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16504 papers
Constituency parsing is an important task of informing how words are combined to form sentences. While constituency parsing in English has seen significant progress in the last few years, tools for constituency parsing in Indonesian remain few and far between. In this work, we publish ICON (Indonesian CONstituency treebank), the hitherto largest publicly available manually-annotated benchmark Indonesian constituency treebank with a size of 10,000 sentences and approximately 124,000 constituents and 182,000 tokens, which can support the training of state-of-the-art transformer-based models. As part of the process of building the treebank, we review and revamp the constituent and POS tagsets in use in existing treebanks to ensure that the labels are relevant and suitable for the grammatical features of Indonesian. We establish strong baselines on the ICON dataset using the Berkeley Neural Parser with transformer-based pre-trained embeddings, with the best performance of 88.85% F1 score coming from our own version of SpanBERT (IndoSpanBERT). We further analyze the predictions made by our best-performing model to reveal certain idiosyncrasies in Indonesian that pose challenges for constituency parsing.
Recursive Neural Networks (RNNs) are a powerful tool for Natural Language Processing (NLP) that can easily learn and represent recursive structures in sentences. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been widely used in various NLP tasks, such as language modeling, text classification, and sentiment analysis. With the development of deep learning, RNNs have emerged as a powerful tool to represent structural and syntactic information of sentences. RNNs have attracted a lot of attention due to their ability to learn complex language structures and representation. Consequently, RNNs have achieved great performance in a variety of NLP applications, such as text summarization, machine translation, and question answering. In this paper, we discuss the importance of RNNs in NLP and present different smart performance optimization strategies for RNNs. Firstly, we consider the use of pre-trained language models such as GloVe and word2vec to enhance the representation of words and improve the overall accuracy. Secondly, we implement a variety of regularization techniques, such as dropout and batch normalization, to regularize the learning process of RNNs. Finally, we discuss the approaches used to reduce the complexity and overfitting of RNNs. We compare the performance of different RNNs on the Penn Treebank dataset with different optimization strategies. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches can significantly improve the performance of RNNs and provide a more effective solution for NLP tasks.
With the advent of pre-trained language models, many natural language processing tasks in various languages have achieved great success. Although some research has been conducted on fine-tuning BERT-based models for syntactic parsing, and several Arabic pre-trained models have been developed, no attention has been paid to Arabic dependency parsing. In this study, we attempt to fill this gap and compare nine Arabic models, fine-tuning strategies, and encoding methods for dependency parsing. We evaluated three treebanks to highlight the best options and methods for fine-tuning Arabic BERT-based models to capture syntactic dependencies in the data. Our exploratory results show that the AraBERTv2 model provides the best scores for all treebanks and confirm that fine-tuning to the higher layers of pre-trained models is required. However, adding additional neural network layers to those models drops the accuracy. Additionally, we found that the treebanks have differences in the encoding techniques that give the highest scores. The analysis of the errors obtained by the test examples highlights four issues that have an important effect on the results: parse tree post-processing, contextualized embeddings, erroneous tokenization, and erroneous annotation. This study reveals a direction for future research to achieve enhanced Arabic BERT-based syntactic parsing.
Primary visual cortex (V1) is generally thought of as a low-level sensory area that primarily processes basic visual features. Although there is evidence for multisensory effects on its activity, these are typically found for the processing of simple sounds and their properties, for example spatially or temporally-congruent simple sounds. However, in congenitally blind individuals, V1 is involved in language processing, with no evidence of major changes in anatomical connectivity that could explain this seemingly drastic functional change. This is at odds with current accounts of neural plasticity, which emphasize the role of connectivity and conserved function in determining a neural tissue's role even after atypical early experiences. To reconcile what appears to be unprecedented functional reorganization with known accounts of plasticity limitations, we tested whether V1's multisensory roles include responses to spoken language in sighted individuals. Using fMRI, we found that V1 in normally sighted individuals was indeed activated by comprehensible spoken sentences as compared to an incomprehensible reversed speech control condition, and more strongly so in the left compared to the right hemisphere. Activation in V1 for language was also significant and comparable for abstract and concrete words, suggesting it was not driven by visual imagery. Last, this activation did not stem from increased attention to the auditory onset of words, nor was it correlated with attentional arousal ratings, making general attention accounts an unlikely explanation. Together these findings suggest that V1 responds to spoken language even in sighted individuals, reflecting the binding of multisensory high-level signals, potentially to predict visual input. This capability might be the basis for the strong V1 language activation observed in people born blind, re-affirming the notion that plasticity is guided by pre-existing connectivity and abilities in the typically developed brain.
Aesthetic chills are an embodied peak emotional experience induced by stimuli such as music, films, and speeches and characterized by dopaminergic release. The emotional consequences of chills in terms of valence and arousal are still debated and the existing empirical data is conflicting. In this study, we tested the effects of ChillsDB, an open-source repository of chills-inducing stimuli, on the emotional ratings of 600+ participants. We found that participants experiencing chills reported significantly more positive valence and greater arousal during the experience, compared to participants who did not experience chills. This suggests that the embodied experience of chills may influence one's perception and affective evaluation of the context, in favor of theoretical models emphasizing the role of interoceptive signals such as chills in the process of perception and decision-making. We also found an interesting pattern in the valence ratings of participants, which tended to harmonize toward a similar mean after the experiment, though initially disparately distributed. We discuss the significance of these results for the diagnosis and treatment of dopaminergic disorders such as Parkinson's, schizophrenia, and depression.
Comme d’autres pays francophones, la Belgique a connu une tradition puriste séculaire, ciblant ses anathèmes sur la variation topolectale. Le primat d’une norme exogène (le français « de Paris ») n’y a été remis en question qu’à la fin du xxe siècle. Aujourd’hui, la légitimité de certaines normes endogènes est reconnue, en particulier dans le domaine lexical. On présentera les grandes étapes de cette évolution dans les attitudes et les représentations des Belges francophones et le parti qui peut en être tiré pour une meilleure prise en compte de la variation topolectale dans l’enseignement du français.
From the corpus data, we observe that in the real language usage, the particular verb does not appear in all theoretically possible finite and infinite verb forms in the morphologically rich Lithuanian but is used in those forms which are relevant for the verb patterning. On the one hand, by teaching vocabulary, is it important to represent lexis in these relevant forms – frequently used forms, and, on the other hand, in grammar teaching, there is a need to provide learners with appropriate vocabulary, e.g., by teaching infinite forms, to use verbs, in the usage of which, these forms are relevant and frequent.In this paper, we provide language teaching practitioners with the data about the frequently used Lithuanian verbs and show which of them and how often appear in infinite forms (participles in passive and active voice, adverbial participles, half participles). As a research data we use 200 verbs from the Lexical Database of Lithuanian Language Usage which was developed on the basis of the written subcorpus of the Pedagogic corpus of Lithuanian. The investigated verbs belong to the frequent vocabulary: in the corpus of approx. 700,000 tokens, these verbs are used 100 times (and above). First, we analysed, which verbs appear in infinite forms, second, we checked whether frequent and typical infinite forms are included into corpus pattern(s) of these particular verbs, and if there is a link between the infinite form and a particular meaning of the verb.All verbs (except of three verbs with no infinite forms) were included into one of three groups: 1) 11 verbs which occur in the infinite forms frequently (more than 50% of all forms – finite and infinite) and, accordingly, typical; 2) 117 verbs with the infinite forms making up from 10 to 50%; 3) 69 verbs, with the infinite forms making up less than 10% of all verb forms. Interestingly, the verbs of the first group, usually have only one infinite form, e.g., participle in passive voice which makes up more than 50% of all forms of verb. These cases are also frequently observed in the second verb group. Thus, if the verb tends to be used in infinite forms, it is important to know which infinite form is relevant to that particular verb.In the Lexical Database of Lithuanian Language Usage, lexical and grammatical patterning of the word is represented in the form of corpus patterns. In this study, we showed the interrelation between the frequently used infinite forms of the verb and its corpus patterns (also, corpus patterns related to particular meaning of the polysemous verb). We can expect various applications of the provided data in the Lithuanian as a foreign language teaching: the provided data about the verbs typical and frequent in infinite forms and the corpus patterns including these infinite forms can be used for building vocabulary training as well as for developing grammar exercises.
There are at least two problems that underlie the study of interference with Madurese speech, namely that interference can damage the preservation of good and correct Madurese speech and can damage its traditions. Bearing in mind, Madurese speech has a level of speech in which the term Madurese is called ondhagga bhasa. This is also because in general the Madurese are bilingual people who are able to master two or more languages. Interference in Madurese speech includes lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic interference. The targets of the study are as follows: (1) to obtain an overview of lexical interference from basic words or derived words in the form of loanwords, greeting words, idioms in the Indonesian language which are related to their meaning in Madurese speech at the in-laws tradition event in Sumenep; (2) obtain an overview of the causes of lexical interference from the root word or the derived word. This is based on the study of lexical interference theory of basic words and invented words regarding greeting words, borrowed words, idioms (idioms) and good and correct Madurese speech rules. This study uses a descriptive-qualitative research approach with the following procedure. The sources of data used are the speeches of the speakers, informants, events, and literature using speech recording techniques, interviews, observations, and documentation. The study resulted in findings and giving meaning to the existence of lexical interference from basic words and derived words regarding greeting words, borrowed words, idioms from a number of speakers in the speeches of the mantu tradition. The occurrence of this interference is caused by the lack of basic vocabulary and invented words regarding the level of fine speech and understanding of its use so that it is unable to represent what is conveyed. This can damage the good and correct norms of Madurese speech and damage the sacredness of its traditional events.
The article discusses the grammatical competence in the English language of future teachers in the undergraduate program as a component of effective foreign language teaching in the form of ability to correctly apply the morphological, syntactic and lexical norms of the English language in solving practical problems. Taking into account the teaching of English as a pedagogical specialty, it is necessary to take into account the communicative and pedagogical components of professional competence. Based on theoretical provisions in the form of an analysis of pedagogical conditions of the organization of education, the current study views the specifics of improving morphological grammatical skills in the form of teaching tense forms of English verbs on the material of authentic texts from classical literature. As part of the study, as part of a pedagogical experiment, according to the results in the experimental group, difficulties in mastering the tense forms of verbs were identified. Increasing the level of foreign language communicative competence will contribute to the improvement of theoretical and linguistic knowledge, to the formation of practical skills in the form of teaching the norms of the literary language.
The article is devoted to language competence study of higher education institutions’ students as the basis of professional language culture. It was emphasized that students of higher education should develop language competence, follow the literal language norms, avoid morphological, lexical and phonetic violations. Mastering the Ukrainian language perfectly is the task of every conscious citizen, who is obliged to be able to use all the lexical wealth in the professional language. The theoretical basis of language competence is substantiated, it is emphasized that it should not be confused with communicative competence. Various aspects of research by scientists regarding language culture, language norms, language and stylistic advice aimed at improving the language of professional communication are highlighted. Violations of lexical norms in the students’ professional language were revealed. The most typical lexical errors were analyzed: 1) inappropriate use of paronyms. Such words should be checked in the dictionary of paronyms; 2) the use of pleonasms, excessive or redundant words and repetitions (tautologies); 3) the use of lexical Russianisms, which violates lexical norms, litters the literary form of the Ukrainian language, leads to mistakes regarding the use of tracing foreign words, surzhyk (mixed language dialect); 4) using words in a noncharacteristic or context-inappropriate meaning; 5) literal translation of phraseological units, words with a phraseologically related meaning, which have their counterparts in the Ukrainian language, or violations of phraseological accuracy; 6) inappropriate use of borrowed vocabulary, in particular anglicisms that have their counterparts in the literary language. A foreign word can be determined by phonetic-grammatical design and lexical meaning; 7) incorrect use of prepositional structures, which arises due to insufficient knowledge of the Ukrainian prepositional patterns. When translating the conjunction with the preposition “po” from Russian, one should take into account the peculiarities of prepositions’ use in the Ukrainian language, and not translate verbatim. Work on lexical errors’ elimination will make it possible to improve the language culture of students, to form language competence, and to observe the literary language norms.
The article examines the language means marking timeand spacerelated commemorative practices and explores ways in which the urban discourse communicates national values, norms and expectations to city residents. The 102 focus is made on the textual components of commemorative plaques functioning in the urban discourse from the angle of spatialtemporal relations. The motivation was that the choice of a certain historical event and linguistic means representing it reveals what values and attitudes are communicated and which models of socially expected behavior are cultivated by social agents. The empirical data for the study were selected from the official corpus of memorial plaques texts available on the Moscow government open data portal. The content analysis was performed with the Voyanttools and AntConc software to calculate word frequencies and analyze their contexts. The obtained data on the thematic and conceptual dominants of the texts were used to identify and describe commemorative narrative strategies, specific lexical markers and syntactic models typical of urban commemorative texts. As a result, the correlation was found between commemorative narrative strategies and verbal and syntactic linguistic means that emphasize certain cultural and historical events, locations of urban space not only targetting the axiological sphere of the addressee but also promoting certain models of social behavior.
Chloé Braud, Yang Janet Liu, Eleni Metheniti, Philippe Muller, Laura Rivière, Attapol Rutherford, Amir Zeldes. Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023). 2023.
The paper focuses on the analysis of the means of representation of the informant’s linguistic personality at phonetic, lexical, grammatical, cognitive, and pragmatic levels in the oral discourse. The material of the study is a transcript of an audio recording of one interview from the author’s multimedia corpus “Everyone has their own war”. The interview was recorded in the Ukrainian language in one of the most emotionally, psychologically, and physically difficult moments of the informant’s life. Despite a certain limitation of language material, the peculiarities of the speech manifestations of the linguistic personality of the informant, a twenty-nine age widow (a woman and a mother), are representative since she describes her life and the life of her family after the full-scale invasion on February 24 and until May 2022. The analysis of the informant’s linguistic personality shows that the verbal and semantic specificity is determined by the volume of lexical items, the peculiarities of nominating speech objects and the choice of means for their characteristic, as well as the style of speech. The informant’s speech is characterized by violations of literary norms: it is full of adapted and unadapted lexical and morphological units of the Russian language, and improper pronunciation of words, which in general correlates with her cultural and educational level. The informant’s vocabulary is pragmatically functional and determined by the level of education, social status, type of employment and living conditions. It clearly reflects the essence and content of the linguistic personality. The vocabulary of the everyday sphere prevails, onyms (toponyms, anthroponyms, ergonyms) and a small amount of military lexicon are also registered. Emotional and evaluative interjections with a positive or negative assessment are representatives of the emotional, functional, and semantic sphere of the informant’s speech. The connotative coloration is provided, in particular, by the verbal characterization of the occupiers, which includes ethnonymic nicknames, including those based on appearance, language, and behaviour. In terms of content and values, the discursive activity of the informant, represented by referential semantic elements, is determined by extralinguistic factors and it correlates with universal values. The motivational and pragmatic aspect of linguistic personality is grounded on the desire to speak out, and includes life or situational goals, which are reflected in the discourse. It is manifested, in particular, in the manner of speech, in the choice of markers used to organize and control the discursive coherence. The analysis of the pragmatic markers included their functions, the specifics of their use and frequency.
CONTEXT: Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a genetic disorder that results in hormonal imbalances and decreased brain volumes in regions important for emotional processing. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether emotion perception differs between youth with CAH and control youth, and if these differences relate to brain volumes. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study of 27 youths with CAH (mean age = 12.63 years, 16 female) and 35 age- and sex-matched controls (mean age = 13.03 years, 20 female), each participant rated picture stimuli and completed a 3T structural brain scan. Valence and arousal ratings and reaction times of 61 affective images were assessed. Gray matter volumes were measured by MRI. RESULTS: Youth with CAH had lower valence ratings for negative (P =.007) and neutral (P =.019) images. Controls showed differences in reaction times and arousal ratings across stimuli conditions, but youth with CAH did not. Brain volumes of the right amygdala (P =.025) and left hippocampus (P =.002) were associated with valence ratings. Left rostral middle frontal (P <.001) and right medial orbitofrontal cortex (P =.002) volumes were negatively related to valence scores only in youth with CAH, whereas left medial orbitofrontal cortex (P <.001) volumes were associated with valence scores positively in youth with CAH and negatively in controls. CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that youth with CAH perceive emotive stimuli as more unpleasant. Decreased brain volumes in the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex are associated with these measures of altered emotion perception in youth with CAH.
Abstract Viewing a live facial expression typically elicits a similar expression by the observer (facial mimicry) that is associated with a concordant emotional experience (emotional contagion). The model of embodied emotion proposes that emotional contagion and facial mimicry are functionally linked although the neural underpinnings are not known. To address this knowledge gap, we employed a live two-person paradigm (n = 20 dyads) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy during live emotive face-processing while also measuring eye-tracking, facial classifications and ratings of emotion. One dyadic partner, ‘Movie Watcher’, was instructed to emote natural facial expressions while viewing evocative short movie clips. The other dyadic partner, ‘Face Watcher’, viewed the Movie Watcher's face. Task and rest blocks were implemented by timed epochs of clear and opaque glass that separated partners. Dyadic roles were alternated during the experiment. Mean cross-partner correlations of facial expressions (r = 0.36 ± 0.11 s.e.m.) and mean cross-partner affect ratings (r = 0.67 ± 0.04) were consistent with facial mimicry and emotional contagion, respectively. Neural correlates of emotional contagion based on covariates of partner affect ratings included angular and supramarginal gyri, whereas neural correlates of the live facial action units included motor cortex and ventral face-processing areas. Findings suggest distinct neural components for facial mimicry and emotional contagion. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Face2face: advancing the science of social interaction’.
Abstract In this study, we compared affective ratings of emotional valence and arousal for 882 Serbian words at three points in time: before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2018), during the COVID-19 lockdown (2020), and after the government measures were abandoned (2022). We did not observe a significant change in average valence or arousal ratings across time points. A more detailed look into the data revealed the change in arousal that was different across the valence values. An increase in their linear correlations and a decrease in the nonlinearity of the GAMM smooth demonstrated that, upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emotionally negative words elicited higher arousal ratings, whereas emotionally positive words elicited lower arousal ratings. It revealed that our participants became more sensitive to the negative content and less sensitive to the positive content. Our results add to the findings, which showed that the relationship between emotional valence and arousal is a function of contextual factors, which primarily influence the arousal of words.
International audience
“M. Marcel Proust has just published the third volume of his childhood memories,” wrote an exceptionally obtuse reviewer of Le Côté de Guermantes in 1920 (qtd. 130). That's one of the generic frames within which À la recherche du temps perdu has been read; other descriptions include “a psychological novel, a novel about time and memory, later a novel about art and aesthetic experience, a philosophical novel, a phenomenological one, and perhaps only later still a novel with a deeply anthropological and sociological bent, a novel interested in how culture happens, how language is a space in which culture happens, in which it is possible to watch culture happening over time, and to watch social change occur as culture happens” (125). The latter is of course the description closest to Michael Lucey's heart; his Proust is an ethnographer of the work done by language, and more generally a kind of wild sociologist who is deeply attentive to the playing out of social roles in conversation and in the idiosyncrasies of speech. The project of What Proust Heard is at once to analyze that narrative mode and to inculcate in the reader a novelistic form of attention to talk and to the social patterns that are revealed and enacted in talk.Two metadiscourses meet in this book. One is the series of reflections made by Proust's narrator on the conversations and the speech patterns of characters in the novel, including (by implication) those of the hero himself. The other is a set of theoretical languages elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, and above all by the linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein.Let me start with the former. What the narrator notices and returns to again and again is a depth that underlies all talk (what Nathalie Sarraute calls the sous-conversation) (220). His interest is not in what is said but in how it is said and what that underlying subtext tells us about the speakers. Every act of speech carries with it the traces of a complex personal and interpersonal history, a linguistic habitus displaying the patterns of class, gender, and culture that are mobilized when characters speak. Everyday talk involves the attempt to decipher those traces and to ratify the social roles performed by speakers, as well as the social capital they claim and that is either granted or denied by their interlocutor; and much of the novel's comic force arises from its representation of the failed assumption of a shared habitus.Take, for example, a conversation centered on the Duc de Guermantes that Lucey analyzes at some length. The duke has expressed his regret that his nephew, Robert de Saint-Loup, has aligned himself with the supporters of Dreyfus: “With a name like ‘the Marquis de Saint-Loup,’” he remarks, “one isn't a Dreyfusard.” The narrator then appeals to one of two “laws of language” to explain the duke's use of the inappropriate phrase “with a name like” (“quand on s'appelle”). One of them “demands that we should express ourselves like others in our mental category and not of our caste”; the duke is speaking like a grocer. The other law is that from time to time there arise, as though by pure chance, “modes of expression that one hears in the same decade on the lips of people who have in no way concerted their efforts to use them” (qtd. 16). The first law, as Lucey paraphrases, “has to do with registers and how they are disseminated, and the second has to do, perhaps, with lexical innovation, borrowing, and diffusion” (17). The play of shifting registers continues in this conversation with interventions by an archivist and a historian: The former introduces a lexical novelty (the term “mentality” to describe a state of mind). The latter, “anxious to be part of the conversation,” points out that the word “mentality” occurs more frequently than the adjective “talentuous” (which the duke has just remarked on), citing as his authority the fact that “I'm on a committee at the Ministry of Education where I've heard it on several occasions, and also at my club, the Volney, and even at dinner at M. Émile Ollivier's.” To which the duke scathingly replies—“with false humility but with a vanity so deep-seated that his lips could not refrain from a smile”—that, since he doesn't have the honor of belonging to the Ministry of Education, nor of belonging to the Volney Club (“my only clubs are the Union and the Jockey—I don't believe you belong to the Jockey, monsieur?”), nor of having been invited to dine with M. Ollivier, he hasn't come across the word “mentality” (qtd. 20–21). Social caste is asserted, a social hierarchy reaffirmed.Although characters thus confirm their social roles by repeatedly performing them, their speech is not reducible to the expression of social position: the duke will, under certain circumstances, speak like a grocer. Much of the narrator's metadiscourse is directed to the slippery negotiations of position that take place in talk. Sexual codes are a particularly rich source of positional ambiguity: Charlus has to work out whether being called “one of us” by M. Verdurin means that his sexual proclivities (and thus, surprisingly, Verdurin's) have been revealed or that something more innocuous is intended, and the narrator is driven to anguish by Albertine's abruptly expressed desire to “me faire casser...,” which he reconstructs (“me faire casser le pot”) as referring to an obscene sexual act (158). Aesthetic codes similarly work both to shape a shared social space and to divide it through operations of distinction and exclusion: Elstir, Bergotte, and Vinteuil act as touchstones by which characters judge and are judged (Charlus signals reverence during a performance of the Vinteuil Septet, Mme. Verdurin performs absorption, and the narrator, anticipating Bourdieu, constructs and reconstructs the social field across which judgments of taste and the concomitant judgments of character are distributed).In a series of interludes between chapters Lucey extends Proust's narrator's fascination with the forms and uses of talk to other novelists who share that fascination: Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. These interludes shift the focus from Proust to the description of a specific genre of the novel that culminates, paradoxically, in Cusk's tonally flat representations of talk which leave it entirely to the reader to make sense of motive and intention: her metadiscourse is present only as inference. We might wonder, though: Which novels would be excluded from this tradition? Which novelists are not particularly interested in the social dynamics of talk? And when Lucey speculates on how a reader would decipher motive and social patterning in a novel made up entirely of dialogue (Ivy Compton-Burnett comes to mind), he doesn't push this to think about how such deciphering might work in the limit case of drama and dramatic irony.The second metadiscourse elaborated in What Proust Heard is drawn from Bakhtin's account of speech genres (but not, unfortunately, except in passing, the early work of Bakhtin/Vološinov and Bakhtin/Medvedev); Goffman's account of the splitting of the author function between animator, author, and principal; Bourdieu's account of habitus, field, and the logic of practice; and Michael Silverstein's linguistic anthropology (but not, unfortunately, the social semiotics of Michael Halliday, which covers much of the same ground as Silverstein but more lucidly and with somewhat more linguistic complexity in its theorization of the interlocking determinations of speech registers). Here the key construct is the “social indexicality” of language, a concept that invites us to attend not to the denotational force of speech but to the social markers it carries and the social work it performs. Lucey's reading of Silverstein is grounded in a compelling critique of the limitations of speech act theory and of H. Paul Grice's “cooperative principle.” The tradition that stretches from J. L. Austin through Grice and John Searle understands language-in-use in ways that are instrumentalist and acontextual, oriented to the speaker's intention and to the truth-values carried by speech. As Goffman puts it, however, talk is less about giving information than about “giving shows” (98). For Silverstein, language has an indexical rather than an illocutionary force: it carries embedded information about role relationships and it projects “consequential social action”; its “indexical entailments” are “more various than normal construals of performativity allow for” (223–24). Whereas Grice's account of conversational implicatures expresses a kind of philosopher's fantasy about the use of talk for the rational and cooperative construction of a shared project, where participants are expected to speak transparently, economically, truthfully, and to the point, “neither Proust nor linguistic anthropology proceeds from the assumption of reciprocity, and so neither finds it normal that an easily or widely shared reference to a common repository of illocutionary possibilities or metapragmatic functions necessarily produces a uniform recognition of what transpires in this or that instance of language use” (32–33). To the contrary: what Proust takes from Dostoevsky is a thematics of mutual incomprehension, such that any conversation between, say, the narrator and Albertine is largely opaque to their respective “intentions,” and speakers are never fully the subjects or authors of their speech. Many of the most interesting and most subtle readings in the book are explorations of the tormented dynamic that holds the narrator and Albertine together and apart.The two metadiscourses elaborated in this book—that of the narrator, and a social-scientific discourse—are interrelated; but the form of their relationship is something of a problem. At times Proust (or the narrator) figures as a kind of precursor of social theory; at others that theory acts as a supplement, translating the narrator's analyses of talk into explicitly sociological terms. I'm not entirely convinced that that act of translation adds significant value, however, and I have a particular concern about Silverstein's concept of the social “indexicality” of language. The Peircean indexical sign operates by means of a direct existential or physical connection between the sign and its object: the connection may be causal, or it may be spatiotemporal, as in the case of deictic indices. The concept of social indexicality thus seems to indicate that role relationships can be read off from spoken text, with immediate legibility, and it points to actual relations of power and solidarity conveyed in talk rather than to relations that are projected but not necessarily accomplished: to discursive positions that don't simply or immediately reflect actual social positions (the duke speaking like a grocer). To put this differently, the logic of the concept of indexicality cuts short an analysis of the negotiation through talk of rhetorical positions, and the interpretive ploys that all such negotiation involves.One of the consequences of this logic is played out in Lucey's response to a reflection by Cusk on the instability of character in her novels. She tells her interviewer that “we're very used to a novel being carried by a self that we believe in, and we believe in it as a simulation, or a representation of us. We think that's what our experiences are like, and this is the form which that experience of being in a self is like, and I don't believe that. I don't think that's true. I think... that experience is much more lateral and oceanic” (258). To which Lucey replies that “of course, it is probably statistically more likely that certain kinds of people will share certain experiences than others, will be informed by certain kinds of experience than others, will talk in one way rather than another.... Cusk's novels constantly hover on the brink of this kind of self-reflexivity. Proust's narrator hovers on this same brink” (259).I don't want to make too much of this: Lucey's reading of Proust is fully attentive to the indeterminacies and instabilities of character and to the “distributive authorship” of speech (276). But one of the ways in which Proust is not doing the kind of norm-governed classificatory work that a sociologist like Bourdieu does has to do with his fascination with the dispersal of “character”: the atavism that finds us speaking the language of our parents and acquiring the racial features of our ancestors; the slippage of one character into another through the myriad transformations of desire and identity in this most fluid of novels. Proust may indeed have an ethnographic sensibility, but his commitment as a novelist is not only to the descriptive but also to the transformative and the Cratylic powers of language.
In contrast with findings of reduced facial and vocal emotional recognition (ER) accuracy, children on the autism spectrum (AS) demonstrate comparable ER skills to those of typically-developing (TD) children using music. To understand the specificity of purported ER differences, the goal of this study was to examine ER from music compared with faces and voices among children on the AS and TD children. Twenty-five children on the AS and 23 TD children (6-13 years) completed an ER task, using categorical (happy, sad, fear) and dimensional (valence, arousal) ratings, of emotions presented via music, faces, or voices. Compared to the TD group, the AS group showed a relative ER strength from music, and comparable performance from faces and voices. Although both groups demonstrated greater vocal ER accuracy, the children on the AS performed equally well with music and faces, whereas the TD children performed better with faces than with music. Both groups performed comparably with dimensional ratings, except for greater variability by the children on the AS in valence ratings for happy emotions. These findings highlight a need to re-examine ER of children on the AS, and to consider how facilitating strengths-based approaches can re-shape our thinking about and support for persons on the AS.
Abstract This paper presents the introduction of frame semantics in SciE-Lex, a lexical database of biomedical English, in order to establish frame-based semantic networks among the lexical units contained in the database and draw attention to the domain-specific meanings and syntactic patterns that they exhibit. Taking the general English FrameNet database as a reference and the verbs diminish, compete, and perturb as an illustration, this paper shows how modelling the syntacticosemantic properties of biomedical English results in three scenarios: (a) the general English FrameNet analysis is fully adequate for biomedical usage (b) the frame elements in the general English FrameNet do not fully characterize the semantic and syntactic properties of the lexical items in biomedical English, so an existing frame needs to be customized (c) the frame(s) evoked in general English are different, so either the customization of an existing frame or the addition of a new frame is necessary.
BACKGROUND: Gaming disorder (GD) is a disorder due to addictive behaviors (ICD-11). Cue-reactivity and craving are relevant mechanisms in the development and maintenance of addictive behaviors. When confronted with cues showing in-game content (proximal cues) individuals with higher symptom severity show increased cue-reactivity. Based on conditioning and addiction theories on incentive sensitization, cue-reactivity responses may generalize to more distal cues, e.g. when individuals at risk of developing a GD are confronted with a starting page of an online game. In cue-reactivity paradigms so far, only proximal gaming cues have been used. METHODS: We investigated the effect of distal gaming cues compared to gaming-unrelated control cues on cue-reactivity and craving in 88 individuals with non-problematic use of online games (nPGU) and 69 individuals at risk for GD (rGD). The distal cues showed the use of an electronic device (e.g., desktop PC or smartphone) whose screen showed starting pages of either games (target cues), shopping- or pornography sites (control cues) from a first-person perspective. FINDINGS: We found significantly higher urge and arousal ratings as well as longer viewing times for gaming-related compared to gaming-unrelated control cues in rGD compared to nPGU. Valence ratings did not differ between groups. INTERPRETATION: The results demonstrate that already distal gaming-specific cues lead to cue-reactivity and craving in rGD. This finding indicates that based on conditioning processes, cue-reactivity and craving develop during the course of GD and generalize to cues that are only moderately related to the specific gaming activity.
The issue of studying the linguistic variation, caused by the stratification of society into different strata and groups, has not been solved so far, remaining one of the key issues in modern linguistics. This article deals with the concept “nonstandard dialect” in the framework of sociolinguistic research into the German-speaking tradition, which belongs to the field of studies of linguistic variability of the German language native speakers. Nonstandard dialects may differ from other forms of language existence, as well as from the literary language at all linguistic levels: phonological, grammatical, syntactical, lexical and idiomatic. We examine various forms of the vernacular existence, including urban vernaculars. The focus is on the consideration of the features characterizing language variations at phonological and phonetic levels. This is caused by the necessity of determining sources and patterns of linguistic variations at the phonetic level, one of which, in our opinion, may be the nonstandard dialect as one of the forms of language existence. The article touches upon such notions as: colloquial language, regional norms and regional peculiarities of pronunciation. The article presents some pronunciation peculiarities of Cologne inhabitants’ urban colloquial speech at the segmental level of the German language phonetic system.
This paper aims to provide clear guidelines for researchers studying conspiracy theory belief. It examines the meta-linguistic question about how we should conceptaulize 'conspiracy theory' and its relationship to the evaluative question of how we should evaluate beliefs in conspiracy theories, addressing normative issues surrounding the meaning, use, and conceptualization of ‘conspiracy theory’, as well as how these issues might impact how researchers study conspiracy theories or beliefs in them It argues that four norms, the Empirical Accuracy Norm, the Linguistic Norm, the Social Norm, and the Academic Fecundity Norm, underlie debates about how we should conceptualize or define ‘conspiracy theory’. We zoom in on the linguistic norm, as it has been treated as more fundamental than the other norms. We then scrutinize the argument that normative conceptualizations prematurely settle the question of how conspiracy theories and belief in them should be evaluated, and argue that it fails. Subsequently, we turn to the risks normative conceptualizations pose when it comes to certain assumptions and biases in the study of conspiracy theory belief. Finally, we explore where this leaves us regarding the meta-linguistic and evaluative questions, and formulate seven guidelines for studying conspiracy theory belief, whether it be theoretical, historical, or empirical.
The subject of this article is the most frequent linguistic units in the speech of modern embroiderers, which arise as a result of deviations from the language norm and testify to the high linguo-creative potential of the craftswomen discourse. However, the author also draws attention to the lexical unit class that are characteristic of the embroiderers speech and have a terminological character. Productive models for creating new lexical units are subjected to a detailed analysis: suffixation, addition, contraction, truncation of a phrase, abbreviation. The analysis showed that the morphological suffixal way of word formation exceeds in the modern embroiderers speech, addition and abbreviation are represented to a lesser extent. In addition, it was found that one of the active mechanisms for the transformation of lexical units is semantic derivation, which leads to the expansion of the conceptual scope of traditional lexemes. In most cases, this process occurs as a result of metaphorical transfer. The author of the article also considers cases of proverbs transformation in the embroiderers speech, reflecting the special worldview of embroiderers, and also being an opportunity for free self-expression. Most of them are transformations of traditional Russian proverbs, and new variants in speech become more common than their prototypes – canonical proverbs. Changes in the construction-sources are determined by the craftswomen intentions and affect different levels — semantics and structure. At the same time, the replacement of the proverb component becomes the most frequent creative mechanism. The language material collected and analyzed by us allows us to conclude that the speech of modern embroiderers has a high linguistic and creative potential and a wide range of language game markers, indicating the emergence of a special subculture of craftswomen at the present time.
In this excellent book, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion defend an etiological-functionalist account of the normativity of assertion. Specifically, the etiological function of assertion is to generate knowledge in hearers. Kelp and Simion argue that this functionalist thesis has two important implications: a) that epistemically good assertions are those that are disposed to generate knowledge in hearers, and b) that epistemically permissible assertions are those that conform to the Knowledge Rule of Assertion (KRA). One important feature of the book is a sophisticated defense of KRA by means of an etiological-functionalist framework.The book is lucidly written, rigorously argued, informed, and original. All of this is as expected, coming from two authors who have already made significant contributions to the topic. Indeed, the book draws on both their single-authored and coauthored work on related issues, including the normativity of assertion, the epistemology of testimony, epistemic norms, and epistemic normativity. The result is that an etiological-functionalist account of assertion is now front and center among competing views.The book also contains several other interesting and original discussions, all by way of applying the authors’ etiological-functionalist framework to prominent issues in the literature on assertion and beyond. These include a chapter on epistemic injustice (defending a duty to believe on the part of hearers), a chapter on whether there is a constitutive rule of assertion (rejecting Williamson’s strong constitution thesis, but defending a weaker version), a chapter on contextualism (arguing, contra DeRose, that KRA counts against a contextualist semantics of knowledge attributions), and an appendix on the value of knowledge (offering an original defense of our concern with knowledge, as well as a functionalist account of knowledge’s value). In my judgment, the book advances discussions on all of these topics in important and original ways.In the remainder of the review, I clarify what Kelp and Simion mean by a functionalist account of assertion, and I review what I take to be the authors’ most interesting arguments in favor of KRA and their etiological-functionalist account. I end by raising some questions about the view that results.Kelp and Simion tell us that they are arguing for a “function first” account of the normativity of assertion. Three points of clarifications are important here. First, this an account of the epistemic normativity of assertion, that is, an account of what makes an assertion epistemically (as opposed to practically, morally, or all-things-considered) good, proper, or right. Second, by “function,” the authors mean etiological function. This makes their account a competitor with ones that ground the normativity of assertion in human intentions (or what I will call the intended function of assertion). For example, it is a competitor with accounts that ground the normativity of assertion in human intentions embedded in speech acts or in other social practices or norms. Putting these two points together, Kelp and Simion are arguing for an etiological account of the epistemic normativity of assertion.Third, Kelp and Simion think that the normativity of assertion is multidimensional in the following way: there is a distinction between an assertion’s being good (or valuable) and its being permissible. As such, they argue, an adequate account of the normativity of assertion must address both of these dimensions. Specifically, rules of assertion such as KRA address the epistemic permissibility question. KRA says one must (epistemically) assert p only if one knows p. Alternatively, it is (epistemically) permissible to assert p only if one knows p. But this leaves open the question of the goodness of assertion—what makes an assertion epistemically good or valuable. Their function first account primarily answers this second question about goodness, and then derives an answer to the permissibility question from that. In turn, they argue, alternative accounts tend to conflate the distinction between these two dimensions for normativity, either assuming that good assertions must be permissible assertions or missing the distinction altogether.Regarding the epistemic permissibility of assertion, Kelp and Simion defend KRA in two stages. In the first stage, which comprises part 1 of the book, they look at the main arguments for and against KRA in the literature. Here they introduce a piece of theoretical machinery—their “Basic Normative Framework”—that I think moves discussion forward. In particular, a number of objections to KRA take the form of an apparent counterexample: a person S asserts p in a case where a) S does not know p, and yet b) S’s assertion seems permissible nonetheless. A common move by defenders of KRA is to interpret the case as a blameless norm violation. For example, KRA is indeed governing S’s assertion and violated, but S has an excuse. Objectors to KRA complain that this kind of move is ad hoc, inappropriately insulating KRA from apparent counterexamples. In the context of this dialectic, Kelp and Simion introduce an independently plausible framework for understanding criticism and blame, and they then show how the framework predicts patterns of criticism, apology, explanation, and excuse that favor KRA over other accounts. The Basic Normative Framework and the discussion around its application are too complex to present here. I will only register my agreement with Kelp and Simion on two central points: a) that their Basic Normative Framework is independently plausible and b) that it speaks decisively in favor of KRA in terms of how it predicts relevant conversational patterns.The second stage of KRA’s defense takes place in part 2 of the book, in the context of a broader defense of Kelp and Simion’s etiological-functionalist framework. Specifically, chapter 4 articulates and defends a functionalist account of the goodness of assertion. Roughly, one’s assertion is (epistemically) good just in case it has the disposition to generate knowledge in one’s hearers. Chapter 5 then shows how KRA, which speaks to the permissibility of assertion, can be derived from the account in chapter 4. The arguments of both chapters are central to the purposes of the book, and are of independent interest as well.The burden of chapter 4 is to establish the following evaluative norm:The argument begins by endorsing a standard account of etiological function:Kelp and Simon introduce some additional theoretical machinery that complicates the standard account and is employed to argue for their Evaluative Norm of Assertion. Specifically, a “simple economic system (SES)” is one that is constituted by a type of producer, a type of product, a type of consumer, and a type of return. For example, consider the practice of producing and consuming espresso at a local coffee shop (SES-Espresso). In SES-Espresso, baristas (producers) produce cups of espresso (product), which are consumed by customers (consumers) by means of a purchase (return). By E-function, tokens of espresso have the e-function of producing pleasant gustatory experiences in customers in SES-Espresso.Next, Kelp and Simion defend the following general evaluative norm:By this general evaluative norm, cups of espresso that have the disposition to produce pleasant gustatory experiences are good cups of espresso.The next step of the argument is to apply this machinery to assertions. Specifically, Kelp and Simion argue that our practice of making assertions qualifies as a simple economic system. In SES-Assertion, speakers (producers) produce assertions (products), which are consumed by hearers (consumers) by means of belief (return). By E-function, assertions have the e-function of generating knowledge in hearers. Finally, by means of the general evaluative norm for tokens with an e-function, we get The Evaluative Norm of Assertion.The task of chapter 5 is to provide a functionalist rationale for KRA, that is, to explain from a functionalist perspective why KRA should govern the permissibility of assertion. Kelp and Simion begin by describing a kind of situation where it makes sense to govern e-tokens by some rule or other. This is a situation where a) it matters that tokens of the type fulfill their e-function reliably (Reliability), b) there are numerous possible ways of producing tokens of the type, with varying reliability regarding whether tokens so produced fulfill their e-function (Variation), and c) tokens of the type are produced by human agents who are criticism-averse (Humanity). In such a situation, Kelp and Simion argue, it makes sense to govern the production of tokens by means of rules that promote reliability regarding e-function fulfillment. Moreover, they argue, SES-Assertion satisfies these conditions, so it makes sense that assertions should be governed by such a rule. The next step of the argument is to show that assertions should be governed by KRA in particular. That is, to show that governing assertions by KRA promotes the reliability with which assertions generate knowledge in hearers. Kelp and Simion offer several reasons for supposing that it does, thereby vindicating KRA from a functionalist perspective.First, why do Kelp and Simion think that the function of assertion is to generate knowledge rather than transmit it? The question arises because, on their own account, “cases in which testimony transmits knowledge predominate and cases in which testimony generates knowledge are rare exceptions” (114). But if generation cases are rare, it is unclear how assertions can have “the disposition to generate knowledge that p in one’s hearer(s) … by functioning normally in normal conditions.” (See the Evaluative Norm of Assertion, above). It is also unclear how knowledge generation “contributes to the explanation of why” assertions exist in SES-Assertion. (See E-function, above.) By their own reasoning, then, Kelp and Simion should think that the function of assertion is to transmit knowledge and that it is the disposition to fulfill this function that makes a token assertion good.Second, is FFAA supposed to give a full account or a partial account of the epistemic goodness of assertion? If it is supposed to give a full account, then FFAA is implausible. That is because assertions plausibly have an intended function as well as an etiological function, and it is plausible that intended function fulfillment also contributes to assertion’s epistemic goodness. For example, various authors have argued that the speech act of assertion is constituted by the intention to transmit knowledge, to give a reason to believe, or to give license to believe. If so, then it is plausible that the epistemic goodness of assertions is at least partly a matter of fulfilling their intended epistemic function. Suppose, then, that FFAA is supposed to give only a partial account of the epistemic goodness of assertion. In that case, it is unclear why FAA is a competitor to “intended function” accounts, including those that ground the goodness of assertion in the epistemic intentions embedded in constitutive rules, linguistic norms, or other social norms governing the practice of assertion.Suppose Kelp and Simion were to revise their view so as to accommodate these concerns. Many of their arguments and much of their view would be left intact, including their functionalist defense of KRA. And we would still have a compelling (now partial) account of the goodness of assertion, in terms of assertion’s etiological function of transmitting knowledge.
Recent efforts to consolidate guidelines and treebanks in the Universal Dependencies project raise the expectation that joint training and dataset comparison is increasingly possible for high-resource languages such as English, which have multiple corpora. Focusing on the two largest UD English treebanks, we examine progress in data consolidation and answer several questions: Are UD English treebanks becoming more internally consistent? Are they becoming more like each other and to what extent? Is joint training a good idea, and if so, since which UD version? Our results indicate that while consolidation has made progress, joint models may still suffer from inconsistencies, which hamper their ability to leverage a larger pool of training data.
L1-L2 parallel dependency treebanks are UD-annotated corpora of learner sentences paired with correction hypotheses. Automatic morphosyntactical annotation has the potential to remove the need for explicit manual error tagging and improve interoperability, but makes it more challenging to locate grammatical errors in the resulting datasets. We therefore propose a novel method for automatically extracting morphosyntactical error patterns and perform a preliminary bilingual evaluation of its first implementation through a similar example retrieval task. The resulting pipeline is also available as a prototype CALL application.
In task-based second language (L2) writing research, genre effects on linguistic features are usually explained by either task complexity hypothesis or differences in communicative demands. The basic distinction between the two explanations is determined by whether cognitive factors are at work. To date, the actual causes for L2 learners' different linguistic features in different genres are still unclear. Aiming at providing empirical evidence for explaining the mechanism of genre effects, this investigation uses dependency-grammar-based measures to examine the role of cognitive factors in L2 argumentative, narrative, and descriptive writings. A total of 540 compositions from three different proficiency groups of English as a foreign language learners were collected, and their mean dependency distances and their distributions of dependency distance were calculated. It was found that in all proficiency groups of compositions, dependency distance distributions of five types showed significant differences between genres. Since dependency distance reflects cognitive load, those five dependency types were able to show that cognitive factors are at play in the writing process. Among the five types, the phrasal dependency relation types could reveal genre effects regardless of learners' language proficiency, and clausal dependency relation types might pinpoint learners' threshold of perceiving task complexity. The findings suggest that genre effects on linguistic features in L2 writings may result from different cognitive demand imposed by writing tasks with different genres, and genre effect may exhibit variation among different proficiency groups.
One of the types of analysis of a literary text is linguistic poetic analysis, and in linguistics there are several conditions for this type of linguistic analysis. In other words, the following issues should be considered by the linguist researcher: to pay attention to how the author made a selection of language units in accordance with the literary genre of the fiction; to make an analysis of compliance with the norms inherent in the speech samples of the literary text; also to pay attention to the observance of the norms of person and time in the narrative form of speech in a single artistic text; to pay attention and analyze the compositional division of the analyzed artistic text; to give illustrative examples from the studied artistic text and pay attention to the fact that the elements of colloquial speech form a syntagma separated from the emerging patterns of lexical syntagmas in artistic texts, to show that they are able to exist and be in a literary language, since some elements of colloquial speech have potential; to analyze the elements of language that form the imagery of a literary text, as well as to prove that an artistic text enriches the vocabulary, since new words more often generate artistic texts, etc. And also to form an opinion about the individual style of the author.
Purpose: This study aims to examine the impact of sleep deprivation on individual cognitive reappraisal ability using a standardized behavioral paradigm. Methods: A randomized pretest-posttest control group design was conducted. Thirty-nine participants were eventually enrolled and randomly assigned to receive either the sleep control (SC: n = 17) or the sleep deprivation (SD: n = 22). Both of them were required to perform a standardized behavioral paradigm of measuring cognitive reappraisal ability one time under sleep-rested condition and another time under the condition of different sleep manipulation a week later. Results: Mean valence ratings of SD group were more negative than SC group's (p < 0.05) and mean arousal ratings of SD group were higher than SC group's (p < 0.01). Conclusion: Sleep deprivation may impair individual cognitive reappraisal ability and could potentially undermine the efficacy of cognitive therapy in terms of emotion regulation.
BACKGROUND: Psychiatric comorbidities are common in Parkinson's disease (PD) and may change with high-frequency stimulation targeting the subthalamic nucleus. Numerous accounts indicate subthalamic alpha-frequency oscillation is implicated in emotional processing. While intermittent alpha-frequency (10Hz) stimulation induces positive emotional effects, with more ventromedial contacts inducing larger effects, little is known about the subacute effect of ventral 10Hz subthalamic stimulation on emotional processing. OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS: To evaluate the subacute effect of 10Hz stimulation at bilateral ventral subthalamic nucleus on emotional processing in PD patients using an affective task, compared to that of clinical-frequency stimulation and off-stimulation. METHODS: Twenty PD patients with bilateral subthalamic deep brain stimulation for more than six months were tested with the affective task under three stimulation conditions (10Hz, 130Hz, and off-stimulation) in a double-blinded randomized design. RESULTS: While 130Hz stimulation reduced arousal ratings in all patients, 10Hz stimulation increased arousal selectively in patients with higher depression scores. Furthermore, 10Hz stimulation induced a positive shift in valence rating to negative emotional stimuli in patients with lower apathy scores, and 130Hz stimulation led to more positive valence to emotional stimuli in the patients with higher apathy scores. Notably, we found correlational relationships between stimulation site and affective rating: arousal ratings increase with stimulation from anterior to posterior site, and positive valence ratings increase with stimulation from dorsal to ventral site of the ventral subthalamic nucleus. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight the distinctive role of 10Hz stimulation on subjective emotional experience and unveil the spatial organization of the stimulation effect.
Social distance, or perception of the other, is recognized as a dynamic dimension of an interaction, but yet to be widely explored or understood. Through CORAE, a novel web-based open-source tool for COntinuous Retrospective Affect Evaluation, we collected retrospective ratings of interpersonal perceptions between 12 participant dyads. In this work, we explore how different aspects of these interactions reflect on the ratings collected, through a discourse analysis of individual and social behavior of the interactants. We found that different events observed in the ratings can be mapped to complex interaction phenomena, shedding light on relevant interaction features that may play a role in interpersonal understanding and grounding. This paves the way for better, more seamless human-robot interactions, where affect is interpreted as highly dynamic and contingent on interaction history.
Princeton University, including the various language programs it offers, has intentionally resisted distance learning for decades, primarily out of a desire to concentrate on the residential undergraduate educational experience. While the COVID-19 pandemic prompted sweeping changes to policies regarding remote instruction, they were temporary and are already, albeit irregularly, reverting to established, pre-pandemic norms. At the level of individual course or program curricula, however, potentially enduring adjustments have now taken root. In our second-year German courses, a convergence of factors, from video-based instructional modes and assignments to the poorly timed, as it felt then, roll-out of a new learning management system (LMS), have reshaped and helped redesign our approach to computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in the taught curriculum, classroom time, homework, and the modes of communication prioritized in assignments. Pandemic-related disruptions and institutional responses to them varied geographically and politically. In New Jersey, USA, state-level restrictions and institutional decisions resulted in the closure of campus instructional spaces from the halfway point of the 2020 spring semester through the end of the 2020–2021 academic year, with further precautions, mitigations, and flexible responses throughout the following academic year, including but not limited to frequent reversion to remote instruction during periods of high incidence, interior masking requirements, and social distancing when possible in classroom spaces. This situation prompted two sets of considerations, the first centered on adapting a remote instruction curricular and technological framework, the second on returning, however haltingly, to “normal” while adapting previous changes to unusual in-person environments. Our department was among the initial LMS implementation group in fall 2020. For the past six years, I have also redesigned, expanded, and aligned our second-year German program with the first year, which is based on a high-frequency core vocabulary and the development of contextual reading strategies, among other approaches (for a detailed description of approach, form, and function, see Oberlin, in press). In the spring semester of 2020 prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, I began testing the development of a new online curricular platform on the Canvas LMS (https://www.instructure.com/canvas), which has subsequently fully replaced Blackboard (https://www.blackboard.com/) at Princeton. The first semester of the Canvas implementation thus coincided with the first semester of fully remote instruction, while the remote half-semester prior remained on Blackboard; pre-pandemic, the LMS was used primarily as a repository for syllabi, electronic documents, and discussion boards. In the immediate context of the institutional shutdown effective March 14, 2020, which was announced just before the week of spring break, faculty had approximately 9 days to reenvision remote instruction to commence the week after. Of the many tools and approaches considered during this frantic and bewildering week, one stands out: the application of outside-of-class student-to-student communication via Zoom or other video-conferencing technologies with written follow-up to fulfill a number of desiderata: (1) that students speak more in an alternate assignment format given the realities of affective and technological hurdles while using video conferencing software; (2) that they are provided with an unsupervised opportunity to speak in an effort to reduce anxiety; (3) that self-scheduled partner work might offer flexibility necessary during home-based study and the various complications and distractions that entails, particularly during a period of ongoing disruptions; and (4) that a written response to this oral communication would generate classroom discussion, deepen engagement with materials, and present instructors with another avenue for teacher–student feedback and the assessment of sentence- or paragraph-level writing. While other types of oral communication were considered, for example, asynchronous recordings (see Ly, 2022), unrecorded and unobserved communication was selected for one type of assignment in order to foster confidence in speaking in an unusual environment of increased affective hurdles (Conroy & Lykens, 2022, pp. 119–120). This weekly assignment, a meaning-focused task (see Heift & Rimrott, 2012, on the efficacy of CALL task types in German) called a Partnergespräch in our curriculum, consists of a 20-min voice- or voice and video-based conversation between two or at most three students, based on a given prompt, usually a set of questions about curricular materials and the use of certain grammatical forms (e.g., the past subjunctive or the passive) and followed by a written exercise submitted on the LMS, either a summary of the partner's contributions or a reflection on the outcome of the conversation if a synthesis or agreement is requested. Any technology during remote instruction was allowed, provided that students did not simply text, email, or otherwise write to one another without speaking; students reported using Zoom, Facetime, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and telephone calls to complete the assignments. Now that we have returned to classroom teaching, some students choose to meet in person and others continue to meet virtually due to preference or ease of scheduling. Examples of current topics and materials across both second-year courses include analyzing specific themes or passages in novels and graphic novels (e.g., Heimat, Krug, 2018; Madgermanes, Weyhe, 2016; Im Westen nichts Neues, Remarque, 2014), films, and other materials tied to units on topics such as small text forms, rhetoric, phraseology, and media linguistics. Student responses from past semesters are shared anonymously after certain class discussions with current cohorts, particularly when opinions or perspectives diverge or shift over time. While instructors are unable to listen to the conversations (i.e., they are both unsupervised and unrecorded, a different approach than the dialogues discussed in Groepper, 2022), the conversations and the written responses have led to increased participation on assigned topics, materials, and questions in class, and course evaluations also suggest that they have been effective. For example, a student in an intensive intermediate course during the interrupted semester (spring 2020) mentioned that “I actually got more speaking practice than I would have due to the regularly scheduled discussions with the professor and my conversation partner. This sort of structure is great for online classes, and should be adopted more widely.” In the summer of 2020, a remote course took the place of our immersion program in Munich, during which a student in an intermediate class noted that “the structure of one-on-one partnered discussions” was “always helpful.” Another in an advanced course during the first fully remote semester (fall 2020) said “[m]y spoken German improved a lot in this course. The Partnergespräch was a big part of this.” After we returned to in-person instruction and the assignments were maintained as part of an increasingly utilized flipped-classroom approach, an advanced student in the tumultuous fall of 2021 provided feedback that has since proved beneficial: “Many of the assignments were great and wonderful [for] thinking and writing in German; however, I felt that the frequencies of the Partnergespräche were unhelpful and sometimes prioritized breadth over depth. I would prefer them to be longer and weekly rather than shorter and more frequent.” Both structures, twice and once weekly with shorter and longer prompts, are now in place in the third and fourth semesters, respectively. These assignments are broadly applicable to live, hybrid, and remote instructional modes. They can be scaled to a large extent in terms of the overall number, spacing, time span, prompts, and follow-up tasks and are technologically accessible to any student with a computer or smartphone or, in the case of live instruction, to all students without technological assistance and therefore bear no cost. The assignments support flipped curricula in providing a pre-lesson space for engaging with materials and one's peers before dealing with a topic in writing, all of which precede classroom discussions and activities. They can be minimally burdensome in terms of student time, that is, in our curriculum, they often replace other grammatical or lexical homework on days they are assigned rather than add to extant tasks. This is one small part of an overall Complex Adaptive Blended Language Learning System approach (Ortner, 2021; Wang et al., 2015) that seeks to center pedagogy over technology and adapt to changing circumstances, local conditions, student needs, and program goals. Furthermore, we hope that this and similar changes to the curriculum will continue to bridge the gap between theories of learner autonomy and the efficacy of task-based language learning (Schmenk, 2012). Adam Oberlin is a Senior Lecturer and the Academic Director of the Princeton in Vienna program in the Department of German at Princeton University, where he coordinates second-year courses and is developing new approaches to curricular development from corpus linguistic, lexicological, and historical linguistic perspectives.
status: Published online
This paper deals with an electronic resource under construction. The objective is to construct a lexical database of Malagasy adjectives. Malagasy is an agglutinative language of Austronesian origin, spoken in the African island of Madagascar. The method used to construct the resource is adapted from the approach of Gross (1989) to electronic dictionaries. The content of the resource is based on linguistic analysis and encoded so as to be used by language-processing software. However, care has been taken that all linguistic information is easily readable and updatable. The resource allows for morphological analysis and generation of adjectives, removing obstacles to the construction of computer applications to process the Malagasy language. The originality of this paper also comes from our proposal of a distinction between adjectives in the usual sense and adjectival forms of other parts of speech.
International audience
Linguists and media scholars have long noticed the declining use of Shanghai Wu in China's reform years, particularly since the 1990s. Yet this issue has been mainly explored in the field of Chinese (socio)linguistics, such as in Qian Nairong's work. Edward Gunn and Jin Liu briefly identified four factors accounting for the Shanghai media's preference for Putonghua Mandarin rather than Shanghai Wu, yet they did not elaborate further.1 Fang Xu's is the first book-length work devoted to this issue from the perspective of urban sociology. With a decidedly interdisciplinary nature, Xu's book situates the dialect crisis in the context of political agendas and language policies, economic development and urban transformation, and demographic migration and massive dislocation in contemporary China. With a rich trove of field research and resources, Xu's book provides a comprehensive and timely account of the dramatic changes in the linguistic and urban landscapes in Shanghai, particularly in the past two decades.Xu lays out the analytical framework for her research in the introduction. She clearly articulates and smoothly transits between different theories and concepts (linguistic capital, language ideology, right to the city, place identity, and nationalism) in relation to her research topic. In chapter 1, Xu traces the contested origin of both the city and its dialect and provides the necessary historical and socioeconomic context, including the city's history of migration, the traditional upper/lower corner divide, recent hukou (household registration system) reform, and the hybrid nature of the “young” Shanghai dialect formed “around the 1920s” (54).In the following chapters, drawing on rich and valuable empirical fieldwork data (70 interviews and 248 survey responses as well as personal experience and ethnographic observations), Xu dwells on three factors leading to Shanghai Wu's decline and possible demise. In chapter 2, Xu focuses on the state's political agendas and language policies, which have dramatically diminished the linguistic space for Shanghai Wu. Yet the author finds that although the dominant language ideology has been successfully promoted as top-down panopticon, the competing, alternative language ideology, in which Shanghai Wu is endowed with covert prestige, solidarity, and local pride, “still thrives in the city” (89). In chapter 3, Xu discusses in detail how the geographical displacement and involuntary relocation of local residents accelerates the disappearance of Shikumen vernacular architecture and the dispersal of their vernacular speech community. Coupled with her intimate knowledge of the city districts, particularly in Puxi, the author vividly cites many personal experiences of alienation and placelessness. In chapters 4 and 5, Xu focuses on the recent migrants who are highly educated and well off. Although the newcomers received the official identity of “new Shanghairen,” their authenticity is challenged by the earlier migrants due to the former's lack of proficiency in Shanghai Wu, which is seen as the “exclusive last pillar of Shanghairen identity” (133). For the recent migrants themselves, “language is the ultimate barrier for them to self-identify... as genuine Shanghairen” (181), too. This, again, highlights the intricate relationship between language and identity, the subtitle of this book.The book sets up to investigate the tension between the global (“Shanghai's emergence as a global city”) and the local (“the marginalization of... the Shanghai dialect”) (1–2). It ends up tackling the conflict between the national and the local by subduing Shanghai's globalization exclusively as a state project. The author is very explicit in her harsh criticism of the authoritarian nation-state and attributes all the factors for the dialect's endangerment simply to the top-down “state policies” (2). Yet, among others, the heterogeneous Shanghai Wu itself is also intrinsically a factor in the limited role played by mass media, which is “crucial for the fate of the dialect” (210). It is “virtually impossible” for Shanghai media to find performers with identical accents, and Shanghai Wu as a media language “evoked disparities and controversy as much as community.”2 In contrast, Xu's book treats the global largely with a sympathetic tone. She touches on the “uniformity and McDonaldization” of the urban landscapes (121), but the target is still the national. The arguments would be more sophisticated if the book recognized the globalization as a separate yet related homogenizing factor. In this sense, the function of the nation-state is more aligned with globalization and its concomitant homogenization.Another simplification may relate to the methodology, particularly sampling bias. According to the book, “more than one million households” (15) were displaced among the “sixteen million native Shanghairen” (17). Since all of the “native Shanghairen” whom the author interviewed experienced relocation (22), through synecdochic substitution, the “native Shanghairen” as a whole are depicted as victimized and marginalized. Readers may wonder about different narratives, such as the experiences of the wealthy and highly educated local elites. Have they developed a similar “flexible resident identity” as the recent migrants? The book only hints a little about this subgroup, such as by mentioning their professionalism (179), but does not provide a complex picture of Shanghairen's experiences.Moreover, in exploring the issue of language and identity, the book would benefit from a more solid scholarship in linguistics. For example, a statement such as “Shanghai Wu belongs to a different language family from Mandarin” (italics mine) is far beyond the linguistic norms. Similarly, the author consistently uses “artificial” or “newly invented” (92) to label Putonghua, which “inherited the Beijing-pronunciation-based Guoyin” (5). Xu confuses the old guoyin and new guoyin and misinterprets Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China (1989) when citing Ramsey on page 65. The allegation of artificiality only applies to old guoyin, not new guoyin. There are also some minor mistakes. For example, the place-names in the 1919 map, such as Whangpoo River (Xu misread it as Hwangpoo) and Soochow Creek used the Postal romanization, not the “Wade-Gile system” (45). In addition, Pinyin spelling mistakes such as yangjingbang as yangjinbang (44) and Minhang as Minghang (103) betray traces of her native tongue's influence, as the author honestly acknowledges.Despite these flaws, Xu's book is a unique addition both to the already rich scholarship on Shanghai and to the still fairly limited literature on language politics in contemporary China. It maps out Shanghai's dramatic social transformation in the past decades from a unique perspective of language/dialect. Besides rich firsthand materials on language attitudes and language shift, the book, written in a very approachable style, addresses broadly Shanghai's history, architecture, housing reform, resident permit policies, and new social classes in the making. I would recommend the book not only to scholars of language and urban studies but also to general readers interested in contemporary China, especially Shanghai.
We discuss Telugu Language and Treebanks briefly in this work. Initially, we'll go over the Telugu language briefly. The paninian grammatical model utilized for Telugu dependency representation is then described. Following that, we explain Telugu treebanks and the various formats used to express these treebanks. We also discuss the Telugu language and its representation in the Telugu Dependency Treebank, and we give information on the Telugu language and the Telugu Dependency Treebank. Natural languages are often morphologically rich, and they create sentences in a variety of ways. Researchers have been investigating approaches to annotate text with linguistic knowledge since the advent of machine translation in the 1960s. Previous studies on Indian languages were done at the chunk level. The present shallow parser morphologically parses the input text to the chunk label. Researchers are considering working at the phrase level in the future. They broke the phrases down into smaller parts. The relationship between chunk heads is essential to proceed to sentence-level parsing. This results in reliance parsing.
The outstanding performance recently reached by neural language models (NLMs) across many natural language processing (NLP) tasks has steered the debate towards understanding whether NLMs implicitly learn linguistic competence. Probes, i.e., supervised models trained using NLM representations to predict linguistic properties, are frequently adopted to investigate this issue. However, it is still questioned if probing classification tasks really enable such investigation or if they simply hint at surface patterns in the data. This work contributes to this debate by presenting an approach to assessing the effectiveness of a suite of probing tasks aimed at testing the linguistic knowledge implicitly encoded by one of the most prominent NLMs, BERT. To this aim, we compared the performance of probes when predicting gold and automatically altered values of a set of linguistic features. Our experiments were performed on Italian and were evaluated across BERT’s layers and for sentences with different lengths. As a general result, we observed higher performance in the prediction of gold values, thus suggesting that the probing model is sensitive to the distortion of feature values. However, our experiments also showed that the length of a sentence is a highly influential factor that is able to confound the probing model’s predictions.
Animacy plays an important role in cognition (e.g., memory and language). Across languages, a processing advantage for animate words (representing living beings), comparatively to inanimate words (i.e., non-living things), has been found mostly in young adults. Evidence in older adults, though, is still unclear, possibly due to the use of stimuli not properly characterised for this age group. Indeed, whereas several animacy word-rating studies already exist for young adults, these are non-existent for older adults. This work provides animacy ratings for 500 British English and 224 European Portuguese words, rated by young and older adults from the corresponding countries. The comparisons across languages and ages revealed a high interrater agreement. Nonetheless, the Portuguese samples provided higher mean ratings of animacy than the British samples. Also, the older adults assigned, on average, higher animacy ratings than the young adults. The Age X Language interaction was non-significant. These results suggest an inter-age and inter-language consistency in whether a word represents an animate or an inanimate thing, although with some differences, emphasising the need for age- and language-specific word rating data. The animacy ratings are available via OSF: https://osf.io/6xjyv/.
Анализируются орографические апеллятивы возвышенного рельефа на материале якутской оронимии в сравнительно-сопоставительном аспекте с тюркскими, монгольскими и тунгусо-маньчжурскими языками. Рассматривается их семантика, дистрибуция и определяется их роль в формировании оронимов. Материал исследования извлечен главным образом из двуязычных, лексикографических, этимологических, диалектологических, топонимических словарей, лингвистических работ, содержащих сведения об орографических апеллятивах. В исследовании также использовались материалы, собранные автором во время полевых экспедиций, проводимых с 2020 г. в центральных районах Республики Саха (Якутия). Цель статьи – выявление и сравнительно-историческое описание орографических апеллятивов возвышенного рельефа в якутской оронимии. Актуальность исследования обусловлена безотлагательной необходимостью фиксации, систематизации, изучения и сохранения в информационном поле лингвистов столь специфического пласта якутской топонимической лексики, как оронимия, находящегося под угрозой исчезновения в силу ряда причин социолингвистического и социоэкономического характера. Результат описательного метода показывает, что орографические апеллятивы, встречающиеся в якутской оронимии, отражают физико-географические особенности рельефа местности, на которой они функционируют. Статистический метод показал, что апеллятивы возвышенного рельефа составляют примерно 27 % всех якутских оронимов. Наиболее активными в образовании оронимов являются апеллятивы хайа ‘гора, скала’ (20 %), булгунньах ‘булгуннях, бугор пучения’ (19 %), таас ‘скала, гора’ (7 %), тумул ‘мыс’ (7 %). Словообразовательная структура большинства якутских оронимов с апеллятивами возвышенного рельефа представлена двусловными атрибутивными конструкциями и образуется по моделям типа «существительное + существительное» и «прилагательное + существительное». Сравнительно-историческим методом установлено, что орографические апеллятивы возвышенного рельефа в якутской оронимии представлены тюркскими, монгольскими, тунгусо-маньчжурскими, а также общими алтайскими основами. Этимологический анализ апеллятивов, обозначающих различные формы рельефа, позволяет углубить и расширить изучение генетического родства алтайских языков, путей их исторического развития. Некоторые апеллятивы возвышенного рельефа находятся в стадии своего становления, другие устоялись и существуют во многих тюркских, монгольских и тунгусо-маньчжурских языках. The article analyzes the orographic appellatives of high relief on the material of Yakut oronymy in a comparative aspect with Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus languages. The author examines their semantics and distribution. In addition, their role in the formation of oronyms is determined. The research material comes mainly from bilingual, lexicographic, etymological, dialectological, and toponymic dictionaries and linguistic works containing information on orographic appellatives. The study also used material collected by the author during the field expeditions conducted in the central regions of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) since 2020. The article aims to identify the orographic appellatives of the high relief in Yakut oronymy and to describe them comparatively historically. Nowadays, such a specific layer of the Yakut toponymic vocabulary as oronymy is considered endangered for a number of sociolinguistic and socioeconomic reasons and needs collection, systematization, study, and preservation in linguistic databases. The result of the descriptive method shows that the orographic appellatives occurring in Yakut oronymy reflect the physical and geographical features of the terrain in which they function. The statistical method has shown that high relief appellatives account for about 27% of all Yakut oronyms. The most active in forming oronyms are the appellatives haya ‘mountain, rock’ (20%), bulgunniakh ‘pingo’ (19%), taas ‘rock, mountain’ (7%), tumul ‘cape’ (7%). The word formation structure of most of the Yakut oronyms with appellatives of high relief is represented by two-word attributive constructions and is formed according to models such as “noun + noun” and “adjective + noun”. The comparative historical method has shown that the orographic appellatives of high relief in Yakut oronymy are represented by Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, as well as common Altaic word stems. The etymological analysis of the appellatives denoting different forms of relief allows us to deepen and broaden the study of the genetic relationship of the Altai languages and the ways of their historical development. Some appellatives of high relief are in the stage of their formation, and others are well established and exist in many Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus languages.
The link between linguistic deviation and translation techniques is enshrined in the conventionality of language use and communication. Linguistic deviation occurs when a text ignores conventional norms of a language in order to communicate a certain artistic merit and draw attention to the meaning of the message. The main objective of this paper is to interrogate how translation techniques used on bilingual billboard slogans in Cameroon lead to linguistic deviation and how such deviations affect communication and sociolinguistics. The corpus of this paper is composed of fifteen bilingual billboard slogans purposively selected from different parts of Cameroon. In terms of methodology, the data was collected by taking pictures of billboards and extracting their slogans. A qualitative descriptive method of document analysis was used with the help of Leech’s linguistic deviation theory and Jakobson’s communication functions. Regarding the results, the study identified graphological, semantical, grammatical and lexical deviations on the selected billboards caused by translation techniques like literal, reduction, adaptation, borrowing, discursive creation, amplification and transposition. As a result of linguistic deviation, the messages that were finally conveyed through bilingual billboards looked absurd and sometimes nonsensical. The paper recommends that certified translators should be employed to translate billboard slogans from French to English.
In today's multilingual lexical databases, the majority of the world's languages are under-represented. Beyond a mere issue of resource incompleteness, we show that existing lexical databases have structural limitations that result in a reduced expressivity on culturally-specific words and in mapping them across languages. In particular, the lexical meaning space of dominant languages, such as English, is represented more accurately while linguistically or culturally diverse languages are mapped in an approximate manner. Our paper assesses state-of-the-art multilingual lexical databases and evaluates their strengths and limitations with respect to their expressivity on lexical phenomena of linguistic diversity.
Abstract Background The need persists for sensitive, low‐cost, and high‐access cognitive markers to complement biomarker information in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Sensitive cognitive markers may be derived from information at the item level of neuropsychological tests. We investigated if item‐level metrics add information beyond total score in the relationship of semantic fluency—generating as many words as possible of a category in a given time frame—to cortical thinning across eight years in middle‐aged to older adults without dementia. Method Participants were part of the SMART‐MR cohort (n = 251, age = 59.6±8.6, 19.5% women), designed to investigate brain changes in individuals with arterial disease, which puts them at high risk for dementia. Global cortical thickness was derived from MRI scans at two visits approximately eight years apart. Item‐level metrics were derived from linguistic databases: mean log lexical frequency (how often a word occurs in our language) and mean age of acquisition (AoA; at what age a word was learned) of words generated on a 2‐minute semantic (animal) fluency task (Fig 1). We calculated residualized item‐level scores representing the deviation in the item‐level metric from what is expected based on the total score to account for collinearity. Linear regression models—adjusted for age, sex/gender, education, and history of stroke—analyzed the relationship between total score or item‐level metrics as determinants and cortical thickness at follow‐up as the outcome, adjusting for baseline level. Result Total score alone was not related to cortical thinning at follow‐up (β = ‐.023[‐.001;.000], p =.466). However, a higher‐than‐expected mean lexical frequency (β = ‐.065[‐.054;‐.002], p =.033) and lower‐than‐expected mean AoA (β =.066[.001;.019], p =.033) were related to more cortical thinning at follow‐up. An alternative analytic approach to capture change, using the difference in cortical thickness between visits without baseline adjustment, yielded similar results. Conclusion Alternative item‐level metrics of semantic fluency, as opposed to the traditional total score, related to future neurodegeneration in high‐risk individuals without a dementia diagnosis. The results seem robust across two different item‐level metrics and two different analytic approaches. Valuable item‐level information could be leveraged for accurate identification of the earliest stages of clinical Alzheimer’s disease, in addition to biomarker evidence, for intervention and timely diagnosis.