Index Of Languages Research Articles

Metonymic Brigid Brophy: failures In Transit

ABSTRACT Brigid Brophy is not easily situated in postwar British literary history. The work of this public intellectual of the 1960s does not fit comfortably on either side of divisions between ‘experimental’ or ‘realist’ postwar literary fiction that have been used by some scholars to understand both the aesthetic distinctions between texts and how postwar writers understood themselves. Recent years have seen a wellspring of new interest in Brophy’s novel In Transit (1969), in which the author’s efforts to realise in literary form ‘ambivalence’ as ‘essence’ reveal a new way of understanding the development of the British novel of the postwar period. In this novel preoccupied with the textual and graphic nature of literary character – and indeed all discursive positions – metonymy is both a common trope and a structuring principle. Employed as a heuristic, metonymy reveals that narratorial decisions about pronouns have ontological effects. Brophy’s metonymic principle illuminates a shift in understandings of the relationships between indexical language and the materiality of its referent in postwar British literature, including the perhaps unexpected aesthetic and political affordances of ostensible ‘failures’ of integration, determinacy, and memory.

Ngugi and Mazrui in Digitalization Policy

Digitalisation of public service provision has been and remains a pillar of the Kenyan government’s approach to development. Kenya has explicitly linked digitalisation to its ambitions for development – an approach that is echoed in the political campaign materials produced and distributed by all major political parties in the country. Yet the country’s digital policy continues to be developed primarily in English, as the countries continues to build and also receive digital technologies built elsewhere, primarily in English. This paper argues that in the context of postcolonial societies like Kenya and Tanzania, this has a distinct impact of deepening power differentials within the society that are rooted in ‘coloniality’ as defined by Grosfoguel. The use of colonial languages in the creation and dissemination of digital policy is an obstacle to decolonising the internet in postcolonial societies.Building from Ngugi’s work on indigenous languages in public life, the paper argues that to properly map the terrain of decolonial praxis in technology, we must engage with the power differentials embedded in how languages are perceived and experienced in postcolonial societies. Languages, the paper argues, are not only a key component of colonial violence as Ngugi argued, but they also perpetuate the power disparities of incomplete decolonisation, including for example the perception of those who speak indigenous languages as their index language as being lower class and therefore more abstract to power. The paper then summarises a project developed by the author to create a lexicon for digital rights in Kiswahili as an example of some of the decolonial praxis that is necessary to addressing these power disparities in countries like Kenya and Tanzania. In this way, the paper not only proposes a theoretical argument for decolonisation but also offers a practical example of what meaningful decolonial praxis of digital technologies can look like. Overall, the paper argues that decolonisation of digital technologies is imperative to addressing the coloniality embedded in digitalisation policy in Kenya.

Literary Warrant dan User Warrant untuk Merancang Konstruksi Prototipe Tesaurus

A thesaurus limits its scope to specific subjects or related to certain subjects and is a means of standardizing terms created as a tool in the process of organizing information. A principle-compliant index language is required when organizing information. A user warrant and literary warrant approach can be used to construct a thesaurus with a particular subject. User warrant means the collection of terms based on users’ frequency of use of a term, while the literary warrant is carried out with an accurate survey of a word, phrase, or term contained in literature. The results of the analysis in the form of a thesaurus prototype can be used as a tool for document indexing and information retrieval. This becomes a tool for classifying and finding collections in the library as collections with various subjects grow. A thesaurus is a form of means of supervising controlled terms post-adjustment or post-coordination. In constructing the thesaurus, an arrangement of entries is formed to show equivalence relationships, hierarchical and associative. The results of the subject thesaurus construction can be used as a basis for further thesaurus development, which is more complete for the indexing process.

Some bilingual couples speak lingua francas: personal pronoun indexicality in the light of positioning theory

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the communication of three bilingual couples, each speaking a different lingua franca (LF). Positioning theory offers a methodological framework to explain language choice in interactive positioning within personal contacts. A comparative view of the couples’ storylines benefits from the differences between them. The analysis herein shows how the speakers are positioned in the subtle interplay of self-positioning and the positioning of the partner. The couples draw on their language resources and specific linguistic features which index language ideologies. Reasons for the choice and maintenance of a LF in the couple are informed by attitudinal factors which contribute to the discursive production of interpersonal positions. Findings outline multidimensional perspectives on LF couples by showing how different positions are created and how positioning is connected to the negotiation of a common language. This paper advances the debate on LF communication in intercultural relationships by demonstrating that positioning helps to investigate the ways in which diverse language resources intertwine to create different linguistic constellations and eventually improve our understanding of the performance in a third language.

Systems of Classification and Categorization as Revealing Tensions Within Knowledge

Knowl­edge organization systems are likely to reveal disagreements and controversies in the construction of knowl­edge. This article looks at the social tensions reflected in the use of terms such as "race" or typical expressions like "woke" or "cancel culture". It compares the use of these terms in the French-speaking world between Wiki-pedia and the Rameau subject headings. It first examines the operational functioning of Rameau's indexing language for libraries, then that of the French Wikipedia's categorization system, and finally explores their differences and similarities in the use of the terms presented.

Revisiting Robert Pagès: Documents and Culture

An introduction to the life and work of Robert Pagès (1919–2007), French social psychology researcher and theorist of documentation. From 1946 to 1948 Pagès was a student in the program in documentation directed by Suzanne Briet that later became the Institut National des Techniques de Documentation (INTD). A 1947 thesis was published in 1948 as an article entitled “Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel” (Documentary transformations and cultural context). It received little attention until recently. The article, now reprinted and translated, examines the rise of new media and how they have largely displaced lived experience and bookish knowledge in a society that has become increasingly planned and coordinated. A notable feature of this article is his distinction between unique, particular objects, which he called “autodocuments,” and specimens that are representative of whatever group they are specimens of. A second thesis of classification was published in 1955 as Problèmes de classification culturelle et documentaire. Pagès founded and directed a laboratory for social psychology. He developed an indexing language (named CODOC) with interesting syntactic and notational characteristics for materials collected in the laboratory. Pagès writings and leftwing political activism are briefly noted.

Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge

Over the past decades, focus has been on developing methods that allow tapping into aspects of cognition that are not directly observable. This includes linguistic knowledge and skills which develop largely without awareness and may therefore be difficult or impossible to articulate. Building on the relation between language cognition and the nervous system, we examine whether Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a cardiovascular measure that indexes Autonomic Nervous System activity, can be used to assess implicit language knowledge. We test the potential of HRV to detect whether individuals possess grammatical knowledge and explore how sensitive the cardiovascular response is.41 healthy, British English-speaking adults listened to 40 English speech samples, half of which contained grammatical errors. Thought Technology's 5-channel ProComp 5 encoder tracked heart rate via a BVP-Flex/Pro sensor attached to the middle finger of the non-dominant hand, at a rate of 2048 samples per second. A Generalised Additive Mixed Effects Model confirmed a cardiovascular response to grammatical violations: there is a statistically significant reduction in HRV as indexed by NN50 in response to stimuli that contain errors. The cardiovascular response reflects the extent of the linguistic violations, and NN50 decreases linearly with an increase in the number of errors, up to a certain level, after which HRV remains constant.This observation brings into focus a new dimension of the intricate relationship between physiology and cognition. Being able to use a highly portable and non-intrusive technique with language stimuli also creates exciting possibilities for assessing the language knowledge of individuals from a range of populations in their natural environment and in authentic communicative situations.

Absolution: Divine and Human

This article is a contribution to an ecumenical theology of the Word, examining how divine absolution is realized in concrete human experience. It addresses both the scriptural and sacramental mediation of divine absolution, emphasizing the commonality of both resting on the power of God's word spoken in human concrete actuality. The philosophical literature concludes that human beings, in order for forgiveness to be real to them, need to hear and know that they are forgiven. In other words, for forgiveness to be complete, the wrongdoer requires an act of “absolution” (even in a secular sense), which may be verbal or gestural. This observation then drives our theological inquiry. How does divine Providence condescend in the economy of Revelation to make divine absolution available in the concrete details of human life, since it must be available to us, if it is to be received and accepted and be real to us? This investigation assumes that understanding forgiveness in human experience better serves to enrich theological reflection on divine forgiveness. The fact that forgiveness in human experience is primarily a dialogical affair, worked out in a “dialogical narrative” (Griswold) that parallels the dialogical nature of salvation, is evidenced in Scripture. In scriptural mediation, divine absolution becomes a living reality through a “hermeneutic of identity” by which the hearer of the Word appropriates the indexical language of a text, and, for example, self-inserts into a ready-made dialogue. In this way, God's absolution is effectively made a present reality. Finally, the article argues that Christ's words should be considered among his salvific acts, including his absolutions of individual sinners. The immanent expression of divine absolution, therefore, comes through the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in historical concreteness, providing one avenue of response to the timeless theological question Cur Deus homo?

On the word problem for weakly compressible monoids

We study the language-theoretic properties of the word problem, in the sense of Duncan & Gilman, of weakly compressible monoids, as defined by Adian & Oganesian. We show that if C is a reversal-closed super-, as defined by Greibach, then M has word problem in C if and only if its compressed left monoid L(M) has word problem in C. As a special case, we may take C to be the class of context-free or indexed languages. As a corollary, we find many new classes of monoids with decidable rational subset membership problem. Finally, we show that it is decidable whether a one-relation monoid containing a non-trivial idempotent has context-free word problem. This answers a generalization of a question first asked by Zhang in 1992.

How Racism Leads to Epistemicide or Murder of Knowledge? A Case Study of Tangible and Cultural Heritage of the Nile Valley in Sudan

In this paper, we introduce epistemicide as an emerging theoretical framework for critical library and information studies alongside the well-known ones extensively covered in the literature of our field. Definitions of epistemicide and an aggregate of related concepts drawn from recent research are reviewed and examined through the lens of the ethics of information and knowl­edge organization (KO). A detailed historical background about Nubia and Kushite kingdoms along the river Nile is chosen as a case study. It focuses on the early conditions that led to racism, marginalization, and discrimination of the civilization of the Nile Valley in Sudan and its tangible cultural heritage. Facts are drawn from a vast literature review, documentary films, checked in knowl­edge organization systems (KOS, indexing languages and classifications) and museums. The paper concludes with an appeal to information scholars and professionals to address epistemicide as an ethical and crucial issue for information professionals responsible for the credibility and accuracy of the information they handle in every field of knowl­edge.

Metalinguistic Monstrosity and Displaced Communications

David Kaplan's semantic theory for indexicals yields a distinct logic for indexical languages that generates contingent a priori truths. These special truths of the logic of indexicals include examples like "I am here now", an utterance of which expresses a contingent state of affairs and yet which, according to Kaplan, cannot fail to be true when it is uttered. This claim is threatened by the problem of displaced communications: answerphone messages, for example, seem to facilitate true instances of the negation of this supposed logical truth as they allow the agent of the message to no longer be at the location of the message when it is encountered by an audience. Many such displaced communications can be identified in everyday natural language uses of indexicals. Recent discussion has suggested that Kaplan's error is to be overly restrictive in the possible contexts of utterance his semantic theory recognizes, as he fails to acknowledge the possibility of utterances that occur at a context distinct from that in which they are constructed. I reject this diagnosis and defend Kaplan's semantic theory. Displaced communications, I argue, are best understood as resulting from a pragmatically introduced metalinguistic context-shifting operation and hence do not demand revision of Kaplan's semantic theory. I provide an analysis of the pragmatic process underlying this operation and make the case for its merits over those of rival accounts of displaced communications.

Linguistics Database

ProQuest's Linguistics Database (LDB), a collection of over 260 journals in linguistics, serves as the full-text complement to the key indexing database Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA). Together, these two resources constitute ProQuest's Linguistics Collection, a suite of products “covering all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.”Since most of these journals have short backfiles, going back 20 years or less, it is suggested to pair LDB with another product that offers deeper chronological coverage (such as JSTOR).

Variation in Spanish /s/: Overview and New Perspectives

The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision, and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors, and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing the sibilants’ geo-linguistic features has received much attention from scholars, resulting in sibilants being one of the most studied variables in Spanish phonetics. In this article, we provide a concise approach that offers the reader an updated sociolinguistic view of the modern cross-dialectal realizations of /s/. It is essential to study sibilant development to describe Spanish dialects, the differences between Transatlantic and Castilian varieties, and the speech features found in Spanish speaking communities in the Americas. Examining sibilance from different approaches with a representative variety of Spanish dialects as examples advances the importance of sociolinguistic phenomena to index language changes.

Indexing languages for digital humanities

Indexing languages for digital humanities

Event Related Potential Signal Capture Can Be Enhanced through Dynamic SNR-Weighted Channel Pooling.

Background: Electroencephalography (EEG)-derived event-related potentials (ERPs) provide information about a variety of brain functions, but often suffer from low inherent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To overcome the low SNR, techniques that pool data from multiple sensors have been applied. However, such pooling implicitly assumes that the SNR among sensors is equal, which is not necessarily valid. This study presents a novel approach for signal pooling that accounts for differential SNR among sensors. Methods: The new technique involves pooling together signals from multiple EEG channels weighted by their respective SNRs relative to the overall SNR of all channels. We compared ERP responses derived using this new technique with those derived using both individual channels as well as traditional averaged-based channel pooling. The outcomes were evaluated in both simulated data and real data from healthy adult volunteers (n = 37). Responses corresponding to a range of ERP components indexing auditory sensation (N100), attention (P300) and language processing (N400) were evaluated. Results: Simulation results demonstrate that, compared to traditional pooling technique, the new SNR-weighted channel pooling technique improved ERP response effect size in cases of unequal noise among channels (p’s < 0.001). Similarly, results from real-world experimental data showed that the new technique resulted in significantly greater ERP effect sizes compared to either traditional pooling or individual channel approach for all three ERP components (p’s < 0.001). Furthermore, the new channel pooling approach also resulted in larger ERP signal amplitudes as well as greater differences among experimental conditions (p’s < 0.001). Conclusion: These results suggest that the new technique improves the capture of ERP responses relative to traditional techniques. As such, SNR-weighted channel pooling can further enable widespread applications of ERP techniques, especially those that require rapid assessments in noisy out-of-laboratory environments.

Effect of Democracy and Land Language on Human Development Index

The factors that affect Human Development Index have been investigated extensively in previous researches. These studies consider education as an important factor and focus on the quality of education such as teachers&amp;rsquo; skills, educational facilities and student conditions. Democracy has also been established as an important factor in HDI. In this study, we examined two variables, the democracy index and the land language index as fundamental variables of the Human Development Index (HDI). The land language index is a new variable created to signify the importance of the medium of instruction in higher education institutes, particularly in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. We performed a multiple-correlation analysis with the available data to find the correlation of these two indices on HDI. We found that together, the democracy index and land language index had a strong correlation to HDI. The results of this study can have a significant impact on social scientists and policymakers and should be considered for further research.

ANALISIS USABILITY SITUS WEB VOCABULARY CONTROL NUSANTARA MENGGUNAKAN METODE WEBUSE

Vocabulary Control Nusantara Website is a voluntary movement that focused work on developing the index language automation system web-based, which is everyone can contribute to the development of site content. From the beginning of the movement until now Vocabulary Control Nusantara Website still in the development stage and no assessment evaluates the level of usability of the website. Therefore, usability analysis is needed to measure the level usability of the Vocabulary Control Nusantara Website and also to predict the potential benefits which will be obtained later when this movement complete. This study does a usability analysis on the homepage and backend page of the Vocabulary Control Nusantara Website by using the WEBUSE method to measure how good the level usability website. The analysis results show on the homepage page get the level usability “Good”, although there are two categories on the backend page which gets the level usability “Moderate”. Besides, there are some unsolved problems that are recommended to further testing and implementation redesign websites.

Examining dialogic opportunities in teacher-student interaction: An ethnographic observation of the language classroom

Abstract This paper challenges prevailing paradigms in the contemporary research regarding teacher discourse as a mostly diagnostic endeavor correcting students' errors and indexing language learning to first language (L1) norms. In contrast, this paper conceptualizes dialogic opportunities in the classroom space that facilitates the co-construction of knowledge between teacher and student. This paper presents data taken from an ethnographic study of an EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom involving an L1 English-speaking teacher and his L1 Japanese-speaking students. This paper analyzes observational and interview data to illustrate how the teacher takes advantage of opportunities in dialogic interaction, particularly with respect to centering dialogue around students' knowledge and perspectives, eliciting and validating their contributions, and establishing a meaningful rapport. A discussion of these findings aims to provide researchers guidance for developing a theoretical framework for positive dialogic opportunities, while calling on practitioners to adopt a more holistic approach to instructional practices.

Indexing Subject Ontogeny

This paper discusses about origin and evolution of subjects—the subject ontogeny, and the changes in it that gets reflected in indexing language. We argue subjects originate from ideas that are products of intellectual efforts. The function of indexing language is to make access to knowledge of subjects easier through scientific mechanisms (schemes) and methodologies that give users much freedom and convenience in their search for information. We undertake a formal discussion on the theory of subject ontogeny linked to intellectual history of idea generation and how changes in its ontogeny are captured and retained through indexing languages.

Subject-access metadata on ETD supplied by authors: A case study about keywords, titles and abstracts in a Brazilian academic repository

The keyword lists are rich in terminology and as such, they are also characterized by great semantic ambiguity, which presents the problems of synonymy and polysemy typical of uncontrolled language, which is both an advantage and a drawback. However, assigning keywords has gained particular importance in the current open scientific communication ecosystem in digital environments, mainly in the academic dissertation and repositories of theses.This article reports a study on the organization of knowledge, using subject-access metadata of master's theses from the digital repository of the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, applying analytical techniques to a big amount of data. The objective was to analyze the number of keywords in each record and keywords repeated in the title and abstracts of the dissertations in Portuguese and English. The analysis of the 48,501 metadata records of master's theses submitted to the repository, between 2001 and 2019, presents a total of 223,867 keywords in Portuguese, with an average of 4.62 keywords per record, and a total of 216,521 keywords in English, equivalent to an average of 4.59 per record. Although, the attribution of keywords in Portuguese and English by the author is an economic way to expand access to the content of theses and dissertations in institutional repositories, it is necessary to define rules for authors about the choice of keywords and the preparation of the abstract, as well as its translation into English. The task of controlling keywords requires a partnership between authors and librarians who can enrich the quality of indexing languages.