Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Introduction Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) can be used for communication and motor restoration (Birbaumer & Cohen, 2007). To our knowledge, no BCI study looked at patients with dementia who have severe communication deficits. BCIs based on operant training could be problematic for patients with cognitive deficits. A paradigm shift from instrumental-operant learning to classical conditioning could possibly overcome this failure (Birbaumer, 2006). Recent findings demonstrated the possibility to classify cognitive and emotional states by the pattern classification of BOLD signals in both offline (Lee et al., 2010a, 2010b) and online situations (Sitaram et al., 2010). The present study aims to investigate the feasibility of an auditory classical conditioning paradigm within a fMRI based BCI setting. The paradigm is designed to condition individuals to associate positive and negative emotional stimuli as unconditioned stimuli (US) with congruent and incongruent word pairs as conditioned stimuli (CS), respectively. Our goal is to ascertain whether the brain signals pertaining to congruent and incongruent word pairs could be classified with more than chance accuracy using our fMRI support vector machine (SVM) with a view to apply for basic online yes/no communication in Alzheimer patients. Methods The paradigm consisted of one single session divided into six blocks, comprising the different phases of conditioning (habituation, acquisition, extinction). The US consisted of auditory emotional stimuli selected from the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS, Bradley & Lang, 1999). A segment of baby laughter represented the positive emotional stimulus and a segment of screaming represented the negative emotional stimulus. The CS, presented aurally, were congruent (e.g. ‘animal-elephant’) and incongruent (e.g. ‘animal-Germany’) word-pairs. The unconditioned and conditioned responses (UR and CR) were the changes in the BOLD signal pertaining to the CS and US, respectively. The first block consisted of a randomized presentation of 50 US and 50 CS. In the second and third blocks 25 congruent word pairs, immediately followed by the baby laughter, and 25 incongruent word pairs, immediately followed by the scream, were presented randomly. In the fourth and fifth blocks, respectively 40% and 20% of the CS were paired with the US. In the sixth block, only the CS was presented. Functional imaging was performed continuously during these blocks on 6 healthy subjects (4 females, 2 males, age 21-27) on a 3.0 T scanner (Siemens, Germany). To classify the signals corresponding to various conditions, namely congruent and incongruent word-pairs, a linear SVM (with the regularization parameter, C=1) was implemented. Classification performance from data was evaluated through 2-fold cross validation (CV). Based on the parameters of the trained SVM model, we analyzed the fMRI data with the Effect Mapping method (EM; Lee et al., 2010a, 2010b, Sitaram et al., 2010). To investigate the relative importance of different brain regions in decoding the conditioning brain states, feature vectors from the frontal cortex were used as input to build a separate SVM classifier. Results The Self Assessment Manikin (SAM) test showed that participants reported more negative valence and a higher arousal for the scream compared to the baby laughter. Classification of the BOLD signal as a response to the congruent and incongruent word pairs immediately followed by the emotional US showed above chance level performance (57-64%) on one subject, around chance level (50-56%) performance on three subjects, and below chance level (44-47%) performance on two subjects. Conclusions In this pilot study we have demonstrated an approach for conditioning the BOLD signal by repeated association of the emotional stimuli with semantic stimuli, resulting in a paradigm for basic yes/no communication. Further work includes improving the performance of the classifier by feature selection, an online implementation of the system, and its testing on patients. References: Birbaumer, N. (2006), ‘Brain-computer-interface research: coming of age’, Clinical Neurophysiology, vol. 117, pp. 479-483. Birbaumer, N. & Cohen, L. G. (2007), ‘Brain-computer interfaces: communication and restoration of movement in paralysis’, The Journal of Physiology, vol. 579, no. 3, pp. 621-636. Bradley, M. M. & Lang, P. J. (1999), ‘International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS): Stimuli, instruction manual and affective ratings’, University of Florida, Gainesville. Sitaram R, Lee S, Ruiz S, Rana M, Veit R, Birbaumer N. Real-time support vector classification and feedback of multiple emotional brain states. Neuroimage, 2010 Aug 6. Lee, S., Halder, S., Kübler, A., Birbaumer, N., Sitaram, R. Effective functional mapping of fMRI data with support-vector machines. Hum Brain Mapp. 2010a, Jan 28. Lee, S., Ruiz, S., Caria, A., Birbaumer, N., Sitaram, R Cerebral reorganization induced by real-time fMRI feedback training of the insular cortex: a multivariate investigation. Neuroreh and Neural Rep (2010b).
The reconstruction of standardized texts in the Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech enables the comparison of authentic spoken utterances and standardized texts The authors concentrate on the questions: What does the syntactic identity of the Czech spoken and written texts consist of? What syntactic constructions are „natural“ in the spoken and in the written text? What is the difference in the density of the cohesive links, in the explicit and implicite relations between units?
The article focuses on the contacts between prescriptive and universal grammar in 18th century British linguistics. The author argues that, contrary to the wide-spread belief, there existed two-way relations between them: on the one hand, practical prescriptive grammar used the principles of universal grammar as the foundation for singling out parts of speech and grammar categories and based normative recommendations upon similarities between languages. On the other hand, the authors of universal grammars showed interest to problems of linguistic norm and gave practical recommendations in the vein of prescriptive tradition.
The article describes the development of the typographical practice of placing spaces between words in the early printed Glagolitic books and the swift decline in the 16 th century of the use of so-called word-blocks in favour of full word separation.Little studied but signifi cant for our understanding of a host of writing and reading practices, ranging from the rhetorical and compositional features of the medieval Croatian Church Slavonic texts to the linguistic norms of early modern works, the use of the white space consistently increases over time as modern typographical practices take hold.In the context of widespread changes in mechanical printing practices in the 15 th -17 th centuries, the paper looks at the increasing use of white space between all words, primarily in the CrCS printed liturgical books and on the parallel decrease in the use of word-blocks (zdruenice).Given the larger movement toward regularization of liturgical texts in the 16 th century and the growing awareness of linguistic science our examination of typesetting practices offers some insights into the implementation of regularized linguistic norms for the Glagolitic liturgical books and makes it possible to conclude that the more widespread typesetting practices of the secular presses quickly gained a foothold in the ecclesiastical printeries.There was, moreover, a rapid conformity to the Western typographical practice of separating words as the smallest units of independent meaning; i.e. in accordance with our own contemporary practices.
The paper deals with compounds in the Pralex lexical database, especially with their general characteristics and problems with their processing in the database. Apart from the compounds, the author focuses on the particular components and their origin, meanings and mutual relations. Compounds with a quantitative meaning as well as compounds containing such component are not handled in here.
In this paper, we give a summary of various dependency chart parsing algorithms in terms of the use of parsing histories for a new dependency arc decision. Some parsing histories are closely related to the target dependency arc, and it is necessary for the parsing algorithm to take them into consideration. Each dependency treebank may have some unique characteristics, and it requires for the parser to model them by certain parsing histories. We show in experiments that proper selection of the parsing algorithm which reflect the dependency annotation of the coordinate structures improves the overall performance. 1
The article deals with the program and content aspects of the treatment of the Czech lexis in the form of a lexical database. It summarises the development of the Praled software, the basic features of the macro- and microstructures of the Pralex LDB and the main principles of the treatment of database items.
This paper analyses a Quebec comic strip, Magasin general, in which language is both an element of group cohesion and of explicit thematisation. Starting from the problematic relationship Quebec has with French linguistic norm, we try to investigate the use of language in the BD itself, the discourse about language by the characters and by a large paratextual apparatus, and also the reception of this comic by the Quebec highbrow press.
The first part of this paper deals with the concept of multi-word lexical units and the delimitation of their basic types in the Pralex lexical database, including the analysis of some terminological and conceptual issues. After a short preview of the approaches to the lexicographical treatment of multi-word lexical units in contemporary monolingual dictionaries, the second part of this paper deals with the database processing of multi-word lexical units, both with the general rules of their treatment in the Pralex lexical database and with the specific rules of treatment of one of two basic types of multi-word lexical units, i.e. multiple-word namings.
The problem of automatically extracting structured information from texts is an important, unsolved problem within the field of Natural Language Processing. The extraction of such information can facilitate activities such as the building of knowledge bases, automatic \nsummarisation and sentiment analysis. A human reader can easily discern the events described in a text, along with the participants and the relationships between them, \nbut using a computer to automatically discover the same information is much more challenging. Particular focus has been given to extracting relations between the entities in a text, such as those representing geographical locations, personal and social relationships, and employment. In this thesis, we consider two closely related entity relationships, which are interesting, frequent and have not been tackled previously, which we refer to collectively \nas entity instantiations. \nWe define an entity instantiation as an entity relation in which a set of entities is introduced, and either a member or subset of this set is mentioned. In the example below, \nwe see a set membership instantiation, between ‘several EU countries’ and ‘the UK’, along with a subset instantiation, between the same set and ‘the low countries’. Inflation has increased sharply in several EU countries. In the UK, this has accompanied a drop in interest rates, but in the low countries rates have remained steady. This thesis details the creation of the first corpus of entity instantiations. The final corpus consists of 4,521 instantiations, 2,118 of which are intersentential, and 2,403 of which are intrasentential, annotated over 75 Penn Treebank Wall Street Journal newswire texts. The subsequent annotation study shows high levels of inter-annotator agreement and our \ncorpus study analyses the annotated entity instantiations in terms of their internal structure, the distance between arguments and their syntactic relationship, finding a particularly strong link between syntactic parent-child relationships and sentence-internal entity instantiations. \nTo establish that the accurate automatic identification of entity instantiations is possible, we develop the first instantiation identification algorithm, which uses a supervised machine learning approach. The feature set draws on surface, syntactic, contextual, salience and knowledge features to aid classification. We separately apply our classifier to intersentential and intrasentential entity instantiations and experiment with both balanced data, with a 50/50 positive/negative split, and the original unbalanced corpus. The classifier records highly significant performance increases over both unigram-based \nand majority class baselines on the balanced data, and also on the original distribution of intrasentential instantiations. \nIn order to take advantage of the aforementioned link between syntax and intrasentential entity instantiations, tree kernels were employed to learn directly from the syntactic parse trees which contain the two potential participants in an intrasentential instantiation. \nThe tree kernel features perform similarly to the unstructured feature set, with a much shorter development time. Combining tree kernels with unstructured features gives further improvements over both the baselines, and either method in isolation. We also apply our entity instantiations to the difficult problem of implicit discourse relation classification, hypothesising that introducing features identifying the presence of an entity instantiation between the arguments of a discourse relation can improve classification performance. Our experiments show that an entity instantiation is a strong indicator of the presence of an Expansion.Instantiation discourse relation. We create a binary Expansion.Instantiation classifier, based on the feature set detailed in Sporleder \nand Lascarides (2008), but augment it by adding entity instantiation features based on gold standard annotations. The classifier which includes entity instantiation data performs significantly better than the same classifier without entity instantiation data. We also experiment with the incorporation of machine-identified entity instantiations. However, our entity instantiation classifier is not sufficiently accurate to impact on discourse relation classification.
In this study, the complex-network approaches are employed to investigate the word form networks and the lemma networks extracted from dependency syntactic treebanks of fifteen different languages. The results show that it is possible to classify human languages by means of the main parameters of complex networks. The complex-network approaches can obtain language classifications as precise as achieved by contemporary word order typology. Clustering experiments point to the fact that the difference between the word form networks and the lemma networks can make for a better classification of languages. In short, the dependency syntactic networks can reflect morphological variation degrees and morphological complexity.
Nous presentons une architecture pour l’analyse syntaxique en deux etapes. Dans un premier temps un analyseur syntagmatique construit, pour chaque phrase, une liste d’analyses qui sont converties en arbres de dependances. Ces arbres sont ensuite reevalues par un reordonnanceur discriminant. Cette methode permet de prendre en compte des informations auxquelles l’analyseur n’a pas acces, en particulier des annotations fonctionnelles. Nous validons notre approche par une evaluation sur le corpus arbore de Paris 7. La seconde etape permet d’ameliorer significativement la qualite des analyses retournees, quelle que soit la metrique utilisee.
UFAL). Abstract. Annotated corpora such as treebanks are important for the development of parsers, language applications as well as understanding of the language itself. Only very few languages possess these scarce resources. In this paper, we describe our eort in syntactically annotating a small corpora (600 sentences) of Tamil language. Our annotation is similar to Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT 2.0) and consists of 2 levels or layers: (i) morphological layer (m-layer) and (ii) analytical layer (a-layer). For both the layers, we introduce annotation schemes i.e. positional tagging for m-layer and dependency relations (and how dependency structures should be drawn) for a-layers. Finally, we evaluate our corpora in the tagging and parsing task using well known taggers and parsers and discuss some general issues in annotation for Tamil language.
Network analysis has demonstrated that systems ranging from social networks to electric power grids often involve a small world structure-with local clustering but global ac cess. Critically, small world structure has also been shown to characterize adult human semantic networks. Moreover, the connectivity pattern of these mature networks is consistent with lexical growth processes in which children add new words to their vocabulary based on the structure of the language-learning environment. However, thus far, there is no direct evidence that a child's individual semantic network structure is associated with their early language learning. Here we show that, while typically developing children's early networks show small world structure as early as 15 months and with as few as 55 words, children with language delay (late talkers) have this structure to a smaller degree. This implicates a maladaptive bias in word acquisition for late talkers, potentially indicating a preference for ''o)
Abstract Prior research on relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese has led to conflicting results regarding ease of processing subject-extracted RCs (SRCs) versus object-extracted RCs (ORCs) and has often used animacy configurations that are rare in corpora. Building on animacy patterns observed in a corpus, we used self-paced reading to explore how animacy influences real-time processing of Chinese RCs. Experiment 1 tested SRCs, and found marginal facilitation effects with animate heads (subjects) and inanimate objects. Experiment 2 tested ORCs and found significant facilitation effects with inanimate head (objects). Experiment 3 showed that when the subject is animate and the object inanimate, ORCs are as easy to process as SRCs, but when the subject is inanimate and the object is animate, SRCs are processed faster. Thus, the animacy of the head and the embedded noun must be taken into account when evaluating processing ease. Keywords: AnimacyRelative clause (RC)Mandarin ChineseProcessing Acknowledgments We would like to thank audiences at the 14th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), the 2008 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) and the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), where earlier versions of some of this research were presented. Preliminary analyses of some of the data reported here appeared in Wu, Kaiser, and Andersen (2010). The stimuli used in this research are a revised version of the stimuli used in Wu (2009). We thank Yanan Sheng for assistance in the stimulus revision and running of participants, Xiaomei Qiao, and Tangfeng Yang for assistance in carrying out norming studies, Mei Li for providing facilities in running Experiment 3 at Tongji University, and Rudolf Troike for help with finalising the translations of our Chinese stimuli. This research was partially supported by a project sponsored by the Scientific Research Foundation for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry, and by a grant from the Shanghai Municipal Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation (2010BYY003) to the first author. Notes 1As a reviewer pointed out, the relation between head animacy and RC-type is clear with object RCs (which tend to occur with inanimate heads), but less so with subject RCs. Indeed, in Mak et al.'s (2002, pp. 54–55) German corpus, the 144 subject-extracted RCs have inanimate heads almost as frequently as animate heads: 57% animate heads and 43% inanimate heads. Also, in Roland et al.'s (2007, p. 357) analysis of the English-language Brown corpus, 47% of 100 randomly-selected subject-extracted RCs have inanimate heads. However, existing corpus data from Chinese suggest that subject RCs' head animacy patterns (at least in Chinese) may vary depending on the grammatical role of the RC's head noun. For Chinese, Pu (2007, p. 45) and Wu (2009) found that (1) when SRCs modify sentential subjects, animate heads significantly outnumber inanimate heads, but (2) when SRCs modify sentential objects, there is no particular bias toward animate or inanimate heads. 2The term "experiencer" refers to a change of psychological state on a human participant caused by someone or something in the context of certain intransitive verbs (e.g., win, die); experience-theme verbs (e.g., love, discover, like); or causer-experiencer verbs (e.g., please, amuse, amaze, and annoy). 3Lin and Garnsey (Citation2010) manipulated animacy in their stimuli, but they also topicalised their RCs to a sentence-initial position and used null head nouns. Headless RCs and topicalisation in Mandarin normally occur only when supportive discourse contexts are given, but their stimuli were presented in isolation. Thus their stimuli had a marked structure, which may have complicated their results. 4One reviewer pointed out that the percentage of RCs where both nouns have the same animacy is 28% in Mak et al.'s (2002) Dutch corpus and 40% in their German corpus. However, viewed from another perspective, this means that the percentage of RCs with contrastive animacy configuration is 72% in Dutch and 60% in German, a pattern similar to Wu's (2009) corpus analysis. Furthermore, at least in Wu's (2009) analyses of Chinese Treebank Corpus, RCs with matched animacy (double-animates or double-inanimates) occurred significantly less frequently than RCs with nonmatched animacy (p'<.05). 5In Experiment 1, the log frequencies for the different verbs and for the embedded nouns were matched. The mean log frequencies for the verbs from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.14 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 3.32 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 0.1069, p=.9558. The mean log frequencies for the verbs from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.46 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 9.04 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si. These frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 78) = 0.6015, p=.616. The mean log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.07 for Oi-Sa and Oi-Si, 3.28 for Oa-Sa and Oa-Si. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 78) = 0.1726, p=.9146. The log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.38 for Oi-Sa and Oi-Si, 9.36 for Oa-Sa and Oa-Si. The frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 82) = 0.0087, p=.9989. Log frequencies for the head nouns were matched for the 2008 dictionary (means: 8.5 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 9.05 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si). According to this corpus, the frequencies of the different head nouns do not differ significantly, F(3, 72) = 1.7263, p=.1692. However, according to the SUBTLEX-CH corpus, the log frequencies for the head nouns are not matched [means: 4.32 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 2.88 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si; F(3, 74) = 4.8757, p=.0038]. As said, the frequency check reported above are based on an incomplete list of words that have their frequencies listed in either resource. 6At the sentence-initial RC-verb position (pos 1, e.g., raokai "bypass"), there was a marginal main effect of Head Animacy (t=1.84, p=.0663), and a marginal interaction between Head Animacy and Embedded-noun Animacy (t=−1.8, p=.073). However, given that this is the first word region, these weak effects are probably due to lexical differences. 7In Experiment 3, the log frequencies were matched for the verbs, but not for the embedded nouns and for the head nouns. The mean log frequencies of the verbs from SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.83 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads, 3.41 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 82) = 0.2254, p=.8785. The mean log frequencies of the verb from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.26 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 9.19 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. These frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 0.1274, p=.9436. The log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 2.86 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 4.03 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads. The differences in frequencies are marginally significant, F(3, 74) = 2.581, p=.062. The log mean frequencies of the embedded nouns from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.52 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 9.11 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads). These frequencies differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 2.833, p=.044. Reversely for the head nouns, their log frequencies for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads are more frequent than the log frequencies for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. However, because we used a Latin-square design such that the different nouns rotated through the different conditions, we do not think this affects our results.
The language of a speech community can only act as an identity marker for all of its speakers if linguistic norms are widely shared and if a minimal number of language varieties are spoken. This article examines briefly how a linguistic norm came to serve the whole of Iceland and how a situation of relative linguistic homogeneity was maintained for centuries. Sociolinguistic theory tells us that the speech community that we can reconstruct for early Iceland should lead to the establishment and maintenance of local norms. However, Iceland, arguably monodialectal, was certainly characterized by long-term linguistic homogeneity and remained a society where nucleated settlements barely formed over a thousand-year period. Scholars have argued that a mixture of dialects leveled shortly after the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century (Settlement). Studies show that dialect leveling requires dialect mixing, the convergence of people on one place, and sustained linguistic contact between the speakers. The settlement pattern of Iceland is indicative of population divergence (not convergence) and there is limited evidence of sustained contact. It is therefore proposed that the dialect leveling might be linked instead with significant population movements and social upheaval in mainland Scandinavia in the immediate pre-Viking period. The variety of Norse that was taken westward across the Atlantic might itself already have been the result of several earlier stages of mixing and koineization. It is only by combining linguistic, historical, and archaeological knowledge that this problem of how one linguistic norm came to serve the whole of Iceland can be understood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Music listeners have difficulty correctly understanding and remembering song lyrics. However, results from the present study support the hypothesis that young adults can learn African-American English (AAE) vocabulary from listening to hiphop music. Non-African-American participants first gave free-response definitions to AAE vocabulary items, after which they answered demographic questions as well as questions addressing their social networks, their musical preferences, and their knowledge of popular culture. Results from the survey show a positive association between the number of hip-hop artists listened to and AAE comprehension vocabulary scores. Additionally, participants were more likely to know an AAE vocabulary item if the hip-hop artists they listen to use the word in their song lyrics. Together, these results suggest that young adults can acquire vocabulary through exposure to hip-hop music, a finding relevant for research on vocabulary acquisition, the construction of adole)
Reference-point reasoning is a pervasive cognitive phenomenon intrinsic to many domains of human activity. However, very little is known about linguistic aspects of this phenomenon. This paper elaborates the reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics and, more specifically, to the semantics of dimensional adjectives. It is argued that a panoply of reference points may be used to anchor conceptual specifications of adjectives, prototypes being only a special case of the reference-point mechanism. For example, dimensional adjectives may be interpreted vis-à-vis an average value of the property (norm), endpoints of the scale and dimensions of the human body (ego). Each of these reference points motivates crucial semantic and functional properties of dimensional adjectives.
espanolComo admite en algunas obras de su produccion normativa mas reciente la Asociacion de Academias de la lengua espanola, “el espanol no es identico en todos los lugares en que se habla”. De hecho, “por su caracter de lengua supranacional, hablada en mas de veinte paises, el espanol constituye, en realidad, un conjunto de normas diversas”. Con todo, pese a las evidentes divergencias entre tales normas, se sostiene que, al mismo tiempo, todo el espanol comparte, no obstante, “una amplia base comun: la que se manifiesta en la expresion culta de nivel formal, extraordinariamente homogenea en todo el ambito hispanico, con variaciones minimas entre las diferentes zonas, casi siempre de tipo fonico y lexico” (RAE 2005: xiv-xv). Entre estas “variaciones minimas”, hay muchos rasgos que el andaluz, sobre todo occidental, comparte con el espanol de America; de ahi que se pudiera tener la tentacion de conceder identico estatus a fenomenos comunes en cuanto a su manifestacion material, mas aun cuando tales fenomenos poseen, naturalmente, un pasado tambien comun, y en vista de que –aunque esto apenas se ha advertido– tanto el continente americano como la region andaluza han vivido, en periodos historicos diferentes, proclamas de independizacion linguistica con respecto a la lengua comun en alguna medida similares. Ahora bien, frente a tal propension, en este trabajo se defendera la oportunidad de distinguir claramente entre espanol de America y andaluz, por cuanto, como senala Wulf Oesterreicher, linguisticamente, “en ningun caso es interesante […] el dato linguistico crudo, p. ej. la existencia de tal sonido, construccion o palabra en un territorio o en otro”, sino que lo que interesa y constituye realmente hechos (y no meros datos) linguisticos es la marcacion diasistematica de tal fenomeno, su posicion relativa en el conjunto del espacio variacional de la lengua (Oesterreicher 2002: 286). Y desde esa perspectiva, los hechos linguisticos del andaluz y del espanol de America no parece que muestren, pese a su identidad material, una identidad tambien de estatus. EnglishAs the Asociacion de Academias de la lengua espanola states in some of its most recent normative publications, “Spanish is not identical in all the places it is spoken”. In fact, “due to its status as a supranational language, Spanish is really a cluster of different norms”. However, it argues that despite the evident differences, all these different norms share “a large common base: that which manifests itself in the formal register of educated speakers. This is extraordinarily homogeneous throughout the Spanish speaking world, as the variations between the different geographical areas are minimal and are almost entirely phonetic or lexical” (RAE 2005: xiv-xv). These ‘minimal differences’ include many characteristics that Andalusian, and above all western Andalusian, shares with American Spanish. It could be tempting to award the same status to such materially identical phenomena, especially considering that both varieties share a common past, and have experienced similar claims for their linguistic independence with respect to the common standard language in different historical periods. This article contests that view and argues that a clear distinction should be made between Andalusian and American Spanish phenomena, since, as Wulf Oesterreicher says, linguistically speaking “raw linguistic data, e.g. the existence of this or that sound, construction or word in one area or another, are not interesting at all. It is only the value ascribed to the phenomenon, in other words, its diasystematic mark and the place it occupies in the variational space of a particular language, that constitutes linguistic facts» (Oesterreicher 2002: 286). From this point of view, Andalusian and American Spanish linguistic facts may be materially identical but they do not appear to enjoy identical status.
In this article, I undertake a qualitative analysis of third-person direct-object anaphoric reference in a corpus of Brazilian TV evening news programmes. A comparison of my results to previous studies (Bagno 2005, Duarte 1989, Schwenter and Silva 2003) reveals surprising findings in that figures for anaphoric pronouns (both clitics and tonic pronouns), as well as null objects, are extremely low. Instead, lexical NPs and passive constructions are used to establish anaphoric reference. While the use of lexical NPs to establish anaphoric reference has been analysed before, the use of passive constructions for this purpose has not been previously observed. I argue that the described pattern can be explained when taking into account the audiovisual quality of television combined with an audience design (Bell 1984) that aims to underline the seriousness of quality reporting.Neste artigo propomos uma analise qualitativa da referencia anaforica de objeto direto de terceira pessoa com base num corpus constituido...
In this article, I undertake a qualitative analysis of third-person direct-object anaphoric reference in a corpus of Brazilian TV evening news programmes. A comparison of my results to previous studies (Bagno 2005, Duarte 1989, Schwenter and Silva 2003) reveals surprising findings in that figures for anaphoric pronouns (both clitics and tonic pronouns), as well as null objects, are extremely low. Instead, lexical NPs and passive constructions are used to establish anaphoric reference. While the use of lexical NPs to establish anaphoric reference has been analysed before, the use of passive constructions for this purpose has not been previously observed. I argue that the described pattern can be explained when taking into account the audiovisual quality of television combined with an audience design (Bell 1984) that aims to underline the seriousness of quality reporting.
We tested whether the intervening time between multiple glances influences the independence of the resulting visual percepts. Observers estimated how many dots were present in brief displays that repeated one, two, three, four, or a random number of trials later. Estimates made farther apart in time were more independent, and thus carried more information about the stimulus when combined. In addition, estimates from different visual field locations were more independent than estimates from the same location. Our results reveal a retinotopic serial dependence in visual numerosity estimates, which may be a mechanism for maintaining the continuity of visual perception in a noisy environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for indivi)
Ingarden's phenomenological study of consciousness in the reading process sheds light on Wolfgang Iser's study of the reading activity,hence the latter's theory of aesthetic response,a branch of reception aesthetics.Iser's theory is at the juncture of phenomenology,reception theory and modern arts,highlighting the interaction in reading.It mainly contains two parts: description of the reading activity,or reading phenomenology,and his elaboration of the structure of literary texts.The former can be summarized as that the work is generated mutually between the reader and the text,with the reader shaped by reading experiences.This opinion cannot be found in Jauss.Iser argues that vacancy and negation in the text offer a special structure controlling the interaction in question.Negation means the discarding of familiar social norms,and is one of the reasons for vacancy,which,in turn,is the potential relationship in the text.Though Iser's theory is considered by some as lexically difficult and contradictory,it is still a supplement to Ingarden's phenomenology and therefore deserves recognition.
In this paper we aim to briefly review Eugenio Coseriu’s ideas regarding synonymy and some Coserian disciples’ contributions (be they direct or indirect) concerning this issue. The largest part of this article, however, presents our own contribution to the study of synonymy, whose starting point was Coseriu’s integral linguistics, considered as an epistemological frame of reference. We have tried to apply, within the general study of synonymy (lexical, phraseological and lexico-phraseological), distinctions such as: language as activity [enérgeia], competence [dýnamis] and product [érgon] to its three levels (universal, historical and individual); norm and system; historical language and functional language, etc. As far as we are concerned, we were interested in pointing out, for each of Coseriu’s levels in turn, the difference between synonymy in actu (the real one) and synonymy in potentia (the virtual or potential one). We also aimed at drawing attention to the importance of competence (mainly the idiomatic and expressive ones) in the analysis of different types of synonymy as “knowledge” in using the synonyms.
This paper examines the linguistic representation of male and female. Comparing German and English, this paper argues that, despite the grammatically gendered nature of German, both languages equally privilege the male element at the expense of the female. Referencing a variety of studies, this paper explores the use—in both languages—of the “generic he,” investigating how this custom is perceived by listeners; it examines marked terms, particularly the apparent need to mark female appearance in male-dominated professional spheres; it considers female visibility in language and the differing approaches taken by both English and German; and it explores feminine derivation and the semantic sexualization/degradation of the female form to male counterparts. Derivation from masculine norms as well as lexical and connotative gender are briefl y discussed. Finally, the paper looks at each language’s strategies for correction.
We present an enriched version of the Penn Arabic Treebank (Maamouri et al., 2004), where latent features necessary for modeling morpho-syntactic agreement in Arabic are manually annotated. We describe our process for efficient annotation, and present the first quantitative analysis of Arabic morphosyntactic phenomena. 1
Semantic space models of lexical semantics learn vector representations for words by observing statistical redundancies in a text corpus.A word's meaning is represented as a point in a high-dimensional semantic space.However, these spatial models have difficulty simulating human free association data due to the constraints placed upon them by metric axioms which appear to be violated in association norms.Here, we build on work by Griffiths, Steyvers, and Tenenbaum (2007) and test the ability of spatial semantic models to simulate association data when they are fused with a Luce choice rule to simulate the process of selecting a response in free association.The results provide an existence proof that spatial models can produce the patterns of data in free association previously thought to be problematic.
This article focuses on tracheotomy, which is transformation of language, norms and speech. The article examines the philosophical problem of the transformation of language info speech, the latter is single unbroken wholeness. Norms are previously divided into d ialect and literal. Each of them is in turn d ivided into phonetic, lexical, orthographical, spelling, morphological, syntactic variety. For the disclosure of the issue there are different in terms of foreign and domestic linguistic differentiation with respect to language the language and speech rate. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the norm in-depth by the well-known Uzbek linguists.
This paper introduces the META-NORD project which develops Nordic and Baltic part of the European open language resource infrastructure. META-NORD works on assembling, linking across languages, and making widely available the basic language resources used by developers, professionals and researchers to build specific products and applications. The goals of the project, overall approach and specific action lines on wordnets, terminology resources and treebanks are described. Moreover, results achieved in first five months of the project, i.e. language whitepapers, metadata specification and IPR management, are presented. 1
The article deals with processing of diminutives in the Pralex lexical database, in particular with their allomorphism, homonymy and word-forming relations. Moreover, it discusses various definitions of diminutive meanings and provides their detailed classification in particular types.
Neuropsychological and imaging studies have shown that the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG) is specifically involved in processing spatial terms (e.g. above, left of), which locate places and objects in the world. The current fMRI study focused on the nature and specificity of representing spatial language in the left SMG by combining behavioral and neuronal activation data in blind and sighted individuals. Data from the blind provide an elegant way to test the supramodal representation hypothesis, i.e. abstract codes representing spatial relations yielding no activation differences between blind and sighted. Indeed, the left SMG was activated during spatial language processing in both blind and sighted individuals implying a supramodal representation of spatial and other dimensional relations which does not require visual experience to develop. However, in the absence of vision functional reorganization of the visual cortex is known to take place. An important consideration with respec)
Patrick Hanks probably no longer needs any introduction to lexicographers and lexicologists, and especially not to readers of the International Journal of Lexicography. He has published at least one article or book review every year in IJL since 2004 and his regular contributions to Euralex conferences and to many other journals provide clear evidence that this prolific author cannot be ignored as soon as one discusses modern lexicography. This brief book review will not attempt to describe the multiple facets of Hanks's contributions to lexicography, lexical semantics, computational and corpus linguistics, and the study of word meaning in general. I encourage the reader to read Gilles-Maurice de Schryver's excellent introduction to the Festschrift he edited in honour of his friend on the occasion of his 70th birthday. De Schryver rightly points out that ‘Hanks is a linguistic theorist and empirical corpus analyst, also an onomastician, but above all he is a lexicographer’ (p.4). For linguists who, like me, have always taken a lot of pleasure in reading Hanks's papers on phraseology, on idioms, on metaphors, on word associations, on collocations and collocation extraction, on dictionary definitions, on corpus pattern analysis, on linguistic norms and exploitations, or on proper names, it may be too easy to forget that he is primarily a lexicographer, indeed, and that he has played a pivotal role in several major dictionaries of the English language, including the Collins Dictionary of the English language (1979), the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) and the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998). Beyond these direct contributions to lexicography, it is safe to claim that if today's dictionaries, especially learners’ dictionaries, are better at presenting collocational material and phraseological data, it is largely due to the fact that, in 1989, Patrick Hanks showed us how to discover the most significant collocates in a seminal and influential paper he wrote with Ken Church (Church and Hanks 1989).
Hedges,as an important strategy and a pervasive feature in academic writing,can present claims with greater precision,limit the professional damage and give deference to the reader.However,it has often been mistaken as poor writing style and thus neglected for a long time.This paper presents a contrastive interlanguage analysis(CIA) of lexical hedges in two self-compiled corpora,i.e.Native Abstract Corpus(NAC) and Chinese Abstract Corpus(CAC).With the use of lexical hedges in English abstracts of linguistic research articles written by native speakers as the norm,this study analyzes the deviation in the use of lexical hedges by Chinese researchers—EFL learners at a higher linguistic level through comparison with a view to providing some suggestions for the teaching and learning of hedges in EAP classrooms.