Lexical Ambiguity Research Articles

Translatorial voice through modal stance: A corpus-based study of modality shifts in Chinese-to-English translation of research article abstracts

Research on translation shifts, especially divergence in modality, that occur to English translations of Chinese research article abstracts is rare. The article aims to explore the linguistic changes in modality use, a linguistic device for expressing authors’ evaluative judgement, in the abstracts of Chinese research articles and their English translations. By adopting a three-step analytical coding procedure from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study analyses the cross-linguistic modality shifts in modal value, type and orientation in English translations of Chinese research article abstracts (RAAs) from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. It is found that 1) quantitatively, a considerable number of modality shifts have been observed in translated RAAs on value, followed by type and orientation, in which the distributions present a stronger and more objectivised stance resulting from a loss of modality on low-value implicit proposition; 2) qualitatively, Chinese-specific lexical, syntactic, and textual factors are associated with modality shifts, including lexical ambiguity, “run-on” sentences, and implicit information structure. The findings provide evidence of how original authorial modal stance is influenced by translators and integrated into academic discourse. The study also paves the way for future investigations of possible variables (e.g., the speech-written mode) in modality shifts.

Word meaning is both categorical and continuous.

Most words have multiple meanings, but there are foundationally distinct accounts for this. Categorical theories posit that humans maintain discrete entries for distinct word meanings, as in a dictionary. Continuous ones eschew discrete sense representations, arguing that word meanings are best characterized as trajectories through a continuous state space. Both kinds of approach face empirical challenges. In response, we introduce two novel "hybrid" theories, which reconcile discrete sense representations with a continuous view of word meaning. We then report on two behavioral experiments, pairing them with an analytical approach relying on neural language models to test these competing accounts. The experimental results are best explained by one of the novel hybrid accounts, which posits both distinct sense representations and a continuous meaning space. This hybrid account accommodates both the dynamic, context-dependent nature of word meaning, as well as the behavioral evidence for category-like structure in human lexical knowledge. We further develop and quantify the predictive power of several computational implementations of this hybrid account. These results raise questions for future research on lexical ambiguity, such as why and when discrete sense representations might emerge in the first place. They also connect to more general questions about the role of discrete versus gradient representations in cognitive processes and suggest that at least in this case, the best explanation is one that integrates both factors: Word meaning is both categorical and continuous. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Implementing the map task in applied linguistics research: What, how, and why

The “map task” is an interactive, goal-driven, real-time conversational task used to elicit semi-controlled natural language production data. We present recommendations for creating a bespoke map task that can be tailored to individual research projects and administered online using a chat interface. As proof of concept, we present a case study exemplifying our own implementation, designed to elicit informal written communication in either English or Spanish. Eight experimental maps were created, manipulating linguistic factors including lexical frequency, cognate status, and semantic ambiguity. Participants (N = 40) completed the task in pairs and took turns (i) providing directions based on a pre-traced route, or (ii) following directions to draw the route on an empty map. Computational measures of image similarity (e.g., structural similarity index) between pre-traced and participant-traced routes showed that participants completed the task successfully; we describe use of this method for measuring task success quantitatively. We also provide a comparative analysis of the language elicited in English and Spanish. The most frequently used words were roughly equivalent in both languages, encompassing primarily commands and items on the maps. Similarly, abbreviations, swear words, and slang present in both datasets indicated that the task successfully elicited informal communication. Interestingly, Spanish turns were longer and displayed a wider range of morphologically complex forms. English, conversely, displayed strategies mostly absent in Spanish, such as the use of cardinal directions as a communicative strategy. We consider the online map task as a promising method for examining a variety of phenomena in applied linguistics research.

Semantic Perspective on Lexical Ambiguity in English

This research focuses on the phenomenon of lexical ambiguity in English, examining its definition, types, and intricacies from a semantic standpoint. Lexical ambiguity holds substantial importance for scholars and, particularly, for translators who must navigate its complexities during the translation process. The diverse perspectives of different scholars are acknowledged, as they contribute to the multifaceted understanding of this linguistic phenomenon.The study begins by defining lexical ambiguity and categorizing its various types, illustrating how a single word or phrase can give rise to multiple interpretations. The significance of lexical ambiguity is underscored by exploring its implications in communication and the potential challenges it poses for language comprehension.The research methodology employed in this study is expounded upon, elucidating its influence on the organization and presentation of research findings. A clear distinction is drawn between research methodology and research methods, emphasizing their complementary roles in effectively structuring academic papers, theses, and dissertations. By embracing robust research methodologies, scholars can enhance the quality and reliability of their work.Moreover, the research investigates different research approaches and their relevance to the core methodology. These approaches provide a systematic framework for examining and analyzing lexical ambiguity, enabling researchers to draw meaningful conclusions and contribute to the existing body of knowledge.This research aims to provide valuable insights into the multifaceted nature of lexical ambiguity in English. By exploring its definition, types, and intricacies, and by examining various scholarly viewpoints, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Additionally, it highlights the significance of research methodology and research approaches, aiding researchers in effectively addressing lexical ambiguity and making meaningful contributions to the field.

어휘적 중의성 해소과정에서 나타나는 초등학생과 대학생의 읽기 특성: 안구운동 추적연구

어휘적 중의성 해소과정에서 나타나는 초등학생과 대학생의 읽기 특성: 안구운동 추적연구

The Analysis of Ambiguity in Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “Five Feet Apart”

This study deals with the analysis of Ambiguity in Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “ Five Feet Apart” The objectives of this research are to find out the lexical and syntactical ambiguities found in Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “Five Feet Apart”, to find out the most dominant causal factors of ambiguities appeared in Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “Five Feet Apart”, and to describe how the lexical and syntactic ambiguities appeared in Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “Five Feet Apart”. Descriptive qualitative method was used in this study. The data of this study were taken from Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “Five Feet Apart”. There are seven types of lexical ambiguity appeared in the novel. They are Polysemy, Homonymy, Synonym, Hyponymy, Antonym, Redundancy, and Part of speech. Meanwhile there are six types of syntactical ambiguity. They are Personal pronoun, Adjective, Noun, Preposition, Verb and Adverb. Redundancy ambiguity is the most dominant lexical ambiguity and personal pronoun is the most dominant syntactical ambiguity used in this novel. There are two ways how the writer used lexical ambiguity in Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “Five Feet Apart”. First, the writer repeated the words to insist the readers that everything is the same. Second, the writer made sure the readers what the writer described. In syntactical ambiguity, the researcher found that in Rachel Lippincott’s Novel “Five Feet Apart”, the writer often missed the subject pronoun in the novel

Comparing the Performance of Google Translate and SYSTRAN on Arabic Lexical Ambiguity

Machine translation systems face many challenges when dealing with Arabic lexical ambiguity, which affects the quality and accuracy of their translations. This study investigates how two popular MT systems, Google Translate and SYSTRAN, handle three problematic linguistic features of the Arabic language: homonyms, heteronyms, and polysemes. A test suite was designed to include sentences that contain these features in different contexts and domains. The translations produced by the two MT systems were evaluated by four independent evaluators for intelligibility and accuracy using a four-point scale. Results showed that both MT systems struggled with the three chosen linguistic features, with average scores below 40%. Google Translate outperformed SYSTRAN in almost every sentence in the test suite. Both systems scored better in intelligibility than in accuracy. Heteronyms proved to be the most challenging for both MT systems due to the unique design of Arabic discretization, which is not yet recognized by translation systems. This study contributes to the field of machine translation by providing a comprehensive analysis of Arabic lexical ambiguity and its impact on MT quality, as well as suggesting possible ways to improve MT systems for Arabic-English translation.

Ambiguity in Chinese College Students’ L2 Tertiary-Level Writing: A Thematic Analysis

The current study investigated ambiguity errors that characterise the L2 tertiary-level writing of Chinese college students. Data were drawn from 56 authentic English writings from 11 students of different disciplines across 10 different Chinese institutions. A thematic analysis was conducted to examine the ambiguity error patterns at the lexical and syntactic levels. Lexical ambiguities were found to include Chinglish, ambiguous references, and ambiguous abstractions, and syntactic ambiguities were found to consist of misplaced and dangling modifiers. It was also found that lexical ambiguity far exceeded syntactic ambiguity. The results demonstrate Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ limited L2 linguistic competence and struggle with accurate L2 production. This study aims to draw attention to the unpreparedness of Chinese EFL students for tertiary-level L2 writing and to the need for linguistic support in their written L2 output. Given the increasing demand for academic writing, writing with clarity is of great significance for EFL students. Whereas ambiguity resolution in L2 input has received much scholarly attention, limited empirical research has been conducted on ambiguity errors that characterise EFL students’ L2 written output. Therefore, the current study aims to fill this gap by examining the ambiguity patterns that characterise the L2 writing of Chinese college students, thus informing future teaching.

Temporal constraints on (non-)epistemic readings: Further evidence from Korean

This paper investigates how modal readings are affected by temporal interpretation in natural language sentences, by taking a close look at the Korean swu- construction which can receive multiple modal readings. Previous work on the swu- construction has attributed its modal readings to syntactic structures (e.g. Ha 2007; Chung 2007; Kim 2010) or lexical ambiguity (e.g. Mun 2016; Lee 2017). I discuss empirical and theoretical problems with these approaches, and provide a non-ambiguity analysis, following Kratzer’s (1981, 1991) view that distinct modal readings are contextually determined. I argue that the modal readings are determined by modal-temporal interactions at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Utilizing Condoravdi’s (2002) notions of Temporal Perspective (TP) and Temporal Orientation (TO), I provide a novel empirical finding that the non-epistemic readings are available only with future TOs while the epistemic modal reading is not temporally constrained in the swu- construction. I develop a compositional analysis of the temporal interpretation, and account for the (un)availability of (non-)epistemic readings in terms of the temporal constraints on the modal bases, along the same line as Condoravdi (2002) and Rullmann & Matthewson (2018). The analysis proposed in this paper is shown to be empirically and theoretically superior to the previous analyses of the swu- construction, and provides further crosslinguistic support for the theory of modal-temporal interactions proposed by Rullmann & Matthewson (2018).

Evaluating Lexical Ambiguities About Brazilian Students in The Fifth Year of Elementary School Towards Statistical Graphs and Tables

When words that are part of everyday language are used differently from the way they are used in formal classroom language, it is said to present lexical ambiguity. Thus, this study aims to understand possible lexical ambiguities regarding knowledge about representations of statistical graphs and tables of 74 students in the fifth year of elementary school (approximately 10 years) of a municipal school in Barueri, São Paulo, Brazil. This research was exploratory, with a qualitative and quantitative approach, in which data were collected through a questionnaire available on Google Forms. An Automated Content Analysis was carried out using the IraMuTeQ software (R Interface for Multidimensional Text and Questionnaire Analysis) performing multivariate statistical analyzes (Descending Hierarchical Classification - DHC and Factorial Analysis by Correspondence – CFA). The results show the predominance of words and verbal expressions of the common language related mainly to the intuitive meaning and its use in everyday life. It was also noticed indications of the formal construction of tables and graphs associated with guidelines carried out in the classroom.

Lexeme connexion measure of cohesive lexical ambiguity revealing factor: a robust approach for word sense disambiguation of Bengali text

Lexeme connexion measure of cohesive lexical ambiguity revealing factor: a robust approach for word sense disambiguation of Bengali text

Diversity of narrative context disrupts the early stage of learning the meanings of novel words

High quality lexical representations develop through repeated exposures to words in different contexts. This preregistered experiment investigated how diversity of narrative context affects the earliest stages of word learning via reading. Adults (N = 100) learned invented meanings for eight pseudowords, which each occurred in five written paragraphs either within a single coherent narrative context or five different narrative contexts. The words’ semantic features were controlled across conditions to avoid influences from polysemy (lexical ambiguity). Posttests included graded measures of word-form recall (spelling accuracy) and recognition (multiple choice), and word-meaning recall (number of semantic features). Diversity of narrative context did not affect word-form learning, but more semantic features were correctly recalled for words trained in a single context. These findings indicate that learning the meanings of novel words is initially boosted by anchoring them to a single coherent narrative discourse.

Copredication, Davidson and Logical Form

This paper offers a novel account of polysemous copredicative sentences. The solution, which it is argued enjoys a number of advantages over the alternative accounts currently on the market, is inspired by Donald Davidson’s first attempt to deal with ambiguity. Specifically, the account involves mapping ambiguities in the object language (in this case polysemous singular terms) onto ambiguities in the metalanguage. If this account is coherent and superior to its rivals, it tells us something important about logical form: the value of logical form does not lie in the elimination all lexical ambiguity.

Lexical ambiguity resolution & bilingual language experience: Evidence from Albanian-Greek bilingual children of immigrant families

The present study aims at exploring lexical ambiguity resolution in bilingual children employing homonym meaning activation. Specifically, we are examining the processing of Greek homonyms in relation to the language input, verbal ability and cognitive capacity of 10–12 years old bilingual children raised in an immigrant context, in which Albanian is their heritage language and Greek is the majority language. We systematically assessed sentence context effects in homonym meaning activation using a cross-modal priming task. Primes were sentences biasing towards the dominant, subordinate, or neither meaning of a sentence-final homonym while visual targets were related to either meaning of the homonym. To measure the bilingual language experience and address variability issues in the dataset, we administered a background questionnaire that focused on acquisition history, bi-literacy practices and self-reported competence in each language along with a standardized test for verbal ability in Greek. The study's findings show that frequency and context are significant parameters in the examination of ambiguity resolution and underline the contribution of verbal working memory to lexical processing. Additionally, our results highlight the role of the bilingual language experience in the function of the mental lexicon and the potential benefits of bi-literacy development.

Assessing lexical ambiguity of simplified Chinese characters: Plurality and relatedness of character meanings.

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive among Chinese characters as many of them are polysemantic, with one orthographic form carrying unrelated meanings, related meanings, or sometimes both unrelated and related meanings. A large-scale database with ambiguity measures for simplified Chinese characters has yet to be developed, which could greatly benefit psycholinguistic research on the Chinese language or cross-language comparisons. This article reports two sets of ratings by native speakers, the perceived number of meanings (pNoM) for 4,363 characters and the perceived relatedness of meanings (pRoM) for a subset of 1,053 characters. These rating-based ambiguity measures capture the representational nuance about a character's meanings stored in average native speakers' mental lexicon, which tends to be obscured by dictionary- and corpus-based ambiguity measures. Consequently, they each account for a reliable portion of variance in the efficiency of character processing, above and beyond the effects of character frequency, age of acquisition, and other types of ambiguity measures. Theoretical and empirical implications with regard to the plurality and the relatedness of character meanings, the two focal aspects of debate on lexical ambiguity, are discussed.

Machine Translation on Dravidian Languages

The Dravidian languages are spoken all over the world. Despite their distinctiveness, Dravidian languages haven’t gotten much attention because there aren’t enough resources to handle tasks like translation that require language technology. Since Dravidian languages are largely spoken in southern India, machine translation is necessary. For those who speak these regional languages, this would improve information creation and access. It can be challenging to translate between languages, particularly that of Dravidian, because of lexical divergence, ambiguity, and other, lexical, syntactic and semantic issues. This research looks into a number of machine translation models for different languages, conducts a thorough literature review on the various machine translation techniques from earlier studies, and analyses their methodology. The major objective of this research is to evaluate the viability and effectiveness of a machine translation process for Dravidian languages.

Assessing Iraqi University Students’ Ability to Interpret Lexical Ambiguity

This research is devoted to study the lexical ambiguity. By definition, ambiguity is a linguistic phenomenon in which a given text has more than one meaning or interpretation. Thus, this study aims for:
 
 Assessing Iraqi university students’ ability to interpret lexical ambiguity at colleges of education/ English department in three universities Tikrit, Kirkuk, and Al-Anbar
 Finding out the comparison of the students’ ability to interpret lexical ambiguity at both the recognition and production levels at the three universities: Tikrit, Kirkuk, and Al-Anbar.
 
 The participants were three hundred and seventy-five undergraduate students in the fourth year of study in the Departments of English, Colleges of Education, University of Tikrit, University of Kirkuk, and University of Al-Anbar. The research was conducted during the first semester of the academic year 2021-2022. The data was gathered by using a diagnostic test to assess students’ ability to interpret lexical ambiguity. The results of the study revealed that there are statistically significant differences among Iraqi university students’ ability to interpret lexical ambiguity.

Resolving Lexical Verb Ambiguity in Yoruba through Semantic Web Annotations

Lexical verb ambiguity refers to the potential for multiple interpretations of units of speech in languages that renders it difficult or impossible to understand a lexical item without additional information. The goal of semantic web research is to allow the vast range of web-accessible information and services to be more effectively exploited by both humans and automated tools. Technological advancement has given rise to scholars developing automated translation systems from English to the Yorùbá language. However, the problem arises that these tools are not coping easily with semantic nuances found especially in Yorùbá verbs. To explore this problem, a number of Yorùbá lexical ambiguous verbs which may pose serious challenges to the existing machine translation tools were generated and analyzed. To facilitate a solution to the problem, the identified verbs are annotated following the Qualia Structure (QS) of the Generative Lexicon. Protégé 4.5 is employed as the editing tool to map the semantic interpretations of the QS to the semantic web. With the aid of the unique formal specification implemented for each of the lexically ambiguous verbs, the existing automated translation system can now utilize the Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) of the Unified Resource Locator (URL) found in the model developed to link the loop and thereby alleviate the problem of ambiguity for the automated translation system. This paper, therefore recommends that more efforts be geared towards ontological annotation in order to foster more automated tools that will be built for the Yorùbá language.

Lexical Ambiguity in Political Rhetoric: Why Morality Doesn't Fit in a Bag of Words

AbstractHow do politicians use moral appeals in their rhetoric? Previous research suggests that morality plays an important role in elite communication and that the endorsement of specific values varies systematically across the ideological spectrum. We argue that this view is incomplete since it only focuses on whether certain values are endorsed and not how they are contextualized by politicians. Using a novel sentence embedding approach, we show that although liberal and conservative politicians use the same moral terms, they attach diverging meanings to these values. Accordingly, the politics of morality is not about the promotion of specific moral values per se but, rather, a competition over their respective meaning. Our results highlight that simple dictionary-based methods to measure moral rhetoric may be insufficient since they fail to account for the semantic contexts in which words are used and, therefore, risk overlooking important features of political communication and party competition.

The Effects of Word Processing, Recognition and Context in Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

This article aims to discuss the effects of word processing, recognition and context in lexical ambiguity resolution, trying to find an answer to how the reader-listener determines the contextually appropriate meaning of a word. Ambiguity resolution is analyzed and explored in two perspectives: the context in which the lexical items appear and the activation of all the meanings that an ambiguous word has. There is no clear-cut answer to lexical ambiguity resolution and there is a great debate about the role of the context in the activation of the meaning of ambiguous words.