Lexical Properties Research Articles

Analysing Deception in Witness Memory through Linguistic Styles in Spontaneous Language

The act of lying and its detection have raised interest in many fields, from the legal system to our daily lives. Considering that testimonies are commonly based on linguistic parameters, natural language processing, a research field concerned with programming computers to process and analyse natural language texts or speech, is a topic of interest on this front. This study aimed to examine the linguistic styles of simulated deception and true testimonies collected with the aim of studying witness memory. Study participants were asked to act as a witness of a crime by retelling the story they had just read. Cognitive interviewing techniques were used to collect testimony under two conditions: truth and simulated deception. A sample of 48 participants volunteered to participate in the study. Analyses of the linguistic indicators and content were carried out. Specifically, we performed a comparison of testimonies of the same participant by condition to analyse the variation between (i) lexical and (ii) linguistic features and (iii) content and speech characteristics (disfluencies) depending on the narrative condition. Concerning lexical properties, adjectives were the most-varying grammatical category between truthful and deceptive testimonies. Furthermore, in the linguistic analysis, we observed that truthful testimonies were generally longer than deceptive ones in terms of the number of words and sentences and also characterised by more articulated sentence structures, and these differences were also statistically significant. Regarding the analysis of the content, cognitive criteria (details) and admitting lack of memory were more present in truthful statements. By providing an objective measure, these results are of interest in developing NLP tools for assessing the credibility of testimonies in forensics.

How the characteristics of words in child-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech to influence children’s productive vocabularies

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children’s vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens from adult speech directed at children (from caregiver–child transcriptions) to the same quantity directed at adults. We show that child-directed speech contains greater numbers of words that are lower in phonemic length, higher in frequency, lower in phonotactic probability, and higher in neighborhood density than adult-directed speech; furthermore, child-directed speech explains over twice the variability of children’s productive noun vocabularies than adult-directed speech. These findings indicate that children’s word production is clearly influenced by the characteristics of the words spoken directly to them and that researchers need to be wary of using adult-directed language corpora when calculating lexical measures.

Deriving lexical statistics for psycholinguistic research on isiXhosa

Psycholinguistic research on isiXhosa and related Bantu languages is scarce. For research on lexical processing in particular, a prerequisite is data on lexical properties that impact word recognition, such as word frequency and neighbourhood density. This paper describes the derivation of these and related lexical statistics from a newly created 4.8-million-word isiXhosa corpus. It then reviews the potential applications of such a lexical database for research on language acquisition, language development, and language processing. The paper closes with recommendations for further work in this domain.

Polish Comparative Adjectives and Adverbs

The paper investigates the morphosyntax of Polish synthetic comparative adjectives and adverbs. It is argued that we can predict the distribution of different classes of adjectival roots and suffixes if we adopt the idea that both types of morphemes lexicalize syntactic constituents, the central tenet of Nanosyntax. The paper makes a case for two central claims. One is that the syn-sem properties of adjectives can be described with a finegrained syntactic sequence proposed for Slovak in Vanden Wyngaerd et al. (2020). The other one is that the lexical properties of Polish gradable adverbs follow from the syntactic representation of the adverb as properly containing the syntactic representation of the adjective.

ХЕДЖИНГ КАК ОБЩЕСЕМИОТИЧЕСКОЕ ЯВЛЕНИЕ

Alexander Barulin’s most notable results have to do with the communicative aspects of the human protolanguage. This kind of research differs from the conventional reconstructions of proto-languages because it cannot rely on material traces left by ancient humans, and the linguistic structures properly speaking are hardly available. Thus, linguists cannot put forward a description of phonetic and grammatical systems of the languages of the first humans. Instead, conjectures are usually made based on the etological-communicative studies of animal behaviour. Following Alexander Barulin, animal communication displays certain signs analogous to ‘hedges’, whose main function consists in accommodating information conveyed as a sort of ‘goods’ in communicative ‘exchange’. Hedges of “possibly” vs. “probably” types belong to linguistic techniques extensively used both in West-European and in Russian discourses. Lexical properties of such hedges interact with grammatical and pragmatical categories of tense, mood, and negation.

Некоторые проблемы терминологической неопределенности в правовом регулировании страхования на случай пожара

The formulation of the problem is due to the priority of the state’s tasks in the field of fire safety and the need in this regard for the development of legal regulation of fire insurance, which in turn focuses on the development of regulatory legal acts regulating public relations in the field of fire insurance. Law-making activity is inextricably linked with the application of legal and technical rules, with the development of precise terms. There are some problems of terminological uncertainty in the legal regulation of fire insurance. The purpose of work is to analyze the legal and technical characteristics of the term “fire insurance” used in legal acts, to determine the degree of its compliance with the requirements of terminological accuracy. The research is aimed at solving problems related to terminological uncertainty in the legal regulation of fire insurance. The subject of the study includes regulatory legal acts, court decisions, insurance rules, scientific texts using terms related to fire insurance in their content. The methodological basis is made up of general scientific methods. The method of dialectics, system-structural, formal-legal, comparative and other methods are used. The general theoretical views on concepts, terms, definitions are investigated. The lexical properties of the accuracy of the term “fire insurance” are considered. The discrepancy between the semantic content of the term “fire insurance” and its purpose has been revealed. The use of the term “fire insurance” is proposed and an attempt is made to define the concept corresponding to this term by the author. The conclusion is made about the possibility of using the term “fire insurance” in legal texts.

A methodology for model clone detection using statistics of design metrics

Model clone detection has predominantly gained momentum in the field of software development process and model driven engineering. Reuse and mutations of the existing models will increase the complexity of managing the software’s organisation’s internal repositories. Detecting semantic and structural similarities among the models finds various uses like fault prediction, estimation of maintenance and refactoring. Literature in the domain witnesses very few works focussing on model clone detection. This work proposes a model clone detection technique by leveraging the statistical and lexical properties of the UML diagrams. The primary contribution of the work is the construction of Similarity Measure (SM) by analysing the design metrics from different perspectives namelyi)measuring the statistical variability between the models and ii) estimating the lexical similarity among design metrics. The results of the model indicates that the proposed method was able to detect the semantically similar model clones of the banking use case. Also, the method is very robust and computationally inexpensive, so that it could find its applicability in all fields where model driven engineering is used.

Translation of Morphologically Complex Terms: The Case of untenantability

The article addresses problems of understanding and translation of morphologically complex terms, often characterized in terms of idiosyncratic and unpredictable semantics. This is due not only to the complex structural relations within such words, but also the individual history and idiosyncratic lexical properties of their components. The law term untenantability belongs to a motley group of semantically complex derivatives in -able. It is argued that untenantability bears no semantic relation to the modal adjective able. The morphological structure of untenantability and its syntactic properties highlight its meaning of ‘unfit for tenancy’. This meaning is corroborated, and its specifics clarified, by the use of untenantability in legal contexts.

“It’s way too intriguing!” The fuzzy status of emergent intensifiers: A Functional Discourse Grammar account

AbstractThis article seeks to explore the function and linguistic status of non-central members of the class of “degree words,” focusing on specific cases in English and Spanish, namely, the English adverbswayandproper, the Spanish trendy phrase “Adjno, lo siguiente” and the adverbmuy.These intensifiers will be explored in the light of the architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), specifically in relation to the levels of linguistic representation that are distinguished in this theory, mainly the Interpersonal (or pragmatic) Level (IL) and the Representational (or semantic) Level (RL) and in terms of FDG’s distinction between lexical and grammatical units. It will be shown that the various functional properties of these expressions can be easily accommodated in this theory. As intensifying devices, these expressions are represented as units specifying the Lexical Property at the RL. In addition, some of these expressions can be used with an emphatic function, pertaining to the set of pragmatic distinctions that are represented at the IL.

Lexico-semantic peculiarities of a virtual language personality

The article is devoted to the study of the current topic of modern linguistics –virtual linguistic personality, aimed at describing the linguistic features of personality and lexico-semantic specifics of virtual linguistic personality in Internet communication.The study began with a review of works on the concept of linguistic personality, studies of domestic and foreign scientists and focused on its features and properties. Given the relevance of studying Internet communication from a linguistic point of view, the existing definitions of the concept of "virtual personality" were analyzed. The article considers a virtual linguistic personality with its special meanings, a changed attitude to time and space, a high degree of involvement in virtual activities, specific goals and communicative strategies, etc. It was considered as a new type of linguistic personality, characterized by lexico-semantic discursiveness. The goal of the – study is to consider the totality of the lexical and semantic properties of a virtual linguistic personality. The object of the study – is a virtual linguistic personality as a participant in a virtual discourse on the Internet. The research method and research materials include comments on the publication "Florida lawmakers strip Disney of special tax status" posted on the BBCNews Instagram page. In the course of the study, the efficiency of the following lexical units was determined in the comments of respondents to the post: slang vocabulary; idioms; colloquial and ordinary language; paremia; occasionalisms; terms and quotations. As a result, a quantitative and comparative analysis of these language units was carried out and conclusions were drawn. Key words: virtual linguistic personality, virtual space, Internet communication, lexico-semantic analysis, comments.   &nbsp

Communication partner strategies in negotiation for meaning in interactions involving aided communication

ABSTRACT Co-constructing meaning is acommon feature of all conversationsbut may have amore specific role in interactions where one of the participants uses aided communication. The present study applies qualitative descriptive analysis supported by quantitative measures in exploring meaning-negotiation strategies of speaking communication partners in task-related aided conversations. The study focuses on identifying and exploring strategies that the communication partners utilise when attempting to interpret the meaning and resolve potential ambiguities of aided utterances in the context of event descriptions. The participants of the study were three aided communicators (age 8 to 11 years), who used graphic communication systems as their main means of communication, and familiar adult communication partners. The results demonstrate that the communication partners employed several strategies in attempting to comprehend, interpret and co-construct the meaning of aided utterances at various phases of interaction. The primary strategy involved clarifying the lexical properties of the aided constructions, reflecting the multidimensional and polysemous nature of graphic communication systems. Structural and referential complexities affected how the elements produced were understood as part of the ongoing context. The study highlights the participants´ shared responsibility in developing and utilising effective meaning-negotiation and repair strategies to support successful communication.

The effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on incomplete tonal neutralization.

We investigated the effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on the acoustic realization of two neutralizing falling tones in Dalian Mandarin Chinese. Monosyllabic morphemes containing the target tones (Tone 1 and Tone 4) were produced by 60 native speakers from two generations (middle-aged vs. young). The duration of tone-bearing syllable rhymes, as well as the F0 curves and velocity profiles of the lexical tones were quantitatively analyzed via linear mixed-effects modeling and functional data analysis. Results showed no durational difference between T1 and T4. However, the F0 contours of the two falling tones were incompletely neutralized for both young and middle-aged speakers. Lexical frequency showed little effect on the incomplete tonal neutralization; there were significant differences in the turning point of the two falling tones in syllables with both high and low lexical frequency. However, homophone neighborhood density showed an effect on the incomplete neutralization between the two falling tones, reflected in significant differences in the slope and turning point of the F0 velocity profiles between the two tones carried by syllables with low density but not with high density. Moreover, homophone neighborhood density also affected the duration, the turning point of F0 curves, and velocity profiles of the T1- and T4-syllables. These results are discussed with consideration of social phonetic variations, the theory of Hypo- and Hyper-articulation (H&H), the Neighborhood Activation Model, and communication-based information-theoretic accounts. Collectively, these results broaden our understanding of the effects that lexical properties have on the acoustic details of lexical tone production and tonal sound changes.

The V-Neg-V complex predicates, two types of negation, and grammaticalization in Japanese

In this article, I argue for the existence of a complex predicate containing negation in the form of [[V-Neg]-V]. If Neg is a functional category, this will falsify the prohibition against syntactic verb incorporation that picks up a functional head to reach a lexical head, or the Principle of Lexical Integrity, which in effect prohibits merger of any functional category within a complex word or any application of syntactic operation (movement or deletion) that targets part of a complex word. It will be argued, however, that these complex predicates are not considered bona-fide counterexamples to these hypotheses or principles of word formation because negation in Japanese can be a lexical adjective. Moreover, in cases where negation behaves as functional category, I argue that the lexical verb that selects the negation is grammaticalized to an aspectual functional category. The assumptions regarding the syntactic ambiguity of negation and grammaticalization will help us understand how complex predicates expand their host class and ultimately transform into a full-fledged construction. This will also shed light on the issue of whether and how some complex predicates can retain their lexical properties after the entire construction has been grammaticalized. The bidirectional change toward grammaticalization and lexicalization can be understood from a ‘constructionalization’ viewpoint.

How to obtain a copula from a process verb: Insights from the event structure of posture verbs

Posture verbs (sit, stand, lie) seem to constitute an aspectual class of their own, as they do not readily fit the description of either states or activities. The contradicting results obtained from applying various diagnostic tests, which group posture verbs with either states or activities depending on the test’s sensitivity, have led to the creation of additional classes of states, namely, interval states (Dowty 1979) and Davidsonian states (Maienborn 2005), to account for the particular nature of the events denoted by these verbs. These approaches leave unanswered why equivalent verbs such as sentar ‘sit’ in Spanish, a Romance language, but also setzen ‘sit’ in German, a Germanic language, cannot denote stationary motion by themselves. This paper proposes that it is not necessary to introduce additional types of events to account for the lexical aspectual properties of posture verbs in English. Instead, it is their basic aspectual make-up, that is, their having a single process subevent (procP) (Ramchand 2008), and the labile nature of English that can explain their recalcitrant properties and the cross-linguistic issues they raise, while at the same time offering a seamless explanation for the propensity of posture verbs to become copulas cross-linguistically.

Sobre a construção 'ir a' + Infinitivo em Português Europeu

Differently from e.g. Spanish, European Portuguese has two analogous but quite independent constructions incorporating the verb ir (to go) that point to the future realisation of an eventuality. In both cases, ir may retain most of its lexical properties or it may arise in constructions that have undergone a lower or greater degree of grammaticalization. The main goal of this paper is to compare the behaviour of these two structures, namely ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, which consistently conveys a temporal relation of posteriority, and its ir (‘go’) a + Infinitive counterpart, which seems to carry aspectual information of prospectivity. As a temporal operator, ir (‘go’) + Infinitive combines with all kinds of eventualities and occurs with different prospective temporal adverbials; on the other hand, as an aspectual operator establishing a preliminary state, ir (‘go’) a + Infinitive is completely incompatible with statives, is anomalous with long distance future temporal adverbials and demands the presence of another event in order to ensure the requirement of “present relevance”.

Using natural language processing to automatically classify written self-reported narratives by patients with migraine or cluster headache

BackgroundHeadache medicine is largely based on detailed history taking by physicians analysing patients’ descriptions of headache. Natural language processing (NLP) structures and processes linguistic data into quantifiable units. In this study, we apply these digital techniques on self-reported narratives by patients with headache disorders to research the potential of analysing and automatically classifying human-generated text and information extraction in clinical contexts.MethodsA prospective cross-sectional clinical trial collected self-reported narratives on headache disorders from participants with either migraine or cluster headache. NLP was applied for the analysis of lexical, semantic and thematic properties of the texts. Machine learning (ML) algorithms were applied to classify the descriptions of headache attacks from individual participants into their correct group (migraine versus cluster headache).ResultsOne-hundred and twenty-one patients (81 participants with migraine and 40 participants with cluster headache) provided a self-reported narrative on their headache disorder. Lexical analysis of this text corpus resulted in several specific key words per diagnostic group (cluster headache: Dutch (nl): “oog” | English (en): “eye”, nl: “pijn” | en: “pain” and nl: “terug” | en: “back/to come back”; migraine: nl: “hoofdpijn” | en: “headache”, nl: “stress” | en: “stress” and nl: “misselijkheid” | en: “nausea”). Thematic and sentiment analysis of text revealed largely negative sentiment in texts by both patients with migraine and cluster headache. Logistic regression and support vector machine algorithms with different feature groups performed best for the classification of attack descriptions (with F1-scores for detecting cluster headache varying between 0.82 and 0.86) compared to naïve Bayes classifiers.ConclusionsDifferences in lexical choices between patients with migraine and cluster headache are detected with NLP and are congruent with domain expert knowledge of the disorders. Our research shows that ML algorithms have potential to classify patients’ self-reported narratives of migraine or cluster headache with good performance. NLP shows its capability to discern relevant linguistic aspects in narratives from patients with different headache disorders and demonstrates relevance in clinical information extraction. The potential benefits on the classification performance of larger datasets and neural NLP methods can be investigated in the future.Trial registrationThis study was registered with clinicaltrials.gov with ID NCT05377437.

The Impact of Grammar on the Construal of Discourse Alternatives in German and English

This paper investigates additive links to discourse alternatives in picture comparison dialogues produced by adult native speakers of English and German. Additive relations are established across turns when participants are confirming the presence of matching objects on both pictures (A: “I have X”. B: “I also have X”). Speakers thereby describe their own picture and construe the interlocutor (or rather: the interlocutor’s picture) as a discourse alternative. Whereas the vast majority of the confirming descriptions in German contain an additive particle (auch), less than half of the corresponding confirmations in the English data do (“also”, “too”, etc.). Numbers differ even more drastically in polarity questions (“Do you (also) have X?”) that are equally typical for the dialogue task. Such frequency differences are at odds with recent accounts treating additive particles as being quasi obligatory when their presupposition is satisfied. An in-depth contrastive analysis of lexical, syntactic and information structural properties reveals that the default mapping of information units on syntactic functions (subject) in conjunction with the SVO word order of English leads to a structure in which subject, initial (topic) position and the particle’s associated constituent coincide. This would make the relation to its discourse alternative more prominent than warranted by the dialogue task and speakers of English leave this relation unmarked or resort to alternative constructions instead. The V2 syntax of German, on the other hand, allows for a dissociation of discourse topic and associated constituent. It allows the speaker to topicalize reference to the matching object, to highlight the confirmation of its presence on the speaker’s picture, and to relate the changing information to its discourse alternative in a non-contrastive way.

The Syntactic and Discourse Properties of Second Person Singular Forms of Address inPaisaSpanish

AbstractIn this study we examine the linguistic complexity and lexical properties of the discourse associated with second person singular forms of address (2PS) in the Spanish spoken in Medellín, Colombia. This Spanish variety exhibits the use of a tripartite system of 2PS, in whichvoseo,tuteo, andustedeoare used, and sometimes interchanged, according to sociopragmatic factors. By means of a discourse completion task (DCT), 672 responses were collected from 38 informants. Data was parsed and tagged using UDPipe to train an annotation Spanish model. Syntactic and lexical properties were extracted automatically in Python. Results revealed the syntactic properties and the existence of collocations significantly associated with each 2PS. The discourse associated withvosdiffers in terms of the predicate structure, DCT response length, pragmatic function, and use of colloquial speech markers. Results of this work shed further light on the variable use of 2PS in this intriguing Spanish dialect.

Graph transformer for cross-lingual plagiarism detection

<span lang="EN-US">The existence of vast amounts of multilingual textual data on the internet leads to cross-lingual plagiarism which becomes a serious issue in different fields such as education, science, and literature. Current cross-lingual plagiarism detection approaches usually employ syntactic and lexical properties, external machine translation systems, or finding similarities within a multilingual set of text documents. However, most of these methods are conceived for literal plagiarism such as copy and paste, and their performance is diminished when handling complex cases of plagiarism including paraphrasing. In this paper, we propose a new graph-based approach that represents text passages in different languages using knowledge graphs. We put forward a new graph structure modeling method based on the Transformer architecture that employs precise relation encoding and delivers a more efficient way for global graph representation. The mappings between the graphs are learned both in semi-supervised and unsupervised training mechanisms. The results of our experiments in Arabic–English, French–English, and Spanish–English plagiarism detection show that our graph transformer method surpasses the state-of-the-art cross-lingual plagiarism detection approaches with and without paraphrasing cases, and provides further insights on the use of knowledge graphs on a language-independent model.</span>

SCOPE: The South Carolina psycholinguistic metabase.

The number of databases that provide various measurements of lexical properties for psycholinguistic research has increased rapidly in recent years. The proliferation of lexical variables, and the multitude of associated databases, makes the choice, comparison, and standardization of these variables in psycholinguistic research increasingly difficult. Here, we introduce The South Carolina Psycholinguistic Metabase (SCOPE), which is a metabase (or a meta-database) containing an extensive, curated collection of psycholinguistic variable values from major databases. The metabase currently contains 245 lexical variables, organized into seven major categories: General (e.g., frequency), Orthographic (e.g., bigram frequency), Phonological (e.g., phonological uniqueness point), Orth-Phon (e.g., consistency), Semantic (e.g., concreteness), Morphological (e.g., number of morphemes), and Response variables (e.g., lexical decision latency). We hope that SCOPE will become a valuable resource for researchers in psycholinguistics and affiliated disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience of language, computational linguistics, and communication disorders. The availability and ease of use of the metabase with comprehensive set of variables can facilitate the understanding of the unique contribution of each of the variables to word processing, and that of interactions between variables, as well as new insights and development of improved models and theories of word processing. It can also help standardize practice in psycholinguistics. We demonstrate use of the metabase by measuring relationships between variables in multiple waysand testing their individual contribution towards a number of dependent measures, in the most comprehensive analysis of this kind to date. The metabase is freely available at go.sc.edu/scope.