Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Richard Socher, Alex Perelygin, Jean Wu, Jason Chuang, Christopher D. Manning, Andrew Ng, Christopher Potts. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2013.
World Wide Web contains huge amount of data available in different languages across the world. Web browsers are tools used to display the data in graphical forms. With the evolution of Web 3.0, data has become an important part of human daily tasks, where it is used to process information, and formulate important decision rules for many organizations. Current tools used to conceptualize data are catered for some of the world well known languages such as English. However, these tools may not be able to support other languages as there are a wide range of languages with different syntax and representation. In this paper, we present a novel lexical semantic based database tool called MalayWordNet, specifically written for Malay language. Our tool is helpful for high end semantic based applications which use Malay language as part of their data presentation.
Over the last decade, the prominence of statistical NLP applications that use syntactic rather than only word-based shallow clues increased very significantly. This prominence triggered the creation of large scale treebanks, i.e., corpora annotated with syntactic structures. However, a look at the annotation schemata used across these treebanks raises some issues. Thus, it is often unclear how the set of syntactic relation labels has been obtained and how it can be organized so as to allow for different levels of granularity in the annotation. Furthermore, it appears questionable that despite the linguistic insight that syntax is very much language-specific, multilingual treebanks often draw upon the same schemata, with little consideration of the syntactic idiosyncrasies of the languages involved. Our objective is to detail the procedure for establishing an annotation schema for surface-syntactic annotation of Spanish and present a restricted set of easy-to-use criteria and a methodology which facilitate the decision process of the annotators, but which can also accommodate for the elaboration of a more or a less fine-grained tagset. The procedure has been tested on a Spanish 3,513 sentence corpus, a fragment of the AnCora newspaper corpus.
In this paper, we present our recent experience in constructing a first-of-its-kind functional corpus based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Annotated on selected texts from the Penn Treebank, the corpus was built by a collaborative team on web-based annotation platform with several advanced features. After a discussion on the background and motivation of the project, we present our solutions to some of the challenges encountered in the collaborative annotation process. With fine-grained annotations of an initial corpus now available, the corpus can serve as a valuable linguistic resource that complements existing semantically annotated corpora and aid in the development of a larger-scale resource crucial for automated systems for analysis of linguistic function. 1
Croatian WordNet is a lexical database created on the principles of the Princeton WordNet.As such, it contains a complex network of lexical relations built primarily on the relations of hyperonymy / hyponymy and synonymy.Thus WordNet can be regarded as a tool by which we can represent and in turn, closely examine various lexical-semantic relations of a language.However, in order to use WordNet as an analytical tool, it is necessary to provide a detailed account of other lexical relations such as polysemy, and also design the database according to the interactions of various lexical relations they have with each other.In this paper we strongly emphasize the role that WordNet can have in the study of complex lexical-semantic relations of a lexicon as a whole, and we try to show the methodological prerequisites that must be fulfilled in order to achieve this goal.We focus on the relations of synonymy and polysemy and their interaction in structuring the lexicon of the Croatian language.We show the similarities and differences between nominal and verbal polysemous structures and the ways these can be represented in the Croatian WordNet.We also show how certain methodological inconsistencies as pertaining to the original Princeton WordNet were corrected in the building of the Croatian WordNet.
George Armitage Miller died on July 22, 2012, at the age of ninety-two. He led a rich life full of accomplishments in the three areas of activity that he had chosen as a young man: psychology, writing, and golf.Miller was not only a witness but a key player in the major paradigm shift of the 20th century that came to be known as the cognitive revolution. Incredible as it may seem today, his teachers at Harvard followed the behaviorist dogma and recognized neither the autonomy nor the significance of the human mind. It took two courageous young scientists—George Miller and Jerome Bruner—to assert, each in their own domain of investigation, that the mind is a worthwhile subject of study. They started out by teaching a course boldly entitled “Cognition” and eventually established the Center for Cognitive Studies, ultimately making behaviorism obsolete.Miller drew an analogy between the human mind and a computer, noting that both store and process huge amounts of information. At the same time, human short-term memory is limited, as his most celebrated paper on the “Magical Number Seven” demonstrates (Miller 1956/1994). Miller showed that chunking information into meaningful units helps recall, though the number of units that can be memorized seems to hover around seven. For example, U.S. telephone numbers are broken down into three groups of three, three, and four digits (area code, local exchange, and individual number). Chunk parsers (Abney 1991) build on the idea that sentence processing proceeds in phrases, reflected in prosodic patterns.Among our cognitive faculties, it was language in particular that fascinated George, a gifted writer. One attraction was that linguistic behavior could be observed, tested, and evaluated quantitatively with the experimental paradigms available to psycholinguists at a time when brain imaging techniques had not yet been developed. The rules of language, with their recursive aspects, could be seen as a kind of program. Although he collaborated with Noam Chomsky on the formal aspects of language, Miller in later life harbored a suspicion of highly abstract theories of syntax. His interest lay primarily in the lexicon, not only because of his authorial love of words, but also because of its size, open-endedness, and dynamic aspects. Moreover, the growth of children's lexicons offered a window into their cognitive development.Miller is probably best known to readers of Computational Linguistics for his creation of the large lexical database WordNet (Miller 1995). WordNet's use as a resource for natural language processing was in fact unintended, and its rapid adoption by the NLP community came as a surprise. George was interested in human semantic organization and wanted to test the then-fashionable concept of semantic networks, which allowed for plausible and elegant models of semantic representation and seemed supported by experiments testing lexical access and retrieval (Collins and Quillian 1969). Miller wondered whether a semantic network could in fact be built for the bulk of the English lexicon. In the mid 1980s, he recruited a group of colleagues, students, and his wife Kitty and, without much further instruction, asked them to cluster nouns, verbs, and adjectives into “synsets” that could be interrelated with a handful of semantic relations. Relying on conventional lexical resources and intuition, the WordNet team created tens of thousands of entries manually, a fact that provokes head-shaking among the new generation of WordNet builders, who proceed fully or semi-automatically. Each senior member was assigned a different part of speech; Kitty was the “Adjective Lady,” and George took charge of the noun lexicon. Both would come to the Cognitive Science Laboratory every day and patiently perform their lexicographic labor. Once or twice a week, George would leave in the afternoon for the golf course. Well into this eighties, he participated in tournaments and, more often than not, his team was among the winners.A government sponsor's requirement that the database be publicly released was duly followed, but the response from the budding NLP community was entirely unanticipated by the WordNet team, which was unaware of the challenge of word sense disambiguation. WordNet turned out to be a tool that promised help with the vexing task of word sense discrimination, and its graph structure became the basis for a number of algorithms that measured semantic similarity among words in terms of their distance in the network. Being unique in coverage and design, WordNet not only survived but continued to grow, though its claims to modeling human semantic memory were largely abandoned. George was proud to say that WordNet defined a new kind of electronic lexicography, and WordNet became a common noun. WordNets have been built for dozens of genetically and typologically unrelated languages (http://www.globalwordnet.org).While working on WordNet, George became interested in children's literacy. He believed that children did not learn words and their meanings from dictionaries, as they were instructed to do in school. To test this hypothesis, he asked children to look up unfamiliar words in a dictionary and write sentences using the new words. As George had guessed, the results were both appalling and amusing. For example, when asked to write a sentence with the word meticulous, children would produce sentences like she was meticulous about falling off the cliff after having seen a dictionary entry that defined this adjective as careful, scrupulous, fastidious.Moreover, George guessed that children enjoy reading but, when encountering an unfamiliar word, are generally disinclined to put their books down and consult a dictionary. His idea was to present new words in their contexts, based on evidence that context-based learning was both natural and efficient (Miller and Gildea 1987). He and his team began to manually annotate a digitized book with entries from WordNet; an interface would allow the children to read the book on the screen, click on unfamiliar words and be presented with the context-appropriate WordNet sense. It should be remembered that George's idea of reading books on a screen was long before the invention of e-readers!The text-to-WordNet link gave birth to the idea of the semantic concordance. A large team of Princeton students manually annotated nouns, verbs, and adjectives from texts in the Brown Corpus against the corresponding WordNet senses. George thought that this would be a straightforward task: Just as lexicographers create dictionary entries based on tokens in a text, their entries should be mappable back to words in texts in a one-to-one fashion. We learned that dictionaries with enumerative, discrete word senses are in fact not a particularly good way of modeling speakers' lexicons. Today, research into semantic annotation and measurements of inter-annotator agreement is a lively area of investigation.Although he had to transfer to emeritus status at the then-mandatory retirement age, George did not give up teaching. He organized an informal course on the lexicon and for each of twelve weekly meetings prepared beautifully written lectures that the participants would discuss and critique. The lectures would become The Science of Words, a prize-winning book on the lexicon that was translated into numerous languages. In this and several other books (including Language and Communication [1963] and Spontaneous Apprentices [1977]), George's lively, lucid prose made a scientific subject accessible to the general public and conveyed his fascination with language and cognition. His landmark book Language and Perception (1976), co-authored with Philip Johnson-Laird, remains a classic among psycholinguists to this day. Co-authoring a paper with George invariably involved a final editing step on his part, which he referred to as “Millerizing.”George collected many prizes, medals, and honorary doctorates. He was modest about it and only very occasionally did a new frame appear on his office walls alongside graduation and wedding pictures of former students and the fake Renoir that he had kindly bought from a street vendor.
The paper addresses the challenge of con-verting MIDT, an existing dependency– based Italian treebank resulting from the harmonization and merging of smaller re-sources, into the Stanford Dependencies annotation formalism, with the final aim of constructing a standard–compliant re-source for the Italian language. Achieved results include a methodology for con-verting treebank annotations belonging to the same dependency–based family, the Italian Stanford Dependency Treebank (ISDT), and an Italian localization of the
There is considerable ethno-linguistic and genetic variation among human populations in Asia, although tracing the origins of this diversity is complicated by migration events. Thailand is at the center of Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), a region within Asia that has not been extensively studied. Genetic substructure may exist in the Thai population, since waves of migration from southern China throughout its recent history may have contributed to substantial gene flow. Autosomal SNP data were collated for 438,503 markers from 992 Thai individuals. Using the available self-reported regional origin, four Thai subpopulations genetically distinct from each other and from other Asian populations were resolved by Neighbor-Joining analysis using a 41,569 marker subset. Using an independent Principal Components-based unsupervised clustering approach, four major MSEA subpopulations were resolved in which regional bias was apparent. A major ancestry component was common to these MSEA subpopula)
The article appraises gender representation in the 1999 Nigerian Constitution using insights from critical discourse analysis, feminism and systemic functional linguistics, with particular emphasis on grammatical cohesion. Specifically, it examines lexical and grammatical expressions that encode gender in the Constitution, the ideological positions evident in these expressions, and their impact on gender parity and socio-political equity. The focus is on the reference-antecedent cohesion of gender-marked pronouns and nouns used to refer to individuals and social/political positions. Our findings show a preponderance of generic masculine noun and pronoun references, tracking antecedents that refer to social and political positions open to eligible individuals in Nigeria, while the single feminine referent was a marked case. These findings buttress the ‘male-as-norm’ ideology and the relegation to anonymity of the female gender in this important national document. For equity and fairness, the article recommends revising the Constitution with epicene expressions to expunge gender biases.
The given article touches on the problem of coordination between lexical nominations of speech etiquette in modern English and Lezghin languages, on examples of sentences of greeting and farewell. Differences in speech etiquette tactics in the situations of greeting and farewell in the mentioned cultures are found on verbal and nonverbal levels. They depend on norms of politeness and special dominating traditions of communication culture in a certain society.
Question Time is a distinctive daily parliamentary routine. Its aim is to hold Ministers of the State accountable for the actions and decisions of the Government. However, in many Parliaments, including the New Zealand and Australian Federal Houses of Representatives, it is more of a theatrical performance where parties try their best to score political points. As any performance, Question Time is governed by certain rules and regulations outlined in an official document Standing Orders. As there is not much action, Standing Orders mainly describe language norms and specify „unparliamentary language‟. This research looks at and analyses the use of formulaic vocabulary used by MPs in the year preceding general elections in New Zealand and Australia. The formulaic language includes phrasal lexical items and formulae for asking / answering questions, for raising points of order and the Speakers‟ idiolectal phrasal vocabulary for quelling disorder in the Chambers and regulating the work of the House. The framework developed for this research consisted of the following steps: an ethnographic study of Question Time as a communicative performance which included the development of a database containing all the empirical material; a xii linguistic study of Question Time including genrelect study, parliamentary formulae study and disorder analysis before the elections. As a result this research has shown that Question Time is a communicative performance event in New Zealand and Australia with significant cultural, historic and linguistic differences in spite of the common origins of the two Parliaments. It has identified 60 Question Time genre-specific phrasal lexical items that MPs use in the two Parliaments, studied their structure and meaning (where necessary). It has also looked at the strategies the MPs employ for creating disorder in the House, and the ways of quelling disorder by the Speakers of the two Parliaments.
BACKGROUND: Previous studies investigating speech recognition in adverse listening conditions have found extensive variability among individual listeners. However, little is currently known about the core underlying factors that influence speech recognition abilities. PURPOSE: To investigate sensory, perceptual, and neurocognitive differences between good and poor listeners on the Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set (PRESTO), a new high-variability sentence recognition test under adverse listening conditions. RESEARCH DESIGN: Participants who fell in the upper quartile (HiPRESTO listeners) or lower quartile (LoPRESTO listeners) on key word recognition on sentences from PRESTO in multitalker babble completed a battery of behavioral tasks and self-report questionnaires designed to investigate real-world hearing difficulties, indexical processing skills, and neurocognitive abilities. STUDY SAMPLE: Young, normal-hearing adults (N = 40) from the Indiana University community participated in the current study. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Participants' assessment of their own real-world hearing difficulties was measured with a self-report questionnaire on situational hearing and hearing health history. Indexical processing skills were assessed using a talker discrimination task, a gender discrimination task, and a forced-choice regional dialect categorization task. Neurocognitive abilities were measured with the Auditory Digit Span Forward (verbal short-term memory) and Digit Span Backward (verbal working memory) tests, the Stroop Color and Word Test (attention/inhibition), the WordFam word familiarity test (vocabulary size), the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function-Adult Version (BRIEF-A) self-report questionnaire on executive function, and two performance subtests of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) Performance Intelligence Quotient (IQ; nonverbal intelligence). Scores on self-report questionnaires and behavioral tasks were tallied and analyzed by listener group (HiPRESTO and LoPRESTO). RESULTS: The extreme groups did not differ overall on self-reported hearing difficulties in real-world listening environments. However, an item-by-item analysis of questions revealed that LoPRESTO listeners reported significantly greater difficulty understanding speakers in a public place. HiPRESTO listeners were significantly more accurate than LoPRESTO listeners at gender discrimination and regional dialect categorization, but they did not differ on talker discrimination accuracy or response time, or gender discrimination response time. HiPRESTO listeners also had longer forward and backward digit spans, higher word familiarity ratings on the WordFam test, and lower (better) scores for three individual items on the BRIEF-A questionnaire related to cognitive load. The two groups did not differ on the Stroop Color and Word Test or either of the WASI performance IQ subtests. CONCLUSIONS: HiPRESTO listeners and LoPRESTO listeners differed in indexical processing abilities, short-term and working memory capacity, vocabulary size, and some domains of executive functioning. These findings suggest that individual differences in the ability to encode and maintain highly detailed episodic information in speech may underlie the variability observed in speech recognition performance in adverse listening conditions using high-variability PRESTO sentences in multitalker babble.
This paper describes a new protocol for assessing the phonological systems of two-year-olds with typical development and older children with delays in vocabulary acquisition. The test (Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills (PEEPS), Williams & Stoel-Gammon, in preparation ) differs from currently available assessments in that age of acquisition, based on lexical norms from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories, served as the primary criterion for creating a word list. Phonetic and semantic properties of the words were also considered in selecting items for the test. Productions of words using the PEEPS protocol have been gathered from a group of children with typical development and another group with cleft lip and/or palate. By 24 months of age, the children with typical development produced more than 90% of the target words and the children with atypical development produced 73% of the words. Regarding administration, the time needed for administering the protocol decreased with age.
While working on valency lexicons for Czech and English, it was necessary to define treatment of multiword entities (MWEs) with the verb as the central lexical unit. Morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of such MWEs had to be formally specified in order to create lexicon entries and use them in treebank annotation. Such a formal specification has also been used for automated quality control of the annotation vs. the lexicon entries. We present a corpus-based study, concentrating on multilayer specification of verbal MWEs, their properties in Czech and English, and a comparison between the two languages using the parallel Czech-English Dependency Treebank (PCEDT). This comparison revealed interesting differences in the use of verbal MWEs in translation (discovering that such MWEs are actually rarely translated as MWEs, at least between Czech and English) as well as some inconsistencies in their annotation. Adding MWE-based checks should thus result in better quality control of future treebank/lexicon annotation. Since Czech and English are typologically different languages, we believe that our findings will also contribute to a better understanding of verbal MWEs and possibly their more unified treatment across languages. This work has been supported by the Grant No.
AIM: A group-based multisensory activity program (Sensory Day) for residents with dementia was developed, to address the challenge of providing personalised activities within tight operational constraints in residential aged care facilities. METHOD: Fourteen participants with severe and very severe dementia were observed before, during and after participation in one of four Sensory Day sessions. The Menorah Park Rating Scale was used to yield four levels of engagement. The Philadelphia Geriatric Affect Rating Scale was used to identify four affect states. Dementia severity was ascertained by PAS-CIS scores mapped onto the Global Deterioration Scale. RESULTS: Increased levels of constructive engagement and positive affect were observed during participation in the Sensory Day sessions, relative to measures taken before the session. CONCLUSIONS: This novel approach to activity programming demonstrates that it is possible to provide group-based activities for residents with severe and very severe dementia which result in increased engagement and positive mood.
Prior research has suggested that configural resemblance between a current scene and a previously experienced but forgotten one may trigger déjà vu experiences. The present study examined whether there is a relationship between the frequency of actual déjé vu experiences, measured by questionnaires, and sensitivity to a configural resemblance between past and present events, measured by questionnaires, and between two scenes presented simultaneously in the laboratory. We measured familiarity ratings and remember–know judgements of several scenes. Some scenes had been previously presented, some were similar to previously presented scenes and the others were dissimilar. Déjà vu tendencies were significantly correlated with sensitivity to similarity in the measured questionnaires and in the laboratory, as well as to a feeling of familiarity for similar scenes. In this study, we found for the first time that people who more frequently experience déjé vu states were also more likely to regard themselves as sensitive to similarity and more likely to notice the similarity between two scenes in the laboratory.
Dans cette thèse, nous menons une réflexion sur les notions de norme(s) et d usage(s) langagiers dans le cadre du domaine du contrôle aérien. Ce domaine offre l exemple parfait de la mise en œuvre d une norme langagière: la "phraséologie" aéronautique, le langage opératif censé permettre des communications sûres et efficaces entre pilotes et contrôleurs, lors des situations les plus courantes. Lorsque la phraséologie ne suffit pas, ces derniers ont recours à une forme langagière plus naturelle, le "plain language". De nombreux problèmes relatifs à la mise en œuvre de ce dernier ont rapidement vu le jour et ont suscité des interrogations, notamment chez les professionnels de l enseignement de l anglais de l aviation. Pour répondre aux besoins spécifiques de l ENAC, cette thèse dresse un panorama des usages faits de la langue anglaise par les contrôleurs français et les pilotes étrangers lors de leurs communications radiotéléphoniques. Notre méthode d analyse consiste en une étude comparative entre un corpus de référence, représentant la norme, et un corpus de communications réelles, représentant les usages. Cette analyse comparative nous permet de repérer, de décrire et de catégoriser les formes langagières employées lors de situations routinières de la navigation aérienne. Certaines différences sont ainsi repérées entre les deux corpus. En fonction de la situation, les pilotes et les contrôleurs peuvent procéder à des variations d ordre lexical, sémantique, syntaxique et discursif. Alors que certains semblent subir l influence de la langue naturelle, d autres semblent mettre en œuvre une stratégie communicationnelle pour tenter d "humaniser" ou de modaliser le contenu de leurs messages.
The translation of the “Linguoterritorial Dictionary of Latgale” into the Latgalian language (one of 4 languages of the dictionary) is the biggest large-volume comprehensive set of existent Latgalian texts in the Latgalian orthography of 2007. The subject matter of the entries of this dictionary covers almost all spheres of life and even reveals style nuances within the framework of popular science texts, so the texts may sometimes seem to be radical and unprecedentedly innovative. The translators would be happy to keep to the current orthographic norms and practice-fixed options of Latgalian, however, answers to the numerous problematic issues (the display of Latvian personal names, palatalization/ softening of foreign words, suffix endings of less- used nouns, etc.) cannot be found in the sources known to specialists working with Latgalian literary/ written language, and sometimes may be resolved through individual consultations with experts of the Latgalian language This shows the need to resume / renew the work of the subcomission of Latgalian written language, as well as the necessity of a modern Latgalian spelling dictionary. Regarding lexical issues, the translators are aware that Latgalian texts may always be "pulled in one specific direction”, and then the right arguments are found: 1) in the direction of Lithuanian culture layer (understanding of the basis of the Balts parent language), in the direction of Slavic culture layer (recognition of the natural historical reality when Polish or Russian dominated in Latgale, retaining their influence), in the direction of Latvian (definition of the national identity), 2) it is possible to “fall into the ditch” of neologisms or archaisms, 3) it is also possible to overestimate the role of the recipient (understanding or non-acceptance). The observation of the “golden midway” seemed to be the most difficult challenge. During the search for more accurate equivalents, the synonym group was always determined, as well as compliance of the dominated seme with any context was weighted. The choice of equivalents is made easy not by the richness of the synonym group, but by the oppositional character of their meanings (Rozenbergs 1995: 153). This paper describes the realized principles and most typical cases during the translator work. First, individual style of translators is preserved, therefore in the use of neutral lexemes in the “Linguoterritorial Dictionary of Latgale” synonymy is allowed, which is non-determined by other criteria, such as: saulis grīžki / saulis meitovys ‘solstice’, ci/voi ‘or’, nedeļa/savaite ‘week’, gastēt/cīmuotīs ‘to be visiting’. Second, in other cases, when a number of Latgalian equivalents correspond to only one Latvian equivalent, the qualitative difference of synonyms was searched for (on the functional level and seme level). For example: 1) there are three Latgalian equivalents to Latvian "tulkot” ‘translate, interpret’, one of which “tulkuot” (respectively tulkuojums, tulkuotuojs ‘translation, translator’) is used to denote professional translation, however “puorlikt” (calque of germanism “übersetzen”) is used, when speaking about the translations of sacred/ spiritual texts of the 18th century. In its turn, “atvērst” (compare with Lithuanian “versti”) is not used due to the misleading homonymy with Latvian “vērst” ‘to turn, direct, point); 2) Latvian word "saimniecība” ‘economy, industry, farm, housekeeping’ in Latgalian texts corresponds to saimnīceiba "zyvu saimnīceiba” ‘fish industry’ as well as to saimisteiba "zemnīku saimesteiba” (farm, resp. economic entity); 3) Latvian "deja” ‘dance’ - Latgalian "dzyga" as an ethnographic dance, "daņcs” as any dance, "deja” in usual compound names (e.g. Dzīšmu i deju svātki) 4) Latvian "virsnieks” ‘military officer’ – Latgalian "oficers” and not "viersnīks” in order to avoid the misunderstood homonymy with the Latgalian lexeme “vierseiba / vierseibnīks” ‘management, authorities / boss’. Third, etymological specificity of Latgalian equivalent may limit its use, and in other contexts another lexeme has to be used, e. g. the denotative seme of the Latvian lexeme "zupa” is - ‘liquid food, meal’, but Latgalian “virīņs” – 'cooked food/meal’, so in the word combination "soltuo zupa” ‘cold soup’ another lexeme "zupa” is necessary. It is usual, that “behavior” against occasionalisms is favorable in artistic texts, but they are irrelevant/ impertinent in scientific and popular style. However, translators took the liberty to use not only widely accepted neologisms (e. g. “škārsteiklys” ‘internet’), but also to offer their own occasional neologisms (dreizynuot, mudrynuot ‘to accelerate, to speed on’, tuoļuokuot ‘to continue’, parūceibys ‘advantage’, sasprīdums ‘decision’, pasavierieji ‘spectators, onlookers’, ītums ‘course of life; annual, day, week set’, apdzeive ‘ancient settlement’, breinuojums ‘astonishment, wonder’, pasūlejumu palete ‘a set of offers’, zeimyns ‘brand, trade mark’, makšariešona ‘fishing, angling’, daīmameiba ‘accessibility, availability’, seneiba ‘ancient times’, augzeme ‘top soil’, perekļuot ‘to nest’, svešlītyns ‘foreign body’). However, the following principle, that is firmly adhered, is that new word / formation/derivation is recognizable by the root and experimental by affixes.
The article discusses some inaccurate uses of pronominal forms, certain terms, syntactical and lexical mistakes in papers on welding. The article also provides the examples of mistakes found in welding papers. The use of nonpronominal forms in the denoted terms is one of the typical morphological mistakes in treating the process of welding. Another problem is the inaccurate use and wrong formation of terminology. The main lexical mistakes are semantic mistakes and calque. The article also focuses on the syntactical mistakes – the mistaken expression of purpose, the wrong use of preposition prie, redundant use of abstract nouns in treatises, also inaccurate use of infinitive with conjuction kad in dependant clauses. Causes for language mistakes and correction of errors are given.
This experiment investigated whether affective information from unfamiliar people can influence the affective ratings for unfamiliar foods, before and after participants have ate the foods. The participants rated a food product’s appearance in terms of how palatable it looked on a 7-point Likert scale before they had eaten it (affective expectation). They also rated how palatable the food actually was after they had eaten it (affective evaluation). Results showed that there was a significant interaction between when participants provided the ratings and whether they had been informed of other people’s affective evaluation. Exposure to affective information did not influence affective expectation, but it did increase affective evaluation. These results suggest that affective information that is presented simultaneously with a visual experience might only be influential when perceivers are able to test the information through their perceptual experience.
It is clear that the conventions which govern the use of ‘rude’ language in public discourse have altered over a generation. It is possible to imagine a Tory patriarch like Ted Heath or a Labour leader like Harold Wilson referring to members of their governing cabinet as ‘bastards’ in private conversation. But it is difficult to imagine either of these British Prime Ministers using this description in public. Perhaps more importantly, it is open to doubt whether the use of such a term, even if it slipped out by mistake, would have been reported by the leading newspapers and media outlets of the day. It is more likely that the desire on the part of the gatekeepers of culture to protect the linguistic propriety of the political field would have outweighed the temptation to print a controversial story.1 Yet John Major's position as Prime Minister in 1993 appeared wholly unaffected by his leaked admission that he didn't sack rebel ministers after a parliamentary vote of confidence because he didn't want ‘three more of the bastards’ conspiring against him. Indeed the comment may well have enhanced Major's weak image in the eyes of the electorate. His successor, Tony Blair, at least in the early days of his premiership, actively cultivated an association with the ‘bad-mouthed’ boys and girls of Cool Britannia and his Press Secretary and confidante Alastair Campbell gained a reputation for his use of expletives in his dealings with the media.2 There seems then to have been a modification to the ‘structure of feeling’ associated with this aspect of rudeness in British society. But there is one place in Britain which has been almost automatically linked with forms of rudeness which are socially unacceptable; a location where offensiveness, crudity, insulting behaviour and nastiness constitute not so much the exception as the norm. Or at least this is how it appears in the social imaginary. The aim of this chapter will be to explore this arena in order to determine what it reveals about both British society and its boundaries of rudeness. The site to be considered is the Premiership football ground, when Saturday comes.3
espanolPresentamos un sistema de normalizacion de tweets en espanol, que usa reglas de preproceso, un modelo de distancias de edicion adecuado al dominio y modelos de lengua para seleccionar candidatos de correccion segun el contexto. El sistema obtuvo resultados superiores a la media en la tarea Tweet-Norm de SEPLN 2013. EnglishWe present a system to normalize Spanish tweets, which uses preprocessing rules, a domain-appropriate edit-distance model, and language models to select correction candidates based on context. The system’s results at SEPLN 2013 Tweet-Norm task were above-average.
Much of the research exploring the relationship between taste quality and affective state suggests that sweet-tasting foods are associated with pleasant feelings, and sour- and spicy-tasting foods are associated with unpleasant feelings. The findings of arousal response as a component of overall affective state are less clear with respect to taste quality. The present study investigated the relationship between taste quality and affective state by comparing arousal and pleasantness ratings of neutral images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Participants (N = 55) recorded these ratings during consumption of sprays which varied in taste quality (sweet, sour, or spicy). As hypothesized, sweet sprays elicited significantly higher ratings of pleasantness than sour or spicy sprays ( η 2 p =.14) on the neutral images. However, arousal ratings did not differ among the three taste quality conditions. Implications of the findings in a broader framework and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Code-mixing involves the deliberate mixing of two languages without an associated topic change. It is primarily used as a solidarity marker. It is not something brought about by laziness or ignorance as such, rather it requires the conversant to have a good knowledge of the grammar of the two languages and to be well aware of societal norms. It is a source of pride to bilinguals (Wardhaugh 1986). In this paper we examine code mixing from the interference dimension, looking at it from the phonological and inter-lingual angles. We discuss code-mixing because Efik people are not monolingual. To them, substantial command of English is a passport to the arena of globalization and competitive white-collar job market. Therefore mixing Efik and English is inevitable. Urbanization, education, government business and multilingualism have triggered the Efik people to learn English. A combination of research principles using unstructured forms of data collection research methods is used for this study which are (i) Participant Observation and (ii) In-depth Interview. This paper is rooted in the phonemic theory which models what happens to the languages when there is a mixing and interference. We used aspects of morphological and sociolinguistic models in the analysis. We have come up with the key findings which state that the grammatical items, rather than the lexical ones, are crucial to the identity of a language. Also a language may borrow lexical items freely assimilating or not assimilating them. We can again add that a language is on its way to losing its identity once it starts borrowing grammatical items from another language.
Thresholded two-tone ("Mooney") images are of interest for vision science because the object hidden within the image can be hard to recognize, with recognition times in the second to minute range. However, once a subject has seen the original grayscale image from which the Mooney is generated, recognition is much accelerated. Typically, suitable "Mooney" images need to be painstakingly generated by hand. Here, we present an approach for automatically generating a two-tone image database. This is based on large number of images collected from the internet. We first selected concrete words from a linguistic database. Using these words as search words, we automatically downloaded images from an online image database (www.flickr.com). Subsequently, the images were preprocessed and thresholded using a histogram based thresholding algorithm to generate the two-tone images. We provide an image set with 330 Mooney images and psychophysical results obtained from six subjects. With a presentation time of 20 s, the average recognition time was 9.36 s ± 7.40 s. Additionally, subjective ratings (confidence, Aha, and difficulty ratings) were obtained and are presented for each subject and image. This image set is, to our knowledge, the largest two-tone image set available to the vision and cognitive science research community (https://sites.google.com/site/hayneslab/links). We provide a Matlab toolbox that makes the extension of the image database possible. Using this toolbox, the researcher can add new object names as search words and create new two-tone images easily. Furthermore, we will present possibilities to extent this toolbox using another image database called ImageNet and introduce the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk to select useful images for a particular experiment. This image database can be useful for studying the mechanisms of rapid learning of visual image recognition, and has applications in research on conscious vision, learning, priming, reward and insight. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013
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.
We have introduced here a new type of corpus annotation which we call Etymological Annotation (EA). We propose this new type because although, over the years, scientists have proposed corpus annotation of various types (Atkins, Clear and Ostler 1992, Biber 1993, Leech 2005), nobody has ever suggested that words included within corpora need to be annotated at their etymological level so that one can retrieve necessary linguistic information relating to antiquity of words and terms used in corpora. The applicational relevance of etymologically annotated corpora may be visualized in language description, language planning, language education, lexicology, language technology as well as in compilation of general, historical, learner and special dictionaries. In case of those languages, where one comes across large number of words borrowed from neighbouring and foreign languages, the proper identification of source of origin of words carries tremendous referential relevance in cross-lingual lexical database generation, morphological processing, part-of-speech tagging, e-learning, digital lexical profile generation, information retrieval, machine learning, and language documentation. Thus, etymologically annotated corpora become an essential resource of applied linguistics and language technology. We propose here to define this new event with necessary direction and guidance to develop etymologically tagged language corpora for all natural languages.
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
African Languages WordNet is an ongoing project which is based on the English WordNet.WordNet is an electronic lexical database that groups words in synonym sets (synsets).In this project, words are translated from English to African Languages.As such, this paper comments on the semantic aspects of verbs in one of the African Languages, namely Northern Sotho, that are translated from English.Verbs are generally understood as expressions of action or state of being.These two languages are typologically dissimilar, with different cultural-historical backgrounds.Northern Sotho is a Bantu 1 language, agglutinating with extensive and productive use of affixes while English is not.In the first place, structural differences between these two languages pose equivalence challenges, both linguistically and computationally.Secondly, verb equivalents may not be affected by the same collocational restrictions in the source and target languages.Another issue is that a verb in one language may invoke certain connotations, which may not apply to its equivalent in another language.Finally, some concepts may be foreign and others culture-specific to one language and not the other, thus resulting in omission of some target language concepts.Attention to these equivalence challenges may enhance technological development of the target language lexicon.
This chapter examines the way in which Aristophanes introduces obscene words into his comedies both at the beginning of the plays and subsequently, following more heightened and/or more sober sequences. The Aristophanic norm is to introduce obscenity unsignalled, the 'obscenity out of nowhere' technique, often employed to signal abuse, crudeness, buffoonery and/or freedom from inhibitions. Alternatively, the poet sometimes employs the 'build-up' technique, in which double entendres and sexual allusions occur with increasing intensity before a climactic primary obscenity is finally introduced. Examples of both techniques are analysed, and some of the challenges that Aristophanic obscenity present and the relationship between obscenity and paratragedy are explored.
La medecine actuelle se base sur les principes de l'EBM dans l'optique destandardiser les pratiques. Les soins palliatifs sont eux aussi soumis a unereglementation et il apparait alors une norme dans les soins palliatifs. Or les soinspalliatifs sont une discipline a part qui a pour objet principal la prise en chargeindividualisee. A partir d'une revue de la litterature, les normativites theorique etpratique ont ete definies. L'objectif de ce travail est de voir quelle est la conceptiondes soignants du travail en soins palliatifs et de voir comment normativite et ideauxs'articulent au quotidien dans le travail en USP. Pour repondre a cette problematique, une etude qualitative par entretiens semi-diriges de soignants exercant en USP a ete realisee. Ils ont ete soumis a une double analyse: une analyse par le logiciel d'analyse lexical Alceste© et une analyse manuelle. Le travail en equipe, le dialogue, l'accompagnement ressortent comme des points importants du travail en USP. Il existe egalement une grande adaptabilite au patient meme s'il existe un certain rythme dans l'organisation de la journee. La norme est donc necessaire en soins palliatifs pour creer un cadre et assurer un acces egal a tous et garantir l'individualisation des prises en charge. Cette norme est en constante evolution pour s'adapter au patient
This paper describes designing and implementing Mobile Dictionary, taken into consideration language characteristics. The proposed system represents bilingual dictionary based on WordNet lexical database with a semantic and commonsense knowledge. The proposed dictionary will be implemented for mobile devices, therefore; the cloud computing will be used in this implementation. Consequently, SQL Azure will be used to solve scalability, and interoperability of mobile users and other methods have been used for both Arabic and English languages. So, the SQL Azure will be used as the cloud database to solve both the scalability in the data with scale terabytes of data to millions of mobile users and the interoperability challenges. The system dictionary is developed and tested in Android mobile platform. Experimental results show that the proposed system has two versions- at work; offline and online. The online approach uses the mobiles computing in the cloud system to reduce the storage complexity of the mobile. Real time test will be used in order to evaluate the system access and respond times to display results.
Reviewed by: Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity by Peter Trudgill Sali A. Tagliamonte Sociolinguistic typology: Social determinants of linguistic complexity. By Peter Trudgill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 288. ISBN 9780199604357. $35. In this book Peter Trudgill tells the story of what he has been wondering about most of his academic career: to what extent do 'different types of human society produce different types of language and, if this is the case, what [does] this mean for the future typology of human languages' (viii)? T is a master linguist and a consummate storyteller, making this book not only a culminating piece of scholarship but also a page-turner. You get a hint at the magnitude of the story he wants to tell when you see that his book is dedicated to William Labov and the sheer number of famous researchers that are thanked for contributing to its telling (xii-xiii). T has synthesized a linguistic treasure trove-data from all over the globe and an amalgamation of insights from sociolinguistics, dialectology, historical linguistics, and typology. T's story begins with an overview of innumerable 'Social correlates of linguistic structures' (xv). From the thirty Sami words for types of snow through the honorifics of Korean, the directional prefixes of Tibeto-Burman and the lexicon of British carpenters, readers are led through a dizzying array of correlations between language phenomena and climate, geography, and culture. The relationship between a language's lexis and grammar and its social circumstances is strong.\ But curiously, there are also many examples where there is no correlation at all. T proposes to 'get a grip' on this dilemma by looking at other aspects of human societies that may offer insight. Here begins the exploration of what factors 'might be promising to look at in our search for explanations for why certain languages select certain structures and not others' (1). T naturally turns to the sociolinguistic literature where it is well known that sociocultural phenomena are critically linked to linguistic change, transmission, diffusion, incrementation, and lifespan change (Labov 1972, 2007). Cataclysmic events and economic upheavals accelerate the rate of linguistic change. Different levels of language structure change at different rates. Change in phonology and in features that are pragmatically sensitive proceed relatively rapidly. In contrast, grammatical features can remain stable for centuries. Yet some languages and dialects change faster than others. Why? In fact, there is good evidence to argue that linguistic change is strongly influenced by: (i) the relative degree of contact vs. isolation of a speech community, and (ii) the relative social stability vs. instability of a community. In low-contact, socially stable circumstances, change proceeds slowly, in fact very slowly. Language change is also influenced by contact, which leads to simplification in linguistic phenomena and processes such as regularization, increasing lexical and morphological transparency, and loss of redundancy. Yet complexification [End Page 378] may also occur under the same circumstances, such as when there is transfer of features from one language to another, borrowing, and the like. This leads to a conundrum: 'what are the circumstances in which contact leads to simplification, and what are the circumstances when it leads to complexification' (33)? T argues that there is a solution to this paradox because there are different types of contact, which in turn impact the way language learning and acquisition evolve within the speech community; that is, who are the people in contact with each other, adults or children (see e.g. Kerswill 1996)? Complexification develops in low-contact situations where there is long-term transmission from parent to child, there are shared norms, and change proceeds down an uninterrupted path. Simplification arises in high-contact situations where there is a significant history of the language having been acquired by adult nonnative speakers, and individuals may not have much in common. There is yet another factor implicated in language change-community size. When a population is relatively small, tight social networks can 'push through, enforce, and sustain linguistic changes which would have a much smaller chance of success in larger, more fluid communities' (103). In high-contact communities, leveling and the loss of arbitrary distinctions develop in order to accommodate communication among...
This paper describes the annotation process and linguistic properties of the Persian syntactic dependency treebank. The treebank consists of approximately 30,000 sentences annotated with syntactic roles in addition to morpho-syntactic features. One of the unique features of this treebank is that there are almost 4800 distinct verb lemmas in its sentences making it a valuable resource for educational goals. The treebank is constructed with a bootstrapping approach by means of available tagging and parsing tools and manually correcting the annotations. The data is splitted into standard train, development and test set in the CoNLL dependency format and is freely available to researchers. 1
Factors Related to Undergraduate Psychology Majors Learning Statistics Tamarah Faye Smith Doctor of Philosophy: Educational Psychology Major Advisor: Dr. Frank Farley The American Psychological Association (APA) has outlined goals for psychology undergraduates. These goals are aimed at several objectives including the need to build skills for interpreting and conducting psychological research (APA, 2007). These skills allow psychologists to conduct research that is covered in the media (Farley et al. 2009) and influences policy and law (Fischer, Stein & Heikkinen, 2009; Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham & Banich, 2009a; Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham & Banich, 2009b). One of the fundamental courses required for building these skills is statistics, a course that begins at the undergraduate level. Research has suggested that performance after completing statistics courses is weak for many students (Garfield, 2003; Hirsch & O'Donnell, 2001; Konold et al. 1993; Mulhern & Wylie, 2005; Schau & Mattern, 1997). The current study examined factors that may be related to performance on a statistical test. A sample of 231 students enrolled in or having already completed a statistics course for psychology majors completed a statistical skill questionnaire, built by the author, to measure performance with four APA outlined goals. To measure student attitudes the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS-36; Schau, 2003) was completed with adapted questions to measure perceived attitudes of peers and faculty toward statistics. Finally, questions pertaining to classroom techniques and content areas covered were assessed. Building off of social cognitive theory (SCT; Bandura, 1986) and expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), it was expected that lower attitudes, such as low value and low interest, among the students and those perceived to be held by faculty and peers would be related to lower performance on the statistical test. A series of linear regressions were conducted and revealed no significant relationship between perceived faculty attitudes and performance. Students' own liking and positive affect ratings were positive predictors of performance indicating a gain of 3-4% on the statistical test. However, an interesting negative relationship emerged with respect to students' value of statistics and peer interest scores where performance on the statistical test decreased as value and peer interest increased. This may be demonstrating issues pertaining to the SATS-36 validity when measuring students' value as well as issues with the items created to measure perceived peer interest. The results of a factor analysis on perceived attitude measures for peers and faculty suggest that the need for more items is necessary, particularly for faculty attitudes. Finally, this study provides a first look at the performance of a sample of psychology students with APA goals for quantitative reasoning. Results showed that students performed best at reading basic descriptive statistics (M=74.5%), and worst when choosing statistical tests for a given research hypothesis (M=30%). Performance on questions pertaining to confidence intervals (M=38%) and discriminating between statistical and practical significance (M=39%) was also low. Future research can address limitations of this study by expanding the sample to include a broader range of psychology undergraduates and including additional items for measuring perceived attitudes. Other methodological approaches, such as experimental design and directly measuring faculty attitudes, should also be considered. Finally, further research and replication are necessary to determine if scores on the statistical test will continue to be low with other samples and varying question formats. These results can then be used to generate conversation about why and how students are, or are not, learning the appropriate quantitative skills.
Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how codin
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If language comprehension requires a sensorimotor simulation, how can abstract language be comprehended? We show that preparation to respond in an upward or downward direction affects comprehension of the abstract quantifiers “more and more” and “less and less” as indexed by an N400-like component. Conversely, the semantic content of the sentence affects the motor potential measured immediately before the upward or downward action is initiated. We propose that this bidirectional link between motor system and language arises because the motor system implements forward models that predict the sensory consequences of actions. Because the same movement (e.g., raising the arm) can have multiple forward models for different contexts, the models can make different predictions depending on whether the arm is raised, for example, to place an object or raised as a threat. Thus, different linguistic contexts invoke different forward models, and the predictions constitute different understandings)
Various aspects of motherese also known as infant-directed speech (IDS) have been studied for many years. As it is a widespread phenomenon, it is suspected to play some important roles in infant development. Therefore, our purpose was to provide an update of the evidence accumulated by reviewing all of the empirical or experimental studies that have been published since 1966 on IDS driving factors and impacts. Two databases were screened and 144 relevant studies were retained. General linguistic and prosodic characteristics of IDS were found in a variety of languages, and IDS was not restricted to mothers. IDS varied with factors associated with the caregiver (e.g., cultural, psychological and physiological) and the infant (e.g., reactivity and interactive feedback). IDS promoted infants’ affect, attention and language learning. Cognitive aspects of IDS have been widely studied whereas affective ones still need to be developed. However, during interactions, the following two observati)
The meaning of person names is determined by their associated information. This study used event related potentials to investigate the time course of integrating the newly constructed meaning of person names into discourse context. The meaning of person names was built by two-sentence descriptions of the names. Then we manipulated the congruence of person names relative to discourse context in a way that the meaning of person names either matched or did not match the previous context. ERPs elicited by the names were compared between the congruent and the incongruent conditions. We found that the incongruent names elicited a larger N400 as well as a larger P600 compared to the congruent names. The results suggest that the meaning of unknown names can be effectively constructed from short linguistic descriptions and that the established meaning can be rapidly retrieved and integrated into contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Scienc)