Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
This study explores the stylistic capabilities of editGPT, an AI-powered text editing tool, by examining how it transforms identical source texts into four distinct registers: academic, formal, casual, and speech. Drawing on a specialized corpus derived from the ICIC Fundraising Discourse dataset, the research investigates style-specific linguistic features using both lexical and syntactic metrics. Lexical features analyzed include overused words, nominalizations, and measures of lexical complexity, such as density, sophistication, and variation. Syntactic analyses address parts of speech distribution, passive constructions, and complexity indices, such as clause embedding and sentence length. Statistical methods, including ANOVA and post-hoc tests, confirm significant differences across styles, aligning with genre conventions while also yielding unexpected patterns, such as high nominal complexity in casual texts. The study highlights how editGPT operationalizes stylistic norms by modifying lexical choices and structural features without altering semantic content. Findings suggest that AI-generated texts can effectively model stylistic variation, making them valuable resources for teaching stylistic awareness in language education. This research advances understanding of AI’s role in language learning and stylistics, and underscores the importance of style-sensitive writing instruction in EFL contexts.
We present a systematic stress-test of geometric metrics for LLM evaluation. Rank-based geometric properties of internal representations have shown promise as reference-free quality signals, but the conditions under which they are reliable remain unclear. We evaluate eight commonly-used metrics: intrinsic-dimensionality estimators, spectral norms, and related quantities across six tester models (0.5-8B) and eight generators on contrasting tasks, separating genuine geometric signal from text-length effects and from what standard text statistics already capture. Three findings emerge. First, some metrics (notably Schatten Norm and MOM) mainly reflect output length, and their apparent discriminative power collapses once length is controlled. Second, geometric metrics add modest but real information beyond text statistics: combined with them, a classifier reaches 78% accuracy on 6-way generator identification versus 69% for text statistics alone. Third, rather than tracking a general notion of text quality, the metrics demonstrate only moderate association between the intrinsic-dimensionality and lexical diversity (RTTR). We give use-case-specific recommendations and identify failure detection as the most promising near-term application.
During their work, translators constantly face challenges of preserving author's intention and stylistic features of a literary work while translating original Russian texts into foreign languages. Understanding these features contributes to a more accurate perception of Russian culture with its unique images and deep meanings. This article aims to reveal the specificity of translation errors in translations of A. Chekhov's monologue ‘On the harmful effects of tobacco' into foreign languages. The original monologue and its translations into three languages (English, French and Arabic) taken from open sources were selected as the material for our study. Comparative analysis of the original and the translated versions was used to identify lexical and semantic groups of the original text that require translators' close attention: onomastic material, nominations of everyday realities related to conveying the atmosphere of the work, names of cultural realities, expressive and evaluative means. Then, based on the classification of translation errors, the main inaccuracies in translating A. Chekhov's monologue were identified: 1) violations in the transfer of meaning related to the denotative content of the text; 2) violations related to the transfer of the stylistic patterns of the original; 3) errors related to the transfer of the author's evaluation; 4) obvious violations of the norms and usage of the target language. The research also identifies the major ways of choosing an analogue: introduction of functional names, descriptive technique, the use of literal nominations, selection of an identical idiom in the target language, transcribing, calquing, etc. The study considers various aspects of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic adaptation of the material, typical for each of the three languages.
[... waveform poisoning initiated... ] This archive is the missing addendum to the manuscript "The Atlas Code: A Hitchhiker's Guide to No Man's Sky." It contains the complete Glyph Rosetta Dataset — a linguistic database of 4,820 words and their associated glyphs across the five languages of No Man's Sky: Atlas, Gek, Korvax, Vy'keen, and Autophage. This version (v1.1) has been rebuilt from the ground up and version locked to No Man's Sky Update 6.33 (April 15, 2026). It supersedes v1.0, which should no longer be cited. The rebuild accounts for new words added by Hello Games in Updates 5.6 and 6.33, corrections to internal string errors, and clerical errors identified during three independent manual verification passes of the complete dataset. The completed rebuild reduced the total dataset size by 150mb. The archive includes all in-game menu screenshots catalogued with a three-part inventory system for rapid cross-referencing, the complete dataset in both CSV and Excel formats, a First Pass Analysis worksheet documenting shared words, bigram assignments, and cross-language vocabulary overlaps, and a full Table of Contents for the original manuscript. This data is provided for the sole purpose of allowing the community to verify the findings of the original manuscript.
This article explores the phenomenon of French–English code-switching within the framework of psycholinguistic theory, offering a comprehensive analysis of its cognitive, linguistic, and sociolinguistic dimensions. Code-switching, defined as the alternation between two or more languages within a single communicative act, is examined through foundational theories from scholars like U. Weinreich, S. Poplack, J. J. Gumperz, and K. de Bot. The study delves into psycholinguistic models, such as Levelt’s speech production framework, which outlines stages like conceptual preparation, grammatical encoding, phonological encoding, and articulation. De Bot’s bilingual lexicon model suggests that lexicons of different languages form interconnected subsystems within a unified framework, enabling seamless code-switching through lemma selection and word-form retrieval. The concept of the matrix language, introduced by F. Grosjean, highlights how bilingual speakers operate in monolingual or bilingual modes, with co-activation of languages facilitating dynamic linguistic transitions. Linguistically, the article addresses constraints like S. Poplack’s equivalence constraint, which ensures structural compatibility, and J. MacSwan’s minimalist approach, which views code-switching as the merging of lexicons within a unified grammatical system. Challenges to rigid constraints, such as the government principle, reveal the flexibility of bilingual speech, influenced by social and pragmatic factors. French–English code-switching, prevalent in fashion and lifestyle media, exemplifies how French terms like laissez-faire, je ne sais quoi, and rendezvous are integrated into English discourse to evoke sophistication and cultural prestige. These terms often function as borrowings or code-switches, reflecting bilingual competence and cultural signaling. Sociolinguistically, code-switching serves as a marker of identity and prestige, particularly in globalised contexts. The article emphasises the cognitive flexibility of bilinguals, as noted by E. Bialystok, and the role of social context in shaping language choice, as discussed by P. Auer and B. Spolsky. Examples from media texts illustrate how French terms enhance rhetorical expressiveness while adhering to English grammatical norms. The study concludes that French–English code-switching reflects a complex interplay of cognitive processes, linguistic structures, and cultural dynamics, offering insights into bilingual communication and its role in modern discourse.
Understanding and expressing emotions is subjective, leading to varying levels of ambiguity in how emotions are perceived. Humans naturally handle this ambiguity, and it's crucial for machines to do the same for natural human-machine interaction. Efforts are being made to develop emotion recognition systems that can handle ambiguity by modelling emotions as distributions of arousal/valence labels. However, existing approaches often assume that an underlying distribution can be inferred from ground truth ratings. Yet, the underlying distribution is never observed and the inferred distribution from the ratings can accurately represent the true distribution only when enough raters are involved. Our study investigates how the number of raters impacts the uncertainty in inferring distributions from ground truth ratings in the context of modelling emotion ambiguity. We then explore how many raters may be sufficient to effectively approximate the ambiguity present in the emotion annotations. Using the Belief Mismatch Coefficient (BMC) for analysis, we compare distributions to different numbers of ground truth ratings leading to quantitative and interpretable inferences. Experimental analysis was conducted using both simulated ratings and the real emotion (both arousal and valence) ratings collected from MSP-Conversation dataset. Our results suggest that using 5 raters may be sufficient to approximate a stable distribution representing the underlying emotional ambiguity when time continuous emotion ratings are captured and annotated from speech. Our study provides insights and practical advice for collecting emotion labels. Additionally, the analyses methods presented in this paper are expected to be relevant in any field of study dealing with labelling of subjective quantities that can vary from person to person.
Although extensive research on Javanese has focused on politeness, speech levels, and also the preservation of social harmony, studies addressing its harsh words and expressions remain limited. This gap fails to address how Javanese accommodate the expression of conflict, frustration, mockery, as well as other forms of emotional intensity that challenge the idealized image of politeness. The main objective of this study was to investigate the lexicons that constitute harsh words or expressions in Javanese, with particular attention to their sources and the cultural analogies that shape their harsh meanings. Data were generated through the introspective method and literature review and analyzed using Conceptual Metaphor and Dysphemism Theory. The analysis revealed that Javanese harsh words or expressions are grouped into three categories: physical activities, physical states, and body parts or organs, with their usage reflecting two opposite poles: negative, when employed to express conflict, frustration, criticism, or mockery; and neutral, when used playfully among close friends. The findings indicate that the harshness of Javanese expressions is not embedded in the lexical items themselves, but instead arises from the situational and socio-cultural contexts, along with the meanings they convey.
Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to infer others’ mental states—is fundamental to social cognition. Social categorization, the grouping of individuals into in-group or out-group categories, shapes these inferences. These processes co-occur during facial perception, with recent research suggesting both shared neurocognitive mechanisms and modulation of ToM by social category cues. However, existing tools for studying the impact of racial diversity on social cognition are limited: some databases prioritize racial representation but restrict stimuli to the six basic emotions, while others broaden mental state diversity but lack diversity in social appearance.Here we introduce the McGill Diverse Face Database, a validated set of 1,286 images of 14 actors from socially perceived racial categories portraying 92 complex mental states. Validation included three experiments: (1) a four-alternative forced-choice task assessing recognition accuracy, (2) a “point-and-click” task rating valence and arousal in a two-dimensional affective space, and (3) a trait-rating task evaluating perceived actor characteristics. Participants accurately identified mental states across categories (77 % of stimuli). Mean valence–arousal ratings revealed a non-linear one-dimensional manifold structure that correlated with behavioral measures. An interactive online visualization allows users to explore this “Theory of Mind manifold” (https://hctor99.github.io/TheoryofMindManifold/). By integrating social-category diversity with complex emotional expression, this database provides a new resource for studying how socially perceived group membership shapes the perception and inference of mental states.
Large language models (LLMs) have materially changed natural language processing (NLP).While LLMs have shifted focus from traditional semantic-based resources, structured linguistic databases such as WordNet remain essential for precise knowledge retrieval, decision making and aiding LLM development.WordNet organizes concepts through synonym sets (synsets) and semantic links but suffers from inconsistencies, including redundant or erroneous relations.This paper investigates an approach using LLMs to aid the refinement of structured language resources, specifically WordNet, by an automation for multiple hypernymy resolution, leveraging the LLMs semantic knowledge to produce tools for aiding and evaluating manual resource improvement.
The article deals with the language description transfer from the encyclopaedic edition «Languages of the World» to the «Languages of the World» database web version. The feature base structure and dependencies within different sections are analysed, along with the possible ways of terminology unification. The article may be of interest to specialists in linguistic typology, data formalisation and development of linguistic databases.
The gambling landscape is constantly evolving. Digital technologies feature several emerging forms of gambling-like activities (‘gamblification’) including free-to-play social casino games and video game loot boxes, as well as the opportunity to spectate gambling on streaming platforms such as Twitch, Kick and YouTube (Macey & Hamari, 2024). Recent research has begun to characterize links between these activities and real-money gambling. For example, young adults who purchase loot boxes show an increased likelihood of initiating gambling over the next 6 months (Brooks & Clark, 2023). We do not yet understand how early exposure to randomized rewards in these settings draws people to gambling, and the factors associated with risk and resilience to gambling harm. This study will focus on gambling streams, as a popular medium through which young people are exposed to gambling content. Watching a gambling stream does not involve betting or winning money, but the viewer observes authentic gambling, often in a highly stimulating context (e.g. high stakes bets). Streaming content is often broadcast as highlight ‘clips’: short, edited videos that can be viewed on the channel homepage and also shared across social media platforms. For gambling streams, these clips often display the outcomes of single bets showing large 'jackpot' wins, accompanied by the streamer’s intense emotional reaction to winning. It is well recognized that experiencing early big wins in the context of (firsthand) real-money gambling is associated with future gambling problems (Turner et al., 2006), and we propose that the ‘vicarious’ observation of winning may also shift gambling attitudes and intentions. The present study is an online experimental design that will present pre-selected gambling stream clips to participants assigned to two conditions. The experimental group will view a sequence of clips featuring gambling jackpot wins. The control group will view clips with realistic gambling outcomes, i.e. mostly small losses. We will develop these stimuli from a combination of authentic clips and edited Kick footage from longer streams, both as publicly accessible content. The primary dependent variables are (1) attitudes towards gambling, (2) intention to gamble on slot machines, (3) winning probability judgement. We will also measure participants’ affect ratings of the clips as a manipulation check. Trait-level scores on the Gambling-Related Cognitions Scale (GRCS) will be recorded as a possible moderator.
Colors serve as an important embodied source of perceptual experiences for conceptualizing emotional concepts. This study offers an image-based visual corpus analysis on perceptual (dis)similarities among six basic color terms (black, white, red, green, yellow, blue) and 63 emotion-label words in English. The investigation focuses on two primary questions: (i) whether the six colors are significantly different regarding their contributions in conceptualizing emotional concepts, and (ii) how color-emotion association patterns are shaped by valence and arousal. Empirical analyses were conducted and discussed using the degree of perceptual (dis)similarities between the target color terms and emotion words as an indicator of the strength of color-emotion associations, based on a dataset of 69*100 images collected from Google Image, comprising 63 emotion words and 6 color terms, with 100 images retrieved for each term. The results reveal that (i) significant differences exist among the six colors in their effectiveness at capturing affective (dis)similarities among various emotional concepts, as well as in their association strength with the affective domain, and (ii) the valence and arousal ratings of emotion words are significantly correlated to the strength of their associations with five of the six color terms, with the exception of blue. This study provides an image-based empirical exploration of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for color-emotion mappings, highlighting the essential and distinctive roles of colors in understanding emotional concepts.
The paper offers a comprehensive linguistic and translation analysis of the lexical and stylistic challenges encountered during the rendering of English popular science psychological discourse into Ukrainian. The research is based on Eric Berne’s seminal monograph “Games People Play” and its official Ukrainian translation. The relevance of the study is driven by the growing demand in Ukrainian society for high-quality popular science literature in social psychology, alongside the necessity to theoretically conceptualise the cross-linguistic recoding of texts that merge academic and colloquial styles. Popular science psychological discourse is treated as a complex inter-stylistic phenomenon where the translator’s primary task is to maintain the source text's communicative and pragmatic function — ensuring that scientific frameworks remain highly accessible to a general audience while sustaining reader engagement. The structural matrix of E. Berne’s monograph dictates a clear differentiation of translation approaches. The theoretical framework, written in an academic yet simplified style to achieve immediate pragmatic impact, heavily relies on mono- and bi-component terms. The study indicates that simple terms are most effectively rendered via equivalent translation and transliteration, whereas complex terms and compound concepts (such as Ego-State) are reproduced through calquing, transliteration, or a combination of both techniques. In the practical section of the monograph, which focuses on the typology of social games, the discourse shifts towards a colloquial register. This section features emotionally expressive vocabulary, stylistic tropes (epithets, metaphors, metonymies, personifications), slang, and unique onomastic units. While calquing remains the predominant method for translating both conventional and authorial epithets or metaphors, contextual substitution and connotative variation are selectively deployed to improve readability. Metonymic game titles are mostly transferred using direct lexical equivalents. Special emphasis is placed on the translation of onomastics — the proper names of psychological behavioural scripts («games»), structural roles, and interaction patterns. The analysis demonstrates that accurate pragmatic recoding of these creative capitalised terms requires a flexible application of diverse translation transformations: lexical transformations (concretisation, generalisation, contextual substitution, and descriptive (explicative) translation for non-equivalent culture-bound items); grammatical transformations (reordering to align word sequences with Ukrainian syntactic norms, grammatical tense shifts, and nominalisation (replacing English participles with Ukrainian nouns)); stylistic transformations (attenuating vulgar/slang terms to neutral equivalents, or conversely, intentionally downgrading neutral elements into colloquialisms to replicate the source text's signature humor, sarcasm, or irony). The study concludes that a successful reception of popular science psychological texts within the Ukrainian linguaculture depends heavily on the harmonious balance between strict semantic equivalence and pragmatic adaptation. This approach preserves the implicit psychological connotations of the source text while adhering strictly to the norms of the target language.
In research on Spanish-English bilingual code-switching (CS), bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) have been shown to occur at different frequencies in distinct bilingual communities. This paper proposes production frequencies play an important role in the online processing of Spanish-English CS. Sixteen early Spanish-English bilinguals participated in a reading-while-eye-tracking study where they read sentences containing BCVs that are attested in their bilingual community and those that are syntactically plausible, yet unattested in the same community. Participants were expected to show a processing cost for the light verb (LV) condition with the switch occurring at the lexical infinitive, as this switch is unattested in this participant group’s speech community. Participants were also expected to display this sensitivity during earlier stage processing when compared to age-matched learners of Spanish. The results showed a trend of longer reading time for the LV at lexical infinitive switch that became most robust in the spillover region. A z-scored analysis of an offline acceptability assessment of the presented stimuli revealed a strong dispreference for the unattested switch. These results indicate that prior exposure to language had an important impact in online and offline processing of Spanish-English CS.
Abstract This study examines the usage, semantics, and affective valence of olfactory metaphors in English, addressing a gap in sensory language and metaphor research. We analyze eight basic smell lexemes ( smell, aroma, scent, odor, stench, stink, reek, fragrance ) in the iWeb corpus, tracing their abstract noun collocates through frequency counts, WordNet hypernym paths, intersection analysis, and affective valence ratings. Our results reveal that English olfactory metaphors are highly productive, mapping smell perception onto a broad array of abstract experiences, especially socioemotional and moral domains. The eight patterns exhibit pronounced affective polarization: while some (e.g., fragrance, aroma ) skew positive, most (e.g., stink, stench, reek, odor ) skew negative, reflecting both olfactory hedonics and a cognitive negativity bias. These findings deepen our understanding of how sensory language structures abstract thought and affirm the rich figurative potential of smell in English, with implications for theories of sensory language, conceptual metaphor, and embodied cognition.
Background People with aphasia (PWA) often struggle to determine who/what pronouns refer to. However, spontaneous speech studies on non-fluent PWA have revealed a disparity: one cluster of PWA tends to omit pronouns, while another cluster tends to overuse them. This study improves our current knowledge of pronoun processing by presenting how aphasia impacts pronoun production in Turkish.Aims This study addresses three questions: (i) whether Turkish-speaking PWA show impairments in producing pronouns in spontaneous speech, either through omission or overproduction; (ii) whether their production of personal pronouns is selectively affected; and (iii) whether theyexhibit difficulties in producing deictic and/or non-personal pronominal elements, including demonstratives, indefinites, and possessives.Methods & Procedures Spontaneous speech samples from 10 PWA speaking Turkish and 10 matched healthy controls were analysed. Three groups of pronoun variables were quantified: (i) general characteristics of pronoun uses including total number of pronominal elements, and pronoun-to-noun ratios, (ii) total and null personal pronouns in subject and object positions, and (iii) other types of pronouns including demonstrative, indefinite, and possessive pronouns.Outcomes & Results The Turkish-speaking PWA were above the control norms in total number of pronominal elements, and pronoun-to-noun and pronoun-to-word ratios, but they showed reduced lexical diversity in noun usage. They produced more first-person (deictic) than third person (anaphoric) pronouns while this difference was not significant in the controls. The PWA exhibit overuses in null subjects and objects, demonstratives and indefinite pronouns.Conclusions Turkish-speaking PWA overproduce pronouns; however, this overuse does not represent a uniform pattern. Overuses caused mostly by deictic elements such as demonstratives and indefinite pronouns, in the context of reduced lexical diversity in nouns. While the overuse of pronouns likely reflects a communicative strategy, the extent and nature of this strategy seem to vary across individuals.
This study addresses a critical gap in understanding how queer and feminist counterpublics countered homophobic nationalism in China’s censored internet, as exemplified by the #WesternizedDaughter hashtag on Sina Weibo. Combining corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) and van Dijk’s sociocognitive framework, we uncover both convergent and divergent resistance strategies: while both movements critique gender norms, Confucian values, and state censorship through evasive language, satire, collective identity appeals, and recontextualization, their tactical intensities starkly differ. Queer discourses prioritize lexical camouflage to exploit state ambivalence, whereas feminist discourses weaponize satirical hyperbole. These dynamics reveal a survivalist dialectic we term “co-opetition”: movements simultaneously compete for visibility in attention economies and collaborate to circumvent state erasure. This challenges the agonistic model of counterpublics as purely competitive spheres, instead reframing their relations under state censorship as strategically entangled. Our analysis complicates the “us-them” binary in both movements’ rhetoric—framing a “backward China” against a “progressive West”—by revealing underlying decolonial tensions. While strategic mirroring critiques dominant narratives, it also risks reinforcing Orientalist hierarchies. These insights highlight the need for inclusive advocacy in China, where effective resistance relies on tactical hybridity.
This study adapts the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) dataset for Mexican Spanish, validating emotional dimensions in culturally relevant contexts. A total of 753 participants rated 1,028 translated words on valence, arousal, and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale. The adaptation ensured linguistic equivalence through iterative translation and consensus processes, selecting region-specific terms verified with the Corpus XXI of the Royal Spanish Academy. Split-half correlations confirmed high internal consistency across dimensions, demonstrating stable and reliable ratings within the Mexican sample. Cross-linguistic analyses revealed strong correlations between Mexican Spanish and norms for European Portuguese and Spanish, with moderate correlations to English norms, highlighting cultural and linguistic influences on emotional word ratings. Gender differences further provided insights into demographic factors affecting emotional word processing. These findings underscore the need for culturally specific adaptations in research, ensuring that affective norms align with regional language use and emotional perception. This study offers a methodological framework applicable to other linguistic and cultural contexts, enhancing the precision of cross-cultural research in affective science.
Recent advancements in thermal device technology present new possibilities for conveying sensations and emotions in diverse applications. Yet, systematic investigations into the design parameters of thermal feedback and their effects on elicited sensations and emotions remain underexplored. To address this gap, we created 36 thermal feedback patterns by systematically varying the amplitude of change, rate of change, and indoor temperature, and applied them across three body sites on the hand, forearm, and upper arm. We then collected perceived intensity, valence, and arousal ratings from 12 participants. The results revealed the efficacy of the thermal design parameters. For example, the amplitude of change served as the primary parameter influencing the intensity and arousal ratings across body sites, while it affected valence only when thermal feedback was applied to the forearm and upper arm. Using the collected data, we developed a neural network to predict the intensity sensation and emotion ratings elicited by thermal feedback. Our model outperformed three baseline machine learning models and demonstrated strong alignment with non-linear sensory and emotional responses. We present four guidelines for designing thermal feedback and discuss implications for future research and applications in haptic design.
We provide an open-access dataset containing salivary cortisol data and self-reported emotional ratings from 371 healthy Chinese participants who took part in a controlled laboratory study using the Maastricht Acute Stress Test (MAST). Of these participants, 241 individuals were assigned to the stress condition and 130 were assigned to the control condition. The dataset includes various variables such as demographic information (e.g., age, gender, and BMI), salivary cortisol levels, trait and state anxiety scores, and positive and negative affect ratings. All of these variables were measured before and after the stress induction. This dataset is a valuable resource for evaluating the effectiveness of MAST in eliciting acute stress responses in Chinese populations, as well as for studying variations in stress reactivity among individuals.
The recent surge in the morphological awareness literature targeting ESL university students has two limitations: most studies come from Asia, and measures used lack validation within ESL university contexts. The present study expands ESL research towards Africa. We investigated whether linguistic measures of morphological knowledge, normed on monolingual American students, can produce reliable and valid scores when used among English second-language (ESL) students in Ghana. 454 ESL university students completed the Nonword Sentence Completion task (NWSC) and the Derivational Suffix Task (DST). Results show that the NWSC task, although relatively easy, proved a reliable and valid test for Ghanian ESL students. The DST was reliable, but not sufficiently valid. Additionally, morphosyntactic features of the test items were analysed in relation to the results. Our expectation that items with simple morphosyntactic characteristics are easier than those with complex morphosyntactic characteristics was not confirmed, suggesting that the effect of morphosyntactic variables on linguistic complexity in derived words (lexical density, word frequency, sentence length, levels of shift) may be due to the measurement tasks used in this study. The study proposes a framework as to how existing language tests (in any language), developed for L1 populations, can be normed in L2 regions.
The article is devoted to the study of the ecolinguistic approach in the educational process. It has been studied that the ecological approach to the language is the preservation of language traditions, the protection of the language from the influx of foreign loanwords, the active use of the Ukrainian language in everyday communication, the enrichment of the lexical composition of speech, and the avoidance of negativism in the language. It has been proven that the linguistic-ecological approach to the educational process is part of the competence approach in higher education, which assumes that, in addition to special, professional competences, graduates must possess general competences; they should have valuable qualities, in particular, the competencies of global citizenship, multiculturalism and other aspects of environmental communication. Qualitative characteristics of graduates include not only study results, but can be considered as a distinguishing feature of study at each individual university in addition to the knowledge acquired in the process of study. The article explores the concept of «ecological communication» as communication that does not have a harmful effect on the psycho-emotional state and health of a person; and vice versa – «non-ecological communication» – communicative behavior that does not meet ethical speech norms, negatively affects a person's mental health. The speech of modern youth/students is analyzed, which, in most cases, is expressive, laconic, informative, sometimes endowed with coarse and familiar features. The article focuses attention on the fact that in the conditions of modern challenges caused by war, we can trace a certain negativism in speech. Despite everything, the priority in educational activities should be the protection and preservation of standardized symbols – expressions of the spiritual values of society. In order to ecologize the literary language of students, it is necessary to constantly work on the observance of language norms, appropriate use of speech means, promotion of moral norms, traditional national heritage, aesthetics of expression, high linguistic culture.
This study explores the pragmatic dimension of personal pronouns in Azerbaijani and English, focusing on how these linguistic units encode social status, politeness, inclusion, and speaker identity. Traditionally considered mere grammatical markers, pronouns are shown here to be crucial indicators of social relationships and communicative intent. Drawing on Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), the research analyzes how pronoun choice affects illocutionary and perlocutionary acts within discourse. Comparative examples from the Azerbaijani National Corpus and the British National Corpus illustrate that Azerbaijani explicitly encodes respect and social distance through morphological distinctions such as sən (informal “you”) and siz (formal “you”), while English relies on syntactic and lexical politeness strategies. The study further discusses the inclusive and exclusive uses of biz (“we”) in Azerbaijani, highlighting how speakers use pronouns to manage in-group and out-group relations. Findings reveal that while English achieves pragmatic variation indirectly through modal expressions and context, Azerbaijani does so directly through its pronominal system. This demonstrates that personal pronouns function as powerful pragmatic tools reflecting cultural values, politeness norms, and communicative strategies. The article contributes to the broader understanding of linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and intercultural communication.
The article explores the development of the Russian language as a complex and multifaceted process, encompassing not only the establishment of grammatical and lexical norms but also the crucial role of language in thinking and communication. Language is viewed as a tool for conveying thoughts and facilitating communication, contributing to the development of cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and logical thinking. The influence of cultural, social, and historical factors on speech development is emphasized, alongside the interaction of language with mass media, the internet, and modern culture. The article highlights the importance of education in developing speech skills and fostering critical thinking. Technology is seen as a complement to traditional teaching methods, enhancing the effectiveness of the educational process. Ultimately, the Russian language is presented as a dynamic system that plays a key role in social and cultural life.
The article is devoted to the study of humor in English-language comedy animated film text and the analysis of its translation strategies into Ukrainian. Modern animation is a reflection of world cultural universals. Animated film text is often saturated with humor which serves not only as a means of creating comic situations but also as a tool for disclosing characters, strengthening dramaturgy and establishing an emotional connection with the viewer. The object of this investigation is humor in English-language comedy film text. The subject is the translation strategies of English-language humor into Ukrainian. The research material covers humor from the American animated television series «Gravity Falls» [1] and their translation, made by the Ukrainian TV channel PLUSPLUS [2]. The analysis of humor in the animation «Gravity Falls» shows that the main mechanism for implementing the comic effect is the use of verbal elements. At the phonetic level, this is achieved by the peculiarities of the characters’ speech, non-compliance with orthoepic norms, and the use of non-literary language variants; at the morphological level – by the wide use of word-formation devices; at the lexical level – by the use of unusual or unexpected lexical elements that create contrast or irony in the context, repetitions, tropes; at the word combination level – by incorrect word agreement, periphrase, phraseological expressions; at the sentence level – by alogisms, ironic contrasts, too complex or simple sentence structure; at the text level – by context, repetitions, citations, allusions, and a mixture of registers and speech styles.Translating humor in audiovisual content is a challenging task, as the comic effect is often lost due to linguistic and cultural differences. The lack of universal solutions forces translators to approach each case individually and apply different strategies. Omission is used when humor cannot be adequately conveyed by means of the target language or it is not critically important for rendering. Humor preservation involves literary or approximate translation. Adaptation involves a creative rethinking of humor, taking into account the cultural characteristics of the target audience. The choice of the strategy depends on the context, the importance of the humorous element and its function in the text. Despite the inevitable losses, translation can enrich the target text, or completely rethink the content of the original.
This study aimed to explore the problems and strategies of translating paratexts in digital media through content analysis, comparing the English and Arabic paratextual elements of six media digital sources, including the BBC News website, Al Arabiya blog, and Reuters forum. The study identified several translation problems, including culturally specific terms, cultural references, conflicting verbal and paratextual components, and reframing the narrative functions of paratexts. The emergent themes revealed that 97% of the problems were attributed to terminology and lexical choices, whereas 83% were related to the integration of visual elements. Themes of cultural adaptation for governing the content of paratextual elements and reframing the narrative functions of paratexts each reached 80%. The emergent themes also revealed the strategies that translators use to address the translation of paratexts. These strategies include employing the translation adaptation approach (95%), applying functional translation (90%), using thematic analysis for intralinguistic subtitles (87%), using multimodal transcription (85%), and using transposition (82%). The study recommends replacing cultural references, idioms, or symbols with equivalents that resonate with the target audience. Functional equivalence ensures that translated paratexts serve the same purpose in the target language, adhering to cultural norms. The study highlights the distinction between traditional criteria for identifying paratexts and the functionality of translation in identifying digital paratexts. Understanding functional equivalence dynamics can help translators produce high-quality translations for the digital era. Thus, the study contributes to the fields of translation studies, translation and culture studies, and translation and information technology.
This paper outlines the theoretical and methodological framework of the Urban Lexicon of Granada project, developed from the corpus of the Coordinated Study of the Educated Linguistic Norm of Spanish Spoken in the Main Cities of Ibero-America and the Iberian Peninsula. The research is structured around two complementary goals: the digitalization and informatization of the educated lexicon of Granada, aimed at preserving and providing open access to Francisco Salvador’s original corpus, and the creation of a new urban lexicon that reflects current lexical dynamics and diachronic variation. This dual approach combines linguistic heritage recovery with methodological innovation, through the use of relational databases and digital tools applied to lexical geolinguistics. The project is linked to the international networks VARILEX and Lexical Availability (LD) and proposes a model for updating and reusing historical corpora of educated Spanish in contemporary urban contexts.
The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the impact of Internet memes and social media discourse on the evolution of contemporary English, focusing particularly on the processes of lexical innovation, semantic shift, and pragmatic adaptation of linguistic units.In the digital age, communication increasingly takes place through multimodal platforms such as TikTok, Twitter/X, Instagram, and Reddit, which serve as powerful instruments of sociolinguistic dynamics.These platforms not only facilitate the rapid dissemination of slang and emerging expressions but also create new contexts in which users engage in collective linguistic creativity.Internet memes are interpreted as cultural and semiotic units that combine text, imagery, audiovisual effects, and situational context, ensuring the effective circulation and consolidation of new linguistic forms within the global communication space.The article emphasizes that memes function as mechanisms of social identification and linguistic play, reflecting the values, moods, and trends of youth subcultures.The study demonstrates that memes are not merely reflections of linguistic change but active catalysts of language evolution, fostering the emergence of new lexical items, neologisms, and grammatical patterns.The growing influence of Internet culture is shown to shape new norms of speech behavior, where the boundaries between spoken and written, formal and informal language are increasingly blurred.The linguistic transformations driven by digital environments reveal a profound reconfiguration of English lexis, syntax, and pragmatics, as well as a reconsideration of the role of context in communication processes.The conclusion highlights the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon,
This article examines the linguistic, cultural, and pragmatic features of euphemisms in English and Uzbek discourse. Euphemisms—lexical units used to soften or obscure potentially offensive, taboo, or socially sensitive concepts—play a significant role in interpersonal communication and cultural norms. The study provides a comparative analysis of the semantic domains in which euphemisms most frequently occur, including death, illness, bodily functions, age, appearance, and socio-political issues. It also highlights the structural and pragmatic mechanisms of euphemism formation such as metaphor, metonymy, generalization, borrowing, and periphrasis. The findings indicate that while both languages employ euphemisms to maintain politeness and preserve social harmony, English tends toward institutionalized formulaic expressions, whereas Uzbek euphemisms are more culturally loaded and value-oriented. The article concludes that euphemisms reflect national mentality, linguistic worldview, and social etiquette norms.
The expansion and consolidation of the use of state language in scientific and professional domains is one of the priority directions of Kazakhstan’s language policy and national development strategy. In this regard, the adaptation of sectoral terminology, including the medical terminological system, to national linguistic norms is particularly relevant in the process of enhancing the status of the Kazakh language as a language of science. The study of the terminological nature of bone and joint names allows for the identification, structuring and systematization of the fundamental lexical layer of national medical terminology. As a structural core of anatomical terminology, bone and joint names form the basis of medical diagnoses, disease nomenclature, and clinical discourse. Their unification, codification and lexicographical description in the Kazakh language are considered essential steps toward ensuring the full-fledged functioning of the state language in medical education, professional translation and the healthcare system. Despite belonging to the original lexical fund of the Kazakh language and being widely used in ethnolinguistic and phraseological domains, their representation in modern sectoral dictionaries, textbooks and especially in clinical discourse remains inconsistent. The lexical field of bones and joints, shaped by traditional medicine and embedded in the national worldview and value system of the Kazakh people, has a rich historical, linguistic, and cultural foundation. Considering these lexical units as an integral part of the national terminological system constitutes an important scientific and applied task. This article examines the linguistic foundations of the Kazakhization process in the medical terminological system. It substantiates the relevance of studying bone and joint terminology, analyzing the degree of their codification in the Kazakh language, models of term formation, and the current state of their lexicographical representation.
The article analyzes the key theoretical and practical aspects of developing lexical competence in the process of learning Ukrainian as a foreign language. Lexical competence is considered an essential component of foreign language communicative competence, ensuring effective communication in accordance with linguistic and cultural norms. The author explores the peculiarities of vocabulary acquisition at the initial (A1), basic (A2), and threshold (B1) levels of Ukrainian language proficiency. The study examines teaching methods that include systemic-linguistic, conditional-communicative, and communicative types of exercises, as well as interactive methods such as language games, working with texts, and visual learning aids. Through the communicative approach, which involves working with realistic texts, role-playing games, and situational dialogues, the process of immersing foreign learners in the language environment is implemented. Based on the topic “Professions,” both traditional systemic-linguistic and communicative tasks adapted to the needs of foreign learners are proposed. The presented set of exercises is aimed at the gradual development of lexical skills, ranging from familiarization with new words to their active use in speech. It facilitates the development of reading, speaking, listening, and writing skills. These tasks help foreign learners work with texts and create their own. The use of such methods contributes to increasing students’ motivation and enhancing the effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition. Reading or listening to texts about famous Ukrainians fosters linguistic and cultural competence. The described approaches can be applied both in classroom settings and for independent student work. The practical significance of this study lies in the introduction of modern approaches to teaching Ukrainian vocabulary as a foreign language. The proposed approaches and types of exercises can be adapted for studying other topics in a foreign language audience at all proficiency levels. Key words: methods of teaching Ukrainian as a foreign language, lexical competence, language proficiency levels, exercises.
The digital era has brought profound changes to language, particularly visible in the rapid emergence of new lexical units. This article explores how internet communication, social media, and technological innovations influence language change, leading to the creation and diffusion of novel words and expressions. By analyzing examples from contemporary digital discourse, the study highlights the dynamic nature of language and the impact of digital culture on vocabulary expansion. The article also discusses the implications of these changes for language norms and linguistic identity.
The article examines the linguistic features of Gumar Karash, a prominent Kazakh intellectual, public figure, and writer of the early twentieth century. The study identifies lexical units characteristic of his works, including nouns, adjectives, pronouns, regional vocabulary, and borrowed lexicon, and analyzes their semantic and functional properties. These linguistic elements are examined in comparison with the norms of modern Kazakh literary language, Turkic written monuments, and the language of Karash’s contemporaries, which allows for a clarification of the author’s individual stylistic profile. The analysis highlights Karash’s use of borrowed words either in forms close to the original or adapted to Kazakh phonetic patterns, his incorporation of regional speech elements, his command of the classical written tradition, and his application of Turkic language structures. The aim of the study is to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of various lexical layers (nouns, adjectives, pronouns), regional words, and borrowed vocabulary in Karash’s writings, as well as to identify the author’s distinctive linguistic and stylistic features. The research demonstrates the preservation of archaic usages, the frequency of dialectal elements, variation in the phonetic representation of Arabic-Persian borrowings, and Karash’s productive word-formation based on the internal resources of the Kazakh language. The findings show the poet’s contribution to the development of the Kazakh literary language in the early twentieth century and justify the historical motivation of his linguistic choices.
This article investigates the stylistic and linguistic features of Gustave Flaubert’s prose, with a particular focus on lexical contradiction and idiomatic tension. Through a close analysis of key works such as Madame Bovary, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet, the study highlights how Flaubert’s writing systematically juxtaposes opposing semantic registers—romantic idealism and mundane realism, poetic elevation and trivial detail. These lexical contradictions not only enrich narrative depth but also underscore the disillusionment and irony characteristic of Flaubert’s modern vision.The article further explores how Flaubert manipulates idiomatic expressions, either by subtly distorting them or by integrating them ironically into character discourse. This tension between conventional language and authorial critique reveals Flaubert’s ambivalent relationship with linguistic norms and his pursuit of lemot juste. Drawing on French and Francophone critical literature, the study situates Flaubert’s stylistic innovation within broader debates about the literary function of cliché, the evolution of free indirect discourse, and the modern fragmentation of narrative voice.By analyzing the paradoxes at the heart of Flaubert’s style, the article demonstrates how lexical contradiction and idiomatic tension function not only as aesthetic devices but also as means of epistemological inquiry—interrogating language,meaning, and the act of writing itself.
This paper explores how people’s lifestyles are reflected within linguistic anthropocentric paradigms, emphasizing the central role of human experience in shaping language. Anthropocentrism frames language as a dynamic system through which individuals negotiate identities, communicate cultural norms, and establish social hierarchies. Adopting insights from cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis, the study examines the conceptualization processes that encode lifestyle values into everyday speech, metaphors, and broader discursive practices. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which cultural concepts, identity markers, and social structures manifest in lexical choices and communicative strategies. The analysishighlights how metaphors, identity expressions, and discourse patterns serve as windows into a community’s lifestyle priorities and norms, revealing the interplay between language, cognition, and socio-cultural contexts. Finally, the paper underscores thesignificance of recognizing power dynamics, globalization, and cultural exchanges in shaping contemporary representations of lifestyle. By considering human-centric language processes, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how linguistic practices both mirror and mold the lived experiences of individuals and groups, ultimately underscoring the inseparability of language and culture.
Violation of lexical norms in primary school textbooks is a serious problem and negatively affects the development of students' language skills. Also, violations of lexical norms in textbooks weaken children's thinking and communication skills. Therefore, special attention should be paid to the lexical norms of the language when preparing textbooks, and each word and expression should be selected purposefully. Teachers should be provided with methodological support and their language teaching skills should be improved. By taking these steps, correct language habits can be formed at the primary education level and support can be provided for the development of literary language in the future.
The formation of communicative skills in foreign students is impossible without mastering language norms. The study of Russian verbs of motion, including their lexical and grammatical features, is among the most difficult challenges for Iranian audience. Most often, when studying Russian verbs of motion, students get acquainted with the direct and basic meanings of the verbs. The practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language shows that Iranian students often have no idea about figurative meanings of verbs of motion. Moreover, the ability of verbs to combine with different affixes and acquire new lexical and grammatical characteristics complicates the process of mastering their figurative meanings. The fact that verbs of motion are frequently used not only in everyday life but also in business communication makes it necessary to teach figurative meanings in audiences studying Russian as a foreign language. This research paper analyzes the methods of translating figurative meanings of the verbs of motion ‘прийти – приходить’ into Persian. The purpose of this article is to study the figurative meanings of these verbs in Persian as well as the linguistic means by which these meanings are conveyed.
Language is critical in the formation of social ideologies and consumers' perceptions particularly in the beauty sector as advertising discourse constructs the ideologies of femininity and desirability. This study focuses on the lexical variations of beauty advertisements in Pakistani and British English in order to identify how language represents culture, social norms and ideological orientation. The study intends to find the lexical variations in beauty products’ advertisements in both places and to explore pragmatic and interlinguistic functions of lexical variation. Using a qualitative comparative design based in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2001), the study examines twenty real-life beauty advertisements, ten from sources in Pakistani English and ten from sources in British English. Appearance, lexical choice, metaphorical language, evaluative adjectives and pragmatic strategies such as persuasion, modality and direct address are examined. The results show that the commonest literature in Pakistani advertisements favor the lexical items emphasizing fairness, transformationalism and social acceptance using words like fair, bright, radiant, glow, etc., as they are imbued with postcolonial and gendered ideologies. The lexical grids employed in British advertisements were related to individuality, confidence and authenticity which is the reason why British advertisement was characterized by the following words, natural, revive, pure, confidence, etc. Practically, the Pakistani advertisement was premised on promises and emotional appeal but not the British advertisement, which is premised on a subtle empowerment and self-expression. The results have indicated that this linguistic distinction in the beauty advertisements could potentially represent extended socio-cultural ideologies in either one situation or the other. It is an extension to its spheres of applied linguistics and discourse in the sense that language can be used as a tool of marketing and propagating ideologies within the globalized aesthetic consumer culture.
This article examines the pragmatic functions of intensifiers in English and Uzbek media texts, focusing on how lexical and phraseological means are used to strengthen meaning, guide interpretation, and influence audience perception. Intensifiers such as scalar adverbs, extreme adjectives, reduplication, evaluative expressions, and emotionally loaded phraseological units are analyzed within their communicative contexts. The study reveals that English media typically employs controlled, graded forms of intensification to shape evaluative tone subtly, while Uzbek media relies more heavily on expressive and culturally embedded intensifiers to create emotional resonance. By comparing these patterns, the research highlights how linguistic structure, cultural norms, and media strategies determine the pragmatic roles of intensifiers in shaping stance, persuasion, dramatization, and ideological framing.
The present study focuses on Russian-English language interference in the context of strengthening English as the global language of online communication. The relevance of the research stems from the demand in scientific research on the dynamics of language contact between Russian and English in online-communication, as well as on linguistic tendencies in the system of modern Russian language. The research aims to identify and analyze lexical and grammatical aspects in Russian-English language interference in online-communication. The research methods were chosen in accordance with the aim, tasks and nature of the study: continuous sampling, complex analysis of extralinguistic factors of language interference, comparative analysis. The study shows that text-messages and posts in online-communication tend to resemble spoken language, which indicates that Internet users are seeking to close the gap between online and offline communication. It demonstrates that internet users implement foreign language units to dissociate from emotionally loaded utterances as well as to express a specific grammatical or lexical semantic unit not found in their native language. To facilitate sentences one also uses syntax models which are foreign for the native language. The consequences of language interference are rather specific. The studied material shows that interference units are used repeatedly to a large extent. This implies that such language units, on the one hand, tend to be part of the speaker’s individual vocabulary and, on the other hand, they may become linguistic norm. The research argues that Russian has a tendency to move towards more analytic language paradigms, predominantly through involuntary reduction of the case system in the spoken language.
The reception of culture-specific items has recently emerged as a key focus in empirical translation studies. Food is one of the most iconic culture-specific items, as it is regarded as a cultural product across its production, preparation, and consumption. Due to its culturally embedded nature, the quality of food translation depends significantly on how readers decode and respond to the culturally specific elements of foodstuffs and foodways. However, the reception of food translation by readers remains underexplored. This study examines the reception of food translation among Australian English speakers. Twenty-two participants were asked to read translated food-related content and articulate their understanding in semi-structured interviews. The study finds that domestication can lead to cultural misconceptions, while foreignisation may result in problematic lexical choices and stylistic inconsistencies. Nevertheless, readers tend to prefer foreignised translations of exotic food content, expecting only minimal explanation to avoid confusion. While generally tolerant of linguistic errors, readers are particularly sensitive to the precision of lexical choices in translation. This article offers empirical data on readers’ cultural perceptions of culinary norms and their expectations to inform translators’ decision-making in food translation.
In the middle of the summer of 2020, a group of journalists, academics, and self-styled thought leaders signed the now-infamous free speech letter in Harper's Magazine. The letter proclaimed a new epidemic: “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open date and toleration.” Such forces of “illiberalism” were constraining the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society.” To oppose this rising tide of so-called cancel culture, the signatories insisted that all ideas, including bad ideas, deserve “exposure, argument, and persuasion” rather than “trying to silence or wish them away.”1 More recently, a number of universities faced condemnation for tolerating displays of antisemitism. Contrary to the earlier claims of Harper’s that we need more free speech on campus, think pieces and media personalities condemned anti-genocide protests as the wrong kind of speech. Most people broadly accept that free speech is a democratic value and good for democracy. But those signatories of Harper’s letter in the summer of 2020 and the more recent outcry against antisemitism both suggest that campus activists are practicing the value of free speech incorrectly. What is it about the liberal democratic notion of speech that seeks, on the one hand, to encourage a proliferation of some speech while, on the other hand, to limit other speech? What discursive legacy gives the current pejorative heirs of “political correctness”—“cancel culture,” “woke,” and “DEI”—their political salience in maintaining the boundaries of democratic speech? In looking at the demographics for whom these phrases are most valuable, we can glean an anti-egalitarian tendency in their invocations. To “cancel” does not mean “to silence.” Neither recent anti-Trans legislation in the United States nor opposition to queer book displays in public libraries has meaningfully been perceived as attempts to “cancel.” Relatedly, anti-Zionist Jews engaged in opposing the foreign policy situation in Gaza are also not legibly targets of “being canceled” when city councils and boards of trustees institutionally pressure them into silence. Instead, “canceling” seems only to occur when speech derived from traditional hierarchies and sources of authority is challenged. Refusing to host anti-abortion Christians is to “silence” them (Bruce 2021). To refuse an audience to trans-exclusionary feminists is to reject “civilized debate.”2 It is rejecting both the free market of ideas and “standards of moral judgement” to not hear out “an argument” against “same-sex marriage or transgenderism” (Arkes 2018). Tradition is entitled to free speech; challengers are not. The liberal democratic imaginary of speech lends itself to the preservation of hierarchies even while it theoretically insists on the power of critique. Herein, I want to frame respect for traditional authority as constitutive of the liberal democratic imaginary of free speech. The authority owed to speech can be seen by the way certain thinkers in the liberal canon have theorized the role of the listening audience. In tracing the role of speech and listening through Hobbes and Locke, we glean that speech is the entitled prerogative of the sovereign or of citizens constituting the sovereign; listening is the obedience owed to such persons. Listening is a passive position that is not merely a choice but a necessary function without which the speaker cannot exist. Mill, perhaps the patriarch of free speech, pushes the burden of listening further: it is active listening that all speech, even bad speech, is entitled to. For all three thinkers, speech expressed from a position of power is owed a receptive audience. The refusal to listen is tantamount to a disregard for either the sovereign or society at large. In what follows, I contextualize the politics of free speech in the present moment. I juxtapose the progressive and rightwing rhetoric around free speech before clarifying the crux of the issue: that certain rightwing actors demand institutional respect and legitimization of inegalitarian speech, which requires the presence of an audience to hear it. Refusing to listen is thus an act of disrespect and delegitimization. Such a perception of delegitimization follows from the way Western political theory traditionally conceives of the listener: as passive or effete in contrast to the assertive and authoritative role of the speaker. 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This study investigates the thematic structure of Persian imperative clauses within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), focusing on the concept of Theme. In this framework, the Theme is defined as the first element of a clause that is a Participant, a Process, or a Circumstantial adjunct. In Persian, the unmarked Theme in most constructions follows the pattern of declarative clauses; however, the thematic position in imperative clauses has been little studied. To address this, 2,099 imperative clauses were extracted from the Persian Syntactic Dependency Corpus, and half of them were analyzed for thematic structure. It was hypothesized that in some clauses—particularly those with motion verbs—the verb might serve as the unmarked Theme. The findings reveal that more than 90% of Persian imperatives are verb-final. In about 10% of the clauses, a verb with a clausal complement appears initially, with its complement at the end. Among these, only about 0.5% are simple clauses in which the verb itself occurs in the initial position. Overall, the results show that the thematic pattern of Persian imperative clauses conforms to the verb-final typology of the language.IntroductionSystemic Functional Grammar (SFG) conceptualizes grammar as a meaning-oriented system shaped by social use. Within this framework, each clause simultaneously realizes three metafunctions: experiential, interpersonal, and textual. The experiential metafunction is concerned with processes, participants, and circumstances, while the interpersonal metafunction organizes relations between speakers and addressees; and the textual metafunction organizes the clause as a message in discourse.Central to this metafunction is the notion of Theme, which identifies the element chosen as the point from which the clause unfolds. Thematic choices reflect how speakers manage information flow, relate clauses to their context, and guide addressees toward an intended interpretation. As such, the analysis of thematic structure provides insight into the interface between grammar, discourse, and communicative intent.Cross-linguistic research has shown that unmarked thematic patterns often vary according to clause type. In imperative clauses, for example, most languages display subject omission as a conventional strategy. In English, this pattern typically coincides with verb-initial imperatives, where the Process functions as the unmarked Theme. Persian, however, differs typologically as a verb-final language, raising questions about how imperative clauses are thematically organized within its grammatical system.Although word order and thematic structure in the Persian language have been widely discussed for declarative and interrogative clauses, imperative constructions have received comparatively little systematic attention. This gap is noteworthy given the frequency of imperatives and their central role in instructional, persuasive, and interpersonal discourse.Assuming subject omission in imperative clauses as a cross-linguistic common pattern, the present study focuses on how thematic structure is realized in Persian imperatives. It examines whether the unmarked thematic pattern of Persian declarative clauses extends to imperatives and whether the Process can function as the unmarked Theme, as observed in English. By addressing these questions, the study seeks to identify the unmarked thematic structure of Persian imperative clauses through a corpus-based analysis.Research QuestionsThis study addresses the following research questions:Does the unmarked thematic pattern of Persian declarative clauses extend to imperative clauses?Can the Process (verb) function as the unmarked Theme in Persian imperative clauses, as it does in English?Literature ReviewStudies of word order have long been shaped by typological research, notably the work of Greenberg (1963, 1974), Dryer (1992), and Bybee (2002), which seek to explain cross-linguistic ordering patterns in functional terms. Functional approaches treat word order as a flexible means of organizing discourse rather than a purely syntactic constraint, emphasizing its role in information management and contextual interpretation. Research on Persian has largely concentrated on declarative and interrogative clauses, showing that verb-final order is predominant but readily modified for discourse-related purposes (Dabir-Moghaddam & Sharifi, 2005; Rezaei & Tayyeb, 2006; Tabatabaei & Modarresi, 2017). Corpus-based studies of Persian Wh-questions further indicate that unmarked thematic patterns in Persian differ from those in English and vary according to clause type (Mirzaei, 2019). Despite these advances, the thematic structure of imperative clauses in Persian has received little systematic attention.MethodologyThe data for this study were extracted from the Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank (Rasooli, et al., 2013). Using verbal mood annotations, 2,099 imperative clauses were identified. From this dataset, 1,276 clauses were selected sequentially for detailed analysis. Each clause was examined for word order and coded for the presence and position of the Process, Participants, Circumstantial adjuncts, and vocatives. This approach allowed for a quantitative and qualitative analysis of thematic patterns in Persian imperative clauses.ResultsThe analysis shows that the vast majority of Persian imperative clauses are verb-final. Verb-initial structures are rare and largely restricted to clauses containing clausal complements.Figure 1Position of the verb in Persian imperative clausesIn verb-final imperatives, Circumstantial adjuncts are the most frequent unmarked Themes, followed by Participants. Figure 2Ordering of circumstances in relation to direct and indirect objectsVocatives typically occur in the initial position but do not function as Themes. The modal adjunct lotfan, ‘please’ appears frequently at the beginning of clauses, but does not alter the underlying verb-final thematic structure. DiscussionThe findings show that Persian imperative clauses differ fundamentally from their English counterparts in thematic structure. The strong preference for verb-final structures reflects broader typological constraints and suggests that thematic choices in the Persian language are shaped primarily by language-specific syntactic patterns rather than by clause type alone. The prominence of Circumstantial adjuncts as Themes highlights the role of contextual framing in Persian directive discourse.ConclusionThis study demonstrates that the unmarked thematic structure of Persian imperative clauses conforms to the verb-final typology of the language. The Process does not function as the unmarked Theme, even in clauses with motion verbs. Instead, non-verbal experiential elements—particularly Circumstantial adjuncts—are favored in the thematic position. These findings contribute to functional and typological studies of Persian and open new avenues for research on the interaction between thematic structure, modality, and polarity in imperative constructions.
The Mitochondrial Stress, Brain Imaging, and Epigenetics (MiSBIE) study (Kelly et al., 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.tem.2024.08.006) was designed to investigate how mitochondria regulate multisystemic processes involved in resilience and disease vulnerability across the lifespan. Specifically, the study assessed emotional, cognitive, neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune functioning in both healthy individuals (n = 70) and patients with Mitochondrial Disease (MitoD) (n = 40). Participants underwent both home-based assessments reflecting normative physiological conditions, and clinic-based protocols that included fasting and non-fasting baseline measurements as well as exposure to an acute psychological stressor. This dataset and documentation pertain to the MiSBIE Stress Reactivity Subproject, which focuses on responses to the acute stressor. In this arm of the study, we aimed to examine the reactivity and recovery of key stress response systems following a simplified, 5-minute version of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST, cf. Kelly et al., 2024, for details). Study Design and Measurements: Participants provided self-report affect ratings and biofluid samples (blood and saliva) over a 2-hour time period, beginning with a baseline measurement 5 minutes before stress exposure and continuing across seven post-stressor time points (at 5, 10, 30, 60, 90, and 120 minutes). Various affective states (i.e., Stressed, Nervous, Angry, Calm, Relaxed, Energetic, and Worn-out) were assessed on Likert scales. From the biofluids, we analyzed hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis hormones (ACTH and cortisol), and sympathetic-adreno-medullary (SAM) axis catecholamines (norepinephrine and epinephrine), as well as other steroids produced in the mitochondria (testosterone, cortisone, corticosterone, progesterone, DHEA, and DHEAs), and other catecholamines relevant to affect regulation (serotonin and dopamine). Additionally, physiological measures included peripheral body temperature (hand, tongue, and neck) and continuously assessed breathing rate (BR), heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP), and electrodermal activity (EDA). At the time of data upload (Aug 2025), BR, HR, BP and EDA raw data are still undergoing technical pre-processing and will be made available for analysis later. Planned Analyses: Our main objective is to assess whether patients with mitochondrial disease (MitoD) differ from healthy controls in their emotional, hormonal, and physiological stress reactivity. To evaluate this, we will apply longitudinal mixed-effects models to model the time courses of each outcome variable. Therefore, models will include: (i) Fixed effects of interest for evaluating our research questions, i.e., main effects of Time, Group (MitoD vs. Control), and their interaction; (ii) random effects to map the study design, i.e., COVID-19 timing (i.e., pre vs. post pandemic visits), analytical batch (to map technical variance) and participant ID (to account for repeated within-subject measures), and (iii) potential fixed covariates, i.e., sex, BMI, and age. We will construct multiple candidate mixed-effects models that consistently include our hypothesis-relevant fixed effects and design-relevant random effects (i.e., Time x Group + (1|COVID19) + (1|Batch) + (1|Subject)) and vary in their inclusion of additional covariates. Model selection will be based on Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The model with the lowest criterion values will be selected for interpretation. Distributional Properties and Special Considerations: Due to the strictly positive and typically right-skewed nature of hormonal concentration data, we anticipate using log-normal distributions (or log-transformation of outcomes) in our modeling. In addition, many biofluid markers are also subject to technical detection limits, resulting in: (i) Left-censoring (values below the lower limit of detection, LLOD); (ii) Semi-quantitative measurements (values detectable but below the lower limit of quantification, LLOQ); and (iii) Ceiling effects (values above the upper limit of quantification, ULOQ). We plan to address these properties through: (i) Tobit mixed-effects models for left-censored outcomes; (ii) Generalized rank-based models (e.g., aligned rank transform (ART) mixed-effects models) for outcome with relevant proportions of semi-quantitative data; and (iii) more complex censoring-aware modeling approaches that account for the simultaneous presence of three tiers of data quality (LLOD-censored, semi-quantitative, fully quantitative). Model adequacy will be evaluated using standard criteria such as information criteria, posterior predictive checks, and assumption diagnostics. Post-Hoc Analysis and Interpretation: Significant main or interaction effects relevant to our hypotheses will be explored through post hoc comparisons, with correction for multiple testing where appropriate. Figures will visualize the model-derived estimates on the backdrop of individual data trajectories.
Acumular objectes és un símptoma que pot estar present en múltiples patologies com el trastorn psicòtic, la depressió, el deteriorament cognitiu, el consum d’alcohol i el trastorn d’acumulació (TA), entre altres. Tot i ser un problema freqüent, l’acumulació d’objectes és una conducta amb poca representació en la literatura científica. A més, la majoria d’estudis provenen de mostres de voluntaris i són pocs els que provenen de la pràctica clínica habitual. La tesi consta de 2 estudis de pacients extrets de la pràctica clínica habitual. Per valorar la gravetat de l’acumulació s’ha utilitzat l’escala Clutter Image Rating (CIR). Es van incloure en els estudis aquells individus amb una puntuació de l’escala CIR >= 4, que és la que es considera que és clínicament significativa. El primer dels estudis va incloure 243 subjectes i descriu que la conducta d’acumulació sovint passa desapercebuda en les seves etapes inicials, amb un retard mitjà en la seva detecció d’uns 10 anys. Tots els subjectes inclosos en aquest estudi presentaven acumulació greu i múltiples complicacions per acumulació, fins i tot aquells que no complien els criteris diagnòstics per a TA. El TA va ser el diagnòstic més comú en el 48,1% dels pacients. Els pacients en els quals l’acumulació era deguda a patologies diferents del TA, sovint tenien trastorn per consum d’alcohol. El segon estudi consta de 214 individus amb acumulació clínicament significativa (CIR >=4) seguits durant 2 anys. En aquest estudi es van avaluar i comparar tres enfocaments diferents per a la gestió de l’acumulació en pacients no col·laboradors: (1) enfocament de gestió de casos amb personal a temps complet i parcial, (2) enfocament de gestió de casos basat en la col·laboració en xarxa interprofessional i (3) atenció rutinària de serveis socials sense gestió específica d’acumulació dirigida per un treballador social. Es va aconseguir la resolució en el 84,5%, 36,4% i 36,6% dels casos gestionats per les estratègies (1), (2) i (3), respectivament. L’estudi conclou que la gestió de casos amb un equip a temps complet va ser la més efectiva per resoldre l’acumulació severa en pacients no voluntaris, suggerint que centralitzar la gestió de casos en un equip de professionals especialitzats i autònoms podria ser la millor estratègia per resoldre l’acumulació clínicament significativa en pacients no col·laboradors.
Background Intracranial arterial dolichoectasia (IADE) is associated with cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) in populations with ischemic stroke. Whether IADE is related to CSVD markers in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is unclear but might be relevant for CSVD diagnosis and prognosis. We aimed to investigate the prevalence and associations of IADE in patients with ICH. Methods We included consecutive patients with ICH between February 2016 and September 2023. IADE was determined using magnetic resonance angiography based on validated scales assessing vessel diameter, length, and tortuosity. Neuroimaging markers of CSVD were investigated using validated magnetic resonance imaging rating scales. Left ventricular mass (LVM) was determined from transthoracic echocardiography. Multivariable binary logistic regression analyses were used to evaluate associations between IADE and CSVD. Results We included 138 patients with a mean age of 66.7±11.8 years, 58.0% men. IADE was present in 16 patients (11.6%). LVM was greater in patients with IADE (183.0±61.3 g versus 155.3±51.2 g, P =0.04). Patients with ICH and IADE had significantly higher proportions of deep lacunes (43.8% versus 18.0%, P =0.02) and deep cerebral microbleeds (56.3% versus 27.1%, P =0.02) compared with individuals without IADE. IADE was independently associated with deep lacunes (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 3.10 [95% CI, 1.02–9.55], P =0.04), severe periventricular white matter hyperintensities (adjusted OR, 3.29 [95% CI, 1.00–10.94], P =0.04), and deep cerebral microbleeds (adjusted OR, 2.80 [95% CI, 1.04–8.65], P =0.04). Among these CSVD markers, IADE had a high predictive value for deep cerebral microbleeds with a receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.75 (95% CI, 0.66–0.85). There was no statistically significant association between IADE and lobar ICH (adjusted OR, 1.29 [95% CI, 0.36–4.64], P =0.70) or cerebral amyloid angiopathy (adjusted OR, 0.46 [95% CI, 0.13–1.67], P =0.24). Conclusions IADE is found in approximately 12% of patients with ICH and is independently associated with neuroimaging markers of arteriolosclerosis but not cerebral amyloid angiopathy.
Background There is growing interest in the use of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) as a means for quantifying how individuals’ affective experiences fluctuate over time, and how such dynamics relate to mental health outcomes. A plethora of methods exist for precisely quantifying these affect dynamics, but recent work pooling data from multiple studies has suggested that most of the variance in outcome measures of depression, borderline symptoms, and life satisfaction is captured by simple measures, such as the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) of affect ratings over time. Ever-more sophisticated approaches for measuring affect dynamics may offer little value for understanding mental health. Here, we examined a broad array of mental health outcomes and affect dynamic measures within a single cohort to comprehensively evaluate whether EMA-derived measures of affect dynamics are associated with specific psychopathological experiences.Methods 314 adults (97 males; 18–45 years of age) completed 28 days of EMA, which included once-daily ratings on the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)-10 and daily measures of stress, sleep, and alcohol use. We calculated 16 established affect dynamics measures (M, SD, relative SD, mean-squared successive differences, autoregression, intraclass correlation, and Gini coefficient for positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA), as well as emotion network density and PA–NA correlation) in addition to six additional measures derived using dynamic network analyses of participant responses (promiscuity and flexibility for the entire network, PA, and NA). Predictive power was assessed using cross-validated linear regression models predicting 117 outcomes spanning five cross-sectional psychometric questionnaires and EMA-based longitudinal behavioral measures. We compared models that included each complex measure against baseline models using only M or M + SD scores quantifying PA and NA.Results Across all 117 outcomes, no complex affect dynamics measures improved cross?validated R² by more than 5.3 % beyond the M and SD of PA and NA. Conclusion Elaborate measures of affect dynamics, as indexed by the PANAS-10, offer minimal incremental explanatory power in predicting psychopathology beyond basic summary statistics of daily affect. These findings question the added value of increasingly complex measures of affect dynamics for predicting standard psychological and behavioral outcomes.
Arabic is one of the oldest and richest languages in the world. However, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in digitizing this language faces unique challenges, especially in syntax and morphology. This study discusses the problems AI applications face in processing and analyzing Arabic syntax and morphology, focusing on the technical and linguistic challenges that hinder the complete success of these applications. The researcher uses a descriptive-analytical approach, both qualitative and quantitative, which is done by collecting information/samples, selecting respondents, and analyzing information/samples—the complexity of morphology and syntax. Results: Arabic is characterized by a complex morphological and syntactic system, where many rules are not easily aligned with simple computational models. This includes verb conjugation, various sentence structures, and context-dependent pronouns. Diversity of forms and structures: Arabic words have many morphological forms used in different contexts, leading to differences in meaning. This variability makes machine translation and text analysis very challenging. Challenges in processing Arabic sentences: Arabic sentences differ from sentences in other languages regarding word order and pronouns, making it difficult for AI applications to interpret and extract meaning accurately. Limited resources: although there are some tools and libraries for Arabic, they are still limited compared to other languages, such as English, which reduces the effectiveness of models that can be used in applications. Processing methods; use of advanced machine learning techniques: By relying on machine learning techniques such as deep neural networks and big data analysis, models capable of understanding more complex linguistic structures can be developed. In developing large linguistic databases, it is essential to create databases that include a rich syntactic and morphological framework covering the vast diversity of Arabic, helping in model training and improving their accuracy. Research on hybrid approaches: combining traditional AI techniques with rule-based syntactic and morphological methods can help enhance sentence translation and analysis. Improved contextual processing: by developing models that handle texts in a broader context, errors can be reduced due to narrow interpretations or multiple meanings. Therefore, enhancing AI applications in the digitization of Arabic requires special attention to address the linguistic and technical challenges associated with syntax and morphology. Effective solutions can be developed through collaboration between linguists and AI engineers to make these applications more accurate and suitable for various uses in fields such as education, translation, and research.
Fear, particularly the “fear of weight gain” is central to the diagnosis of various eating disorders (EDs), including Anorexia Nervosa (AN), Atypical Anorexia Nervosa (AAN), and Bulimia Nervosa (BN) (Steinglass et al., 2013). Strober’s (2004) theoretical framework proposed that anxiety-related behaviors in AN may reflect an abnormality in fear learning, such that individuals with AN are more prone to learn associations (“fear acquisition” in the present study) than those without AN. This framework is also relevant for AAN and BN, as they share similar fear-related mechanisms that may influence behavior. The primary fear conditioning paradigm consists of four phases known as “acquisition”, “generalization”, “extinction”, and “renewal” (McGregor et al., 2022). Fear acquisition refers to the process of fear learning resulting from the repeated pairing of a stimulus with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), which is referred to as fear acquisition training (Lonsdorf et al., 2017). Fear generalization assesses how fear learning transfers to stimuli with similar perceptual (stimuli that are neutral but perceptually similar to conditional fear stimuli) or conceptual (stimuli that are categorically related to a conditioned stimulus (CS) even though perceptually distinct) properties (Bennett et al., 2015). Fear extinction refers to the reduction of conditioned fear responding as a result of repeated CS presentations in the absence of the US and is a central mechanism of exposure-based treatments (Pittig & LeBeau, 2018). Fear renewal represents the return of fear when an individual encounters contexts or cues outside the setting where extinction learning occurred (Pittig et al., 2018). However, fear conditioning research among ED populations is preliminary. For instance, Lambert (2021) found no significant group differences between AN and control groups during the acquisition phase, but AN groups had greater threat expectancy during the extinction and renewal phases. Thus, fear learning in the context of EDs remains a new area of exploration, with only one study to date examining fear conditioning specifically in ED samples. Given the relevance of anxiety and fear in the EDs and to the application of exposure therapy to EDs, more research is needed. In the present study, we will explore the relations between each phase of fear learning and ED pathology, eating-related fears, and anxiety comorbidities. A smartphone application, the Fear Learning and Anxiety Response (FLARe) app, was used to deliver the fear learning procedure remotely via smartphone. FLARe measured: fear acquisition (i.e., initial pairing of a US with a negative CS), fear extinction (i.e., extinguishing the fear association), fear generalization (i.e., generalization from CS to other similar stimuli), and fear renewal (i.e., reacquisition of fear association after extinction). During fear acquisition, participants viewed 12 presentations each of a large and small circle on a background image of an outdoor scene (Context A). A human scream was used as the US) and paired with 75% of the presentations of one of the two circles serving as the CS). The circle paired with the scream was counterbalanced between participants and became the CS+ (associated with threat) while the circle never paired became the CS− (associated with safety). During generalization, one presentation of the CS+ was paired with the aversive stimulus. Fear extinction consisted of 18 presentations each of the CS+ and CS− on a background image of an indoor living room scene (Context B) with no US. Fear renewal involved four presentations each of the CS+ and CS− on Context A with no US. FLARe includes two primary outcome measures: expectancy and affective ratings. Expectancy ratings capture participants' anticipation of a scream during each trial of the CS presentations, assessing how strongly they expect the aversive event to occur. Affective ratings gauge participants' emotional responses to each stimulus at four time points: before the experiment (baseline), after acquisition (post-acquisition), after extinction (post-extinction), and after renewal (post-renewal). While a wealth of literature has explored the relation between eating and body-related fears, anxiety comorbidities, and eating disorder pathology, the role of fear learning is largely unexplored. Investigating the role of fear learning in eating disorders is crucial for several reasons. First, understanding the correlations between fear learning and ED pathology could provide insights into why those with EDs may be more sensitive to weight-related cues and perceived threats around food. Second, understanding fear learning could clarify links between eating disorders and anxiety disorders, which creates opportunities to identify specific targets for therapeutic intervention. Finally, understanding fear learning could uncover pathways that contribute to the onset of EDs by identifying individuals at risk and intervening before maladaptive eating behaviors become entrenched. The present study will explore how fear learning relates to eating disorder pathology, eating and body-related fears, and anxiety comorbidities, within a clinical eating disorder sample. Thus, the present study represents a step forward in understanding how fear learning mechanisms contribute to the complexities of eating disorders, potentially informing more effective prevention and treatment strategies.
[eng] Introduction Visual complexity plays a crucial role in aesthetic appreciation and has been the focus of extensive research. Traditional studies in this field have relied on objective visual features such as the number of elements and their organizational structure within an image. Mathematical logic-based methods, including Kolmogorov complexity, entropy, and analysis of compressed file sizes, have been used to quantify visual complexity. Although these measures have proven effective in predicting perceived complexity, they fall short of fully capturing aesthetic appreciation, which is also significantly shaped by subjective factors. Content of the research This thesis aims to characterize how individuals construct representations of visual complexity by integrating subjective experience with objective features. We first reviewed cross-cultural studies on aesthetic appreciation to examine the consistency of complexity judgments across contexts. Our findings revealed significant cultural variability in complexity-related aesthetic preferences, highlighting a gap in understanding the underlying influencing factors. We then conducted empirical studies to explore how providing genre information and emotional valence in representational artworks affects visual complexity judgments. Results show that such contextual cues narrow the gap between perceived and depicted complexity. Furthermore, emotional valence significantly modulates perceived complexity: positive valence tends to decrease it, while negative valence increases it. To examine the role of prior experience, participants were exposed to images of low or high complexity before evaluating images of intermediate complexity. This pre-familiarization shifted their complexity judgments, with those previously exposed to low-complexity images rating moderate images as more complex. Conclusion Our findings indicate that genre information, emotional valence, and pre-familiarization not only influence perceived complexity but also clarify preferences and enhance understanding of artworks. Importantly, we show that liking mediates the relationship between complexity and understanding. This thesis broadens the research landscape by providing a more nuanced account of the dynamic interplay between objective and subjective factors in aesthetic perception.