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18265 papers
In this study it was investigated whether Catalan dominant bilinguals from Girona performed differently on a Spanish vocabulary test in comparison to Spanish monolinguals from Toledo. The test measured both lexical knowledge and lexical accessibility. The test was administered to two groups of bilinguals and monolinguals: one aged 5-6 and another aged 8-9. The monolinguals outperformed the bilinguals at both ages, but most of the Catalan dominant bilinguals fell within monolingual norm at age 8-9, despite the fact that at group level the differences were still observable.
The field of psycholinguistics has recently questioned the primacy of word frequency (WF) in influencing word recognition and production, instead focusing on the importance of a word's contextual diversity (CD). WF is operationalised by counting the number of occurrences of a word in a corpus, while a word's CD is a count of the number of contexts that a word occurs in, with repetitions within a context being ignored. Numerous studies have converged on the conclusion that CD is a better predictor of word recognition latency and accuracy than frequency. These findings support a cognitive mechanism based on the principle of likely need over the principle of repetition in lexical organisation. In the current study, we trained the semantic distinctiveness model on communication patterns in social media platforms consisting of over 55-billion-word tokens and examined the ability of theoretically distinct models to explain word recognition latency and accuracy data from over 1 million participants from the Mandera et al. English Crowdsourding Project norms, consisting of approximately 59,000 words across six age bands ranging from ages 10 to 60 years. There was a clear quantitative trend across the age bands, where there is a shift from a social environment-based attention mechanism in the "younger" models, to a clear dominance for a discourse-based attention mechanism as models "aged." This pattern suggests that there is a dynamical interaction between the cognitive mechanisms of lexical organisation and environmental information that emerges across ageing.
Abstract Background. One of the most important problems of modern Ukrainian linguistic studies is the comprehensive study of the language as a dynamic system, which has recently been noticeably «updated» at all levels. Under the influence of a number of social factors the lexical-semantic and derivational systems change most noticeably, the dynamics of other linguistic systems, morphological system in particular. In various socio-communicative fields, the functioning of many variabilities of grammatical forms of verbs that show the category of aspect of the verb is observed. New tendencies in the formation of perfectives and imperfectives in this regard are the most significant, they are most active in informational and publicistic, scientific, literary discourses. The purpose of the article is to identify and prove specific features of perfectivations / imperfectivation of aspectual pairs of verbs in the language of prose of P. Zahrebelnyi The main tasks of the article: to describe the writer's perfectives and imperfectives as stylisthemes that in the literary discourse of the prose writer represent the category of occasionality; specify the methods of their derivation; identify the main functions of stylisthemes in the author's novel. Methods. In this publication were used general scientific methods such as observation, analysis, synthesis and comparison; within linguistic methods, there is the descriptive method which is used for interpretation of perfectivation / imperfectivation in the literary discourse of P. Zagrebelny; method of integrative analysis is the basis of the overall study of the set of stylistic matters that represent the grammatical category of aspect in the writer’s language; method of linguistic analysis allows to determine stylistic functions of author’s individual perfectives and imperfectives in the vertical context of analyzed novels. Results. In the morphological system of the modern Ukrainian literary language, not all verbs form aspectual pairs. One-aspect (non-biaspectual) verbs form quite a steady subsystem within the verbal system of the Ukrainian language. However, within grammatical verb categories span different points of tense, aspect, state, the person of a verb, functioning of active and passive particles became visibly active from the end of the 80s – beginning of the 90s of XX century. At the beginning of the 20s of the XXI century we can see consequences of tendencies that not only show the dynamic nature of the verbal system but also the dynamic consistency of grammatical norms. In the language of P. Zagrebelny's fiction, potential verbs, identifying the category of occasionality, reflect modern tendencies in the development of the Ukrainian language and can strengthen the potential of the literary standard. In the works of the author, written in the 60’s – the early ‘80s of last century, grammatical forms are found, which represent the perfection of verbs of imperfect form and the imperfection of verbs of perfect form, which in modern Ukrainian became more active only in the late 80’s – early ‘90s of the twentieth century. A specific feature of the writer’s linguistic style is the active production of aspectual pairs, which in the vertical context of his language creative work acts as a stylistheme. The whole set of individual author's perfectives and imperfectives is a consequence of an unusual (previously untraceable) combination of usual morphemes. Discussion. Numerous potential verb forms that mark the literary discourse of P. Zahrebelnyi demonstrate the author's linguistic sense to choose the ways of development of the Ukrainian language, the knowledge of tendencies of activation of its grammatical phenomena during the last few decades in particular. From the '60s of the twentieth century, the writer actualized numerous forms within verb grammatical categories, in particular the verb category of the form, which mostly corresponds to the modern linguistic and literary standard, significantly diversified the language of fiction with stylisthemes that are potentially close to commonly used linguistic units. We see prospects for further research of this topical problem in a comprehensive study of individual author's formation within the verb categories of state and personality / impersonality, which also reflect the dynamics of the stylistic norm of the modern Ukrainian literary language, represented in literary discourse. Keywords: grammatical category of aspect, perfective, imperfective, stylistic norm, literary discourse.
Статья посвящена методическим аспектам изучения заимствованной лексики в русском языке, в частности из английского языка. Авторы отмечают, что заимствованные из английского языка слова составляют в русском языке динамический слой лексического состава, поэтому изучение англицизмов в школьном курсе русского языка занимает одно из ведущих мест. Изучение заимствованной лексики основывается на следующих принципах: экстралингвистическом, лексико-грамматическом; семантическом; диахроническом. Каждый из этих принципов обеспечивает разностороннюю работу над словом не только на уроках русского языка, но и на уроках по другим предметам. Во время изучения заимствованной лексики, школьники знакомятся с системой лексических понятий, обогащая свой активный словарь. Перед учащимися средней школы раскрываются не только внутрипредметные связи, создающие предпосылки для изучения различных разделов школьного курса на лексической основе, но и возможность достичь интеграции в содержании и формах обучения. Процесс заимствования слов естественен и неизбежен, употребление иноязычных слов – лексическая норма. Поэтому, выбирая слова, необходимо обращать внимание на значение слов, их стилистическую окрашенность, сочетаемость с другими словами. Нарушение любого из этих критериев приводит к речевым ошибкам. The article is devoted to methodological aspects of studying borrowed vocabulary in the Russian language, in particular from the English language. Russian Russian is a dynamic layer of lexical composition, so the study of Anglicisms in the school course of the Russian language occupies one of the leading places. The authors note that words borrowed from the English language make up a dynamic layer of lexical composition in the Russian language. The study of borrowed vocabulary is based on the following principles: extralinguistic, lexico-grammatical; semantic; diachronic. Each of these principles provides a versatile work on the word not only in Russian lessons, but also in lessons on other subjects. During the study of borrowed vocabulary, students get acquainted with the system of lexical concepts, enriching their active vocabulary. Secondary school students are exposed not only to intra-subject connections that create prerequisites for studying various sections of the school course on a lexical basis, but also the opportunity to achieve integration in the content and forms of education. The process of borrowing words is natural and inevitable, the use of foreign words is a lexical norm. Therefore, when choosing words, it is necessary to pay attention to the meaning of words, their stylistic coloring, compatibility with other words. Violation of any of these criteria leads to speech errors.
Defined as fixed, unchangeable, and hereditary, the family name carries characteristics of historical and geographical identity. They originate from different word classes and different dialectal or homeland idioms. Therefore, their grammatical and lexical characteristics show certain particularities in relation to the standard language norm. Description of morphological and morphosyntactic characteristics of surnames in language manuals is mostly indicated in the case of foreign surnames, cases of declension of female sur-names ending in -a, writing and declension of double surnames. Not rarely, Croatian surnames and their declension patterns are causing problems for Croatian language speakers. This paper analyzes surnames of the region of Zadar, their formation patterns as well as their peculiarities in relation to the standard language form. Analyzed surnames are chosen according to their re-presentation and include all formation suffixes of surnames of the region of Zadar. This paper also tries to define to what extent speakers of the Croatian language have difficulties in defining their declension patterns. The starting assumption of the research study is that, because of their geographical distribution or frequency of use, certain surnames are closer and more familiar to Croatian native speakers. Hence, less deviation from the standard is observed in their declension by comparison to the declension of surnames that are less represented or less widespread.
Automatically detecting the intent of an utterance is important for various downstream natural language processing tasks. This task is also called Dialogue Act Classification (DAC) and was primarily researched on spoken one-to-one conversations. The rise of social media has made this an interesting data source to explore within DAC, although it comes with some difficulties: non-standard form, variety of language types (across and within platforms), and quickly evolving norms. We therefore investigate the robustness of DAC on social media data in this paper. More concretely, we provide a benchmark that includes cross-domain data splits, as well as a variety of improvements on our transformer-based baseline. Our experiments show that lexical normalization is not beneficial in this setup, balancing the labels through resampling is beneficial in some cases, and incorporating context is crucial for this task and leads to the highest performance improvements 7 F1 percentage points in-domain and 20 cross-domain).
The article explores the use of proper names as a source of wordplay in the classroom bilingual interaction in English as a second language. It is noted that wordplay becomes a means of accommodation to the onomastic system of a foreign language when proper names trigger bilingual metalinguistic reflection. The author emphasizes that wordplay is a process of deliberate deviation from language norms in which the proper name is a standard language unit (‘normema’) that undergoes linguistic reinterpretation and turns into a non-standard language unit (‘igrema’) developing both formal and semantic changes. It is exactly the non-standard nature of onomastic units under study and the specificity of the material that explain the novelty of the present research. This paper aims to identify the reasons why proper names become a source of non-standard language units in the classroom bilingual speech. Two groups of such reasons are distinguished, namely, the features of the formal morphological structure of proper names and features of their lexical meaning. It appears that wordplay occurs in proper names that include a ‘transferable’ component, creating an associative metatextual reference in the bilingual mind. Proceeding from the fact that such components can be found on the phonemic, morphemic, or lexical level, the author describes three corresponding models of wordplay. It is noted that wordplay mostly involves proper names with a distinct social component that is also relevant in the community of native English speakers. These include personal and place names, names of organizations and products. For each type of proper names, the author suggests two types of the development of the semantic connection between a standard language unit and a non-standard language unit: the one that does not involve the internal form of a proper name and another one that is based on it.
Suppose you say to yourself, “If I cut the pie the way it should be then meanings must be in the head!”1 In other, less catchy words: expressions of natural languages understood by intrinsically identical people must have the same meaning. What could meanings be if this is true? The standard answer is that they could be concepts—composable mental symbols— assembled in the minds of those who interpret linguistic expressions. For example, the meaning of ‘mothers’ could be a complex concept built from the meanings of its constituents (presumably, the noun ‘mother’ and the plural morpheme ‘-s’) in a way corresponding to its morpho-syntactic structure. There are at least three objections to this type of meaning internalism. The first is that it is vacuous. We are told that for one thing (e.g., the word ‘mother’) to have a certain meaning is for it to be associated with another (e.g., the concept MOTHER) that has the same meaning. This seems about as revealing as saying that for a dish to be spicy is for it to be associated with a spicy taste. Interpreting a word may involve translating it to Mentalese but then we still have to say what the translation means.2 The second objection is that the proposal overcounts meanings. ‘Mother’ is associated with multiple concepts: one that applies to someone whose egg unites with a sperm producing a child, another that applies to someone who gives birth to a child, a third that applies to someone who raises a child. And yet, ‘mother’ does not seem to have all these different but closely related meanings. If you introduce me to someone saying, “I'd like you to meet my mother,” and I mistakenly conclude that she is the person who gave birth to you then I misunderstood you, but I did not misinterpret your words.3 The third objection is that the proposal isn't general enough. Even if intrinsically identical people must associate the same concepts with ‘mother,’ they could associate different ones with ‘water’ or with ‘arthritis.’ No concept associated with ‘water’ is employed in thinking about XYZ, and yet, someone intrinsically identical to me living on a planet where rivers and lakes are filled with XYZ could be thinking of XYZ using such a concept. Similarly, no concept associated with ‘arthritis’ is employed in thinking about inflammations in thighs, and yet, someone intrinsically identical to me living in a linguistic community whose members used ‘arthritis’ to talk about inflammations in thighs could be thinking about that using such a concept.4 There are answers to these objections. One can argue that the view is informative because it reduces linguistic meaning to mental content, that polysemous words are just special homonyms, and that concepts have narrow contents. Alternatively, one can articulate a different version of meaning internalism that bypasses these concerns. This is what Paul Pietroski has done in Conjoining Meanings. The meanings of natural language expressions, we are told, are not the concepts assembled in interpreting them but instructions for the assemblage (19). The meaning of ‘mothers’, for example, is the instruction to fetch a monadic concept associated with the noun ‘mother’, fetch another associated with the plural morpheme ‘-s’, and then conjoin the two. Instructions get more intricate as we consider more complicated expressions, but all linguistic interpretation is a mechanical process of fetch, join, and repeat (106)—building complex concepts from simple ones. What, if anything, these concepts apply to in the external world matters to cognition but makes no difference to semantics. A meaning, on this view, is not a representation. It does not have meaning or content, and hence, is not subject to interpretation. This immediately disarms the first objection. In telling what sort of instruction a given meaning is, we are saying everything that needs to be said about what it is—no passing of the buck to a future theory of intentionality. The second objection is also moot. Lexical meanings are instructions to fetch a concept meeting some constraint from a mental address. Nothing rules out that there are multiple concepts meeting the constraint there. If so, linguistic interpretation will not have a determinate outcome and we must rely on pragmatic mechanisms to figure out what was intended. Finally, there is nothing in this view of linguistic meaning that is incompatible with externalism about mental content. The meaning of ‘water’ (or ‘arthritis’) is an instruction to fetch an appropriate concept from a mental address—the same instruction in the minds of all who understand it. What concepts are stored at the address may depend on facts about the physical and social environment. Externalists think being meaningful is being related in a certain way to something external. Internalists who identify meanings with concepts hold on to this relational view—they simply replace the external thing with an internal representation. On Pietroski's view, being meaningful is an intrinsic feature. But the view goes even further: “If meanings are concept assembly instructions, Slang expressions [Pietroski's term for expressions of natural languages] can be these meanings/instructions. […] This does not imply that every feature of a Slang expression is relevant to an encoded meaning. On the contrary, a generable expression can also be a phonological instruction […] generable expressions can be partially described in various ways: as pronounceable meanings; as meaningful pronunciations; or as syntactic structures that are meaningful and pronounceable.” (292-3) We might conjecture that the significance of combining a word with a relative clause is fixed by the innate endowment children use to acquire language. Then it is a law of natural language that given what ‘that we saw yesterday’ and ‘a cow’ mean ‘a cow that we saw yesterday’ must mean what it does. So far so good. But the modality here is restricted—there is no reason to deny that we could invent a language where ‘that we saw yesterday’ and ‘a cow’ mean just what they do in English, and yet, ‘a cow that we saw yesterday’ means something entirely different.5 If sentences are their meanings then they could not mean anything other than what they actually mean, and hence, the perfectly sensible question, “Why does (1) have the meaning of (1a), rather than that of (1b) or (1c)?” would be much like the absurd question, “Why is water H2O, rather than H3O or HO2?” Pietroski can hold on to all that is attractive in his meaning internalism without opting for the Chomsky-inspired view that natural languages generate pronounceable meanings. They generate words, phrases, and clauses—things that have meanings and pronunciations intrinsically. But they do so contingently. How can we go about deciding whether meanings are mental instructions or what is represented by the outputs of such instructions? The colloquial meaning of ‘meaning’ would be a poor guide. The claim that meanings are instructions in the mind sounds like a category mistake, but so does the claim that they are things in the external world. To paraphrase Bishop Butler, meaning is what it is, not another thing. Or, anyway, so it seems when we rely too heavily on what sounds felicitous in everyday conversation. The question is what we should call meaning when we try to develop a theory of meaning. This depends, in part, on where we think the most fruitful questions in this area lie. Those who think we are very much in the dark when it comes to investigating the psychological mechanism of linguistic interpretation will be drawn to externalist, referential semantics. Such theories explain how we could, in principle, understand natural languages without making a commitment that the compositional rules they identify are the ones we actually follow. Those who decry making ontological claims based on linguistic evidence will find internalist, instruction-based semantics appealing. These theories purport to give the exact mechanism at work in the interpretation of natural language but set aside the question how to understand people who use language to say various things that can be evaluated as true or false. Partisans in this debate often justify their choices in stark terms. David Lewis, for example, expresses doubts that we can make objective sense of the claim that a given language has a particular grammar. He argues that people speak a language L in virtue of belonging to a community where a convention of truthfulness and trust in L holds, but such a convention cannot pin down how the sentences of L are generated from their parts. He does not discard the notion of meaning for subsentential expressions of L (“that would be absurd,” he says), but he thinks this notion is “no clearer and no more objective than our notion of a best grammar” for L.6 Lewis's reasons for skepticism about grammar are highly speculative. Like Quine and Davidson, he thinks all evidence in favor of interpreting a language must be manifestable in behavior, and that the only relevant form of behavior is acceptance of a sentence as true. Neither of these assumptions is forced upon us. Noam Chomsky, on the other side of the debate, is even more forceful. He thinks the technical terms ‘reference’, ‘extension’, ‘denotation’, etc. have been introduced to provide a semblance of respectability for our inherently messy ideas about intentionality. He thinks, “A word, even of the simplest kind, does not pick out an entity of the world,” but also that this fact should not be seen as a denial that “there are banks, or that we are talking about something (or even some thing) if we discuss the fate of the Earth (or the Earth's fate) and conclude that it is grim.”7 Chomsky's reasons for skepticism about reference are also highly speculative. Like Putnam and Burge, he thinks what we use our words to talk about depends on norms—in particular, norms of who we should defer to— and that there is no credible way to fit the study of these norms into a naturalistic inquiry. Depending on how one understands what counts as naturalistic inquiry, one can either insist that theories of reference can be naturalistic, or deny that their non-naturalism is a blemish. Pietroski is clearly sympathetic to the Chomskian hard line: he suspects typical concepts (and a fortiori, typical expressions of natural languages) don't have extensions (9). But what he tries to show in Conjoining Meaning is something different: that even if expressions of natural languages have extensions, those extensions play no significant role in a theory of meaning. He has two main arguments for this, one based on semantic paradoxes developed in Chapter 4, and another based on event semantics presented in Chapter 5. Here I'll focus on the second. Davidson has argued that action sentences existentially quantify over events. For example, ‘Jones buttered the toast in the bathroom at midnight’ says that for some event e, e is a buttering of the toast by Jones, and e occurred in the bathroom, and e occurred at midnight, which is why the sentence entails both ‘Jones buttered the toast in the bathroom’ and ‘Jones buttered the toast at midnight’ and fails to be entailed by their conjunction.8 Subsequent work has deepened the empirical case for event semantics.9 The first premise of Pietroski's argument is that Davidsonian semantics is on the right track. And yet, it would be ludicrous to claim that when Simon is playing the song on his tuba he is doing two different things. This is the second premise. Pietroski thinks the best way to reconcile the two premises is to give up the assumption that (2), (3), or (4) have truth-conditions. They can, of course, be used to make true claims, but that is not because any of the thoughts one can build following the instructions that constitute their meanings are true. Those thoughts are all false—the things they existentially quantify over are simply not there. Talk of musical performances is “like talk of lovely sunrises, blue skies, and other ‘things’ we talk about without using words that are true of them.” (199) Well, that's one way to go. For my part, I would be more inclined to reject the second premise than to accept this conclusion. On reflection, we can find a clear modal difference between Simon's playing the song and his playing his tuba. Imagine a counterfactual possibility where the song has never been written. Simon is playing his tuba in exactly the same way but he is not following a score—he is just improvising. Then (2) would be false but (3) would still be true. This probably won't move Pietroski. He agrees that there are apparent differences between Simon's playing the song and his playing the tuba: we might want to say, for example, that the former reaches its culmination after three minutes, while the latter simply ends then. But this sort of difference, he insists, is not in the events themselves but in the way we represent them (219). My question is: so what? What is wrong with saying that Simon's playing the song is not a bare event but an event represented in a certain way—as a playing of the song by Simon? This is the sort of view Barry Schein holds.10 Pietroski briefly discusses the proposal but rejects it because he thinks it gives up the rationale for referential semantics: we are no longer in the business of relating linguistic expressions to items in the objective, mind-independent world (207). But this job-description is tendentious: referential semantics seeks to relate expressions to things they are about (in a rather broad de re sense of aboutness, modeled with the technical notion of reference) whether or not these things are representation-dependent. Natural language sentences often quantify over representation-dependent things: when Lucy imagines a unicorn she imagines something, as does Franz when he fears everything Lucy imagines. The novelty in Schein's proposal is the idea that we might be doing this all the time, not just when we employ overtly intentional vocabulary. All of us (except for the idealists) agree that there are objective, real word events, independent of our thinking about them that can be described using natural language. How does this happen? One hypothesis is that sentences of natural languages encode instructions to build thoughts which describe nothing in the real world, but there are other thoughts in the neighborhood which do describe objective events. We pick out one of these thoughts relying on context and background information. Another hypothesis is that sentences of natural languages encode instructions we use to build thoughts which describe events as being represented in a certain way. There are also other thoughts in their neighborhood which describe the same events more objectively, in ways less tied to the character of natural languages. We design artificial languages whose sentences can do this job. Pietroski opts for the first one—I think the second is at least as plausible. I think the most original part of Conjoining Meanings is the semantics sketched in Chapters 6 and 7. It is an internalist theory, but its main ideas could be adopted by externalists as well. Many semanticists nowadays are working within a framework whose basic tenets go back to Frege. They include (i) that every expression belongs to a semantic type which determines what kind of meaning it has, (ii) that semantic types are generated recursively from basic types 𝑒 (for expressions denoting entities) and 𝑡 (for expressions that have truth-values), and (iii) that the interpretation of syntactic composition is functional application. Each of these initial assumptions can be relaxed—semantic theories often allow type shifting as well as additional basic types or composition rules beside functional application—but departures from the bare-bones account must always be justified and kept at a minimum. This sort of theory raises some uncomfortable questions. Why do expressions of natural languages belong to only a handful of semantic types? It is glaring that even some of the simplest types—like 〈𝑒, 𝑒〉 or 〈𝑡, 𝑒〉—are apparently uninhabited. Why do semantic types look so gerrymandered from the point of view of syntax? Despite their vast differences, most nouns, verbs, and adjectives are standardly ascribed the same semantic type—〈𝑒, 𝑡〉; despite their massive similarities, proper and common nouns are standardly ascribed different semantic types—𝑒 and 〈𝑒, 𝑡〉, respectively. Why are pro-forms not available more freely across semantic types? They tend to be of type 𝑒 (‘she’, ‘this’), or type 〈𝑒, 𝑡〉 (‘so’, ‘how’), but never in otherwise well-inhabited types like 〈𝑒, 〈𝑒, 𝑡〉〉 or 〈〈𝑒, 𝑡〉, 𝑡〉. Pietroski suggests that we should radically flatten the semantic type hierarchy. In his view, all natural language expressions are predicates. All complex expressions as well as most of the simple ones are one-place. The exceptions (which are all functional items) are two-place. He argues that proper nouns are predicates, that sentences are predicates applying to everything or nothing, that transitive verbs are two-verb constructions (and so verbs can all be one-place), and that nouns without their count/mass, singular/plural features are number neutral (i.e. can apply to one, many, or much). The outline covers roughly the same empirical ground as standard semantics textbooks do, showing the viability of the proposal. I am very much on board with this project and I find a lot of the details congenial. But I'd like to mention one area where I prefer to go in a different direction. On Pietroski's account, quantificational determiners fetch concepts that apply (non-distributively) to ordered pairs—e.g., ALL/SOME/MOST applies to some ordered pairs iff all/some/most of their second components are one of their first components (330). The interpretation works but it feels farfetched and parochial. Farfetched, because it seems unlikely that everyone who understands ‘all’, ‘some’ or ‘most’ must have the capacity to think about ordered pairs. Parochial, because it is hard to see how it can be generalized to cover the interpretation of the intuitively quite similar (but focus-sensitive) ‘always’, ‘sometimes’, and ‘often.’ Other concepts Pietroski had to posit to get his semantics rolling can all be plausibly attributed to competent If you understand you have a concept that applies to if you understand you have a concept of that applies to of if you understand a you have a concept that applies to those who see a and if you understand you have a concept that applies to most of the But what sort of concept do you have to have if you understand There is nothing natural to say, so Pietroski ends up saying something I think to reject the is a functional and functional items are not associated with at least not if concepts are to be mental used to about things in certain They are not associated with but rather with ways we can build complex from ones. Pietroski's framework the natural thing to say would be that their meanings are not instructions to fetch a but instructions to There are items in Pietroski's functional items would not the basic It would be a to have to accept a (but number of of just the handful the version But to artificial concepts seems the
Slang is a very interesting concept that generally exists in any language. In particular, this layer of the lexical system of the language is very actively expanding in modern times, we would say that it is becoming more widespread among young people and new ones are being formed. This is especially due to the fact that many of the restrictions that have existed so far in public and private life have been removed, and therefore it manifests itself in language, people are able to express their views. In some cases, it seems that the use of slang is due to illiteracy, but in fact this is not the case. Slangs, as a rule, differ significantly from the norm of literary language. Of course, this is not always the case. It is the first to react to every event and change in society and is able to assimilate them, and therefore slangs are more popular among young people. Slang is distinguished from dialects and dialects by its vocabulary. The words in its lexical system are mainly divided into three groups: a) words taken from another language; b) specially installed words; c) words with changed meaning, etc. Words in slang are unusual. This feature enhances the listener's sense of expressiveness and expressiveness. As a result, there is an opportunity to spread. Elements of slang are rapidly spreading and used in the art world, albeit by a small number of people. Slang is not the same in all nations. Thus, in many nations it is weak, and in some nations it is strong. For example, slang related to hunting and trade was widespread in Russian until the beginning of the 20th century. The origin, formation and development of slangs, as well as tracking their transformation into literary language over time, researching their cognitive relationship, summarizing these ideas, classifying slang, studying their origin and use from a social and functional point of view can be considered a scientific innovation of our research.
BACKGROUND: Picture-naming tests (PNTs) evaluate linguistic impairment in dementia due to semantic memory impairment, impaired lexical retrieval or perceptual deficits. They also assess the decline in naming impairment at various stages of dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) that occurs due to progressive cognitive impairment. With the increasing numbers of people with dementia globally, it is necessary to have validated naming tests and norms that are culturally and linguistically appropriate. AIMS: In this cross-sectional study we harmonized a set of 30 images applicable to the Indian context across five languages and investigated the picture-naming performance in patients with MCI and dementia. METHODS & PROCEDURES: A multidisciplinary expert group formed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) collaborated towards developing and adapting a picture naming test (PNT) known as the ICMR-PNT in five Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Based on cross-cultural adaptation guidelines and item-wise factor analysis and correlations established separately across five languages, the final version of the ICMR-PNT test was developed. A total of 368 controls, 123 dementia and 128 MCI patients were recruited for the study. Psychometric properties of the adapted version of the ICMR-PNT were examined, and sensitivity and specificity were examined. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: = 139.85; p < 0.001). Furthermore, PNT scores for MCI was higher in comparison with patients with dementia in all languages combined (p < 0.001). The area under the curve across the five languages ranged from 0.81 to 1.00 for detecting dementia. There was a negative correlation between Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) and ICMR-PNT scores and a positive correlation between Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination-III (ACE-III) and ICMR-PNT scores in control and patient groups. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The ICMR-PNT was developed by following cross-cultural adaptation guidelines and establishing correlations using item-wise factor analysis across five languages. This adapted PNT was found to be a reliable tool when assessing naming abilities effectively in mild to moderate dementia in a linguistically diverse context. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject Picture-naming evaluates language impairment linked to naming difficulties due to semantic memory, lexical retrieval or perceptual disturbances. As a result, picture naming tests (PNTs) play an important role in the diagnosis of dementia. In a heterogeneous population such as India, there is a need for a common PNT that can be used across the wide range of languages. What this study adds to existing knowledge PNTs such as the Boston Naming Test (BNT) were developed for the educated, mostly English-speaking, Western populations and are not appropriate for use in an Indian context. To overcome this challenge, a PNT was harmonized in five Indian languages (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam) and we report the patterns of naming difficulty in patients with MCI and dementia. The ICMR-PNT demonstrated good diagnostic accuracy when distinguishing patients with mild to moderate dementia from cognitively normal individuals. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? With the growing number of persons suffering from Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia around the world, its critical to have culturally and linguistically relevant naming tests and diagnosis. This validated ICMR-PNT can be used widely as a clinical tool to diagnose dementia and harmonize research efforts across diverse populations.
The article examines the changes that have occurred in family-related communication. The research is based on family speech handwritten notes and transcripts of voice records made by the author and the students of her special seminar, correspondence of family members and relatives in various messengers, as well as on the speech material presented in articles and books published by various researchers. The purpose of the study is to show how changes in everyday life, caused by new realities of the domestic sphere, various events in the country and the world, the development of information technology, affect family-related communication and speech, and by and large, the very existence of the family. Changes in the domestic sphere – the emergence of new social objects, new household cleaning supplies, development of fashion industry and everything that is, in one way or another, connected with the daily routine of a person – lead to expanding and updating the lexical field of familyrelated communication. There is high penetration of new lexical units, primarily borrowings from other languages, into family speech, including the speech of children. The research has shown that such an active and rapid borrowing process can give rise to misunderstanding between different generations in the family. The focus of the study is on the development of mediated communication in everyday life. Both positive and negative factors of information technologies influence are noted. Mediatization of the population, the use of cellular phones affect the nature of family communication, etiquette, and cultural norms and absorb free time. The line between work and home communication is blurred, which has a devastating effect on the life of the family as one of the most important institutions of society, designed to ensure the stability of its existence.
من دروس علم الأصوات الوظيفي (التناوب الحرکي وألوانه الشکلية في کتاب المُطْلِع على أبواب الفقه) (لأبي الفَتْح البَعْلِيّ المتوفى 709هـ) محمد عبد الحميد حويزي مدرس أصول اللغة في کلية اللغة العربية بإيتاي البارود جامعة الأزهر. ملخص البحث/ هذا البحث يتعرض لدرس من دروس علم الأصوات الوظيفي، ألا وهو التناوب بين الحرکات القصيرة في کتاب المطلع على أبواب الفقه، ليبين من خلاله مدى خصوصية هذه الحرکات وصعوبة مسلکها ومدى أهميتها في بناء الصيغ وتنوعها، ويعزز ـ من خلال صهر مواده في بوتقة المناهج اللغوية الحديثة ـ التفاعل بين الماضي والحاضر؛ رجاء العثور على إنجازات باهرة في مجال البحث اللغوي. وقد قضت طبيعة دراسته أن يخرج في مقدمة، وتمهيد، وثلاثة مباحث، وخاتمة، وفهارس. أما المقدمة ففيها عرض موجز للإطار المنهجي للبحث، وأما المباحث فالأول منها: التناوب بين الحرکات المرققة، والثاني: التناوب مع الحرکات المتوسطة، والثالث: التناوب مع الحرکات المفخمة. تليها الخاتمة، ثم الفهارس. وکان من أبرز نتائج هذا البحث: أن اللغة تنعم بانسجام صوائتها القصيرة تبعا للأعراف المنظمة لقواعد الذوق الاستعمالي لدى العرب، والتي من أهمها تأثر الأصوات ببعضها؛ إحداثا للانسجام، وتيسيرا لعملية النطق، واقتصادا في المجهود العضلي، وفي هذا إظهار للدور الکبير التي يؤديه هذا التناوب مع الأصوات ثقيلها وخفيفها. أن ابن جني کان أول من تعامل مع الحرکات وسماها صراحة؛ وقد عالج بها کثيرا من المسائل الصوتية. أن المتقابلات الثنائية أدت دورا مهما في تغيير دلالة المعنى الوظيفي للکلمة، غير أن هذا في أغلب الأحيان لا يکون له دور في تغيير دلالة المعنى المعجمي للکلمة الواحدة؛ لکن نقول إن جل هذه المتقابلات يرجع إلى اختلاف اللهجات في ضبط بنية الکلمة، فقبيلة تنطقها بالفتح، وأخرى تنطقها بالکسر، وثالثة بالضم، وهکذا؛ بيد أن صاحب المطلع لم ينسب هذه اللهجات إلى أصحابها في الغالب، مما دفعنا بالبحث عن هذه اللهجات، ونسبتها إلى قائليها والمصادر التي نسبتها إليها ـ ما أمکن ـ وما أورده العلماء من مفاضلات بين تلک اللهجات. الکلمات المفتاحية: التناوب الحرکي / الصوائت القصيرة / علم وظائف الأصوات / المطلع على أبواب الفقه / أبو الفتح البعلي. Lessons of functional phonology (The kinetic alternation and its formal colors in the book Al-Mutlaa on the Doors of Fiqh) (Of Abu Al-Fath Al-Baali, who died in 709 A.H.) Mohammed Abdul Hamid Hweizi Teacher of the origins of the language in the College of Arabic Language Itay Al-Baroud Al-Azhar University Abstract / This research is exposed to one of the lessons of functional phonology, namely, the alternation between short movements in the book of the Insider on the Chapters of Jurisprudence, to show through it the specificity of these movements and the difficulty of their behavior and the extent of their importance in building formulas and their diversity, and reinforces - by melting its materials into the crucible of linguistic approaches Modern - the interaction between the past and the present; Please find some outstanding achievements in the field of linguistic research. The nature of his studies required him to come out with an introduction, an introduction, three sections, a conclusion, and indexes. As for the introduction, it contains a brief presentation of the methodological framework of the research. As for the investigations, the first is the alternation between thinning movements, the second: alternation with intermediate movements, and the third: alternation with exaggerated movements. Followed by the conclusion, then the indexes. One of the most prominent results of this research was: that the language enjoys the harmony of its short refinement according to the norms that regulate the rules of use taste among Arabs, the most important of which is the influence of sounds with each other. Creating harmony, facilitating the articulation process, and economizing the muscular effort, and in this a demonstration of the great role that this alternation plays with sounds of heavy and light. That Ibn Jinni was the first to deal with the movements and explicitly called them; He dealt with many phonological issues. The binary interviews played an important role in changing the meaning of the functional meaning of the word, but this in most cases does not have a role in changing the meaning of the lexical meaning of a single word. But we say that most of these interviews are due to the different dialects in controlling the structure of the word. By fraction, by third by annexation, and so on; However, the author of the insider did not attribute these dialects to their owners most of the time, which prompted us to search for these dialects, and to attribute them to those who said them, the sources that they attributed to them - as much as possible - and what scholars have stated about the trade-offs between those dialects. key words: Rotational motor / short silences / phonology / insider on the gates of jurisprudence / Abu Al-Fath
The article analyzes the contribution of occasional word formation to the expressiveness of the text. Making the text more expressive by means of an occasional word-formation takes place when the process of text creation involves a coining of a new word which violates the norms of lexical derivation in its structural and semantic parameters. Due to its optional, new, non-normative, functional one-time nature, occasional derivatives (coinages) have become one of the major linguistic means of forming the connotative component of the semantics of the text or its segment. An occasionally derived word appears as a result of a combination of common word-forming components, characteristic for a particular linguistic system, i.e. a creative basis and a derivational formant, but their interaction in a particular derivative may result in the expansion of internal valence and pushes it beyond the language norm. The article focuses on a detailed description of the non-normative interaction of common creative bases and forms within the main parts of speech and word formation methods as well as their role in the expressiveness of the text. The article also describes less common ways of forming the linguistic expression of the text by means of occasional coinages. The latter methods include the use of word-forming formats stylized according to the derivational means of another language present in the text, permutation of formative bases which are the components of a word-forming structure, the amalgamation of several prefixes, which either strengthen the meaning of the first one or neutralize the value of the following prefix. Emotionally colored occasional derivatives (coinages) constitute an important component of text creation as they are responsible for the pragmatic sphere of the text which is connected with the subjective modality of the text and its realization.
The article introduces a comparative analysis of some interlingual variant formations in the linguistic structures of the Croatian and the Serbian literary languages. The general integration processes that occurred in the Slavic linguistic world in the XIX and the early second half of the XX centuries did not unite individual Slavic languages or their variants. By the end of the XX century, linguistic convergence was replaced by linguistic divergence. After the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the new states that arose in the post-Yugoslavian space fixed the status of Croatian and Serbian as official languages. At present, Croatian and Serbian have their own codified norms; they develop and function autonomously and independently in different ethnic cultures and states. The widening gap between the post-Yugoslavian states of Serbia and Croatia contributed to the interlingual divergence between these languages. Their linguistic structure has multiple differences at phonetic, phonological, grammatical, lexical, syntactic, and stylistic levels. This research showed that the most prominent differences occur at the lexical level. As for linguistic standardization and codification, the Croatian language reveals a prescriptive-descriptive approach to language regulation, while Serbian is characterized by a descriptive-prescriptive approach. The authors illustrate this conclusion by various intervariant or equivalent language units from parallel reference books and online discourse.
This paper illustrates how spelling errors can be analyzed in a didactically relevant manner, and it draws attention to knowledge about pronunciation as an indispensable tool in this task.A basic distinction is made between norm conflicts and norm gaps as two causes for spelling errors.Deviation from a distinct, standard language pronunciation ('rigsmål') may cause norm conflict errors, whereas lack of knowledge about letter-to-sound correspondence may cause norm gap errors.Such norm gap errors may further be divided into four types according to whether they concern unconditioned rules, pronunciation conditions, grammatical conditions, or lexical conditions.The typology of causes for spelling errors and the illustration of the correspondence rules are followed by a survey of some more recent phonetic developments in Standard Danish that may cause more difficulties in the spelling process.The papers ends with a discussion of whether political, technological, and didactic initiatives can make Danish spelling easier.
Intercultural communication is a set of all forms of communication between representatives of different cultures. The goal of intercultural communication is to establish interaction between cultures, with language as a link. The effectiveness of intercultural communication depends on an adequate understanding and interpretation of symbols and markers of social space, as well as on the use of linguistic means to convey their meaning. The article deals with the role of a song in the formation of a national-ethnic consciousness and emphasizes the importance of song exchange between representatives of different cultures in the process of progressive globalization. It is stated that a song, as one of the most important musical genres, is able to accurately and figuratively reflect various aspects of people's lives, as it has verbal lyrics. Songs reflect the most important values, ethical views, social ideas and changes of a certain era, create patterns of behavior, establish cultural norms and and transmits them to the next generations. The study identifies the necessity of translating foreign songs in the context of building strong relationships in intercultural communication. Song lyrics is a special genre of poetry. The need to preserve the rhythm and rhyme on the one hand, and the words as well as the meaning behind them on the other, make the translation of a song so difficult. When translating poems, significant changes to the original text are inevitable. In this regard, many difficulties arise in translation, and to overcome them a translator must have special skills and a certain amount of experience. In this article, three types of song translation are distinguished: word-for-word or "informative" translation, interpretation, and equirhythmic translation. The latter is characterized by the preservation of the melody and the reproduction of the lyrics of the song as accurately as possible. The factors that determine the choice of one particular method have been specified in this article as well. If the goal is simply to understand the meaning of a foreign song, a semantically close prose translation is suitable. But if the song is to be performed in another language, it is necessary to achieve «singability» of the translated text. In addition to the difficulties caused by the need to reflect certain ethnic realities properly, the factors that make the translation of songs so difficult are: the different length of lexical units in the source language and the target language, which makes it difficult to preserve the rhythm of the song; pauses in the melody, which can cause a break in the semantic segment; parallel constructions and multiple repetitions, which can lead to unnatural translation; use of realia and connotative meanings of words that is difficult to reflect in the target language, etc. In order to describe the lexical-grammatical transformations used in the process of translation, the Ukrainian and English songs having a national-cultural component have been analyzed in the article. In the studied material, such translation transformations as modulation, addition, omission, calquing, transcription and complex transformations affecting both the lexical and grammatical levels and completely changing the structure of original sentences have been observed. The analyzed translations have a high quality, and they are good examples of a proper equirhythmic translation.
This article analyzes the role of phraseology as a field in linguistics, phraseological units formed by means of art terms in French and Uzbek languages and their lexical-semantic features on the basis of two incompatible language norms.
The article presents an analysis of paronymic Russian prefixal verbs converting into synonyms in colloquial speech. Paronyms and synonyms are at first sight distant and opposite lexical concepts. The former underline semantic differences between words whereas the latter focus on their similarities. However, common-root derivatives feature both, being different in affixes while sharing the root. The same lexical units can be regarded either as paronyms or as synonyms depending on particular theoretical models and on what is in focus – their contrast or their resemblance. Lexical and grammatical norms preserve the distinction between close meanings of paronyms, while dynamic language processes erase these differences. We examine prefixal paronyms drifting to synonyms in colloquial speech and suggest reasons for such phenomenon. Synonymy becomes possible when prefixes partly coincide in meaning (one meaning included into the other, or two meanings overlapping due to the shift of the action landmark). Productivity of a derivational model, phonetic resemblance of prefixes, and tendencies towards analogy and economy in colloquial speech are also to be taken into account.
The purpose of this study is to describe and analyse the interference of the Kazakh and Russian languages at the lexical level as a result of the interaction of the two languages and to identify the special features of the use of the Russian language among Kazakhs. The material of the study is the results of an experiment conducted in a school with 29 pupils in Grade 9 with Kazakh as the language of instruction at the Nur-Sultan Lyceum School No. 48. The first part of the study consists in the fact that the subjects were offered words with which they had to form phrases from the proposed pairs. In the second part of the experiment, students were offered sentences in Kazakh that had to be translated into Russian. The study considered various views on the definition of the phenomenon of interference resulting from the interaction of language systems in the context of bilingualism, during linguistic contacts. Interference is expressed in deviations from the norm and the system of the studied language under the influence of the native. In addition, the causes of interference were described, which are explained not only by linguistic, but also by extralinguistic factors.
Forms of Address in Portuguese as a Foreign Language Textbooks: Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach In this paper, starting from the methodological viewpoint of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM, see Wierzbicka 1996, 2013), we aim to describe how forms of address are used in Portuguese as a foreign language textbooks (European variety), investigate whether they comply with the real use of forms of address and with cultural norms of today’s Portuguese society, and propose NSM explications of their pragmatic and lexical meaning that would facilitate their acquisition. Our corpus of data contains examples taken from the PFL textbooks used for teaching students in Poland.
The material of the research includes A. N. Gvozdev’s diary entries entitled "From first words to the first form" and the records of the ‘speech start’ of three XXIst-century children. Taking the data into account, the author attempts to compare the speech acquisition of A. N. Gvozdev’s son Zhenya that is recorded in the above-mentioned diary and is 100 years distant from us and the author’s almost daily observation of her grandchildren’s speech development. This comparison aims to identify the constants and variables of such development. The analysis confirms the idea suggested by modern scientists that studying the formation of children’s ability to think and speak is a "clue" to many mysteries of the origin and evolution of communication. The study is based on empirical observation and takes into consideration the psychological, gender, social, and philosophical sides of the issue. The paper examines the phonetic, lexical, and grammatical aspects of children’s speech. It is claimed that each child forms laws of his/her own phonetics, and that the choice of sounds in a word to convey thoughts is a certain deliberate compromise between what he/she can pronounce and how he/she can do it to be understood. Mastering the lexical aspect of speech is closely related to the problem of children’s comprehension of the changing picture of the world. Mastering grammatical categories reflects vari[1]ations in the formation of grammatical laws in children. It is concluded that each child creates his/her language model. At the same time, the communication environment requires children to adjust the created model in compliance with the norms adopted in a particular language.
The medical profession is closely related to the speech activity, so the doctor must be able to master the word, because it plays a key role in the relationship between doctor and patient. Today, the purpose of learning a language in a non-language institution of higher education is not only to acquire skills of professional communication, but also the formation of language personality in general. The article considers the didactic possibilities of the professional text in the classes on the educational component «Ukrainian language (for professional use)». It is noted that in the medical institution of higher education the professional and language training of the future doctor takes place in parallel. It is emphasized that working with texts provides an opportunity to demonstrate the functioning of language phenomena in the professional sphere, to develop skills in constructing texts in the specialty. The ability to create their own statements is related to the ability to perceive, understand, analyze another person's speech and reproduce it. The author notes that only by working with professional texts, future doctors enrich their vocabulary, perceive the meaning of words, professional terms; explain spelling, lexical, morphological, syntactic, stylistic norms, and this contributes to the formation and improvement of their own speech. The definition of «professional text» is clarified and presented in detail. Texts and tasks to them are offered and expediency of their use for development of communicative abilities and skills in the future professional activity is proved.
A major effort is currently underway to develop a large-scale treebank for Indian low resource Languages (ILRLs). Apart from that, a rich and large-scale treebank can be an essential resource for linguistic investigations. This paper presents the first publicly available treebank of Santali low resource Indian language. The treebank contains 307 tokens (51 sentences) in the Santali language. All the selected sentences are manually annotated following the Universal Dependency guidelines. The morphological analysis of the Santali treebank was performed using machine learning techniques. The Santali annotated treebank will enrich the Santali language resource and will help in building language technology tools for cross-lingual learning and typological research. We also built a preliminary Santali parser using a machine learning approach. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the linguistic analysis of the Santali UD treebank.
Introduction Our visual, auditory, and tactile perception is not solely determined by what we process at a given moment in time, but also determined by what we perceived recently. These sequential effects can either be negative (repulsive) or positive (assimilative). Here, we investigated whether such sequential effects also occur in odor perception. Method Participants rated a sequence of 40 different odors (varying widely in hedonic valence) on four different characteristics (intensity, familiarity, valence, and arousal). For each of these characteristics, we conducted an inter-trial analysis, based on whether the rating on the preceding trial was low or high. Results We found a positive serial dependence for both odor intensity and familiarity ratings. That is, the rating on the current trial was higher when the rating on the previous trial was high than when the rating on the previous trial was low. We observed no sequential effects for odor valence and arousal ratings. Conclusion The olfactory system integrates previous stimuli into the current perception of intensity and familiarity.
The article deals with the actual problem of improving language skills in English at the level of speech norm. Like other aspects of the language, oral speech has a number of features that reflect the mentality of a given country, therefore, to build an utterance, it is not enough just to translate sentences from one language to another. The statement must comply with the rules of construction adopted in society. This article is devoted to two features of English colloquial speech, which fundamentally distinguishes English speech from Russian speech, namely, the use of vague language and the preferential use of nominative structures. These features are considered within the framework of various scientific concepts, the main of which are the categorical structure of parts, the theory of politeness, the categorical structure of the picture of the world, and others. The concept of Vague language is based on lexical and grammatical lexis, which make speech less direct and categorical, which is generally consistent with the maxims of British politeness. As for the predominantly nominative way of expression, this feature is explained from the standpoint of paradigmatic asymmetry, which is based on part-of-speech transformations that are optimal for use in a given specific speech situation. The paper also provides some methodological recommendations for the formation of students' speech skills. The relevance of the work is due to the fact that errors in the use of parts of speech at the level of the norm of speech, as a rule, do not lead to a distortion of meaning, but create an accent and lead to the formation of an unfavorable image of the speaker.
The aim of the study is to determine the optimal translation strategy for H. G. Wells’ novel “The Invisible Man” based on a comparative analysis of expressive means and realia. The author examines the notions of translation adequacy and equivalence, translation norm. Scientific novelty of the study lies in assessing the quality of translations by the two translators D. L. Weiss and O. M. Solovyova, as a result of which the optimal translation variant has been identified. The researcher carried out a comparative analysis of translation transformations used to render stylistic figurative means and realia in the text of the novel. The translators employ such common translation methods as loan translation, transliteration, omission, transposition of lexical units and descriptive translation. As a result, it has been proved that D. L. Weiss’ translation strategy is the most optimal one, since it meets all the translation norms, conveys the writer’s idea and thoughts, emotionally influencing the reader.
Camfranglais is the language of young Cameroonians who are trying to adapt it to French. Despite the diversity of forms imposed by the mixture of French, English, pidjin-english and other identity languages, it is noticed that the lexico-morphological system of camfranglais function within the base on the French language rules. The morphological transformations occurred on words portray the variations of grammatical categories imposed by the discursive situations. It has been found that speakers resort to derivation, more precisely to suffixation in creating words which enrich the lexicon. Thus, the creation of new words and their usages have been noticed in language use on the part of speakers who were under focus in different campuses and university rooms such as Maroua, Ngaoundéré and Yaoundé in 2015. Direct and interactive observations from sociolinguistics have helped in collecting data that were analyzed. The analyses were done following a normative approach with the intention of showing how Camfranglais establishes its norms. The morpho-syntactic rules which buttress the dynamism of this sociolect are observed at the lexical level of the verbal and syntactic systems.
The aim of this article is to present the basic capabilities of the Google search engine in the process of analysing multi-word lexical combinations. Our assumption is that the Google search engine can be regarded as a kind of linguistic database ready to be used as a practical linguistic tool. The text is an overview, therefore the presented material is limited to the necessary minimum, i.e. fifty randomly-selected phraseological compounds. In the introduction, we list ( and briefly discuss ) the tools available for studying Polish-language multi-word lexical combinations. With such an outlined background, we may characterise the Google search engine as a linguistic database. Finally, in the relevant part, we present the ways of using this tool with selected examples. In the summary, we discuss the possibilities offered by the use of a constantly-updated linguistic database which the Internet search engine under review can be considered to be.
About a fifth of all children in Sweden learn the societal language Swedish outside of the home, i.e., they have Swedish as a second language (L2). Many of these children have lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, which predicts lower language proficiency. The aim of the present study is twofold: to contribute to a greater understanding of L2-Swedish proficiency in preschoolers with lower SES backgrounds, and to find out how proficiency tests should be adapted for bilingual children such that the tests are valid, i.e., unbiased to the language status (L1 or L2). We investigate test performance on a Swedish receptive language proficiency test (the Comprehension scale of The New Reynell Developmental Language Scales, NRDLS) which has a monolingual norming sample. The participants are 51 bilingual children (3-5-years of age) with Arabic as their L1, and who attend preschools in Swedish neighborhoods with lower SES. Results indicate that in contrast to the norming sample, bilingual children’s raw scores for subsections of the test are not progressively more difficult. Thus, we need to be aware that bilingual children’s high proficiency in a particular aspect of the language does not necessarily imply that they are proficient in aspects that would be considered easier from a monolingual perspective. In addition, there are indications that unfamiliarity with L2 lexical items, that are typically acquired early in L1, causes bilingual children to fail on tasks aimed at assessing syntactic skills, even though they appear to understand the syntactic pattern. We conclude with suggestions for special considerations and adaptations to assess individual L2-comprehension in preschoolers more accurately, such that practitioners in turn can support the children’s language development.
This study focuses on the negativity bias theory displayed by individuals scoring high on depressive symptoms when viewing emotional stimuli. Based on previous research on negativity bias in depressed individuals, two hypotheses were tested: (1) The valence scores are lower for individuals scoring higher on depressive symptoms when rating high arousal, low valence images, and (2) a magnified LPP amplitude is observed for more depressed individuals when viewing high arousal images with low valence. Participants (N=131) were university students (Mean age= 20.8). The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images were used as stimuli, and scalp event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) was used to determine levels of depressive symptoms and categorize participants into low, middle, and high levels of depressive symptoms groups. Results showed significantly lower LPP amplitudes and higher mean valence ratings for individuals scoring higher on depressive symptoms compared to the low and mid depressed groups. Based on the results, both hypotheses are rejected as more depressed individuals show flattened emotional responses to highly arousing, unpleasant stimuli.
Statement of the problem. The vocabulary of a particular language is constantly updated, getting rid of redundant words, and simultaneously, enriching with new lexical units. The process of word obsolescence is a complex phenomenon, the result of which may be its gradual disappearance. Apart from sporadic cases of reactivation of passive vocabulary, most of the words from the obsolete vocabulary are gradually forgotten, eventually becoming completely incomprehensible to native speakers. Archaic words belong to the field of vocabulary, which is characterized by mobility and changeable sphere of use in any language. The most vivid manifestation of author’s style is in deviation from the literary norm of the language when the writer actively searches for the new linguistic forms or reinterprets archaic ones. One of the urgent problems in modern linguistics is the writer’s influence on the language he uses as the most important element of his individual style. The language of a literary work as a way of conveying content, is not only correlated, but also connected with this content; the lexicon depends on the content and on the author’s attitude towards it. The purpose of the article is to identify the role of archaisms in the formation of the individual J.R.R. Tolkien’s style on the example of the novel “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”. Methodology is as follows: method of linguistic description, component analysis method, methods of lexicographic and contextual analysis. Conclusion. The modern trend of studying individual style of a writer is based on the principle that every literary work has certain specific features which characterize the writer’s style. The analysis of the language material reveals the fact that J. R. R. Tolkien’s individual style dictionary includes a large number of obsolete words as a hallmark of his individual style. The suggested passages clearly show how the writer uses morphological features in combination with poetic and archaic vocabulary to model the represented reality. The motivated selection of certain lexical units is dictated by the content and genre of the work and includes the use of archaizing syntactic structures, the entire spectrum of obsolete vocabulary, poetic words, author’s neologisms.
The chapter demonstrates the expressive and evaluative potential of grammatical gender and specifically highlights the ways ‘grammatical neutering’ can be used to belittle and other unpopular politicians. The authors develop the idea that in gendered languages intentional deviations from a grammatical norm are pragmatically loaded and express a notable implicit message. They present a number of examples collected from online Ukrainian-language sources where the neuter pronoun vono (it) was used to refer to two presidents: Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, and Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Viewing such examples as cases of grammatical metaphor, the authors show that classifying a referent as ‘other’ may be achieved not only by lexical but also by grammatical means. The application of it and neuter morphology where feminine or masculine is expected while expressing disapproval produces a strong pragmatic effect. The addition of grammatical dehumanization and desexualization to derogatory semantic propositions magnifies the utterances’ negative impact and helps to communicate antipathy and dissociation. The chapter discusses the communicative consequences of grammatical metaphorization of the neuter third person pronoun in Ukrainian political discourse, drawing conclusions about pragmatic effects of grammatical gender alternations.
Good quality of data preprocessing will have a greater impact on improving the performance of the classification models. Negation is one of the most important features in textual data. Only one negation word can change the polarity of the whole sentence. It is often seen that words like ‘not’, ‘non’ or suffixes like “n't” are removed during noise removal thereby leading to blunders in Sentiment Classification. Effective Feature extraction is the cornerstone of effective Sentiment Analysis and Negation handling is simply essential for this purpose. In this paper, an effective function for handling negations based on First Sentiment Word (FSW) antonymy in the WordNet has been implemented on a set of IMDB movie reviews. The function for Negation Handling created for this paper increased the accuracy of Sentiment Classification by 4-8%. Experiments done in this paper show that improving the quality of the data gives higher results than implementing different state-of-the-art methods like n-grams and even deep learning methods like Word Embeddings, especially when used in an industry setting, where there is a need of quick deployments and changes with cost effectiveness and resource management.
Treebank selection for parsing evaluation and the spurious effects that might arise from a biased choice have not been explored in detail. This paper studies how evaluating on a single subset of treebanks can lead to weak conclusions. First, we take a few contrasting parsers, and run them on subsets of treebanks proposed in previous work, whose use was justified (or not) on criteria such as typology or data scarcity. Second, we run a large-scale version of this experiment, create vast amounts of random subsets of treebanks, and compare on them many parsers whose scores are available. The results show substantial variability across subsets and that although establishing guidelines for good treebank selection is hard, it is possible to detect potentially harmful strategies.
This paper addressed the problem of structured sentiment analysis using a bi-affine semantic dependency parser, large pre-trained language models, and publicly available translation models. For the monolingual setup, we considered: (i) training on a single treebank, and (ii) relaxing the setup by training on treebanks coming from different languages that can be adequately processed by cross-lingual language models. For the zero-shot setup and a given target treebank, we relied on: (i) a word-level translation of available treebanks in other languages to get noisy, unlikely-grammatical, but annotated data (we release as much of it as licenses allow), and (ii) merging those translated treebanks to obtain training data. In the post-evaluation phase, we also trained cross-lingual models that simply merged all the English treebanks and did not use word-level translations, and yet obtained better results. According to the official results, we ranked 8th and 9th in the monolingual and cross-lingual setups.
The present study investigates the relations between L2-English proficiency and L1-Turkish lexical property evaluations. We asked whether L2 proficiency affects lexical properties, including imageability and concreteness ratings of 600 Turkish words selected from the Word Frequency Dictionary of Written Turkish. Seventy-two participants (L1-Turkish - L2-English) provided ratings of concreteness and imageability for 600 words on a 7-point scale. In order to assess their L2 proficiency, we administered Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-IV (PPVT-IV). We divided categories into two subcategories as high and low for the frequency, concreteness, imageability, and age of acquisition (AoA). The relationship between these subcategories and imageability-concreteness was examined by mixed effects linear regression analyses. We found that L2 proficiency and imageability ratings were positively correlated and specifically, this positive association was evident for low-frequency words and later acquired words. Results are in line with the interaction of bilingual representation under the dual-coding theory which suggests that bilinguals develop an interconnected imaginal representation for two languages as opposed to separate verbal representations. As L2 proficiency increased, the imageability also increased. These findings have implications for literature investigating the relationship between L2 proficiency and linguistic outcomes. Additionally, findings point to the importance of considering the L2 proficiency of participants when lexical tasks that involve cue words or word lists are used.
INTRODUCTION: Drug addiction is characterized by impaired response inhibition and salience attribution (iRISA), where the salience of drug cues is postulated to overpower that of other reinforcers with a concomitant decrease in self-control. However, the neural underpinnings of the interaction between the salience of drug cues and inhibitory control in drug addiction remain unclear. METHODS: We developed a novel stop-signal functional magnetic resonance imaging task where the stop-signal reaction time (SSRT-a classical inhibitory control measure) was tested under different salience conditions (modulated by drug, food, threat, or neutral words) in individuals with cocaine use disorder (CUD; n = 26) versus demographically matched healthy control participants (n = 26). RESULTS: Despite similarities in drug cue-related SSRT and valence and arousal word ratings between groups, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity was diminished during the successful inhibition of drug versus food cues in CUD and was correlated with lower frequency of recent use, lower craving, and longer abstinence (Z > 3.1, P < 0.05 corrected). DISCUSSION: Results suggest altered involvement of cognitive control regions (e.g. dlPFC) during inhibitory control under a drug context, relative to an alternative reinforcer, in CUD. Supporting the iRISA model, these results elucidate the direct impact of drug-related cue reactivity on the neural signature of inhibitory control in drug addiction.
Neural constituency parsers have reached practical performance on news-domain benchmarks. However, their generalization ability to other domains remains weak. Existing findings on cross-domain constituency parsing are only made on a limited number of domains. Tracking this, we manually annotate a high-quality constituency treebank containing five domains. We analyze challenges to open-domain constituency parsing using a set of linguistic features on various strong constituency parsers. Primarily, we find that 1) BERT significantly increases parsers' cross-domain performance by reducing their sensitivity on the domain-variant features. 2) Compared with single metrics such as unigram distribution and OOV rate, challenges to open-domain constituency parsing arise from combinations of factors, including cross-domain lexical and constituent structure variations.
For fans of popular cultural products, digitization has meant the configuration of affinity spaces online and opportunities for learning in the “digital wilds,” including incidental language learning and identity development. Through online multiparty written interaction, we explored how 15 Catalan-speaking gamers organized themselves to translate games from English into Catalan. Results indicated distributed roles, routinized translation practices, and, through translating and commenting on new members’ translation tests, the emergence of folk linguistic attitudes and beliefs regarding Spanish-Catalan interference, changes to Catalan linguistic norms, or positionings towards the group’s English-Catalan translation strategy: They favored creative expressions and what they believed were idiosyncratic language choices with symbolic power to signal what Catalan is or ought to be. The group of fan translators configured a site for metapragmatic discussion and identity development which navigates across monoglot/heteroglossic, prescriptive/descriptive/idiosyncratic conceptions of language, manifesting grassroots linguistic activism fueled by the diglossic status of the Catalan language.
With the advent of the WordNet (a lexical database), the field of linguistics ushered into the new realm where this structured database, based on ontology can be used for a variety of operations such as Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), checking Semantic Similarity, performing Text Based Summarization etc. The development of various knowledge bases/lexicons like WordNet, with graphically structured information allowed many graph based approaches to be used for choosing the best sense in the Word Sense Disambiguation process. In these graph based approaches, local graph connectivity measures like Fuzzy Degree Centrality ($\mathrm{V}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{D}\mathrm{C}}$), Fuzzy Closeness Centrality ($\mathrm{V}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{C}\mathrm{C}}$), Fuzzy Betweenness Centrality ($\mathrm{V}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{B}\mathrm{C}}$), Fuzzy PageRank Centrality ($\mathrm{V}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{P}\mathrm{C}}$) and global graph connectivity measures like Fuzzy Compactness ($\mathrm{V}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{C}}$) and Fuzzy Graph Entropy ($\mathrm{V}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{G}\mathrm{E}}$) are widely used to perform WSD.Proposed and implemented here is a novel fuzzy graph connectivity measure named as Fuzzy Expected Force (FExF) to choose the correct word sense, by taking into consideration the influential as well as less influential nodes for the node under consideration in the graph formed using Fuzzy Hindi WordNet. FExF performs less computations than $\mathrm{V}_{\mathrm{F}\mathrm{G}\mathrm{E}}$ to give accurate results; thus becoming a reliable local graph connectivity measure, as overall structure of graph is not necessary for finding correct sense of the word.
This study sought to determine if hues overlayed on a video recording of a piano performance would systematically influence perception of its emotional arousal level. The hues were artificially added to a series of four short video excerpts of different performances using video editing software. Over two experiments 106 participants were sorted into 4 conditions, with each viewing different combinations of musical excerpts (two excerpts with nominally high arousal and two excerpts with nominally low arousal) and hue (red or blue) combinations. Participants rated the emotional arousal depicted by each excerpt. Results indicated that the overall arousal ratings were consistent with the nominal arousal of the selected excerpts. However, hues added to video produced no significant effect on arousal ratings, contrary to predictions. This could be due to the domination of the combined effects of other channels of information (e.g., the music and player movement) over the emotional effects of the hypothesized influence of hue on perceived performance (red expected to enhance and blue to reduce arousal of the performance). To our knowledge this is the first study to investigate the impact of these hues upon perceived arousal of music performance, and has implications for musical performers and stage lighting. Further research that investigates reactions during live performance and manipulation of a wider range of lighting hues, saturation and brightness levels, and editing techniques, is recommended to further scrutinize the veracity of the findings.
Classical views suggest that experienced affect is related to a specific bodily response, whereas recent perspectives challenge this view postulating that similar affective experiences rather evoke different physiological responses. To further advance this debate in the field, we used representational similarity analysis to investigate the correspondence between subjective affect (arousal and valence ratings) and physiological reactions (skin conductance response [SCR], startle blink response, heart rate, and corrugator activity) across various emotion induction contexts (picture viewing task, sound listening task, and imagery task). Significant similarities were exclusively observed between SCR and arousal in the picture viewing task. However, none of the other physiological measures showed a significant relation with valence and arousal ratings in any of the tasks. These findings are discussed within the framework of the Populations hypothesis, suggesting that physiological responses do not depend on the experienced affect but are directly associated with the context in which they are evoked.
Dependency parsing has become the norm for its advantages of representing syntactic information for numerous tasks of natural language processing (NLP). In Vietnamese, a challenging problem which arises in this domain is the insufficiency of the training resource. Our work presents a new method to automatically convert a Vietnamese constituency treebank into dependency trees. We designed new dependency labels for Vietnamese treebank. Furthermore, in this research, we proposed new head-percolation rules and dependency relations. The experimental results on two state-of-the-art parsers, MaltParser and MSTParser, indicated that our treebank were roughly 13% UAS and 21% LAS higher than previous works.
Siyao Peng, Yang Janet Liu, Amir Zeldes. Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers). 2022.
The amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) form a crucial part of the emotion circuit, yet their emotion induced responses and interactions have been poorly investigated with direct intracranial recordings. Such high-fidelity signals can uncover precise spectral dynamics and frequency differences in valence processing allowing novel insights on neuromodulation. Here, leveraging the unique spatio-temporal advantages of intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) from a cohort of 35 patients with intractable epilepsy (with 71 contacts in amygdala, 31 in OFC and 43 in mPFC), we assessed the spectral dynamics and interactions between the amygdala, OFC and mPFC during an emotional picture viewing task. Task induced activity showed greater broadband gamma activity in the negative condition compared to positive condition in all the three regions. Similarly, beta activity was increased in the negative condition in the amygdala and OFC while decreased in mPFC. Furthermore, beta activity of amygdala showed significant negative association with valence ratings. Critically, model-based computational analyses revealed unidirectional connectivity from mPFC to the amygdala and bidirectional communication between OFC-amygdala and OFC-mPFC. Our findings provide direct neurophysiological evidence for a much-posited model of top-down influence of mPFC over amygdala and a bidirectional influence between OFC and the amygdala. Altogether, in a relatively large sample size with human intracranial neuronal recordings, we highlight valence-dependent spectral dynamics and dyadic coupling within the amygdala-mPFC-OFC network with implications for potential targeted neuromodulation in emotion processing.
We propose a novel multitask learning method for diacritization which trains a model to both diacritize and translate. Our method addresses data sparsity by exploiting large, readily avail able bitext corpora. Furthermore, transla tion requires implicit linguistic and seman tic knowledge, which is helpful for resolving ambiguities in diacritization. We apply our method to the Penn Arabic Treebank and re port a new stateoftheart word error rate of 4.79%. We also conduct manual and automatic analysis to better understand our method and highlight some of the remaining challenges in diacritization. Our method has applications in texttospeech, speechtospeech translation, and other NLP tasks. * Work done while at Apple. 1 Notable exceptions include the Quran and many chil dren's books.