Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God presents a radical departure from the tragic mulatta trope in African American literature by centering a black feminist protagonist, Janie Crawford, who is neither defined by racial ambiguity nor constrained by the moral expectations imposed on middle-class black women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike her literary predecessors, Janie speaks in black vernacular, embraces her sexuality, and ultimately finds agency outside of marriage, despite the novel’s exploration of love and relationships. This paper argues that Hurston’s portrayal of Janie’s three marriages illustrates a pessimistic view of black women’s status within love and marriage, revealing that even true love cannot fully liberate them from patriarchal constraints. Through an analysis of Janie’s relationships, this paper demonstrates how Their Eyes Were Watching God challenges intra-community sexism and critiques the internalization of white patriarchal values by black men. Additionally, it explores Hurston’s literary innovations, particularly her use of black dialect and folklore, as an intervention against white literary standards and a foundation for later black feminist narratives. Hurston’s use of black dialect and folklore functions not merely as a literary gesture, but as a deliberate political and aesthetic intervention. The black vernacular, often seen as non-literary or even “primitive” in dominant white and even black literary standards, becomes in Hurston’s hands a medium of authenticity, resistance, and empowerment. By embedding Janie’s voice within this dialect—particularly through her dialogues with other women and her defiance of male authority—Hurston decentralizes white linguistic norms and reclaims black southern oral traditions as legitimate literary forms.By foregrounding the singularity of Janie’s experience, Hurston’s novel marks a turning point in the representation of black women in literature, paving the way for subsequent authors like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison to further explore Black female autonomy and agency.
We expand the second language (L2) Korean Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank with 5,454 manually annotated sentences. The annotation guidelines are also revised to better align with the UD framework. Using this enhanced treebank, we fine-tune three Korean language models and evaluate their performance on in-domain and out-of-domain L2-Korean datasets. The results show that fine-tuning significantly improves their performance across various metrics, thus highlighting the importance of using well-tailored L2 datasets for fine-tuning first-language-based, general-purpose language models for the morphosyntactic analysis of L2 data.
With the increasing application of automated news writing and digital anchors in journalism, AIGC (Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content) has become highly realistic in form and increasingly conforms to the linguistic norms of traditional news. However, AIGC news often suffers from ambiguous sources and insufficient factual support, leading to a crisis of authenticity. Drawing on Baudrillards theory of simulacra, this paper systematically analyzes the manifestations of the authenticity crisis in AIGC news at the levels of content generation, expressive form, and audience perception, revealing its impact on the ontological logic of news content. The study argues that AIGC drives a shift in news authenticity from a logic of facts to a logic of perception. Its high imitation of traditional news styles in language, layout, and headline structure creates a hyperreal illusion, blurring the standards of authenticity and forcing audiences into a state of non-judgmental reading, thereby deepening the publics cognitive crisis. This paper aims to provide a critical perspective for the development and theoretical study of AIGC news.
BACKGROUND: Emotion dysregulation is a central feature in trauma-associated disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, it remains unclear whether emotion dysregulation is a transdiagnostic phenomenon closely linked to childhood trauma, or if disorder-specific alterations in emotion processing exist. Following a multimethodological approach, we aimed to assess and compare the reactivity to and regulation of emotions between patients with BPD and PTSD, as well as healthy controls, and identify associations with childhood trauma. METHODS: A total of 135 women, 43 healthy controls, 43 with BPD and 49 with PTSD, took part in a multimethodological assessment of emotional reactivity and regulation. Self-report measures were used to assess childhood trauma and emotion dysregulation. Additionally, participants performed a classic emotion regulation (ER) paradigm. Subjective emotional valence ratings and neurophysiological responses (P3 and late positive potential, LPP) were measured in response to negative, positive, and neutral pictures (emotional reactivity) and during active regulation vs. passive viewing of negative pictures (ER). RESULTS: Regarding emotional reactivity, during the experimental paradigm both patient groups reported lower emotional valence after viewing positive or neutral pictures compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, P3 amplitudes in response to neutral pictures were reduced in both patient groups and in response to negative pictures, specifically in patients with PTSD. Regarding ER, while both patient groups self-reported significant disturbances in ER, neither valence ratings nor neurophysiological responses assessed during the ER task (P3, LPP) differed from healthy controls. Across groups, childhood trauma was related to decreased emotional valence ratings on neutral and positive pictures and higher self-reported emotion dysregulation. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with BPD and PTSD exhibited a reduced emotional reactivity in response to positive and neutral information. Specifically, patients with PTSD demonstrated hypo-reactivity to neutral and trauma-unrelated negative stimuli, which might be due to altered attentional resource allocation following trauma. Although patients reported using adaptive ER strategies less frequently in daily life, they effectively implemented them when instructed to, highlighting important clinical and theoretical implications.
The incorporation of real-world contexts into mathematical problems has become increasingly significant on a global scale, which is also reflected in Vietnamese education reform. This emphasis has resulted in the development of different series of textbooks designed to enhance student engagement and foster active learning through real-world problem contexts. In particular, the geometry and measurement strand presents substantial opportunities for the integration of contexts. In this study, we investigate the theoretical foundations of contexts, context familiarity, and context authenticity in mathematics education, with a focus on the plane geometry content in ninth-grade Vietnamese textbooks. The analysis is supported by four illustrative examples drawn from three reformed textbook series, demonstrating how context familiarity and authenticity are represented. A 5-point Likert-type survey of 109 students (72 males and 37 females) revealed that the soccer context was rated as less familiar than the airplane context overall, with no significant difference in familiarity ratings between boys and girls. Both the bike-riding and tripod contexts were rated as moderately authentic but not highly so. The authors also acknowledge several limitations and offers certain recommendations for future research in the area of contextual mathematics education.
Formulaic Networks as Prototypical Categories: Combining the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank with the Ancient Greek WordNet for a Pilot Study on the Iliad was published in Advances in Ancient Greek Linguistics on page 737.
Emotional experiences involve dynamic multisensory perception, yet most EEG research uses unimodal stimuli such as naturalistic scene photographs. Recent research suggests that realistic emotional videos reliably reduce the amplitude of a steady-state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) elicited by a flickering border. Here, we examine the extent to which this video-ssVEP measure compares with the well-established Late Positive Potential (LPP) that is reliably larger for emotional relative to neutral scenes. To address this question, 45 participants viewed 90 matched pairs of realistic videos and scenes. Consistent with prior work, reduced 7-8 Hz ssVEP amplitude was evident during emotional relative to neutral videos. However, this reduction in power was not specific to the driving frequency of 7.5 Hz, and in fact, Fourier transformation analyses limited to 7.5 Hz were not modulated by video content. Still, at the group level, the video-driven reductions in 7-8 Hz power and LPP modulation by scenes produced similarly large valence effects, and both measures strongly correlated with arousal ratings. Consistent with previous research, the scene-LPP was sensitive to specific emotional contents (erotica and gore) somewhat inconsistent arousal ratings. In contrast, the video-driven oscillation modulation did not show this content sensitivity and was better explained by individual arousal ratings per video clip. In sum, these results show that the 7.5 Hz flickering-border paradigm does not index emotional engagement with video stimuli, yet emotional videos do evoke robust decreases in 3-10 Hz oscillatory power that is somewhat distinct from emotional modulation of the scene-evoked LPP. Matched emotional video and scenes evoke large EEG responses compared with neutral content within-participant. Our findings align with previous research indicating that video modulation of power around the evoked 7.5 Hz ssVEP frequency (7-8 Hz) serves as a reliable emotional measure. However, further analyses reveal that this effect is attributable to a general decrease in power across the 3-10 Hz frequency range.
Decision confidence is a prototypical metacognitive representation that is thought to approximate the probability that a decision is correct. The perception of being correct has also been associated with affective valence such that being correct feels more positive and being mistaken more negative. This suggests that, similarly to confidence, affective valence reflects the probability that a decision is correct. However, both fields of research have seen very little interaction. Here, we test if affect, similarly to confidence reflects probability that a decision is correct in two perceptual decision-making experiments where we compare the relationships of theoretically relevant variables (e.g. evidence, accuracy, and expectancy) with both confidence and affect ratings. The findings indicate that confidence and affect ratings are similarly sensitive to changes in accuracy, evidence, and expectancy, indicating that both track the subjective probability that a decision is correct. We identify various mechanisms that can explain these results. We also envision future research for clarifying the role of cognitive and affective aspects of metacognition relying on deeper integration of the respective research fields.
Contemporary Written Fuṣḥā (also known as Modern Standard Arabic, MSA) is often perceived as only the lexically modernized form of classical Arabic. However, significant examples of syntactic evolutions are not lacking (amongst others, the conditional systems). To show the evolution of Contemporary Written Fuṣḥā, mainly in Arabic newspapers, this article will look at some cases of so-called “new” constructions, some of them are even ancient but perceived as impossible and faulty to the canons of the classical language. From surveys made on the Internet, in newspapers, and in novels written in Contemporary Written Fuṣḥā, this article shows the existence of other forms of negation in the future than that of lan + subjunctive. It demonstrates that the so-called MSA grammar books are, once again, descriptively inadequate when facing the reality of the texts. While arguing for a renewal of the teaching of MSA grammar, this article shows that these forms are much older than they appear and proposes assumptions to analyze the conditions for their emergence. More specifically, following Larcher and drawing on the principle of non-synonymy, the article proposes that the coexistence of several forms of negation in future contexts signals a probable reorganization of the negation system where, on logical and pragmatic bases, the difference would be made between a descriptive negation on one hand and a modal negation (= denial) on the other. Then the article addresses the combinations involving sawfa where the latter is preposed to sa-yafʿalu, therefore already a future form, as well as to faʿala, so a past while sawfa is supposed to be a marker of future intervening only before a muḍāriʿ. These evolutions, perceived by the supporters of a frozen Arabic language and other deaf and blind guardians of the language as only faults, are nevertheless meaningful, showing the strength of pragmatics over mere reference to a grammatical norm that is quite incapable of so many nuances.
Lipiku su 15. ožujka 2025.dodijeljene Nagrade "Dr.Ivan Šreter" za najbolju novu hrvatsku riječ u 2024.Natječaj je proveo časopis Jezik i od 420 riječi koje su prošle godine pristigle na natječaj, izabrane su tri.Izbor nije bio lagan, mnogo je riječi, mnogo članova povjerenstva (predsjednica Sanda Ham, članovi Igor Čatić, Zvonimir Jakobović, Hrvoje Hitrec, Marko Kovačić, Nataša Bašić, Mario Grčević, Veno Volenec, Mile Mamić i Ljubica Josić) pa je ovaj put bilo potrebno birati riječi u tri kruga.Svečanost dodjele bila je dobro posjećena, a radost je što su bili brojni mladi -na njima je budućnost hrvatskoga jezika.Domaćin je dodjele, već godinama, Toplice Lipik -Specijalna bolnica za medicinsku rehabilitaciju.Okupljenima su se obratili pozdravnim govorima Ivan Žilić, predstavnik Toplica Lipik, domaćina svečanosti, gradonačelnik Vinko Kasana i predsjednik Šreterove zaklade Damir Foretić.Program je vodila Ljubica Josić, članica Povjerenstva.U raskošnoj dvorani Quella uz brojne goste iz Osijeka i Zagreba, pobjednicima su dodijeljene nagrade -diplome, kipići Tonka Fabrisa i nemale novčane nagrade koje daruje Zaklada "Dr.Ivan Šreter": 600 eura prvoj riječi, 400 eura drugoj i 200 eura trećoj.Pozivamo čitatelje da šalju svoje prijedloge na jezik.hr@gmail.com.Može se poslati najviše pet prijedloga, prednost imaju zamjene za nepotrebne anglizme, a riječ ne smije biti potvrđena u upotrebi prije nego što je poslana na natječaj.Dobro bi bilo upisati riječ, koju se želi poslati, u Googleovu tražilicu da se provjeri je li već potvrđena.Povjerenstvo provjerava u hrvatskim rječnicima. Okrugli stol o hrvatskom jezikuOdržan je i okrugli stol o hrvatskom jeziku uz tri kraća predavanja.Prava je zanimljivost predavanje prof.Čatića, ne samo zbog teme koju je odabrao -o povijesnim dobima i njihovim nazivima (od kamenoga do plastičnoga), nego jer je prof.Čatić najdugovječniji suradnik Šreterova natječaja, s nama je već 19 godina.Uvijek je u U simplified structures.Moreover, there is a growing tendency to eliminate suffixes altogether, favoring communication through isolated monosyllabic units.Such developments ultimately contribute to the erosion of the structural integrity of the language system.While older generations generally maintained a clear distinction between slang and standard language, younger speakers increasingly lack proficiency in the standard variety.Consequently, slang is gradually establishing itself as a dominant mode of communication, thereby accelerating the degradation of linguistic norms.
The increasing availability of cross-linguistic databases dedicated to documenting morphosyntactic, lexical and phonological features has proliferated the use of such data for studies on language evolution and human history. However, most of these databases were not designed to ensure independence of features, such that it is not valid to jointly use all their features in large-scale statistical analyses assuming independence of inputs. Here, we curate published data from five large linguistic databases to generate two global-scale cross-linguistic datasets: GBI (from the Grambank dataset), and TLI (using inputs from the World Atlas of Language Structures, AUTOTYP, PHOIBLE and Lexibank). The datasets minimize logical dependencies of features and forms of strong statistical dependencies that go beyond phylogenetic and geographical signal. They are also made available in densified form, reducing the proportion of missing data. We document our curation principles and workflows to ensure reusability of this framework with other inputs or thresholds of independence. Our curation steps on both datasets reveal robust and comparable global patterns of structural linguistic diversity.
Background and aims: Despite a previously reported connection between compulsive sexual behaviors (CSB), such as problematic pornography use, and heightened cue-reactivity, empirical evidence of the alteration of processes responsible for increased salience attribution to erotic cues remains sparse. Drawing on similarities with addiction models, this study explores the neuronal mechanisms of CSB through the use of appetitive conditioning and extinction with erotic and monetary rewards. Methods: Thirty-two heterosexual males struggling with CSB (age: 28.9 ± 7.1), and 31 healthy matched participants (age: 27.8 ± 5.6) underwent active appetitive conditioning and extinction tasks in fMRI. The effects of conditioning and extinction towards cues of erotic and monetary rewards were measured via self-assessment (valence and arousal rating towards cues), behavior (reaction times), and brain reactivity. Results: In conditioning, subjective ratings increased, and reaction times were faster for both erotic and monetary cues among participants with CSB, along with altered activity in ventral striatum (vStr), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and anterior orbitofrontal cortex (aOFC). In extinction, self-assessment ratings remained elevated in the CSB group for both cues in a non-reward-specific fashion, accompanied by altered activity of dACC and vStr. Discussion and conclusions: These findings suggest enhanced incentive salience attribution to conditioned cues, highlighting a generalized motivational and value-related transfer from rewards to the cues in participants with CSB. Additionally, despite the absence of rewards, the persistence of arousal and valence towards cues underscored the maladaptive extinction process. These insights advance the understanding of CSB's neurobiological underpinnings and its relation to addiction frameworks.
Anxiety is a prevalent and debilitating phenomenon. Although the DSM-5 offers useful classification guidelines, overlapping symptoms across categories of anxiety highlight the need for transdiagnostic approaches. Threat processing, closely linked to anxiety, offers a promising pathway for such exploration. Threat processing involves various neurocognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms, including visual cortical responses, physiological reactivity, and affective ratings. This study examined whether different anxiety subtypes could be identified based on individual differences in threat processing. A total of 211 undergraduate students were recruited, with 198 included in the analyses. Threat-related measures included attentional bias competition indices derived from Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials in the visual cortex, heart rate, skin conductance responses, and arousal/valence ratings. Anxiety-related measures included self-report questionnaires and momentary assessments using experience sampling methods. Latent profile analysis revealed three distinct profiles: Profile 1 (n=114; 58%) was labelled as “low psychophysiological but high psychological affective reactivity”, Profile 2 (n=59; 30%) as “low psychophysiological affective reactivity”, and Profile 3 (n=25; 13%) as “high psychophysiological affective arousal”. However, these different threat-related profiles did not reflect major differences in the anxiety-related measures, either in questionnaires or momentary assessments. These findings offer preliminary insight into distinct threat-processing profiles in anxiety and highlight the need for further research, especially with larger samples and more variance in anxiety.
Abstract Previous research on syntactic complexity is primarily focused on the synchronic distribution of clausal and phrasal features and the diachronic shift from clausal elaboration to phrasal compression. However, the interrelationship between clause complexity and phrase complexity remains unexplored. This study investigated syntactic complexity at different linguistic levels across three disciplinary groups (Social Sciences, Humanities and Natural Sciences) using a corpus of research article abstracts. Sentence complexity was measured by the number of clauses per sentence, clause complexity by the number of clausal constituents per clause, and nominal group (NG) complexity by the number of words per NG. The results show that: (1) sentences are the least complex in Natural Science (NS) texts; (2) clauses are also the least complex in NS, despite having the highest average number of clausal constituents; (3) NGs are the most complex in NS texts. Furthermore, the study found that NG complexity could be more accurately measured by the number of premodifiers of the head noun (HN) of the NG. These findings have important implications for instructing English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in discipline-specific academic writing.
The present study extends recent work on Universal Dependencies annotations for secondlanguage (L2) Korean by introducing a semiautomated framework that identifies morphosyntactic constructions from XPOS sequences and aligns those constructions with corresponding UPOS categories.We also broaden the existing L2-Korean corpus by annotating 2,998 new sentences from argumentative essays.To evaluate the impact of XPOS-UPOS alignments, we fine-tune L2-Korean morphosyntactic analysis models on datasets both with and without these alignments, using two NLP toolkits.Our results indicate that the aligned dataset not only improves consistency across annotation layers but also enhances morphosyntactic tagging and dependency-parsing accuracy, particularly in cases of limited annotated data.
This study investigated the neurophysiological and affective responses elicited by nature-inspired indoor design elements, including curvilinear forms (CL), nature views (N), and wooden interiors (W), in a virtual environment, and their effects on cognitive performance. Thirty-six participants experienced one control and three experimental conditions in a within-subject design. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record neural activity, relaxation and valence ratings assessed affective states, and standardized tasks measured cognitive performance. The W condition elicited EEG patterns indicative of relaxed attentional engagement, including increased alpha-to-theta (ATR) and alpha-to-beta (ABR) ratios, and a decreased theta-to-beta (TBR) ratio. These neural patterns were associated with higher self-reported relaxation and positive affect, and with enhanced cognitive performance relative to the control condition. In contrast, the CL and N conditions did not improve cognitive performance, and the N condition showed elevated physiological arousal, likely due to heightened visual stimulation. Regression analysis identified ATR and relaxation as significant predictors of cognitive performance, emphasizing the role of emotional stability and neural balance in supporting task engagement. Overall, the findings highlight the potential of nature-inspired design to foster a synergy between psychological relaxation and cognitive attention, though further research is needed across diverse spatial typologies to isolate specific design parameters.
We compare the performance of a transition-based parser in regards to different annotation schemes. We pro-pose to convert some specific syntactic constructions observed in the universal dependency treebanks into a so-called more standard representation and to evaluate parsing performances over all the languages of the project. We show that the ``standard'' constructions do not lead systematically to better parsing performance and that the scores vary considerably according to the languages.
A collection of trained models for syntactic parsing of Latin. The models have been trained using UDPipe 1.2 (Straka et al., 2016) and Stanza (Qi et al., 2020) on the harmonized version of the Latin treebanks available in Universal Dependencies (UD) version 2.10, as described in Gamba and Zeman (2023a,b).
Chinese word segmentation is a foundational task in natural language processing (NLP), with far-reaching effects on syntactic analysis. Unlike alphabetic languages like English, Chinese lacks explicit word boundaries, making segmentation both necessary and inherently ambiguous. This study highlights the intricate relationship between word segmentation and syntactic parsing, providing a clearer understanding of how different segmentation strategies shape dependency structures in Chinese. Focusing on the Chinese GSD treebank, we analyze multiple word boundary schemes, each reflecting distinct linguistic and computational assumptions, and examine how they influence the resulting syntactic structures. To support detailed comparison, we introduce an interactive web-based visualization tool that displays parsing outcomes across segmentation methods.
The article presents computerized Latin dialectology, a method developed by the Budapest school based on the work of József Herman. It analyses “errors” in Latin inscriptions from the Imperial period to study regional varieties of Latin. The main tool is the LLDB database (lldb.elte.hu/en). The article also traces the history of research on provincial Latin and illustrates methodological advances through practical examples.
The study of linguistic variation within the administrative structures of small-town America reveals a complex intersection between language, social identity, and institutional behavior. When approaching the linguistic environment of these communities from a purely academic perspective, without relying on personal immersion narratives or experiential accounts, one must begin with the foundational premise that English in the United States is profoundly regionalized. This regionalization is not a superficial matter of accent or vocabulary; it is a system of deeply embedded linguistic norms that shape how communication occurs, how authority is interpreted, and how institutional legitimacy is constructed. My interest as a researcher lies not in documenting local flavor or collecting curiosities from rural life but in understanding the mechanisms by which language operates as a structural force within governance. This requires an examination of sociolinguistic corpora, regional dialect research, institutional discourse studies, and the extensive literature on American dialect geography that has accumulated since the mid-twentieth century.
Abstract Combining research in developmental sociolinguistics and L1 acquisition, this study explores how caregivers may orient children towards (socio)linguistic norms through parental feedback. Based on self-recorded family interactions in the Belgian-Dutch setting, it applies a top-down quantitative perspective to examine feedback on non-conventional versus non-standard language use, alongside a bottom-up qualitative perspective highlighting factors that influence parental feedback occurrence. Findings reveal limited feedback on children’s non-standard language use, with participation frameworks and multiactivity contexts emerging as possible constraints. The combined approach also foregrounds possible tensions between researcher categorisations and participants’ perspectives. Overall, this study offers a first step in bridging research on parental feedback and sociolinguistic variation, identifying patterns that merit further investigation.
This study examined the influence of social top-down information on eye-gaze behaviour and valence perception in individuals with higher and lower autistic traits. Data from 57 participants (37 identified as female, 18 as male, 2 as non-binary; M = 21.33 years, SD = 4.35) were analysed. Participants rated the valence of facial expressions depicting different intensities of emotions across three contexts while an eye-tracker recorded their gaze behaviour. In the no-context condition, participants observed neutral, joyful and angry faces without any background context; in the positive-context, they viewed neutral and joyful faces while imagining a dream-job offer scenario; and in the negative-context, they viewed neutral and angry faces while imagining a dream-job rejection scenario. Key findings included: (1) both the higher and lower autistic traits groups fixated longer on the eyes than the mouth across valence categories and contexts, with largest differences observed in the no-context condition, (2) the higher autistic traits group showed similar or longer eye fixations than the lower autistic traits group, with greater variability, and (3) the lower autistic traits group exhibited context-sensitive valence ratings, perceiving faces as more negative in positive and negative contexts than in no-context, whereas the higher autistic traits group showed no significant context effects. These results suggest that while both groups integrate prior information in sensory-driven processes like gaze behaviour, context-sensitive reflective judgments are more evident in individuals with lower autistic traits, highlighting trait-linked differences in predictive processing in social cognition.
Kyrgyz, a Turkic language with over 4.4 million speakers concentrated primarily in Kyrgyzstan and adjacent regions of Central Asia, faces a significant disparity in computational linguistic resources compared to languages with similar or even smaller speaker populations. Despite its status as a government language and cultural cornerstone, Kyrgyz remains underrepresented in the digital linguistic landscape. This investigation examines the application of the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework – an annotation system engineered to facilitate cross-linguistic syntactic comparability – to the structural complexities of Kyrgyz. We endeavor to identify optimal annotation strategies that faithfully represent Kyrgyz-specific syntactic phenomena while adhering to the principled constraints of the UD paradigm. The establishment of standardized syntactic resources for Kyrgyz carries dual significance: it advances linguistic typology by incorporating data from an underrepresented language family, while simultaneously laying groundwork for practical natural language processing applications crucial for Kyrgyz speakers’ participation in the digital sphere. Our methodological approach encompasses rigorous analysis of nascent Kyrgyz treebanks, comparative evaluation of annotation strategies employed for genetically related Turkic languages, and systematic examination of four fundamental annotation challenges: the representation of Kyrgyz’s defective copula system, the classification of multifunctional grammatical particles, the annotation of constructions with implicit heads, and the demarcation between inflectional and derivational morphology in this highly agglutinative language. Our analysis reveals that achieving the dual objectives of linguistic fidelity and cross-linguistic consistency necessitates judicious adaptation of UD guidelines to accommodate Kyrgyz-specific structures. We advance unified annotation solutions that preserve the integrity of Kyrgyz linguistic patterns while facilitating meaningful cross-linguistic comparison. This research not only contributes substantively to computational resources for Kyrgyz but also establishes annotation principles with broader applicability to typologically similar agglutinative languages. The practical implications extend to enhanced guidelines for Kyrgyz treebank development, which will consequently improve parser accuracy and catalyze the development of essential language technology tools for Kyrgyz speakers.
The article systematizes and comprehensively analyzes the phenomena of the phonetic level of the Internet vocabulary of the modern Kazakh language. Instagram, Facebook, social networks (Threads, Instagram, Facebook), and instant messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram), which have been actively used in recent years, were chosen as the object of the study. The research used methods of observation, generalization, comparative and descriptive analysis. As a result, it is revealed that new forms of linguistic usage are being formed in the Internet space, characterized by a mixture of elements of spoken and written speech. At the phonetic level, phenomena such as sound compression of words and, conversely, the repetition of graphemes to convey emotions in writing are widespread. The active use of Latin graphics and the development of foreign-language sounds indicate a new stage of phonetic adaptation in the Kazakh-speaking Internet space. The article provides specific examples of these phenomena, reveals their causes and impact on the modern linguistic norm and writing culture. According to the results of the study, it was found that the phonetic features of the Internet vocabulary reflect the natural development and adaptability of the Kazakh language.
This manuscript proposes the S M Nazmuz Sakib Dependency-Focus Principle for Bengali sentence structure and introduces a derived scalar quantity, the Sakib constant, defined over dependency treebanks. Informally, the principle states that in attested Bengali usage, core arguments (subjects and objects) cluster closer to the verbal head than peripheral modifiers (adverbials and clausal adjuncts), and that the ratio between these average distances is numerically stable across corpora. Using real statistics from the UD Bengali-BRU treebank and the Bengali section of the Bengali-Magahi PUD treebank, we define the Sakib constant K Sakib as the ratio between average dependency lengths of core versus peripheral relations, and compute its value for UD Bengali-BRU. Ten figures based on genuine counts and averages illustrate tense and case distributions, relation frequencies, and core versus non-core dependency lengths for Bengali and, for comparison, Magahi. The proposal is presented as a precise hypothesis, mathematically well-defined and empirically grounded in existing treebank data, but still requiring broader testing for confirmation and cross-linguistic generalisation.
This study investigates differences in artificial intelligence (AI) literacy and adoption between engineering students and faculty in a Middle Eastern higher-education institution. Parallel surveys were administered to undergraduate engineering students (N = 73) and faculty members (N = 20), each rating their familiarity with 20 AI tools covering learning, coding, productivity, and engineering applications. An AI Literacy Index was computed by assigning numerical values to familiarity ratings (A = 2, B = 1, C = 0) and normalizing the total to a 0–1 scale. Results from Welch’s t-test indicated that students demonstrated significantly higher literacy than faculty (0.454 vs. 0.356, p ≈ 0.042). Students also reported strong AI adoption for academic tasks (71.2%) and high perceived learning benefits (83.6%). Conversely, faculty expressed substantial concern about student over-reliance on AI (90%) while indicating readiness for professional development through AI training workshops (75%) and reporting assessment redesign efforts (75%). Overall, the findings highlight a meaningful literacy and perception gap with implications for engineering pedagogy, curriculum development, and assessment practices. Recommendations are provided to support the alignment of student and faculty AI competencies within engineering programs.
Abstract This study investigates the relationship between literature and poetry reading frequency and participants’ ratings of metaphors on key features: quality, aptness, familiarity, and comprehensibility. Using a set of Serbian poetic metaphors, we explored two main questions: how reading habits correlate with metaphor feature ratings, and whether the type of reading material (i.e., literature vs poetry) influences sensitivity to these features. The sample consisted of 140 native Serbian-speaking students from varied academic disciplines. Participants rated metaphors based on reading frequency (literature and poetry) using a 7-point Likert scale. Analysis showed that frequent readers generally gave higher overall metaphor ratings than infrequent readers, with significant differences noted particularly in familiarity and comprehensibility. Specifically, familiarity ratings yielded the most substantial differences between infrequent and frequent readers, which can indicate the influence of reading experience on the perceived recognition and understanding of metaphors. Aptness and quality ratings showed no significant differences, which suggests that familiarity and comprehensibility are more sensitive to variations in reading habits.
The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, Revised (RMET-R) is a widely used measure that purports to assess theory of mind (ToM). However, the psychometric properties of the RMET-R have been called into question. To examine a wider array of the RMET-R's psychometric properties, as compared to prior studies, we recruited undergraduate students ( N = 640; 65.31 % women; M age = 20.33; SD = 4.30) from three public universities. Participants completed the RMET-R, a novel word choice familiarity task, a novel task rating each response option's description of the picture, along with emotional valence and arousal, and two self-report cognitive empathy measures. Results indicated a small positive correlation with one self-report measure of cognitive empathy, and acceptable internal consistency. Performance was related to prior familiarity of words used on the test, and a quarter of the trials had a foil word rated similarly as the target word in describing picture. Item-level analysis found that valence ratings correlated significantly with accuracy, even on the least accurate items. Results corroborate and expand published concerns about the RMET-R's psychometric properties. We propose changes to the measure, including updated stimuli and structural improvements.
In the 20th century, the concept of “compliance” gained prominence in academic publications, particularly within the realms of medical and financial-economic discourse. Recently, its application has extended to fields such as pedagogy, psychology, and philology. This concept encompasses two primary substantive dimensions: the first involves the establishment of requirements aligned with existing norms and standards, while the second pertains to the genuine and conscientious adherence to these stipulations. Contemporary sociological studies are beginning to explore the willingness of certain religious adherents to fulfill tax obligations, necessitating a theoretical framework for understanding these practices within the context of academic religious studies. Historically, the term “compliance” — denoting agreement, indulgence, voluntary concession, and self-restraint — originated in English from Latin ecclesiastical terminology. It encapsulated specific norms governing interreligious and interfaith relations that evolved within Christian culture, particularly during the Reformation, a period marked by significant conflict. The imperative to achieve consensus with dissenters for the collective civil good prompted the formulation of new legal and literary standards, addressing challenges such as the transformation of various “religion names” and “confessional names,” wherein derogatory connotations were supplanted by neutral or respectfully affirming alternatives. This analysis draws upon resources from dictionaries, encyclopedias, the linguistic database “National Corpus of the Russian Language,” and additional scholarly sources.
Frequencies of occurrence for phrase and function labels in the PS treebank.
The advent of ChatGPT has profoundly reshaped scientific research practices, particularly in academic writing, where non-native English-speakers (NNES) historically face linguistic barriers. This study investigates whether ChatGPT mitigates these barriers and fosters equity by analyzing lexical complexity shifts across 2.8 million articles from OpenAlex (2020-2024). Using the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD) to quantify vocabulary sophistication and a difference-in-differences (DID) design to identify causal effects, we demonstrate that ChatGPT significantly enhances lexical complexity in NNES-authored abstracts, even after controlling for article-level controls, authorship patterns, and venue norms. Notably, the impact is most pronounced in preprint papers, technology- and biology-related fields and lower-tier journals. These findings provide causal evidence that ChatGPT reduces linguistic disparities and promotes equity in global academia.
This paper examines the pitfalls of word-for-word translation in learning Italian as a second language (L2). Drawing on translation studies and language pedagogy, it highlights how literal translations often distort meaning by ignoring cultural, semantic, and pragmatic complexities. Contrary to the belief that direct translation ensures accuracy, this approach frequently leads to awkward or misleading results, e.g., rendering “over easy eggs” as uova super facilmente instead of uova fritte. Italian-specific structures and conventions, such as the formal Lei or idioms like in bocca al lupo, illustrate the deep cultural embedding of language. Three key factors contribute to word-for-word mistranslation: structural differences between Italian and English, false cognates that create semantic confusion, and cultural-pragmatic gaps in idioms and social norms. High-stakes fields like marketing, literature, and international relations underscore the risks of misinterpretation. Advocating a communicative, functional approach, this paper emphasizes the need for cultural literacy, awareness of traditions, idioms, and symbols. It outlines classroom strategies such as contrastive analysis, peer review, and selective technology use. Through examples and case studies, it argues that translation is a process of cultural mediation rather than mechanical substitution. Educators, learners, and professionals must go beyond one-to-one lexical correspondence to foster true intercultural communication. Lost in Translation: Le insidie del trasferimento linguistico parola per parola Questo articolo analizza le insidie della traduzione parola per parola nell’apprendimento dell’italiano come lingua seconda (L2). Basandosi su studi di traduzione e pedagogia linguistica, evidenzia come le traduzioni letterali spesso distorcano il significato, ignorando complessità culturali, semantiche e pragmatiche. Contrariamente alla convinzione che la traduzione diretta garantisca accuratezza, questo approccio porta frequentemente a risultati imprecisi o innaturali, ad esempio, tradurre over easy eggs come uova super facilmente invece di uova fritte. Strutture e convenzioni italiane, come il Lei formale o espressioni idiomatiche come in bocca al lupo, dimostrano il forte radicamento culturale della lingua. Tre fattori principali contribuiscono agli errori di traduzione letterale: le differenze strutturali tra italiano e inglese, i falsi amici che generano confusione semantica e le discrepanze culturali e pragmatiche negli idiomi e nelle norme sociali. Settori di alto profilo come il marketing, la letteratura e le relazioni internazionali mettono in luce i rischi di un’interpretazione errata. Sostenendo un approccio comunicativo e funzionale, questo studio sottolinea l'importanza della competenza culturale, la consapevolezza di tradizioni, espressioni idiomatiche e simboli culturali. Presenta strategie didattiche come l’analisi contrastiva, la revisione tra pari e l’uso selettivo della tecnologia. Attraverso esempi e casi di studio, dimostra che la traduzione è un atto di mediazione culturale, non una semplice sostituzione meccanica. Docenti, studenti e professionisti devono superare la corrispondenza lessicale uno-a-uno per promuovere una comunicazione interculturale autentica.
Language plays a crucial role in intercultural communication, especially when it comes to nationally marked vocabulary and phraseology. These linguistic elements often contain meanings that are difficult to fully translate, yet they provide valuable insights into a nation’s cultural and historical background. Like a mirror, they reflect the history, settlement, and development of a people, making them an essential area of study not only for linguists but also for historians, ethnographers, and geographers. Idioms, as a fundamental part of any language, also serve as a rich repository of cultural heritage, encapsulating centuries of traditions and ways of life. Their study helps deepen our understanding of both language and culture. The concept of "realities"—words that convey tangible and culturally specific elements—emerged in linguistic discussions around the 1950s. These terms capture unique aspects of a nation’s material culture, historical events, governmental institutions, folklore figures, and mythological beings. Similarly, non-equivalent words refer to concepts that do not exist in other languages and therefore lack direct translations. These words highlight the uniqueness of each culture’s worldview and emphasize the importance of studying language as a bridge to understanding different societies and their distinct identities.
Semantic analysis is a fundamental aspect of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that focuses on understanding the meaning of words and their relationships. This chapter explores key concepts in semantics, including semantic grammar, lexical semantics, lexemes, and word senses. Various word relationships, such as hyponymy, homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, and antonym, are examined to illustrate their role in language comprehension. WordNet, a lexical database, is discussed for its application in word similarity and semantic analysis. Additionally, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), a crucial technique for resolving word meaning in different contexts, is explored through dictionary-based approaches. The significance of word similarity measures and their impact on NLP tasks like information retrieval is also highlighted. By analyzing these fundamental semantic concepts, this study provides insights into improving machine understanding of natural language, enhancing applications such as search engines, text classification, and automated language translation.
Researchers often assess processes underlying human perception by measuring participants’ judgements of image stimuli. However, traditional methods for quantifying subjective judgements, such as Likert scales, sliding scales, and pairwise comparisons, are vulnerable to biases or demand extensive time and resources from researchers and participants. The present study compared the efficiency, reliability, and validity of these established methods against the Fast Image Rating Experiment (FIRE), our force-choice-based paradigm for assessing perceptions of visual stimuli. When used to rate image preference and naturalness, the FIRE was five times faster than established methods, highly reliable, and valid. FIRE achieved high reliability in less than half the time required to reach equivalent reliability with the Likert or sliding scale, which could save researchers thousands of dollars. The scalability and cost-effectiveness of the FIRE make it a valuable resource for supporting large-scale behavioral science.
In recent years, syntactic and semantic analysis tools have become increasingly important in various subfields of Natural Language Processing (NLP). These tools enable automatic parsing of large-scale sentences in language corpora, allowing researchers to uncover syntactic structures and statistical regularities of a given language. This study focuses on the development and evaluation of syntactic parsing models for the Uzbek language, employing two widely used approaches: constituency parsing and dependency parsing. For constituency parsing, a rule-based system was developed to identify noun and verb phrases along with their internal constituents. For dependency parsing, a set of hand-crafted linguistic rules was created and applied to syntactically analyze simple Uzbek sentences. As a result of this work, a dependency-based syntactic treebank for Uzbek-Named UzTreebank was constructed. The treebank includes 20,000 automatically parsed simple sentences, of which 10,000 were manually annotated. Additionally, 36 syntactic templates of simple sentences were identified, and 50 linguistic rules were formalized and integrated into the system. The suboptimal performance of the system at its current stage is primarily attributed to the absence of hybrid modeling approaches and the limited size of the training corpus. The paper presents an overview of the rule-based architecture, parsing results, and the current stage of syntactic resource development for the Uzbek language.
The purpose of the article is to describe the concept “acquaintance” to improve the people’s understanding of semiotic means of meeting people in Ukraine, Great Britain and the USA spreading them to the social norms of communication and international collaboration. The research engages the comparative analysis of people’s verbal or nonverbal means of meeting people in Ukraine, Great Britain and the USA, lexical semantics, interpretation, conceptual analysis which reveal the cultural stereotypes of different nations. People contact due to their origin, likings, knowledge of conventions and social situations. Verbal and nonverbal semiotics in implied senses can orient, prevent, provoke or stimulate acquaintance. The fatic function (of meeting people comprises cognitive, emotional and social (conventional) information. Communication performs various functions in life disclosing the implied senses of symbols and sayings: security, warning, calling, agreeing or refusing, relaxing or straining, pleasing or displeasing, attracting or repulsing, etc. Verbal and nonverbal signals can stimulate or provoke acquaintance, they can be deceiving or misunderstood. Observing meeting traditions in Ukraine, GB and USA one can notice the similar requirements of good disposition in words and face, some difference in expressions and nonverbal signals. The concept “acquaintance” reflects the space, time and person reference. In meeting traditions in Ukraine, GB and USA the similar requirements of good attitude are observed as the principal cultural element at the core of the concept as well as difference in verbal and nonverbal reference.. Changes in the conceptual semantics can be determined as mutual penetration of the contact making traditions in communication.
Mastery of legal language is essential for aspiring legal professionals, and this process of linguistic socialization begins in law school. While much research has focused on lectures and doctrinal content, less attention has been paid to how law students acquire legal language norms through interactive settings. This study examines how academic tutors at a Dutch law school contribute to students’ language socialization during small-group tutorial sessions. Drawing on participant observations and semi-structured interviews, the analysis reveals how tutors correct or reinforce students’ language use, and how these correction practices reflect differing language ideologies – ranging from the valorization of traditional legal terminology to the acceptance of more accessible alternatives. These practices shape not only students’ understanding of legal concepts but also their acquisition of linguistic capital and sense of professional identity. The study highlights how language norms are reproduced or challenged in early legal education and considers the implications of this for inclusion and access within the legal profession. The study contributes to broader discussions about legal language ideology, including the accessibility concerns raised by the plain language movement.
This chapter investigates the relationship between diversity and mobility in education. It explores the ambivalent relationship between this aspect of the internationalisation of education and the celebration of diversity. While becoming ‘educated’ is equated with travel and internationalised education in the Anglosphere for students travelling to other/othered places, there is a simultaneous scepticism towards the motivations of people migrating to Anglospheric nations in pursuit of education. Moreover, there is little acknowledgement of the difficulties faced by international students arriving from other contexts in understanding and adopting the new linguistic norms in relation to diversity. The chapter posits that, ironically, the language of diversity is one that only the privileged of the Anglosphere can speak. It argues that claims to diversity are a way of tidying away the complex challenges of representation, inclusion and belonging that internationalised education should embrace. This chapter draws on the author’s previous empirical study of refugees in higher education, which analyses how these young people discursively construct the benefits of education and the barriers they face to being accepted as legitimate students in an internationalised institution.
Abstract Morphological analysis is a foundational task in natural language processing (NLP) and is particularly challenging for low-resourced and morphologically rich languages such as Kangri. Despite substantial numbers of speakers, Kangri lacks annotated corpora, computational tools, and lexicons, making linguistic analysis and downstream processing difficult. This paper presents a hybrid morphological analyzer for the Kangri language that integrates rule-based suffix analysis, lexicon extraction, and efficient machine learning models. A lexicon and suffix transformation rules were automatically induced from the Universal Dependencies (UD) Kangri Treebank. The rule-based morphological analyzer achieved an accuracy of 59\% on the UD test set. A machine learning baseline using TF--IDF character n-grams with Logistic Regression achieved 64.61\% accuracy, while an enhanced model incorporating POS tags improved performance to 67.40%. The results demonstrate that combining linguistic heuristics with statistical learning substantially improves lemma prediction and morphological interpretation for Kangri. This work establishes an initial computational morphology framework for Kangri and provides a foundation for further NLP tool development.
Целта на статията е да представи методика за разработване на български жестов речник за комуникация в кризисни ситуации. Езиковите данни са извлечени в съответствие с основни лексикографски принципи за създаване на жестови речници въз основа на наблюдения върху употребата на жестовете. В специално организирани семинари с глухи модератори, провеждани под формата на свободна дискусия в платформата Zoom за онлайн комуникация, се осигурява възможност на глухи носители и ползватели на българския жестов език да общуват, без да се допуска интерференция от български словесен език. Извлечените данни се обработват ръчно в специализираната програма ELAN за лингвистична обработка на видеофайлове, за да се опишат всички варианти на жестове на ключови думи, разпределени по тематични области от кризисната комуникация. В крайния си вариант речникът съдържа 600 единици и ясно демонстрира, че няма пълно съответствие между речниковите единици на българския словесен и българския жестов език, като липсват много жестове за ключови понятия от областта на кризисната комуникация. Библиография: Лозанова, Сл., Стоянова, Ив. (2016). Интеркултурни и социолингвистични особености на жестовия език в общността на хората с увреден слух в България. Сборник Паисиеви четения: Език, литература и интеркултурна комуникация, 2016:290-302. Лозанова, Сл. (2015). Семиотични аспекти на вербално-жестовия билингвизъм при деца с увреден слух. Дисертация за присъждане на научната степен „доктор”, Нов български универсистет. Лозанова, Сл. (2018). Българският жестов език като предмет на лингвосемиотично изследване – методология и изводи. Сб. Научни и практически аспекти на приобщаващото образование, УИ Св. Климент Охридски, 260–269. Тишева Й., В. Христова, В. Жобов, Г. Дачева, Кр. Алексова, П. Ангелкова, Ц. Попзватева, Ю. Стоянова. (2017). Речник на българския жестов език. Изд. Изкуство и образование. МОН., София. Достъпен на: https://mon.bg/upload/21132/Rechnik_bg_zhestov_ezik.pdf. Bond, Fr., Foster, R. (2013). Linking and extending an open multilingual Wordnet. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1352–1362, Sofia, Bulgaria. Association for Computational Linguistics. Crasborn, O., Sloetjes, H. (2008). Enhanced ELAN functionality for sign language corpora. In Proceedings of LREC 2008, Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Fellbaum, C. (ed.). (1999). WordNet: an Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Fenlon, J., Schembri, A., Johnson, T., Cormier, K. (2015). Documentary and Corpus Approaches to Sign Language Research. In The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Sign Language Studies, ed. by E. Orfanidou, B. Woll & G. Morgan, 156–172. Oxford: Blackwell. Koeva, Sv. (2010). Bulgarian Wordnet – current state, applications and prospects. Bulgarian-American Dialogues, 120–132. Lucas, C., Clayton, V. (1989). Language contact in the American Deaf community: The sociolinguistics of the Deaf community. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Привлечение внимания к новым источникам для изучения лексики XIX века – одна из задач статьи. В качестве материала для наблюдений и выводов привлечены эпистолярные тексты из архива Соликамского Святотроицкого мужского монастыря, содержащие сведения о духовной и материальной культуре одного из древнейших монастырей Северного Прикамья. В статье на лексическом уровне демонстрируется реализация основных тенденций развития русского литературного языка в 1‑й половине XIX века: тенденция «к синтезу всех жизнеспособных языковых средств» и тенденция к демократизации языка. В результате анализа выявлено, что выработка лексико-семантических и стилистических норм происходили за счет новообразований (частовремяннопредающегося, первоотходящею почтой) и заимствований из церковнославянского языка, расширения валентности слов (краткий недостатокъ) и «освежения» семантики уже известных лексем за счет смыслов, присущих им в народно-разговорной речи (круто, недосылка). Деловая переписка, привлеченная к анализу, характеризуется эмоциональностью и строгим соблюдением этических норм, принятых в монастырской среде, однако не и ймеет такой черты делового стиля, как «неличный характер текста». Drawing attention to new sources for studying the lexicon of the 19th century is one of the article’s objectives. The material for observations and conclusions is drawn from epistolary texts from the archive of the Solikamsk Holy Trinity Male Monastery, which contain information about the spiritual and material culture of one of the oldest monasteries in Northern Prikamye (Kama region). At the lexical level, the article demonstrates the implementation of the main trends in the development of the Russian literary language in the first half of the 19th century: the tendency toward “ the synthesis of all viable linguistic means” and the tendency toward language democratization. As a result of the analysis, it has been revealed that the elaboration of lexical-semantic and stylistic norms occurred through neologisms (e. g., chasto-vremyanno-predayushchegosya ‘often temporarily handing over’, pervo-otkhodyashcheyu pochtoyu ‘by the first outgoing mail’), borrowings from Church Slavonic, expansion of word valency (e. g., kratkiy nedostatok ‘brief shortage’ with an extended meaning), and “refreshing” the semantics of already known Слово. Текст. Контекст. 2025. № 3 (23) 68 Слово. Текст. Контекст. 2025. № 3 (23) Харламова М. А. Эпистолярные тексты Соликамского Святотроицкого монастыря I-й половины XIX века: отражение основных тенденций развития литературного языка эпохи lexemes through meanings inherent in colloquial speech (e. g., kruto ‘steeply’ in a figurative sense, nedosylka ‘under-delivery’ as ‘shortcoming’). The business correspondence analyzed is characterized by emotionality and strict adherence to ethical norms accepted in the monastic environment, but it lacks such a feature of the business style as the “impersonal character of the text”.