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We describe an LR parser of parts-of-speech (and punctuation labels) for Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAGs), that solves table conflicts in a greedy way, with limited amount of backtracking. We evaluate the parser using the Penn Treebank showing that the method yield very fast parsers with at least reasonable accuracy, confirming the intuition that LR parsing benefits from the use of rich grammars.
You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Nov 2002AAC, Literacy and Bilingualism Ovetta L. Harrison-Harris Ovetta L. Harrison-Harris Google Scholar https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR2.07202002.4 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) have historically been challenged in their attainment of literacy skills. These challenges are even greater for AAC users who are bilingual. AAC users in the United States comprise large numbers of individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Current demographic trends indicate that linguistic diversity will continue to intensify. During the 12 years between 1986 and 1998, the number of U. S. children who were identified as limited English proficient increased from 1.6 million to 9.9 million (see Tucker 1999). It is estimated that, by the year 2050, 40% of school-aged children in the United States will come from homes where English is not the first language. Individuals who use AAC systems surely will be represented in this group. The fact that many children in the United States, including those who use AAC systems, live amidst a sea of languages has captured national attention and has influenced our educational system. The new thrust to achieve educational equality represents a historic change. Many bilingual or monolingual schools that taught in languages other than English existed before World War II. For example, many German-only schools could be found in the northern Midwest. Afterward, a pattern of English-only instruction dominated our education system. As recognition of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the United States grew, a need to provide effective and appropriate education for bilingual children arose. Educators, parents, and researchers have challenged the notion of an English-only education for children from linguistically diverse backgrounds. Research supports the notion of education for limited-English-proficient children, including those relying on AAC systems, to be introduced in their first language, providing a transition to stronger second-language usage. This is logical given the fact that literacy attainment depends on language. Language learning, including reading and writing, is always culturally based. Reading and writing involve particular ways of using and thinking about written language that go beyond finding meaning in text and include the construction of sociocultural viewpoints or ways of understanding the world around us. It is important to realize the sociocultural and communicative nature of literacy, because of the possible therapeutic impact when working with bilingual AAC users. Writing, similarly, is a contextualized social event. It is a transactional, circular process created from a person's linguistic resources and interaction with past experiences. Viewing literacy learning as it is socially constructed through language provides a nice perspective of the need to educate linguistically and culturally diverse children from their first-language knowledge base. Research Challenges The challenges of literacy attainment for both monolingual and bilingual children who use AAC have become an area of focus for special educators, speech-language pathologists, parents, and researchers. Although research in reading and writing development of AAC users has increased steadily over the past 10 years, only recently have researchers turned their attention to reading and writing development of bilingual AAC users. Many of these children are unsuccessful in developing literacy, yet there is increasing recognition that this group is capable of developing sophisticated reading and writing skills. Bilingual AAC users who are highly successful in developing these skills make tremendous gains in overall language development and in use of their AAC systems. Acquisition of more vocabulary and the ability to compose text are just two advantages that literacy attainment brings to their receptive and expressive language development. Major focus has been brought to the topic of literacy attainment for bilingual AAC users because of its particular importance for this population. Attainment of literacy allows bilingual and monolingual AAC users, like all students, to be able to prepare messages to be used at a later time, produce exact messages, and learn vocabulary with which they can spontaneously spell out messages. But Light and McNaughton (l993) give three reasons why literacy development holds additional importance for AAC communicators. First, their face-to-face communication skills are often severely limited. Communication can be quite slow. Often the able-bodied message receiver doesn't have time to participate in communication interaction with an AAC communicator. Research shows that, in interactions between a person who is using an AAC system and a speaking person, the speaking person often dominates the interaction, and the person using the AAC system may not have opportunities to initiate topics or converse fully. Literacy gives an AAC communicator the opportunity to overcome many of the restrictions of face-to-face interaction, especially those imposed by slow AAC systems. Through writing it is possible for individuals to communicate more fully, to express themselves in more detail, and to circumvent some of the time limitations that they would normally experience in face-to-face interactions. The second aspect of school literacy importance for individuals who use AAC systems is that those who are preliterate are often limited to an ideographic literacy system. Some of these graphic systems force AAC communicators to use a closed vocabulary set and do not allow them to generate words to communicate new ideas. For example, an AAC communicator may operate a system composed of just 50 pictures or 100–200 ideographic symbols. They do not have access to the many thousands of concepts and ideas that they need in order to communicate fully and effectively. The use of orthographic literacy skills can be one way to open up access to a full range of concepts and vocabulary to students who use AAC. The literate AAC communicator, using traditional orthography, may spell words that are not printed on their communication boards or indicate first letters of words to which they don't have access on their communication system. In this way, they can use literacy skills to communicate in face-to-face interactions. The literacy development of augmentative communicators also may provide them with a means to participate in society by using written communication (as others also use written communication) to express opinions and give information. Using literacy as others do may help the bilingual AAC communicator advocate for bilingual education and acquire a sense of belonging to society as well as a stronger sense of value. The third way that literacy development carries added importance for bilingual AAC users involves vocational opportunities. In North America, there are very few individuals who use AAC systems who are competitively employed. The number holding white-collar jobs is few. The range of job opportunities available to individuals who have physical disabilities in general is restricted. AAC communicators are not usually employed in jobs requiring manual labor. Thus, they may need highly developed literacy skills for jobs involving, for example, data entry or word processing. Given limited vocational opportunities, the role of literacy in job preparation for bilingual AAC communicators is critical. Yvonne's Story AAC users must rely on innovative and sometimes creative strategies to learn to read, write, and monitor their understanding of what they are reading. Literacy-learning strategies for bilingual AAC users have not received as much attention as those of monolingual users. Some of the unique struggles and successes of literacy attainment can be seen in the story of Yvonne, a young Puerto Rican AAC user. Yvonne provides a wonderful example of the importance of first-language support and the use of specific literacy-learning strategies for bilingual AAC users. Yvonne is a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy of the spastic quadriplegic variety. She is nonambulatory and limited-speaking secondary to cerebral palsy. Her hearing and vision are within normal limits. During my initial contact with Yvonne, her intellectual functioning had not been formally determined. Yvonne's family immigrated to the United States one year before my initial contact with them. She is an only child. The primary language of the home is Spanish. Her father had limited English proficiency and her mother spoke no English at the time of my initial contact, although over the course of the school year they gained more proficiency. Another important characteristic of this family was the fact that the parents decided not to have any other children in order to devote total attention to Yvonne's education and health needs. Although no extended family lived in the area, they resided in a supportive neighborhood with other Puerto Ricans. Yvonne communicated primarily through use of an eye-gaze communication board. She used Mayer-Johnson Symbols and usually had a maximum of six symbols on her board. Other methods of communication included a smile/frown, yes/no response. A smile meant yes and a frown meant no. Yvonne also communicated by directing her eyes toward people or items that she wanted. Yvonne was not reading or writing very much in English when we first met. She may have recognized some English words that she encountered daily such as the names of her school, teacher, and classmates, and she had limited environmental vocabulary. I was not sure of her exact reading proficiency in Spanish; however, she did not demonstrate the ability to independently read upper-elementary-graded text w ritten in Spanish and answer basic content questions. Her listening comprehension for stories read to her in Spanish was good. We were not able to assess written language use because the classroom lacked the technology for text composition. Yvonne had a strong desire to learn to read more proficiently. Yvonne was a student in a general elementary school located in western Massachusetts. Her classroom was nongraded, but the students, all classified as special needs, were of comparable ages to those of fourth grade. The room was self-contained and designated by the school system as a special education classroom. The special need categories included physically and cognitively impaired. Half of the class comprised other Puerto Rican children. My role was that of AAC literacy consultant, but I also brought my expertise in the area of multiculturalism in speech-language pathology. My initial meeting with Yvonne occurred early in the school year, in her classroom with the classroom teacher and instructional aide. Yvonne immediately greeted me with a welcoming smile because she appeared to know that I was there especially to help her learn. During my initial meeting I was able to informally assess that Yvonne had good cognitive skills. She used her voice to initiate communication to bring attention to matters of need or interest. She laughed appropriately at jokes, her eyes followed speakers in a conversation, and she spontaneously used her eyes to appropriately answer yes/no questions. All of the conversations around her and directed to her by her teacher were in English. Yvonne obviously acquired some English proficiency, although she may not have understood everything. I had formal training in Spanish and worked some years earlier in a predominately Mexican-American school district in Southern California where I used the language daily. Although I lacked confidence in my use of Spanish, I greeted Yvonne and introduced myself in Spanish. Approaching her using Spanish set a tone for Yvonne that I was supportive of her background and language usage. She recognized that I needed help using the dialect of Spanish that she was familiar with as a primary way of communicating with her. We learned quickly to work together around the use of a language system. Honoring her first language was important to our working together. Another important factor was Yvonne's desire and willingness to learn English, which contributed significantly to her rapid acquisition of stronger English proficiency. On my second day of visiting the classroom, I was extremely pleased to meet the school SLP assigned to Yvonne. This wonderfully competent, energetic clinician just happened to be bilingual in English and Spanish. With a bilingual SLP and my knowledge of literacy-learning techniques for AAC users, Yvonne blossomed over the course of that academic year in her English proficiency and particularly in her ability to read and spell. A Successful Technique I first introduced a spelling/word-level reading technique to Yvonne that proved to be highly successful and allowed her to gain 10–12 new words in reading recognition and spelling each week. Upper-elementary-aged bilingual AAC users with profiles similar to Yvonne should start with whole-word-level reading aimed at teaching recognition of entire words such as swim, pool, the, or cap. Instruction of whole words leads to success in reading phrases and simple sentences quickly. Phonetic instruction should occur as well. The Words on the Wall technique, which can be used with monolingual as well as bilingual AAC users, begins by the teacher selecting approximately 3–5 new words that the student needs to learn. These should be words relevant to familiar situations and not spelling words from a spelling book. For example, Yvonne went swimming each week in school and thus, during her first week, she learned the words swimming, towel, pool, water, and splash. These words were initially introduced in Spanish only. The next step in this technique is to make the word accessible by writing it in large print on a sentence strip and attaching it to the wall. The word may initially be paired with a symbol, with the symbol being phased out over time leaving just the written word. The student and the teacher define the word and talk about events involving the target word. After all of the target words are discussed and displayed on the wall, the teacher asks the student to identify each word one at a time as in a spelling test. Yvonne used eye gaze to identify her target words. During the next day or week, depending on how well the student masters each set of words, introduce more words (1–3 a day). Leave all words on the wall for the school year, increasing the number of words each week. Review old and new words. After enough words are mastered, have the student begin to read simple sentences. Introduce words such as a and the to allow formation of sentences. The school SLP delivered all of the training to Yvonne in Spanish first and followed it with English only after she knew that Yvonne understood the word in Spanish. Because this literacy-learning technique is based primarily at the word level, it is easier to transition from the Spanish to the English word. The school SLP also kept in close contact with Yvonne's parents, phoning them and sending home each week the word that Yvonne was working on. Yvonne's communication reflected her increased vocabulary. A board in Spanish was sent home and used with her parents and an English board was used at school initially. As Yvonne's parents gained more English proficiency, they requested to have the English communication board as well. During the school year we piloted different types of high-tech AAC devices and switches with Yvonne. We also explored technology for writing purposes during this year. Assessment Words on the Wall lends itself to a Maze Reading Assessment technique once a student has acquired reading of simple sentences. This technique involves the deletion of target words in a sentence leaving a blank space. The student should be provided with three alternative words in random order at each blank (correct choice, incorrect choice of the same part of speech, incorrect choice of a different part of speech). For example: The boy ate a ______ (truck, this, banana). This technique can be used easily with many AAC users. Yvonne's eye gazed to her chosen word using this technique. The scale of reading proficiency most often used for informal reading assessments such as this is 90% accuracy indicating that the student is reading at an independent level, 60%–80% accuracy relating to a level where more instruction is needed, and below 60% is equivalent to a frustration level. For Yvonne, the Maze technique was delivered in English because she already had mastered the words on the wall and read simple sentences in English. The Words on the Wall technique and a Maze Reading Assessment Technique are two techniques that can be culturally and linguistically sensitive and used well with AAC users. Voice output is not required for these techniques, and the words are derived from the students' existing linguistic bases or contextual experiences. Other techniques also can be used to facilitate literacy development with bilingual AAC users. Techniques that contextualize instruction in the experiences of the home and first language are desirable. For young bilingual literacy-language learners, it is important to use interactive learning techniques that involve the teacher, peers, and the AAC user. Techniques that allow students to demonstrate competence in using language and literacy throughout the school day in all instructional activities are greatly beneficial. Techniques that use narratives such as storytelling, listening to stories, or writing are good for content development. These narratives should be delivered in the language that will allow the child to gain academic skill while learning English. My first year with Yvonne was a successful one. She gained approximately 10 new words a week over the course of the school year. For AAC users similar to Yvonne in age and cognitive ability, this is an expected rate of growth. There is no typical rate of growth for all AAC users because this population is so diverse in skill and ability. The Next Year I returned to visit Yvonne the next year when she had been promoted to a new class and school. The successful learning environment that she had previously experienced had come to an abrupt end. There was a lack of continuity with her education from the previous year. Yvonne was in a new school with all new staff. There was no Spanish language support. The literacy-learning methods had been abandoned. Communication with Yvonne was a problem. There was limited communication between the school and home. I spent the first few days in Yvonne's classroom as a participant observer and quickly assessed the social and literacy-learning needs of everyone involved in Yvonne's schooling. The goals of my intervention with Yvonne during this second school year included elimination of the communication problem between the school and the family and establishment of better trust and communication, reestablishment of appropriate instructional methods, eliminating AAC barriers, and supporting cultural identity through literacy lessons/interactions and development of a more efficient communication system. The lack of Spanish support and having to demonstrate and convince the new teachers of Yvonne's literacy-learning capabilities resulted in lost time in her development. Strong first-language support and knowledge of specific literacy-learning techniques for bilingual AAC users led to a successful outcome for Yvonne. She enjoys reading and had a strong desire to continue reading and learning English. This was compatible to the wishes of her parents. Like Yvonne, not all bilingual AAC users have significant difficulties learning to read and write; however, many of them do. Therefore, it becomes important to communication disorders specialists to identify variables of language that are predictive of later reading difficulties. Researchers and other professionals from different fields of study are combining their interests to close the knowledge/information gap that exists between what is already known about bilingual AAC users' acquisition and development and the information needed to help develop intervention strategies for successful written language. Strategies for Monolingual Clinicians: A Postscript Although I did have formal training in Spanish in high school and college and had worked in a predominately Spanish-speaking community in Southern California, I still lacked confidence to converse with Yvonne in Spanish when I first met her. I knew that there were many dialects of Spanish, and I initially did not know enough about the Spanish that she and her family used. Clinicians who are monolingual or who lack information about a second-language-speaking student must do the research to find linguistic information particular to that student. Such knowledge is also helpful in understanding the contexualized uses of literacy in the home that will complement those used in the classroom. General professional development in the area of bilingual literacy learning is highly recommended, as is professional development in AAC. Understanding policies in educating bilingual students that are implemented in your school district is important. Clinicians should understand how policy affects access to instruction for bilingual students. Social, cultural, and economic issues that affect student learning and instruction also should be well understood. It is helpful to gain information from parents, other teachers, and community members about ways that they find helpful in instructing bilingual AAC users. Ovetta Harrison-Harris is chair of the department of communication sciences and disorders at Howard University. She is project director for a U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services-funded graduate training program in AAC with an emphasis in multiculturalism and literacy development. For More Information Light J., Binger C., & Smith A.K. (1994). Story reading interactions between pre-schoolers who use AAC and their mothers. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 10, 225–268. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Light J., & McNaughton D. (1993). Literacy and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC): Expectations and Priorities of Parent and Teachers. Topics and Language Disorders, 13(2), 33–46. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Light J., & Smith A.K. (1993). Home literacy experience of pre-schoolers who use augmentative communication systems and their non disabled peers. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 9, 10–25. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Pearson B.Z., Fernandez S., & Oller D.K. (1993a). Lexical developmental in simultaneous bilingual infants: Comparison to monolinguals. Language Learning, 43, 93–120. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Pearson B.Z., Fernandez S.C., & Oller D.K. (1993b). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning, 43(1), 93–120. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Pearson B.Z., Fernandez S., & Oller D.K. (1995). Cross-language synonyms in the lexicons of bilingual infants: One language or two?, Journal of Child Language, 22, 345–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar Pearson B.Z., Oller D.K., Umbel V.M., & Fernandez M.C. (1996, October). The Relationship of Lexical Knowledge to Measures of Literacy and Narrative Discourse in Monolingual and Bilingual Children. Paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum, Tucson, Google Scholar Tucker A perspective on and bilingual education Google Scholar Ovetta L. is chair of the department of communication sciences and disorders at Howard University. She is project director for a U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services-funded graduate training program in AAC with an emphasis in multiculturalism and literacy development. of the ASHA Special Augmentative and Alternative Communication, and a for With Communication to your in Nov &
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During the analysis of the protagonist's (namely, Sharik's and Sharikov's) way of speaking in Bulgakov's story Heart of a Dog, an abrupt contrast or even a complete oppositeness of the constituents becomes apparent. In its turn, this provides the base and evidence for this ultimate oppositeness of the protagonists in the story in general. Sharikov's speech is mainly characterized by the following features: 1) absence of skills of monological speech manifested by the violation of norms of constructing sentences and by the tendency towards using short and concise sentences, 2) violation of lexical and grammatical norms, 3) abundance in colloquialisms, 4) frequency of generalized and demagogic constructions, 5) presence of officialese and ideological clichés. It is Sharikov's speech and his way of speaking that enables the reader to make conclusions about his figure in general, and determine the most important characteristic features of his inner self which are as follows: 1) low cultural level, 2) aggressiveness and growing confidence in his own right, 3) belonging to the layer of uneducated, uncivilized and often declassed people.
Research into the relationship between language and gender challenges group psychotherapy to pay attention to the significance of gender in shaping the language used by members and conductors. Language is a major resource in the creation of our gendered sense of self, with styles stereotypically associated with male and female. The linguistic culture of the group has stereotypical 'male' and 'female' aspects. The language of the therapist is critical in establishing linguistic norms, challenging or reinforcing gender stereotypes. The movement from these stereotypical styles, with the ability to draw upon both 'male' and 'female' characteristics, is a therapeutic movement. The absence of critical analysis of these aspects of language and gender in group theory witnesses to the power of the 'social unconscious'. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Comprehensive computational lexicons areessential to practical natural languageprocessing (NLP). To compile such computationallexicons by automatically acquiring lexicalinformation, however, we previously requiresufficiently large corpora. This study aims atpredicting the ideal size of suchautomatic-lexical-acquisition oriented corpora,focusing on six specific factors: (1) specificversus general purpose prediction, (2)variation among corpora, (3) base forms versus inflected forms, (4) open class items,(5) homographs, and (6) unknown words.Another important and related issue withregard to predictability has something to dowith data sparseness. Research using theTOTAL Corpus reveals serious datasparseness in this corpus. This, again, pointstowards the importance and necessity ofreducing data sparseness to a satisfactorylevel for the automatic lexical acquisition andreliable corpus predictions. The functions ofpredicting the number of tokens and lemmas in acorpus are based on the piecewisecurve-fitting algorithm. Unfortunately, thepredicted size of a corpus for automaticlexical acquisition is too astronomicalto compile it by using presently existingcompiling strategies. Therefore, we suggest apractical and efficient alternative method. Weare confident that this study will shed newlight on issues such as corpus predictability,compiling strategies and linguisticcomprehensiveness.
We present statistical models for morphological disambiguation in agglutinative languages, with a specific application to Turkish. Turkish presents an interesting problem for statistical models as the potential tag set size is very large because of the productive derivational morphology. We propose to handle this by breaking up the morhosyntactic tags into inflectional groups, each of which contains the inflectional features for each (intermediate) derived form. Our statistical models score the probability of each morhosyntactic tag by considering statistics over the individual inflectional groups and surface roots in trigram models. Among the four models that we have developed and tested, the simplest model ignoring the local morphotactics within words performs the best. Our best trigram model performs with 93.95% accuracy on our test data getting all the morhosyntactic and semantic features correct. If we are just interested in syntactically relevant features and ignore a very small set of semantic features, then the accuracy increases to 95.07%.
The database Profil has been set up tooffer readers studying modern literarymanuscripts a reference tool to identifywatermarked papers. In the study of writers'drafts as in artists' sketches, the differentkinds of papers used provide valuableinformation on the genesis of a work of art andwatermarks, when they exist, are the bestvisible hint allowing us to identify paper. Amultimedia database, with digitized images moreprecise than usual traced design, seems to beappropriate to register, visualize, and comparemodern watermarked papers. Besides itsusefulness for specialists, such a databasebearing on modern manuscripts should also beconceived in a didactic perspective, as it isoriented towards literary scholars who are notparticularly familiar with the history of modern paper. In this paper we present the database Profilwhich includes a set of digitized images from acollection of betagraphies made by thereproduction service of the National FrenchLibrary. Then we explain problems of databasenormalization when human sciences areinvolved.
We tested a computer-based procedure for assessing reader strategies that was based on verbal protocols that utilized latent semantic analysis (LSA). Students were given self-explanation—reading training (SERT), which teaches strategies that facilitate self-explanation during reading, such as elaboration based on world knowledge and bridging between text sentences. During a computerized version of SERT practice, students read texts and typed self-explanations into a computer after each sentence. The use of SERT strategies during this practice was assessed by determining the extent to which students used the information in the current sentence versus the prior text or world knowledge in their self-explanations. This assessment was made on the basis of human judgments and LSA. Both human judgments and LSA were remarkably similar and indicated that students who were not complying with SERT tended to paraphrase the text sentences, whereas students who were compliant with SERT tended to explain the sentences in terms of what they knew about the world and of information provided in the prior text context. The similarity between human judgments and LSA indicates that LSA will be useful in accounting for reading strategies in a Web-based version of SERT.
This paper describes a combined instrument (eye tracker and target generator, both head mounted, with integrated data analysis) that tests parameters of saccadic eye movement and fixation control to give insight into the status of functional brain systems. Using three minilasers, the target generator projects three visual stimuli, a fixation point and two lateral stimuli, with programmable timing. The controller allows the selection of overlap, 200-msec gap, or remembered saccade trials. Size, maximal velocity, and reaction time are determined for each primary saccade. The number of prosaccades and antisaccades are counted. More saccades—for example, the occurrence and latency of corrective saccades—may be evaluated off line by an interactive PC analysis program. The eye position data can be transferred to a PC. Off-line analysis compares each observed variable relative to an age-matched control group (300 healthy control subjects 7–70 years of age, tested in the overlap condition with prosaccade instructions and in the gap condition with antisaccades). The diagnostic results can be used to elaborate an individual optomotor training program.
Recent studies have suggested a theoretical distinction between active elaboration and passive storage in visuospatial working memory, but research with older adults has failed to demonstrate a differential preservation of these two abilities. The results are controversial, and the investigation of the active component has been inhibited by the absence of any appropriate experimental procedures. A new task was developed involving the mental reconstruction of pictures of objects from fragmented pieces, and this provides a useful procedure for exploring active visuospatial processing. Significant differences in terms of both correctness and response latency were obtained between young and older adults and between younger old and older old adults. Performance also varied with visual complexity, mental rotation, and processing load. It is concluded that this ecologically relevant procedure constitutes a very powerful, sensitive, and reliable tool for identifying individual differences in visuospatial working memory.
Looking specifically at the genre ofadaptive narrative, this article explores thefuture of literature created for and withcomputer technology, focusing primarily on thetrope of mutability as it is played out withnew media. Some of the questions askedare: What can the medium of a work ofliterature, that is its material aspect, tellus about the text? About character? What canit possibly matter if narrative is recounted onpapyrus, retold on parchment and rag, and thenremediated in pixels? Isn't it the messagecarried by the medium we are most concernedwith, stable or unstable throughout the processof inscription, reinscription, encoding anddecoding, translation and remediation? Thispaper speculates about possibilities ratherthan attempts to answer these questions, butthe structuring and mean-making componentsconsidered here stand as examples of some wemay want to think about when developing futuretheories about literature – and all types ofwriting – generated by and for electronicenvironments.
The measure of the lexical richness of literary texts as a tool in thecomparative analysis of literary style has been hampered by the problem ofthe inequality of text lengths within and between literary corpora. Thispaper proposes an empirical method of description of lexical richness byaveraging measures on multiple chunks of text of a standard lengthwithin a literary work or corpus. A workss average vocabulary richness,average portion of hapax legomenaof the corpus from which it derives,and average repetition of frequently appearing vocabulary may thencharacterize that work relative to other works partitioned along withit. This method reveals the possibility of significant variance of thesemeasures of vocabulary among works of a single authorss corpus and warnsagainst the notion of some absolute authorial stylistic character. Weapply this method of vocabulary averaging to the corpora of threeplaywrights from classical antiquity whose works are chronologicallyrankable: Euripides, Aristophanes, and Terence. We look for trends in vocabulary richness over time, which we posit functions as anindicator of progressively changing authorial ability or inclination. This method then holds the potential of predicting datesfor undateable or tenuously dated works within a corpus of otherwisesecurely dated texts. From the results derived, a relatively late date forthe composition of the redrafted version ofAristophaness Clouds appearslikely; we predict an early composition date for the redraft of TerencessHecyra (and thus are inclined to think that the playwright did verylittle redrafting); and finally we findEuripidess Electra andSupplices exhibiting vocabulary characteristics of extremely latecomposition and we predict dates much later than those assigned based onmetrical considerations.
Parallel to, and to some degree inreaction to French poststructuralisttheorization (as championed by Derrida,Foucault, and Lacan, among others) is a Frenchneo-structuralism built directly on theachievements of structuralism using electronicmeans. This paper examines some exemplaryapproaches to text analysis in thisneo-structuralist vein: SATOR's topoidictionary, the WinBrill POS tagger andFrançois Rastier's interpretativesemantics. I consider how a computer-assisted``Wissenschaft'' accumulation of expertisecomplements the neo-structuralist approach.Ultimately, electronic critical studies will bedefined by their strategic position at theintersection of the two chief technologiesshaping our society: the new informationprocessing technology of computers and therepresentational techniques that haveaccumulated for centuries in texts.Understanding how these two informationmanagement paradigms complement each other is akey issue for the humanities, for computerscience, and vital to industry, even beyond thenarrow realm of the language industries. Thedirection of critical studies, a small planetlong orbiting in only rarefied academiccircles, will be radically altered by the sheersize of the economic stakes implied by a newkind of text, the industrial text, thetechnological heart of an information society.
This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering.GATE lies at the intersection of human language computation and software engineering, and constitutes aninfrastructural system supporting research and development of languageprocessing software.
Users need more sophisticatedtools to handle the growing numberof image-based documents availablein databases. In this paper, wepresent a system devoted to theediting and browsing of complexliterary hypermedia includingoriginal manuscript documents andother handwritten sources. Editingcapabilities allow the user totranscribe manuscript images in aninteractive way and to encode theresulting textual representationby means of a logical markuplanguage (based on the XML/TEIspecification). Bothrepresentations (image andstructured text) are tightlylinked to facilitate the readingand the interpretation ofdocuments. This text/imagecoupling scheme is an attempt tounify several layers ofinformation in order to providethe user with a global vision ofthe work. Our system also suppliestools capable of processing andrelating information stored bothin images and structured texts.Finally, application-specificvisualization techniques have beendeveloped in order to provideusers with a way to identifyrelationships between sourcedocuments and help them tonavigate.
^j;=5!? ITHIN the rich corpus of metrical psalms comtm itt^ta * posed during Spain's Golden Age, Fray Luis de Aivi bl T 0_Le6n's versions are universally accorded the high;@ ^ VV |@ est praise. As heir to a literary tradition that ex,.A s iGne * tended back to the late Middle Ages and early.f4Li J Renaissance, the Salamancan scholar and poet revolutionized Spain's engagement with the Psalter, establishing the lira or estrofa alirada as the dominant verse form for vernacular psalm translations (Rivers 112; Nufiez 357), and making close lexical parallelism and philological accuracy, rather than interpretive digression, the norm for most of his followers. As may be expected from the great Augustinian's role as el primer poeta humanista espaniol en lengua vulgar (A. Blecua 97), Fray Luis was widely imitated, especially among disciples of his own order, and questions of authorship and dating of the many psalm versions attributed to him continue to trouble literary historians (Nufiez 357-8; J. M. Blecua Poesia completa, 41-2). Jose Manuel Blecua, in his 1990 edition of the Poesia completa, based on all extant manuscripts, includes as genuine the following poems: Psalm 1 Beatus vir, 4 Cum invocarem, 6 ne in furore, 9 Salvum me fac, 12 Usquequo, Domine (2 versions), 17 Diligam te, 18 Coeli enarrant, 24 Ad te, Domine, levavi,
A novel eye-movement-contingent method is presented. It builds on and extends established eye-movement-contingent visual display change methods in that it uses movements of the eyes to control the presentation of acoustic information during sentence reading. In one implementation, an irrelevant spoken word is presented when the eyes cross a predetermined spatial boundary before they move on to a selected visual target word. The relationship between the spoken word and the visual target is manipulated, and the pattern of interference, caused by the presentation of the spoken word, is used to determine the nature and time course of activated representations. Results from three recently completed experiments in which the technique was used show that a word’s phonological code remains active after it has been read and that the activated code has speech-like properties.
We present a program for Matlab that quickly generates Attneave-style random polygons and families of similar polygons. The function allows a great deal of user control over various aspects of the shape generation process. It also has the ability to detect and eliminate shapes that do not match a variety of user-entered parameters regarding the lengths of the shapes’ sides, vertex angles, and topological form. The function eliminates the time-consuming task of generating such shapes by hand and should allow their broader use in behavioral research. The Matlab script function can be downloaded at www.dal.ca/ ~mcmullen/downloads.html.
We present a flexible approach for extracting hierarchical classifications from linguistic data. To this end, the framework of observational logic is introduced, which extends the logic that underlies standard Formal Concept Analysis by allowing disjunctive rules and exclusions. We give a rigorous mathematical characterization of how the chosen rule type affects the structure of the induced hierarchy. The framework is applied to the induction of hierarchical classifications from linguistic databases. The pros and cons of several types of hierarchies are discussed in detail with respect to criteria such as compactness of representation, suitability for inference tasks, and intelligibility for the human user.
In this paper, the Arabic lexicon has been investigated in the context of relational database theory. A feature analysis of lexical entities has been carried out which shows that lexical attributes can be classified into five categories comprising nineteen attributes, including form attributes, morphological attributes, functional attributes, meaning attributes, and referential attributes. Based on this analysis, eleven database relations have been identified which form the backbone of an Arabic lexical database, including: words, roots, forms, infinitives, verbs, nouns, plurals, particles, meanings, lexical functions, and cross-references. The design ideas discussed in this paper were tested using a sample of lexical items selected from a modern printed dictionary. The results of developing an experimental lexical database indicate that the relational approach provides an efficient method for storing and retrieving Arabic lexical information. It should be mentioned, however, that several problems were encountered when the printed data was translated into a database form. Some of these problems are inherent in the Arabic lexicon itself, while others are due to the way by which lexical information is presented by paper-based dictionaries.
We present an algorithm which translates the Penn Treebank into a corpus of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) derivations. To do this we have needed to make several systematic changes to the Treebank which have to effect of cleaning up a number of errors and inconsistencies. This process has yielded a cleaner treebank that can potentially be used in any framework. We also show how unary type-changing rules for certain types of modifiers can be introduced in a CCG grammar to ensure a compact lexicon without augmenting the generative power of the system. We demonstrate how the combination of preprocessing and type-changing rules minimizes the lexical coverage problem. 1.
This paper describes an approach to treebank development which relies on the manual development of annotation tools. The overall process of tree annotation is described, and a special emphasis is put on the description of the last tool which has been built, i.e. a dependency-based robust chunk parser. The modularization of the parser and the central role of verbal subcategorization is presented. Some experimental results, carried
Lexical data resources are growing rapidely thanks to the Internet. Unfortunately, despite numerous existing standards like TEI, MARTIF, GENELEX, EAGLES/PAROLE, etc. each resource has its own format and own structure. Furthermore, the existing lexical data is generally developed for a specific purpose and can't be reused easily in other applications. In this paper, we intend to define a complete framework for developing multilingual lexical database for multipurpose. The framework is generic enough in order to accept a wide range of dictionary structures and proposes for manipulating heterogeneous dictionaries a set of common pointers into these structures. We will first present the organisation of Dictionary Markup Language (DML) framework. Then we will describe more precisely the DML language based on XML schemata. Next, we explain how to describe dictionary macro and microstructures with the DML. Lastly, we will explain our concept of common pointers defined in a Common Dictionary Markup (CDM) set.
This paper would like to introduce the reader into those aspects of the Arabic language which require some special treatment compared to languages Europeans are more familiar with. In spite of having fresh experience in building the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank, the authors try to take a broader view of the problems encountered under way. The topics discussed include linguistic data retrieval, morphology and morphotactics modelling, and description of the language on the analytical level.
'I~-eebanks, such as the Penn Treebank (PTB), offer a simple approach to obtaining a broad (:overage grammar: one can simply read the g rammar off the parse trees in the treebank. While such a g rammar is easy to obtain, a square-root rate of growth of the rule set with corpus size suggests that the derived grammar is far fi'om complete and that much more treebanked text would be required to obtain a complete grammar, if one exists at some limit. However, we offer an alternative explanation in terms of the underspecification of structures within the treebank. This hypothesis is explored by applying an algorithm to compact the derived grammar by eliminating redundant rules rules whose right hand sides can be parsed by other rules. The size of the resulting compacted grammar, which is significantly less than that of the full t reebank grammar, is shown to approach a limit. However, such a compacted grammar does not yield very good performance figures. A version of the compaction algorithm taking rule probabilities into account is proposed, which is argued to be more linguistically motivated. Combined with simple thresholding, this method can be used to give a 58% reduction in g rammar size without significant change in parsing performance, and can produce a 69% reduction with some gain in recall, but a loss in precision. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The Penn Treebank (PTB) (Marcus et al., 1994) has been used for a ra ther simple approach to deriving large grammars automatically: one where the g rammar rules are simply 'read off' the parse trees in the corpus, with each local subtree providing the left and right hand sides of a rule. Charniak (Charniak, 1996) reports precision and recall figures of around 80% for a parser employing such a grammar. In this paper we show that the huge size of such a treebank grammar (see below) can be reduced in size without appreciable loss in performance, and, in fact, an improvement in recall can be achieved. Our approach can be generalised in terms of Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) methods (see (Bonnema et al., 1997)) with the tree depth of 1. However, the number of trees produced with a general DOP method is so large that Bonnema (Bonnema et al., 1997) has to resort to restricting the tree depth, using a very domain-specific corpus such as ATIS or OVIS, and parsing very short sentences of average length 4.74 words. Our compaction algorithm can be easily extended for the use within the DOP framework but, because of the huge size of the derived grammar (see below), we chose to use the simplest PCFG framework for our experiments. We are concerned with the nature of the rule set extracted, and how it can be improved, with regard both to linguistic criteria and processing efficiency. In what tbllows, we report the worrying observation that the growth of the rule set continues at a square root rate throughout processing of the entire t reebank (suggesting, perhaps tha t the rule set is far from complete). Our results are similar to those reported in (Krotov et al., 1994). 1 We discuss an alternative possible source of thi,~ rule growth phenomenon, partial bracketting, and suggest that it can be alleviated by compaction, where rules that are redundant (in a sense to be defined) are eliminated from the grammar. Our experiments on compacting a PTB tree1For the complete investigation of the grammar extracted from the Penn Treebank II see (Gaizauskas, 1995)
One of the major purposes of annotated corpora is their potential for use as databases for linguistic research. An important design criterion for corpora specifically intended for this use is the need to encode a plurality of types of information, some of which are clearly interrelated. This need can conflict
To test the hypothesis that lactate plays a central role in the distribution of carbohydrate (CHO) potential energy for oxidation and glucose production (GP), we performed a lactate clamp (LC) procedure during rest and moderate intensity exercise. Blood [lactate] was clamped at approximately 4 mM by exogenous lactate infusion. Subjects performed 90 min exercise trials at 65 % of the peak rate of oxygen consumption (V(O(2))(,peak); 65 %), 55 % V(O(2))(,peak) (55 %) and 55 % V(O(2))(,peak) with lactate clamped to the blood [lactate] that was measured at 65 % V(O(2))(,peak) (55 %-LC). Lactate and glucose rates of appearance (R(a)), disappearance (R(d)) and oxidation (R(ox)) were measured with a combination of [3-(13)C]lactate, H(13)CO(3)(-), and [6,6-(2)H(2)]glucose tracers. During rest and exercise, lactate R(a) and R(d) were increased at 55 %-LC compared to 55 %. Glucose R(a) and R(d) were decreased during 55 %-LC compared to 55 %. Lactate R(ox) was increased by LC during exercise (55 %: 6.52 +/- 0.65 and 55 %-LC: 10.01 +/- 0.68 mg kg(-1) min(-1)) which was concurrent with a decrease in glucose oxidation (55 %: 7.64 +/- 0.4 and 55 %-LC: 4.35 +/- 0.31 mg kg(-1) min(-1)). With LC, incorporation of (13)C from tracer lactate into blood glucose (L GNG) increased while both GP and calculated hepatic glycogenolysis (GLY) decreased. Therefore, increased blood [lactate] during moderate intensity exercise increased lactate oxidation, spared blood glucose and decreased glucose production. Further, exogenous lactate infusion did not affect rating of perceived exertion (RPE) during exercise. These results demonstrate that lactate is a useful carbohydrate in times of increased energy demand.
Is there a general model that can predict the perceived phrase structure in language and music? While it is usually assumed that humans have separate faculties for language and music, this work focuses on the commonalities rather than on the differences between these modalities, aiming at finding a deeper 'faculty'. Our key idea is that the perceptual system strives for the simplest structure (the 'simplicity principle'), but in doing so it is biased by the likelihood of previous structures (the 'likelihood principle'). We present a series of data-oriented parsing (DOP) models that combine these two principles and that are tested on the Penn Treebank and the Essen Folksong Collection. Our experiments show that (1) a combination of the two principles outperforms the use of either of them, and (2) exactly the same model with the same parameter setting achieves maximum accuracy for both language and music. We argue that our results suggest an interesting parallel between linguistic and musical structuring.
We describe extensions to a scheme for evaluating parse selection accuracy based on named grammatical relations between lemmatised lexical heads. The scheme is intended to directly reflect the task of recovering grammatical and logical relations, rather than more arbitrary details of tree topology. There is a manually annotated test suite of 500 sentences which has been used by several groups to perform evaluations. We are developing software to create larger test suites automatically from existing treebanks. We are considering alternative relational annotations which draw a clearer distinction between grammatical and logical relations in order to overcome limitations of the current proposal.
The paper deals with current lexical databases that are seen as a basis for broad-coverage general-purpose ontologies. Various extensions and refinements of existing multi-lingual lexical knowledge bases are proposed with the aim of improving the capabilities of these resources. The main goal lies in the effort to gain a better lexical knowledge representation, which is crucial to coping with the requirements of the Semantic Web. The final section discusses the question of how lexical knowledge bases can be shared and combined. It presents the designed and implemented system WOMANISER that is able to merge independently developed parts of ontologies, check inconsistencies and report errors. The paper ends with the future directions of this research.
In the field of empirical natural language processing, researchers constantly deal with large amounts of marked-up data; whether the markup is done by the researcher or someone else, human nature dictates that it will have errors in it. This paper will more fully characterise the problem and discuss whether and when (and how) to correct the errors. The discussion is illustrated with specific examples involving function tagging in the Penn treebank.
The PAPILLON project aims at creating a cooperative, free, permanent, web-oriented and personalizable environment for the development and the consultation of a multilingual lexical database. The initial motivation is the lack of dictionaries, both for humans and machines, between French and many Asian languages. In particular, although there are large F-J paper usage dictionaries, they are usable only by Japanese literates, as they never contain both original (kanji/kana) and romaji writing. This applies as well to Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, etc.
In this paper, we introduce a new European project named OrienTel. The aim of OrienTel is to enable the project's participants to design and develop multilingual interactive communication services for the Mediterranean and the Middle East, ranging from Morocco in the West to the Gulf states in the East, including Turkey and Cyprus. These multilingual applications will be largely speech-based and will typically be implemented on mobile and multi-modal platforms such as cellular GSM or UMTS phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) or combinations of the two. Applications of the kind targeted are unified messaging, information retrieval, customer care, banking, WAP and service portals. To achieve this aim, the consortium will produce various surveys of the OrienTel region, compile a set of 22 linguistic databases, conduct research into ASR-related problems the OrienTel languages hold and develop demonstrator applications bearing evidence of OrienTel's multilingual orientation.
In this paper, I will examine some of the difficulties faced by the linguistic fieldworker who is attempting to observe and record "natural" conversations, and I will reconsider the long-held sociolinguistic notion of the observer's paradox by recasting it within Bell's (1984) framework of audience design theory. Using data gathered during my own fieldwork, I will once again call into question the idea of a single, unmarked, unperformed vernacular, the access to which is supposedly blocked by the observer's paradox. Finally, I will demonstrate that "performed" or "self-conscious" speech produced for the fieldworker can be useful in systematic linguistic analysis, and in gaining insights into local language ideologies and linguistic norms.
BACKGROUND: Prostatodynia is a common and often disabling condition that affects males and has the characteristics of a somatoform pain disorder. It presents with urogenital pain and urinary symptoms. Failure of conventional treatment and a successful uncontrolled pilot study with fluvoxamine in this condition prompted this study. METHOD: In a randomized double-blind trial, 42 patients with prostatodynia were assigned to receive either fluvoxamine (N = 21) or placebo (N = 21) for up to 8 weeks. Doses were adjusted according to therapeutic need. The median dose of fluvoxamine was 150 mg (range, 50-300 mg). Self-rated pain scores, urinary flow rates, and depression and anxiety scores were measured at baseline and several times throughout the study period. RESULTS: The groups were similar at baseline, and the results were examined by intent-to-treat analysis either using the last observation carried forward or, in the case of dichotomous measures, counting treatment dropouts as treatment failures. Fluvoxamine was significantly more likely to reduce pain intensity (p =.01) and normalize urinary flow rates (p =.03) with a clinically significant number needed to treat value of 1.5 (confidence interval = 1.12 to 5.50). This therapeutic effect could not be attributed to change in mood, as the 2 groups did not differ with respect to affective ratings at the end of the study. The fluvoxamine-treated group had significantly lower (p =.02) final scores on the General Health Questionnaire, indicating an overall benefit from pain relief. CONCLUSION: Fluvoxamine is a viable treatment for prostatodynia. Dose-ranging studies and longer trials are needed to evaluate this agent further.
Reviewed by: Dictionary of Louisiana Creole ed. by Albert Valdman, et al. John M. Lipski Dictionary of Louisiana Creole. Ed. By Albert Valdman, Thomas Klinger, Margaret Marshall, and Kevin Rottett. Bloomington &Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. 656. Louisiana is home to North America’s only homegrown creole language with a French lexifier. Louisiana French Creole is spoken in some fashion by some 40,000–50,000 residents, most of African origin. The language differs substantially from Acadian French and bears striking syntactic similarities to the French-derived creoles of Haiti and the Lesser Antilles. This dictionary, which combines contemporary field research with historical documentation of earlier stages of Louisiana Creole (LC), is the most comprehensive dictionary of any language of the United States other than English and is arguably the most extensive and complete dictionary of any creole language. The book consists of a grammatical introduction to LC, a users’ guide, nearly 500 pages of entries, and shorter English-Creole and French-Creole glossaries. The introduction sketches the origin of LC, claimed to be indigenous to Louisiana despite the influx of thousands of French planters and their slaves following the Haitian slave revolts at the end of the eighteenth century. The authors assert that LC was essentially formed prior to the arrival of other French creole speakers; left unaccounted for are such marked parallels between LC and Caribbean French creoles as definite determiners postposed to entire NPs, a postposed plural marker identical to the third person plural subject pronoun, postposed possessors, homologous interrogative words, and circumlocutions. Despite these unexplained parallels, the argumentation in favor of a Louisiana origin for LC is well-crafted and cannot be lightly dismissed. The grammatical overview identifies at least three dialects of LC which are differentiated in the dictionary entries. Most of the differences are lexical, and the basic grammatical structures hold for all varieties of LC. The dictionary entries are lengthy; most contain [End Page 181] examples of actual usage, dialectal variation and phonetic variants, English and French equivalents, and earlier attestations when appropriate. The totality of the examples constitutes a considerable corpus of earlier and contemporary LC usage. LC has no written tradition other than outsiders’ representations of the spoken language, usually written with French orthographic conventions. The LC dictionary uses a combination of phonetic spellings (particularly the use of the letters k, y, and z), French spellings (e.g. gn, ch, and the vowels ê and ò), and orthographic norms developed for Haitian Creole (e.g. lamen < [la] main ‘hand’, lanm < [l’] âme ‘soul’). Given the frequent alternation between front rounded vowels (in Frenchified LC) and front unrounded vowels (in basilectal LC), many entries show both spellings (e.g. [di]felfeu ‘fire’). This may seem confusing, but the orthographic representations reflect available corpora of LC usage, which nonsystematically span all the above-mentioned possibilities, and other less coherent patterns as well. This dictionary provides an invaluable resource in the study of a language which was despised or ignored during most of its existence and which is rapidly disappearing from the American linguistic landscape. It provides an excellent benchmark for future dictionaries of creole languages, endangered languages, and languages with a scarce written literature. John M. Lipski Pennsylvania State University Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America
This paper describes a general-purpose sentence generation system that can achieve both broad scale coverage and high quality while aiming to be suitable for a variety of generation tasks. We measure the coverage and correctness empirically using a section of the Penn Treebank corpus as a test set. We also describe novel features that help make the generator flexible and easier to use for a variety of tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical measurement of coverage reported in the literature, and the highest reported measurements of correctness.
This paper reports on the development of a new eye-tracking system for noninvasive recording of eye movements. The eye tracker uses a flying-spot laser to selectivelyimage landmarks on the eye and, subsequently, measure horizontal, vertical, and torsional eye movements. Considerable work was required to overcome the adverse effects of specular reflection of the flying-spot from the surface of the eye onto the sensing elements of the eye tracker. These effects have been largely overcome, and the eye-tracker has been used to document eye movement abnormalities, such as abnormal torsional pulsion of saccades, in the clinical setting.
As a result of colonialism, pidgins and creoles emerged around the world in order to fulfil the communicative needs of the people who came in contact in the new situation. As those needs disappeared pidgins also gradually disappeared. However, in some areas, such as Papua New Guinea, the need for a common language in such a linguistically heterogeneous society helped the impoverished pidgin evolve into an extended pidgin suitable for use in a wide range of contexts and functions. This dissertation analyzes the parallel developments of Tok Pisin and the history of its speakers, from the birth of the pidgin as a jargon in the Southwest Pacific until the present moment, when as an extended pidgin with a few thousand creole speakers, faces the challenge of adapting to the modern world. In Chapter I some basic considerations are made about the circumstances that allow pidgins and creoles to emerge and the strategies used in their formation and further development. After this introduction to the topic, attention is paid to the relevant events taking place in the southwest Pacific first and in Papua New Guinea later, namely labour trade and plantations, the declaration of a German protectorate in 1884, the changing of colonial powers, World War I and World War II and the current sociolinguistic situation in the country. In Chapter II a diachronic analysis is made of the developments taking place in the different areas of Tok Pisin. During the jargon stage Tok Pisin was used basically for communication between colonizers and natives. There is a need to communicate in a very restricted domain only, communication is very simple and the degree of individual variation is likely to be very high in all the areas of the language. During stabilization norms emerged out of the chaos of the jargon. It was during this stage that Tok Pisin started to be used for communication among natives rather than only between colonizers and natives. When indentured labourers, speakers of different languages, came together on plantations, they soon realized they needed to communicate. The urgent need for vocabulary in the new situation was fulfilled by borrowing from all sources at hand, e.g. English, German, Malay, Tolai. During expansion, Tok Pisin made use of internal resources and expanded the possibilities already present in the language. At the end of this stage, renewed contact of Tok Pisin with English in towns caused a new variety to emerge, Urban Pidgin, characterized by the massive borrowing from English. In Chapter III the focus is on different aspects of the lexicon which will show how Tok Pisin has adapted to its new uses and functions in a new social environment. Tok Pisin is not a language for restricted communication anymore, its use has greatly expanded and, as a consequence, its functions, too. On the one hand, there has been a massive increase of its inventory of lexical items necessary to adapt the language to the new circumstances of the society where it is spoken. New words which deal with new situations have been incorporated from English. On the other hand, stylistic variation is now possible, and a number of changes do not have an influence on the referential power, but rather on style. Tok Pisin has been enriched by new functions including expressive and poetic. Lexicon seems to be affected by external influences earlier than the other areas of the language. Speakers of Tok Pisin seem to be favouring borrowing over exploitation of internal resources. Also in grammar, although to a much lesser extent, these changes can be observed. What evidence shows at the present moment is that the new patterns being borrowed do no seem to be replacing the old ones, but rather both of them coexist. Thus, instability will be a feature of the language while restructuring takes place. This can show that a linguistic continuum might be consolidating and that there might be a range of possibilities within the spectrum to convey the same idea. The gap emerging in the language is a reflection of the changes taking place in society, being caused by different degrees of access to formal education and to an urban setting. As a consequence of the changes taking place in society, the use of loanwords from the substratum is also declining, because they reflect a reality that is gradually disappearing. Only those words whose referent is still present will remain. Also idioms which correspond to a certain interpretation of reality will tend to disappear as the Western culture and beliefs spread. An area where substratum influence tends to be retained longer is exclamations and interjections. However, even here English expressions are finding their way into Tok Pisin. At the present moment very few people in Papua New Guinea are in direct contact with English. And for many it is a language learnt in the formal environment of the classroom. The influence of English on Tok Pisin will not spread if Tok Pisin remains only the language of formal education. However, other factors such as the contact of a growing number of speakers with English as a consequence of expected migration to town areas, the influence of the media or the growing prestige of the urban variety can help to increase the number of English features in Tok Pisin. Throughout its history, Tok Pisin has evolved and has become enriched by its speakers. They, rather than language policies, have been the ones who have decided the direction of the development of the language by accepting or rejecting the different possibilities of expansion. It is in their hands to decide what Tok Pisin will be like, to decide if they want to favour the changes in the direction of English and the consolidation of a linguistic continuum already emerging, knowing there is a risk of losing communicative power, a factor which cannot be undervalued in such a linguistically heterogeneous society. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ As a result of colonialism, pidgins and creoles emerged around the world in order to fulfil the communicative needs of the people who came in contact in the new situation. As those needs disappeared pidgins also gradually disappeared. However, in some areas, such as Papua New Guinea, the need for a common language in such a linguistically heterogeneous society helped the impoverished pidgin evolve into an extended pidgin suitable for use in a wide range of contexts and functions. This dissertation analyzes the parallel developments of Tok Pisin and the history of its speakers, from the birth of the pidgin as a jargon in the Southwest Pacific until the present moment, when as an extended pidgin with a few thousand creole speakers, faces the challenge of adapting to the modern world. A further analysis of different aspects of the lexicon shows how Tok Pisin has greatly expanded its use and functions. English seems to be influencing Tok Pisin to a great extent in the area of lexicon and, to a lesser extent in other areas as well. What evidence shows at the present moment is that the new patterns being borrowed do not seem to be replacing the old ones, but rather both of them coexist. Thus, instability will be a feature of the language while restructuring takes place. Social mobility and education will be important factrs that will make speakers modify their speech in the direction of the standard. Some hypotheses about the possible further developments of Tok Pisin are suggested.