Lexical Semantic Categorization Research Articles

Categorizing possession in Zuanga-Yuanga and other Kanak languages (New Caledonia): a typological perspective

Abstract Like many other Oceanic and Kanak languages of New Caledonia, Zuanga-Yuanga [ZY] has classifiers restricted to the possession of nouns denoting food, drink, animals and plants; it also has dichotomous direct and indirect adnominal possessive constructions, which are generally labeled inalienable or alienable in the Oceanic literature. These terms refer to a distinction between close versus distant structural marking, which do not strictly correlate with lexical-semantic categories. For instance, kinship nouns are split over the two types of constructions, distinguishing reference from address kinship terms, not in terms of semantic distinctions between close versus distant kinship types. The split for body-part nouns is between directly possessed dedicated terms and indirectly possessed metaphorical body terms, not in terms of permanent versus removable parts, or temporary body properties. In ZY possessive constructions correlate with fairly strict possessee noun classes belonging to one single structural class (directly or indirectly marked). Only a limited number of nouns denoting parts-of-whole have alternate constructions expressing different semantic relations to the possessed noun.

TERMINOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK LINGUISTICS

The study of the history of the formation of lexical-semantic means of language in general and terminological vocabulary in particular is of great scientific, theoretical, and practical importance. In connection with the intensive development of all areas of modern knowledge, the problem of a comprehensive study of nominative terminological systems is becoming increasingly urgent.The problem of terms as a special lexical-semantic category of words, as well as the relationship of terminological vocabulary with the rest of the vocabulary of the literary language, has not yet been sufficiently studied. In the study of terms, two main approaches are outlined -normative and descriptive. The normative approach, within the framework of which the basic requirements for the term were formulated (the author of the first of which was D.S. Lotte -unambiguity, accuracy, brevity, absence of synonyms, etc.) made it possible to create state, industry and international standards for terms and definitions, collections of recommended terms and terminological dictionaries.

Semantics and Ways of Expressing the Plural of Nouns in Russian and Japanese Languages

Purpose. The study compares the ways to express the plural, as well as categories connected with these ways, and the semantics of plurality in Russian and Japanese languages which are genetically and typologically unrelated: Russian is an inflectional language and Japanese is an agglutinative one.Results. There is a grammatical category of singular and plural in Russian. This category is missing in Japanese, but there is a lexical-semantic category. The concept of singularity and plurality is not represented in Japanese. Number may be actualized by the speaker if the object (animate or inanimate) enters the speaker’s personal zone or a personification takes place. There is only one way to express plurality in Russian – by using flexions of plurality. There are four ways to do that in Japanese which are markers of plurality, classifiers, reduplication and combined dvandva (a word with coordinative connection between components of the whole word). The usage of inflections to express plurality is mandatory in Russian, but the usage of plurality markers in Japanese is probabilistic.Conclusion. A common category for Russian and Japanese languages which is important for expressing plurality is the category of animation. The similar meanings of plurality both in Russian and in Japanese is collective, representative and indefinite discrete plurality expressed in different ways.

On determination of the part-of-speech affiliation of modal words

The subject of this research is the part-of-speech affiliation of modal words – a special group of lexemes that are irreplaceable, syncategorematic, and lack formal unity. The author examines four most widespread approaches towards determination of the part-of-speech status of modal words, modal semantics, in particular, and the function of modal meaning; provides summary of the existing in Russian linguistics classifications of modal words, and lists their basic lexical-semantic categories. In the course of studying the genesis of modal words, the author correlates them with other parts of speech. For determination of the part-of-speech status, emphasis is placed on the degree of manifestation within this group of lexemes of semantic, morphological, syntactic and word-forming characteristics, namely the compliance of modal words with the listed criteria. The novelty consists in the analysis of the part-of-speech affiliation of modal words through the prism of the traditional semantic-syntactic approach, considering the formal-morphological aspect of modal words, which allows accumulating the avaliable knowledge on modal words, as well as compiling holistic representation on the nature of their origin and functionality. The research materials can be used in teaching morphology of the modern Russian language, as well as in preparation of lectures and textbooks on cognate disciplines. The conclusion is made that in synchrony, modal words represent an isolated group that is in-between of autosemantic and functional words. The recommendation to classify this group as a separate part of speech remains polemical; however, segregation of modal words in the grammatical system is unarguable.

Buchnąć z futrówy, odpypić z ponsy – about vocabulary from the category „cheating” in student jargon from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

The article presents the history of the student jargon. The author describes the vocabulary used in the period: second-half the 19th century – first half the 20th century; the lexis belongs to the thematic category „cheating”. In the text the reader gets to know theses: 1) the lexis discussed is the root cause of one of the most extensive lexical-semantic categories of the student jargon in the post-partition period (after the period of the Partitions of Poland); 2) in former student language a shared store of the vocabulary exists – this group is independent of the administrative dependence of schools; 3) we notice much former vocabulary in the contemporary jargon; 4) we will notice jargon words in the general Polish in the 19th century; 7) we can see the participation of criminal jargon from the 19th century.

THE LINGUISTIC CORPUS VEPKAR IS A LANGUAGE REFUGE FOR THE BALTICFINNISH LANGUAGES OF KARELIA

The purpose of creating conservation areas is to protect endangered plant and animal species. Large, tagged linguistic corpora with a great variety of genres are used for the preservation and research of safe and endangered languages. The article describes the history, structure and development of the Open Corpus of the Veps and Karelian languages. The Veps language corpus was created in 2009 under the leadership of Nina Zaitseva. Three Karelian subcorpora (Karelian proper, Livvi and Ludian) were included in the linguistic corpus in 2016. The united linguistic platform was named “The Open Corpus of the Veps and Karelian languages” (VepKar). This linguistic corpus includes texts and dictionaries stored in a database, and a computer program (corpus manager) for searching and processing the data. This corpus manager was written in the PHP programming language in the Laravel framework. The data are stored in a MySQL database. Corpus and dictionaries data are available online (dictorpus.krc.karelia.ru). YouTube and Wikipedia are used by VepKar authors to popularize the corpus. Dictionaries and corpus texts are strongly interrelated. Multifunctional dictionaries of the Veps and Karelian languages contain definition, translation, dialect labels, semantic relations (synonyms, antonyms, etc.), examples of word usage with reference to texts, as well as complete inflectional paradigms. All texts are automatically marked up and there are references from words in the text to the corresponding meanings in the dictionary entries. The developers continue adding useful new features to the corpus manager to make the work of editors easier. For example, over the past three years, nominal and verbal inflection rules have been formulated and programmed for all dialects of the Veps language and its newly-written version, as well as for the Livvi-Karelian, North Karelian and Tver newly-written versions of the Karelian language. Thanks to this, 2.1 million word forms were generated in the VepKar system in a semi-automatic mode. The semantic markup in the corpus is 2.1 million links between words from the text and the meanings of lemmas in the dictionary. The grammatical markup was added, namely, 1.1 million links between words from the text and the grammatical features of word forms from the dictionary were automatically established. The multilingual VepKar corpus is divided into subcorpora according to languages and dialects, and the texts are also classified into styles and genres. The corpus has a sophisticated search system (with filtering of texts by language, style and dialect, by informant, collector or author, by year of recording or year of publication). It is possible to search for lemmas by dialects, parts of speech, grammatical features, and even by lexical-semantic categories. These categories appeared due to the integration of the data of the outstanding “Comparative and Onomasiological Dictionary of the Dialects of the Karelian, Veps and Sami Languages” into the vocabulary part of VepKar. In 2021, the Sanahelmi electronic dictionary was created on the basis of VepKar for Android phones. The development of mobile applications based on corpus data is our bright future.

Means of informal communication in political cartoons

This article attempts to analyze means of communication such as euphemisms and dysphemisms in a political cartoon. Free expression of personal and public opinion, political humor and political cartoon became an important part of the information sphere. This makes the genre of political cartoon more relevant than ever. The cartoon consists of verbal and visual components, which make the choice of communication tools in the text especially difficult. This determined the problem of our study. We have analyzed political cartoons published in the American media. Using the method of content analysis, we selected 174 euphemisms and dysphemisms, which we divided into lexical-semantic categories. As a result, euphemisms are used frequently in political cartoon than dysphemisms, which, is caused by the genre specificity, thus, the ironical effect is achieved by the contrast between the verbal and visual components.

Proper names from story recall are associated with beta-amyloid in cognitively unimpaired adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease

Due to advances in the early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) biomarkers including beta-amyloid (Aβ), neuropsychological measures that are sensitive to concurrent, subtle changes in cognition are critically needed. Story recall tasks have shown sensitivity to early memory declines in persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early stage dementia, as well as in persons with autosomal dominantly inherited AD up to 10 years prior to a dementia diagnosis. However, the evidence is inconclusive regarding relationships between evidence of Aβ and story recall measures. Because story recall tasks require the encoding and delayed retrieval of several lexical-semantic categories, such as proper names, verbs, and numerical expressions, and because lexical categories have been shown to be differentially impaired in persons with MCI, we focused on item-level analyses of lexical-semantic retrieval from a quintessential story recall task, Logical Memory from the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised. Our objective was to investigate whether delayed recall of lexical categories (proper names, verbs and/or numerical expressions), as well as the traditional total score measure, was associated with “preclinical AD,” or cognitively unimpaired adults with positive Aβ deposition on positron emission tomography (PET) neuroimaging using Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB). We developed an item-level scoring system, in which we parsed items into lexical categories and examined the immediate and delayed recall of these lexical categories from 217 cognitively unimpaired participants from the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention (WRAP). We performed binary logistic regression models with story recall score as predictor and Aβ status (positive/negative) as the outcome. Using baseline Logical Memory data, proper names from delayed story recall were significantly associated with Aβ status, such that participants who recalled more proper names were less likely to be classified as PiB(+) (odds ratio = .58, p = .01). None of the other story recall variables, including total score, were associated with PiB status. Secondary analyses determined that immediate recall of proper names was not significantly associated with Aβ, suggesting a retrieval deficit rather than that of encoding. The present findings suggest that lexical semantic retrieval measures from existing story recall tasks may be sensitive to Aβ deposition, and may provide added utility to a widely-used, long-standing neuropsychological test for early detection of cognitive decline on the AD continuum.

Positional verbs: derivation semantics and functioning

espanolEste articulo se basa en la teoria del caracter universal de la categoria de causalidad lexico-semantica y su caracter especifico. Teniendo en cuenta la ausencia de la categoria gramatical de la causacion en ambos idiomas, considero la posibilidad de que se compense con la categoria de formacion de palabras correspondiente comprendida por los verbos causativos derivados de la posicion. Los verbos causales posicionales se utilizan en este estudio como un termino general que se refiere a una clase de verbos causales que codifican semanticamente la postura corporal estatica o la posicion de los seres animados o la ubicacion estatica de los objetos inanimados en el espacio. La derivacion, la semantica y la pragmatica de los verbos causales derivados de la posicion en aleman y ucraniano se analizan para describir las relaciones locativas EnglishThis research is based on the universal theory of the lexical-seman-ticcategory of causation. Taking into ac-countthe absence of the grammatical category of causation in German and Ukrainian, I consider the possibility that it is compensated by the correspondingword-formation category comprised positional derived causative verbs. They semantically encode the change of the body position of animate beings as well as the location of inanimate objects in space. Although the positional verbs have been described in many languages, the semantic features of positional causative verbs have never been previously investigated in German and Ukrainian, which accounts for the novelty of the research. The derivation and semantics of positional derived causative verbs are analyzed to show how typologically different languages, on the one hand, have similarity in expressing the basic concepts of positional causative situation. But on the other hand, they differ in the spatial representation francaisCet article est base sur la theorie du caractere universel de la categoriede causalite lexico-semantique et de son caractere specifique. Compte tenu de l’absence de la categorie grammaticale de causalite dans les deux langues, j’envisage la possibilite qu’elle soit compensee par la categorie de formation de mots correspondante,constituee par les verbes causatifs derives positionnels.Les verbes causatifs de position sont utilises dans cette etude comme un terme generique qui designe une classe de verbes causatifs qui encodent semantique ment la positional corporelle statique ou la position des etres animes ou la position statique des objets inanimes dans l'espace. Bien que les verbes de position aient ete decrits dans de nombreuses langues, leurs caracteristiques semantiques n’ont jamais ete explorees auparavant en allemand et en ukrainien. La derivation et la semantique des verbes causatifs derives positionnels sont analysees pour montrer comment des langues typologiquement differentes, d'une part, ont une similitude dans l'expression des concepts de base de situation causative positionnelle. Mais d'un autre cote, ils different dans la representation spatiale

Miejsce słowotwórstwa w gramatyce pisanej według formuły „treść > forma”

The author understands word-formation as a system of formal means for lexicalization, i.e. for creation of new lexemes and enriching the inventories of the lexical semantic categories. She suggests that in a grammar written after the formula meaning > form the thematic block 'word-formation' should be correlated with the semantic classification of predicates and conceived as an analysis of the lexical semantic categories with word-formational exponents.

Semantic (Ir)regularities in Action Nouns in Irish

Cross-linguistically, verbal nominalizations display a close semantic and syntactic affinity to their corresponding predicates. Another characteristic feature of action nominalizations is that they exhibit the process/result dichotomy. In the process of lexicalization, the meanings of nominals drift away from the core actional reading, and come to denote ‘something material connected with the verbal idea (agent, instrument, belongings, place or the like)’ (Marchand 1969, 303). Nominalizations in Irish show a systematic polysemy between an abstract action reading and more concrete meanings such as result or object of activity, e.g. míniú ‘explanation’, ceartú ‘correction’, filleadh ‘bend’. We can observe a cline with a non-count action nominal and a count result nominal as extremes. The ability to pluralize is a clear indicator of lexicalization, e.g. oiriúintí ‘fittings, accessories’, admhálacha ‘receipts’, socruithe sochraide ‘funeral arrangements’. It will be demonstrated that the patterns of polysemy in verbal nouns are constrained by the lexical semantics of the base verbs. In the paper an overview is made of nominals related to verbs of different situation types (i.e. Vendler’s (1967) classes such as states, accomplishments, achievements, activities), and different lexical semantic categories (i.e. verbs of creation, consumption, motion, speech act verbs, verbs of emission etc.). The study is based on the corpus of ca. 2300 verbs and their corresponding VNs from Ó Dónaill (1977).

Lexical Borrowing, Categorization, and Mental Representation

AbstractThe article argues that lexical borrowing is not only motivated by cultural factors linked to prestige or economical aspects but also by the speakers’ need for new lexical-semantic categories and for highly expressive metaphorical terms to operate with, which makes them borrow words. The semantic changes of the lexical borrowings point to the creation of new items in the semantic fields of the receiving language. The integration of borrowings into Hungarian and Romanian exemplifies these processes.

Representational Similarity Mapping of Distributional Semantics in Left Inferior Frontal, Middle Temporal, and Motor Cortex.

Language comprehension engages a distributed network of frontotemporal, parietal, and sensorimotor regions, but it is still unclear how meaning of words and their semantic relationships are represented and processed within these regions and to which degrees lexico-semantic representations differ between regions and semantic types. We used fMRI and representational similarity analysis to relate word-elicited multivoxel patterns to semantic similarity between action and object words. In left inferior frontal (BA 44-45-47), left posterior middle temporal and left precentral cortex, the similarity of brain response patterns reflected semantic similarity among action-related verbs, as well as across lexical classes-between action verbs and tool-related nouns and, to a degree, between action verbs and food nouns, but not between action verbs and animal nouns. Instead, posterior inferior temporal cortex exhibited a reverse response pattern, which reflected the semantic similarity among object-related nouns, but not action-related words. These results show that semantic similarity is encoded by a range of cortical areas, including multimodal association (e.g., anterior inferior frontal, posterior middle temporal) and modality-preferential (premotor) cortex and that the representational geometries in these regions are partly dependent on semantic type, with semantic similarity among action-related words crossing lexical-semantic category boundaries.

Noun Gender in Romanian, a Lexical-Semantic Category

The aim of our research is to prove the fact that the gender of Romanian nouns cannot and should not be considered a grammatical category, but a lexical-semantic category, since this part of speech has gender even at a lexical level, a category that also ascends to the immediately superior level: the grammatical one. In contemporary grammar treatises, numerous linguists argue that gender belongs to the axis of grammatical categories that are specific to the Romanian noun, along with number, case and determination. At the same time, it is not a novelty that the gender of nouns, at the level of this entire class in the Romanian language, even where the phenomenon of gender suffixation is involved, does not represent a flectional criterion for this lexical-grammatical class, which does not have distinct opposable forms that mark out the class in question, unlike in the case of pronouns, adjectives or numerals. The actualization of the gender category in nouns, compared to its materialization in the other parts of speech that feature it and in which its status is undoubtedly that of a grammar category, should be discussed in entirely different terms. The grammaticalization of gender that has three components – masculine, feminine and neuter – in the other parts of speech from the nominal group confirms the existence of this category in nouns, but does not entail its grammaticalization in this lexical-grammatical class. Asserting that the gender of nouns is a fixed, given category pertains to the semantics of the part of speech in question. The oppositions between the category members are achieved between different lexemes, hence, outside the flective, and not between different flectional units and/or subunits.

Emotional arousal and lexical specificity modulate response times differently depending on ear of presentation in a dichotic listening task

We investigated possible hemispheric differences in the processing of four different lexical semantic categories: SPECIFIC (e.g. bird), GENERAL (e.g. animal), ABSTRACT (e.g. advice), and EMOTIONAL (e.g. love). These wordtypes were compared using a dichotic listening paradigm and a semantic category classification task. Response times (RTs) were measured when participants classified testwords as concrete or abstract. In line with previous findings, words were expected to be processed faster following right-ear presentation. However, lexical specificity and emotional arousal were predicted to modulate response times differently depending on the ear of presentation. For left-ear presentation, relatively faster RTs were predicted for SPECIFIC and EMOTIONAL words as opposed to GENERAL and ABSTRACT words. An interaction of ear and wordtype was found. For right-ear presentation, RTs increased as testwords’ imageability decreased along the span SPECIFIC–GENERAL–EMOTIONAL–ABSTRACT. In contrast, for left ear presentation, EMOTIONAL words were processed fastest, while SPECIFIC words gave rise to long RTs on par with those for ABSTRACT words. Thus, the prediction for EMOTIONAL words presented in the left ear was borne out, whereas the prediction for SPECIFIC words was not. This might be related to previously found differences in processing of stimuli at a global or local level.

Norma categorial para el español de Bogotá, Colombia.

In this article, we present the results of a study carried out in Bogota, Colombia with 210 university students from five different universities pertaining to diverse socio-demographic groups. The objective of the study was to establish the lexical category norms. 56 lexical-semantic categories used by Battig and Montague (1969) in their classic study were employed. More than 7800 words were collected and organized by range and mode. There are no other studies on this subject for Colombian or Latin American Spanish. We hope that the results presented here will be used both in psycholinguistic and language therapy studies. The collected data were compared to one of the category norm studies made for European Spanish.

Antonymy on historical aspect

Antonymy is defined as lexical-semantic category based on opposite meaning off two units. It is important characteristic of the language used in the medieval texts so in that context, antonymia is documented on historical level. Based on the mutual semantically relationship, there are gradual, complementary and vector antonyms. Antonyms with opposite basic semantic realizations are thought as real antonyms, but if only their secondary semantic realizations are in opposition, they are thought as quasi-antonims. In stylistic usage of antonyms, the creativity of Slavic translators and the expresivity of the language can be noticed.

Verbal fluency impairments among middle-aged and older outpatients with schizophrenia are characterized by deficient switching

Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate impaired verbal fluency, but no studies have examined the underlying cognitive mechanisms (e.g., clustering and switching) associated with impaired fluency among middle-aged and older, non-institutionalized patients. Using Troyer et al.'s [Troyer, A.K., Moscovitch, M., Winocur, G., 1997. Clustering and switching as two components of verbal fluency: evidence from younger and older healthy adults. Neuropsychology 11 (1), 138–146] conceptual model, we examined clustering and switching on verbal fluency tasks among 163 middle-aged and older outpatients with schizophrenia and 92 age comparable healthy comparison (HC) participants. The patients produced significantly fewer total words than HC participants on both the letter (“F”, “A”, “S”) and Animal fluency conditions. With regard to clustering, patients were similar to HC participants on both FAS and Animal fluency tasks. However, significantly fewer switches between lexical–semantic categories were observed among patients with schizophrenia on both conditions relative to HC participants. A small, but statistically significant association was found between number of switches on the Animal fluency task and severity of negative symptoms. The absence of a difference in mean cluster size between the patient and HC groups suggests intact lexical–semantic stores among middle-aged and older outpatients with schizophrenia. Differences in switching between patients and HC participants may be driven by several cognitive impairments associated with schizophrenia. Further delineation of the cognitive mechanisms of the observed lexical–semantic switching deficits in schizophrenia should be a focus of future research.

De la "naturalité" des catégories sémantiques : des catégories d'objets naturels aux catégories lexicales

About the "naturalness " of semantic categories — From categories of "natural objects" to lexical categories This paper examines the notion of naturality developed in the framework of the theory of natural categories and the natural process of categorization. We first analyze the seminal work of Rosch on focal colors as instances of natural categories. We then track the extension of the notion of natural categories to natural objects, from natural categories to artefacts and to any object categorized on the basis of typicality. Finaly we point to the consequences of such a concept on cognitive linguistics based on the naturalization of lexical semantic categories. The polysémie use of the notion of naturality is subsumed by the epistemic function of preserving the principles of universality of cognition against cultural determination.

Deep dyslexia in a Dutch-speaking patient

Abstract A left-handed, Dutch-speaking woman of average intelligence became aphasic after having sustained a left frontotemporal cerebrovascular accident. As she had made semantic paralexias while reading isolated words during a routine aphasiological assessment, we wanted to know whether she could be characterized as «deep dyslexic», and whether the deep dyslexia symptom complex described in English-speaking patients would recur in a Dutch-speaking patient. We subsequently administered two experimental reading tests in order to investigate the organization of five situational lexical-semantic categories, and to analyse the types of reading errors affecting different word classes. Our findings, which indicate that the patient is a deep dyslexic reader, shed light upon three theoretical issues: (1) the occurrence of individual differences within the symptom complex, (2) the plurimodality of certain features first thought to be specific to reading, and (3) the underlying causes of the semantic paralexias.