Morphological and semantic opacity as factors of linguistic change: A study of Form VIII verbs in Arabic

The paper highlights modern economic discourse peculiarities in English and Spanish. Everyday life is determined by the economic situation on the national, regional and international levels. Thus, the economy plays a leading role in any society. The presented research aims to outline language changes on the lexical and morphosyntactic levels that exist in the modern English and Spanish economic discourse. The article introduces the discussion about English overwhelming influence over all other languages in the economic and business area. Nowadays, as a result of globalization, economic discourse has become uniform everywhere. Nevertheless, the uniformity level can differ even in one language group. For instance, Italian is much more receptive to borrowings from English than Spanish or French. At the same time Spanish is evaluated in this research as a purist language example as it has changed to a lesser extent than other languages on the lexical level. This feature is clearly represented by Spanish economic discourse metaphors. For example, famous English metaphors “bear” and “bull” correspond to Spanish “bajista” and “alcista”. At the same time some Spanish metaphors coincide with English ones (the Debt Service (Eng.) – el Servicio de la Deuda (Sp.), country risk (Eng.) – riesgo país (Sp.)). Syntactic structures analysis enabled to investigate several English and Spanish economic discourse phenomena. One of the most important phenomena involves changes of grammatical category, especially the nominalisation of verbs in order to indicate processes as well as of adjectives in order to indicate conditions and qualities. As a nominalisation process consequence, ellipsis, Passive Voice and intransitive verbs employment is observed. In general, it is proved that Passive Voice is used more in English than in Spanish. Nevertheless, Passive Voice is used in Spanish economic discourse to emphasise its impersonality, i.e. subject in the sentence is not expressed by an author but by the action itself. The use of personalisation and metaphors helps to explain abstract notions, i.e., accountability, value, validity, welfare (Eng.) as well as la responsabilidad, valor, la validez, el bienestar (Sp.)

This paper first presents a number of serial verb constructions (svcs) fou~d , In Papuan and Austronesian languages and then raises the following quest ions: What are svcs?' What about typological research on svcs? What about the syntactic descr iption of SVCs? Is there a comprehensive definition of SVCs? Which types of svcs do we find? What about the SVCS fulfill? Which kind of verbs constitute SVCs? What about the order of verbs within svcs? What kind of lexicalization processes can we,observe in SVCs? What is expressed as an event in a sv c and how is it expressed? Are there any language and/or culture-specific rules for the combination of verbs in these constructions? Can we infer from svcs to language and/or culture-specific conceptualizations of events? The paper ends with a brief outline of the direction for a new approach to research on SVCS which may lead to answers for at least some of these crucial questions . 1. What are serial verb constructions? Features, types' and functions Speakers of Taba, the Austronesian language ' spoken on the islands Makian, Moti and Kayoa in Indonesia (northern Moluccas) may describe their successful hunting of a mosquito as follows (Bowden 1997: 339) : (1) Npun bobay npake sandal. n-pun bobay n~pake sandal 3.Sg-kill mosquito 3.Sg-use thong 'He killed the mosquito with a thong .'

Phonological opacity v. semantic transparency: Two cases from Israeli Hebrew

This paper explores the possibility of classifying traditional affixes as two groups, syntactic or lexical affixes, as proposed within Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). It is argued that the main challenge for the FDG approach to derivational morphology arises from properties which revolve around the semantic contribution of derivational affixes: i) the fact that derivational processes introduce unpredictable meaning components (semantic opacity), ii) the question of what constitutes lexical meaning vs. grammatical meaning, iii) the intrinsic polysemy of some affixes, and iv) affix competition. The authors conclude that FDG should treat lexical and grammatical affixes similarly, unless a clear distinction can be made in particular cases on clearly specified semantic principles.

This paper holds the view that word order change in some minority languages in southern China is caused by language contact. Word order changes discussed in this paper include the word order of object and verb, manner adverb and verb, degree adverb and adjective, noun and noun, adjective and noun, possessive attribute and noun, demonstrative and classifier (or noun phrase), adjective and comparative standard, noun and relative clause.

We reveal an ongoing language change in Ukrainian involving a construction with a subject comprised of the indefinite quantifier багато ‘many’ modifying a noun phrase in the Genitive Plural. Number agreement on the verb varies, allowing both Singular (in 69.1% of attestations) and Plural (in 30.9% of attestations). Based on statistical analysis of corpus data, we investigate the influence of the factors of year of creation, word order of subject and verb, and animacy of the subject on the choice of verb number. We find that, while all combinations of word order and animacy are robustly attested, VS word order and inanimate subjects tend to prefer Singular, whereas SV word order and animate subjects tend to prefer Plural. Since about the 1950s, the proportion of Plural has been increasing, overtaking Singular in the current decade. We propose that this Singular vs. Plural variation is motivated by the human embodied experience of construing a group of items as either a homogeneous mass (and therefore Singular) or a multiplicity of individuals (and therefore Plural). This proposal is supported by the identification of micro-constructions that prefer Singular and show reduced individuation of human beings.

In two studies, we find that native and non-native acquisition show different effects on sign language processing. Subjects were all born deaf and used sign language for interpersonal communication, but first acquired it at ages ranging from birth to 18. In the first study, deaf signers shadowed (simultaneously watched and reproduced) sign language narratives given in two dialects, American Sign Language (ASL) and Pidgin Sign English (PSE), in both good and poor viewing conditions. In the second study, deaf signers recalled and shadowed grammatical and ungrammatical ASL sentences. In comparison with non-native signers, natives were more accurate, comprehended better, and made different kinds of lexical changes; natives primarily changed signs in relation to sign meaning independent of the phonological characteristics of the stimulus. In contrast, non-native signers primarily changed signs in relation to the phonological characteristics of the stimulus independent of lexical and sentential meaning. Semantic lexical changes were positively correlated to processing accuracy and comprehension, whereas phonological lexical changes were negatively correlated. The effects of non-native acquisition were similar across variations in the sign dialect, viewing condition, and processing task. The results suggest that native signers process lexical structural automatically, such that they can attend to and remember lexical and sentential meaning. In contrast, non-native signers appear to allocate more attention to the task of identifying phonological shape such that they have less attention available for retrieval and memory of lexical meaning.

Words in different languages rarely cover the exact same semantic space. This work characterizes differences in meaning between words across languages using semantic relations that have been used to relate the meaning of English words. However, because of translation ambiguity, semantic relations are not always preserved by translation. We introduce a cross-lingual relation classifier trained only with English examples and a bilingual dictionary. Our classifier relies on a novel attention-based distillation approach to account for translation ambiguity when transferring knowledge from English to cross-lingual settings. On new English-Chinese and English-Hindi test sets, the resulting models largely outperform baselines that more naively rely on bilingual embeddings or dictionaries for cross-lingual transfer, and approach the performance of fully supervised systems on English tasks.

Introduction: the article is devoted to the identification of means of expression of an alternative in the Khanty language. An alternative is one of the varieties of multiplicative type of multiplicity of situations. The analysis of the semantic zone of alternativeness revealed lexical and morphological means through which this meaning is expressed. Objective: to identify means of expression of an alternative in the Khanty language and to identify the most expressive one. Research materials: the bilingual (Khanty-Russian) dictionaries of the Kazym, the Shuryshkar and the Eastern Khanty dialects, as well as examples from theoretical research on the Khanty language. Results and novelty of the research: the scientific novelty of the research is that for the first time a comprehensive study of the semantic zone of an alternative in the Khanty language was conducted. The analysis reveals lexical and morphological means by which this meaning is realized. The alternative subsystem contains three groups: lexical means with semantics of an alternative; word-forming means expressing the meaning of an alternative; paired adverbs expressing mutually directed action. In the components of the first group the meaning of an alternative is the least expressed and difficult determined; the second group contains verbs formed by the word500 forming suffix =i=/=ij= ~ = ĭ=/=ĭj= (they express the multiplicative type of multiplicity of situations including an alternative); the most clearly the meaning of an alternative is presented in the group with paired adverbs.

Bilingual lexicons, essential to many NLP applications, can be constructed automatically on the basis of parallel or comparable corpora. In this article, we make two contributions to their induction from comparable corpora. The first one concerns the creation of these lexicons. We show that seed lexicons can be improved by adding a bootstrapping procedure that uses cross-lingual distributional similarity. The second contribution concerns the evaluation of bilingual lexicons. It is generally based on translation lexicons, which corresponds to the implicit assumption that (cross-lingual) synonymy is the semantic relation of primary interest, even though other semantic relations like (cross-lingual) hyponymy or cohyponymy make up a considerable portion of translation pair candidates proposed by distributional methods.We argue that the focus on synonymy is an oversimplification and that many applications can profit from the inclusion of other semantic relations. We study what effect these semantic relations have on two cross-lingual tasks: the cross-lingual projection of polarity scores and the cross-lingual modeling of selectional preferences. We find that the presence of non-synonymous semantic relations may negatively affect the former of these tasks, but benefit the latter.

The current study investigates the grammatical, rhetorical, and semantic relationship between the introduction of Surat As-Saffat and the textual structures forming the Surah. It assumes that the introduction verses are richly loaded with lexical and grammatical meanings. The title of the study, “Grammatical and Semantic Relationship between the Introduction of Surat As-Saffat and Its Textual Structures: A study in Light of the textual science,” seeks to answer the main question: (1) What are the grammatical and semantic relationship between the introduction verses of this Surah and its subsequent textual structures? This inquiry is further divided into key questions, such as: How are grammatical relationships manifested? (2) How are semantic cohesive relationships established? To answer these questions, the researcher adopted the textual methodology, which offers a theoretical framework for understanding the text as a cohesive grammatical and semantic unit, with an approach encompassing both theoretical and applied dimensions. The study reached several results, the most important of which were horizontal and vertical relationships, including repetition of grammatical style, news styles, and construction styles, in addition to frequent repetition of emphasis, forming a horizontal grammatical relationship noted by the researcher. As for semantic world and sentence structure, the text forms an interconnected semantic world through generative sentences rich in grammatical transformation; key transformational elements include the imperative, the interrogative, and emphasis, linking deep generative sentences with superficial transformational sentences.

The notion of ‘linguistic cycle’ has long been recognized as being relevant to the descriptions of many processes of language change. In a process known as grammaticalization, a given linguistic form loses its lexical meaning as well as some of its phonological content, and then gradually weakens, until it ultimately vanishes. This process of change becomes cyclic when the grammaticalized form is replaced by an innovative item, which can develop along exactly the same pathway. This volume unites thirteen chapters which address aspects of cyclical change from a wide variety of empirical perspectives. Couched in the generative framework, the contributions to this book bear witness to the rapidly growing interest among Chomskyan syntacticians in the phenomenon of grammaticalization. Topics touched upon include, but are not limited to, the diachrony of negation (in the context of, but also beyond, Jespersen’s Cycle), the syntax of determiners and pronominal clitics, the internal structure of wh-words and logical operators, cyclical changes in argument structure, and the relationship between morphology and syntax. One conclusion that transpires is that the correlation between cyclical change and grammaticalization—though undeniable—is perhaps less strong than sometimes assumed. Given its emphasis on empirical data description and theoretical analysis, Cycles in Language Change will be of interest to historical linguists working in formal and usage-based frameworks, and more broadly to scholars interested in language variation and change.

نگاهِ علمی به فرهنگ ­نگاری و دور شدن از فرهنگ ­نگاریِ سنتی، نیازمندِ درکِ عمیق­ تر پژوهشگرانِ این حوزه و همچنین بهره‌گیری از رویکردی موشکافانه­ تر به رویاروییِ نظریه و عمل در فرهنگ­ نگاری است. یکی از زمینه ­های قابلِ پژوهش در این حوزة زبا­ن­شناسی، نقد فرهنگ ­های دوزبانه است. ناگفته پیداست که نقدِ فرهنگ، می­تواند زمینۀ بهبود فرآیندِ فرهنگ‌نگاری را فراهم سازد که پیامدِ آن افزایشِ کاراییِ این گونه فرهنگ ­ها و در نتیجه بهره ­مندی مطلوب­ترِ کاربران خواهد بود. در این راستا، هدفِ اصلیِ این نوشتار با روش پژوهش توصیفی-تحلیلی، شناساندنِ برخی ویژگی­های ساختار خردِ سه فرهنگ­ دوزبانه بر پایة مقایسۀ آن‌ها با یک‌دیگر و با فرهنگ پیشرفتة زبان­ آموز آکسفورد از دیدگاه نظریۀ معناشناسی قالبی چارلز فیلمور است. یافته‌های بررسی، ضعفِ ساختاربندیِ پایگانی و تفاوت در برش­های معنایی، ناهمگونی در اجزایِ کلام موردِ اشاره در هر مدخل، ناسازگاری معانی و معادل­های ارائه شده با قالب را نشان می‌دهد. مهم­تر از همه، این یافته‌ها نیاز به بهبود کمّی و کیفی سه فرهنگ گسترده پیشرو آریان­پور، معاصر هزاره و معاصر پویا از جنبة ارائۀ همایند، نمونه و توصیف ظرفیت در مقایسه با فرهنگ مبنا را نمایان می‌سازند.

This article describes the role of associative units in the creation of the Uzbek language corpus, their specific features. The attitude of the questions to the types of associative units, the formation of syntactic compounds through such units, their placement in the corpus are expressed. The associative connection of lexical units in an antonymous relationship is also based on a semantic relationship. It is well known that any conflict requires opposing members. The interconnectedness of opposing members through confrontation causes them to remember each other in the memory of the speaker. The associative meaning of a lexeme is realized through a word like a lexical meaning, but the lexical meaning is expressed in the lexeme, the associative meaning is formed in the linguistic consciousness of language owners in connection with a certain lexical unit.

The ontolex interface is anchored on two essential elements of human knowledge: conceptual structure and lexical access. A well-structured ontolex interface facilitates bilingual representation of both the conceptual structure and the lexical information which will be crucial in overcoming linguistic barriers. In this chapter we propose a robust and versatile approach for constructing the ontolex interface infrastructure: Bilingual Ontological WordNet (BOW). The Academia Sinica Bilingual Ontological WordNet (Sinica BOW) was constructed in 2003 using this approach. We argue that this novel combination of ontology and WordNet will (1) give each linguistic form a precise location in the taxonomy, (2) clarify the relation between the conceptual classification and its linguistic instantiation, and (3) facilitate a genuine crosslingual access of knowledge.