Lexical Data Research Articles

Pun processing from a psycholinguistic perspective: Introducing the Model of Psycholinguistic Hemispheric Incongruity Laughter (M.PHIL)

ABSTRACTAmbiguity processing was examined using a stimulus set consisting of homograph puns in which semantic salience, as measured by semantic co-occurrence, was manipulated. Two lexical decision tasks using puns as primes for ambiguous targets revealed that high co-occurrence meanings were processed faster than low co-occurrence meanings. A divided visual field protocol revealed involvement of both hemispheres, but with the pattern of priming from the right visual field more similar to that of the centrally presented condition than the left visual field pattern. In contrast to the lexical decision data that favoured high co-occurrence targets, data from a forced-choice relatedness task showed an advantage for the low co-occurrence associates. Results from this series of experiments are consistent with Bryden's [(1982). Laterality: Functional asymmetry in the intact brain. New York, NY: Academic Press] proposal that there are several different laterality effects when processing language and emotionally valent stimuli. The results are used to frame a working model of pun processing based on the Graded Salience Hypothesis [Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 8(3), 183–206].

Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World BAR International Series S2580 TOM HOOGERVORST pp., 157 including Linguistic Appendix, 60 b&w figures, 8 tables British Archaeological Reports, 122 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 7BP, 2013, £31 (sbk), ISBN 978-140

Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World BAR International Series S2580 TOM HOOGERVORST pp., 157 including Linguistic Appendix, 60 b&w figures, 8 tables British Archaeological Reports, 122 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 7BP, 2013, £31 (sbk), ISBN 978-140

Linguistic Features of the Earliest Copy of the Didactic Gospel by Constantine the Presbyteros: From the East Slavic Manuscript to the South Slavic Archetype

The article is dedicated to the linguistic features of the Didactic Gospel by Constantine the Presbyteros, who is also known as Constantine of Preslav or Constantine of Bregalnica. The earliest witness of the original text, which Constantine wrote down at the end of the 9th century in the First Bulgarian Kingdom, is the Old East Slavonic manuscript dating to the end of the 11th–beginning of the 12th centuries (this manuscript is sometimes dated to a later period). The manuscript is remarkable for its graphic and orthographic features characteristic only for the earliest Church Slavonic sources of East Slavonic provenance; these sources are dated to the 11th century or to the beginning of the 12th century. At the same time, the manuscript attests phonetic innovations caused by the initial stage of the loss of the jer-vowels, such as “new jat’” and the change of e into o. On the basis of the earliest manifestations of the change of e into o in the written sources, the author argues that this phonetic change took place in the southern part of the East Slavonic area and first of all in the prefinal syllable before the final jer in the absolute weak position. Phonetic and orthographic peculiarities of the East Slavonic witness of the Didactic Gospel testify to the southwest Balkan provenance of its South Slavonic protograph, which must have been a Cyrillic one. (On the basis of lexical data, the southwest Balkan origin of Constantine’s archetype was argued by the author elsewhere.) From the point of view of verbal morphology, the earliest witness of the Didactic Gospel seems to be one of the most archaic East Slavonic manuscripts, which is particularly testified by a number of forms of the root aorist. Special attention is devoted to the construction called “relativer Attributivkonnex” (Ch. Koch). It was discovered by scholars in a number of South Slavonic sources or in East Slavonic manuscripts which go back to the South Slavonic tradition, and is to be observed in the Didactic Gospel, too.

Semantics of Falling: A Cross-Linguistic Approach

The paper gives a cross-linguistic insight into the domain of falling predicates. The research employs the methods based on combinability restrictions of lexical items in different languages developed by the Moscow Lexical Typology Group. The basic typologically relevant parameters that constitute the domain are the object of a falling event, the source of the motion and the goal of the motion. The lexical data presented in the study was collected from more than 20 languages.

A tool for automatic transcription of intonation: Eti_ToBI a ToBI transcriber for Spanish and Catalan

This article presents Eti_ToBI, a tool that automatically labels intonational events in Spanish and Catalan utterances according to the Sp_ToBI and Cat_ToBI current conventions. The system consists in a Praat script that assigns ToBI labels to pitch movements basing the assignments on lexical data introduced by the researcher and the acoustical data that it extracts from sound files. The first part of the article explains the methodological approach that has made possible the automatisation and describes the algorithms used by the script to perform the analysis. The second part presents the reliability results for both Catalan and Spanish corpora showing a level of agreement equal to the one shown by human transcribers among them in the literature.

A Bayesian Phylogenetic Classification of Tupí-Guaraní

This paper presents an internal classification of Tupí-Guaraní based on lexical data from 30 Tupí-Guaraní languages and 2 non-Tupí-Guaraní Tupian languages, Awetí and Mawé. A Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using a generalized binary cognate gain and loss model was carried out on a character table based on the binary coding of cognate sets, which were formed with attention to semantic shift. The classification shows greater internal structure than previous ones, but is congruent with them in several ways.

ISO standard modeling of a large Arabic dictionary

AbstractIn this paper, we address the problem of the large coverage dictionaries of Arabic language usable both for direct human reading and automatic Natural Language Processing. For these purposes, we propose a normalized and implemented modeling, based on Lexical Markup Framework (LMF-ISO 24613) and Data Registry Category (DCR-ISO 12620), which allows a stable and well-defined interoperability of lexical resources through a unification of the linguistic concepts. Starting from the features of the Arabic language, and due to the fact that a large range of details and refinements need to be described specifically for Arabic, we follow a finely structuring strategy. Besides its richness in morphology, syntax and semantics knowledge, our model includes all the Arabic morphological patterns to generate the inflected forms from a given lemma and highlights the syntactic–semantic relations. In addition, an appropriate codification has been designed for the management of all types of relationships among lexical entries and their related knowledge. According to this model, a dictionary named El Madar1has been built and is now publicly available on line. The data are managed by a user-friendly Web-based lexicographical workstation. This work has not been done in isolation, but is the result of a collaborative effort by an international team mainly within the ISO network during a period of eight years.

A mysterious animal called Al-Wark

The paper examines the mysterious term al-wark, which–according to Maḥmūd of Kāşğarī (11th century AD)–denotes a small animal similar to a badger (Turk. borsmuk) in the Xakani language. This animal was treated as a symbol of fatness. It is suggested that the term in question was borrowed from a Tocharian source. The Indo-European term *wṛḱos (m.) ‘badger’ (originally ‘fat animal’, cf. Hittite warkant- adj. ‘fat’) is reconstructed on the basis of Indic, Greek and Anatolian lexical data.

Spatial Structure of Evolutionary Models of Dialects in Contact.

Phylogenetic models, originally developed to demonstrate evolutionary biology, have been applied to a wide range of cultural data including natural language lexicons, manuscripts, folktales, material cultures, and religions. A fundamental question regarding the application of phylogenetic inference is whether trees are an appropriate approximation of cultural evolutionary history. Their validity in cultural applications has been scrutinized, particularly with respect to the lexicons of dialects in contact. Phylogenetic models organize evolutionary data into a series of branching events through time. However, branching events are typically not included in dialectological studies to interpret the distributions of lexical terms. Instead, dialectologists have offered spatial interpretations to represent lexical data. For example, new lexical items that emerge in a politico-cultural center are likely to spread to peripheries, but not vice versa. To explore the question of the tree model’s validity, we present a simple simulation model in which dialects form a spatial network and share lexical items through contact rather than through common ancestors. We input several network topologies to the model to generate synthetic data. We then analyze the synthesized data using conventional phylogenetic techniques. We found that a group of dialects can be considered tree-like even if it has not evolved in a temporally tree-like manner but has a temporally invariant, spatially tree-like structure. In addition, the simulation experiments appear to reproduce unnatural results observed in reconstructed trees for real data. These results motivate further investigation into the spatial structure of the evolutionary history of dialect lexicons as well as other cultural characteristics.

Fachlexicographie - Probleme, Aufgaben, Konzepte

Most LSP dictionaries are used as translation tools. Neglecting other uses allows us to describe some fundamental principles of LSP lexicography including economic factors as well as the user's world and linguistic knowledge. Use of terms in LSP texts and the requirements to guide the user to the dictionary's entry provoke us to differentiate lexicon forms from text forms, and additionally to define dictionary forms of terms. Normally, dictionary use is in three steps: forming a potential entry address, verifying the identity of the text and entry words' meanings, and selecting/adapting a word for the TL text. Díctionary making is surveyed in brief. LSP lexicographical research should be done in the fields of the user's lexical demand, of corpus and data collection, and of data presentation, in each case considering theoretical, technological, economic, and didactic aspects of LSP lexicography.

Commentary: Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice vs. wheat agriculture.

Commentary: Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice vs. wheat agriculture.

Southeast Asia in the ancient Indian Ocean World Combining historical linguistic and archaeological approaches

This PhD dissertation examines the role of insular Southeast Asia in the trans-regional networks of maritime trade that shaped the history of Indian Ocean. The work brings together data and approaches from archaeology, historical linguistics and other disciplines, proposing a reconstruction of cultural and linguistic contact between Southeast Asia and its maritime neighbours to the west in order to advance our historical understanding of this part of the world. Numerous biological, commercial and technical items are examined. The study underlines that the analysis of lexical data is one of the strongest tools to detect and analyse contact between two or more speech communities. It demonstrates how Southeast Asian products and concepts were mainly dispersed by speakers of Malay varieties, although other communities played a role as well. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the study offers new perspectives on the role of insular Southeast Asian agents on cultural dynamism and interethnic contact in the pre-modern Indian Ocean World.

Conducting spoken word recognition research online: Validation and a new timing method.

Models of spoken word recognition typically make predictions that are then tested in the laboratory against the word recognition scores of human subjects (e.g., Luce & Pisoni Ear and Hearing, 19, 1-36, 1998). Unfortunately, laboratory collection of large sets of word recognition data can be costly and time-consuming. Due to the numerous advantages of online research in speed, cost, and participant diversity, some labs have begun to explore the use of online platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) to source participation and collect data (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 3-5, 2011). Many classic findings in cognitive psychology have been successfully replicated online, including the Stroop effect, task-switching costs, and Simon and flanker interference (Crump, McDonnell, & Gureckis PLoS ONE, 8, e57410, 2013). However, tasks requiring auditory stimulus delivery have not typically made use of AMT. In the present study, we evaluated the use of AMT for collecting spoken word identification and auditory lexical decision data. Although online users were faster and less accurate than participants in the lab, the results revealed strong correlations between the online and laboratory measures for both word identification accuracy and lexical decision speed. In addition, the scores obtained in the lab and online were equivalently correlated with factors that have been well established to predict word recognition, including word frequency and phonological neighborhood density. We also present and analyze a method for precise auditory reaction timing that is novel to behavioral research. Taken together, these findings suggest that AMT can be a viable alternative to the traditional laboratory setting as a source of participation for some spoken word recognition research.

Towards a formal genealogical classification of the Lezgian languages (North Caucasus): testing various phylogenetic methods on lexical data.

A lexicostatistical classification is proposed for 20 languages and dialects of the Lezgian group of the North Caucasian family, based on meticulously compiled 110-item wordlists, published as part of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project. The lexical data have been subsequently analyzed with the aid of the principal phylogenetic methods, both distance-based and character-based: Starling neighbor joining (StarlingNJ), Neighbor joining (NJ), Unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA), Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Unweighted maximum parsimony (UMP). Cognation indexes within the input matrix were marked by two different algorithms: traditional etymological approach and phonetic similarity, i.e., the automatic method of consonant classes (Levenshtein distances). Due to certain reasons (first of all, high lexicographic quality of the wordlists and a consensus about the Lezgian phylogeny among Caucasologists), the Lezgian database is a perfect testing area for appraisal of phylogenetic methods. For the etymology-based input matrix, all the phylogenetic methods, with the possible exception of UMP, have yielded trees that are sufficiently compatible with each other to generate a consensus phylogenetic tree of the Lezgian lects. The obtained consensus tree agrees with the traditional expert classification as well as some of the previously proposed formal classifications of this linguistic group. Contrary to theoretical expectations, the UMP method has suggested the least plausible tree of all. In the case of the phonetic similarity-based input matrix, the distance-based methods (StarlingNJ, NJ, UPGMA) have produced the trees that are rather close to the consensus etymology-based tree and the traditional expert classification, whereas the character-based methods (Bayesian MCMC, UMP) have yielded less likely topologies.

INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF MODERN LEARNING PROCESS

The process of the world globalization leads to the enlargement of intercultural and interlingual connections among the representatives of different countries, nations, religions and cultures. Herewith, there is a special interest towards the study of intercultural communication and its reflection in the educational sphere. That is why the problem of including cultural information into modern educational programmes and compilation of cutting edge teaching materials has acquired great importance. Modern methodical complexes acquaint students with the changing realities of the English-speaking countries and fixed expressions that describe various aspects of life. The main task is to avoid misunderstanding, caused not only by purely linguistic reasons but also by lack of cultural knowledge, misunderstanding or simply unfamiliarity with the key concept of the culture being studied. Taking into consideration the changing status of foreign languages as a source of intercommunication and mutual understanding, methodology underlines the necessity of intensification of pragmatic aspects of the language acquisition. Nowadays, the main purpose of the educational process is to get acquainted with the foreign language as a whole unit, including grammar and lexical data, as well as cross-cultural information. It helps to understand natural, historical and social realia, spiritual values and assists in the formation of the linguistic consciousness. At the present stage educational courses solve the problem of a textbook, as well as a reference resource, highlighting all the lexical, grammatical and cultural information, and meeting the students’ needs. These directories support effective lesson and make it possible to get deeper into the culture of the foreign language.

Responding to nonwords in the lexical decision task: Insights from the English Lexicon Project.

Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, because a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide valuable insights into early lexical processes. In the present study, item-level and participant-level analyses were conducted on the trial-level lexical decision data for almost 37,000 nonwords in the English Lexicon Project in order to identify the influence of different psycholinguistic variables on nonword lexical decision performance and to explore individual differences in how participants respond to nonwords. Item-level regression analyses reveal that nonword response time was positively correlated with number of letters, number of orthographic neighbors, number of affixes, and base-word number of syllables, and negatively correlated with Levenshtein orthographic distance and base-word frequency. Participant-level analyses also point to within- and between-session stability in nonword responses across distinct sets of items, and intriguingly reveal that higher vocabulary knowledge is associated with less sensitivity to some dimensions (e.g., number of letters) but more sensitivity to others (e.g., base-word frequency). The present findings provide well-specified and interesting new constraints for informing models of word recognition and lexical decision.

Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language Through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary by David Crystal (review)

Reviewed by: Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language Through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary by David Crystal Ammon Shea (bio) Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language Through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary by David Crystal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 288. $27.95. ISBN 978-0-19-968047-4 To say that David Crystal, the author or editor of more than one hundred books, is a prolific writer on the subject of the English language is a significant understatement. Crystal’s oeuvre ranges from large works, such as The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2003), to smaller books which focus on a particular aspect of our language (such as texting, Shakespeare’s pronunciation, of the language of the King James Bible). Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is certainly one of his smaller efforts, which by no means should be taken to indicate that it is without charm or utility. Words in Time is exactly what its title suggests: an examination of some portions of the English language as they are illustrated in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED). For the few readers of this journal who are not familiar with this title, the HTOED is the exceedingly large thesaurus (almost 4,000 pages) compiled over a period of some forty-four years by researchers at the University of Glasgow, and which is based on the Oxford English Dictionary (as well as some material from the Thesaurus of Old English). Published in print in 2009, the HTOED received considerable acclaim, although some reviewers found the indexing to be confusing (Görlach 2011, 195). With almost 800,000 words and 235,000 entry categories spread across a thousand years of English usage, it is not surprising that users would occasionally find looking up specific meanings difficult. The HTOED is now directly accessible through the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, making searches considerably easier. Still, it presents a daunting amount of information for any but the most dedicated searcher of words. Many readers, particularly those who are not scholars, would do well to be introduced to this thesaurus through a smaller guide book. David Crystal is a fitting author for such a vade mecum. He writes engagingly here, with a lightly erudite touch, and has come up with a rather ingenious way to explore the massive amount of lexical data in the book about which he is writing. Crystal restricted his examination to fifteen fairly narrow semantic fields from the HTOED (words for inns and [End Page 191] hotels, fools, pop music, etc.), allowing him the luxury of showcasing in relative depth the thoroughness of treatment that was afforded to the language in the thesaurus about which he is writing. Each chapter has a short preface, followed by a list of the words from the HTOED for that particular semantic field, occasionally divided into several small categories. The words are arranged chronologically in each group, and accompanied by a single explicatory paragraph, written by Crystal. One wishes that Crystal had spent more time in his role as guide, as the nuggets that he supplies in the introductions to these chapters are often lovely, and not the sort of information that a user of either the OED or the HTOED is likely to find in those works. For instance, in the introduction to Chapter 6 (From dizzy to numpty: words for a fool) he writes, “Sound symbolism is a powerful explanatory principle in this semantic field. Almost half the words in the list below have an unclear or unknown etymology – a remarkable proportion.” He makes note as well of the high rate of certain phonetic patterns, such as oo, initial f’s and g’s, and final p’s in the list of words for a fool (86). In the introduction to his chapter on words for hotels and inns, Crystal provides an excellent explanation for the increase in such words (especially those of a foreign origin) in the years after 1600: England saw a period of relative peace, allowing increased foreign travel, and the travel writings...

An Efficient Technique to Implement Similarity Measures in Text Document Clustering using Artificial Neural Networks Algorithm

Pattern recognition, envisaging supervised and unsupervised method, optimization, associative memory and control process are some of the diversified troubles that can be resolved by artificial neural networks. Problem identified: Of late, discovering the required information in massive quantity of data is the challenging tasks. The model of similarity evaluation is the central element in accomplishing a perceptive of variables and perception that encourage behavior and mediate concern. This study proposes Artificial Neural Networks algorithms to resolve similarity measures. In order to apply singular value decomposition the frequency of word pair is established in the given document. (1) Tokenization: The splitting up of a stream of text into words, phrases, signs, or other significant parts is called tokenization. (2) Stop words: Preceding or succeeding to processing natural language data, the words that are segregated is called stop words. (3) Porter stemming: The main utilization of this algorithm is as part of a phrase normalization development that is characteristically completed while setting up in rank recovery technique. (4) WordNet: The compilation of lexical data base for the English language is called as WordNet Based on Artificial Neural Networks, the core part of this study work extends n-gram proposed algorithm. All the phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pair corresponds in accordance to the application. Future work extends the application of this same similarity measures in various other neural network algorithms to accomplish improved results.

Compound tensification and laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions in Yanbian Korean

In Korean compound nouns, the onset of the second element tensifies: /pjəl + picʰ/ → [pjəl.p*icʰ]. This process displays a substantial number of exceptions. We show that in the Yanbian dialect phonological factors influence compound tensification; their influence is confirmed by the results of a wug test. These results mostly mirror generalisations informed by lexical data, but a pattern not clearly observed in the existing lexicon also emerged (analytic bias or ‘overlearning’), while phonologically implausible interactions were not actively incorporated (‘underlearning’). Preliminary acoustic analysis motivates an OCP restriction against multiple laryngeally marked segments, due to the shared feature [long non-modal voicing]. But in simplex nouns the co-occurrence of two tense onsets is overrepresented. This apparent contradiction is explained by a directionality difference: compound tensification is progressive, as opposed to the regressive assimilation of creaky voice from the vowel of the following syllable in simplex words.

Decomposing encoding and decisional components in visual-word recognition: a diffusion model analysis.

In a diffusion model, performance as measured by latency and accuracy in two-choice tasks is decomposed into different parameters that can be linked to underlying cognitive processes. Although the diffusion model has been utilized to account for lexical decision data, the effects of stimulus manipulations in previous experiments originated from just one parameter: the quality of the evidence. Here we examined whether the diffusion model can be used to effectively decompose the underlying processes during visual-word recognition. We explore this issue in an experiment that features a lexical manipulation (word frequency) that we expected to affect mostly the quality of the evidence (the drift rate parameter), and a perceptual manipulation (stimulus orientation) that presumably affects the nondecisional time (the Ter parameter, time of encoding and response) more than it affects the drift rate. Results showed that although the manipulations do not affect only one parameter, word frequency and stimulus orientation had differential effects on the model's parameters. Thus, the diffusion model is a useful tool to decompose the effects of stimulus manipulations in visual-word recognition.