Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
This paper examines the rapid evolution of net slang and its consequential impact on Standard Mandarin, highlighting the interplay between net slang and traditional linguistic norms. The study begins by delineating three principal characteristics of net slang: multiformity, simplicity, and flexibility. Through a survey assessing Chinese attitudes towards net slang, both positive and negative viewpoints are revealed. Results indicate that while net slang can enhance communication with creative elements such as emoticons, it also risks grammatical divergence and semantic deviations. These impacts are particularly pronounced in the realm of Chinese language education, where net slang affects graphology and fosters misinterpretations. Despite these challenges, the paper advocates for a balanced approach, proposing the integration of beneficial aspects of net slang into Standard Mandarin following rigorous evaluation. Emphasizing language sustainability, the study underscores the role of educators and parents in promoting reading, thereby ensuring the harmonious coexistence of net slang and standard language while preserving linguistic integrity for future generations.
This is a corpus based sociolinguistics study of language variation (between American and British English) and attitudinal alignment of The Dawn. The main aim of this study is to understand which language variety is more frequent in The Dawn and what this frequency reveals about The Dawn attitudinal orientation toward modernity or tradition. For data collection a specialized corpus was compiled of about 817,946 words by taking news from different sections of The Dawn newspaper online platform. Beside compiled corpus, a reference list, containing word pairs of American and British English vocabulary and spellings, was also prepared for finding frequencies in compiled corpus. To derive frequencies of American and British lexical items (vocabulary and spellings) AntConc 3.5.9 was used. In order to interpret attitudes, two sociolinguistic frameworks were used; Giles’s (2007) communication accommodation theory and Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of linguistic capital. Findings of the study suggest that although both varieties are present in The Dawn newspaper articles the frequency of British English is relatively higher. Moreover, the results also shows that The Dawn as one of the oldest and most read online newspaper of Pakistan, not only aligns with traditional and established norms but also shows a slight alignment with new innovative American linguistic trends making it more relevant and appealing for international audience.
Despite their potential as sustainable protein sources, insect-based food products are facing slow acceptance by European consumers. The study investigated societal attitudes toward insect-based foods according to a survey of Italian consumers. Employing the Theory of Social Representation (SR) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) the study adopted a quali-quatitative approach to identify the interplay between cultural factors and determinants of behavioral intentions to consume insect-based foods. The study sample ( N = 380) responded to a two-part online survey: a free word association task to the stimulus “insect-based food” and a structured questionnaire of TPB variables (attitude toward insect-based food, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, behavioral intention) and its pertinent extensions, i.e., disgust, food neophobia, and positive moral attitudes. The lexical corpus derived from free associations was analyzed with ALCESTE and the resulting lexical classes were illustrated by means of quantitative measures. Three social representations of insect-based food, varying in their degree of abstraction/concreteness and perceived safety and effectiveness, were identified and labeled as “Simply Disgusting,” “Nutritious and Sustainable,” and “Curiosity and Caution.” Each representation was associated with a well-defined profile of participants and was clearly linked to participants' beliefs about insect-based food, the moral implications of these dietary choices, and consumers' intentions to purchase such products. The study suggests the need for targeted interventions to address societal misconception and foster a more favorable perception of insect-based food products as viable food options in European diets. Our findings provide insights for policymakers and producers seeking to promote sustainable dietary choices. • Social Representations of Insect-Based Foods and the Theory of Planned Behavior. • Consumer Perspectives on Insect-Based Foods: Curiosity and Positive Moral Attitudes Beyond Disgust. • Targeted Interventions to Overcome Societal Skepticism Toward Insect-Based Foods. • From Free Associations to Social Representations: How Consumers Perceive Insect-Based Food.
The rapid expansion of digital media has significantly reshaped the ways in which language is used, adapted, and evolved in contemporary communication. This study explores how online platforms—ranging from social media networks to messaging applications—have influenced linguistic norms, introduced novel expressions, and reshaped traditional grammar and syntax. By analyzing communication patterns across diverse digital contexts, the research highlights how users creatively manipulate language to suit the immediacy, brevity, and interactive nature of online discourse. The findings reveal a dynamic linguistic environment where slang, emojis, abbreviations, and code-switching are not only prevalent but also indicative of broader cultural and generational shifts. This investigation contributes to the understanding of language as a fluid and evolving entity, driven increasingly by the participatory and fast-paced nature of digital interaction.
We investigate the performance of state-ofthe-art (SotA) neural grammar induction (GI) models on a morphemically tokenised English dataset based on the CHILDES treebank (Pearl and Sprouse, 2013).Using implementations from Yang et al. (2021b), we train models and evaluate them with the standard F1 score.We introduce novel evaluation metrics-depth-ofmorpheme and sibling-of-morpheme-which measure phenomena around bound morpheme attachment.Our results reveal that models with the highest F1 scores do not necessarily induce linguistically plausible structures for bound morpheme attachment, highlighting a key challenge for cognitively plausible GI.
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.
This study explores the evolving interplay between language, cognition, and digital media in the context of the attention economy.It proposes six key dimensionsrepresentation, virtuality, attention, community language, cognitive transformation, and the speech-writing continuum -through which digital communication reshapes linguistic practices.Drawing on contemporary theories of mediatisation, multimodality, and sociolinguistics, the authors argue that digital environments fundamentally alter linguistic representation and identity construction.Through the analysis of semiotic innovation, platform logic, and cognitive offloading, the article highlights how digital discourse is not a degradation of language but an adaptive response to new communicative affordances.The findings invite a rethinking of linguistic norms and suggest directions for further research into the ethical, cultural, and neurological consequences of pervasive digital communication.
Modern lifestyles demonstrably influence language as a social construct. The Russian language is not exempt from the constant evolution of its lexical units; some terms lose their original meanings and acquire new ones, while others become obsolete, replaced by newer vocabulary. Certain situations may necessitate deviations from established linguistic conventions, potentially creating legal grounds for subsequent litigation. The purpose of the study is to analyze some challenging issues of spelling and using words in the Russian language that are reflected in judicial practice. The present study was carried out based on traditional general scientific methods (analysis and synthesis, etc.) and methods of legal science (system analysis, formal-legal, etc.). Analysis of regular and irregular spelling and using words, including foreign ones, in the Russian language tellingly reveals the complexity of linguistic issues facing courts. Notably, challenges arise from the lack of a unified legal and linguistic definition of the word “obscene”, hindering its subsequent legislative consolidation, and from misuse of technology in drafting court documents, leading to repeated mistakes. It is concluded that it is necessary to expand the List of grammars, dictionaries and reference books approved by Order of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation No. 195 dated 8 June 2009, containing the norms of the modern Russian literary language when used as the state language of the Russian Federation, including because of the need to legislatively consolidate the new vocabulary appearing in the reference literature.
Scientific research in various areas of computational linguistics has been conducted by many scholars around the world. Today, issues related to computational linguistics are being explored in fields such as language technology, natural language processing, machine learning, and corpus linguistics. In Uzbekistan, pioneering research in the field of computational linguistics was initiated by scholars such as N. Yaqutova, M. Ayimbetov, S. Rizaev, and S. Muhammedova. Notably, S. Muhammedova co-authored a textbook with R. Piotrovsky that presents quantitative models of Uzbek texts. Currently, the number of researchers in this field is growing, and a wide range of scholars are engaged in computational linguistics research. Furthermore, collaboration with experts from related disciplines—such as computer science and language technology—is contributing to significant progress in this domain. This article addresses research in the field of computational linguistics within Uzbek linguistics, highlights the structural and typological features of the Uzbek language, and discusses its distinctions from European languages. In addition, the article provides recommendations regarding structural aspects of Uzbek that should be considered in computational research and illustrates Chomsky’s hierarchy using examples from the Uzbek language.
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.
Background Dementia can impair cognitive functions in older adults and further affect language abilities, such as sentence construction. The use of linguistic biomarkers for detecting cognitive decline and early stages of dementia has demonstrated great potential due to its low-cost and non-invasive nature, especially towards a large aging population.Aims In this study, we focused on the syntactic complexity and aimed to identify highly discriminative syntactic features and those set in differentiating Mandarin-speaking older adults with and without cognitive impairment using machine learning models.Methods & procedures We established a new cohort consisting of 52 Chinese older participants, which has not been reported in any previous studies. After applying exclusion criteria, 49 were selected for this study, including 24 labeled as cognitively normal (CN) and 25 as cognitively impaired (CI) based on their scores in the MoCA-B test (Chinese version). Each of the participants completed three connected speech tasks: a picture description task (the Picnic Scene), a story narrative task (Sanmao’s Wanderings), and a story recall task (Cowherd and Weaver Girl). The speech recordings were automatically transcribed into text files and manually checked. We then performed treebank annotation, which was also manually corrected. Subsequently, 17 linguistic unit-based and 10 syntactic structure-based features were extracted from the texts using Python codes. To identify key syntactic features and feature sets, we first examined the discriminative power of these features per se for distinguishing between the CI and CN groups. Then we employed three machine learning algorithms to identify feature combinations performing the best in terms of high accuracy and AUC in cross-validation and minimal number of basic features.Outcomes & results No single feature or feature panels showed high discriminability between groups across all three tasks. However, certain macro-level features with high measurement robustness, such as mean depth of nodes, mean dependency distance, and the ratio of head-final dependencies in specific tasks are noteworthy. Moreover, through machine learning algorithms, we identified several well-performing feature combinations in terms of the metrics of cross-validation mean accuracy and area under curve (AUC). Notably, a feature panel with only two features (mean depth of nodes, and proportions of prepositional dependencies) achieved the best result across classifiers in the story narrative task (ACC = 0.840, AUC = 0.867).Conclusions This study demonstrated the potential of using purely treebank-derived features within a single linguistic domain (syntax) for cost-effective cognitive impairment screening, indicating the value of syntactic biomarkers for cognitive impairment in Mandarin-Speaking Older Adults.
Unlike traditional macro-power theories, Foucault's micro-power theory reveals the complex inter-constructive relationship between linguistic norms and social power structures. His assertion that "discourse is power" provides a crucial perspective for analyzing the mechanisms of power operation within linguistic practices[3]. This study employs Foucault's power theory as its analytical framework. Through an in-depth interpretation of the movie My Fair Lady, it uncovers the inherent paradox between linguistic norms and subject empowerment, thereby transcending conventional boundaries in film analysis. This approach not only offers a novel theoretical pathway for interpreting My Fair Lady but also deepens the practical significance of Foucault's power theory within cultural criticism, exposing the concealed power dynamics within linguistic practices and their dialectical shaping of subject freedom.
This paper explores the cultural, linguistic, and identity-related functions of phraseological units and proverbs in Albanian, viewing them as carriers of folk wisdom and linguistic structures with deep social roots. Phraseology serves not only as a lexical resource but also as a reflection of collective psychology, nature, and historical experience. Proverbs and idioms encode moral norms, ethical values, and practical judgments that have guided Albanian communities across generations. The study places special focus on nature and animal symbolism, examining figures such as mountain, forest, wolf, fox, hare, sheep, ram, and goat as semantic axes that convey complex ideas of masculinity, fear, cunning, gentleness, order, and authority. These expressions form a culturally embedded linguistic code that transmits social models and collective memory through metaphorical language. The research demonstrates how these linguistic elements shape identity while preserving tradition and offering emotionally resonant, easily assimilated messages to speakers. Through scholarly sources and detailed linguistic analysis, this study highlights phraseology as a vital component of Albanian cultural heritage and traditional reasoning. The findings reveal how these linguistic structures continue to influence contemporary Albanian discourse while maintaining their historical significance as repositories of cultural knowledge. Received: 14 May 2025 / Accepted: 27 August 2025 / Published: 05 September 2025
The increasing use of English in many professional and academic contexts has played a pivotal role not only in expanding the teaching of English at universities worldwide but also in determining the growth of teaching in English. This has heightened the need to teach thesis writing in many English-medium contexts. Focusing on the tension between individuality – expressing an individual point of view – and commonality – adopting the rhetorical and linguistic norms of the specific discourse community addressed, we discuss our experience of designing an introduction to thesis writing for an EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction) multidisciplinary MA programme in Italy. The chapter begins by exploring the interplay between commonality and individuality, then proceeds to describe the course’s context and its educational underpinnings. The general principles are illustrated through an analysis of activities meant to teach the students how to engage with the discourse community of their choice and to express their stance: from engaging with discourse communities to finding relevant sources, incorporating other voices into a literature review, and working collaboratively on the conclusion section. The chapter closes with a brief summing up of the issues raised.
This study explores the sociolinguistic characteristics of Generation Alpha's language use on TikTok, a platform blending creativity and social interaction. Examining code-switching, slang, and the influence of visual elements highlights how these features shape digital identities and cultural expression. The research uses qualitative methods like content analysis and user interviews to reveal how Gen Alpha adapts language to TikTok’s standards while challenging traditional linguistic norms. The findings demonstrate that digital communication significantly impacts the language of today’s youth, showcasing Generation Alpha’s sensitivity and inventiveness in coining new terms driven by rapid technological advancements. Social, cultural, and technical factors influence these communication patterns, with video and visual exchanges enhancing communication skills, shaping social identities, and fostering intergenerational connections. This research emphasizes the role of platform-specific language practices in shaping teenage culture and advancing sociolinguistics in social media contexts. It concludes that Generation Alpha employs a relaxed, creative, and trend-sensitive vocabulary, particularly on TikTok, reflecting contemporary digital communication trends. The study underscores the importance of understanding language dynamics in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Cette thèse présente le corpus NaijaSynCor-Prosody, une ressource innovante qui intègre des annotations phonétiques détaillées dans un corpus syntaxique existant. Chaque token du corpus est associée à des annotations décrivant la hauteur, la durée, l’intensité et d’autres attributs prosodiques de chaque syllabe. Ces annotations incluent notamment des contours prosodiques stylisés produits à l’aide du modèle SLAM 3, développé au cours de cette thèse. Cette fusion de données morphosyntaxiques et prosodiques permet des analyses quantitatives de l’interaction entre intonation et syntaxe dans le Naijá, ou pidgin nigérian. À l’aide de ce corpus, nous étudions la différenciation prosodique des unités lexicales qui remplissent également une fonction grammaticale, par exemple des auxiliaires préverbaux marqueurs de TAM. Les contrastes prosodiques entre usages lexicaux et grammaticaux ne sont pas uniformes selon les éléments, bien que notre corpus révèle deux grandes classes prosodiques d’auxiliaires. Un groupe (dey, go, bin) présente une hauteur faible et une courte durée, tandis que les autres se caractérisent globalement par une hauteur plus élevée et une durée plus longue. Deux d’entre eux, make et no, sont particuliers car ils combinent une hauteur élevée et une faible durée. Une analyse plus approfondie de leurs environnements syntaxiques montre qu’ils ont également des distributions atypiques parmi les auxiliaires. Par ailleurs, plusieurs adverbes annotés présentent une distribution syntaxique analogue à celle des auxiliaires et un profil prosodique similaire aux auxiliaires à haute hauteur et longue durée. Ce travail soulève des questions plus générales sur l’utilisation des annotations prosodiques pour remettre en question les étiquettes morphosyntaxiques existantes. La thèse fournit ainsi à la fois une nouvelle ressource linguistique et un cadre méthodologique pour intégrer l’analyse prosodique dans l’étude syntaxe–prosodie à partir de corpus.
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.
This research investigates the meanings of emotion-related words in English and Uzbek by using a comparative linguistic method to identify the similarities and differences in how emotions are understood in these two distinct languages. Utilizing semantic field theory and prototype semantics, the study analyzes a collection of emotion-related terms sourced from a corpus, focusing on key categories such as joy, anger, sadness, fear, and surprise, along with their derived and idiomatic forms. The methodology integrates qualitative semantic mapping with quantitative frequency analysis from bilingual corpora, revealing how cultural frameworks influence lexical representation—specifically, the prevalence of somatic metaphors in Uzbek emotional expressions compared to the more abstract concepts found in English. Key findings emphasize polysemy, connotative shifts, and context-dependent interpretations that reflect sociocultural norms, such as the contrast between collectivist and individualist approaches to emotional expression. This study contributes to cross-linguistic typology, offering insights for machine translation, second-language education, and intercultural psychology by linking linguistic relativity with universal emotions.
• Introductory videos shaped perceived familiarity with SAE Level 3 automation. • Basic introductory videos and graded warnings improved take-over safety and reduced crashes. • Visual scanning patterns were similar between groups but became more variable over time. Increasing levels of vehicle automation bring new risks to drivers, particularly those who are using a new automated driving system (ADS). The overreliance on partially automated advanced driver assistance systems (SAE L2 ADAS) has led to crashes, a concern that might escalate with conditional ADS (SAE L3), which require timely driver intervention. This study examines the impact of how L3 ADS’ capabilities and limitations are communicated to users on their subjective attitudes toward ADS and their driving behavior and performance, particularly concerning safety. In a driving simulator study, participants received introductory videos about the role of drivers at different automation levels, the capabilities and limitations of L3 ADS, and its human–machine interface (HMI). Videos concluded with either “Highlighted Benefits” of higher automation levels, reflecting current marketing trends of ADAS and ADS, or an “Explicit Reminder” of driver responsibilities in L3 ADS usage. Participants then completed three driving simulator runs (repeated measures) during or after which visual monitoring behavior, take-over performance, and subjective attitudes (trust and acceptance) toward the ADS were gathered. Participants resumed control when receiving uncertainty alert from the ADS across both introductory information conditions, with minor differences in take-over performance and monitoring behavior. No significant differences were observed in road monitoring behavior, take-over performance, and subjective attitudes between conditions, except for subjective familiarity ratings, which decreased over runs for the Explicit Reminder group compared to the Highlighted Benefits group. Both conditions showed take-over performance improvements, particularly after practice. Successful crash avoidance in both groups indicates that graded warnings and practice can effectively improve take-over performance. This similarity in outcomes suggests that introductory information about ADS may not significantly affect monitoring behavior and performance of ADS users. These results highlight the potential for such systems to mitigate ADS complacency and promote safer resumption of vehicle control during automation failures.
In this exploratory study, we seek to identify the predictors of repetition or lexical variety in the translation of English reporting verbs into Russian. Using a sample of 20 literary novels from the InterCorp corpus (v.15), we fitted multiple negative binomial regression models with a random intercept. The goal was to assess how selected predictor variables—namely, the frequency of a source-text verb, its number of senses, semantic type, length in characters, date of translation, and translator—affect the response variable: the number of Russian target-text reporting verbs an English source-text (ST) reporting verb is translated into. The findings showed that the semantic category of a ST reporting verb, its frequency and translation date as well as the translator as a random intercept have the largest individual contributions to explaining the proportion of variation in the response variable. More precisely, the model allows us to explain 73% of the variation (per conditional r-squared) in the number of distinct target text (TT) reporting verb types a ST verb is translated into. Viewed in the context of prevailing stylistic norms in Russian, the findings offer an attempt at explanation for the translator’s choices in rendering recurring reporting verbs following dialogues, which play an important stylistic effect in literary texts.
Treebanks are critical resources in Natural Language Processing (NLP), supporting parser development, linguistic research, and the evaluation of large language models. While Tamil has seen progress in Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanking, existing corpora have been restricted to prose texts, leaving its vast poetic tradition underrepresented. This paper presents the first effort to be made to construct a syntactic treebank for Tamil poetry, specifically focussing on the ThirukkuRaḷ, which is composed in kuRaḷ veṇpā form. A central challenge in this work is posed by the treatment of multiword tokens (MWTs) and elliptical constructions, both of which are observed to occur frequently in Tamil verse due to its agglutinative morphology and metrical constraints. An annotation strategy is proposed within the Enhanced UD (EUD) framework to systematically address five major types of ellipsis—casal, verbal, adjectival, comparative/simile, and cumulative—alongside complex MWT patterns. These annotations not only enhance the representation of Tamil poetic syntax but also broaden the applicability of UD guidelines to underrepresented genres. The contribution is shown to underscore the linguistic and computational importance of capturing the structural specificities of Tamil poetry, while establishing a foundation for future cross-linguistic and literary treebanking efforts.
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.
Cette thèse vise à présenter une méthode complète permettant d'extraire des règles grammaticales quantitatives et interprétables à partir de treebanks syntaxiques. Cet objectif s'inscrit dans le cadre des grammaires descriptives, qui nécessitent des analyses fines pour saisir des phénomènes linguistiques complexes tout en intégrant les propriétés fondamentales du langage. Pour y parvenir, nous proposons une formalisation générale des règles grammaticales issues de corpus, facile à généraliser et à mettre en œuvre à l'aide de méthodes automatisées. Les règles extraites sont concises, ont différents niveaux de granularité, permettent une sélection flexible et sont ordonnées par importance. Ces descriptions formelles sont extraites de corpus à l'aide de modèles de régression logistique parcimonieux, qui favorisent l'interprétabilité tout en produisant un ensemble concis de règles présentant les propriétés souhaitées. Les résultats de notre méthode sont évalués dans plusieurs langues afin d'examiner sa capacité à répondre aux besoins descriptifs et comparés à d'autres approches existantes. La méthodologie est ensuite étendue à la description contrastive des langues, mettant en évidence les différences et les similitudes entre les langues. Cette approche permet d'obtenir des signatures linguistiques, des ensembles de modèles communs et distinctifs qui profilent chaque langue. Les expériences portent sur plusieurs paires de langues, familles de langues et genres textuels. Une attention particulière est accordée à la nature des règles extraites et au rôle des connaissances linguistiques théoriques dans le processus d'extraction. Cette thèse vise en fin de compte à démontrer la faisabilité de l'extraction d'une grammaire guidée par le corpus pour la description des langues. Ainsi, elle étend les liens entre la linguistique descriptive, formelle et computationnelle dans le contexte plus large de la description des langues.
Press releases represent a business genre that is widely used by organisations to communicate externally with a range of stakeholders including journalists, investors and the general public. The multipurpose nature of press releases (Bremner 2014) has led to their characterisation as a complex hybrid genre (Catenaccio 2008) with informational, persuasive and promotional communicative purposes. Press releases are also marked by what Jacobs (2006: 201) calls “preformulation”, i.e. “a news style that requires little or no reworking on the part of the journalists who receive” them (e.g. third person self-reference, self-quotation). An examination of the treatment of press releases in a series of business communication textbooks and guidebooks (e.g. Thill & Bovée 2022, Chan 2020, Kennedy 2014) reveals that, while information and guidance about the move structure, format and layout of press releases are generally provided, the actual language typically used in these texts tends to be largely neglected. This paper explores the extent to which findings from corpus-driven research into the language of press releases could be used to inform learning/teaching business communication materials to raise the students’ awareness of some of the key linguistic features associated with press releases written in English. This exploration is based both on an analysis of recurrent sequences of words extracted from a one-million-word corpus of corporate press releases in English issued in by Fortune 500 companies (De Cock and Granger 2021) and on more recent phraseological research conducted within the framework of this paper. Recurrent sequences of words provide a useful starting point to access and identify the preferred ways of saying or of writing things in specific genres and the paper presents and discusses concrete examples of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) activities that could help business communication students develop their press release writing knowledge. References Bremner, S. (2014). ‘Genres and processes in the PR industry: Behind the scenes with an intern writer’. International Journal of Business Communication 51(3), 259-278. Catenaccio, P. (2008). ‘Press releases as a hybrid genre: Addressing the informational/promotional conundrum’. Pragmatics, 18(1), 9-31. Chan, M. (2020). English for Business Communication. Routledge. De Cock, S. & Granger, S. (2021). ‘Stance in press releases versus business news: a lexical bundle approach’. Text & Talk 41(5-6), 691-713. Jacobs, G. (2006). ‘The dos and don’ts of writing press releases (and how learners act upon them)’. In P. Gillaerts & P.Shaw (eds), The Map and the Landscape: Norms and Practices in Genre, 199-218. Bern: Peter Lang. Kennedy, M. (2014). Beginner’s Guide to Writing Powerful Press Releases: Secrets the Pros Use to Command Media Attention. eReleases. Thill, J. V. & Bovée, C. L. (2022). Excellence in Business Communication (13th ed.). Pearson Education Limited.
The translinguistic research paradigm contributes to the study of specific aspects of social interaction among multilingual language users. The multimodal and multisensory nature of language is manifested in language varieties including geographical, social, age or gender varieties. Human beings in the process of language contacts are very conscious of the relationship between race, nation and community on the one hand and language on the other, and the discrepancies between boundaries in linguistic structural terms and in socio-cultural and ideological terms. The object of the study is anglicisms used by the students of Don State Technical University in the media space from the point of view of highlighting their lexico-semantic characteristics and functioning. The aim of the research is to study the main trends in the use of anglicisms by students in social student networks. On the basis of the conducted online survey of 360 students of DSTU we tested hypotheses about the reasons and main trends in the use of anglicisms, the influence of students' specialization on their use in speech. The respondents' answers were divided into the following categories: 1) the most frequent anglicisms; 2) meanings of words; 3) spheres of application; 4) violation of the linguistic norm; 5) reasons for their usage; 6) prospects. We collected both quantitative and qualitative data, including surveys and observations. The results of the research indicate the tendency of frequent usage of direct borrowings and calques from English related to the sphere of “Internet” usage. Multilingual learners freely incorporate Anglicisms into their speech to overcome differences, discrepancies, inconsistencies and ambiguities in communication, manipulating them for strategic benefits when necessary. The use of anglicisms in the speech of the youth does not depend on their belonging to a professional community, with the exception of jargon and professional slang.
This study investigates gender-based lexical choices in Pakistani News Discourse (2023–2025) through Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Studies. Newspapers in Pakistan provide linguistic spaces where gender-based identities are generated, expressed, reinforced, and challenged. A purpose-built corpus of editorials and feature articles written by female journalists is used as the foundation to uncover the reflection and reproduction of gendered language patterns which demonstrate sociocultural power relations. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis of corpus is done for keyword and collocational patterns, recurrent lexical preferences and expressions that shape gendered representation. The patterns of gendered language in the writings of female journalists have been explored through methodological framework of Corpus Assisted Sociolinguistic Studies. The corpus analysis revealed that female journalists in Pakistani English newspapers prominently use gender-related lexical items, modal verbs, and collocational patterns to construct and assert their gendered identity. Key thematic domains included gender, education, politics, media, and culture, highlighting both advocacy and empowerment. Their language reflects agency, solidarity, and social awareness, while challenging traditional gender norms and stereotypes.
This study examines how religious minorities are represented and made intelligible within platform-native journalism, with particular attention to the discursive strategies employed by Indonesian digital news media on YouTube. The purpose of the study is to critically explore how intercultural meanings, inclusivity, and social legitimacy are constructed through audiovisual news content featuring minority religious groups, and how such representations operate within broader social and ideological contexts. Using a qualitative research design, the study applies Critical Discourse Analysis based on Teun A. van Dijk’s three-dimensional framework, encompassing textual structures, social cognition, and social context. The primary data consist of selected special-feature videos produced by Kumparan’s YouTube channel that focus on Sikh and Orthodox Christian communities in Indonesia, supported by secondary data from relevant literature and institutional documents. The findings reveal that platform-native journalism does not merely report on religious diversity but actively performs discursive inclusion through careful lexical choices, narrative framing, visual composition, and dialogic presentation. These strategies position minority religions as legitimate social actors while simultaneously aligning journalistic narratives with dominant norms of tolerance, harmony, and national pluralism. At the level of social cognition, the media organization demonstrates an awareness of its influential role in shaping public understanding of religious difference, while at the level of social context, the discourse reflects broader efforts to manage religious diversity within a multicultural society. The significance of this study lies in its contribution to religious and media studies by highlighting how digital journalism platforms function as sites where inclusion is not only articulated but enacted discursively. By foregrounding platform-native news practices, this research offers a nuanced understanding of religion, media power, and intercultural communication in contemporary society, making it relevant to international discussions on religion in the digital public sphere.
In their most recent work, Judith Butler is interested in understanding Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024). More specifically, this book undertakes a double task: first, Butler’s aim is to present a rebuttal to several arguments made against the destructive powers of “gender ideology;” second, and perhaps most crucially, Butler’s goal is to formulate ideas about the ways in which we may collectively resist – and organize against – the rising tide of fascist passions and authoritarianism that threaten our possibilities for “livable lives.” When it comes to performativity studies, Butler offers a significant contribution to scholarship with their work on (counter)imaginaries and phantasmatic syntax. Thus, it appears that Butler’s newest release is a departure from their earlier works on gender and performativity, insofar as it shifts focus from the ways in which ritualized performances constitute gender (Butler, 1990) within a largely heterosexual frame (Butler, 1993). In Who’s Afraid of Gender? they examine why and how “gender” becomes a nexus through which fear and anxiety about the future coalesce. To me, as both a queer scholar and a feminist who is interested in affect and the ways storytelling can shape our (relationship to) possible future(s), this book offers a needed perspective shift. In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler explored how “gender” and “sex” were made to seem normal and natural: how they operated within a coherent internal order – or a syntax – which structured and organized our sense of self. The “story” of gender (and sex), thus, could be taken apart – and it was – to reveal how even the “natural” is constantly (re)constructed. In a similar vein, Bodies that Matter (1993) explored the ways in which bodies were the “material reality” upon which heterosexual desires and scripts were inscribed and negotiated. In that sense, gender was what enabled us to think about our bodies: gender was the “constitutive constraint” against and through which we might make sense of how we moved, how we loved and how we lived. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler considers the power of affect: how it sustains and animates stories about gender and the future. Instead of showing how stories come to “make sense,” Butler shows how, in fact, stories do not always need to make sense to work. What they can hinge on, instead, is how they make us feel. Therefore, in their latest release, Butler presents gender as a “phantasmatic scene”: a space where fear and anxiety weave (oftentimes contradictory) stories about bodies, sex and desire and the possibilities of life. It is their goal, then, to pull at the fabric of those stories, to unravel them and to suggest other stories for the future.From the outset, Butler identifies the ways in which “gender” is constructed as a phantasm. The term itself is a stand-in for a plethora of threats: the destruction of the traditional family, the indoctrination of children into homosexuality, pedophilia and other paraphilias, the end of “true masculinity”, just to name a few. It seems that the lexical, political and theoretical flexibility of the term serves – at least in an affective sense – to stoke the fires of “multitudes of modern panics” (p. 5). Furthermore, if “gender” becomes the figure through and against which most fears and anxieties are articulated, the actual myriads of reasons to be fearful and anxious become obscured: “those fears lose their names” (p. 6). This orchestrating of fear enables states and other sites of consolidated power to breed compliance and pull people “back into the fold,” as it were. Butler borrows the concept of “phantasmic scene” from the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to engage with “anti-gender” (p. 10). In this context, fantasy is “an organization of desire and anxiety that follows certain structural and organizational rules, drawing on both conscious and unconscious material” (p. 10). Following this conceptual framework, fantasy has material bearing on the world – how it is made, unmade and inhabited.This articulation of gender is not completely removed from Butler’s previous works, especially when it comes to considering the ways in which it is imbued with certain structures of (heterosexual) desires for the future (1993). However, whereas Bodies that Matter may have been more concerned with understanding what specific desires, such as marriage and reproduction, structured gender and gendered life, Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024) seeks to understand how varied affects (fear, anxiety) themselves are focused contingently at the site of “gender” to influence what constitutes a “possible life.”It is worth mentioning that the anti-gender movement is not opposed to gender per se but has a vested interest in imposing a certain “gender order” (p. 18) on the world. Furthermore, their willingness to “eliminate gender” is born from a refusal to engage with scholarship that would enable them to enter public debate. In this sense, Butler argues that reading and sincerely engaging with what is at the heart of the debate is not merely a luxury or a hobby: it is the prerequisite for a productive democratic life. “Informed debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute” (p. 18). It seems that the anti-gender movement does not value having a shared understanding of “what” is at stake. For Butler, the work, then, is not to deconstruct an argument—or to construct an entirely new one. It is, rather, to neutralize a “gender-as-Hydra” – a collection of nightmare sequences that feed off fear – which seeks to destroy certain possibilities for queer, trans and feminist lives. Therefore, Butler is interested in constructing a counter-imaginary to oppose the ways in which the anti-gender movement acts “as a part of fascism” (p. 25).According to the “anti-gender” movement, the many faces of “gender” can be as terrifying as the Hitler Youth, nuclear warheads, or those who think they may usurp the power of God (chapter 1). When gender isn’t presented as the aforementioned threats, it can also take the form of indoctrination. The interesting thing, then, when it comes to performativity studies, is the way in which gender becomes a site for a variety of simultaneous embodiments – in which it is not the repetition of a variety of gender acts that coalesce into a coherent performance. How may we think about gender when the anti-gender movement has so clearly pushed aside any consideration of coherence and consistency?On the matter of “gender-as-harm,” Butler also explores the way in which the Vatican presents “gender” as a danger to the complementarity of man and woman, marriage, the family and children (chapter 2).It seems the Church is trying to make queer lives – or any type of lives that exist outside of heterosexual marriage – completely unthinkable and unsayable. In that sense, queer partnership or parenthood is presented as a threat to children both in terms of indoctrination and sexual abuse. In other words, the Vatican is trying to enact a form of effacement – or at the very least is trying to limit the conditions of possibility for different (queer) embodiments – by conjuring up a reversed fantasy where “gender ideology” is what lurks in the shadows, waiting for innocent and easily influenced children.More specifically, Butler explores how “anti-gender ideology” movement manifests itself in the United States. Chiefly, Butler analyses the ways in which “the deprivation of health care and the censorship of education” are disenfranchising LGBTQIA + communities and increasing their vulnerability (chapter 3). By multiplying the legislative bans and restrictions, the United States’ Right is effectively forming a “state-backed form of thought police” which seems to target the apparent corruptive and indoctrinating power of reading and books. It seems that not only do words such as “gender,” “gay” and “trans” have the power to indoctrinate whoever encounters them, but it also appears that the minds of children and young adults are “fully porous or helplessly responsive” in such scenarios. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Butler had analyzed a similar dynamic when it came to the military and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. By trying to fix the meaning of certain words as contagious and dangerous, the State and its various apparatuses were trying to make them unsayable in the context of self-declaration.The study of performativity – and much of the scholarship that has been developed in and around this concept – has to do with what is enacted and constructed through our practices and our speech. The “what” that is performed is often a semi-unified – and hopefully – coherent thing. What is interesting then is that in this case, the thing that “gender” performs, insofar as the Right is concerned, has less to do with one singular thing and more to do with an affective state of fear and anxiety. That affective state leads to policy and legislative action such as bans of healthcare and censorship in education, but seems secondary to the importance of the specific affective wavelength. If Butler is concerned with the “phantasmatic scene” and the imaginary that “gender” can conjure, there is something to be said about the different types of coherence that can be built upon. That is to say that the dream sequence – or nightmare sequence, more aptly – is not beholden to the same laws of coherence as that of the waking world. If the Right has tapped into our collective fears and anxieties, they are potentially operating on the level of the dream sequence, against which logic and rational argument seldom are enough to change paths.When it comes to fixing the meaning of certain terms, the Right and more specifically the Trump administration have taken it upon themselves to try to ensure that “sex” should be considered immutable (chapter 4). Aided by the Supreme Court, which has taken a particularly “literalist” approach to matters concerning human rights and personal freedom, any definition of “sex” that would allow for the evolution is presented as a threat to national order. For Butler, this visceral opposition to freedom is a matter of concern. “Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is it rather: How has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?” (p. 129). However, amongst those who insist that “sex” is/should be fixed, there is another notable group that finds itself aligned with the “anti-gender” movement. Indeed, “gender critical feminists” argue that bodies and “sex” produce hors tout a set of experiences – and ways of being read, signified, and interacted with – that have nothing to do with specific sociopolitical and historical context (chapter 5).A point of interest is the idea that there are categories – ways of approximating, naming and enacting lived gendered experiences with language – which “let many of us live” (p. 151). In this sense, gender and its ritualized performances are normative: they can be (and are) coercive and oppressive, but they may also be life-affirming. For some of us, thinking within and against the boundaries of gender is not only a question of what constraints “weigh” on life, but a question of the possibility of a life worth living. Naming our various gendered embodiments may very well be a practice of survival in the face of the organized violence of erasure and denial. If our understanding of “sex” is broadened when we consider that it is not a fixed and ahistorical feature of a person, does that mean the realities that “sex” articulates are therefore erased? For Butler, that is hardly a convincing argument.Furthering their argument, Butler challenges the assertion that feminists are denying the “facts” of sex (chapter 6). Namely, they call upon John Berger’s intervention to remind us that “what” we see is always conditioned by our ways of seeing, which are themselves “laden with presuppositions about the meaning of what there is to be known” (p. 181). How we understand “sex” – and where we are willing to look for it – is already saturated with ideas and political inclinations. Then, it stands to reason to say that neither nature nor the body reveals itself plainly, when they are always in the process of being constructed and captured.To enrich the articulation between “sex” and its imaginary, Butler examines the “corrective” surgeries performed on intersex children by John Money in the late sixties and seventies. Thus, Butler presents the ways in which fear is built into the practice of sex assignment (chapter 7). In this case, the fear of not living up to expectations of social normalcy overrode considerations about the self-determination and agency of intersex children. It can be said, then, that sex assignment summons an imaginary and a set of expectations for the future of children. The projected failure to live up to those expectations has compelled cruel and inhumane medical procedures, such as those conducted by Money. However, for Butler, Money’s contributions to gender studies – even as we may be required to think against his contributions – are still relevant. He identified a gap between bodies and the projected trajectories of a life, which remains a productive space for thought. “At every stage in this process of becoming gendered, a persistent incommensurability exists between the lived body and the category under which it is to be understood” (p. 201). However, that very space between the lived body and the category that aims to capture it is often eschewed in the name of what is considered “natural.” In that regard, Butler explores the ways in which the nature/culture dichotomy has influenced sex/gender binarism (chapter 8).In turn, for many proponents of “anti-gender” ideology, “sex” is the essential and “natural” fact of the material world, upon which we have imposed the fable of “gender.” Through a co-constitutive approach, which has come to be favored in many fields of science such as biology and immunology, we may understand the material reality of sex and its bearings on possible embodiments. Speaking of such varied embodiments, Butler explores “when and how gender was forcibly imposed” (p. 212), specifically focusing on how “colonial powers, imposed gender norms on Black and brown bodies that naturalized and idealized heteronormative white and (mainly) European norms” (p. 212). In fact, Black and brown bodies were considered the anomalous bodies against which “normal” (and desirable) femininity and masculinity could be defined (chapter 9). Thus, gender dimorphism was negatively constituted against Black and brown “flesh” – which was considered a site where beings became “ungendered” – and insofar as “gender” may be a framework through which we can try to understand the relations we form with each other and the world, it is of crucial importance to understand how specific (racist, colonial and imperial) practices of “gendering” were/are at work in our very understanding of “sex.” Moreover, in many (white) feminist works that sought to understand patriarchal gender arrangements in racialized and subalternized cultures, the prism of “gender” was applied without consideration for the ways in which it writes over structures of kinship and intelligibility that may have organized social relations before colonization. This is not to say that inequality, oppression or violence were absent prior to colonization, but rather, it is an invitation to turn towards non-Western epistemological foundations when it comes to understanding different gendered embodiments and collective life trajectories.To situate and contextualize the concept, Butler explores the ways in which “gender” has been presented as an imperialist intrusion in non-English-speaking countries (chapter 10). “Although the anti-gender ideology movement often opposes the foreignness of gender on nationalist grounds, it oscillates between figuring the foreign as an imperialist power and an unwanted migrant” (p. 230). In this sense, the phantasm of “gender” becomes a synecdoche for what is foreign—imperial or otherwise. Moreover, issues of translation seem to be at the heart of this question. “If no one language monopolizes a word or idea, if there are other words that try to get at the same or a similar phenomenon, then asking what we refer to with the term “gender” can initiate an extremely interesting conversation among users of different languages” (p. 234). Indeed, Butler suggests that through paying attention to a variety of languages and formulations of gendered life, we may become attuned to different possibilities for embodiment. In this sense, language does not co-constitute an easily translatable concept of universal “gender,” but rather, language points to a contingent dimension of gender and gendered life. It is then not enough to simply find an adequate translation for an English concept of “gender”: we must open the floor to a plurality of gendered experiences and ways to name them if we wish to find more possibilities for livable lives.In their closing remarks, Butler reminds the readers that the aim of the book has been to encourage and foster potential alliances between different marginalized groups, despite the struggles that come with forming coalitions to fight against the phantasm of “gender.” Although Butler seeks “neither to provide a new theory of gender nor to defend or reconsider the theory that (p. the interest of this book is the way in which it with In the face of material fear and anxiety about the future have been made to coalesce around the “gender” by proponents of an “anti-gender” In that sense, Who’s Afraid of Gender? does something different previous works by It is less concerned with itself within a – at this very – conversation on performativity and is more concerned with the ways in which logic and coherence may be eschewed in of political and Butler us to consider the ways in which we do with rational debate when we are and the people in a terrifying over Who’s Afraid of Gender? shows us how we come to the for the Although it may not be its this work may still performativity studies insofar as it us to consider how affect enables certain and how we might neutralize their Who’s Afraid of Gender? that we enter the of fantasy with our desires for the a queer and feminist scholar much of this process was in various states of and – at the one it is to be when think of the ways in which have be and made up into – Butler is one of them, but also thinking about a feminist and a who does reading with just to name those from of are people who are for to point the of oppression – for to work against the other it is also to read about how our lives are as as nuclear The are they often make to no sense, and we are to our and to and every It is work, and we are largely to people who not to us or who not engage in The of a book then, is that it offers another way to resist fascist In that we to we are being we are no simply to and increasing are not to – with its and are the we are our in the phantasmatic we are the of our collective
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.
В статье исследуются различные семиотические средства трансляции ценностей, норм и установок в процессе осмысления коллективного прошлого в дискурсивном городском пространстве. Предметом исследования выступают принципы вербального и невербального кодирования информации об объекте коммеморации в текстах мемориальных досок. Статья представляет собой попытку изучить национальное коммуникативное пространство коммеморации в теоретической рамке лингвоурбанистики, нового исследовательского направления на стыке лингвистики и урбанистики. Впервые в лингвистическом исследовании выделены национальные особенности коммеморации в городской среде, репрезентирующие стратегии формирования согласованных ценностей, на основе представлений о коллективном прошлом. Цель исследования заключается в изучении механизмов сопряжения семантических компонентов, обеспечивающих коммуникативное единство вербально-визуального комплекса мемориальной доски и его воздействие на массового адресата в городском пространстве. Иконические средства репрезентации представляют особый интерес для исследования, так как через выбор в качестве объекта коммеморации определенного культурного символа или иконического знака транслируются ценностные установки исторического периода. Эмпирической базой исследования послужил корпус коммеморативных текстов, представляющих собой надписи на мемориальных досках города Москвы. Источником формирования исследовательского корпуса послужили сведения, представленные на открытом портале данных Правительства Москвы в сети Интернет. В статье представлена методика контент-анализа отобранного языкового материала с помощью корпусного менеджера AntConc, что позволило получить данные о частотности лексических единиц и содержании контекстов их употребления. Выделена корреляция между языковыми и иконическими средствами, которые акцентируют определенные атрибутивные характеристики объекта коммеморации, нацеленные на аксиологическую сферу адресата. The article explores ways in which semiotic means communicate national values, norms and expectations to city residents. The subject of the study is to identify the principles of verbal and non-verbal coding the information about the object of commemoration in the texts of memorial plaques. The article is an attempt to study the national communicative space of commemoration in the theoretical framework of linguo-urbanism, a new research area between linguistics and urbanism. For the first time, the linguistic study highlights the national features of commemoration in the urban environment reflecting the strategies to form the agreed values, based on ideas about the collective past. The research objective is to focus on mechanisms that ensure the communicative unity of the verbal-visual complex of the memorial plaque and its impact on the mass addressee in the urban space. The paper analyzes iconic means since the choice of a certain cultural symbol or iconic sign reveals what values and expectations are communicated and which models of social behavior are promoted by social agents. The empirical data for the study comes from the official text corpus of memorial plaques available on the Moscow government open data portal. The research techniques involve content analysis of the memorial plaques texts with the AntConc software to calculate word frequencies and analyze their contexts. In order to translate certain values specific lexical and iconic markers that describe attributive characteristics of the object of commemoration were outlined in accordance with the obtained data on the thematic and conceptual dominants of the typical commemorative texts. The paper suggests arguments for correlation between verbal and non-verbal means not only addressing the axiological sphere of the addressee, but also representing national commemorative cognitive scheme.
The article focuses on the current problem of changes in the language norm in the Italian language caused by both objective trends in the unification of languages in the era of information globalization and the subjective features of its formation and development. Italian is a Florentine dialect of the 14 th century, “intertwined” in the works of the natives of Florence – Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. But this language was a written language; it was spoken by an extremely narrow group of educated people (no more than 3 % of the population). Founded in the 16th century, the Kruska Academy pursued a deliberate policy of rejecting new vocabulary and grammatical phenomena in order to preserve the purity of the language. This language was not a native but a learned language, since even in Florence the dialect deviated from the samples of the 14th century. The situation began to change after the unification of Italy in 1861. The State adopted an Italian language education program. The following factors played an important role: the appearance of the radio and the media in Italian, the education of children in school, maintenance of documentation and administrative activities in the official language, mass resettlement of residents of southern Italy to the northern regions and, most importantly, the advent of television in the 60 s − 70 s of the 20 th century. Italian became an oral, native, spoken and popular language, and, accordingly, subjected to change. But grammars and textbooks designed to preserve the language norm are slow to respond to these changes. Students notice discrepancies in what they study as a linguistic norm, and what they hear and read in modern texts, which lead them to reasonable uncertainty and doubts. The collected corpus of materials contains examples of grammatical and lexical fluctuations. The changes in the language norm are analyzed and recommendations are given to students and teachers of the Italian language regarding these phenomena.
The article discusses the design and application of dependency treebanks for Biblical Hebrew, focusing on their potential for linguistic research. It highlights the importance of such treebanks in studying historical languages, where native speaker intuition is unavailable. The study compares dependency grammar frameworks, such as Universal Dependencies and Prague Dependencies, examining their suitability for different research goals, including syntax-semantics interface, word order analysis, and phonological-syntactic relationships. Specific criticisms of Universal Dependencies, particularly its hybrid nature prioritising semantic over surface-syntactic relations, are addressed alongside alternatives like the multilayered Prague Dependencies. The article emphasises the need for research-driven design, recommending adaptations based on the intended linguistic applications and underlying theoretical assumptions.
In human life, the prevention of violence, the revival of principles of humane existence, and the creation of a just world for future generations require eliminating inequality between women and men. In this context, comprehensive scientific exploration of the topic becomes increasingly relevant. In contemporary research, the issue of new terms in languages always takes center stage, which is an undeniable fact. This article introduces, for the first time in the scientific community, the term “unisex names”. In the Kazakh language, there is no specific category dedicated solely to gender, and therefore, this topic is not addressed by language norms. Nevertheless, there are elements that consistently manifest in the form of personal names. In Kazakh society, when choosing a name for a child, their gender is taken into account, but there are names that can be given to both boys and girls. This article explores the reasons for studying unisex names in the Kazakh language, their impact on a child's psychology, and their role in the social adaptation of an individual in society. Research on unisex names in the Kazakh language has been systematized, and a comparison with similar forms in other cultures has been conducted. Special attention is given to the structure and creation of lexical-semantic meanings of unisex names in the Kazakh language, and factors influencing the sociocultural adaptation of the personality have been identified. To validate the findings, a survey was conducted using a specifically designed questionnaire.
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 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.
This study assesses community-based tourism as an innovation mechanism for protected areas by examining Agdal commons, traditional seasonal resource-closure systems, in Oukaimden (Toubkal National Park) and Tiout (Argan Grove Biosphere Reserve), Morocco. Through exploratory fieldwork comprising eleven semi-structured interviews with forest rights holders, cooperative members, and local governance councils (Jmaa), complemented by correspondence factor analysis, hierarchical classification, and lexical visualization techniques, the research identifies three organizing dimensions of stakeholder discourse: ecological stewardship anchored in Agdal practices, territorial relationships linking place-people-resources, and institutional coordination through cooperatives and associations. Findings reveal that while Agdal terminology pervades local narratives as shorthand for intergenerational ecological knowledge and adaptive regulation, tourism-driven livelihood diversification risks fragmenting external tourism expertise from indigenous governance norms unless deliberately integrated through certified agro-sylvo-pastoral value chains such as cooperative-marketed argan oil. Oukaimden demonstrates underutilized ecotourism capacity beyond its winter-sports focus, whereas Tiout exhibits more mature community tourism adoption. The study proposes actionable policy frameworks that couple community-based tourism development with product certification, cooperative strengthening, and environmental safeguards to prevent resource degradation and social displacement, thereby advancing equitable transitions toward locally controlled, low-impact tourism models within Morocco's biosphere reserves. Although tourism and natural resource management are often perceived as distinct areas, they are interconnected and have significant implications for local populations. Tourism in Oukaimden and Tiout can provide development opportunities but can also put pressure on natural resources. The paper highlights the community approach through a significant observation and interviews carried in both communes. Developing a system of measures and policies to promote the adoption of community tourism, along with implementation mechanisms, positioning it as a key strategy for ensuring a successful transition.
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.
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.
Purpose: This study examined the effects of reduced bandwidth and auditory-visual congruence on emotional responses to nonspeech auditory-only and auditory-visual stimuli. Auditory-visual stimuli were picture/sound pairs that were congruent or incongruent in terms of valence (e.g., pleasant picture/unpleasant sound or vice versa). Method: Twenty adults with normal hearing rated the valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (exciting to calming) of nonspeech auditory-only and auditory-visual stimuli. Auditory stimuli were presented broadband (~125–8000 Hz) or bandpass filtered (800–2000 Hz). Auditory-visual stimuli were created by combining auditory stimuli with a picture of congruent or incongruent valence. Results: Bandpass filtering of auditory-only stimuli reduced the range of valence responses (less pleasant and less unpleasant). With congruent auditory-visual stimuli, bandpass filtering did not affect valence ratings. Incongruent audiovisual stimuli were rated as less pleasant than were congruent, pleasant, auditory-visual stimuli. Arousal ratings were lower with bandpass filtering but were not affected by congruency. Conclusions: Congruent auditory-visual stimuli resulted in more extreme ratings of valence than did auditory-only stimuli. Incongruent auditory-visual stimuli were generally rated as more unpleasant than pleasant, auditory-only stimuli. Consistent with previous studies of low- and high-pass filtering, bandpass filtering (800–2000 Hz) of auditory-only stimuli resulted in more neutral responses, suggesting that frequencies below 800 Hz and above 2000 Hz are important for ratings of valence. Inconsistent with previous low- and high-pass filtering work, bandpass filtering did not affect ratings of congruent auditory-visual stimuli, suggesting a different set of frequencies are important for ratings of valence when visual cues are also available. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29971387
Universal Dependencies (UD) have garnered notable focus for the systematic assessment of cross-lingual methods in the task of dependency parsing. In this article, we present our initiative toward the development of a dependency treebank for the resource-poor language: Nepali, within the framework of UD. To this end, we have mapped the Nepali treebank to the UD scheme. A detailed mapping procedure tailored to meet the requirements of the Nepali language has been outlined with examples. Experiments on dependency parsing with the UD-mapped Nepali treebank achieved UAS and LAS scores of 78 and 63.1, respectively.
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.
The present paper describes the building of STAF, a Universal Dependencies treebank for Albanian. STAF was bootstrapped using a Stanza model trained on previously unreleased data and then manually corrected by three Albanian speakers supervised by the author, who also revised all sentences. STAF focuses on the fiction genre, featuring 200 sentences selected from nine literary texts written by Albanian contemporary authors.
The abbreviations by superscript letters in 18th century Portuguese are analyzed, with the aim of finding consistent uses by the copyist of abbreviation strategies by superscription. The hypothesis tested is that there are patterns when abbreviating a lexical item, and that the choices made by the copyist regarding the letters that are selected to be overwritten, as well as their quantity, are not random. The corpus used is the Manuscript PBA-749 from the National Library of Portugal, which title is Primeiro copiador das respostas dos senhores governadores desta capitania [minas gerais] às ordens de s[u]a mag[esta]de, e contas que lhe dãoão que principia no governo do sen[h]or Antonio de Albuquerque Coelho de Carvalho. Based on an exhaustive vocabulary of the abbreviations in the document, we selected the 3,793 occurrences of suspension abbreviations. Then, using the theoretical-methodological framework of René Pellén (2005), we examined all the occurrences in depth, looking for rules that could be generalized, thus helping us to better understand not only the brachygraphic system of the time, but also the 18th century Portuguese language. We conclude that abbreviations by superscript letters are not done arbitrarily, and that there are recurring norms and formulas that can be quantified and given generalizing qualitative analyses.
[EN] We introduce Argos, an online search engine for Greco-Latin treebanks, developed by the Greek Linguistics Group at ILC (CSIC). Argos is designed as an intuitive and efficient tool, enabling complex searches and providing results in user-friendly formats, with future plans for expansion to incorporate more features and languages. To contextualize this tool, we present a brief overview of the state of the art in treebanks, focusing particularly on those dedicated to Ancient Greek and Latin, and their search engines.
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.
The article considers how ontology is structured and used as a linguistic database. Linguistic ontology allows for a structural description of language units, lexical-semantic relationships, and terminological systems. The database is used as an interactive resource in scientific research, terminological development, and language teaching. At the same time, the integration of ontology with electronic corpora and the possibilities of data retrieval, analysis, and visualization are discussed. This approach ensures the systematic and effective use of terminology in linguistic research.
Abstract The N400 component of ERPs is modulated by how predictable a word is, but predictability is usually quantified with lexical cloze —the probability that readers supply that exact word in offline sentence completion tasks. This form-based metric is at odds with decades of evidence that the N400 is primarily sensitive to meaning. Here, we asked whether a measure of semantic feature predictability can better account for N400 amplitude modulation. We reanalysed two independent EEG datasets (N = 26 and N = 334), computing lexical and semantic cloze for each critical word. Across both datasets, semantic cloze emerged as a better predictor of the N400 data than lexical cloze. Using the same materials, we then compared semantic and lexical cloze with probabilities from four large language models (GPT-2, GPT-2.7b, RoBERTa, ALBERT). None of the LLM-derived predictors outperformed semantic cloze. Our findings support the view that the N400 primarily reflects semantic—not exact-word—processing. Methodologically, we argue that replacing lexical cloze with semantic cloze can substantially increase the explanatory power of N400 studies, and caution against substituting human norms with raw LLM probabilities.