Patterns Of Language Use Research Articles

Spiritual Healing: Ragam Bahasa Balian Sebagai Salah Satu Pelestarian Tradisi Lokal di Bali

This research aims to identify the language varieties of Balian and the factors that influence these language varieties. This research is descriptive qualitative with a linguistic and pragmatic theory approach used by Balian. Data collection was done by in-depth interviews with Balians in the hotel. The collected data were then transcribed and thematically coded to identify patterns in language use, such as the use of language, the use of metaphorical language styles, and the sentence structure used. The results found that the balian language variety when communicating with clients is the use of affirmative language, the use of spiritual metaphor style, and the use of imperative sentence structure to direct the client's experience and emotional response during the healing process. Meanwhile, the factors that influence balian language varieties are cultural, spiritual, social, economic, and personal factors. An understanding of these factors helps explain how balians navigate between local traditions and the needs of their clients, as well as how they integrate different elements of language to create effective and meaningful healing experiences. Future studies go more in-depth into analyzing balian language use when viewed pragmatically and therapeutically.

Urban Language Practices in a UNESCO World Heritage Site: A Case Study of George Town, Penang

The case of multilingual and multicultural George Town World Heritage Site (GTWHS) illustrates that language practices among its urban community are varied across different settings and interlocutors. The study aims to identify current language practices in GTWHS, particularly those influenced by urban space and repertoires. Using a mixed-method research design, the study included a sample size of 156 respondents and covered areas in both the Core and Buffer Zones of George Town, Penang. Data analysis then comprises discussions on language repertoires of the interlocutors within the domains of the respective social interactions. Findings of the study show that the use of English, Malay, Mandarin and code-switching are several of the patterns of language use that can be observed in the city. The ability to style shift among the respondents is also indicative of language patterns that interact with both the physical and social settings that they belong to. As a result, these language practices can be fluid in order to facilitate the needs of the communicative activities as the interlocutors relocate themselves in different spaces or domains within the George Town city. More importantly, the study highlights heterogenous populace, linguistic repertoire and cultural practices as determinants that further characterise the overall cityscape of urban social environment and its speech community.

Multilingual Tallinn: People and Languages in the Urban Space

Multilingualism in post-Soviet countries where as a result of the Soviet time migration and Russification, Russian speakers still constitute a significant part of population, presents an interesting case for analysis. Estonia, being officially a monolingual country with quite strict language policy, is extremely linguistically diverse in terms of actual everyday communication, with both Russian and English playing a significant role. Moreover, as Estonia attracts many foreign visitors, expats, and refugees, other languages, including Ukrainian, also become more and more noticeable in both visual and acoustic form in public spaces. However, spatial distribution of different languages in urban landscapes varies significantly, and by analyzing it one can reveal not only the patterns of language use but also power relations between different linguistic, ethnic, and social groups. The paper reports on preliminary results of a study conducted in Tallinn in 2022–2023 and focused on collecting and comparing data on both linguistic landscapes and soundscapes in several locations in the city. The study shows a mismatch between visual linguistic representation and actual linguistic diversity and tries to contemplate it in a broader historical context of multilingualism and language contacts in the Baltic region.

Potential of Large Language Models in Health Care: Delphi Study.

A large language model (LLM) is a machine learning model inferred from text data that captures subtle patterns of language use in context. Modern LLMs are based on neural network architectures that incorporate transformer methods. They allow the model to relate words together through attention to multiple words in a text sequence. LLMs have been shown to be highly effective for a range of tasks in natural language processing (NLP), including classification and information extraction tasks and generative applications. The aim of this adapted Delphi study was to collect researchers' opinions on how LLMs might influence health care and on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of LLM use in health care. We invited researchers in the fields of health informatics, nursing informatics, and medical NLP to share their opinions on LLM use in health care. We started the first round with open questions based on our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats framework. In the second and third round, the participants scored these items. The first, second, and third rounds had 28, 23, and 21 participants, respectively. Almost all participants (26/28, 93% in round 1 and 20/21, 95% in round 3) were affiliated with academic institutions. Agreement was reached on 103 items related to use cases, benefits, risks, reliability, adoption aspects, and the future of LLMs in health care. Participants offered several use cases, including supporting clinical tasks, documentation tasks, and medical research and education, and agreed that LLM-based systems will act as health assistants for patient education. The agreed-upon benefits included increased efficiency in data handling and extraction, improved automation of processes, improved quality of health care services and overall health outcomes, provision of personalized care, accelerated diagnosis and treatment processes, and improved interaction between patients and health care professionals. In total, 5 risks to health care in general were identified: cybersecurity breaches, the potential for patient misinformation, ethical concerns, the likelihood of biased decision-making, and the risk associated with inaccurate communication. Overconfidence in LLM-based systems was recognized as a risk to the medical profession. The 6 agreed-upon privacy risks included the use of unregulated cloud services that compromise data security, exposure of sensitive patient data, breaches of confidentiality, fraudulent use of information, vulnerabilities in data storage and communication, and inappropriate access or use of patient data. Future research related to LLMs should not only focus on testing their possibilities for NLP-related tasks but also consider the workflows the models could contribute to and the requirements regarding quality, integration, and regulations needed for successful implementation in practice.

The Role of Age Variables in Family Language Policy

Family language policy (FLP) provides a critical framework to explain the planning of language use in the home. It constitutes a dynamic construct that sheds light on variations in the language acquisition of bilingual children, potentially explaining the shifts that may occur in language dominance and preference. The environment and life experiences are thought to shape FLP, yet little is known about the function of age. This study examines the association of FLP with children’s chronological age and the age they become bilingual. Data were collected via questionnaires from parents and their bilingual children (n = 82) aged 5.08–14.08 (M = 8.98, SD = 3.27) speaking English (heritage language) and Hebrew (societal language). Correlations and logistic regressions indicate a relationship between FLP and dimensions of age. Findings reveal that age may have repercussions for parent language beliefs, patterns of language use within the home, and the adoption of language promotion strategies. Younger children and children with a later age of onset of bilingualism are associated with families who lean towards a pro-heritage language FLP. Considering dimensions of age enhances our understanding of FLP and may offer a greater insight into how languages are supported in the bilingual home.

Language Maintenance and Language Shift of Poguli Spoken in Jammu and Kashmir, India

The present paper involves a comprehensive language maintenance and shift of Poguli. It seeks to look at their sociolinguistic profile to understand the influence of the majority ethnic/linguistic community with their language on this group. It focuses on the language maintenance and language shift of the Poguli speech community living in Chinab valley of Jammu and Kashmir and tries to study and understand their linguistic usage, patterns of language use, identity, status, and patterns of language use occurring in this community. To make matters more interesting, this Poguli speech community is dominated by many neighbouring languages and attempts to look at the levels of influence of these languages on this community. The paper is an attempt to postulate where this linguistic battle is likely to lead.

Shift in Language and Threat to Survival in a South-west Nigerian Border Town

The study examined the pattern of language use in Omuo with the aim of bringing to the fore the impact of multilingualism on the indigenous languages/dialects of Omuo people. The data for the study were obtained through the use of the questionnaire. The theoretical framework adopted for the study is Domain of Language Behaviour. The analyses were on the pattern of language use of Omuo dwellers in different domains- in the home, school, workplace, church and market. The study discovered that Omuo, Ahan and Omuooke languages/dialects, which were the major languages/dialects of the people, were less spoken among youths. This portrayed language endangerment. English/Yoruba took the lead in all the domains examined. The researcher, therefore, suggested that parents should be encouraged to transfer their in-group languages to their children in order to avoid language extinction and death.

Language shift in time of war: the abandonment of Russian in Ukraine

ABSTRACT The article demonstrates an impressive shift from Russian to Ukrainian in war-time Ukraine. I rely on nationwide survey data from before and after February 2022 to analyze the scale and structure of the recent change in patterns of language use. I demonstrate not only an impressive shift across the practices but also a larger scale of change in public communication than in private use. Next, I examine responses to a small online survey and focus group discussions in different parts of Ukraine for detailed accounts of different categories of people’s patterns of language use in various practices and explanations of the reasons for change – or continuity – in those patterns. I demonstrate a new phenomenon of the predominant reliance on Ukrainian at work and in other public communication by many people who used to speak predominantly Russian and still keep it as the main language of family use.

넷플릭스 드라마 <킹덤>의 텍스트 분석을 통한 문화이해 방안 연구

This study examines the narrative structure of the Netflix K-drama “Kingdom,” focusing on the progression of events and analysing the patterns of dialogue in situations of fear. The research aims to explore how the textual elements of visual media, beyond linguistic information, can effectively serve as resources for understanding Korean culture. The study moves from a macroscopic to a microscopic analysis, focusing on the discourse in the drama, conversations within these discourses, sentences within the conversations, and specific vocabulary within the sentences to grasp the situational meaning of each event. From a narrative perspective, it examines sociocultural symbols and, from a linguistic perspective, character identities through dialogue analysis and specific vocabulary. Furthermore, sociocultural symbols are linked to social background and spatial perception, while the linguistic aspect focuses on the speaker’s utterances. “Kingdom” showcases distinct patterns of language use across different social classes. In the common social context of ‘fear,’ the context and situational meaning of events experienced by each class can be understood through the utterances and discourse analysis of characters from different social standings. This research, while analysing the narrative structure and dialogue of “Kingdom,” primarily focuses on the thematic aspect of ‘social discourse.’ Set in the Joseon period, “Kingdom” has a clear conflict structure: a power-hungry noble’s greed for the throne, monstrous zombies, and a prince’s struggle to protect the royal authority and save the people. Unlike Western zombie narratives that often portray zombies in a destructive light, “Kingdom” incorporates distinct Korean messages. The conflicts among characters in “Kingdom” are common themes in Korean drama storytelling. However, the narrative construction of overcoming crises in “Kingdom” can highlight the strengths of traditional Korean narratives. This research analyses the situations and intentions of characters in specific crises through “Kingdom,” a K-content text, suggesting that such cultural understanding and text analysis could enable Korean language learners to become interpreters of K-culture. Additionally, by providing richer information about the Korean language and culture, it is expected to contribute to the academic advancement in literacy related to text comprehension.

A multi-dimensional analysis of graduate student writing in two applied science disciplines

Abstract This article reports on a new Multi-dimensional model of graduate student coursework writing in two applied science disciplines from a corpus containing 1,108 texts and 2,008,316 words. The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) revealed five dimensions: (1) Conceptual Information vs. Process-Focused Actions (2) Human/Subjective- vs. Entity/Objective- Focus, (3) Attitudinal Monoglossia vs. Precisely Measured Information, (4) Social vs. Physical Science Approaches, and (5) Speculative vs. Finalized Events. The dimensions are analyzed functionally in terms of both register and discipline. The results demonstrate that course papers exhibit distinct patterns of language use, often attributed to the varying purposes of the texts but also related to disciplinary ways of knowing. Findings have implications for disciplinary writing research and representativeness of student writing corpora while contributing to an exploration of register as a continuous construct. The research provides an enhanced understanding of academic coursework writing for stakeholders such as professors, graduate students, writing consultants. (150 words)

Bilingual Primary Progressive Aphasia: A Scoping Review of Assessment and Treatment Practices.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome characterized by speech and/or language impairment with relatively spared cognition. Research investigating behavioral speech-language intervention and methods for cognitive-linguistic assessment in PPA has predominantly centered around monolingual speakers. This gap hinders the widespread adoption of evidence-based approaches and exacerbates the inequities faced by culturally and linguistically diverse populations living with PPA. This scoping review synthesizes the current evidence for assessment and treatment practices in bilingual PPA as well as the operationalization of bilingualism in PPA. Arksey & O'Malley's scoping review methodology was utilized. Information was extracted from each study and entered into a data-charting template designed to capture information regarding operationalization of bilingualism in PPA and assessment and treatment practices. Of the 16 identified studies, 14 reported the results of assessments conducted in both languages. Three studies reported positive naming treatment outcomes. Thirteen studies included English-speaking participants, revealing linguistic bias. Most studies reported age of acquisition, proficiency, and patterns of language use rather than providing an operational definition for bilingualism. Neither formal assessment measures nor clear guidelines for assessment of bilingual PPA currently exist; however, language-specific measures are emerging. Speech-language intervention in bilingual PPA has been relatively unexplored, representing a significant gap in the literature. In order to improve diagnostic and treatment options for bilingual PPA, targeted efforts to increase representation of bilinguals from various sociocultural contexts, as well as those who speak a variety of language pairs, is necessary.

Discussion of the Use of Concordance Programs in the EFL Classroom

Classroom concordance programs involve the analysis of concordances of language features. The use of concordancers can provide learners analytic skills to manipulate comprehensive databases for the sake of coping with real-language problems. Due to its practicability, the approach has been developed for language teaching in the ELT classroom. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use of concordance programs in the EFL classroom. A great number of studies regarding the use of corpora and the concordancer as a resource in language teaching and learning demonstrate that concordancing as a teaching tool can be effectively used in classroom to meet some specific teaching purposes, and concordance analysis can help students discover and differentiate meanings of words and phrases, identify useful phrases and unfamiliar collocations, explore word order, and distinguish words with similar meanings. Consequently, in the EFL context, a series of concordance exercises can be carried out to assist students to investigate language data and derive patterns of language use. Furthermore, an active pedagogical approach should be oriented to the acquisition of valuable knowledge, to the solution to sophisticated problems and to the development of learning abilities. Based on this, teachers should select the right pedagogical approach to increase students’ motivation, promote their initiative, and guide them into the procedure of knowledge exploration.

Argumentation Mining System for Corpus-based Discourse Analysis based on Structured Arguments

An Argumentation mining system can analyze a large volume of text data through a variety of sources. Nowadays it is highly useful in the areas of business, economics, and finance with digital marketing being the most promising field along with social media. It is the study of corpus-based discourse analysis that involves the automatic identification of argumentative structure in text. Initially, AM talks about extracting structured arguments from natural text, often unstructured or noisy text. Theoretical approaches of AM and pragmatic schemes that satisfy the needs of social media generated data, recognizing the need for adapting more flexible and expandable schemes, capable of adjusting to argumentation conditions that exist in social media. In this scenario it is a very challenging argumentation scheme able to identify the distinct sub-task and capture the needs of social media text, revealing the need for adopting a more flexible and extensible framework. Corpus-based Machine Learning of linguistic annotations has enabled researchers to identify repetitive linguistic patterns of language use and to uncover hidden meaning in all areas of Natural Language Processing.

Language Use and Lingo-Cultural Identity among Linguistically Diverse Young People in Sheger Sub-cities Surrounding the Capital City of Ethiopia

Addis Ababa/Finfinne, the capital of Ethiopia, is currently among the most booming cities in Africa, using Amharic, the Federal working language of the country, as its lingua franca. Afan Oromo, another language with wider usage in the country, is also native to the indigenous Oromo community residing in the Sheger sub-cities surrounding Addis Ababa/Finfinne (SSSAA/F). This study (a) describes patterns of language use and (b) examines if and how the increasing urbanization of Addis Ababa/Finfinne affects language use and lingo-cultural identity among young people residing in SSSAA/F. A combination of descriptive quantitative and qualitative research design involving questionnaires, surveying of official reports, interviews and observation was employed. Data were collected from 151 adolescents (age: M = 18.22, SD = 1.31, range = 10 years; Male = 74, Female = 74) with diverse lingo-cultural backgrounds and analyzed statistically and thematically. Results showed that there has been an increasing pattern of diversity as well as total shifts toward an Amharic-based lingo-cultural identity due to urbanization. Such a phenomenon is only natural in the absence of a language policy that embraces diversity and averts the dominance of a certain lingo-cultural identity at the expense of others. The results, therefore, have policy and practical implications.

Aspectual se and Telicity in Heritage Spanish Bilinguals: The Effects of Lexical Access, Dominance, Age of Acquisition, and Patterns of Language Use

While differences in the production and acceptability of aspectual inflectional morphology between Spanish–English heritage and monolingually raised speakers of Spanish have been argued to support incomplete acquisition approaches to heritage language acquisition, other approaches have argued that differences in access (e.g., lexical access) to representations for receptive and productive purposes are at the core of some of the unique characteristics of heritage language data. We investigate these issues by focusing on the effects of lexical access, dominance, age of acquisition and patterns of language use in heritage Spanish–English bilinguals. We study aspectual se in Spanish, which yields telic interpretations, in expressions such as María se comió la manzana ‘María ate the apple (completely)’ and Maria ate the apple (where completion may not be reached). Our results indicate that se generates telic interpretations for the heritage and monolingually raised group with no group effect. Heritage speakers showed no English effects in terms of lexical access, age of acquisition, patterns of language use or dominance. This suggests that the heritage group did not differ from their monolingually raised counterparts and showed no evidence of incomplete acquisition of telicity.

Linguistic Shift among Ghanaian and Nigerian New English Native Speakers (NENS): Pedagogical Implications

This study adopts a mixed-methods research design, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methodologies, to examine the proficiency of Non-Native English Speakers (NENS) in Ghana and Nigeria with respect to language concord usage. The research focuses on individuals who utilize English as their primary means of communication. A total of four hundred students, equally distributed between Ghana and Nigeria, participate in the study. Quantitative data is acquired through the administration of a survey questionnaire, which explores participants' language backgrounds, patterns of language use, and competence in employing concord and tense structures in English. The overall percentages of correct responses for both countries are computed, yielding approximately 42.65% for Ghana and approximately 39.15% for Nigeria in concord performance. Notably, Ghana exhibits a marginally higher overall percentage of correct responses compared to Nigeria. The findings of this investigation hold significant implications for pedagogy in both nations. To address the observed linguistic challenges in Ghana, the study advocates for the adoption of more communicative and task-based approaches to English language teaching, alongside an increased emphasis on authentic language exposure. The research underscores the pressing need for more effective pedagogical methodologies in instructing English concord usage. English language instructors in Ghana and Nigeria, as well as analogous contexts, are encouraged to acknowledge the identified challenges and devise strategies to enhance language concord instruction.

Impact of patterns of language use and socio-economic status on a constructed response Situational Judgment Test (SJT).

The study explored the impacts of patterns of language use (PLU) and socio-economic status (SES) on Casper, a constructed-response situational judgment test (SJT). 10,266 applicants from two U.S. medical schools were grouped into self-reported balanced bilinguals, unbalanced bilinguals, English monolinguals, and English as a Second Language (ESL) students. A multicomponent SES composite was used to assess the degree of socioeconomic disadvantage (DSD). Results from a hierarchical regression analysis showed that after accounting for demographic variables, both PLU and DED were significant factors on applicants' Casper performance. Bilingualism was associated with better Casper performance compared to English monolinguals and ESL students. No significant effect of speaking English as a native language was found on applicants' Casper performance. English monolinguals and ESL students performed equivalently on Casper. Finally, high DSD was associated with better Casper performance than low DSD, and the impact of DSD on Casper held the same across all four language groups. These findings provide evidence that socio-cultural factors, such as PLU and DSD have important impacts on SJT performance. Further research is needed to understand the role of differences in language construction across socio-cultural factors on constructed-response SJT performance.

Much ado about ontological nihilism

ABSTRACT According to ontological nihilism nothing exists. A recent argument purports to show that this view is indefensible, since its most plausible formulations are tacitly committed to quantificational claims that are inconsistent with the nihilist's view that there aren't any existents. I show that this objection begs the question against the nihilist. The objector's argument relies on an equivalence principle implying that claims which nihilists regard as non-quantificational should nonetheless be interpreted as equivalent to quantified claims, given that both kinds of assertion are assertible in the same contexts. This style of reasoning is supported by considerations of charity, which suggest that similarities in inter-personal patterns of language use provide evidence of similarity in the semantic content of speakers' utterances. However, related considerations also suggest that intra-personal patterns of language use constitute significant semantic evidence of the same kind. When we appreciate this and further recognize that nihilists are disposed to assert the negation of any positive, quantified claim, we see that it is too much to expect principles of semantic interpretation based on considerations of charity to decisively refute nihilism. This result has interesting metametaphysical implications concerning the role and scope of analogous arguments based on principles of interpretive charity.

ChatGPT and Bard exhibit spontaneous citation fabrication during psychiatry literature search

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is a large language model (LLM), which comprises a neural network that has learned information and patterns of language use from large amounts of text on the internet. ChatGPT, introduced by OpenAI, responds to human queries in a conversational manner. Here, we aimed to assess whether ChatGPT could reliably produce accurate references to supplement the literature search process. We describe our March 2023 exchange with ChatGPT, which generated thirty-five citations, two of which were real. 12 citations were similar to actual manuscripts (e.g., titles with incorrect author lists, journals, or publication years) and the remaining 21, while plausible, were in fact a pastiche of multiple existent manuscripts. In June 2023, we re-tested ChatGPT's performance and compared it to that of Google's GPT counterpart, Bard 2.0. We investigated performance in English, as well as in Spanish and Italian. Fabrications made by LLMs, including erroneous citations, have been called “hallucinations”; we discuss reasons for which this is a misnomer. Furthermore, we describe potential explanations for citation fabrication by GPTs, as well as measures being taken to remedy this issue, including reinforcement learning. Our results underscore that output from conversational LLMs should be verified.

Keeping quantifier meaning in mind: Connecting semantics, cognition, and pragmatics

A complete theory of the meaning of linguistic expressions needs to explain their semantic properties, their links to non-linguistic cognition, and their use in communication. Even though in principle interconnected, these areas are generally not pursued in tandem. We present a novel take on the semantics-cognition-pragmatics interface. We propose that formal semantic differences in expressions’ meanings lead those meanings to activate distinct cognitive systems, which in turn have downstream effects on when speakers prefer to use those expressions. As a case study, we focus on the quantifiers “each” and “every”, which can be used to talk about the same state of the world, but have been argued to differ in meaning. In particular, we adopt a mentalistic proposal about these quantifiers on which “each” has a purely individualistic meaning that interfaces with the psychological system for representing object-files, whereas “every” has a meaning that implicates a group and interfaces with the psychological system for representing ensembles. In seven experiments, we demonstrate that this account correctly predicts both known and newly-observed constraints on how “each” and “every” are pragmatically used. More generally, this integrated approach to semantics, cognition, and pragmatics suggests that canonical patterns of language use can be affected in predictable ways by fine-grained differences in semantic meanings and the cognitive systems to which those meanings connect.