Definition Of Word Research Articles

Assessing knowledge: psychometric properties of the BAMS semantic memory battery

Abstract Background: Semantic memory is a cultural influenced cognitive domain that is responsible for our knowledge about words and the world. Semantic Memory Battery (BAMS) is a new battery that evaluate semantic memory based on a compendium of tasks, including verbal fluency, naming, conceptualization, categorization, general questions, and word definitions, and was designed to consider cultural aspects. Objectives: We aimed to evaluate the BAMS psychometrics structure comprising classical and modern analysis, and also evaluate a clinical subdivision of the battery. Methods: 114 Brazilian cognitively healthy older adults BAMS performance provided data for psychometric analysis using validity tests, item response theory analysis and confirmatory factor analysis for goodness-of-fit measures. Results: BAMS results revealed good validity and good-fit measures in each subtest, total score (X2 = 20.684, p = 0.110) and a hierarchical structure with clinical subdivision of the battery (X2 = 20.089, p = 0.093). Discussion: BAMS is a new compendium of tasks that evaluate distinct aspects of semantic memory and can clinically consider the impact of executive function. This battery evaluates verbal fluency, naming, conceptualization, categorization, general knowledge and word definitions. The BAMS has clinical importance once semantic memory is mostly influenced by culture and language, and there is an absence of broadly semantic memory tests in our scenario, especially with older adults that can have a pathological aging condition that affects primarily or secondarily this domain.

Paperno, Irina ‘Who, What am I?’ Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self (review)

REVIEWS 331 Souls and Dostoevskii’s ‘Mr Prokharchin’. As in previous chapters, the discussion is firmly set within its historical, social and lexicological context. Porter convincingly shows that, despite Gogol´’s initial desire to offer up Dead Souls as a force for moral change (something he was to turn to only in the novel’s unfinished second part, thereby ironically draining it of its originality and vitality), the miserly Pliushkin, with his ‘grotesque destabilization of all distinct forms of value’ (p. 132), obstinately refuses to adopt this particular role. In her final paragraph Porter returns full circle to the question with which the study begins — Russian literature’s ambivalent relationship with France and French cultural and social paradigms. We see Mr Prokharchin labelled as ‘a Napoleon’, and the accusation that he is a prey to French ambition as a ‘death sentence that brings a new life of heightened significance’ (p. 141). This is an impressive addition to the rich corpus of Russian literary criticism. Not the least of its virtues is the inclusion of judiciously chosen illustrations that complement and enhance the argument. It concludes with an appendix on the contrasting definitions of the various words for ambition (the French ambition, together with the Russian liubochestie, chestoliubie and ambitsiia), followed by detailed notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Economies of Feeling may be a relatively slim volume, but it packs more of substance and interest in its pages than books twice its size. However familiar readers might feel they are with the texts discussed here, they will find a book that refreshes their minds, challenges any received ideas and, above all, encourages them to return to the stories themselves. University of Exeter Roger Cockrell Paperno, Irina. ‘Who, What am I?’ Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2014. x + 229 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. $35.00. Starting from the deceptively simple idea that Tolstoi’s central project was to transform his innermost (zadushevnaia) life into a book, Irina Paperno has written an invaluable study of the narratological and philosophical paradoxes at the heart of Tolstoi’s life and work. For despite Tolstoi’s remarkable philosophical and literary talents, his lifelong attempt to narrate ‘the book of his life’ was, from the very beginning, doomed. As Tolstoi understood better than most, even if it were possible for an individual to comprehend the unbounded and infinite nature of a consciousness that exists in a realm beyond time, space and language, it could never be adequately represented in written language. Yet despite his understanding of the philosophical and literary impossibility of the task, Tolstoi never abandoned this quest. While Paperno sees Tolstoi’s SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 332 efforts as heroic, readers less captivated by the ‘Sage of Yasnaya Polyana’ might see it as a sign of obstinance and hubris. Although ‘Who, What Am I?’ is a short book, its author manages to cover all the major periods of Tolstoi’s writing career, beginning with his first attempts at keeping a personal diary in 1847 and ending in 1910 as a dying Tolstoi attempts to dictate his thoughts to his daughter Aleksandra and his disciple Chertkov. Few scholars can match Paperno’s mastery of the more than sixty volumes of non-fictional writings in Tolstoi’s collected works, her knowledge of modern European philosophy, literature and intellectual history, and even fewer can write about complex matters with such concise and intelligent lucidity. In an introduction and six closely argued chapters, she lays out Tolstoi’s decades-long obsession with ‘narrating the self’ in diaries, letters, personal confessions, autobiographical fragments and religious tracts, reading his works as a dialogue with philosophers like Hegel and Schopenhauer and literary autobiographers like Augustine, Rousseau, Goethe and Stendhal. The central paradox that emerges from her study is that Tolstoi’s utopian attempt to imagine a discourse adequate to describe his innermost life directly from the first person led him to reject the infinitely complex and subtle third-person representation of consciousness of fictional characters that he had achieved in his novels and stories (e.g., Natasha Rostova at the ball, Anna Karenina before her suicide, Ivan Ilych on his deathbed). Paperno’s...

Review and Comparison of Content Growth in Word Definition of Persian Speaking Children of 7-12 Years of Age

Review and Comparison of Content Growth in Word Definition of Persian Speaking Children of 7-12 Years of Age

Essence and definition by abstraction

We may define words or concepts, and we may also, as Aristotle and others have thought, define the things for which words stand and of which concepts are concepts. Definitions of words or concepts may be explicit or implicit, and may seek to report preexisting synonymies, as Quine put it, but they may instead be wholly or partly stipulative. Definition by abstraction, of which Hume’s principle is a much discussed example, seek to define a term-forming operator, such as the number operator, by fixing the truth-conditions of identity-statements featuring terms formed by means of that operator. Such definitions are a species of implicit definition. They are typically at least partly stipulative. Definitions of things, or real definitions, are, by contrast, typically conceived as true or false statements about the nature or essence of their definienda, and so not stipulative. There thus appears to be an obvious and head-on clash between taking Hume’s principle as an implicit and at least partly stipultative definition of the number operator and taking it as a real definition, stating the nature or essence of cardinal numbers. This paper argues that this apparent tension can be resolved, and that resolving it sheds light on part of the epistemology or essence and necessity, showing how some of our knowledge of essence and necessity can be a priori.

Arabic Solid-Stems for an Efficient Morphological Analysis

Arabic natural language processing “NLP” researchers have not yet reached a consensus on a unified definition of stop-words, which is a challenging issue and a limitation in the domain of Arabic NLP in general and Arabic morphological analysis in particular. In this research work, we start by giving a detailed definition and classification of solid-stem words which renames stop-words; we then propose a linguistic-based morphological analysis approach to process this class of words in the Arabic language. A solid-stem word has a unique morphological form and is characterized by the fact that the inflectional ending of the word does not change no matter where the word is in the sentence. A solid-stem word can be a constructed noun (pronoun, indeclinable noun, and verbal noun), an invariable verb, or a particle. A new classification of solid-stems is given, based on their type of affixations. The proposed approach distinguishes between variable and invariable solid-stem types, identifies all possible affixes, and generates all possible morphological variants of each word in a systematic way. For this purpose, we propose a formula for solid-stem affixation and describe in detail affixes schemas using finite-state machine. Building the work on strong linguistic bases lays the foundation for building efficient Arabic search engines and special-purpose information retrieval systems.

Math and English for Academic Purposes

Even though math is thought to be mostly numbers, there is a significant amount of language involved. Students do not have to know only the discipline-specific vocabulary, or jargon, associated with math, but they also have to understand other forms of language in and out of the classroom. For example, instructors will work problems out on the board while discussing the steps orally to go from one part of the problem to the next which may not align with what the teacher is writing on the board, so there is potentially a loss of comprehension on the student’s part. Additionally, instructors will give instructions in class or give information on specific dates for exams, quizzes and homework which is sometimes given orally or written on the board. Asking questions during class and following transitions between activities can be another challenge for second language learners who struggle with language in a math class. Another aspect of language present in a math course is in the textbook. Students will often be assigned chapters or sections to read in order to prepare for an upcoming class. The textbook is written using the disciplinary language of math, which makes it difficult to follow especially because definitions of math words are often defined with other math jargon. With such rich language and classroom interaction, it is imperative to not overlook the subject of math when discussing English for Academic Purposes.

Math and English for Academic Purposes

Even though math is thought to be mostly numbers, there is a significant amount of language involved. Students do not have to know only the discipline-specific vocabulary, or jargon, associated with math, but they also have to understand other forms of language in and out of the classroom. For example, instructors will work problems out on the board while discussing the steps orally to go from one part of the problem to the next which may not align with what the teacher is writing on the board, so there is potentially a loss of comprehension on the student’s part. Additionally, instructors will give instructions in class or give information on specific dates for exams, quizzes and homework which is sometimes given orally or written on the board. Asking questions during class and following transitions between activities can be another challenge for second language learners who struggle with language in a math class. Another aspect of language present in a math course is in the textbook. Students will often be assigned chapters or sections to read in order to prepare for an upcoming class. The textbook is written using the disciplinary language of math, which makes it difficult to follow especially because definitions of math words are often defined with other math jargon. With such rich language and classroom interaction, it is imperative to not overlook the subject of math when discussing English for Academic Purposes.

Study on definition of word “cruise”, which is important for future research, considering from background of its birth together with present situation

Study on definition of word “cruise”, which is important for future research, considering from background of its birth together with present situation

Відображення єврейських хронотопів: роман А. Аппельфельда «Могутні води» і робота А. Д. Гордона «Людина і Природа»

The paper "Reflection of Jewish Chronotops: the Novel by A. Appelfeld "Mighty Waters" versus the work "The Man and the Nature" by A.D. Gordon" compares between the novel and the philosophic work. In "The Man and the Nature", the popular ideological leader of Zionist movement Aharon David Gordon (1863–1922) developed his mystical concept of "natural man" and tried to inspire the Zionist pioneers in the Land of Israel to devote their lives and work to farming as a way to connect with nature and to communicate with God through intuition and silence. The novel "Mighty Waters" was published in 2011 by the well-known Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) three decades after Israeli literature switched to postzionism. This article argues that the main character of the novel, a Jewish farmer who lives near the Carpathian Mountains, is a personification of Gordon's ideal and views Appelfeld's novel as a parable that proclaims the traditional Jewish modus vivendi and the importance of Zionism in the 21th century.Both texts are common in ideas and word definitions. Gordon tells about the Juwish loner while the novel shows to readers that such untypical for Juwish mentality existence beyond society is doomed. The researcher proves, that the author of the "Mighty Water' wants the Juwes to be turned back to modus vivendi that have been developed during the Juwish exile. The Juwes for hundred years have been the nation of intellectuals and merchants and still remain them, that have shaped their life style of citizens. So the idea to recalibrate it in separated from the Book and book culture peasant leaving is stillborn.The paper is supplied by the author’s translation of the first paragraph A. Gordon’s work "The Man and the Nature''. Thus, the national chronotop is an important instrument of literary studies, that is able to connect texts of different types and times in order to build a single holistic ideal.

رۆلێ په‌یڤێن كلیلى(Keywords) د به‌رجه‌سته‌كرنا ده‌لاله‌تا تێكستێ ئه‌ده‌بى یێ ئافراندیدا (پڕاكتیزه‌كرن لسه‌ر كۆمه‌له‌ چیڕۆكا"شه‌ڤا فریشته‌ ره‌ڤین"یا ئیسماعیل هاجانى)

The purpose of this study is to show how creative literary texts (key words) can be used for the purpose of inculcating the hidden meaning of the creative literary text. By analyzing the key words within the creative texts, the researcher can find hidden meaning in it, Which is characterized by this subject (key words) to reflect the hidden significance of the texts, but we have not yet find any research or academic message in the Kurdish literary criticism on this subject. In this study, we have presented the subject (key words) in terms of content and context as well, and we have explained the concept and definition of (words) we also explained the dimensions and importance of key words in theory. On the practical side, we analyzed (key words) within the texts of three stories, and it became clear to us that each text contains (key word) and include in their fold the subtle connotation for those stories and it became clear to us that (key words) of those texts were mainly distributed throughout the fabric of the text of those texts.

Computer-Based Teaching of Lexis in Primary School

The article deals with the use of modern computer technologies in the lexical skills formation in primary school students at the foreign language lessons. The work describes the author’s computer-based methods, which include a developed website with a various list of exercises and tasks at the stage of using vocabulary (variant-situational stage): exercises for controlling of vocabulary (correlate words with translation, connect pairs of synonyms or antonyms, and find a definition of a foreign word), thematic crosswords and interactive testing. Also within the framework of the website, we developed a descriptive electronic dictionary with hyperlinks to the context. Various children’s fairy tales were offered as contexts in English. In order to confirm the research hypothesis, an experiment was conducted. The results of the experiment allowed the authors to justify the use of modern ICT at foreign language lessons in order to increase the level of lexical skills of primary school students.

Murder: A Critical Analysis of the Common Law Definition

English Criminal law provides a range of offences that recognizes the sanctity of life by prohibiting the unlawful killing of a human being. The generic term “homicide” covers offences such as murder, manslaughter and causing death by dangerous driving. What all homicides have in common is the unlawful killing of a human being; what distinguishes them is either the state of mind of the defendant who has caused death, or the defense available. This article shall critically analyze the common law definition of murder in various criminal homicide cases to find out if any concrete common law definition could be established. It will be seen throughout this article that though criminal law throws up many exceptions to this general proportion, there is no fixed common law definition of murder. This article shall prompt the question whether the legislature should rethink the forms of criminal homicide and the judiciary reconsiders some of the definitions of the mens rea words produced in recent years.

Международно-правовой режим искусственных островов и иных стационарных конструкций в море

Introduction. The 1969 Report of the UN General Secretary noted that 125 fixed platforms were used in offshore areas for the purpose of oil industry. “The International Law of the Sea” (Vol. 1 and 2) published in UK in 1994 provides that “approximately 6000 fixed platforms have been installed in offshore areas throughout the world”. In 2014 only in the area of the OSPAR Convention, 1992, more than 1300 offshore constructions were installed. As for January 2018, the majority of these constructions are in the North Sea (184), the Gulf of Mexico (175), the Persian Gulf (159), and offshore of Far East Asia (152) and Southeast Asia (152). In the other regions this number varies from 3 to 88, while the Canadian Arctic has the smallest number of offshore constructions limited to just 1 object. Accordingly, the issues of interpretation of UNCLOS articles on legal regime of artificial islands and other fixed structures at sea are becoming more pressing. Moreover, the interstate relations, regarding construction of artificial islands in offshore areas, need relevant legal framework to be in place, taking into account the constant growth of economic and military “competition” among countries, as well as the development of science and technologies applicable to offshore construction. Materials and methods . This paper dwells upon the international treaties and other legal instruments, which rely upon the terms “artificial islands”, “installations”, “structures” at sea for regulating relations among States and between States and other international law subjects. The materials for this paper are also commentaries of the UNCLOS, interpretation of the relevant articles of 1958 Geneva maritime conventions, applicable resolutions of the International Maritime Organization, and also definitions of the conventional terms suggested by scholars. The methodological basis of the research consists of general scientific and specific methods, including comparative method. Research results . Most specialists in the law of the sea who research similar topics dwell upon their personal definitions of the conventional terms mentioned above. Such specialists correctly note that the absence of such definitions in UNCLOS makes it difficult to interpret and apply relevant articles in a proper way. Meanwhile, the necessity for such interpretation and application is of practical value because such terms of UNCLOS relate firstly to relevant rights and jurisdiction of coastal and other States in maritime areas where artificial islands, installations and structures are used, including the territorial sea, the EEZ and the continental shelf. Nevertheless lots of different definitions of such terms suggested by scholars make it even more difficult to interpret and apply the rules of UNCLOS on artificial islands, installations and structures, including such sensitive areas of interstate relations as safety at sea and protection of the marine environment. Discussion and conclusions . The authors of this paper do not support any classification or definition of “artificial islands”, “installations” or “structures” or any other definition of other specific words used in UNCLOS for such terms. Instead the authors bring arguments to legal delineation of artificial islands from any other permanent structure at sea independently of the fact which particular word is used in UNCLOS for describing such a structure in a relevant article (“installations”, “structures”, “devices”, “equipment” etc.). It is argued in this paper that such legal delineation is caused by a difficult and comprehensive balance of interests achieved during the III Conference on the Law of the Sea, and such interests relating to economic, military, environmental interests of States, coastal and non-coastal, firstly in the EEZ and on the continental shelf.

Word intuition agreement among Chinese speakers: a Mechanical Turk-based study

Word intuition is speakers’ intuitive knowledge on wordhood. Collective word intuition is the word intuition of the whole language community. Given this definition, the optimal word segmentation result in Chinese NLP should reflect collective word intuition. It is also believed that an ideal definition of Chinese word should accord with the collective word intuition of Chinese speakers. To test the validity and feasibility of modeling collective word intuition, it is important to know to what extent Chinese speakers agree with each other on what is a word. In this study, we measured word intuition agreement using Mechanical Turk-based Chinese word segmentation experiment. Three metrics were used: proportionate agreement, Cohen’s kappa, and Fleiss’ kappa. The results show that Chinese speakers agree with each other almost perfectly on what is a word. And we found no evidence to support an effect of semantic transparency on word intuition agreement. Such high word intuition agreement among Chinese speakers supports the psychological reality of Chinese word and also suggests that that it is quite feasible to formulate a definition of Chinese word by modeling the collective word intuition of Chinese speakers.

Age-related Changes in Word Defining Abilities in Concrete and Abstract Nouns with Normal Elderly

본 연구는 일반노년층을 대상으로 단어정의하기 과제를 실시하여, 노화에 따른 구체명사와 추상명사의 단어정의하기 능력 변화를 살펴보았다. 대상자는 55~64세, 65~74세, 75~84세, 85세 이상의 네 개 연령집단으로 분류된 총 382명의 일반노인들이었다. 5개의 구체명사와 5개의 추상명사로 구성된 단어정의하기 과제를 실시하여, 단어정의 점수, 주요의미/부수의미의 개수 및 비율, 오류유형을 분석하였다. 연구 결과 구체명사의 정의점수, 주요의미/부수의미의 개수 및 비율은 네 집단 간 차이가 모두 유의하였다. 추상명사의 경우, 높은 연령집단인 75~84세와 85세 이상 집단 간 차이를 제외한 모든 연령집단 간 차이가 통계적으로 유의하였다. 오류의 산출빈도는 85세 이상 집단에서 급격한 증가를 보였으며 오류유형의 산출비율은 55~64세, 65~74세 집단에서 개인적 경험 오류, 75~84세 집단에서 목표어휘 반복 오류, 85세 이상 집단에서 무반응 오류가 가장 높았다. 이러한 결과는 구체명사와 추상명사 모두 노화가 진행됨에 따라 의미망 내에서의 어휘 및 의미자질들의 확산적 활성화가 제한되어 주요의미와 부수의미의 개수가 감소하고 이로 인해 단어에 대한 정의 내용 또한 빈약해진다는 것을 의미한다. 또한 연령이 높은 집단일수록 의미망 내에서 목표어휘와 가까운 거리에 있는 주요의미의 비율이 증가하였다. 본 연구는 다양한 연령대의 노인집단을 대상으로 단어정의하기 능력을 살펴보아, 노화에 따른 언어능력 특성을 제시하였다는 점에 의의가 있다.The purpose of this study was to explore the characteristics of defining concrete and abstract nouns for the elderly. A total of 382 elderly participated in this study and they were classified into four age groups (i.e., over 55 to under 64, over 65 to under 74, over 75 to under 84, and over 85 year-old group). They performed the word definition task, composed of five concrete and five abstract nouns. The total scores and numbers and ratio of core/supplementary meanings were compared among four elderly groups. The frequency and ratio of error types were also examined. The results showed that all four groups had statistically significant differences in total scores, numbers and ratio of core and supplementary meaning of concrete noun definition task. In addition, abstract noun definition performances revealed group differences except the two groups (over 75 to under 84 and over 85-year-old group). The oldest group showed a sharp increase in error production. The highest ratio of error types were personal experience in over 55 to under 64-year-old group, and over 65 to under 74 year-old groups; and for the target word repetition in over 75 to under 84 year-old group; and no response in over 85 year-old group. In conclusion, both concrete and abstract word defining abilities had age-related deterioration. This decline results from impairment in spreading semantic knowledge within semantic network, which is vulnerable to aging. Characteristics of word definition for elderly can provide basic information to understand various neurolinguistic disorders associated with age.

Units of translation adopted in Persian term-formation

Two trends exist for Persian term-formation. In the first method known as calquing, words are rendered morpheme by morpheme. Thus, the unit of translation (UT) is a morpheme. In the second method known as conceptual equivalent-finding, the definitions of words are considered and the UT is a word. The present study was designed to identify which of the two UTs was more favored in Persian term-formation. To this end, 40 English prefixes were studied in 2354 English words together with their Persian equivalents approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) as the official term-formation agency in Iran. It was noticed that calquing was more frequent, i.e. morphemes were more frequently considered as UTs. Moreover, strategies of translating prefixes were introduced and examined in both methods. In conceptual method, prefixes were ignored and not translated morpheme by morpheme. However, in calquing, English prefixes were translated into Persian prefixes or lexemes.

Definitions of Some Sensitive Medical Words in Dictionaries of English

Definitions of Some Sensitive Medical Words in Dictionaries of English

Administration Methods of Word Definition Task for Normal Elderly

Administration Methods of Word Definition Task for Normal Elderly

Vagueness and Aggregation in Multiple Sender Channels

Vagueness is an extremely common feature of natural language, but does it actually play a positive, efficiency enhancing, role in communication? Adopting a probabilistic interpretation of vague terms, we propose that vagueness might act as a source of randomness when deciding what to assert. In this context we investigate the efficacy of multiple sender channels in which senders choose assertions stochastically according to vague definitions of the relevant words, and a receiver then aggregates the different signals. These vague channels are then compared with Boolean channels in which assertions are selected deterministically based on classical (crisp) definitions. We show that given a sufficient number of senders, a linear stochastic channel outperforms Boolean channels when performance is measured by the expected squared error between the actual value described by the senders and the receiver’s estimate of it based on the signals they receive. The number of senders required for vague channels to be at least as accurate as Boolean channels is shown to be a decreasing function of the size of the language i.e. the number of description labels available to the senders. Vague channels are then shown to be robust to transmission error provided the error rate is not too large. In addition, we investigate the behaviour of both Boolean and vague channels for a parametrised family of distributions on the input values. Finally, we consider optimal vague channels assuming a fixed number of senders and show that, provided there are more than two senders, a vague channel can be found that outperforms the optimal Boolean channel. In this context, we show that for channels with relatively low numbers of senders S-curve production functions are optimal.

Shifting of “expert” and “novice” roles between/within two languages: Language socialization, identity, and epistemics in family dinnertime conversations

AbstractThis article explores the construction and shifting of “expert” and “novice” roles between and within two languages (Japanese and English). Taking a language socialization perspective while drawing upon insights from conversation analysis on epistemics in interaction, it analyzes seven hours of audio recordings of dinnertime talk in a Japanese-speaking immigrant family with a university-aged adult daughter living together in Australia. The analysis identifies several key communicative practices, such as word definitions and repair, which participants deploy in displaying epistemic stances that constitute the self and family members as possessing relatively more or less knowledge and expertise (epistemic status) with respect to these two languages. The findings reveal the dynamics of language socialization in a bilingual/immigrant setting in which the relative roles of expert and novice emerge, shift, and are negotiated in interaction. In conclusion, the findings are discussed in relation to language expertise, power and hierarchy, agency and bidirectional language socialization.