Semantic Paradigm Research Articles

Lexical and semantic connections in number words translation

The present study investigated the influence of lexical links and conceptual mediation in number word translation. In four experiments, a semantic blocking paradigm was used with numerical stimuli and stimuli from other non-number categories. The performance of Spanish L1–English L2 bilinguals was examined in backward and forward translation (Experiment 1 and 3), in naming Arabic digits and pictures (Experiment 2A) and in reading L1 and L2 words (Experiment 2B). The blocked context produced a facilitatory effect for numerical stimuli in the lower range. This result contrasts with the interference effect observed for stimuli from non-number categories in translation and naming tasks. These results are interpreted to mean that the translation of number words, particularly those in the lower range of the numeric sequence, takes place with a large influence of the lexical connections. It supports the suggestions that the influence of processing routes depends on the type of items.

TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF SEMANTIC DERIVATION MODELS. A CASE OF MENTAL ENGROSSMENT VOCABULARY

The paper focuses on the semantic derivation models of mental engrossment vocabulary – a semantic class of words that denote the mental state of a person absorbed (lost, buried, plunged, etc.) in thought, memories, dreams, etc. The study shows the characteristics of the development of a mental engrossment vocabulary semantic paradigm from a cross-linguistic perspective and reveals the semantic derivation models of engrossment adjectives in the English and Polish languages. Semantic derivation modelling provided in the paper proceeds from the assumption that the development of a linguistic item semantic paradigm is realised simultaneously with a situation concept extension. The extension of the concept is supposed to be determined by the changes the participants undergo within the source-to-target-situations transitions (shifts). The participants of the source situation may change their role, referential, communicative, taxonomic or deictic characteristics as compared to those in the target one. The changes determine the types (models) of derivational strategies that underlie the development of a linguistic item’s semantic paradigm. The semantic development construed by the English and Polish engrossment adjectives suggests the regular way of a concept extension – from the internal domain (the situation of mental engrossment) towards the external domains (the situations of identification, association, evaluation, etc.). The study concludes that engrossment adjectives in English and Polish may apply to the actantial (based on the increase of the situation participants), implicative (based on the implications of the situation participants’ changes) and categorical (based on the situation participants’ taxonomic class specifications) models of semantic derivation.

El concepto de colocación a la luz de las colocaciones del tipo verbo más locución adverbial

In this paper we discuss the characteristics that are habitually assigned to collocations: binarism, belonging to the norm and arbitrariness and show that these properties do not in fact define them. 1) The binary relationship between the base and the collocate is contradicted by the possibility of combining the same collocate with a number of bases. 2) The assumption that collocations belong to the norm is refuted by the existence of semantic paradigms formed by bases which combine with the same lexical unit: the collocate. 3) The very existence of semantic paradigms is not an arbitrary phenomenon, but rather, a consequence of the meaning of the units that constitute them, the bases, one of whose semantic features forms part of the meaning of the collocate. Thus, we can conclude that collocations are radial syntagmatic structures in which one semantic feature of the collocate determines its combination with a lexical class of units, bases, which share the same feature.

A Critical Linguistic analysis of the representation of Muslims in The New York Times

The aim of this study is to shed light on recurring lexical and syntactic features that contribute to a stereotyped image of out-groups in newspapers. The focus of the study is on articles relating to Muslims in The New York Times. The analysis is based on the analytic paradigm of Critical Linguistics (CL) and Corpus Semantics (CS). The results show that the linguistic features analysed point to a systematic ‘othering’ and stereotyping of Muslims as compared to other participants. The study concludes with a discussion on how the grammatical features examined work together to project a stereotyped image of Muslims and how the analytical method of Critical Linguistics (CL) copes with a quantitative analysis of a great deal of randomly chosen data from a corpus consisting of newspapers from the New York Times.

The effects of semantic congruency: a research of audiovisual P300-speller

BackgroundOver the past few decades, there have been many studies of aspects of brain–computer interface (BCI). Of particular interests are event-related potential (ERP)-based BCI spellers that aim at helping mental typewriting. Nowadays, audiovisual unimodal stimuli based BCI systems have attracted much attention from researchers, and most of the existing studies of audiovisual BCIs were based on semantic incongruent stimuli paradigm. However, no related studies had reported that whether there is difference of system performance or participant comfort between BCI based on semantic congruent paradigm and that based on semantic incongruent paradigm.MethodsThe goal of this study was to investigate the effects of semantic congruency in system performance and participant comfort in audiovisual BCI. Two audiovisual paradigms (semantic congruent and incongruent) were adopted, and 11 healthy subjects participated in the experiment. High-density electrical mapping of ERPs and behavioral data were measured for the two stimuli paradigms.ResultsThe behavioral data indicated no significant difference between congruent and incongruent paradigms for offline classification accuracy. Nevertheless, eight of the 11 participants reported their priority to semantic congruent experiment, two reported no difference between the two conditions, and only one preferred the semantic incongruent paradigm. Besides, the result indicted that higher amplitude of ERP was found in incongruent stimuli based paradigm.ConclusionsIn a word, semantic congruent paradigm had a better participant comfort, and maintained the same recognition rate as incongruent paradigm. Furthermore, our study suggested that the paradigm design of spellers must take both system performance and user experience into consideration rather than merely pursuing a larger ERP response.

THE FUNCTIONAL AND PRAGMATIC PECULIARITIES OF THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES AND CULTURAL ENVIRONMENTS (on the descriptive material of Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, English)

The article attempts to outline some characteristics of the selected Ukrainian-Russian-Polish-English anthropocentric phraseological units. The author strives to show a significant role of anthropocentric phraseological units in the representation of a cultural mentality, as well as in reflecting the national and cultural identity. The investigated examples are grouped into several paradigms, each reflecting a special human trait. It is the first attempt to draw parallels as well contrasts between phraseolo-gisms in a given semantic paradigm both in related Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and non-related English languages. The attempt has been done to learn and understand the national spirit of the certain ethnic group through anthropocentric phraseological units. This is one of the first attempts when these four languages – Polish, English, Russian and Ukrainian, have been compared in the certain paradigms of anthropocentric phraseologisms reflecting the national and cultural identity in order to capture the spirit of the target language. It is essential for effective cross-cultural communication because the national and cultural factors of a single speech environment significantly affect not only the elements of the communicative code, but they are also important in the communication process with all its components, i.e. principles, maxims, rules of communication, communication strategies and tactics.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.30.17724

Videogames between ethics and politics

Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them, requiring a pedagogic reflection, aiming at specific juxtapositions and complexity. They force us to review the semantic paradigms of ethics and politics, as they lead us into scenarios of increased reality, characterised by played temporality, constantly changing, passing from a synchronic visionary dimension, even to a temporality that goes backwards, recovering memories that have often never belonged to the person/videogamer beforehand.

The effect of semantic congruence for visual-auditory bimodal stimuli.

It is commonly believed that brain has faster reaction speed and higher reaction accuracy on visual-auditory bimodal stimuli than single modal stimuli in current neuropsychological researches, while visual-auditory bimodal stimuli (VABS) do not show corresponding superiority in BCI system. This paper aims at investigating whether semantically congruent stimuli could also get better performance than semantically incongruent stimuli in Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system. Two VABS based paradigms (semantically congruent or incongruent) were conducted in this study. 10 healthy subjects participated in the experiment in order to compare the two paradigms. The results indicated that the higher Event-related potential (ERP) amplitude of semantic incongruent paradigm were observed both in target and non-target stimuli. Nevertheless, we didn't observe significant difference of classification accuracy between congruent and incongruent conditions. Most participants showed their preference on semantically congruent condition for less workload needed. This finding demonstrated that semantic congruency has positive effect on behavioral results (less workload) and insignificant effect on system efficiency.

Algorithmic Theories of Problems. A Constructive and a Non-Constructive Approach

In this paper we examine two approaches to the formal treatment of the notion of problem in the paradigm of algorithmic semantics. Namely, we will explore an approach based on Martin-Lof’s Constructive Type Theory (CTT), which can be seen as a direct continuation of Kolmogorov’s original calculus of problems, and an approach utilizing Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL), which can be viewed as a non-constructive attempt of interpreting Kolmogorov’s logic of problems. In the last section we propose Kolmogorov and CTT-inspired modifications to TIL-based approach. The focus will be on non-empirical (i.e., mathematical and logical) problems only.

Deverbal nominals derived from intransitive state verbs in isiXhosa: A Generative Lexicon approach

The relationship between deverbative noun classification and the semantic meaning of the derived deverbal nominal has been the focus of many studies in linguistics from very divergent perspectives. This article maintains that the descriptive analysis of deverbal nominals in Bantu languages does not fully interrogate the predicate argument structure of the verbs that host these deverbal nominals. An investigation of how the syntactic properties of verbs from which deverbal nominals are derived is invoked within the paradigm of decompositional lexical semantics so as to explain the argument structure, event structure and qualia properties of deverbal nominals. This is demonstrated in this article, firstly, by the Bantu languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Secondly, this article explores the descriptive nature of deverbal nominals as they manifest themselves either inflectionally or derivationally in the South African Bantu languages, with emphasis on isiXhosa. Thirdly, deverbal nominals drawing on Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon paradigm are analysed. Lastly, the findings of the analyses of deverbal nominals derived from intransitive state verbs demonstrate the need for further research on deverbal nominals.

From guidelines to decision-making: using mobile applications and semantic web in the practical case of guides to support patients

The use of guidelines, procedures and recommendations is very common and also a simple way to structure, organize and retrieve relevant information that, in turn, may impact on patient care. However, it is necessary to expedite the retrieval of stored information. By simplifying the access to the desired data, it is possible to make the process practical, fast and intuitive for the health professional. The main goal of this article is to present a development approach for a project that proposes decision-making tools, based on guidelines, to assist health professionals in the care process of patients with specific diseases (or a combination of them). These tools will be developed for use on mobile devices and as a web-based system, which will transform a passive and declarative manual into an interactive tool that will provide not only data and information, but also knowledge through semantic web paradigm. Further, we will show an example of usability and feasibility of the proposed application through a functional prototype developed for Android platform.

ЗІСТАВНИЙ АНАЛІЗ СЕМАНТИЧНИХ ПАРАДИГМ БРИТАНСЬКИХ ТА АМЕРИКАНСЬКИХ НОМІНАЦІЙ ПРОСТОРУ

The article provides a contrastive analysis of the semantic paradigms – thematical groups and semantic series of the British and American cultural linguistic space representations. The aim of the article is to select the thematical groups with the highest territorial and functional variativity linked to the problem of developing functional semantics in both compared variants of English. The contrastive analysis of the thematical groups of the British and American nominations of natural spaces reveals the highest development of functional semantics in the names of valleys and water spaces; the highest territorial and functional semantic variativity is observed in the names of artificial spaces, for example, those of communications. Thematical group reducing takes place in the process of space names desemantization, and their increasing is typical of lexico-semantic variants of other thematical groups, borrowings and homonyms, the words of different functional styles of English.

Basic discriminative and semantic processing in patients in the vegetative and minimally conscious state

Patients who survive injuries to the brain following accidents or diseases often acquire a disorder of consciousness (DOC). Assessment of the state of consciousness in these patients is difficult since they are usually incapable of reproducible motor movements. The application of event-related potentials (ERP) recorded via EEG constitutes one promising approach to complement the assessment of cognitive functions in DOC patients. For these assessments, a hierarchical approach was suggested which means that paradigms aiming at higher order ERPs are only presented if early responses were found. In this study, 19 behaviorally unresponsive or low-responsive DOC patients were presented with three auditory paradigms using passive instructions. The paradigms aimed at eliciting the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and N400 and were applied at two time points. One oddball paradigm (MMN) and two semantic paradigms (word-pairs: N400 Words; sentences: N400 Sentences) were included. The majority of patients (n=15) did not show any response to the stimulation. In the MMN paradigm, an MMN was identified in two patients, in the N400 Words paradigm, only an N1 was identified in one patient, and in the N400 Sentences paradigm, a late positive complex (LPC) was identified in two patients. These data contradict the hierarchical approach since the LPC was identified in patients who did not exhibit an MMN. They further support the notion that even higher information processing as addressed with the N400 paradigms is preserved in a minority of DOC patients. Thus, in this sample, around 10% of the DOC patients exhibited indicators of preserved consciousness.

Развитие купеческого предпринимательства на Русском Севере в XVIII веке в аспекте идеи нестяжания (на материале исторической прозы)

The article studies the most important paradigm of the existence of entrepreneurship in Russia – the idea of poverty on the basis of analysis of literary and historical sources that contains descriptions of the events of the merchant environment in the Russian North. It is illustrated by the historiographic overview of texts-sources of the XVIII century. In the analysis of the narrative intentions of the Northern Russian historiography we can clearly identify semantic strategy – existential model of life as a debt (responsibility, obligation), love (kindness, mercy, unity, catholicity), faith (trust in a higher principle, faith, hope), and sacrifice (dedication, donations, help, support). All these vital vectors intersect in the semantic space of historical essays and emanate from a single semantic paradigm of “poverty”. These principles have a great influence on the development of the business environment in Russia. From the standpoint of the theory of everyday life it is important to explore historical documents in the framework of the semiotic approach and reveal the specific social actions and communicative acts in them. The literary fact is fixed in culture, while continuing to live in the space of this culture in the form of characters, plots, motives. And this literary sign always points to another sign, leading in turn to a new, hidden sign of the culture. The research intention in this case is directed towards the interpretation of a text sign, opening the code and the comprehension of cultural meaning. In this context, the signs and meanings of historical documentary sources are not just verbal constructions, but the complex cultural forms which keep all strata and sections of past cultural epochs and fixed “nobiological collec- tive memory” (Lotman). In addition, studying historical texts it is necessary to consider the modern anthropological theory of culture, in which the latter is regarded as a value space (C. Geertz).

Effects of the Relative Word Frequency and Spelling-to-Sound Correspondency of the Heterographic Homophone Priming on Semantically Related Word Recognition

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of relative word frequency and the spelling-to-sound correspondence of heregoraphic homophone priming on the recognition of semanticallyrelated words. A cross-modal semantic paradigm has been applied, where homophone primes were presented auditorily and targets were presented visually. The difference in lexical decision latencies of the visual targets was calculated between semantically-related prime and semantically-unrelated prime to measure the size of facilitation. A facilitatory effect was shown only when the spelling corresponds to sound, and no such effect was observed for the relative word frequency condition. These findings indicated that an auditorily presented homophone activates all of its corresponding orthographic words and that the spelling-to-sound correspondence is more influential than the relative word frequency for homophone recognition.

A Novel Approach to Managing the Dynamic Nature of Semantic Relatedness

This research proposes a novel method of measuring the dynamics of semantic relatedness. Research on semantic relatedness has a long history in the fields of computational linguistics, psychology, computer science, as well as information systems. Computing semantic relatedness has played a critical role in various situations, such as data integration and keyword recommendation. Many researchers have tried to propose more sophisticated techniques to measure semantic relatedness. However, little research has considered the change of semantic relatedness with the flow of time and occurrence of events. The authors' proposed method is validated by actual corpus data collected from a particular context over a specific period of time. They test the feasibility of our proposed method by constructing semantic networks by using the corpus collected during a different period of time. The experiment results show that our method can detect and manage the changes in semantic relatedness between concepts. Based on the results, the authors discuss the need for a dynamic semantic relatedness paradigm.

Participant-internal Possibility Modality and It’s Coding by - A Bil Analytical Construction in Kazakh

This paper discusses the semantic paradigm of the participant-internal possibility modality as a subcategory of modality and it’s coding in Kazakh with –A bil analytical construction. We will show that –A bil expresses all semantic properties of participant-internal possibility modality such as inherent/ learnt and mental/physical. Therefore constitutes the core of the functional-semantic field of the given modality. The paper also accounts for the relation of –A bil in modal usage with other category operators such as aspect, tense and voice. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s2p211

Self-organising Logic of Structures as a Basis for a Dependency-based Dynamic Semantics Model

Self-organising Logic of Structures as a Basis for a Dependency-based Dynamic Semantics ModelWe present Self-organising Logic of Structures (SLS), a semantic representation language of high expressive power, which was designed for a fully compositional representation of discourse anaphora following the Dynamic Semantics paradigm. The application of SLS to the description of possible meanings of Polish multiple quantifier sentences is discussed. Special attention is paid to the phenomena of: cardinality dependency/independency of Noun Phrase quantifiers and variety of quantification. Semantic representation based on several formal operators is proposed. They can be combined in many different ways, if one takes a purely theoretical perspective. However, in the paper we show that this huge number is practically reduced in the language use and is governed by several constraints motivated by the analysis of Polish language data. The Hypothesis of Local Range of Cardinality Dependency is formulated as an alternative to representations based on quantifier rising technique. SLS provides a multi-layered language description of inter-linked representation of sever antification, reference, presupposition and anaphora.

The corpus-based identification of cross-lectal synonyms in pluricentric languages

This article discusses a corpus-based method for the automatic identification of synonyms across different varieties of the same language. This method, based on the paradigm of distributional semantics, quantifies semantic similarity on the basis of contextual similarity in two comparable corpora. In two case studies for Dutch and German, we show that it automatically identifies the correct synonym for 31% and 25% of the target words, respectively. A manual error analysis moreover indicates that many additional synonyms are very close in the distributional model, while most other distributional neighbours are semantically related to the target word along other dimensions than synonymy. On the basis of these results, we argue that distributional-semantic methods can play a crucial role in the further evolution of corpus-based lexical semantics to a more quantitative discipline.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PHRASEOSEMANTIC GROUP «BUSUNESS PARTICIPANTS» IN RUSSIAN AND POLISH LANGUAGE»

The article in question deals with the notions of the phraseological units (PhU), phraseological and semantic paradigm Attention is being focused upon the concept of business subject. The authors of this paper have elaborated the classification of the relevant topic using semantic, structural, functional and pragmatic criteria. The valid conclusions are presented herein. PhU under analysis have much in common in terms of convergence. Their divergence is objectivized by certain extralinguistic factors. Business subject PhU are considered on the vector of imaginary motivation. Topical PhU are polyaspected and polymodal for they fulfill nominative identifying functional, pragmatic, expressive and valuative functions. Some of PhU are of borrowed nature due to international cooperation with people speaking English. The scientific validity of this paper consists in its novelty and the efforts to typologically identify the notion of business subjects in the Slavonic languages (Russian and Polish).