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16504 papers
Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers (Conclusion 6: 106); second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers (AI-J: 150); third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them by others (AI-P: 234). Each of these three claims is argued for separately from premises about the ways in which humans, adult and child, succeed in gaining knowledge by testimony. The three arguments provide the structure for Anti-Individualism. Goldberg's argument for the first claim – that the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers – begins from uncontroversial facts about testimony. Gaining knowledge by testimony depends on knowing the meanings of some utterances, and it is possible to know the meaning of a person's utterance while knowing little that would distinguish this person from anyone else (56). The best explanation of how this is possible involves postulating linguistic norms which entail facts about the linguistic meanings of utterances (41). Now in some cases of testimony, a hearer acquires a belief whose content is the linguistic meaning of a speaker's utterance, where the linguistic meaning of this utterance is determined by linguistic norms (Premises 2–4 and Conclusion 3: 105). But linguistic norms might have been different from what they are even while the person's and her audience's non-relational properties remained unaltered (Premises 1: 104–5). And in such a case, the hearer would have acquired a belief with a different content (Premises 5–7: 105–6). Therefore, ‘Psychological facts such as believing that p do not supervene on the individualistic facts regarding the subject’ (106).
In questo articolo descriveremo il VIT, Treebank (Sintattico) dell’Italiano (dell’Università) di Venezia (Venice Italian Treebank) di 320.000 parole, creato dal Laboratorio di Linguistica Computazionale del Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio. Focalizzeremo la nostra attenzione sulle caratteristiche sintattico- semantiche del treebank che sono in parte legate al tagset adottato, in parte sono dovute alla teoria linguistica di riferimento, e infine sono, come per ogni treebank, legate alla lingua prescelta, l’italiano. Con esempi presi anche da treebank dispo- nibili per altre lingue, mostreremo quali sono le differenze e le motivazioni teori- che e pratiche dietro le scelte fatte. Dedicheremo infine una parte della nostra pre- sentazione all’analisi quantitativa dei dati del nostro treebank confrontandoli con gli altri. In generale si cercherà di dimostrare come l’apprendimento di una gram- matica o di un parser in maniera automatica da un treebank, non possa dare gli stessi risultati passando da un treebank all’altro, e come questo processo sia dipendente da fattori sostanziali come il quadro linguistico di riferimento adotta- to per la descrizione strutturale nonché in ultima analisi, la lingua descritta.
The aim of Evalita Parsing Task is at defining and extending the state of the art for parsing Italian by encouraging the application of existing models and approaches. Therefore, as in the first edition, the Task includes two tracks, i.e. dependency and constituency. This second track is based on a development set in a format, which is an adaptation for Italian of the Penn Treebank format, and has been applied by conversion to an existing dependency Italian treebank. The paper describes the constituency track and the data for development and testing of the participant systems. Moreover it presents and discusses the results, which positively compare with those obtained for constituency parsing in the Evalita’07 Parsing Task.
In this paper, we present our in-progress research tasks for building lexical database of the verb valences in the Arabic Quran using FrameNet frames. We study the verbs in their context in the Quran, and compare that with matching frames and frame evoking verbs in the English FrameNet. We analyze the gaps and make appropriate amendments to the FrameNet by adding new frame elements and relations.
Traditionally, deep, wide-coverage linguistic resources are hand-crafted and their creation is time-consuming and costly. Considerable effort has been put into overcoming this problem by automatically inducing linguistic resources such as rich, deep grammars, lexicons or subcategorisation frames from corpora. Most work so far has concentrated on English, like the one of Hockenmaier and Steedman [7], Nakanishi et al. [8] or Cahill et al. [3]. They present approaches for the acquisition of deep linguistic resources from the Penn-II treebank, using different grammar frame-works like CCG, HPSG and LFG. English, however, is a configurational language, where strict word-order constraints help to disambiguate predicate-argument structure. Porting these approaches to a semi-free word order language, the question arises: how good can it get? Can we expect similar results when dealing with (semi-)free word order? Can data-driven methods cope when dealing with ambiguous data structures and sparse data? And, furthermore, what impact has treebank design on the automatic acquisition of linguistic resources such as deep grammars? This paper describes approaches to treebank-based acquisition of LFG resources for a semi-free word order lan-guage, based on and substantially extending the method of Cahill et al., O’Donovan et al. and Burke et al. [2, 9, 1], who presented large-scale acquisition of LFG grammars and lexical resources from the English Penn-II and Penn-III treebanks. They also presented work on data-driven multilingual unification grammar development for Spanish, Chi-nese and German. While treebank-based deep grammar acquisition can be applied to other languages, results are lower
In this paper, we would like to introduce a new approach to recover Vietnamese text's accents. Given a Vietnamese text in which accents are lost, our goal is to seek for a recovered text that yields a best lexical probability. Using a dynamic programming approach, we first build a model of language for Vietnamese as a lexical database which gives lexical probabilities to Vietnamese sentences. Second, we construct a map of literal translations of Vietnamese words to restrict our searching space. Finally, we apply dynamic programming as a searching engine to seek out the most probable sentence. We also use the co-occurrence graph to increase the accuracy of selection, the experimental results show that the average accuracy of our approach is about 93%-94%.
Virtual and mixed reality environments (VMRE) often imply full-body human-computer interaction scenarios. We used a public multimodal mixed reality installation, the Synthetic Oracle, and a between-groups design to study the effects of implicit (e.g., passively walking) or explicit (e.g., pointing) interaction modes on the users' emotional and engagement experiences, and we assessed it using questionnaires. Additionally, real-time arm motion data was used to categorize the user behavior and to provide interaction possibilities for the explicit interaction group. The results show that the online behavior classification corresponded well to the users' interaction mode. In addition, contrary to the explicit interaction, the engagement ratings from implicit users were positively correlated with a valence but were uncorrelated with arousal ratings. Interestingly, arousal levels were correlated with different behaviors displayed by the visitors depending on the interaction mode. Hence, this study confirms that the activity level and behavior of users modulates their experience, and that in turn, the interaction mode modulates their behavior. Thus, these results show the importance of the selected interaction mode when designing users' experiences in VMRE.
In this paper we compare two Machine Learning approaches to the task of pronominal anaphora resolution: a conventional classification system based on C5.0 decision trees, and a novel perceptron-based ranker. We use coreference links annotated in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 for training and evaluation purposes. The perceptron system achieves f-score 79.43% on recognizing coreference of personal and possessive pronouns, which clearly outperforms the classifier and which is the best result reported on this data set so far.
Parallel grammars and parallel treebanks can be a useful method for studying linguistic diversity and commonality. We use this approach to study how arguments to similar predicates are realized across languages. To that end, we formulate formal principles for aligning at phrase and word levels based on translational correspondences at predicate-argument level. A first version of a new tool for creating, storing, visualizing and searching treebank alignment at different levels has been constructed. 1
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of social network comments to give a broad overview to serve as a baseline for future research. Design/methodology/approach English comments from a representative sample of public MySpace profiles were examined with a collection of exploratory analyses, using automatic data processing, quantitative techniques and content analyses. Findings Comments were normally for general friendship maintenance and were typically short, with 95 per cent having 57 or fewer words. They contained a combination of standard spelling, apparently accidental mistakes, slang, sentence fragments, “typographic slang” and interjections. Several new creative spelling variants derived from previous forms of computer‐mediated communication have become extremely common, including u, ur,:), haha and lol. The vast majority of comments (97 per cent) contained at least one non‐standard language feature, suggesting that members almost universally recognise the informal nature of this kind of messaging. Research limitations/implications The investigation only covered MySpace and only analysed English comments. Practical implications MySpace comments should not be written in, or judged by, standard linguistic norms and may cause special problems for information retrieval. Originality/value This is the first large‐scale study of language in social network comments.
We employ a single-trial correlational MEG analysis technique to investigate early processing in the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Three classes of affixed words were presented in a lexical decision task: free stems (e.g., taxable), bound roots (e.g., tolerable), and unique root words (e.g., vulnerable, the root of which does not appear elsewhere). Analysis was focused on brain responses within 100-200 msec poststimulus onset in the previously identified letter string and visual word-form areas. MEG data were analyzed using cortically constrained minimum-norm estimation. Correlations were computed between activity at functionally defined ROIs and continuous measures of the words' morphological properties. ROIs were identified across subjects on a reference brain and then morphed back onto each individual subject's brain (n = 9). We find evidence of decomposition for both free stems and bound roots at the M170 stage in processing. The M170 response is shown to be sensitive to morphological properties such as affix frequency and the conditional probability of encountering each word given its stem. These morphological properties are contrasted with orthographic form features (letter string frequency, transition probability from one string to the next), which exert effects on earlier stages in processing ( approximately 130 msec). We find that effects of decomposition at the M170 can, in fact, be attributed to morphological properties of complex words, rather than to purely orthographic and form-related properties. Our data support a model of word recognition in which decomposition is attempted, and possibly utilized, for complex words containing bound roots as well as free word-stems.
We adapt a semantic role parser to the domain of goal-directed speech by creating an artificial treebank from an existing text tree-bank. We use a three-component model that includes distributional models from both target and source domains. We show that we improve the parser's performance on utterances collected from human-machine dialogues by training on the artificially created data without loss of performance on the text treebank.
The systematic presentation of collocations is increasingly recognized as a very useful addition to specialized reference works. However, few dictionaries or terminological databases actually include this kind of data. More surprisingly still, no method has been designed yet to allow efficient access to and retrieval of specific specialized collocations from electronic reference tools. This article presents two new search paths for accessing and extracting collocations from an English-French specialized lexical database. The paths have been designed according to two specific user-defined situations: (1) translation from L1 to L2; and (2) text production in L2. We exploit a formal semantic encoding of collocations based on Lexical Functions (LFs). LFs allow us to establish an equivalence relationship between collocations that convey the same meaning in different languages without having to link the collocations formally. They also allow us to extract sets of collocations associated with specific meanings.
This paper presents a structural statistical machine translation (SSMT) model to deal with the data sparseness problem that occurs as a result of the necessarily small corpus to translate Chinese into Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL). A parallel bilingual corpus was developed, and linguistic information from the Sinica Treebank is adopted for Chinese sentence analysis. The synchronous context free grammar (SCFG) was adopted to convert a Chinese structure to the corresponding TSL structure and then extract a translation memory which comprises the thematic relations between the grammar rules of both structures. In structural translation, the statistical MT (SMT) approach was used to align the thematic roles in the grammar rules and the translation memory provides the reference templates for TSL structure translation. Finally, the agreement information for TSL verbs was labeled for enriching the expressiveness of the translated TSL sequence. Several experiments were conducted to evaluate the translation performance and the communication effectiveness for the deaf. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms a baseline statistical MT system using the same small corpus, especially for the translation of long sentences.
Automatic syllabification of words is challenging, not least because the syllable is not easy to define precisely. Consequently, no accepted standard algorithm for automatic syllabification exists. There are two broad approaches: rule-based and data-driven. The rule-based method effectively embodies some theoretical position regarding the syllable, whereas the data-driven paradigm tries to infer "new" syllabifications from examples assumed to be correctly syllabified already. This article compares the performance of several variants of the two basic approaches. Given the problems of definition, it is difficult to determine a correct syllabification in all cases and so to establish the quality of the "gold standard" corpus used either to evaluate quantitatively the output of an automatic algorithm or as the example-set on which data-driven methods crucially depend. Thus, we look for consensus in the entries in multiple lexical databases of pre-syllabified words. In this work, we have used two independent lexicons, and extracted from them the same 18,016 words with their corresponding (possibly different) syllabifications. We have also created a third lexicon corresponding to the 13,594 words that share the same syllabifications in these two sources. As well as two rule-based approaches (Hammond's and Fisher's implementation of Kahn's), three data-driven techniques are evaluated: a look-up procedure, an exemplar-based generalization technique, and syllabification by analogy (SbA). The results on the three databases show consistent and robust patterns. First, the data-driven techniques outperform the rule-based systems in word and juncture accuracies by a very significant margin but require training data and are slower. Second, syllabification in the pronunciation domain is easier than in the spelling domain. Finally, best results are consistently obtained with SbA.
Most of text mining techniques are based on word and/or phrase analysis of the text. The statistical analysis of a term (word or phrase) frequency captures the importance of the term within a document. However, to achieve a more accurate analysis, the underlying mining technique should indicate terms that capture the semantics of the text from which the importance of a term in a sentence and in the document can be derived. Incorporating semantic features from the WordNet lexical database is one of many approaches that have been tried to improve the accuracy of text clustering techniques. A new semantic-based model that analyzes documents based on their meaning is introduced. The proposed model analyzes terms and their corresponding synonyms and/or hypernyms on the sentence and document levels. In this model, if two documents contain different words and these words are semantically related, the proposed model can measure the semantic-based similarity between the two documents. The similarity between documents relies on a new semantic-based similarity measure which is applied to the matching concepts between documents. Experiments using the proposed semantic-based model in text clustering are conducted. Experimental results demonstrate that the newly developed semantic-based model enhances the clustering quality of sets of documents substantially.
We present parsing algorithms for various mildly non-projective dependency formalisms. In particular, algorithms are presented for: all well-nested structures of gap degree at most 1, with the same complexity as the best existing parsers for constituency formalisms of equivalent generative power; all well-nested structures with gap degree bounded by any constant k; and a new class of structures with gap degree up to k that includes some ill-nested structures. The third case includes all the gap degree k structures in a number of dependency treebanks.
Alternative paths to linguistic annotation, such as those utilizing games or exploiting the web users, are becoming popular in recent times owing to their very high benefit-to-cost ratios. In this paper, however, we report a case study on POS annotation for Bangla and Hindi, where we observe that reliable linguistic annotation requires not only expert annotators, but also a great deal of supervision. For our hierarchical POS annotation scheme, we find that close supervision and training is necessary at every level of the hierarchy, or equivalently, complexity of the tagset. Nevertheless, an intelligent annotation tool can significantly accelerate the annotation process and increase the inter-annotator agreement for both expert and non-expert annotators. These findings lead us to believe that reliable annotation requiring deep linguistic knowledge (e.g., POS, chunking, Treebank, semantic role labeling) requires expertise and supervision. The focus, therefore, should be on design and development of appropriate annotation tools equipped with machine learning based predictive modules that can significantly boost the productivity of the annotators.
In this paper we describe our participation at the EVALITA 2009 Con- stituency Parsing Task. We used the Berkeley Parser, obtaining the best F1, that is 78:73. This result corresponds to an increment of 15.85% with respect to the best result obtained at EVALITA 2007 by the Bikel's parser (F1 = 67:96). A further important advantage of the Berkeley parser is that it does not require any language adaptation in addition to the need of retraining it on the new treebank. For comparison, we also report the results obtained by the Bikel's parser on the 2009 treebank.
Dysfunctional emotional processing affects social functioning in patients with schizophrenia. However, the relationship between emotional perception and response in social interaction has not been elucidated. Twenty-seven patients with schizophrenia and 27 normal controls performed a virtual reality social encounter task in which they introduced themselves to avatars expressing happy, neutral, or angry emotions while verbal response duration and onset time were measured and perception of emotional valence and arousal, and state anxiety were rated afterwards. Self-reported trait-affective scale scores and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) ratings were also obtained. Patient group significantly underestimated the valence and arousal of angry emotions expressed by an avatar. While valence and arousal ratings of happy avatars were comparable between groups, patient group reported significantly higher state anxiety in response to happy avatars. State anxiety ratings significantly decreased from encounters with neutral to happy avatars in normal controls while no significant decrease was observed in the patient group. The Social Anhedonia Scale and PANSS negative symptom subscale scores (blunted affect, emotional withdrawal, and passive/ apathetic social withdrawal items) were significantly correlated with state anxiety ratings of the encounters with happy avatars. These results suggest that patients with schizophrenia have interference with the experience of pleasure in social interactions which may be associated with negative symptoms.
Regardless of their name (dictionary, glossary, encyclopaedia, or even ‘leximat’, in the case of a new generation of online, semi-automated lexicographic tools), subject-field, purpose, or medium (paper or cyber), lexicographic reference works should be regarded as functional information tools that are solely designed to cater to the information needs of their users in different usage situations and that consequently help them solve specific communication (reading, writing, translation) or knowledge problems (acquiring new knowledge or verifying existing knowledge, learning a language or a subject field). In this article, we briefly outline the evolution of lexicographic reference works from stand-alone to multifunctional lexicographic tools, and we describe the theoretical principles and innovative functionalities of a new task and problem-oriented lexical database, the Base Lexicale du Français. In line with Tarp (2006), a tool that should be truly regarded as a ‘leximat’.
The basic concept of semantic Web,ontology and semantic annotation are described.Then the semantic annotation technology and tool today are introduced and analyzed,and a way of automatic semantic annotation based on HTML documents that contain rich semantic data on the Web is presented.This method couples structural analysis of documents with semantic analysis incorporating domain ontologies and lexical database Hownet,discovers the semantic partition tree corresponding to documents,and annotates HTML documents with semantic lables.The experiment is based on the HTML documents of electronic products,the result shows the method is feasible.
German genitive attributes are usually tagged as such in treebanks. However, it is well known that this information is not sufficient for determining the type of relation between head nouns and attributes, as genitive attributes can express many different semantic relations. Various linguistic classifications have been worked out, but to my knowledge, nobody has so far proposed to apply this linguistic knowledge to a corpus. The challenge here is to come up with a classification that is both easy to verify and sufficiently fine-grained. Using earlier linguistic approaches as guidelines, I propose in this paper a detailed annotation scheme for German genitive attributes based on readily identifiable noun features. First insights from its application to the Smultron Treebank show that it is easy to distinguish between the proposed classes and that my classification of genitive attributes can be related to a more general semantic annotation level.
You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Oct 2009Bilingualism: Consequences for Language, Cognition, Development, and the Brain Viorica Marian, PhD Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah, PhD, CCC-SLP Margarita Kaushanskaya, PhD Henrike K. Blumenfeld andPhD Li ShengPhD Viorica Marian Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD, Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD, CCC-SLP, Margarita Kaushanskaya Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD, Henrike K. Blumenfeld Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD and Li Sheng Google Scholar More articles by this author, PhD https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR2.14132009.10 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Every year, thousands of middle- and upper-class American children study a foreign language for enrichment. These children, their parents, and their teachers are guided by the belief that knowing another language “is good for you.” At the same time (and sometimes in the same schools) thousands of other children—usually from immigrant and lower-class backgrounds—are discouraged from and sometimes forbidden to speak their native language. Their families are told that communication in their native languages will prevent them from mastering English and that raising children with more than one language will “confuse” them and have long-lasting, detrimental effects. Given these two contradictory perspectives, what does research say about the consequences of bilingualism? Cognitive Development Empirical evidence suggests that bilingualism in children is associated with increased meta-cognitive skills and superior divergent thinking ability (a type of cognitive flexibility), as well as with better performance on some perceptual tasks (such as recognizing a perceptual object “embedded” in a visual background) and classification tasks (for reviews, see Bialystok, 2001; Cummins, 1976; Diaz, 1983, 1985). Other studies report that bilingualism has a negative impact on language development and is associated with delays in lexical acquisition (e.g., Pearson, Fernandez, & Oller, 1993; Umbel & Oller, 1995) and a smaller vocabulary than that of monolingual children (Verhallen & Schoonen, 1993; Vermeer, 1992). Bilingual children score on par with their monolingual counterparts on tests of verbal ability by middle school, and well-controlled studies provide no evidence for lower intellectual abilities of bilingual children compared to monolinguals (Baker & Jones, 1998; Cook, 1997; Hakuta, 1986). The early differences in linguistic performance of bilingual children can be attributed to a somewhat different language development pattern. Bilingual children learn earlier than their monolingual counterparts that objects and their names are not the same and that one object can have more than one name. Understanding that language is a symbolic reference system is advantageous for metacognitive development; it does not, however, necessarily translate to improved performance on early vocabulary development tests. Those vocabulary test results are due, in part, to the way language assessment usually takes place. If a monolingual child has three lexical labels for three semantic items (“milk,” “grandma,” and “dog”), and a bilingual child has two lexical labels in English (“milk” and “grandma”) and two in Spanish (“leche” and “abuela,” the Spanish words for “milk” and “grandma”), the monolingual child’s vocabulary will be counted as three words and the bilingual child’s vocabulary will be counted as two words—because vocabulary size is counted not as the number of lexical items known, but as the number of conceptual representations that have lexical labels. Therefore, even though the bilingual child has four words, they map onto two conceptual representations, compared with the three conceptual representations of the monolingual child. This assessment technique frequently places bilingual children at a disadvantage. Bilinguals often are assessed in only one language, providing an inaccurate assessment of the child’s actual level of linguistic and cognitive development. A child assessed in only one language, typically that of the country in which he or she is being tested (i.e., English in the United States, often the second and less-proficient language), may be placed erroneously at a lower level of cognitive development than his or her true level. This placement can have adverse academic consequences, such as inappropriate lower-grade placement, being held back a year, enrollment in inappropriate remedial programs, and other placement decisions. (For more comprehensive discussions of first/second language knowledge and cognitive processing in bilingual children, see work by Cummins). Comparisons of children’s performance in the first and second language indicate that performance in one language, even the dominant language, is not an accurate reflection of the child’s level of development. Instead, assessment is most accurate with “best performance” measures that assess the highest level of development attained by a bilingual child across both languages. Therefore, whenever possible, “best performance” measures across the two languages should be the technique of choice during bilingual assessments. Most school districts and speech-language pathology clinics lack the bilingual staff and financial resources to test individuals in the dozens of native languages of their client populations. The result is both over-identification (the client does not have an impairment, but just needs more time to learn the language) and under-identification (the client is assessed only in English, and the assessor inaccurately concludes that the client’s difficulties are related to learning a new language) of bilinguals. This state of affairs can be improved only if changes are made both at the systemic level—by increasing funding for services to linguistically diverse populations—and at the individual level—by raising clinicians’ understanding of bilingualism and its consequences. With regard to the latter, clinicians should be aware of the most recent findings in four areas: lexical organization, word-learning, cognitive control, and neural organization. Lexical Organization In children learning a first language, a noticeable change takes place in the salience of various word-word relations during middle childhood. For example, a 6-year-old is quick to point out the thematic relationship between an iron and a shirt (“Because you can iron a shirt!”) but has difficulties attributing the relationship between planes and buses to their shared taxonomy. They might say that “Planes and buses both have fumes” instead of recognizing that both are vehicles. By 8 years of age, most children readily acknowledge both thematic and taxonomic relationships (Hashimoto, McGregor, & Graham, 2007). Children learning two languages simultaneously or sequentially must store and retrieve a larger number of words, because vocabularies are distributed across two linguistic systems. Does access to different semantic relations arise in the same timeline for these children? “chair,” a child may produce “table,” “sit,” and “legs”). The bilingual children produced a similar number of taxonomic associations (e.g., chair-table) to the prompts in their two languages and in comparison to monolingual English-speaking peers (who were matched on performance IQ). The similarities in overall performance suggest that the emergence of taxonomic relations is largely determined by general cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, we found subtle differences—the bilingual children more frequently responded taxonomically than the monolingual children when the first associations and associations to verbs (e.g., jump-walk) were compared. This subtle bilingual advantage is interesting given that the bilingual children had a significantly smaller English receptive vocabulary than the monolinguals. The bilingual children’s need to store and retrieve more words across two linguistic systems may have rendered taxonomic relations more salient. More recently, Sheng, Bedore, and Peña (2008) compared word associations generated by Spanish-English bilingual children in their first and second languages. These children were considered relatively balanced bilinguals based on their linguistic input and output. The children showed overall comparable performance in the two languages, but there also was a subtle Spanish advantage over English in generating taxonomic associations to adjectives and verbs. We hypothesize that features of the Spanish language, such as the use of salient derivational endings (e.g., -oso, -ado, -ivo) to mark the adjective class and the use of verbs in more salient positions in an utterance may have led to an earlier appreciation of taxonomic relations for Spanish adjectives and verbs. Sheng, Bedore, and Peña (2009) are extending this research to bilingual children who have language impairment. Monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment exhibit a significant deficit in the use of both taxonomic and thematic relations in comparison to typically developing peers (Sheng & McGregor, in press). Investigations of bilingual children with language impairment will provide insights regarding the interactions among bilingualism (an experiential factor), linguistic capacity (a learner-internal factor), and vocabulary organization. Word-learning Speech-language pathologists have long been aware that application of monolingual language norms to bilingual clients is inappropriate. What are the alternatives? One possibility is to use processing-based measures, such as word-learning, to index language ability in bilinguals (e.g., Peña, Iglesias, & Lidz, 2001) because these tasks reflect a child’s general ability to process linguistic information but do not rely on extant linguistic knowledge. Therefore, bilinguals with poor language knowledge due to low proficiency should perform just as well on word-learning tasks as monolinguals, and better than bilinguals who experience language deficits. However, little is known about the effects of bilingualism on word-learning. How exactly does bilingualism influence word-learning ability? Our recent research comparing bilingual and monolingual adults on their ability to learn new words consistently suggests that bilingual adults tested in their native language outperform monolingual adults on word-learning tasks. For example, Kaushanskaya and Marian (2009a) examined word-learning performance in monolingual speakers, English-Spanish bilinguals, and English-Mandarin bilinguals, and found that both bilingual groups outperformed the monolingual group. A related study (Kaushanskaya & Marian, 2009b) examined the effects of bilingualism on adults’ ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies during novel word-learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned novel words that overlapped with English orthographically, but diverged from English phonologically. Native-language orthographic information presented during learning interfered with encoding of novel words in monolinguals, but not in bilinguals. These findings indicate that knowledge of two languages may shield bilinguals from native-language interference during novel word-learning. Current work (Kaushanskaya, Yoo, Van Hecke, & Mirsberger, 2009) suggests that monolinguals’ ability to learn new words depends on whether they learn new words silently or out loud. Conversely, bilinguals’ performance does not depend on any particular learning strategy, and they can acquire new words efficiently under any learning conditions. Our findings indicate that bilingualism facilitates word-learning performance in adults, although the precise mechanisms of this advantage remain unknown. Whether similar word-learning advantages can be observed in children is still under investigation. It appears that word-learning performance in bilingual children may be less contingent on latent vocabulary knowledge than in monolingual children (e.g., Kan & Kohnert, 2008; Wilkinson & Mazzitelli, 2003). However, studies that contrast word learning in simultaneous bilingual children (exposed to two languages from birth), sequential bilingual children, and monolingual children are necessary to identify the timeline and the mechanisms that underlie the development of the bilingual advantage for word learning. The finding that bilingualism facilitates word-learning performance has implications for the use of word-learning tasks to index language function in bilingual clients. If typically developing bilinguals perform at higher rates than typically developing monolinguals, then the expectations for bilingual clients with a suspected language difficulty may also need to be adjusted. Cognitive Control The consequences of bilingualism on cognition have implications for understanding the nature of linguistic-cognitive deficits. Linguistic and cognitive processes interact across the lifespan, with linguistic function tied to development of cognitive control throughout childhood and to its decline during aging (Comalli et al., 1962). For example, aging adults may have difficulty with language tasks that require inhibitory control, such as ignoring irrelevant language input when multiple speakers are present (Schrauf, 2008). Research suggests that the very processes that decline with normal aging also may be honed by lifelong bilingualism (Kavé et al., 2008). For example, aging bilinguals outperform monolingual peers at suppressing task-irrelevant information (Bialystok et al., 2004). Further, Bialystok, Craik, and Freedman (2007) showed that the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia may be delayed by up to four years in bilinguals relative to monolinguals. How does bilingual experience shape the cognitive system? In general, bilinguals face greater ambiguity during language processing because they consider similar-sounding words from two languages (instead of one) during comprehension and must choose between languages during production. For instance, a German-English bilingual who sees pictures of a bike and a leg while hearing “bike” & Marian, 2007). In our research, we aimed to identify a mechanism through which bilingual language processing may influence inhibitory control (Blumenfeld and Marian, in preparation). We measured the extent to which monolinguals and bilinguals activated similar-sounding words (e.g., “hamper” and “hammer”), and the extent to which they inhibited similar-sounding competitors as they identified the correct targets (e.g., a picture of a hammer). We found a correlation between how bilinguals (but not monolinguals) inhibited irrelevant words during comprehension and how well they performed on a non-linguistic task that required inhibition of irrelevant information. Bilinguals also showed higher accuracy rates on the non-linguistic inhibition task compared to monolingual peers. These findings suggest that a central inhibition mechanism may be recruited and altered by bilingual language processing. Identifying a link between language experience and cognitive processes is important because it may provide insights into how treatment can generalize from the cognitive into the linguistic domain and vice versa. Moreover, because inhibitory control deficits are thought to underlie (at least in part) a number of disorders, including attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and frontal lobe impairments, monolingual/bilingual differences in this domain may become clinically relevant, generating the need to create bilingual norms even on non-linguistic neuropsychological assessment tools. In general, monolingual/bilingual differences should be considered in populations with potentially weaker cognitive control, such as children or older adults. Aspects of cognitive development or aging may differ across monolingual and bilingual populations, with potential consequences for the nature and severity of cognitive/linguistic symptoms related to inhibitory control. Neural Organization Investigations into the neural manifestations of bilingualism have included functional comparisons of a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic domains and studies of cortical anatomy. The earliest studies of the cortical correlates of bilingualism used behavioral approaches to examine hemispheric dominance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, early- and late-acquired bilinguals, and high- and low-proficiency bilinguals. Hull and Vaid’s (2007) meta-analyses of the data reveal that early bilinguals were the only group that showed consistent bilateral dominance for language. Late bilinguals and monolinguals showed left-hemisphere dominance. Second-language proficiency was found to be less relevant than age of acquisition in influencing language lateralization. The authors proposed that a period of early monolingual development establishes left-hemispheric dominance that is then preserved irrespective of future bilingual experience. Interestingly, this decreased hemispheric dominance in early bilinguals also is observed for non-linguistic tasks. For example, Hausmann and colleagues (2004) used visual hemifield presentation to investigate face discrimination, a right-hemisphere-dominant task. Turkish-German bilinguals were more bilaterally dominant than both Turkish and German monolinguals. However, neuroimaging studies have failed to find consistent laterality differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers (e.g., Hernandez et al., 2001; Kim et al., 1997). When neural activations for single words are meta-analyzed on the basis of the lexical processes involved (semantic access, phonological code retrieval, or articulation), bilinguals and monolinguals activate similar neural regions for individual lexical processes (Indefrey, 2006; Indefrey & Levelt, 2004). What is different, though, is that specific perisylvian regions may differentially activate for individual languages of the bilingual speaker. The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) has been shown to respond differentially to L1 and L2, either with different foci for L1 versus L2 or with greater volume of activation for L2 (Kim et al., 1997). This differential activation is found only for late bilinguals and for specific linguistic tasks. Marian and colleagues (2007), for example, found that the foci of LIFG activations differed across L1 and L2 for lexical and phonological processing, but not for orthographic processing. Others found L1 and L2 to activate the LIFG differentially for syntactic processing (Saur et al., 2009). The LIFG appears to make distinctions between L1 and L2 for linguistic processes for which it serves a unique role; further research is needed to elucidate these patterns. Moreover, bilingualism may have ramifications on cortical morphology: Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scans and an analysis procedure called voxel-based morphometry, Mechelli and colleagues (2004) found that individuals with higher proficiency in and/or earlier age of second-language acquisition had a higher gray matter density in the left inferior parietal cortex. What Clinicians Should Know Knowledge of bilingualism suggests the following linguistic, cognitive, and neurophysiological differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers: Linguistic differences Bilingual children develop an earlier understanding of taxonomic relationships than their monolingual peers (e.g., car and bus are vehicles). This understanding is not dependent on vocabulary size, but could be influenced by the structural features of the speaker’s language. Bilingual adults are better than monolingual adults at learning new words. Bilinguals use a variety of word-learning strategies with similar efficiency and are less susceptible to interference from conflicting orthographic information during word-learning. Linguistic input co-activates both languages in bilinguals; when bilinguals hear or read words in one language, partially overlapping linguistic structures in the other language also are activated. Cognitive differences Bilinguals may be able to inhibit irrelevant verbal and nonverbal information with greater ease than monolinguals. Inhibitory control ability is slower to decline with age in bilinguals than in monolinguals. The average age of dementia onset is later in bilinguals than in monolinguals. Bilingual children have been found to exhibit superior performance in divergent thinking, figure-ground discrimination, and other related meta-cognitive skills. Neural differences Bilateral processing of language (and other nonverbal tasks) is most likely to occur only in early bilinguals. Monolinguals and bilinguals use similar neural regions for language processing. However, late bilinguals are likely to activate the LIFG differentially for processes in which the LIFG plays a crucial role, such as phonological and syntactic processing. Bilinguals have greater gray matter density than monolinguals in certain left hemisphere regions. Did You Know? According to the 2000 U.S. Census, a language other than English was spoken in approximately 18% of all American households. According to the U.S. Census, the Hispanic population in 2007 was 45.5 million, a number expected to grow to 47.7 million by 2010 and 59.7 million in 2020. Approximately 7.5 million bilingual children were enrolled in U.S. schools in 2002. U.S. Census information on language use and the incidence of bilingualism (based on the 2000 Census) can be found on the U.S. Census Bureau Web site. ASHA and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimate that 10–15% of the U.S. population has a speech-language or hearing disorder. These estimates are higher among persons from socially and economically disadvantaged groups, including recent immigrants. 3.5% of ASHA have to be bilingual speech-language pathologists or 2009). can and about bilingualism on the Bilingual families can through groups such as Bilingual and in the Web site. A map of languages spoken across the U.S. can be found on the Web site. The of language and of these languages are about the National for Bilingual can be found on the Web site. 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Abstract We investigated how viewing positive and negative emotional stimuli influences the functional field of view. Two types of emotional pictures were used, representing either a negative emotion such as disgust or fear, or a positive emotion such vigour or excitement. The participants' task was to detect and identify a digit presented in any of the four corners of a picture on the display, while discriminating a letter in the centre of the display. We used two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), of 500 and 3000 ms, between the picture and the digit. Performance was poorer in the negative condition than in the positive and non-emotional conditions. Performance in the 500 ms SOA condition was poorer than in the 3000 ms SOA condition. These results suggest that the functional field of view (FFOV) becomes narrower when people view negative emotional stimuli, whereas it does not change when viewing positive or neutral emotional stimuli. Keywords: Emotional stimuliThe functional field of viewSOA Acknowledgements This work was supported by a grant to the first author from the Research Fellowships of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists and Grant no. 15330156 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of the Science to the second author. The authors thank Sachio Nakamizo for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Notes 1The IAPS slide numbers were as follows: positive, 4608, 4660, 5470, 8030, 8170, 8179, 8185, 8186, 8200, and 8490; negative, 1050, 1525, 2811, 3215, 3500, 3550, 6021, 6022, 6300, 6312, 6350, and 9921; neutral, 2102, 2393, 2396, 2579, 2850, 5530, 5731, 7034, 7179, 7205, 7490, and 7710. An ANOVA was performed on the pleasant ratings, arousal ratings, and the number of bytes of the compressed image file sizes with one factor of emotion (positive, negative, and neutral). In the pleasant ratings, the main effect of emotion was significant, F(2, 33) = 560.63, MSE=0.13, p<.001. A post hoc multiple comparison test using Ryan's method indicated that the positive picture (M=7.28) was higher than the neutral (M=5.25) or the negative (M=2.54) picture (p<.05), and the neutral picture was higher than the negative picture (p<.05). In the arousal ratings, the main effect of emotion was significant, F(2, 33) = 257.17, MSE=0.19, p<.001. A post hoc multiple-comparison test using Ryan's method indicated that the positive (M=6.64) or the negative picture (M=6.47) was higher than the neutral (M=3.04) picture (p<.05). In the number of bytes of the compressed image file sizes, a main effect of emotion was significant, F(2, 33) = 8.74, MSE=3641.56, p<.001. A post hoc multiple comparison test using Ryan's method indicated that the negative picture (M=112.83) was lower than the positive (M=187.00) or the neutral (M=211.33) pictures (p<.05).
The existence of graded structure in fruit and flower odour categories and its stability in different cultures is examined. Groups of students from France, the United States, and Vietnam performed a typicality rating task, a similarity judgment task, a membership verification task, a recognition memory task, a familiarity rating task, and a free identification task using a set of 40 odorants (20 fruit odorants and 20 flower odorants). Overall, our results demonstrate that fruit and flower odour categories possess graded structure. Moreover, principal component analyses of the data revealed the implication of typicality in a variety of cognitive tasks where typical odours receive a preferential processing compared to atypical ones. Finally, our results suggest that typicality can be predicted to a certain extent by experiential knowledge but that other determinants play a role in odour category structure. Altogether, this study confirms that graded structure is a universal property of categories and suggests that universals and cultural specifics can both constrain the emergence of odour category structures.
This paper describes log-linear models for a general-purpose sentence realizer based on dependency structures. Unlike traditional realizers using grammar rules, our method realizes sentences by linearizing dependency relations directly in two steps. First, the relative order between head and each dependent is determined by their dependency relation. Then the best linearizations compatible with the relative order are selected by log-linear models. The log-linear models incorporate three types of feature functions, including dependency relations, surface words and headwords. Our approach to sentence realization provides simplicity, efficiency and competitive accuracy. Trained on 8,975 dependency structures of a Chinese Dependency Treebank, the realizer achieves a BLEU score of 0.8874.
We present a framework for interfacing a PCFG parser with lexical information from an external resource following a different tagging scheme than the treebank. This is achieved by defining a stochastic mapping layer between the two resources. Lexical probabilities for rare events are estimated in a semi-supervised manner from a lexicon and large unannotated corpora. We show that this solution greatly enhances the performance of an unlexicalized Hebrew PCFG parser, resulting in state-of-the-art Hebrew parsing results both when a segmentation oracle is assumed, and in a real-word parsing scenario of parsing unsegmented tokens.
The Columbia Arabic Treebank (CATiB) is a database of syntactic analyses of Arabic sentences. CATiB contrasts with previous ap-proaches to Arabic treebanking in its emphasis on faster production with some constraints on linguistic richness. Two basic ideas inspire the CATiB approach. First, CATiB avoids the annotation of redundant linguistic information that is determinable automatically from syntax and morphological analysis, e.g., nominal case. And secondly, CATiB uses linguistic representation and terminology inspired by the long tradition of Arabic syntactic studies. This makes it easier to train annotators and not be restricted to hire annotators who have degrees in linguistics. This paper describes CATiB’s representation and compares it to other Arabic treebanking efforts. 1.
This paper reports results on grammatical induction for French. We investigate how to best train a parser on the French Treebank We compare, for French, a supervised lexicalized parsing algorithm with a semi-supervised unlexicalized algorithm We report the best results known to us on French statistical parsing, that we obtained with the semi-supervised learning algorithm. The reported experiments can give insights for the task of grammatical learning for a morphologically-rich language, with a relatively limited amount of training data, annotated with a rather flat structure.
Abstract Language is an important means through which power relations are created and negotiated. In addition to everyday choices speakers make about their own language use, variations in ways of talking are related to local theories of power, status, identity, self, ethnicity, class, and gender. Grammatical and lexical choices, choices in forms of address and reference, turn‐taking, narratives of cause and effect, genre, and stylistic performance, as well as the organization of space for talk and participation, embodied behaviors, and silence are used as elements in the distribution of power. Power and language are connected through the marking of certain encounters and contexts as requiring particular types of language use, the privileging of certain types of language, who may or may not speak in certain settings, which contexts are appropriate for which types of speech and which for silence, what types of talk are appropriate to persons of different statuses and roles, norms for requesting and giving information, and practices for alternating between speakers. Pragmatic uses of language are an important tool for constructing social difference and distinctions between individuals in terms of efficacy and power.
Treebanks play an increasing role in computational linguistics for training parsers. Some treebanking environments allow annotators to quickly navigate through the parse forest and identify the correct or incorrect or preferred analysis in the current context by selecting or rejecting discriminants. Although, these treebanking decisions are recorded in log files or databases, but, to our best knowledge, until now nobody has inspected potentiality of incorporating such fine-grained decisions made by human annotators for automatic parse disambiguation. This thesis examines this new potential research direction by developing a novel approach for extracting discriminative features using treebanking decisions. The thesis presents comparative analyses of the performance of discriminative disambiguation models built using the treebanking decision features and the state-of-the-art features which indicate features extracted using treebanking decisions are more efficient and informative compared to their traditional counterparts. We highlight how these different types of features scale when their corresponding models are tested on out-of-domain data. The result suggests that, treebanking decision features are more robust. Analyses from different perspectives such as impact of different types of decisions on the disambiguation model, or using the disambiguation model of the treebanking decisions feature as a re-ranker are also included. The study also develops a method to extract patterns of correlated discriminant from human decisions and use them for parse forest reduction. The empirical results indicate that, finding such patterns that yields substantial reduction of parse forest preserving the preferred analyses is not an easy task. The thesis argues that, the discriminative nature of the treebanking decisions allows them to be highly effective features to contribute to an efficient disambiguation model. This is demonstrated by a number of experiments that also reveal some open research questions for future works.
Linguistic database summaries in the sense of Yager (1982), further extended to an implementable form by Kacprzyk & Yager (2001) and Kacprzyk, Yager & Zadrozny (2000), are extremely simple natural language like statements exemplified by, for a personnel database, “most employees are young and well paid” (with some degree of truth). They have been implemented in business contexts (cf. Kacprzyk & Zadrozny,????, Kacprzyk, Wilbik and Zadrozny, 2006–2008). An effective and efficient way of their generation was proposed by Kacprzyk & Zadrozny (????) by using an interactive procedure based on Kacprzyk & Zadrozny's (????) fuzzy database queries with linguistic quantifiers. Moreover, in Kacprzyk & Zadrozny (???) the role of Zadeh's (???) protoform was shown and their use advocated. Though linguistic database summaries have a strong resemblance to natural language generation (NLG), this issue was never considered. In this paper we indicate some important issues that are common to linguistic database summarization and natural language generation, and propose some possible research directions.
BACKGROUND: Time-limited group cognitive behavioral treatments (GCBT) for obsessive-compulsive disorder have demonstrated improvement in target symptoms. One small sample study of GCBT specifically for hoarding problems also showed benefit. This study examines the efficacy of a specialized GCBT for compulsive hoarding on a larger sample. METHODS: Thirty-two clients diagnosed with hoarding participated in five groups. Four groups met once weekly for 2 hour over 16 weeks (n=27) and one group met for 20 weeks (n=5). All participants had two individual 90-min home sessions. Self-report assessments were completed at baseline, mid-treatment, and post-treatment about hoarding behavior and related symptoms (e.g., depression). The sample was predominantly female, White, highly educated, unemployed, and not partnered/married; mean age was 53. A majority was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. RESULTS: Participants showed significant improvement from pre- to post-treatment on the Saving Inventory Revised, Saving Cognitions Inventory, Clutter Image Rating, and Clinical Global Severity. The most recent group (n=8) that used a more formalized treatment and research protocol improved significantly more than did earlier members. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates the feasibility and modest success of GCBT methods in improving hoarding symptoms. Group treatment may be especially valuable because of its cost-effectiveness, greater client access to trained clinicians, and reduction in social isolation and stigma linked to this problem. Further research is needed to improve the efficacy of GCBT methods for hoarding and to examine durability of change, predictors of outcomes, and processes that influence change.
For Arabic, diacritizing written text is important for many NLP tasks. In the work presented here, we investigate the quality of a diacritization approach, with a high success rate for treebank data but with a more limited success on realworld data. One of the problems we encountered is the non-standard use of the hamza diacritic, which leads to a decrease in diacritization accuracy. If an automatic hamza restoration module precedes diacritization, the results improve from a word error rate of 9.20% to 7.38% in treebank data, and from 7.96% to 5.93% on selected real-world texts. This shows clearly that hamza restoration is a necessary step for improving diacritization quality for Arabic real-world texts.
There is strong evidence that human sentence processing is incremental, i.e., that structures are built word by word.Recent experiments show that the processor also predicts upcoming linguistic material on the basis of previous input.We present a computational model of human parsing that is based on a variant of tree-adjoining grammar and includes an explicit mechanism for generating and verifying predictions, while respecting incrementality and connectedness.An algorithm for deriving a lexicon from a treebank, a fully implemented parser, and a probability model for this formalism are also presented.We devise a linking function that explains processing difficulty as a combination of prefix probability (surprisal) and verification cost.The resulting model captures locality effects such as the subject/object relative clause asymmetry, as well as surprisal effects such as prediction in either...or constructions.
In this paper, we focus on facial displays, eye gaze and head tilts to express social dominance. In particular, we are interested in the interaction of different non-verbal cues. We present a study which systematically varies eye gaze and head tilts for five basic emotions and a neutral state using our own graphics and animation engine. The resulting images are then presented to a large number of subjects via a web-based interface who are asked to attribute dominance values to the character shown in the images. First, we analyze how dominance ratings are influenced by the conveyed emotional facial expression. Further, we investigate how gaze direction and head pose influence dominance perception depending on the displayed emotional state.
This paper describes and compares two algorithms that take as input a shared PCFG parse forest and produce shared forests that contain exactly the n most likely trees of the initial forest. Such forests are suitable for subsequent processing, such as (some types of) reranking or LFG f-structure computation, that can be performed ontop of a shared forest, but that may have a high (e.g., exponential) complexity w.r.t. the number of trees contained in the forest. We evaluate the performances of both algorithms on real-scale NLP forests generated with a PCFG extracted from the Penn Treebank.
A text is the carrier of language,and the foundation of cognizing and distinguishing its styles and functions.Text typology offers TQA objective and theoretical underpinnings.Classification and cognition of text types is a fundamental and cognitive approach to text types and has the original guiding effects on TQA.Different text types are meant not only to make up different writing forms including lexical features,styles and norms of writing,rhetorical devices,etc,but also to form different language functions,different text focuses,different TT purposes and translation methods.Obviously,these differences require us to establish different assessment criteria and principles,which provide us with TQA references,and lend themselves to further explore and study TQA model so as to make it maneuverable and practical.
Atypical prosody has been identified as a core feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Even when other aspects of language improve, prosodic deficits tend to be persistent. Deficits in prosody may limit the social acceptance of children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA) mainstreamed into the larger community.Prosody in ASD is an underresearched and criticized area in general and there has been little research on the prosody of Israeli Hebrew (IH) and even fewer studies comparing the prosody of typical and atypical Hebrewspeaking children in particular.Our study compares and contrasts the intonation units (IU), simple pitch accents (PA), and edge tones (ET) of five children between 9 and 12 years of age diagnosed with HFA and five children without developmental disorders (WDD) in reading aloud and spontaneous speech elicitation tasks. The subjects were matched for age, year of school, and academic achievements and all were male monolingual speakers of IH.The data were transcribed using the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) theory of intonation with the IH ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) system being developed for this study with the computerized PRAAT system. The results were analyzed and explained according to: (1) the defintion that language is a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communication function and by the characteristics of its users and (2) the principle that language represents a compromise in the struggle to achieve maximum communication through minimal effort associated with the theory of Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB).The children with HFA produced more IU and PA than the WDD children. The HFA children acquired a limited repertoire of prosodic-edgetone patterns within the norm of the language. These patterns were repeatedly used both in spontaneous speech and in the reading tasks. In contrast, the WWD control group used a greater number of prosodic patterns showing a larger degree of variation for the same speech and language tasks. This study has become the basis for further ongoing research which has shown clear parallels in the extralinguistic, paralinguistic (prosody), and linguistic (lexical repetition) behavior of HFA children.
In recent years, the specter of litigants turning to religious or customary sources of law as authoritative guides to regulate their behavior, alongside or in lieu of secular norms, has risen to the forefront of politics in many countries worldwide. In this essay, we draw upon citizenship theory and comparative constitutional jurisprudence to identify two different categories of judicial response to religious-based claims for recognition, accommodation, and exemption: 1) 'diversity as inclusion;' and 2) 'non-state law as competition.' As long as legal claims for accommodation are not seen by courts as challenging the lexical superiority of the constitutional religion itself ('diversity as inclusion'), they stand a fair chance of success. Contrast that with the unyielding reluctance of legislatures and judiciaries to accept as binding or even cognizable any potentially competing legal order that originates in sacred or customary sources of identity and authority. This pattern of clamping down and refusing to accept any alternative sources of regulation becomes particularly visible where the legal challenge at issue is interpreted as raising doubts regarding which set of norms and institutions, or what set of high priests, should have the final word in authoritatively resolving legal disputes within a given society ('non-state law as competition'). This is a challenge that no secular legal order, no matter how tolerant and otherwise open to providing exemptions and accommodations to religious believers, can accept with indifference. For what perceived to be at stake here is the very authority and source of legitimacy of the accepted civil religion. We demonstrate these claims by focusing on recent jurisprudence from Canada and South Africa, two polities that represent the most difficult cases for our argument; if there is any place we would expect to find recognition by secular countries of religious or customary sources of law and authority, it would be in these diverse societies that have made an explicit constitutional commitment to promote their citizens’ freedom to preserve and enhance their multitude of backgrounds and distinctive cultural, linguistic and religious heritages as part of their 'mosaic' (Canada) or 'rainbow nation' (South Africa) conceptions of citizenship. Although operating in different contexts, the South African Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of Canada seem to have made every effort to subject traditional legal regimes to general principles of constitutional law. By so doing, they have erected a new wall of separation that places noncompliance with the values of the civil religion beyond the pale of accepted accommodation, offering to those who espouse them the potential to either bring these alternative legal domains under the general rule of constitutional law or encounter the wrath of state fiat.
Dolgozatomban, amint arra a címből is lehet következtetni, az 1996 és 2005 között adatolható magyarországi börtönszlenget mutatom be, azt a csoportnyelvet, amelynek az átfogó tanulmányozása hazánkban eddig még nem történt meg. Munkámban büntetés-végrehajtási intézeteink fogvatartottjainak belső, informális nyelvhasználatának általános kérdéseivel foglalkozom, és a mai magyar börtönszleng szó- és kifejezéskészletének szótárba foglalásán túl kísérletet teszek a vizsgált csoportnyelv nyelvi-szociolingvisztikai leírására. \n \nCélkitűzésemet, a magyar börtönszleng átfogó tanulmányozását az indokolta, hogy a kutatás első éveiben olyan mennyiségű és minőségű, a nyelvtudományban eddig még nem tárgyalt adatokra bukkantam, amelyek érdemesnek mutatkoztak arra, hogy egy mélyebb, megtervezett szlengkutatás irányuljon erre a területre. \n \nElsősorban célom volt a magyar börtöszlenget feltárni, bemutatni keletkezését, funkcióját, működését, a szlenghasználó közösségben betöltött szerepét. Célom volt továbbá rámutatni nyelvi előzményeire, összevetni a már létező bűnözői nyelvi adatbázissal, vagyis a tolvajnyelv elemeivel, egyben definiálni helyét a magyar szlengkutatás területén. Kutatásom során mindvégig azt tartottam szem előtt, hogy hol van az ember a szlengben, így célom volt annak leírása is, mikor, milyen körülmények között motiváltak a vizsgált csoport tagjai szlenghasználatra. Ennek kiderítéséhez a nyelvi adatok feltárásán és rendszerezésén túl, a zárt közeg csoportjainak vizsgálatára is ki kellett terjeszteni a kutatást, megfigyelve a csoportszerveződés lehetőségeit és okait a börtöntársadalomban. \n \nAs already the title has suggested, my dissertation presents Hungarian prison slang as attested from 1996 to 2005. This group language has never seen an overall study in Hungary up to now. I deal with general questions of the internal and informal language use of the prisoners of penal institutions in my work and, together with rendering the words and expressions into a dictionary, I attempt at the linguistic and sociolinguistic description of the group language examined. \n \nMy objective, the overall study of Hungarian slang, is justified by the data being of such quantity and quality and having never been dealt with in linguistics that seemed worth to be examined by a deeper and planned slang research. \n \nMy main objective was to explore Hungarian prison slang, to present its origins, functions and operation as well as its role within slang user communities. My aim also was to show its linguistic predecessors, to compare it to an existing linguistic database of criminals, that is, to the elements of cant, and, together with it, to define its place in the area of Hungarian slang research. During my studies, I always kept man’s role in slang in mind so my objective was the description of the conditions among which the members of a researched group are motivated for slang usage. In order to learn about it, I had to extend my research to the examination of the groups of closed space, observing the possibilities and reasons within prison community.
Language can serve as a potent and injurious tool against ambitious women in the workplace. Consider how often both men and women have thought or said 'bitch' or other derogatory terms when describing a woman in a leadership position. Freud once described mental health as the ability to love and to work. For many of these women, their work has also become their love, their passion. Working long hours, often working 'twice as hard as men,' to be viewed as equally competent, perhaps sacrificing spouse and children in deference to career, these women have been inculcated into a patriarchal corporate environment, one in which they must act in a sexual dissonant manner in order to succeed. And as they negotiate the male managerial model, they often come to view their own femininity in an objectified, disparaging way. They may defeminize their language and adopt a 'more adversarial, information-focused style characteristic of all male talk'. Here is where the dilemma begins: If they conform to the masculine linguistic norms of the corporate environment, then their behavior can be perceived as confrontational, harsh, contentious, un-lady-like. A collision of culture ensues on intrapsychic and interpersonal levels between what is expected of a woman in society and what is expected of a person in a high status position where valued leadership traits are male-gendered. Often these women select language and styles that veer away from the feminine side of the gender spectrum. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)