Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
This paper presents a comparative study of Judgment and Assessing frames in English and Portuguese. The aim is to verify the possibility of using the FrameNet frames to construct a lexical database for Brazilian Portuguese. The research corpus is composed by 50 legal documents, totalizing 1.055,535 tokens and 39,108 types. Through a contrastive method the Judgment and Assessing frames were selected and translation equivalents for the English lexical units were established. The points considered in this research were the polysemy and the semantic relations of words. The polysemy is the main difficulty in applying FrameNet frames for Portuguese description.
Any work of art is an original bearer of information. At the same time every cultural phenomenon codes a message through the linguistic means reflecting the specific character of the given work of art. In connection with the individualisation of expressive means in the 20th century the tendency to informational isolation appears in all kinds of art the so-called ciphering of the sense that is not lying on the surface. Not only the quantity of breaches of those linguistic norms, which a composer, transferring a message to the listener, uses in his work, is of primary importance for the composer, but to what extent they are important for the listener and aimed at him. Depending on various circumstances (socio-cultural, moral, aesthetic, etc.) the listener can form his own hypotheses concerning deciphering of the concrete text, revealing his cross-initiatives. Resting upon the semiotic investigation, the author of the article tried to mark out the stages of the listener's perception of a 20th-century musical composition through the definitions of codes and subcodes.
Norms are essential to the human condition. Whether in the guise of tradition, culture, canon or rules, norms are therefore central to studies in the humanities. This book focuses on Russian language culture of the post-revolutionary and post-Soviet periods, times when norms — linguistic and otherwise — have been eagerly debated, challenged, broken and redefined. Exploring the intersections between linguistic authority and creative response, an international team of scholars examines different realms of linguistic practice (literary fiction, internet slang, literary criticism and aesthetics, writers’ blogs, linguistic play) and various arenas for “talk about talk” (the classroom, blogs, the media, or the courtroom). By combining various approaches and disciplines — linguistics, literary criticism, new media studies — the book as a whole explores the multiplicity of meanings that are accorded to the notion of linguistic norms in the Russian community. The result is both a broad and a detailed picture of important trends in modern Russian language culture.
Multi-word Lexical Units (MWLU) are of great importance in language in general, and in Natural Language Processing in particular, since they are not governed by the free rules of the system. In this article, we give an overview of the different types of phraseological units, explaining briefly each one's features. Our priority being to process idioms automatically in Basque texts, we concisely analyze several approaches for the inflectional description of MWLUs, and then, we explain the system we have developed for Basque: (i) a general representation for describing MWLUs in the lexical database for Basque (EDBL), (ii) HABIL, a tool capable of detecting and analyzing them based on the features described in the database, and (iii) a constraint grammar for disambiguating ambiguous MWLUs.
Patients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD) have been shown to exhibit increased thresholds towards experimentally induced thermal pain applied to the skin. In contrast, the induction of sad mood can increase pain perception in healthy controls. Here, we aimed to test the hypothesis that heat pain thresholds are further increased after sad mood induction in depressed patients. Thermal pain thresholds were obtained from 25 female depressed patients and 25 controls before and after sad mood induction applying a modified Velten Mood Induction procedure (MIP). Valence and arousal ratings were obtained using the self-assessment manikin. The Montgomery Depression Rating Scale and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were obtained at baseline from all participants. Pain thresholds at baseline did not significantly differ between groups. Pain thresholds and valence of mood significantly decreased both in patients and controls, while arousal showed an inverse time course between groups. Therefore, our hypothesis could not be confirmed. From these data, we propose that the depressed mood as seen in MDD patients influences pain experience differently as compared to the shorter-lasting mood change after MIP. A differential interaction of both affective states with brain areas of the pain matrix might be assumed. Eventually, the induction of sad mood might mirror the increased number of pain complaints in depressed patients and thus adds to the current concept of adjuvant antidepressant treatment both in depressed patients with pain complaints and in chronic pain patients.
Abstract In the preceding chapter we have delineated the boundaries of our inquiry by defining a cross-linguistically applicable domain of predicative (alienable) possession. On the basis of this definition we can now proceed to build a data base, which comprises the relevant linguistic material from the languages in the sample. Once this task has been completed (and we will assume here that it has) our next step is to construct a typology of predicative possession, on the basis of observable similarities and differences among the constructions included in the cross-linguistic database.
Computer-aided Acquisition of Semantic Knowledge (CASK) is aimed at describing a number of semantic fields of a few European languages using data mining techniques elaborated within the framework of the new paradigm of computation known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). CASK's motivation is to dig deeper in order to find building blocks which could be used in various sophisticated ways. The project is interdisciplinary involving scientific cooperation of experts in linguistics with information engineers. The task of linguists consists in an interactive (computer-aided) discovery of ontology-based definitions of feature structures using the SEMANA (Semantic Analyser) software which was designed especially in order to build linguistic databases with semantic knowledge.
The Postmodern culture today breaks down historically a solid barrier, produced in the modern age, between the language and its users, signs and realities and subject and his object. This phenomenon brings about some translation problems at the same time; interpretative diversity, linguistic derivation in the mass media, permanent reproduction of translated text and meaning`s continuity, definition of translator etc. I examine these problems through a theoretical approach to the mediative nature of the act of translation. I stress on two inevitable aspects of the postmodern linguistic tendencies: connotation generalized in our translation activities and its re-mediative culture. Focusing on a cycling perspective of our translating activities, I could reach the conclusion that the translated text have no relation with the denotative meanings which have been comprised closed and original with the realities from the modern age. A corrected model could be proposed. I call this cycle model of translating process which comprises ① Mediation or Creation ② Re-mediation or Translation ③ Re-re-mediation or Comprehension ④ Verification, Deduction or Correction. Each activity has not only its own translating process but its circulated role for the time in which everyone can participate equally as a reader, a sender, a translator and an individual who makes its contextual needs and desires. This model could show that the translating process is not for fixing a linguistic sign to some closed meanings but for expanding its pertinent meanings to diverse situations. Translating activity is not for making a linguistic norm by itself, but for making appropriate communication with as much of the population as possible.
Annotated data have recently become more important, and thus more abundant, in computational linguistics. They are used as training material for machine learning systems for a wide variety of applications from Parsing to Machine Translation (Quirk et al., 2005). Dependency representation is preferred for many languages because linguistic and semantic information is easier to retrieve from the more direct dependency representation. Dependencies are relations that are defined on words or smaller units where the sentences are divided into its elements called heads and their arguments, e.g. verbs and objects. Dependency parsing aims to predict these dependency relations between lexical units to retrieve information, mostly in the form of semantic interpretation or syntactic structure. Parsing is usually considered as the first step of Natural Language Processing (NLP). To train statistical parsers, a sample of data annotated with necessary information is required. There are different views on how informative or functional representation of natural language sentences should be. There are different constraints on the design process such as: 1) how intuitive (natural) it is, 2) how easy to extract information from it is, and 3) how appropriately and unambiguously it represents the phenomena that occur in natural languages. In this article, a review of statistical dependency parsing for different languages will be made and current challenges of designing dependency treebanks and dependency parsing will be discussed.
Large scale efforts are underway to create dependency treebanks and parsers for Hindi and other Indian languages. Hindi, being a morphologically rich, flexible word order language, brings challenges such as handling non-projectivity in parsing. In this work, we look at non-projectivity in Hyderabad Dependency Treebank (HyDT) for Hindi. Non-projectivity has been analysed from two perspectives: graph properties that restrict non-projectivity and linguistic phenomenon behind non-projectivity in HyDT. Since Hindi has ample instances of non-projectivity (14% of all structures in HyDT are non-projective), it presents a case for an in depth study of this phenomenon for a better insight, from both of these perspectives.
Prior COVID-19 infection may elevate activity of the behavioral immune system-the psychological mechanisms that foster avoidance of infection cues-to protect the individual from contracting the infection in the future. Such "adaptive behavioral immunity" may come with psychological costs, such as exacerbating the global pandemic's disruption of social and emotional processes (i.e., pandemic disruption). To investigate that idea, we tested a mediational pathway linking prior COVID infection and pandemic disruption through behavioral immunity markers, assessed with subjective emotional ratings. This was tested in a sample of 734 Mechanical Turk workers who completed study procedures online during the global pandemic (September 2021-January 2022). Behavioral immunity markers were estimated with an affective image rating paradigm. Here, participants reported experienced disgust/fear and appraisals of sickness/harm risk to images varying in emotional content. Participants self-reported on their previous COVID-19 diagnosis history and level of pandemic disruption. The findings support the proposed mediational pathway and suggest that a prior COVID-19 infection is associated with broadly elevated threat emotionality, even to neutral stimuli that do not typically elicit threat emotions. This elevated threat emotionality was in turn related to disrupted socioemotional functioning within the pandemic context. These findings inform the psychological mechanisms that might predispose COVID survivors to mental health difficulties.
Taking as its basis a survey of the 20th century Korean lexicon, this paper explores its lexical properties through examination of its lexical character, its extralinguistic background and various lexical aspects, and provides an overview of important achievements in lexical studies through the construction and arrangement of lexical data and through the examination of lexical studies. The major results are as follows: First, three main properties of the 20th century Korean lexicon were found: (1) Although it consists of native words, Chinese words, and foreign words from the West, native words are conspicuous for the motivation process of forming words, and highly developed in terms of symbolic words and sense words. (2) Changes in politics and social structures in the 20th century are reflected both directly and indirectly in the Korean lexicon. (3) Complex aspects have appeared due to the expansion of the lexicon, the mass production of new words including foreign words, differentiation between North Korea and South Korea and between old and young generations, and the appearance of an Internet vocabulary in the lexicon of young generations. Second, three significant achievements in 20th century studies on the Korean lexicon were identified: (1) Following on the construction of a lexical database, standard words were established, dictionaries were written, frequencies of words were examined, and basic words were chosen. (2) The government and various civil organizations have focused on lexical purification, with satisfactory results. (3) Books on lexicology and lexical history were published, research on lexical fields and lexical relations was activated and methodologies for lexical education were explored. Lastly, the 20th century Korean lexicon evolved complex and diverse features in response to the demands of the times. On the one hand, lexical studies during this time showed great development and produced significant results, both in quantity and quality. On the other hand, problems continued to exist in areas such as: (ⅰ) limitations in awareness of the importance of the lexicon; (ⅱ) objectives, targets and methodologies of lexical studies; and (ⅲ) lack of research scholars in this field. These problems remain to be addressed by the 21st Korean lexicon.
Although gaze direction and face shape have each been shown to affect perceptions of the dominance of others, the question whether gaze direction and face shape have independent main effects on perceptions of dominance, and whether these effects interact, has not yet been studied. To investigate this issue, we compared dominance ratings of faces with masculinised shapes and direct gaze, masculinised shapes and averted gaze, feminised shapes and direct gaze, and feminised shapes and averted gaze. While faces with direct gaze were generally rated as more dominant than those with averted gaze, this effect of gaze direction was greater when judging faces with masculinised shapes than when judging faces with feminised shapes. Additionally, faces with masculinised shapes were rated as more dominant than those with feminised shapes when faces were presented with direct gaze, but not when faces were presented with averted gaze. Collectively, these findings reveal an interaction between the effects of gaze direction and sexually dimorphic facial cues on judgments of the dominance of others, presenting novel evidence for the existence of complex integrative processes that underpin social perception of faces. Integrating information from face shape and gaze cues may increase the efficiency with which we perceive the dominance of others.
This article focuses on every day communication in New Media with special regards to private writing on Instant Messaging. After brief introductory thoughts about writings beyond the linguistic norm in New Media we compare the specific circumstances of "new" writing via internet and mobile phone with "traditional" offline writing that can be realized by the use of a computer, a type writer or by hand. How this new writing is judged by the public, whether it is considered to be "good" or "bad" and how experts position themselves in this discussion, is shown in section 3. Section 4 takes a look at which linguistic theories might apply to the analysis of typed dialogues in computer mediated communication. The main focus here is on the theory of Interactional Linguistics which formerly had been applied only to the analysis of oral communication. Finally, language critical and linguistic aspects of writing in the New Media are discussed in a brief synopsis.
本文分别结合知网 (HowNet) 和WordNet 讨论知识工程中最常用的两种语义分析方法，即义素分析和语义场分析的方法。知网和WordNet分别是目前应用最广泛的汉语和英语的知识库。知网是以汉语和英语的词语所代表的概念为描述对象，以揭示概念与概念之间以及概念所具有的属性之间的关系为基本内容的常识知识库，1999年上网发布，并不断更新，最新版为2008年版。本文以1.0版为讨论对象。WordNet是由美国George A. Miller主持完成的一个大型的英语知识库(a large lexical database of English)，迄今也不断更新，本文也主要以较早(1997年)发布的16版为考察对象。
Named entity recognition for morphologically rich, case-insensitive languages, including the majority of semitic languages, Iranian languages, and Indian languages, is inherently more difficult than its English counterpart. Worse still, progress on machine learning approaches to named entity recognition for many of these languages is currently hampered by the scarcity of annotated data and the lack of an accurate part-of-speech tagger. While it is possible to rely on manually-constructed gazetteers to combat data scarcity, this gazetteer-centric approach has the potential weakness of creating irreproducible results, since these name lists are not publicly available in general. Motivated in part by this concern, we present a learning-based named entity recognizer that does not rely on manually-constructed gazetteers, using Bengali as our representative resource-scarce, morphologically-rich language. Our recognizer achieves a relative improvement of 7.5% in F-measure over a baseline recognizer. Improvements arise from (1) using induced affixes, (2) extracting information from online lexical databases, and (3) jointly modeling part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition.
Treebank is an important resource for both research and application of natural language processing. For Vietnamese, we still lack such kind of corpora. This paper presents up-to-date results of a project for Vietnamese treebank construction. Since Vietnamese is an isolating language and has no word delimiter, there are many ambiguities in sentence analysis. We systematically applied a lot of linguistic techniques to handle such ambiguities. Annotators are supported by automaticlabeling tools and a tree-editor tool. Raw texts are extracted from Tuoi Tre (Youth), an online Vietnamese daily newspaper. The current annotation agreement is around 90 percent.
In the article we discuss ongoing work concerning a confrontational German-Slovak collocation lexical database. The database consists of two parts, a section of German collocations with Slovak equivalents and a section of Slovak collocations. Intended size of the database is several hundred words of different parts of speech (nouns in the first phase of the project) for each of the languages, together with their collocation profiles. The database uses MediaWiki engine and a wiki-based approach to article editing and collaborative work of a team of lexicographers.
This work investigates a possibility of combining two different types of corpora to build a valence lexicon for French adjectives. We complete adjectival frames extracted from a Treebank with statistical cues computed from a large automatically parsed corpus. This experiment shows how linguistic knowledge and large amount of annotated data can be used in a complementary manner.
Lexical databases are invaluable sources of knowledge about words and their meanings, with numerous applications in areas like NLP, IR, and AI. We propose a methodology for the automatic construction of a large-scale multilingual lexical database where words of many languages are hierarchically organized in terms of their meanings and their semantic relations to other words. This resource is bootstrapped from WordNet, a well-known English-language resource. Our approach extends WordNet with around 1.5 million meaning links for 800,000 words in over 200 languages, drawing on evidence extracted from a variety of resources including existing (monolingual) wordnets, (mostly bilingual) translation dictionaries, and parallel corpora. Graph-based scoring functions and statistical learning techniques are used to iteratively integrate this information and build an output graph. Experiments show that this wordnet has a high level of precision and coverage, and that it can be useful in applied tasks such as cross-lingual text classification.
We present a valency lexicon for Latin verbs extracted from the Index Thomisticus Treebank, a syntactically annotated corpus of Medieval Latin texts by Thomas Aquinas.
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.
Pp. xiii, 265, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, $90.00. This book is not gracefully written, but it is worth penetrating its stylistic carapace if one values tough argument. When I first read the title, the naughty thought occurred to me, what a pleasure it would be to be relieved of one's individual epistemic responsibilities; of ever again having to assume the burden of finding anything out for oneself regarding matters either of fact or of value. But how could one bring off such a feat? Part I, on semantic anti-individualism, begins with an account of the communication of knowledge, and makes a case for the existence of public linguistic norms from the occurrence of successful communication on the one hand, and the existence of misunderstandings on the other. Then he argues from the reality of public linguistic norms to anti-individualism with regard to the language of thought. Part II is concerned with epistemic anti-individualism, and starts applying it to the epistemic dimension of knowledge communication. Objections are mounted which take into account the phenomena of gullibility and rationality. A final chapter recommends what the author calls ‘an ‘active’ epistemic anti-individualism’; in which the reader is given instruction about ‘nearby possible worlds’ in which someone ‘forms the testimonial belief that there is milk in the fridge, under conditions in which there is no milk in the fridge’ (p. 214). Goldberg has a good deal to say on what he calls ‘the consumption of testimony’ (a phrase I find curious, though he frequently uses it). On the acquisition by children of beliefs based on testimony, we seem to have intuitions of which the implications conflict with one another. It seems perverse to deny, on the grounds of her cognitive immaturity, that three-year-old Sally knows that her mother has just bought some ice-cream for dinner, on the basis of what she has been told by her uncle, when in fact her mother has done this. And yet we are also inclined to say that the cognitive immaturity of children of this age makes it impossible for them to have adequate grounds for believing that such testimony is credible, and therefore for knowing the fact in question. Goldberg displays an impressive mastery of the evidence amassed on these matters by empirical psychologists. One of these argues that, up to a certain age, one can indeed be properly said to know through what one is told by another person, even when one has not acquired the mental capacities necessary adequately to evaluate such information. (It appears to me that it is superstitious to believe that there is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the question whether Sally knows about the ice-cream or not; in a sense she does, in a sense she doesn't.) The truth on the central topic under consideration, I believe, may properly be summarized something like this. By attending to the testimony of others, we get the hang of a process which is essentially private to each one of us - using our minds to attend to phenomena of sensation or feeling, to hypothesize more or less intelligently, to judge more or less reasonably what is so, and to make more or less responsible decisions accordingly. Some would say that these activities were not essentially private in that, if we had devices for inspecting the interiors of others' brains, we could observe them directly; but I remain unconvinced. Wittgenstein and his followers have demonstrated, I would concede, that if there were not public criteria for the occurrence of private mental acts, we could not talk of them, or probably even undergo or engage in them. But there are such criteria; we know what it is for people to look and sound as though they had just made an observation, or were trying to puzzle something out, or had just come to a decision after moments or months of hesitation. Having once gained the use of our mental faculties via these criteria, we can use them for ourselves, as even the most insensitive or stupid do to some extent, and persons of genius do to an exceptional degree. Our mental performances are nonetheless essentially private acts, of which we are directly aware, and of which we can enhance our awareness by suitably directed attention. The moral is, that the acquisition and cultivation of our capacity to gain knowledge, whether by testimony or otherwise, is a matter of both ‘public’ social influence and ‘private’ individual practice. We must apply this capacity to some extent for ourselves, as individuals, if we are to live reasonably and responsibly. It will not do to deny individualism so thoroughly as to imply the negation of this enormously important fact. There are times when it is proper to be Athanasius contra mundum. The balance of the public and private, the social and individual, contribution to knowledge, is of the essence. If you tip the balance too far in the direction of the public and social, as I think Goldberg's account might lead you to do, you bid fair to cut off at the root all original creativity in science, morality, or the arts.
The present study demonstrates how the emotional content of search terms and their eventual results affects the breadth of a users’ search for information. We observed the quantity of results selected by users. In a random sample of queries from the Microsoft LiveSearch search engine, 7,021 queries were evaluated using a dictionary with valence and arousal ratings. The number of search results selected was regressed on the valence and arousal of the search terms. We additionally observed users’ selection of results based on the position in the search results. Using the same sample, result placement was regressed on the valence and arousal level of the search terms. Results from quantity of search results selected shows that negative search terms result in an overall larger number of selections made than positive search terms. For position-based selections, we found that the selection of the first result is affected by an interaction of valence and arousal. Specifically, users were unaffected by the arousal level of negative search terms, but appeared to be more likely to search deeper on the page when they searched for less arousing positive information. These results suggest that the emotional content associated with a search query may lead users to be more or less discriminating in their acceptance of information and may influence the impact of placement on result selection.
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.
We describe a heuristics-based system for automatic measurement of syntactic complexity using the revised Developmental Level (D-Level) scale (Rosenberg & Abbeduto 1987; Covington et al. 2006). The system takes a raw sentence as input and assigns it to an appropriate developmental level on the scale. The system is designed with child language acquisition and psycholinguistic research in mind, and is therefore developed and evaluated using both written data from the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al. 1993) and spoken child language acquisition data from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). Experiment results show that the model achieves an accuracy of 94.0% and 93.2% on unseen test data from the Penn Treebank and the CHILDES database respectively. We illustrate how the system is used in an example application to investigate the correlation of average D-Level score and speaker age.
We describe here the first release of the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank (AGDT), a 190,903-word syntactically annotated corpus of literary texts including the works of Hesiod, Homer and Aeschylus. While the far larger works of Hesiod and Homer (142,705 words) have been annotated under a standard treebank production method of soliciting annotations from two independent reviewers and then reconciling their differences, we also put forth with Aeschylus (48,198 words) a new model of treebank production that draws on the methods of classical philology to take into account the personal responsibility of the annotator in the publication and ownership of a “scholarly ” treebank. 1
The PADT project might be summarized as an open-ended activity of the Center for Computational Linguistics, the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, and the Institute of Comparative Linguistics, Charles University in Prague, resting in multi-level annotation of Arabic language resources in the light of the theory of Functional Generative Description (Sgall et al., 1986; Hajičová and Sgall, 2003).
A recent proposal (Pollock 1989) within the framework of Government and Binding (GB) grammatical theory has been that the members of INFL Agreement and Tense should be given full constituent status as maximal projections in their own right. This idea has been applied to the syntax of Modern Irish in order both to test the universality of the expanded INFL proposal and to investigate what new perspectives it might have to offer on some remaining problems of Irish syntax. The results are presented in the following paper along with discussions of the direction they suggest for further research. INTRODUCTION Using data from mostly English and French, J.Y. Pollock argues in a recent proposal (1989) that if the usual members of INFL, Agreement and Tense, are included in the syntax as full maximal projections, many of the phenomena surrounding auxiliaries, negation, and verb movement can receive straightforward explanations. The proposal seems readily adaptable for other SVO languages which are generally accepted as showing evidence of verb movement, notably the so-called Verb Second (V2) languages. In order to test the universality of the expanded-INFL proposal, an expandedINFL syntax has been applied to the model VSO language Modern Irish. The result has been a quite promising new syntactic structure for Irish which seems to confirm the universality of expanded-INFL. While it is fully compatible with existing analyses for Irish word order in which V S O is derived from SVO, the new expanded syntax is equally adaptable to an account deriving VSO from SOV. Such an account is suggested by the Irish infinitive clause, which is built around the verbal noun (VN), and which regularly shows surface SOV order. The new syntax provides an attractive solution for the placement of preverbal particles (interrogative, relative, negative, and copula), which are the only elements regularly allowed to precede the verb in Irish. It also suggests some interesting perspectives for the analysis of copula constructions, an area which remains an open question in Irish syntax. 58 SHEILA DOOLEY COLLBERG Expanded-INFL syntax I would like to begin by defining exactly what is meant here by an expanded-INFL syntax. This is my own terminology for the kind of structure proposed in Pollock 1989. It is probably easiest to see what is new about this structure if we compare it to earlier models of universal syntax. Through the years, the 'basic' syntactic tree structure assumed within the G B theoretical framework has steadily grown more complex and abstract. The first tree structure (a) above shows a pre Barriers (Chomsky 1986) type of syntax with really the bare essentials. The S portion of the tree is the area which undergoes the most change. In the second tree (b), after Barriers, we have a new level of constituent structure introduced: INFL (inflection). It corresponds roughly to the S level of the previous structure. We also see that there is an abstract element Agr (Agreement) which is assumed to be generated in INFL. The whole tree shows consistent 2-level expansion of X-bar syntax for each phrasal projection. The last tree above (c) is an example of the expanded-INFL syntax: The IP of (b) has grown into two fully expanded phrasal projections in their own right: AgrP and TP (Tense). This of course gives us a lot more 'room' in the syntax to propose analyses for grammatical phenomena involving the abstract (or AN EXPANDED-INFL SYNTAX FOR MODERN IRISH 59 overt) elements Agr and Tense, namely things like the behavior of auxiliaries, subject-verb inversion, negation, quantifiers, and verb movement. As Pollock demonstrates, this kind of structure can be used to explain many of the word order details of the SVO languages French and English — details which otherwise seem unexplainable except by recourse to ad hoc stipulations. B A S I C I R I S H S Y N T A C T I C S T R U C T U R E Can the kind of structure pictured in (lc) say anything new to us about Irish? Can we implement such a structure at all for a V S O language like Irish? The answer depends in part upon how one decides to analyze the surface V S O order of Irish. There are two possible analyses, both represented in the existing literature. V S O is base-generated Stenson 1981 and Chung 1983 are two studies which represent the view that the V S O order in Irish is base-generated. This implies that the syntactic structure is a flat, one-level tree with all constituent phrases placed as sisters to the initial verb and no verb movement involved. It accurately represents the observed surface word order of Irish and is thus descriptively adequate, but it offers little explanation for the verb-initial order. Chung attempts to give a possible theoretical defense of the flat structure by appealing to the observation that VSO languages seem to lack the subject-object asymmetries with regard to extraction properties that one usually finds in S V O languages. However, this is not quite correct. The subject NP in Irish is much more closely tied to the verb than the object NP. While nothing can ever intervene between the subject and the verb, there are times when the object is in fact forced to move away from its canonical position. This occurs when the object is pronomimal. It must, appear in absolute final position in its clause, and it apparently reaches this position by means of some sort of a rule of Pronoun Postposing (Chung & McCloskey 1987). These facts suggest that the relationship of the subject and object NP to the verb is not simply one of equal sisterhood. The S V O Analysis If the VSO order of Irish is not base-generated, then it must arise through some sort of derivational process from a different underlying word order. This view is implicitly supported in an article devoted to establishing the 60 SHEILA DOOLEY COLLBERG existence of a V P in Irish (McCloskey 1983). The existence of a V P entails at least two hierarchical levels of sentence structure, with the verb originating in a V O or OV constituent and obligatorily fronted to some other position. Sproat 1985 builds on the work of McCloskey to develop a full SVO Analysis for Welsh, arguing that the same analysis may be applied to Irish. The underlying structure for the two languages is argued to be SVO, and the obligatory fronting of the finite verb is made to follow from the requirements of case theory. Sproat maintains that while INFL in SVO or SOV languages may assign nominative case either to the left or the right, INFL in VSO languages is restricted to assigning case rightward. The verb lexicalizing INFL is thus forced to appear to the left of the subject NP in order to assign nominative case successfully. Sproat's SVO Analysis is a step in the right direction in that it gives a theoretically attractive explanation for the obligatory fronting of the verb, but it is incomplete in that Sproat does not specify any landing site for the conjoined verb and INFL. Without going into any more detail, it may be said that the arguments for the SVO Analysis are quite attractive, and the general consensus among Celtic syntacticians seems to be that Irish is SVO underlyingly. In general, a derivational account like this for verb-initial languages is pretty much the norm now, as can be seen in recent works of a typological, nature such as Koopman & Sportiche 1988. EXPANDED-INFL FOR IRISH Obviously, it should be possible to adapt the Pollock type of syntax for Irish if we accept that Irish VSO order is derived from SVO. So let us assume that for the moment. Then, of course, there are plenty of language-specific details to work out, and the following sections contain suggestions for handling these. My proposal for the full syntactic structure of Irish is given in (2) and wil l be referred to throughout the ensuing discussion. Principles and parameters according to Pollock Given in (3) is a very brief summary of the most important points that Pollock argues for in his article. These can be reduced to a pair of universal principles (I and II) and a set of parameters (III) which vary from language to language. AN EXPANDED-INFL SYNTAX FOR MODERN IRISH 61
ABSTRACT. In poetic language, ordinary language is subject to poetic organization. This organization results in deviation from ordinary-language linguistic norms. A number of Optimality-Theoretic studies analyze poetically motivated linguistic deviation as the domination of linguistic constraints by prosodic constraints (Rice 1997, Golston 1998, Reindl and Franks 2001, Michael 2003, Fitzgerald 2003, 2007). Adding to this line of scholarship, this paper examines how metrical mapping, metrical grouping and rhyme patterning govern stress shift, syllabic variation, and syntactic inversion as exemplified in the lyrics of honky tonk country music singer Hank Williams, Sr. The violation of the norm of the standard, its systematic violation, is what makes possible the poetic utilization of language; without this possibility there would be no poetry. (Mukarovsky 1970: 43) 1. INTRODUCTION. Poetic language necessarily deviates from ordinary language, violating ordinary language norms in order to satisfy poetic patterning. Metrical organization has been shown to govern word order (Youmans 1983, 1989; Golston 1998; Fitzgerald 2003), allomorphy (Youmans 1989), reduplication (Fitzgerald 1998), lexical stress (Janda and Morgan 1988), and the deletion and insertion of syllables (Fitzgerald 1998, Reindl and Franks 2001, Michael 2003). A number of articles analyze such poetically motivated linguistic deviation as the domination of prosodic constraints over other areas of the grammar (Rice 1997, Golston 1998, Reindl and Franks 2001, Michael 2003, and Fitzgerald 2003, 2007). Adding to this line of scholarship, this paper examines how meter, metrical grouping, and rhyme govern linguistic deviation in the lyrics of Hank Williams, Sr. Specifically, I show how metrical mapping and grouping constraints drive stress shift and syllabic variation, and how constraints requiring systematic rhyme govern syntactic inversion. Following a discussion of the methods used in this study is an introduction to the poetic grammar of the Hank Williams song. Three major types of poetic organization are identified: meter, metrical grouping, and rhyme. In the second half of the article, an analysis of the Hank Williams Corpus highlights how three types of linguistic deviation reflect the interaction of poetic constraints and ordinary language constraints: stress shift, syllabic variation, and syntactic inversion. 2. METHODS. The data for the Hank Williams Corpus consist of songs that Williams performed or recorded which were collected on the ten-compact disc compilation album, The Complete Hank Williams. The album contains 224 tracks including songs, recitations, and speech. Of the 164 discrete songs among them, Williams wrote or co-wrote 98 himself. The remaining songs were written by a number of different artists, among them Fred Rose, Mel Foree, Ernest Tubb, and Leon Payne. Each song was coded for its metrical and rhyming structure, and this information was then entered into corresponding databases to facilitate analysis. 3. POETIC ORGANIZATION IN HW CORPUS. Musical rhythm has two major components: meter and grouping (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983). In Williams' lyrics, musical meter is realized in the linguistic text in the distribution of downbeat- and non-downbeat-stressed syllables, linguistically-empty downbeats, and extended syllables on the metrical grid. Patterns in the distribution of these units half-line- and line-finally reflect the metrical grouping structure of the song. Systematic end-rhyme reinforces metrical grouping in its patterning. 3.1 METER. The musical meter for the majority of songs in the corpus, i.e. 115 of 164, is duple, 2/2, with two half-note beats per measure. The remaining 49 songs are in triple meter, 3/4, with three quarter-note beats per measure. In each song, the downbeat, i.e. the first beat of each measure, is acoustically prominent, often realized instrumentally as the thumping bass guitar. …
This study was designed to examine how second language learners process words with more than one translation, a phenomenon called translation ambiguity. In this study, English-German number-of-translations norms were collected to determine the number of distinct translations for a set of 564 English words. These English-German Number-of-Translations norms provide researchers with a tool that can be used in future studies of second language processing. We examined the number of words that had one versus more than one translation, and compared this to the number of translations for the same words from English to Dutch. More than half of the words were assigned a single translation across participants. German was more translation ambiguous than Dutch. In addition, we conducted a primed lexical decision task with monolingual native English speakers, with the eventual goal of extending this task to primed translation production in bilinguals. We compared reaction times between ambiguous and unambiguous targets, related versus unrelated primes, and the more commonly translated meaning versus the less commonly translated meaning. Overall, unambiguous words were responded to marginally more accurately than ambiguous words, and real words were responded to more quickly and more accurately than nonwords.
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.
OBJECTIVES: This study is the first in a series designed to develop and norm new theoretically motivated sentence tests for children. The purpose was to examine the independent contributions of word frequency (i.e., how often words occur in language) and lexical density (the number of similar sounding words or "neighbors" to a target word) to the perception of key words in the new sentence set. DESIGN: Twenty-four children with normal hearing aged 5 to 12 yrs served as participants; they were divided into four equal age-matched groups. The stimuli consisted of 100 semantically neutral sentences that were 5 to 7 words in length. Each sentence contained 3 key words that were controlled for word frequency and lexical density. Words with few neighbors come from sparse neighborhoods, whereas words with many neighbors come from dense neighborhoods. The key words within a sentence belonged to one of the four lexical categories: (1) high-frequency sparse, (2) low-frequency dense, (3) high-frequency dense, and (4) low-frequency sparse. Participants were administered the sentence list and the 300 key words in isolation at 65 dB SPL. Each participant group was tested in spectrally matched noise at one of the four signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs -2, 0, 2, and 4 dB). The percent of words correctly identified was calculated as a function of SNR, key word context (sentences vs. words), and key word lexical category. RESULTS: SNR had a significant effect on the recognition of key words in sentences and in isolation; performance improved at higher SNRs. There were significant main effects of word frequency and lexical density as well as a significant interaction between the two lexical factors. In isolation, high-frequency words were recognized more accurately than low-frequency words. In both word and sentence contexts, sparse words yielded greater accuracy than dense words, irrespective of word frequency. There was a modest but significant negative correlation between lexical density and the recognition of words in isolation and in sentences. CONCLUSIONS: Word frequency and lexical density seem to influence word recognition independently in children with normal hearing. This is similar to earlier results in adults with normal hearing. In addition, there seems to be an interaction between the two factors, with lexical density being more heavily weighted than word frequency. These results give us further insight into the way children organize and access words from long-term lexical memory in a relational way. Our results showed that lexical effects were most evident at poorer SNRs. This may have important implications for assessing spoken-word recognition performance in children with sensory aids because they typically receive a degraded auditory signal.
Currently, there is no international standard for the assessment of fitness to drive for cognitively or physically impaired persons. A computerized battery of driving-related sensory-motor and cognitive tests (SMCTests) has been developed, comprising tests of visuoperception, visuomotor ability, complex attention, visual search, decision making, impulse control, planning, and divided attention. Construct validity analysis was conducted in 60 normal, healthy subjects and showed that, overall, the novel cognitive tests assessed cognitive functions similar to a set of standard neuropsychological tests. The novel tests were found to have greater perceived face validity for predicting on-road driving ability than was found in the equivalent standard tests. Test—retest stability and reliability of SMCTests measures, as well as correlations between SMCTests and on-road driving, were determined in a subset of 12 subjects. The majority of test measures were stable and reliable across two sessions, and significant correlations were found between on-road driving scores and measures from ballistic movement, footbrake reaction, hand-control reaction, and complex attention. The substantial face validity, construct validity, stability, and reliability of SMCTests, together with the battery’s level of correlation with on-road driving in normal subjects, strengthen our confidence in the ability of SMCTests to detect and identify sensory-motor and cognitive deficits related to unsafe driving and increased risk of accidents.
OXlearn is a free, platform-independent MATLAB toolbox in which standard connectionist neural network models can be set up, run, and analyzed by means of a user-friendly graphical interface. Due to its seamless integration with the MATLAB programming environment, the inner workings of the simulation tool can be easily inspected and/or extended using native MATLAB commands or components. This combination of usability, transparency, and extendability makes OXlearn an efficient tool for the implementation of basic research projects or the prototyping of more complex research endeavors, as well as for teaching. Both the MATLAB toolbox and a compiled version that does not require access to MATLAB can be downloaded from http://psych.brookes.ac.uk/oxlearn/.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands We present a coding system combined with an annotation tool for the analysis of gestural behavior. The NEUROGES coding system consists of three modules that progress from gesture kinetics to gesture function. Grounded on empirical neuropsychological and psychological studies, the theoretical assumption behind NEUROGES is that its main kinetic and functional movement categories are differentially associated with specific cognitive, emotional, and interactive functions. ELAN is a free, multimodal annotation tool for digital audio and video media. It supports multileveled transcription and complies with such standards as XML and Unicode. ELAN allows gesture categories to be stored with associated vocabularies that are reusable by means of template files. The combination of the NEUROGES coding system and the annotation tool ELAN creates an effective tool for empirical research on gestural behavior.
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)
Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of human language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how our brains process information and how we, as a society, organize and share it. Among these regularities, only Zipf's law has been explored in depth. Other basic properties, such as the existence of bursts of rare words in specific documents, have only been studied independently of each other and mainly by descriptive models. As a consequence, there is a lack of understanding of linguistic processes as complex emergent phenomena. Beyond Zipf's law for word frequencies, here we focus on burstiness, Heaps' law describing the sublinear growth of vocabulary size with the length of a document, and the topicality of document collections, which encode correlations within and across documents absent in random null models. We introduce and validate a generative model that explains the simultaneous emergence of all these patterns from simple rules. As a r)
Business English is characterized by a specialized vocabulary,polysemy,stylistic norms of formal,nicety,preciseness,concision and emerging new words.It can improve the study effectiveness to paying attention to the accumulation of professional knowledge,to understand vocabulary through context clues,and to learn new words by chunk approach and concern about the latest business information.