Lexical Terms Research Articles

A motivação metafórica na gramaticalização Do marcador evidencial de acordo com

Este artigo objetiva explicitar como a motivação metafórica influenciou a gramaticalização da expressão “de acordo com” como item evidencial. Metodologicamente, a análise fundamenta-se teoricamente nos estudos de Hopper e Traugott (2003), Heine et al (1991) e Sweetser (1991) para o aporte teórico acerca do processo de gramaticalização, enquanto Lakoff e Johnson (1980) estabelecem as balizas da Teoria da Metáfora Conceptual, dentre outros; e utiliza ocorrências do corpus constituído para a pesquisa de tese “A Manifestação da Evidencialidade nos trabalhos acadêmicos de grau do Português Brasileiro Contemporâneo” (CARIOCA, 2011), estabelecendo uma correlação sistemática entre o domínio fonte relacionado ao termo lexical “acordo” com a categoria evidencialidade (domínio alvo) do termo preposicional “de acordo com”. Geralmente, esta marca evidencial é utilizada na linguagem acadêmica para explicitar um efeito de sentido que caracteriza um baixo comprometimento com o que está sendo dito/escrito, visto que a evidencialidade é uma categoria linguística que permite a manipulação estratégica das informações quanto à fonte do conhecimento. “De acordo com”, então, expressa uma afirmação asseverada não a partir do autor do texto, mas de alguém especializado no assunto que está sendo abordado no momento. Conclui-se, então, que a convenção acadêmica também colaborou para a motivação metafórica do marcador evidencial “de acordo com”.

CoSpa: A Co-training Approach for Spam Review Identification with Support Vector Machine

Spam reviews are increasingly appearing on the Internet to promote sales or defame competitors by misleading consumers with deceptive opinions. This paper proposes a co-training approach called CoSpa (Co-training for Spam review identification) to identify spam reviews by two views: one is the lexical terms derived from the textual content of the reviews and the other is the PCFG (Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars) rules derived from a deep syntax analysis of the reviews. Using SVM (Support Vector Machine) as the base classifier, we develop two strategies, CoSpa-C and CoSpa-U, embedded within the CoSpa approach. The CoSpa-C strategy selects unlabeled reviews classified with the largest confidence to augment the training dataset to retrain the classifier. The CoSpa-U strategy randomly selects unlabeled reviews with a uniform distribution of confidence. Experiments on the spam dataset and the deception dataset demonstrate that both the proposed CoSpa algorithms outperform the traditional SVM with lexical terms and PCFG rules in spam review identification. Moreover, the CoSpa-U strategy outperforms the CoSpa-C strategy when we use the absolute value of decision function of SVM as the confidence.

Translating Lexical Legal Terms Between English and Arabic

Legal translation between English and Arabic is under researched. However, the growing need for it, due to immigration and asylum seeking, among other reasons, necessitates the importance of more research. The asymmetry between English and Arabic poses many difficulties for legal translators, be they linguistic-based, culture-specific or system-based. The aim of this research is to discuss ways of translating lexical items between English and Arabic. In this current discussion I will present, exemplify and analyse the common difficult areas of translating English/Arabic legal texts and suggest ways of dealing with them. These areas involve culture-specific and system-based terms, archaic terms, specialised terms and doublets and triplets. With this aim in mind, the paper answers the following research questions: 1. What are the common difficulties of translating legal texts between English and Arabic? 2. What are the common lexical difficulties between English and Arabic legal texts? 3. What are the procedures of translating lexical legal terms between English and Arabic? The paper concludes that translating the above-mentioned lexical terms requires expertise, professional training, robust knowledge of the linguistic and legal systems of languages, as well as up-to-date electronic dictionaries and well-defined parallel corpora.

Words for canoes: Continuity and change in oceanic sailing craft

This article aims to reconstruct prehistoric Oceanic canoes by analysing four technological traits and their associated lexical terms: masts (movable versus fixed), stays (fore and back running stays), steering devices (steering paddle versus steering oars) and method of coming about (shunting versus tacking). By tracing the histories of cognates and/or semantic fields related to these terms, the study demonstrates that the shunting manoeuvre was known at the Proto-Oceanic stage, but no specific rig type can be reconstructed for that time period. The canoe of the Proto Central Pacific speakers used the shunting Oceanic lateen rig. The tacking Oceanic spritsail rigged canoe was a later Proto Polynesian innovation and served for the settlement of East Polynesia.

An Empirical Study on the Projection of Specificity in the Usage of Modifiers in Chinese College EFL Writing

<p>Specificity, as a dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity of a speaker to describe an entity or a situation in different accuracy and details (Langacker, 2008), which is linguistically reflected in lexical and grammatical levels (Wen, 2012). Modifiers can extend a simple sentence into a long and complicated one (Weng, 2007), indicating how accurately and substantially an entity or a situation is depicted by a writer. Cognitive linguistics holds the concept that thoughts can be reflected in language (Zhang, 2007) and accordingly the choice of lexical terms and grammatical structures can project the writers’ intention and preference (Wen, 2012). Given the projective significance of grammatical structures, the study on the usage of modifiers in EFL writings can demonstrate the projection of specificity and investigate the writers’ cognitive activity during writing. Although numerous studies about EFL wring have been done from the perspective of cognitive linguistics in the past decades, research aiming at the cognitive process during writing has been far from satisfaction. Hence, this study will analyze the usage of modifiers and how it projects specificity in specific writing. 20 writing papers are randomly selected as samples written by the second-year college EFL Learners from Leshan Normal University, Leshan, China. Data about the usage of modifiers in each sample are collected by dividing each sentence into smaller unit of modifiers centering on nouns and verbs, ensuring the specificity of each sample to be analyzed in a quantitative level. The study concludes that the writers are inclined to apply modifiers for specificity to a certain extent but the lack of modifier diversity and the partial choice of familiar modifiers indicate monotonous descriptions and personal preference to project certain aspects of an entity or a situation.</p>

Prototypes as compositional components of concepts

The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: (a) that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and (b) that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as fish, red, and gun. Hypotheses (a) and (b) are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that (a) is not negotiable; so they tend to reject (b). Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile these claims (Prinz, Furnishing the mind: concepts and their perceptual basis 2002; The Oxford handbook of compositionality 2012; Jonsson and Hampton, Cognition 106:913–923, 2008; Hampton and Jonsson, The Oxford handbook of compositionality 2012; Schurz, The Oxford handbook of compositionality 2012), but they all adopt an implausibly weak notion of compositionality. Furthermore, parties to this debate tend to fall into a problematic way of individuating prototypes that is too externalistic. In contrast, I propose that we can reconcile (a) and (b) if we adopt, instead, an internalist and pluralist conception of prototypes and a context-sensitive but strong notion of compositionality. I argue that each of this proposals is independently plausible, and that, when taken together, provide the basis for a satisfactory account of prototype compositionality.

Communication between physicians and patients with suspected or diagnosed binge eating disorder

Background. Physician–patient conversations were examined to identify barriers to effective discussions about binge eating disorder (BED) arising from discrepancies in how physicians and patients communicate about BED. Methods. Conversations between suspected or diagnosed BED patients (n = 38) and psychiatrists (n = 11) were recorded and the transcripts were reviewed for BED-related lexical terms using automated conversation analysis software. Researchers disambiguated multivalent terms and combined similar terms. Results. The results showed that psychiatrists evaluated some diagnostic criteria (e.g., the absence of compensatory behavior) but not others (e.g., eating more rapidly than normal), focused more on symptoms in relation to weight and generally discussed weight-related issues more often than did patients, and asked about the type of food consumed more often than the diagnostic criterion related to the quantity of food consumed. In contrast, patients used terminology that attempted to clarify the relationships between feelings, coping strategies, and compulsion to binge eat when discussing binge eating episodes. Conclusion. These findings suggest that educational materials promoting more effective physician–patient dialogues regarding eating behaviors in general, and BED specifically, may be beneficial. Conversations should highlight the BED diagnostic criteria, assessment of patients’ emotions and sense of lack of control, and relationships between body weight and BED.

A TOPIC MODELING BASED REPRESENTATION TO DETECT TWEET LOCATIONS. EXAMPLE OF THE EVENT ”JE SUIS CHARLIE”

Abstract. Social Networks became a major actor in information propagation. Using the Twitter popular platform, mobile users post or relay messages from different locations. The tweet content, meaning and location, show how an event-such as the bursty one ”JeSuisCharlie”, happened in France in January 2015, is comprehended in different countries. This research aims at clustering the tweets according to the co-occurrence of their terms, including the country, and forecasting the probable country of a non-located tweet, knowing its content. First, we present the process of collecting a large quantity of data from the Twitter website. We finally have a set of 2,189 located tweets about “Charlie”, from the 7th to the 14th of January. We describe an original method adapted from the Author-Topic (AT) model based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method. We define an homogeneous space containing both lexical content (words) and spatial information (country). During a training process on a part of the sample, we provide a set of clusters (topics) based on statistical relations between lexical and spatial terms. During a clustering task, we evaluate the method effectiveness on the rest of the sample that reaches up to 95% of good assignment. It shows that our model is pertinent to foresee tweet location after a learning process.

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.

A EPÊNTESE NO PORTUGUÊS BRASILEIRO EM UMA PERSPECTIVA MULTIRREPRESENTACIONAL

Este trabalho trata da epêntese no português brasileiro e sua interação com o acento da palavra. Em especial, avalia-se o caráter gradiente da epêntese, tanto em termos lexicais e estruturais, quanto em termos fonéticos. A principal contribuição deste trabalho é discutir o fenômeno da epêntese sob uma perspectiva teórica inovadora, com base na Fonologia de Laboratório e nos Modelos Multirrepresentacionais. Dados coletados experimentalmente indicam que há gradiência lexical na implementação da epêntese, bem como do fenômeno de acentuação de vogais epentéticas. Verificou-se ainda que as vogais epentéticas acentuadas apresentam duração intermediária entre as vogais epentéticas átonas e as vogais correspondentes plenas, havendo portanto gradiência fonética na implementação do fenômeno. Sugere-se neste estudo que os dados levantados dão suporte a uma visão multidimensional das representações sonoras e que o sistema linguístico encontra-se organizado em redes de relações.

From truth-attesting to intensification: The grammaticalization of Spanish la verdad and Catalan la veritat

The aim of this article is to discuss and illustrate the grammaticalization process and the polysemic and polyfunctional nature of the Spanish and Catalan markers la verdad and la veritat, from an original objectified referential meaning of the forms (‘tell the truth’, opposite to ‘tell a lie’) to a highly subjectified procedural meaning of the markers (figuratively/metaphorically: ‘frankly/sincerely/honestly’). The pragmatic meaning of these markers stems from the loss of semantic features (i.e. semantic bleaching) and the different uses that they can adopt in a variety of syntactic and pragmatic contexts, where their (inter)subjective, evaluative, and intensifying modal dimensions are fully manifested. In lexical terms, they are noun phrases that can take variable and invariable forms. In morphological terms, the variable form is inflected in number (Sp. cantar las verdades; ‘tell the truths’) and has a referential value, whereas the invariable form, prosodically extraposed, or followed by a verbal predicate when working as pragmatic marker (Cat. la veritat, no m’agrada; ‘frankly, I don’t like it’), is always uninflected and is polyfunctional, with a procedural value. When followed by a verbal predicate ( la verdad/veritat es/és que; ‘the truth + be + that), la verdad and la veritat acquire a structural dimension, besides their modal illocutionary one, being used as boundary markers that separate description of facts from first person evaluation, in a monologued stretch of discourse. In an interactional context, the marker frequently prefaces counter expectations. In order to show its grammaticalization process, I will discuss and exemplify their role as (a) evidential marker with a truth-attesting value (‘tell the truth’), (b) epistemic modality markers used to introduce the speaker’s attitude to the content of the proposition (modal meaning) or to the addressee (affective meaning) in the context of an utterance (‘frankly’, ‘honestly’), (c) intensifiers or boosters used to modify the illocutionary force of a speech act (‘really’, ‘truly’), and (d) discourse boundary markers used to delimit real-world facts (description) from personal opinion (evaluation; ‘in fact’, ‘actually’). In order to account for their polysemic and polyfunctional dimensions, I will propose salient meanings and prototypical functions.

An Author-Topic based Approach to Cluster Tweets and Mine their Location

Social Networks became a major actor in information propagation. Using the Twitter popular platform, mobile users post or relay messages from different locations. The tweet content, meaning and location show how an event-such as the bursty one “JeSuisCharlie”’ happened in France in January 2015 is comprehended in different countries. This research aims at clustering the tweets according to the co-occurrence of their terms, including the country, and forecasting the probable country of a non located tweet, knowing its content. First, we present the process of collecting a large quantity of data from the Twitter website. We finally have a set of 2.189 located tweets about “Charlie”, from the 7th to the 14th of January. We describe an original method adapted from the Author-Topic (AT) model based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method (LDA). We define a homogeneous space containing both lexical content (words) and spatial information (country). During a training process on a part of the sample, we provide a set of clusters (topics) based on statistical relations between lexical and spatial terms. During a clustering task, we evaluate the method effectiveness on the rest of the sample that reaches up to 95% of good assignment.

Local plant names reveal that enslaved Africans recognized substantial parts of the New World flora.

How did the forced migration of nearly 11 million enslaved Africans to the Americas influence their knowledge of plants? Vernacular plant names give insight into the process of species recognition, acquisition of new knowledge, and replacement of African species with American ones. This study traces the origin of 2,350 Afro-Surinamese (Sranantongo and Maroon) plant names to those plant names used by local Amerindians, Europeans, and related groups in West and Central Africa. We compared vernacular names from herbarium collections, literature, and recent ethnobotanical fieldwork in Suriname, Ghana, Benin, and Gabon. A strong correspondence in sound, structure, and meaning among Afro-Surinamese vernaculars and their equivalents in other languages for botanically related taxa was considered as evidence for a shared origin. Although 65% of the Afro-Surinamese plant names contained European lexical items, enslaved Africans have recognized a substantial part of the neotropical flora. Twenty percent of the Sranantongo and 43% of the Maroon plant names strongly resemble names currently used in diverse African languages for related taxa, represent translations of African ones, or directly refer to an Old World origin. The acquisition of new ethnobotanical knowledge is captured in vernaculars derived from Amerindian languages and the invention of new names for neotropical plants from African lexical terms. Plant names that combine African, Amerindian, and European words reflect a creolization process that merged ethnobotanical skills from diverse geographical and cultural sources into new Afro-American knowledge systems. Our study confirms the role of Africans as significant agents of environmental knowledge in the New World.

On Equal Terms: The Equivocal Origins of an Early Mughal Indo-Persian Vocabulary

AbstractTheQaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī(‘AQaṣīdahon Hindī Terms’), composed in the early sixteenth century, is an unusual example of theniṣābgenre of multilingual vocabularies in verse, providing Persian glosses for various terms drawn from a language the text labelsHindī. The author of the vocabulary, Yūsuf Ḳhurāsānī ‘Yūsufī’, was a physician who followed the first Mughal-Timurid emperor, Bābur, from Afghanistan to India. This paper examines the content and the arrangement of Yūsufī's vocabulary, paying particular attention to the means through which ‘Yūsufī’ was able to assert semantic equivalences between lexical terms and the materials with which they correspond. It concludes by contrasting the Hindi to Persian glossing directionality of this work with the Persian to Hindi directionality prevailing in later examples of theniṣābgenre, arguing that theQaṣīdahreflects a period when practitioners of the Persianateyūnānīsystem of medical knowledge engaged with Indic counterparts in dynamic and especially fruitful ways.

Approaching the axiomatic enrichment of the Gene Ontology from a lexical perspective.

The main goal of this work is to measure how lexical regularities in biomedical ontology labels can be used for the automatic creation of formal relationships between classes, and to evaluate the results of applying our approach to the Gene Ontology (GO). In recent years, we have developed a method for the lexical analysis of regularities in biomedical ontology labels, and we showed that the labels can present a high degree of regularity. In this work, we extend our method with a cross-products extension (CPE) metric, which estimates the potential interest of a specific regularity for axiomatic enrichment in the lexical analysis, using information on exact matches in external ontologies. The GO consortium recently enriched the GO by using so-called cross-product extensions. Cross-products are generated by establishing axioms that relate a given GO class with classes from the GO or other biomedical ontologies. We apply our method to the GO and study how its lexical analysis can identify and reconstruct the cross-products that are defined by the GO consortium. The label of the classes of the GO are highly regular in lexical terms, and the exact matches with labels of external ontologies affect 80% of the GO classes. The CPE metric reveals that 31.48% of the classes that exhibit regularities have fragments that are classes into two external ontologies that are selected for our experiment, namely, the Cell Ontology and the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology, and 18.90% of them are fully decomposable into smaller parts. Our results show that the CPE metric permits our method to detect GO cross-product extensions with a mean recall of 62% and a mean precision of 28%. The study is completed with an analysis of false positives to explain this precision value. We think that our results support the claim that our lexical approach can contribute to the axiomatic enrichment of biomedical ontologies and that it can provide new insights into the engineering of biomedical ontologies.

Generic Terms for Domestic Animals in East Caucasian

The present paper aims at a closer inspection of historical layers of the lexicon of East Caucasian by looking at a small set of lexical forms that are related to the world of concepts for domestic animals. The paper concentrates on these terms also in order to discuss the question to which extent the reconstructability of corresponding forms for Proto-East Caucasian may shed light on some of the economical patterns of the speakers of this language. It will be shown that much of the terminology for domestic animals has to be related to earlier or later loan layers or to innovative processes within the subgroups. The fact that very few of the terms occurring in one of the domains at issue (‘cow’, ‘horse’, ‘donkey’, ‘pig’, ‘sheep’, ‘goat’) can be reconstructed for Proto-East Caucasian is related to the assumption that lexical terms that are strongly related to the praxeological dimension of socioeconomic concepts tend to be rather instable and adaptable over times to changes with respect to these praxeological patterns. The paper also strongly advocates for a closer consideration and isolation of loan layers present in the individual East Caucasian languages prior to any enterprise aiming at the reconstruction of Proto-East Caucasian lexical units.

Variación textual y variedad lingüística: Un ejemplo de la Biblia E4

The focus of the present paper is the Judeo-Romance Bible E4, and, more specifically, the repeated passage found in 2 Chronicles. The graphic, syntactic and lexical variation of this duplicated passage is worthy of scholarly attention since it can be illuminating us the linguistic variety that the passage reflects. In fact, the lexical term partijas, used only in one of the two versions, could reveal the geographical location where the passage was copied.

Latent Semantic Analysis for Multimodal User Input With Speech and Gestures

This paper describes our work in semantic interpretation of a “multimodal language” with speech and gestures using latent semantic analysis (LSA). Our aim is to infer the domain-specific informational goal of multimodal inputs. The informational goal is characterized by lexical terms used in the spoken modality, partial semantics of gestures in the pen modality, as well as term co-occurrence patterns across modalities, leading to “multimodal terms.” We designed and collected a multimodal corpus of navigational inquiries. We also obtained perfect (i.e. manual) and imperfect (i.e. automatic via recognition) transcriptions for these. We automatically align parsed spoken locative references (SLRs) with their corresponding pen gesture(s) using the Viterbi alignment, according to their numeric and location type features. Then, we characterize each cross-modal integration pattern as a 3-tuple multimodal term with SLR, pen gesture type and their temporal relationship. We propose to use latent semantic analysis (LSA) to derive the latent semantics from manual (i.e. perfect) and automatic (i.e. imperfect) transcriptions of the collected multimodal inputs. In order to achieve this, both multimodal and lexical terms are used to compose an inquiry-term matrix, which is then factorized using singular value decomposition (SVD) to derive the latent semantics automatically. Informational goal inference based on the latent semantics shows that the informational goal inference accuracy of a disjoint test set is 99% and 84% when a perfect and imperfect projection model is used respectively, which performs significantly better than (at least 9.9% absolute) the baseline performance using vector-space model (VSM).

Tratamento das formas de tratamento nas aulas de português língua estrangeira

THE TREATMENT OF THE FORMS OF TREATMENT IN THE CLASSES OF PORTUGUESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
 The terms T and V, based on the Latin pronouns tu and vos, are more connected with a specified society and its culture than with the language they belong to. The terms concern human behaviours and interpersonal relations and they change constantly as the relations evolve. The system of T‑V terms in European Portuguese is very rich, that is why its teaching is a true challenge. It is not really about the lexical terms, it is a combination of pragmatics and sociocultural factors, which, connected to them, promotes the creation and the maintenance of cooperative domain as the first step to a successful communication essential in the usage of the language. To be so, the lexical T‑V terms, as well as the pragmatics and sociocultural factors, create the unique matter of teaching/learning at classes of Portuguese as a foreign language.

El dialecto como reto de doblaje: opciones y obstáculos de la traslación de Bienvenue chez les Ch‘tis

Dubbing a film in which dialect plays a central role not only in the language of some of its characters but also as a topic of discussion and a trigger of comic misunderstandings, is a challenge for any translator. The task of transferring the successful French film Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Sticks) with its extensive use of Picard into Spanish is a case in point. In its analysis of Bienvenidos al Norte, this article discusses several solutions to the problem, rejecting traditional options such as translating dialect into standard Spanish or into a Spanish dialect like Andalusian. The creation of an artificial Spanish is put forward as the best option and evaluated in phonological and lexical terms.