with agent as the subject of a transitive verb, and the other involving grammatical positions, with an EPP-determined subject for the sentence. Some have suggested that the subject-predicate relation might exist only within vP in some languages (e.g. Massam 2001a), whereas B here is suggesting that what remains of D-structure is a verbal root with an upwardly extending ordered string of uniformly introduced arguments, so predication takes place only at the higher level through Agree and/or EPP. His view of argument structure evokes nonconfigurationality, in which there is also no VP, yet unlike such analyses (e.g. Jelinek 1984), for B, phrasal arguments constitute the true arguments of the clause and they are strictly ordered according to grammatical principles. B's work rests on two key points: first, that all argument structure is built through the ordered merging of functional heads, each taking a thematically specific argument in its specifier; and second, that the order of argument merge is universally fixed, with agents merging below themes. B's analysis of a basic transitive clause depends on his claim that the higher merged argument (theme) is local for the lower case relation (accusative from Voi (= Voice)), leaving the lower merged argument (agent) free to raise via EPP to PrP (Pr = Pred), and then undergo Agree with T (T = Tense), thus surfacing as the subject of the clause. His book is a set of arguments for this point of view, examining a range of constructions such as the passive (Ch. 2), affectee constructions (Ch. 3), applicative constructions (Ch. 4), and derived nominals (Ch. 5). The book also contains a brief appendix (Appendix A) that provides a compositional semantics for his analysis and another (Appendix B) that discusses the formal aspects of labeling and selection. In the rest of this review I outline each chapter of the book in turn, ending with some potential problems for B's view of argument structure. In his introductory chapter, B presents an overview of his 'radically different idea' (1) in which all arguments and modifiers are introduced uniformly by functional heads in accordance with a UNIVERSAL ORDER OF MERGE (UOM). Primary arguments are Agent, Theme, and Affectee, which are merged in this order, opposite to the norm. In addition to these arguments, there are secondary arguments (e.g. Instruments), and modifiers (e.g. Manner), also merged in accordance with the UOM. B outlines and counters the reasons why agents are traditionally merged high. His view is post-government and binding, in that syntactic structures provide the lexical semantics of the sentence, rather than being projected from it (as in Borer 2005). His approach here brings to mind construction grammar, where a given meaning is rigidly associated with a particular syntactic configuration. In the final section of this chapter B argues, against Marantz (1984), that subject idioms do exist (e.g. the lovebug bit NP, cf. Postal 2004). This chapter ends with a brief overview of the UOM and works through sample derivations of transitive, intransitive, passive, locative, [End Page 354] and expletive sentences, using...
Translation is a kind of a trial for the target language, a test of its expressive possibilities, but also an exam of the abilities and skills of a translator. Even the best translators refrained from translating “holy books”, due to the challenges of uniqueness of the form and as a precaution of potential sin and (or) blasphemy which translation can cause. However, translating the Word of God, in this case, the Qur’an, is a necessity, and for Bosniaks, it is a national mission, it testifies to their religious tradition written in Bosnian language at a given time. Therefore, translations of the Qur'an deserve a serious scientific analysis and a responsible, multifaceted research approach, about which we have not had a chance to read a lot in linguistics, in particular Bosnistics. The exceptions are the books of Dž. Latić, PhD, and his scientific and professional papers published in the Proceedings of FIS. This study comprises a corpus of four well-known Bosnian translations of the Qur’an, as follows: Besim Korkut, Mustafa Mlivo (whose authenticity is disputed, i.e. its direct translation from the Arabic original), Enes Karić and Esad Duraković. Furthermore, due to the volume of the material, objects of interest are focused on the first and thirtieth juz (first twenty and last twenty pages of translations of the Qur'an) from which all examples of specific linguistic phenomena and regularities have been taken. The main objectives of this paper are: initiation and actualisation of lexicological and general semantic research of translations of the sacred text, which are grammatically interesting and stylogenic, the research of specific lexical-semantic level of linguistic structure of the translations of the Qur'an and a scientific contribution to the study of this kind of discourse. The task of the paper is to describe, or reinterpret the theoretical principles of lexical semantics of Bosnian language by using examples from the corpus, then to affirm the Bosnian language standard by highlighting examples which contribute to the strengthening of linguistic norm in all segments. For the purpose of achieving the objectives and tasks, different methods have been used: monographic, descriptive, comparative, contrastive and lexical-stylistic method. The Qur'anic text is a real repository for stylistic interpretation as well (and not only stylistic, of course) and its literary perfection is a proof of its divine origin. In this paper, a repertoire of semantic figures – tropes, typical contexts in which they operate, their meaning and use have been noted. Stylistics, no matter how successful it is, cannot penetrate into the secret of Qur’anic ijaza (supernatural origin), “as anatomy cannot penetrate into the mystery of creation.” Keywords: tropes, lexical-semantic figures, stylem, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, periphrasis, epithet, personification, simile
Pragmatic markers are an important part of the grammar of conversation and not simply markers of disfluency. They have a number of functions that help the speaker to organize the conversation and to express feelings and attitudes. Advanced EFL learners use frequent pragmatic markers such as well. However their use of well diverges from the native speaker norm. The present study uses data from the Swedish component of the LINDSEI corpus and its native speaker counterpart (LOCNEC) to examine similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers. The overall picture is that Swedish learners overuse well, although there are considerable individual differences. Thus learners use well above all as a fluency device to cope with speech management problems but underuse it for attitudinal purposes. Pragmatic markers cannot be taught in the same way as other lexical items but it is important to discuss how and where they are used.
English periphrastic causative constructions, i.e. constructions where a causative verb like make or get controls a non-finite complement clause, have been the subject of many studies representing different theoretical frameworks, among which generative grammar (e.g. Kastovsky 1973), the universal-typological theory (e.g. Wierzbicka 1998), cognitive linguistics (e.g. Hollmann 2006) and construction grammar (e.g. Stefanowitsch 2001). Most of the time these studies have focused on the way periphrastic causative constructions are used (or should be used) by native speakers of English. Fewer studies have considered the use of these constructions by non-native speakers of English (cf. Ziegeler & Lee 2009, Gilquin 2012). In this presentation, I adopt a constructionist approach to investigate the use of periphrastic causative constructions in two non-native varieties of English, namely English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL). While both of these varieties correspond to L2s that are acquired in addition to the L1, the settings of acquisition are different (mainly an instructional setting for EFL and mainly a natural one for ESL), which could lead to some differences in the way the causative construction behaves in the two varieties. The present study is based on corpus data coming from the International Corpus of Learner English for EFL and from the International Corpus of English for ESL, and representing different L1 populations among the two varieties. Relying on a corpus of native English as a reference, I examine the well-formedness of causative constructions in EFL and ESL, but also their idiomaticity, which is measured through a collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) of the lexemes occurring in the non-finite verb slot. For EFL, this investigation reveals, among others, that learners sometimes use non-standard patterns like [X cause Y Vprp] or [X make Y Vto-inf], and that they tend to produce certain infelicitous constructions, which display lexical preferences different from those of native speakers (e.g. make their norms legalised). These findings are compared with the results of the ESL corpus analysis. This study provides insights into the impact of the acquisitional setting on the behaviour of causative constructions, and hence helps to bridge the paradigm gap that exists between EFL and ESL (cf. Sridhar & Sridhar 1986, Mukherjee & Hundt 2011). More generally, it demonstrates the viability of construction grammar as a theoretical framework to conduct a corpus-based study of interlanguage since, given the right level of abstraction, this framework provides a tertium comparationis for the contrastive analysis of varieties that may not necessarily follow the same norms. The study also underlines the relevance of the collostructional method to perform a contrastive interlanguage analysis, by showing that in both native and non-native varieties words interact with constructions (though sometimes in different ways). Such considerations, hopefully, will contribute to a rapprochement between the constructionist approaches and second language acquisition.
In the light of the overall current strategies and directions of translation (orientation on the language, text and culture of the original, or on the language and cultural context of the target language), the author of the article provides a comparative analysis of the translations of F.M. Dostoevsky's novel Demons (chapter At Tikhon) into German, made by E.K. Rahsin and S. Geier. They are a part of the history of German-language translations of Dostoevsky's novels and are sampled for analysis as playing a significant role in the German reception of Demons in the 20th century. The translation by Rahsin was a result of teamwork. The issues of translation of the novel were discussed in the salon of Merezhkovsky. According to Rahsin, a good translator of Dostoevsky should be: 1) a chemist who finds the right words, 2) an engineer who reconstructs the sentences, 3) an artist who creates the arrangement of the action, pays attention to the shade of sound, rhythm, etc., and 4) a critic, an expert in the German language able to judge whether and which bold solutions / innovations are appropriate or not. S. Geier's approach to the artistic text and its translation was defined by the sound, so she sought to give the German translation the sound and syntax of the Russian original. The translations in the paper are compared on the lexical, syntactic and stylistic levels. It is stated that Rahsin and Geier try to find German equivalents of the original words and expressions in different ways. Rahsin gives explanations in the text of the novel, and Geier, trying not to disturb the sound of the original, often gives a fairly extensive explanation in the notes. Unlike Geier, Rahsin often orders words by the rules of the neutral norm of the German language, thus depriving them of stylistic coloring, expressiveness, smoothing its characteristic roughness. It is concluded that Geier successfully managed to bring the German translation to the original text. She did not seek to correct Dostoevsky's text or make it easier to read for the German public (which, the author believes, was the purpose of the translation by Rahsin), but gave it a rough feeling of the fresh and polyphonic sound of the Russian original.
Abstract for the 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics<br/><br/>Some remarks on wordformation in Danish<br/><br/>Some Danish word formation phenomena pose a problem for the linguist, being a predicament for analysis. In Danish a train leaves the station when it afgår ‘leaves’, while a minister may gå af ‘resign’, whereas a Swedish minister may resign by (att) avgå ‘(to) resign’. Especially tricky are pairs like afholde ‘arrange, organise’ and holde af ‘like’ because of their abstract, but different, meanings, and because the phrasal verb also differs from concrete meanings of holde ‘hold’. In general, there are some patterns for these Danish compounds concerning their internal semantics, in that the same lexical items may be used for different purposes depending on whether they are formed as a straightforward linear sequence (a word formation) or a reversed sequence (a phrase). The problem is (i) how the two kinds of combinations should be analysed, and (ii) what patterns emerge from the potential combinations, and (iii) why there are differences between closely related languages like Danish and Swedish?<br/><br/>It seems to have to do with the semantics of the combinations and not with the basic lexical materials, and that raises the question how to explain the combinatorial patterns by a specific approach in semantics.<br/><br/>The problem may be illustrated by Danish deadjectival nominal conversions like (en) døvstum ‘(a) deaf-mute’. They may be considered copulatives (dvandvas) or may be regarded as appositional compounds depending on whether you focus on their extensional or their intensional meanings. As a copulative (deadjectival noun) døvstum denotes an entity (a person) that represents the union set of the properties (attributes) døv and stum (in that the person represents both all the people constituting the set of the deaf and all the people constituting the set of the mute; i.e. the sum of all entities with either of those properties), whereas as an appositional (deadjectival adjective) compound the expression døvstum denotes the intersection of the sets of the properties (attributes) døv and stum respectively; i.e. individuals with both properties. This kind of analysis may be controversial, but the basic claim is that a primitive set-theoretical notion may be a way of handling adjectival combinations like these.<br/><br/>This kind of approach may also be appropriate when dealing with the formation vs phrase problem illustrated above (afgå vs gå af), in that specific combinations seem to be based on special semantic perceptions of the language users – which can be explained set-theoretically – and in that one may invoke a particular notion called “normative”. If “formative” is the Chomskyan notion of an articulated expressions (in a sentence or phrase) then one might propose a technical term for expressions found in parallel in related languages (like Danish and Swedish) and, crucially, mutually understandable (a minister may ‘gå af’ or ‘afgå’ in both languages and be understood) but with different norms regulating what is licensed in each language. The term ‘normative’ may be suggested for this phenomenon.<br/><br/>The presentation will elaborate on the theoretical and the analytic problems of the approach, and illustrate this by a fair number of excerpts and examples.<br/>
The article aims at drawing the attention of language teachers to a huge number of phraseologisms which exist in every language and which are traditionally rarely used while teaching and learning languages and cultures. The fact that phraseology shows the features of folk culture is now widely accepted. The subject of the research is the experience of the author, namely, the investigation of phraseologisms related with lexicology, the stylistics of lexis and Latvian language for practical uses. These days a wide range of investigation is characteristic of linguistics. Lingvo-culturologic viewpoint to the learning of units of speech takes an important part in the investigations. The question of interaction between language and culture is nowadays relevant in our society, which experiences the growth of global problems, therefore, it is becoming essential to consider the versatility and particularity of behaviour of different nations. Looking at relations between different nations, it is important to foresee potential cultural misunderstandings. It is also important to determine cultural values which form the basis for communicational behaviour. In higher education institutions these skills are obligatory for students who, for various reasons, get into different cultural environments. Until 1990 students were encouraged to memorize word forms and to unpack the meaning of words (usually by means of translation) and only at the end of the 90’s the semantic and practical aspects of speech were highlighted in the process of teaching Latvian as a foreign language. The main unit of lingvo-culturologic viewpoint is lingvocultureme. Lingvocultureme belongs both to language and culture, as it unites the meaning of language and culture which exists outside the boundaries of the language system. Lingvocultureme may be the unit of both lexis and syntax: a word, a phrase, a sentence, a text (Gavrilina, Vulane, 2008, pp. 21). According to lingvo-culturologic language research, linguistic analysis allows to divide units of language into three types: words and sayings which totally coincide in the languages compared; words and sayings which partially coincide in the languages compared; words and languages which do not coincide in the language compared. Since 2005 various aspects of lingvo-culturology have also been the subject of the project which is carried out by the European Society of Phraseology. The aim of the project is to discover the similarities rather than differences, i.e. to find the part of phraseology which is common for European languages. The results of the previous project show that identical or similar phraseologisms can be found in nearly 50 languages. Idioms with similar lexical and semantic structure can be found even in languages which are not genetically connected and whose areas of usage are distant from each other. It is important to note that each nation has its own cultural vision of the world and a cultural-historic way. In the phraseologisms of each language the culture, the way of thinking and values of each nation are conveyed. Phraseologisms in texts encourage students to search for culturologic information, through which students can develop their communicative, language, socio-cultural and learning competences. These opportunities are important in the cases when students who get into different cultural environment for various reasons and who have different nationalities study in one group (in homogeneous cultural environment these opportunities are formal). Various problems are possible while learning phraseologisms: different theories on phraseologisms; students do not know phraseologisms; students know phraseologisms, but do not use them; it is impossible to translate the figurative sense of some words literally; different associations (e.g. sun); the same phraseologisms are used in different contexts (e.g. as brave as a lion, as angry as a lion); students need to learn the expressiveness of phraseologisms. While learning lingvoculturemes new opportunities are created: to develop lexis; to get familiarized with the heritage of your own language and culture; to know more about different cultural environment (the values, stereotypes, norms of behaviour, speech etiquette, customs, way of living, etc. of each nation); enrich intercommunion paying respect to cultural heritage; to motivate language users to take interest in linguistic and extralinguistic research. Such information will enrich both sides, as language users who share their experience learn from the cultural traditions of other nations. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.2.9
This chapter explores the relationship between word meanings as events and word meanings as potentials. It also discusses the relationship between meaning potentials and phraseology, and shows how lexical analysis of phraseology and word meaning can offer insights into word use within the Gricean theory of conversational cooperation and relevance. The chapter argues that context, rather than the word in isolation, generates a substantial part of the meaning of a word in use. It presents a detailed theoretical and practical analysis of the verb climb to illustrate the mechanics of contextual implicatures and how prototypical uses relate to prototypical meanings in context. After discussing meanings as events and meanings as beliefs in the context of H. P. Grice's theory of communicative interaction, the chapter focuses on the distinction between norms and creative exploitations of norms. It concludes by looking at preference semantics and the relationship between the numbered senses in dictionaries and prototype theory.
This study aims to explore National Palace Museum (NPM)'s English texts for its exhibits. NPM, a treasure vault of valuable ancient Chinese cultural artifacts, has endeavored to enter the global arena in recent years. NPM's ambition can be clearly seen on its home page, which provides a great variety of languages. If fact, the vast majority of international visitors rely on its English texts to access knowledge of NPM's exhibits. As such, NPM's English texts play a critical role in making their exhibits understandable to international visitors. However, the English texts of NPM's exhibits are mostly verbatim translation from their original Chinese texts. Its lexical choices and syntactic structures as well as its rhetorical organizations are all highly circumscribed by Chinese norms of language and thinking. In other words, NPM's English texts are the result of using formal equivalence translation (Niad, 1969). Such Chinese-circumscribed English texts, with a low degree of comprehensibility, are ”exotic” and distant to the vast majority of international visitors. To date, there has been a paucity of research addressing the issue of this translation strategy. The current case study thus attempts to explore the reason behind and the influence of such a strategy by NPM. Meanwhile, this study hopes to serve as a reference for NPM translators-to take into account the naturalness of their English texts, thereby enhancing the comprehensibility of their exhibits for international visitors. All things considered, this factor would actually be of utmost importance in NPM's pursuing its goal to enter the global arena.
OBJECTIVE: A growing number of studies on deaf children with cochlear implant (CI) document a significant improvement in receptive and expressive language skills after implantation, even if they show language delay when compared with normal-hearing peers. Data on language acquisition in CI Italian children are still scarce and limited to only certain aspects of language. The purpose of this study is to prospectively describe the trajectories of language development in early CI Italian children, with particular attention to the transition from first words to combinatorial speech and to acquisition of complex grammar in a language with rich morphology, such as Italian. DESIGN: Six children, with profound prelingual deafness, provided with CI, between 16 and 24 months of age were prospectively assessed and followed over a mean period of up to 34.8 months postimplant. During follow-up, each child received between four to five individual language evaluations through a combination of indirect procedures (parent reports of early lexical and grammar development) and direct ones (administration of standardized receptive and expressive language tests with Italian norms and collection of spontaneous language samples). RESULTS: In relation to chronological age, the acquisition of expressive vocabulary was delayed. However, considering the duration of hearing experience, most CI participants showed an earlier start and faster growth of expressive rather than receptive vocabulary in comparison with typically developing children. This quite atypical result persisted right up until the end of the follow-up. The acquisition of expressive grammar was delayed relative to chronological age, though all but one CI participant achieved the expected grammar level after approximately 3 years of CI use. In addition, the rate of grammar acquisition was not homogeneous during development, showing two different paces: one comparable with normal hearing in the transition from holophrastic to primitive combinatorial speech and a much slower one to attain more advanced levels of morphosyntactic control. CONCLUSION: From a rehabilitative viewpoint, our results suggest the importance of implementing rehabilitation in lexical comprehension, even when expressive vocabulary appears to be within normal range. Moreover, assessment of language acquisition in CI Italian children should focus on those grammar aspects that are more vulnerable to early acoustic deprivation (such as free and bound morphology) to ensure enhanced language therapy planning.
Sentence repetition tasks are increasingly recognised as a useful clinical tool for diagnosing language impairment in children. They are quick to administer, can be carefully targeted to elicit specific sentence structures, and are particularly informative about children’s lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge. This chapter exlores the theoretical potential of sentence repetition for assessment of sequential bilingual children, and presents three studies comparing performance of sequential bilingual children with monolingual children’s performance on standardised sentence repetition tests in Hebrew (children with L1 Russian, age 5-7 years, and L1 English, age 4½-6½ years), German (children with L1 Russian, age 4-7 years) and English (children with L1 Turkish, age 6-9 years). Results differed across studies: distribution of children in the Hebrew studies was in line with monolingual norms, while the majority of children in the English-Turkish study scored in a range that would be deemed impaired for monolingual children, and performance in the German-Russian study fell between these extremes. Analyses of performance within studies revealed similar discrepancies in effects of children’s exposure to L2, with significant effects of Age of Onset in the Hebrew-Russian and Hebrew-English groups and some indication of Length of Exposure effects, but no effects of either factor in the English-Turkish group. Multiple differences between these studies preclude direct inferences about the reasons for these different results: studies differed in content, methods and scoring of sentence repetition tests, and in ages, languages, language exposure, and socioeconomic status of participants. It is possible that socioeconomic differences are associated with differences in language experience that are equally or more important than onset and length of exposure. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that sentence repetition provides a measure of children’s proficiency in their L2, but that the use of sentence repetition in clinical assessment requires caution unless norms are available for the child’s bilingual community. As a next step, it is proposed that sentence repetition tests using early-acquired vocabulary and targeting aspects of sentence structure known to be difficult for monolingual children with language impairments should be developed in different target languages. This will allow us to explore further the factors that influence attainment of basic morphosyntax in sequential bilingual children, and the point at which sentence repetition, as a measure of morphosyntax, can help to identify children requiring clinical intervention.
Main issues of «Russian language and language culture» course teaching for foreign students reviewed. Justified requirement of the course adoption for foreign students’ perception. Basic types of lexical mistakes in foreign students’ speech analyzed. Methods of modern Russian language lexical norms teaching proposed.
In the article, consisting of research of linguistic norms is described of OldRussian texts of ХІ – ХІV centuries, analyzed features of that time linguisticnorms. Lexical structure of literary monuments of ХІ – ХІV centuries ischaracterized the presence of far of lexical and word-formation variants.
Bootstrap Effect Sizes (bootES; Gerlanc & Kirby, 2012) is a free, open-source software package for R (R Development Core Team, 2012), which is a language and environment for statistical computing. BootES computes both unstandardized and standardized effect sizes (such as Cohen’s d, Hedges’s g, and Pearson’s r) and makes easily available for the first time the computation of their bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs). In this article, we illustrate how to use bootES to find effect sizes for contrasts in between-subjects, within-subjects, and mixed factorial designs and to find bootstrap CIs for correlations and differences between correlations. An appendix gives a brief introduction to R that will allow readers to use bootES without having prior knowledge of R.
Since its inception a quarter century ago, Princeton WordNet [PWN] (Miller 1995; Fellbaum 1998) has had a profound influence on research and applications in lexical semantics, computational linguistics and natural language processing. The numerous uses of this lexical resource have motivated the building of wordnets1 in several dozen languages, including even a “dead” language, Latin. This special issue looks at certain aspects of wordnet construction and organisation.
Background: The popular theory that complex tool-making and language co-evolved in the human lineage rests on the hypothesis that both skills share underlying brain processes and systems. However, language and stone tool-making have so far only been studied separately using a range of neuroimaging techniques and diverse paradigms. Methodology/Principal Findings: We present the first-ever study of brain activation that directly compares active Acheulean tool-making and language. Using functional transcranial Doppler ultrasonography (fTCD), we measured brain blood flow lateralization patterns (hemodynamics) in subjects who performed two tasks designed to isolate the planning component of Acheulean stone tool-making and cued word generation as a language task. We show highly correlated hemodynamics in the initial 10 seconds of task execution. Conclusions/Significance: Stone tool-making and cued word generation cause common cerebral blood flow lateralization signatures in our participants)
In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a constant metric pattern of three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones that created rhythmic groups of constant size. Accuracy rates in a comprehension task revealed that participants understood rhythmically regular sentences better than rhythmically irregular ones. Furthermore, the mean amplitude of the P600 component was reduced in response to object-first sentences only when embedded in rhythmically regular but not rhythmically irregular context. This P600 reduction indicates facilitated processing of sentence structure possibly due to a decrease in processing costs for the less-preferre)
The CLARIN Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) that is being developed in Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) is a computer-supported framework that combines a flexible component approach with the explicit declaration of semantics. The goal of the Dutch CLARIN project “Creating & Testing CLARIN Metadata Components” was to create metadata components and profiles for a wide variety of existing resources housed at two data centres according to the CMDI specifications. In doing so the principles of the framework were tested. The results of the project are of benefit to other CLARIN-projects that are expected to adhere to the CMDI framework and its accompanying tools.
The experience of a user of major search engines or other web information retrieval services looking for information in the Basque language is far from satisfactory: they only return pages with exact matches but no inflections (necessary for an agglutinative language like Basque), many results in other languages (no search engine gives the option to restrict its results to Basque), etc. This paper proposes using morphological query expansion and language-filtering words in combination with the APIs of search engines as a very cost-effective solution to build appropriate web search services for Basque. The implementation details of the methodology (choosing the most appropriate language-filtering words, the number of them, the most frequent inflections for the morphological query expansion, etc.) have been specified by corpora-based studies. The improvements produced have been measured in terms of precision and recall both over corpora and real web searches. Morphological query expansion can improve recall up to 47 % and language-filtering words can raise precision from 15 % to around 90 %, although with a loss in recall of about 30–35 %. The proposed methodology has already been successfully used in the Basque search service Elebila (http://www.elebila.eu) and the web-as-corpus tool CorpEus (http://www.corpeus.org), and the approach could be applied to other morphologically rich or under-resourced languages as well.
Traditional methods for deriving property-based representations of concepts from text have focused on either extracting only a subset of possible relation types, such as hyponymy/hypernymy (e.g., car is-a vehicle) or meronymy/metonymy (e.g., car has wheels), or unspecified relations (e.g., car--petrol). We propose a system for the challenging task of automatic, large-scale acquisition of unconstrained, human-like property norms from large text corpora, and discuss the theoretical implications of such a system. We employ syntactic, semantic, and encyclopedic information to guide our extraction, yielding concept-relation-feature triples (e.g., car be fast, car require petrol, car cause pollution), which approximate property-based conceptual representations. Our novel method extracts candidate triples from parsed corpora (Wikipedia and the British National Corpus) using syntactically and grammatically motivated rules, then reweights triples with a linear combination of their frequency and four statistical metrics. We assess our system output in three ways: lexical comparison with norms derived from human-generated property norm data, direct evaluation by four human judges, and a semantic distance comparison with both WordNet similarity data and human-judged concept similarity ratings. Our system offers a viable and performant method of plausible triple extraction: Our lexical comparison shows comparable performance to the current state-of-the-art, while subsequent evaluations exhibit the human-like character of our generated properties.
In this paper we analyzed the differences in representation and creation of Berlusconi's identity in the two Italian largest circulation weekly magazines. As a representative time period we chose the year 2011 because of important social and political changes in Italy. The corpus consists of 233 editorials from magazines L'Espresso and Panorama (totalling 152 817 words). The study is based on the theoretical framework of van Dijk on ideology and society and on categories of ideological discourse analysis (van Dijk 2005). Some categories of ideological discourse analysis are: actor description (meaning), authority, burden, categorization, comparison, consensus, counterfactuals, disclaimer, euphemism, evidentiality, example, generalization, hyperbole, irony, lexicalization, methaphor, national self-glorification, number game, polarization, negative other presentation, norm expression, us-the, categorization, populism, positive selfpresentation, vagueness, victimization (van Dijk 2005). The method includes the principles of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In this broad theoretical and methodological framework we developed the procedure that requires classification of linguistic material in clusters according to key characteristics of Berlusconi's profile. In the end, we compared the matrix in two newspapers. The results confirmed the majority of van Dijk's strategies and emphasized the contrasts of linguistic material in sub-corpuses.
This study addresses the feasibility of the classical notion of parameter in linguistic theory from the perspective of parametric hierarchies. A novel program-based analysis is implemented in order to show certain empirical problems related to these hierarchies. The program was developed on the basis of an enriched data base spanning 23 contemporary and 5 ancient languages. The empirical issues uncovered cast doubt on classical parametric models of language acquisition as well as on the conceptualization of an overspecified Universal Grammar that has parameters among its primitives. Pinpointing these issues leads to the proposal that (i) the (bio)logical problem of language acquisition does not amount to a process of triggering innately pre-wired values of parameters and (ii) it paves the way for viewing language, epigenetic (‘parametric’) variation as an externalization-related epiphenomenon, whose learning component may be more important than what sometimes is assumed. [ABSTRACT FRO)
A consolidated approach to the study of the mental representation of word meanings has consisted in contrasting different domains of knowledge, broadly reflecting the abstract-concrete dichotomy. More fine-grained semantic distinctions have emerged in neuropsychological and cognitive neuroscience work, reflecting semantic category specificity, but almost exclusively within the concrete domain. Theoretical advances, particularly within the area of embodied cognition, have more recently put forward the idea that distributed neural representations tied to the kinds of experience maintained with the concepts' referents might distinguish conceptual meanings with a high degree of specificity, including those within the abstract domain. Here we report the results of two psycholinguistic rating studies incorporating such theoretical advances with two main objectives: first, to provide empirical evidence of fine-grained distinctions within both the abstract and the concrete semantic domains wi)
The Roma people, living throughout Europe and West Asia, are a diverse population linked by the Romani language and culture. Previous linguistic and genetic studies have suggested that the Roma migrated into Europe from South Asia about 1,000–1,500 years ago. Genetic inferences about Roma history have mostly focused on the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. To explore what additional information can be learned from genome-wide data, we analyzed data from six Roma groups that we genotyped at hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We estimate that the Roma harbor about 80% West Eurasian ancestry–derived from a combination of European and South Asian sources–and that the date of admixture of South Asian and European ancestry was about 850 years before present. We provide evidence for Eastern Europe being a major source of European ancestry, and North-west India being a major source of the South Asian ancestry in the Roma. By computing allele sharing as a measur)
Genetic studies of human local adaptation have been facilitated greatly by recent advances in high-throughput genotyping and sequencing technologies. However, few studies have investigated local adaptation in Asian populations on a genome-wide scale and with a high geographic resolution. In this study, taking advantage of the dense population coverage in Southeast Asia, which is the part of the world least studied in term of natural selection, we depicted genome-wide landscapes of local adaptations in 63 Asian populations representing the majority of linguistic and ethnic groups in Asia. Using genome-wide data analysis, we discovered many genes showing signs of local adaptation or natural selection. Notable examples, such as FOXQ1, MAST2, and CDH4, were found to play a role in hair follicle development and human cancer, signal transduction, and tumor repression, respectively. These showed strong indications of natural selection in Philippine Negritos, a group of aboriginal hunter-gath)
The present study investigated the effect of performing an intentional non-meaningful hand movement on subsequent lexical acquisition and retrieval in healthy adults. Twenty-five right-handed healthy individuals were required to learn the names (2-syllable legal nonwords) for a series of unfamiliar objects. Participants also completed a familiar picture naming task to investigate the effects of the intentional non-meaningful movement on lexical retrieval. Results revealed that performing this hand movement immediately before linguistic tasks interfered with both new word learning and familiar picture naming when compared with no movement. These results extend previous findings of dual task interference effects in healthy individuals, suggesting that complex, non-meaningful, hand movements can also interfere with subsequent lexical acquisition and retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or e)
Learning vocabulary and understanding texts present difficulty for language learners due to, among other things, the high degree of lexical ambiguity. By developing an intelligent tutoring system, this dissertation examines whether automatically providing enriched sense-specific information is effective for vocabulary learning and reading comprehension of second language learners. The system developed in this study contributes to an extended understanding of how NLP techniques can be applied more effectively in an educational environment. The system allows learners to upload texts and click on any content word in order to obtain sense-appropriate lexical information for unfamiliar or unknown words during reading. The system consists of three components: (1) the system manager controls the interaction among each learner, the NLP server, and the lexical database; (2) the NLP server converts a raw input text to a linguistically-analyzed text; (3) the lexical database is used to provide a sense-appropriate definition and example sentences of a word to the learner. To obtain the sense-appropriate information, the system first performs word sense disambiguation (WSD) on the input text. Pointing to appropriate examples tuned for language learners, however, is complicated by the fact that the database of examples is from one repository (COBUILD), while automatic WSD systems generally rely on senses from another (WordNet). The lexical database, then, is indexed by WordNet senses, each of which points to an appropriate corresponding COBUILD sense. The fact that every sense inventory has its own standards of sense distinction poses a serious problem in integrating these inventories into one. To redirect an input WordNet sense to a corresponding COBUILD sense, thus, a word sense alignment algorithm was developed, following a heuristic of favoring flatter alignment structures. With this system, an empirical study was conducted with 60 intermediate learners of English as a second language to examine whether this system can lead learners to improve their vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension. The findings show that learners demonstrated higher performance when receiving sense-specific information. Furthermore, the qualitative examination of the effect of automatic system errors show that, although learners showed learning regardless of the appropriateness of lexical information, they still showed relatively greater learning when given appropriate lexical information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
The present study extended existing research on alexithymia in men, investigating whether the deficit in processing emotions occurs early in the process, as a result of dissociation or repression, or later, as a result of suppression. We also examined the assumption in Levant’s (2011) normative male alexithymia hypothesis that men with alexithymia would show the greatest deficits in identifying words for emotions discouraged by masculine norms that expressed vulnerability and attachment. Study 1, with 258 college men, showed that scores on measures of alexithymia and normative male alexithymia were more strongly and uniquely predicted by suppression than repression and dissociation, while controlling for positive and negative affect and depression. Study 2 used semantic priming with 85 college men, and revealed that men with alexithymia showed more errors in lexical decision performance using target emotion words discouraged by masculine norms as compared to men without alexithymia. In addition, men with and without alexithymia did not differ in their accuracy using target emotion words that are encouraged by masculine norms. We also found that the disruption in emotional processing among men with alexithymia occurred at 500 ms stimulus onset asynchrony, which is slow enough for conscious processing, supporting an explanation of suppression as the mechanism for the inhibition.
Motivation: Biomedical entities, their identifiers and names, are essential in the representation of biomedical facts and knowledge. In the same way, the complete set of biomedical and chemical terms, i.e. the biomedical “term space” (the “Lexeome”), forms a key resource to achieve the full integration of the scientific literature with biomedical data resources: any identified named entity can immediately be normalized to the correct database entry. This goal does not only require that we are aware of all existing terms, but would also profit from knowing all their senses and their semantic interpretation (ambiguities, nestedness). Result: This study compiles a resource for lexical terms of biomedical interest in a standard format (called “LexEBI”), determines the overall number of terms, their reuse in different resources and the nestedness of terms. LexEBI comprises references for protein and gene entries and their term variants and chemical entities amongst other terms. In addition)
Individuals with significant hearing loss often fail to attain competency in reading orthographic scripts which encode the sound properties of spoken language. Nevertheless, some profoundly deaf individuals do learn to read at age-appropriate levels. The question of what differentiates proficient deaf readers from less-proficient readers is poorly understood but topical, as efforts to develop appropriate and effective interventions are needed. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activation in deaf readers (N = 21), comparing proficient (N=11) and less proficient (N = 10) readers' performance in a widely used test of implicit reading. Proficient deaf readers activated left inferior frontal gyrus and left middle and superior temporal gyrus in a pattern that is consistent with regions reported in hearing readers. In contrast, the less-proficient readers exhibited a pattern of response characterized by inferior and middle frontal lobe activation ()
Background: In alphabetic languages, emerging evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies shows the rapid and automatic activation of phonological information in visual word recognition. In the mapping from orthography to phonology, unlike most alphabetic languages in which there is a natural correspondence between the visual and phonological forms, in logographic Chinese, the mapping between visual and phonological forms is rather arbitrary and depends on learning and experience. The issue of whether the phonological information is rapidly and automatically extracted in Chinese characters by the brain has not yet been thoroughly addressed. Methodology/Principal Findings: We continuously presented Chinese characters differing in orthography and meaning to adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers to construct a constant varying visual stream. In the stream, most stimuli were homophones of Chinese characters: The phonological features embedded in these visual characters were )
Previous research has suggested that children do not rely on prosody to infer a speaker's emotional state because of biases toward lexical content or situational context. We hypothesized that there are actually no such biases and that young children simply have trouble in using emotional prosody. Sixty children from 5 to 13 years of age had to judge the emotional state of a happy or sad speaker and then to verbally explain their judgment. Lexical content and situational context were devoid of emotional valence. Results showed that prosody alone did not enable the children to infer emotions at age 5, and was still not fully mastered at age 13. Instead, they relied on contextual information despite the fact that this cue had no emotional valence. These results support the hypothesis that prosody is difficult to interpret for young children and that this cue plays only a subordinate role up until adolescence to infer others’ emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the )
This paper presents a new method of analysis by which structural similarities between brain data and linguistic data can be assessed at the semantic level. It shows how to measure the strength of these structural similarities and so determine the relatively better fit of the brain data with one semantic model over another. The first model is derived from WordNet, a lexical database of English compiled by language experts. The second is given by the corpus-based statistical technique of latent semantic analysis (LSA), which detects relations between words that are latent or hidden in text. The brain data are drawn from experiments in which statements about the geography of Europe were presented auditorily to participants who were asked to determine their truth or falsity while electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were made. The theoretical framework for the analysis of the brain and semantic data derives from axiomatizations of theories such as the theory of differences in utility )
Lexical gap in cQA search, resulted by the variability of languages, has been recognized as an important and widespread phenomenon. To address the problem, this paper presents a question reformulation scheme to enhance the question retrieval model by fully exploring the intelligence of paraphrase in phrase-level. It compensates for the existing paraphrasing research in a suitable granularity, which either falls into fine-grained lexical-level or coarse-grained sentence-level. Given a question in natural language, our scheme first detects the involved key-phrases by jointly integrating the corpus-dependent knowledge and question-aware cues. Next, it automatically extracts the paraphrases for each identified key-phrase utilizing multiple online translation engines, and then selects the most relevant reformulations from a large group of question rewrites, which is formed by full permutation and combination of the generated paraphrases. Extensive evaluations on a real world data set demon)
The present work suggests that sentence processing requires both heuristic and algorithmic processing streams, where the heuristic processing strategy precedes the algorithmic phase. This conclusion is based on three self-paced reading experiments in which the processing of two-sentence discourses was investigated, where context sentences exhibited quantifier scope ambiguity. Experiment 1 demonstrates that such sentences are processed in a shallow manner. Experiment 2 uses the same stimuli as Experiment 1 but adds questions to ensure deeper processing. Results indicate that reading times are consistent with a lexical-pragmatic interpretation of number associated with context sentences, but responses to questions are consistent with the algorithmic computation of quantifier scope. Experiment 3 shows the same pattern of results as Experiment 2, despite using stimuli with different lexical-pragmatic biases. These effects suggest that language processing can be superficial, and that deepe)
Men generally express more negative attitudes than women toward homosexuals. This study aims to determine if social norms saliency can rely on this "gender effect" and influence attitudes toward homosexuals. Gender characteristics (attitudes and lexical markers) concerning homosexuality were identified in Study 1 and used to construct male- (i.e., promoting a prejudice-related norm) and female-marked (i.e., promoting an anti-prejudice-related norm) messages. Social norms saliency was primed using these messages (Studies 2 and 3) and the participant's immediate context (Study 3). Results show that promoting a prejudiced norm eases expression of males' negative attitudes toward homosexuals, whereas the promotion of an anti-prejudice norm inhibits their attitudes. Theoretical elaborations and potential applications for promotion of tolerance are discussed.
The preponderance of research on trial-by-trial recruitment of affective control (e.g., conflict adaptation) relies on stimuli wherein lexical word information conflicts with facial affective stimulus properties (e.g., the face-Stroop paradigm where an emotional word is overlaid on a facial expression). Several studies, however, indicate different neural time course and properties for processing of affective lexical stimuli versus affective facial stimuli. The current investigation used a novel task to examine control processes implemented following conflicting emotional stimuli with conflict-inducing affective face stimuli in the absence of affective words. Forty-one individuals completed a task wherein the affective-valence of the eyes and mouth were either congruent (happy eyes, happy mouth) or incongruent (happy eyes, angry mouth) while high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. There was a significant congruency effect and significant conflict adaptation effects )
Background: Verbal Fluency is reduced in patients with Parkinson’s disease, particularly if treated with deep brain stimulation. This deficit could arise from general factors, such as reduced working speed or from dysfunctions in specific lexical domains. Objective: To test whether DBS-associated Verbal Fluency deficits are accompanied by changed dynamics of word processing. Methods: 21 Parkinson’s disease patients with and 26 without deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus as well as 19 healthy controls participated in the study. They engaged in Verbal Fluency and (primed) Lexical Decision Tasks, testing phonemic and semantic word production and processing time. Most patients performed the experiments twice, ON and OFF stimulation or, respectively, dopaminergic drugs. Results: Patients generally produced abnormally few words in the Verbal Fluency Task. This deficit was more severe in patients with deep brain stimulation who additionally showed prolonged response latencies i)
This study aimed to characterize the linguistic interference that occurs during speech-in-speech comprehension by combining offline and online measures, which included an intelligibility task (at a −5 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and 2 lexical decision tasks (at a −5 dB and 0 dB SNR) that were performed with French spoken target words. In these 3 experiments we always compared the masking effects of speech backgrounds (i.e., 4-talker babble) that were produced in the same language as the target language (i.e., French) or in unknown foreign languages (i.e., Irish and Italian) to the masking effects of corresponding non-speech backgrounds (i.e., speech-derived fluctuating noise). The fluctuating noise contained similar spectro-temporal information as babble but lacked linguistic information. At −5 dB SNR, both tasks revealed significantly divergent results between the unknown languages (i.e., Irish and Italian) with Italian and French hindering French target word identification to a simila)
Evidence indicates that adequate phonological abilities are necessary to develop proficient reading skills and that later in life phonology also has a role in the covert visual word recognition of expert readers. Impairments of acoustic perception, such as deafness, can lead to atypical phonological representations of written words and letters, which in turn can affect reading proficiency. Here, we report an experiment in which young adults with different levels of acoustic perception (i.e., hearing and deaf individuals) and different modes of communication (i.e., hearing individuals using spoken language, deaf individuals with a preference for sign language, and deaf individuals using the oral modality with less or no competence in sign language) performed a visual lexical decision task, which consisted of categorizing real words and consonant strings. The lexicality effect was restricted to deaf signers who responded faster to real words than consonant strings, showing over-reliance)
This study investigated a theoretically challenging dissociation between good production and poor perception of tones among neurologically unimpaired native speakers of Cantonese. The dissociation is referred to as the near-merger phenomenon in sociolinguistic studies of sound change. In a passive oddball paradigm, lexical and nonlexical syllables of the T1/T6 and T4/T6 contrasts were presented to elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a from two groups of participants, those who could produce and distinguish all tones in the language (Control) and those who could produce all tones but specifically failed to distinguish between T4 and T6 in perception (Dissociation). The presence of MMN to T1/T6 and null response to T4/T6 of lexical syllables in the dissociation group confirmed the near-merger phenomenon. The observation that the control participants exhibited a statistically reliable MMN to lexical syllables of T1/T6, weaker responses to nonlexical syllables of T1/T6 and lexical )
Much of what is known about word recognition in toddlers comes from eyetracking studies. Here we show that the speed and facility with which children recognize words, as revealed in such studies, cannot be attributed to a task-specific, closed-set strategy; rather, children’s gaze to referents of spoken nouns reflects successful search of the lexicon. Toddlers’ spoken word comprehension was examined in the context of pictures that had two possible names (such as a cup of juice which could be called “cup” or “juice”) and pictures that had only one likely name for toddlers (such as “apple”), using a visual world eye-tracking task and a picture-labeling task (n = 77, mean age, 21 months). Toddlers were just as fast and accurate in fixating named pictures with two likely names as pictures with one. If toddlers do name pictures to themselves, the name provides no apparent benefit in word recognition, because there is no cost to understanding an alternative lexical construal of the picture.)
A word like Huh?–used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said– is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe. We investigate it in naturally occurring conversations in ten languages and present evidence and arguments for two distinct claims: that Huh? is universal, and that it is a word. In support of the first, we show that the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance. In support of the second claim we show that it is a lexical, conventionalised form that has to be learnt, unlike grunts or emotional cries. We discuss possible reasons for the cross-linguistic similarity and propose an account in terms of convergent evolution. Huh? is a universal word not because it is innate but because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair. Our proposal enha)