Semantic Perspective Research Articles

A corpus-based approach of conceptual metaphors in English and Romanian headlines. A contrastive analysis

The paper presents an analysis of the use of metaphors in headlines, and combines quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis. The approach is contrastive and is corpus based, as I analysed conceptual metaphors in the headlines in two corpora, one in English and one in Romanian. The analysis revealed the similarities and dissimilarities in the use of conceptual metaphors in headlines, the linguistic realisations of conceptual metaphors, the image schema projected by the conceptual metaphors, and their degree of conventionality. It also identified the headlines that used pragmatic and linguistic devices to achieve emotional effects. The first layer of analysis entailed adopting a semantic perspective, while the second layer consisted of adopting a pragmatic perspective. This second layer of analysis delved into social, cultural and contextual aspects. The analysis of the data revealed that conceptual metaphors relied on contrast, transfer and comparison.

Conceptualization of time in Pashto language

Past studies have investigated metaphoric correlations between time and space or objects from cognitive semantic perspective in different anguages, drawing interesting similarities and cultural differences in the conceptualization of time. This paper departs from the existing literature by examining the concept of time in Pashto language from a cognitive semantic perspective based on the theoretical model of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (hereafter CMT) to find out various conceptual etaphors (hereafter CM) for time in Pashto language and poetry. Linguistic data of 150 sentences and clauses were extracted from the Pashto-English dictionary (Zeeya, 2009), Da Ghani Kulyat (Ghani 1985), Dewan Abdur Rahman Baba (Rahman, 1947), Tsraagh (Saqib, 2019) and everyday language on the basis of topical words and phrases conveying the concept of time. The topical words and phrases technique was used to retrieve the clauses or sentences denoting the concept/theme of time. CMT was used to analyze the clauses and sentences to investigate the source domains which structure the abstract concept of time in Pashto. Eight metaphors for the representation of time emerge from the analysis: i) time is object in motion; ii) time is a thing; iii) time is bounded space; iv) moments of time are landmarks in space and past is in the front, while future is at the back; v) time is person; vi) Time is measurable quantity; vii) time is a valuable commodity; and viii) time passing is tasting it. Contrary to English, Pashto speakers locate past time in the front while locating the future at the back. The present paper recommends further studies in Pashto language from cognitive semantic perspective to examine the tenets of CMT in Indo-Iranian languages to investigate its cross-cultural implications.

A Glimpse at the Study of English Neologism

Language is a social phenomenon and changes with the development of society. Neologisms are new words and new expressions which are the cutting edge of language. Neologisms are being invented or introduced every day to express new things and new ideas in society. Scholars usually discuss neologisms from two perspectives: the time perspective and the semantic perspective. Neologisms can be classified according to their functions, their coinage processes, their formation, and their sources. There are three main methods of new word creation: neologisms by rules of word-formation; neologisms by adding new meanings to existing words; neologisms by borrowing words from other languages. Even a single method is quite productive in new word creation.

Les marqueurs illocutionnaires holophrastiques du désaccord

Our focus is on a subclass of discourse markers that we have called “holophrasis” (Galatanu, 1984, 1992, 1997, 2016). We define “holophrasis” from linguistic (syntactic and semantic) and pragmatic criteria (types of language acts, stereotypical contexts, propositional content classes), as prefabricated expressions from a cognitive but also contextual point of view, which: – mark the illocutionary force of an act of speech and the link between that force and a class of contexts in which the act is performed; – incorporate a class of propositional content appropriate to these contexts; – imply the propositional content of the occurrence of the act in situation. From the theoretical perspective of semantics of the argumentative possibilities (Galatanu, 2018), particularly, its extension by a unified semantic approach of Illocutionary forces and their linguistic realizers, we hypothesize that these expressions coming from a pragmaticalization process (Dostie, 2004), have a complex semantics, enriched by the modal complexity of the illocutionary act they perform and by the complexity of the class of discursive contexts to which they refer. This semantics underlies their pragmatic polyfunctionality. We illustrate our theoretical proposition with three holophrasis among those identified as expression of disagreement – ben voyons; allons, allons and et alors/après – and propose a conceptual model (Meunier, 2009) of the illocutionary acts concerned by these expressions.

Social Context-aware Person Search in Videos via Multi-modal Cues

Person search has long been treated as a crucial and challenging task to support deeper insight in personalized summarization and personality discovery. Traditional methods, e.g., person re-identification and face recognition techniques, which profile video characters based on visual information, are often limited by relatively fixed poses or small variation of viewpoints and suffer from more realistic scenes with high motion complexity (e.g., movies). At the same time, long videos such as movies often have logical story lines and are composed of continuously developmental plots. In this situation, different persons usually meet on a specific occasion, in which informative social cues are performed. We notice that these social cues could semantically profile their personality and benefit person search task in two aspects. First, persons with certain relationships usually co-occur in short intervals; in case one of them is easier to be identified, the social relation cues extracted from their co-occurrences could further benefit the identification for the harder ones. Second, social relations could reveal the association between certain scenes and characters (e.g., classmate relationship may only exist among students), which could narrow down candidates into certain persons with a specific relationship. In this way, high-level social relation cues could improve the effectiveness of person search. Along this line, in this article, we propose a social context-aware framework, which fuses visual and social contexts to profile persons in more semantic perspectives and better deal with person search task in complex scenarios. Specifically, we first segment videos into several independent scene units and abstract out social contexts within these scene units. Then, we construct inner-personal links through a graph formulation operation for each scene unit, in which both visual cues and relation cues are considered. Finally, we perform a relation-aware label propagation to identify characters’ occurrences, combining low-level semantic cues (i.e., visual cues) and high-level semantic cues (i.e., relation cues) to further enhance the accuracy. Experiments on real-world datasets validate that our solution outperforms several competitive baselines.

Governance and stewardship for research data and information sharing: Issues and prospective solutions in the transdisciplinary plant phenotyping and imaging research center network

Societal Impact StatementHigh‐throughput plant phenotyping is a transdisciplinary field of research that provides a systematic approach to assessing and understanding the life cycle of plants and aims to integrate plant genotype with plant ecophysiology and agronomy. Sharing data and information (D&I) is key to accelerating new scientific breakthroughs and innovations in plant phenotyping. The development of a governance and stewardship framework can overcome institutional, legal, and technical barriers that limit D&I sharing. This framework governs how decisions are made about D&I, how researchers engage with each other to manage D&I, and improves the content, discoverability, accessibility, and usability of D&I from different sources.Summary Despite the widely acknowledged value to be added by sharing research data and information (D&I), significant institutional, legal, and technical barriers remain to be addressed, particularly in managing transdisciplinary research. The Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) offers an illuminating case study in how various researchers are exchanging their D&I to accommodate the requirements of transdisciplinary research. Using social network analysis to explore the current state of D&I sharing in P2IRC, we found that D&I sharing was modest, with most exchanges taking place between academic researchers and predominantly within the same discipline. Lacking benefits arising from broader dissemination, scholars are not optimally sharing their D&I. Many researchers identified a range of barriers that limited sharing. These barriers are mainly rooted in the absence of D&I governance and stewardship. To overcome barriers, we offer recommendations and solutions for developing a governance and stewardship framework that is tailored to the P2IRC project, but relevant to the wider research world. This includes how to assist adoption of a governance model, accountability and oversight mechanisms, and an operational framework for effective data collection, analysis, possession, and dissemination. We provide recommendations that enable data stewards to preserve and improve the content, discoverability accessibility, and usability of data and metadata by making data interoperable from semantic, syntactic/technical, and legal perspectives. A governance framework would help open all aspects of research outputs, while achieving the access and benefit‐sharing (ABS) goal and contributing to the preservation and sustainable use of D&I.

As denominações para libélula, no Atlas Linguístico do Brasil: um estudo sobre a motivação dos signos

The names attributed to the libelula (dragonfly), - long, thin body insect, with four transparent wings, which flies and hits the back in the water - Question 85 of the QSL of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil, they exemplify the complex variational system of the lexicon of Brazilian Portuguese (PB), reflecting facts from the socio-history of each region and, even, each location and each individual. The variants registered in ALiB, in the capitals, suggest that the insect’s name is, in general, of metaphorical basis, motivated by its physical aspect, sound, movements and, equally, through mental associations/analogies with similar ones, resulting, in most cases, in transparent signs. In order to ratify or, perhaps, rectify the results of the capitals, in this work, we analyzed the data collected in the interior of the country from 900 informants, making a total of 225 locations. With the support of this corpus, guided by the theoretical and methodological principles of Lexicography and Semantics, we aim to: (i) verify the dictionary entries of the forms obtained; (ii) describe the variants in terms of morphological aspects; and (iii) analyze these denominations from the perspective of motivational semantics.

Comparative analysis of the adverb very and 很 in the Russian and Chinese languages

This article describes the similarities and differences between the Russian adverb “very” and the Chinese adverb 很. The object of this research is the adverb very and 很 in the Russian and Chinese languages. The subject is the comparative study of the Russian adverb “very” and Chinese adverb 很 from the perspective of their meaning and semantic compatibility. The goal of this article lies in the comparative analysis of the adverbs of extent “very” and 很, determination of their semantic and compatible characteristics. For achieving the set goal, the author employs the descriptive method, comparative analysis, and confirmation by example. The scientific novelty of lies in comparative study of the adverbs of extent “very” and 很 in the Russian and Chinese languages based on numerous examples. The author compare the adverbs of extent “very” and 很 in the Russian and Chinese languages from the perspective of semantics and compatibility in order to reveal similarities and differences between them. The conducted research of theoretical provisions and linguistic material allows concluding that despite the conjunction of semantics of the adverbs “very” and 很, they cannot be considered equivalent; the use of these adverbs requires taking into account the similarities and differences in the area of semantics and compatibility.

ПРЕДИКАТИТЕ ЗА СЪСТОЯНИЕ В СЪВРЕМЕННИТЕ ЛИНГВИСТИЧНИ ТЕОРИИ (I) / STATIVE PREDICATES IN CONTEMPORARY LINGUISTIC THEORIES (I)

This paper presents a critical overview of thematic classes of stative verbs. To this end, we analyse three well-known thematic classifications of stative verb classes. While the main focus is on the works by Paducheva (1996; 2004), Spencer and Zaretskaya (2003) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), where relevant we comment on research by other authors. The goal of the study is to shed light on the different views regarding the properties of stative predicates from an aspectual and semantic perspective and to outline the main thematic classes that fall into the category of statives. Keywords: stative predicates, semantic typology, thematic classes and subclasses

Metaphoric and Metonymic Operations for the Iron Expressions

This study uses the word iron as an example to analyze the phenomena of meaning extensions and function shifts from a cognitive semantic perspective. The analysis shows that the meaning extensions of iron, which are systematic and motivated, are present at three word class levels: nouns, adjectives and verbs. The nominal extensions are systematically connected to the parent noun by the metonymy of THE MATERIAL CONSTITUTING AN OBJECT FOR THE OBJECT. The adjectival extensions are motivated by the metonymy of CATEGORY FOR PROPERTY. The verbal extensions are mainly stemmed from the noun extensions and motivated by the metonymy chains of THE MATERIAL CONSTITUTING AN OBJECT FOR THE OBJECT and INSTRUMENT FOR ACTION. The extensions for the phrasal verb iron out are motivated by both the metonymy chains mentioned above and the metaphors of DIFFERENCES ARE WRINKLES, DIFFICULITIES ARE WRINKLES, and PLANS ARE WRINKLES.

The journey of Jephthah’s daughter: On spatial cognition, body and language in Judges 11:37

The traditional literal interpretation of the text in Judges 11:37 shows exceptional variation in topographic depiction. The literal interpretation of Driver, published in Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, is an example. From a linguistic perspective, no attention was paid whatsoever to the relation of interiority between an objective body and an objective space. This article proposes a cognitive semantic perspective and argues that the motion-path verb ירד (yrd) in Judges 11:37 carries a metaphorical meaning, and the linguistic processing, that is, the metaphorical mapping of the image schematic structure of CHANGE (up-down) as the source domain onto that of BEHAVIOUR as the target domain, involving activation of cultural spatial and bodily systems. With this background in mind, Judges 11:37 represents a new understanding for similar UP-DOWN image schemas applied in the Hebrew Bible.Contribution: This article contributes to the understanding of the apparent ‘inexact’ sense of the use of ירד (yrd) in Judges 11:37.

Discourse anaphoricity and first-person indexicality in emoji resolution

This paper proposes a formal semantic classification of emoji-text combinations, focusing on two core sets of emoji: face emoji and activity emoji. Based on different data sources (introspective intuitions, naturalistic Twitter examples, and experimental evidence), we argue that activity emoji (case study I) are essentially event descriptions that serve as separate discourse units (similar to free adjuncts) and connect to the accompanying text by virtue of suitable discourse relations. By contrast, face emoji (case study II) are expressive elements that are anchored to an attitude holder and comment on a proposition provided by the accompanying text. We conclude by revisiting emoji semantics from the perspective of formal gesture semantics: we probe interactions of emoji and texts that contain clausal negation, and conclude that emoji generally do not scope under negation; however, the appearance of such a scope relation arises when activity emoji are connected to the accompanying text by virtue of an Explanation discourse relation.

On the discursive construction of the multiple meanings of francophonie/francophone viewed through the prism of argumentative semantics

This paper addresses the issue of polysemy, and more precisely of multiple meanings in the case of the words francophonie/francophone from the perspective of argumentative semantics. The aim of the paper is to examine the mechanisms that account for the multiple meanings of francophonie/francophone, i.e. the semantic and discursive mechanisms involved in the (re)construction of lexical meaning as the words occur in discourse. The data analysed in this paper consists of a set of discourse fragments about francophone identity, discourses that vary according to the speaker, the geographical location and the media support. The study is carried out within the framework of the SAP theory (Semantics of Argumentative Possibilities), following a procedure based on a pre-built reference meaning – i.e. a description of the argumentative potential of the lexeme – that will be used when analysing the discursive occurrences. First, the paper briefly presents the SAP theory and the pre-built reference meaning of the lexemes francophonie/francophone (described in terms of core-elements, stereotypes and argumentative possibilities). It then illustrates several discursive mechanisms of meaning construction. The analysis highlights a series of meaning construction mechanisms: transgressive activation of the argumentative potential, reconfiguration by scission of the core-elements or by deletion of one of the elements, modality addition, transgressive reconstruction of the core meaning, and finally core circularity. Thus, the paper indicates, from the perspective of argumentative semantics, that the multiple meanings of the words francophonie/francophone, i.e. the various semantic configurations attached to these words, can be seen as reconfigurations of a single lexical meaning.

Identification and characterization of nested-abbreviated terms in scientific discourse

Abstract This paper analyzes nested-abbreviated terms from a linguistic perspective by describing their morphological, syntactic, and semantic features for terminology purposes. Nested-abbreviated terms can be considered as abbreviated forms, either initialisms or acronyms, which have within their meaning another abbreviated term. To carry out the analysis, 433 nested-abbreviated terms were extracted from two specialized dictionaries in English. Data analysis showed that, from the morphological and semantic perspective, nested-abbreviated terms behave like typical abbreviations. Important differences were found from a syntactic standpoint where nested abbreviated terms behave as premodifiers in the noun phrase (NP) in 98.93% of the cases. As this is the first time nested-abbreviated terms are studied, they were not only described but also analyzed and defined. Although the percentage of nested-abbreviated terms obtained from the dictionaries is relatively low, less than 1% of total abbreviations, it was found that it is highly relevant to study this growing phenomenon in specialized languages for terminology extraction, as well as for other purposes.

How did micro-mobility change in response to COVID-19 pandemic? A case study based on spatial-temporal-semantic analytics

Cities worldwide adopted lockdown policies in response to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), significantly influencing people's travel behavior. In particular, micro-mobility, an emerging mode of urban transport, is profoundly shaped by this crisis. However, there is limited research devoted to understanding the rapidly evolving trip patterns of micro-mobility in response to COVID-19. To fill this gap, we analyze the changes in micro-mobility usage before and during the lockdown period exploiting high-resolution micro-mobility trip data collected in Zurich, Switzerland. Specifically, docked bike, docked e-bike, and dockless e-bike are evaluated and compared from the perspective of space, time and semantics. First, the spatial and temporal analysis results uncover that the number of trips decreased remarkably during the lockdown period. The striking difference between the normal and lockdown period is the decline in the peak hours of workdays. Second, the origin-destination flows are used to construct spatially embedded networks. The results suggest that the origin-destination pairs remain similar during the lockdown period, while the numbers of trips between each origin-destination pair is reduced due to COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the semantic analysis is conducted to uncover the changes in trip purpose. It is revealed that the proportions of Home, Park, and Grocery activities increase, while the proportions of Leisure and Shopping activities decrease during the lockdown period. The above results can help planners and policymakers better make evidence-based policies regarding micro-mobility in the post-pandemic society.

Constructions in competition: The development of the impersonal verb hunger and the adjectival periphrasis be hungry in Early Modern English

ABSTRACT The present study is concerned with the syntactic and semantic development of the impersonal verb hunger in Early Modern English. An analysis of corpus data has been carried out on ca. 20 million words drawn from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700). Results show that, from a semantic perspective, the verb hunger undergoes a process of metaphorical extension involving a change from the original meaning ‘to feel hunger’, in the domain of Physical Sensation, to the meaning ‘to desire’, in the domain of Emotion. In this latter sense, the verb becomes predominantly associated with prepositional complements (e.g. 1542, our hungry soules [...] hunger for y^ word of God). Also in the course of the Early Modern period, the verb is subject to competition with the adjectival periphrasis be hungry, especially in the sense ‘to feel hunger’. The article concludes by putting forward hypotheses to explain the motivations for these various developments.

Usage Patterns and Meanings of High-Frequency English Verbs: A Multi-Word Expression Approach to Japanese High School EFL Textbook Analysis

This article aims to classify the overall uses of high-frequency English verbs in a novel methodology from both a pattern and meaning perspective, which has not be done in previous studies, with special reference to TAKE and MAKE. In the pattern-based analysis, all occurrences of these two verbs were collected from Japanese EFL textbook corpus, and the usage patterns of the extracted two target verbs were categorized into three major multi-word expression types: phrasal verbs, grammatical collocations, and lexical collocations. To further investigate the patterns of uses, some multi-word units consisting of three to seven words were identified as either semi-fixed expressions or fixed expressions. After the pattern-based classification, all the multi-word expressions identified were analyzed from a semantic perspective. This analysis revealed the new finding that all uses of TAKE (352) and MAKE (374) obtained from the corpus could be successfully classified into the three major multi-word expression categories. With respect to the pattern, the proportion of major multi-word expression categories showed similar results; lexical collocations were the most frequent, and phrasal verbs were the least frequent in both target verbs’ usage. In terms of meanings, the uses of TAKE were classified in a larger number of semantic categories (42) than MAKE (25). The obtained results have an implication that the novel methodology employed in this study is a valid way to the further investigation of the usage of high-frequency English verbs.

<em>Being tall compared to</em> compared to being tall and being taller

This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (Alice is tall compared to Bob) and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (Alice is taller than Bob) and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form (Alice is tall). We consider evidence from two experiments that tested judgments about these three kinds of sentence, and provide a semantics for implicit comparatives from the perspective of degree semantics.

On the Limitations of Visual-Semantic Embedding Networks for Image-to-Text Information Retrieval.

Visual-semantic embedding (VSE) networks create joint image–text representations to map images and texts in a shared embedding space to enable various information retrieval-related tasks, such as image–text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering. The most recent state-of-the-art VSE-based networks are: VSE++, SCAN, VSRN, and UNITER. This study evaluates the performance of those VSE networks for the task of image-to-text retrieval and identifies and analyses their strengths and limitations to guide future research on the topic. The experimental results on Flickr30K revealed that the pre-trained network, UNITER, achieved 61.5% on average Recall@5 for the task of retrieving all relevant descriptions. The traditional networks, VSRN, SCAN, and VSE++, achieved 50.3%, 47.1%, and 29.4% on average Recall@5, respectively, for the same task. An additional analysis was performed on image–text pairs from the top 25 worst-performing classes using a subset of the Flickr30K-based dataset to identify the limitations of the performance of the best-performing models, VSRN and UNITER. These limitations are discussed from the perspective of image scenes, image objects, image semantics, and basic functions of neural networks. This paper discusses the strengths and limitations of VSE networks to guide further research into the topic of using VSE networks for cross-modal information retrieval tasks.

Metafora dalam Lirik Lagu “Mendarah” oleh Nadin Amizah

The use of literary techniques such as metaphor is commonly found in imaginative writing such as song lyrics. In addition, metaphors can enrich the aesthetic and atmospheric elements in a musical work. This study aims to discuss the element of metaphor in the lyrics of the song "Mendarah" by Nadin Amizah. This research is a qualitative research with descriptive method. Data collection techniques were carried out through observation and note-taking methods. Data analysis was carried out using a direct-directed content analysis method. Analysis of the use of metaphors in the lyrics of this song can be implied in the semantic perspective. The results of this study indicate that there are 3 explicit metaphors (in praesentia) and implicit metaphors (in absentia) in the song "Mendarah". The selection of explicit metaphors (in praesentia) and implicit metaphors (in absentia) have been proportioned in such a way as to produce songs that are not only good to listen to, but also able to convey the message contained in them.