Semantic Profiles Research Articles

Profile semantyczne przyjaciela i wroga w polsko-, rosyjsko- i niemieckojęzycznym obrazie świata

The article aims at reconstructing and comparing the cultural meanings contained in the concepts friend and enemy. To achieve the objective, the author referred to research methodologies elaborated by cognitive linguists. Particularly useful were those approaches which emphasize the necessity of including both the role of cognitive processes in descriptions of language and its historical, cultural and social underpinnings. In such approaches, questionnaires and surveys are accepted as sources of empirical data. In the current study, an analysis of the specific connotations attached to the concepts friend and enemy in Polish, German and Russian is performed. The obtained results allow for creating a hierarchy of the criteria that speakers of the three languages take into consideration, and for establishing significant similarities and differences between the Polish, German and Russian semantic profiles of the two concepts.

Social Content of Psychological Specialists’ Professional Activity

The study defines two main research areas of ideas about a rescuer psychologist. The first area is devoted to the issue of creating social representations about the specialist psychologist and his/her relations with representatives of other professional groups. The other area is represented by works focused on the direct analysis of the profession of psychologist, specific peculiarities of professional activity and personal characteristics of the psychologist. It is indicated that the study of the representations about rescuer psychologist’ involves collective consciousness, and the main direction that allows to solve the reconstruction problem of idea about a rescuer psychologist in the system of categories and conceptual coordinates is psychosemantics. For this purpose, the method of associative experiment defines the basic constructs used by the population to evaluate the representation about a psychologist. The obtained words associations were used to develop a method of semantic scaling of the concept "Psychologist". The research has constructed the semantic profiles of perception of a civilian psychologist and a rescuer psychologist, their most pronounced characteristics were defined. With the help of multidimensional scaling the place of rescuer psychologist in psychosemantic space of psychologists of different kinds of activity was determined. Thus, the rescuer psychologist has the closest professional similarity with a military psychologist and forensic psychologist. According to the respondents' opinion, he/she (a rescuer psychologist) mainly provides psychological correction and rehabilitation, he/she has to work in uncomfortable and dangerous conditions, and also to deal with both individual and group psychological problems.

SEMANTIC PROFILE OF UNIVERSITY’S VISION AND MISSION: A PROSPECTIVE CASE STUDY

This paper proposes the semantics of product functions in a private university in Indonesia. The so-called product of the university is the Vision and Mission that carries intended and aligned message to its target readers/customers. Therefore, this research aims at mapping the semantic profile of University’s Vision and Mission. Analysing this issue, qualitative-descriptive method was implemented to break-down the message of the product function. The results showed that the product clusters the message into general structure of the product, open word class clustering, and word clustering based on meaning association. The semantics then voluntarily specifies particular strategies based on its meaning association. Additionally, the findings suggested that the product function was discovered by analysing the descriptive words in the Vision and Missions. From this discovery, the product can then be mapped into its function class and type. This then specifies possible strategies implemented in “marketing” the product. From the result, it can be concluded that mapping out the message and strategy of the product can best aid universities in improving their language design in every product they have.

Do Spanish causal connectives vary in subjectivity? What crowdsourcing data reveal about native speakers’ preferences

AbstractLanguage users have preferences for the connectives they choose to express causal relations. These choices may depend on the subjectivity involved in the relation. Dutch connectives illustrate this situation clearly:want(‘since/for’) is preferred typically for expressing subjective relations andomdat(‘because’) for objective ones. While various corpus-based studies have revealed a similar pattern in other languages, little attention has been paid to Spanish from this perspective. Recent corpus-based studies analyzed the connectivesporque(‘because’),ya que(‘since’) andpuesto que(‘given that’) using two different methods of analysis. Surprisingly, the findings did not coincide with the previous literature on Spanish connectives, and the semantic profile of such connectives in terms of subjectivity remained unclear. The current study again aims to investigate whether these connectives show systematic variation in terms of subjectivity, using crowdsourcing experimentation. Results show that Spanish native speakers preferpuesto queoverporqueto express subjective relations. However, no statistically significant difference was observed betweenporqueandya que. This study offers a better understanding of Spanish connectives in terms of subjectivity. Furthermore, it contributes to the assessment of the use of crowdsourcing as a useful and reliable method to elucidate the meaning and use of connectives.

What you “mean” is not what I “mean”: Categorization of verbs by Germans and Koreans using the semantic differential

Although there are different approaches to classifying verb categories, the approaches are often not consistent with the results of experimental studies investigating the neurocognitive reality of the categories. One proposal for addressing these inconsistencies is embodiment theory, which states that verbs can be categorized based on accompanying sensorimotor mental simulations. Despite numerous studies on this topic, it remains unclear whether verbs can actually be categorized by means of these sensorimotor simulations and whether these categories are crosslingual.In this study, verbs were examined using the semantic differential in 106 native German and Korean speakers. The aim was to determine with which semantic dimensions each verb can be described and whether verb subcategories can be defined.We were able to show that every verb has an individual semantic profile and that subcategories of verbs exist. For the German and Korean participants, most of the verb categories were comparable and therefore mostly crosslingual. However, there were also distinct subcategories of verbs which can probably be correlated with subtle cognitive and experience-based differences between the participating groups. We conclude from this research that it is problematic to use a single verb classification system for the German and Korean languages.

Old Forms, New Functions: Quadriliteral Root Patterns as Sources of Verbal Meaning

This paper describes a process whereby morphological patterns that, in premodern Hebrew, were not associated with a particular semantic profile, or were only partly associated with such a profile, developed a particular meaning in Modern Hebrew. This process is exemplified by certain types of quadriliteral roots formed in the Hebrew verbal system.

The semantic profile of the verbal prefix do- in Bulgarian and Croatian

This is a comparative study of the verbal prefix do- in two South Slavic languages, Bulgarian (Blg.) and Croatian (Cro.). Although these two languages show many similarities in the meaning of the verb stems and prefixation patterns, there are some unusual differences that may confuse foreign learners of Slavic, who expect identical or similar base verbs to combine with the same prefixes. The cognitive linguistics framework allows us to approach these differences systematically. We apply it to two databases of Blg. and Cro. prefixed verbs developed for the purposes of this research and extracted from reference books, dictionaries, and online corpora. We systematise do- verbs in a semantic network and account for both the overlapping meaning categories and the differences between the two languages studied, taking into consideration prefixes semantically similar to do- that combine with the same base verbs to form near-synonyms of do- verbs. We point to prefix variation as ensuing from different perspectives on the same event.

The Millennials as Stayers versus Switchers: The Context of Mobile Phone Services in Sri Lanka

The study was conducted to evaluate the nature of the behavioral aspects of the Millennials in terms of loyal and switching behavior as reference to the mobile phone services subscription. The study was conducted in two stages. At the initial stage, a customer survey was conducted with a sample of 521 respondents to identify the nature of retention and switching behaviour of the Millennials in the context of mobile phone services. The comprehensive analysis of customer responses extended the study to the second stage which involved in focus group discussions to probe the perceptions towards the decision of remaining loyal or switching and identify the nature and characteristics of each type of customer. Accordingly, the triangulation research approach involving both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods was adopted to achieve the desired objectives of the study. The study is significant as it evaluates the nature of the behaviour of the Millennials in the context of remaining versus switching and presents a semantic profile of customers with four types of loyalty namely fanatic, satisfied, brand loyal and captive and four types of switchers namely convenience seeker, discontented customer, variety seeker and price-conscious customer with respect to the mobile phone services industry.

Extravagant “fake” morphemes in Dutch. Morphological productivity, semantic profiles and categorical flexibility

AbstractDutch features several morphemes with “privative” semantics that occur as left-hand members in compounds (e.g.,imitatieleer‘imitation leather’,kunstgras‘artificial grass’,nepjuwelen‘fake jewels’). Some of these “fake” morphemes display great categorical flexibility and innovative adjectival uses.Nep, for instance, is synchronically attested as an inflected adjective (e.g.,neppe cupcake‘fake cupcake’). In this paper, we combine an extensive corpus study of eight Dutch “fake” morphemes with statistical methods in distributional semantics and collexeme analysis in order to compare their semantic and morphological properties and to find out which factors are the driving forces behind their exceptional “extravagant” morphological behavior. Our analyses show that debonding and adjectival reanalysis are triggered by an interplay of two factors, i.e., type frequency and semantic coherence, which allow us to range the eight morphemes on a cline from more schematic to more substantive “fake” constructions.

The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker (puisque, étant donné que, vu que and comme), which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation.

Creating a 3D semantic profile of causative shi and rang: A constructional approach

ABSTRACT This article models the semantic structure and lectal variation of shi ‘cause’ and rang ‘let’ in the context of an analytic causative construction in Mandarin Chinese. The investigation is framed within a 3D model (the formal, conceptual and social dimensions) and integrates semasiological and onomasiological perspectives of semantic variation. Adopting a corpus-based method and regarding constructional exemplars of the verbs as a prototypical category, it explores semantic salience and variability of the verbs on the one hand and their semantic division of labour on the other. Important dimensions that are relevant for the semantic structure of shi and rang are illuminated, along with their lectal variation. Reasons for the semantic differences are explained from a diachronic perspective, as shi and rang are shown to be at different points along the same grammaticalization pathway.

Wortbildung und Textsorte Verbalabstrakta in der spät(er)en Latinität

Summary:The paper deals with the derivational category of ‘action nouns’ both as a subject of general linguistics and as a problem of Indo-European morphology (primarily in the diachrony of Latin but also from the perspective of comparative philology). First of all, I elucidate the concepts used in the analysis of verbal abstracts – above all their well renowned definition by Walter Porzig as “Namen für Satzinhalte”. Subsequently, I interpret some passages occurring in comedies of Plautus and epigraphic documents of Old Latin illustrating the diachronic developments by accounting for some construction patterns under consideration of their ‘suprasyntactic’ aspects. In the paragraphs following, I discuss a variety of IE actional types (including the genesis of infinitives), also taking care of some significant relics of verbal constructions in Ancient Greek.The implication scale of increasing ‘concretization’, which I proposed and utilized in my studies so far, exhibits a development from action via the steps: result, instrument, location leading to (collective) agents. This thesis may also be corroborated by a number of Latin testimonies.According to my concept of correlation between frequency of nomina actionis and nomina acti on the one hand and the corresponding text type on the other, I present a number of examples taken from the authors Vitruvius, Frontinus, Petronius, Juvenalis, Justinus and Dares Phrygius. I describe and interpret them by means of qualitative criteria and quantitative parameters such as occurrence, semantic profile and competition in relation to alternative derivational types that employ cognate stems and affixes.

Exploring content and language co-construction in CLIL with semantic waves

ABSTRACT In content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms, it is assumed that non-language content subjects provide more authentic communicative contexts for students to learn a foreign/second/additional language (L2). However, learning abstract concepts and academic language in an L2 simultaneously is also challenging for CLIL students. It is thus important for CLIL teachers to unpack and repack both abstract concepts and academic discourse for the students. ‘Semantic waves’, which model classroom practices of both unpacking and repacking, is arguably a key to understanding cumulative knowledge-building. Applying the concepts of semantic profiles and semantic waves, this paper analyses the classroom discourse of two CLIL science lessons in Hong Kong. In one lesson, the semantic profile mainly consists of downward shifts. The teacher adopted various useful strategies to unpack science concepts, especially with multimodalities, everyday L2 and students’ L1 resources. Yet, there was limited repacking. In contrast, some repacking was observed in another lesson, where the teacher provided explicit instruction on academic language and guided students through academic writing tasks. A semantic wave can thus be observed there. These findings on strategies for unpacking and repacking provide significant insights into knowledge building in CLIL contexts, and may hence illuminate CLIL pedagogical practices.

A norm of aesthetic assertion and its semantic (in)significance

ABSTRACT The paper proposes that the distinctive features of aesthetic assertion are due to a special norm governing such assertion rather than any semantic features of aesthetic predication. The norm is elaborated as a (more or less faithful) reading of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment. Apart from the proposed norm capturing various features of aesthetic assertion, it is supported by various linguistic considerations that point to the semantic profile of predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates being in fact alike with respect to the role of a judge or experiencer in the interpretation of the respective kinds of assertions. The difference between the two, therefore, must have a different source than the understood role of an agent, viz. the advertised norm. In particular, it is argued that the role of an explicit agent in both predicates acts to signal a presupposition of another agent having a different experience or judgment from the speaker rather than an articulation of the content of the predicate itself or a determination of its truth value.

Investigation into the Semantic Density and Semantic Gravity Wave Profile of Teachers When Discussing Electrophilic Aromatic Substitution (SEAr).

Language in chemistry is highly specialized, and for students, transitions in language complexity from high school to university can be extremely challenging. With an increasingly diverse cohort of students enrolled in UK chemistry degree programs, better understanding the linguistic challenges students face is becoming a greater pedagogical priority. Spoken language plays a central role when learning chemistry, and any misunderstandings can lead to misconceptions that can impede students’ success in this demanding subject. This small-scale study sought to compare the complexity of spoken-language explanations of the same chemical process within UK secondary (high school) and university contexts. The study involved seven organic chemistry educators/teachers, four based in a UK university and three in a UK high school, discussing electrophilic aromatic substitution (SEAr) via a lecture or screencast. The participants’ spoken discourse was transcribed and coded according to the concepts of semantic gravity (the degree to which meaning relates to context) and semantic density (the degree to which meaning is condensed within symbols) drawn from Legitimation Code Theory, and then it was analyzed for semantic waves. When considering semantic gravity, there were some similarities and some differences. In all cases, semantic gravity was weaker, but participants based in a university environment generally tended to exhibit relatively weaker semantic gravity than their school-based counterparts. The school-based participants usually added further explanations to clarify what was meant during an explanation and exhibited semantic waves by unpacking and repacking a concept, whereas the university-based participants tended to show a flatter semantic profile. Findings showed that, across the levels of study investigated, semantic density was stronger: a similar complexity of chemistry-specific vocabulary used by all seven participants, regardless of the audience. Findings have pedagogical implications and suggest that a larger-scale study of semantic waves in oral chemistry discourse could usefully inform specific-purposes language teaching.

Low inter-rater consistency in semantic profiles of tinnitus-like sounds rated by tinnitus patients.

Characterizations of the tinnitus sound percept are always based on a subjective description by the person affected. Since the experimenter cannot have access to the tinnitus percept, it is not possible to verify whether individuals use the adjectives describing the sound in the expected way, i.e., whether a label given to the tinnitus percept corresponds to the label that the experimenter or another individual would give to the same sound percept. However, if it is assumed that tinnitus patients can reliably describe their own tinnitus, then they should also be able to reliably describe tinnitus-like sounds, presented acoustically. In this study, 26 tinnitus patients used a tablet computer to rate 18 pre-defined adjectives on their level of descriptiveness for their own tinnitus percept as well as 17 tinnitus-like sounds presented via headphones. The main interest of the current study was to calculate intraclass correlation (ICC) and Krippendorff's alpha coefficients for the rating profiles of the acoustically-presented sounds, in order to quantify how well the individuals agreed on the ratings of known sounds, i.e., whether the adjectives would receive similar ratings from all participants for a specific tinnitus-like sound. The results show that the level of agreement was low for all adjectives and sounds, meaning that the different individuals did not use the adjectives in a consistent manner. The conclusion is that subjective tinnitus descriptions should be interpreted with great caution, and that the inherent variability involved in the characterization of sounds by naïve listeners can contribute to the observed heterogeneity in tinnitus symptoms and treatment outcomes.

Exploring college English teaching of rhetorical knowledge: A Legitimation Code Theory analysis

Despite a voluminous literature addressing English language teaching, the explorations focused on knowledge-building are rather limited in number. This is particularly the case with China’s tertiary English education. Unlike existing research, this study investigated Chinese college English teachers’ knowledge-building about rhetorical figures by drawing on the ideas of Autonomy and Semantics in Legitimation Code Theory. Designed as sequential mixed-method research with a development purpose, the study takes as its analytical data the pedagogic discourse generated in the finals of China’s National College English Teaching Context. It was found that the knowledge practices about rhetorical figures vary, for one thing, in their likelihood of shifting to introjected codes and returning to the initial sovereign code and the motivations for their possible drift into exotic codes; and for another, in whether they are unpacking-oriented, repacking-oriented, or unpacking-and-repacking-integrated. With this, the study demonstrated how varied knowledge practices in English language teaching or English-medium teaching can be portrayed, distinguished and explicated in terms of autonomy and semantic code shifts and by reference to their display of autonomy pathways and semantic profiles. The study also makes contributions by actualizing the perspectival complementarity between Autonomy and Semantics in describing and interpreting pedagogic practices, shedding light on the design and improvement of knowledge-building in both English language teaching and disciplinary teaching, and highlighting the necessity of developing non-native English teachers’ metalinguistic awareness of Legitimation Code Theory and systemic functional linguistics.

The steering thrust phenomenon in action-directed-pragmatics

In this paper I explore the pragmatic phenomenon of Steering Thrust, and specifically how speakers steer others to action and the mechanism that underpins how they so steer. In addition to opening the door to a rich pragmatic domain (of Action-Directed Pragmatics), understanding the pragmatics of various locutions and assertions (and sayings) in deliberative action-oriented contexts resolves the puzzle of bank-type cases by a pragmatic treatment of the puzzle, and undermines the motivation to seek a semantic remedy, such as via Pragmatic Encroachment. When speakers steer others to action, they transmit ‘steering thrust’ to the actor (the one they attempt to steer to action). Steering-Thrust is a non-linguistic phenomenon, although it’s generated by the speaker’s assertion: it is a gradable pressure, or a ‘push’, or a mild nudge. The Steering mechanism is ‘on’ when certain norms are operative in the context, primarily instrumental norms (in addition to epistemic/semantic norms), which is the case when the context is deliberative with, typically, in core cases, a decision on an action on the agenda. In such cases, various locutions modify the degree (strength) of Steering Thrust transmitted by a speaker in making an assertion. ‘I know that p’, in addition to its semantic profile, has a distinctive pragmatic/action-directed profile. In particular, a mere assertion in such a context normally carries Steering Thrust (unless it’s cancelled, as by a caveat). Adding the prefix ‘I know that …’ intensifies further the Steering Thrust transmitted to the actor. Steering Thrust can be ‘pro’ or ‘con’—steering towards a certain action, or away from an action. The prefix ‘I know that …’ is a main locution for transmitting pro Steering Thrust (as is ‘I am sure that …). It’s denial, e.g., ‘Now I don’t know that p’, is a main locution for transmitting con Steering Thrust—away from a certain action. Action-Directed Pragmatics focuses on pragmatic contents transmitted in deliberative contexts. Asserting a simple utterance functions in such contexts as conveying pro steering thrust (and functions as an admissible premise in a Practical Inference). In such contexts, the main operative norms, in addition to semantic/epistemic norms, are instrumental norms. Asserting Knowledge denials (i.e.: I don’t know that p) employs literal semantic content in order to convey pragmatic, action-directed content—steering the actor away from the action under consideration. Asserting a Knowledge Ascription conveys a stronger Steering Thrust (than asserting a simple utterance) towards an action. In Action-Directed cases, it is the Action-Directed content of the assertion of a denial of a Knowledge Ascription that is the conveyed content (side-stepping the literal—semantic—content), with a con steering thrust—steering the actor away from the action invoked by asserting that p (the assertion in the scope of the knowledge operator). This pragmatic perspective enables the resolution of bank-type puzzles: Asserting the denial of the knowledge ascription conveys its pragmatic, action-directed content rather than its literal content. Hence, in such cases, it’s a mistake to invoke and employ the ‘intuitive usage’ (i.e., the literal—semantic—content) of the Knowledge Ascription as providing semantic evidence—here, regarding the semantics of ‘know’, since this literal content has not been conveyed by the action-directed assertion token. The intuitive sayability (See below) of the denial of the pertinent knowledge-ascription in such cases is due to the recognition by competent speakers that its pragmatic, action-directed, content is what is being conveyed in the deliberative, ‘action-pregnant’, context (thereby side-stepping its literal semantic content). Saying it strikes one as ‘intuitive’ since what’s conveyed is consteering-to-action by the speaker, which is the function that her saying it performs; and further, saying it steers to non-action that, the reader feels, is the ‘right’ action to take.

Los verbos «llamarse» y «apellidarse»: una caracterización histórica y cognitiva

El propósito de este artículo es presentar una caracterización sintáctica y semántica de los verbos llamarse y apellidarse efectuada desde los presupuestos de la lingüística cognitivo-funcional. Nuestro objetivo es poner de manifiesto cómo funcionan estos verbos en español, cuáles son sus peculiaridades conceptuales (peculiaridades muy notables en el contexto de las lenguas europeas) y cuáles son las posibles razones -históricas y lingüísticas- por las que estas formas verbales pronominales y no otras se utilizan en español para expresar el nombre propio y el apellido. El trabajo ofrece reflexiones originales acerca de estos verbos e hipótesis novedosas sobre la relación entre los verbos de habla, la reflexividad, la representación de uno mismo y la fuerza ilocutiva del lenguaje. This article has as its purpose to offer a syntactic and semantic profile of the verbs llamarse and apellidarse carried out from the postulates of cognitive-functional linguistics. It i sour intention to: (a) show how these verbs work in Spanish; (b) identify their conceptual peculiarities (which are quite remarkable within the context of European languages); and (c) explain the possible -historical and linguistic- reasons why these pronominal verbs, and not others, are used to express the Christian name and the surname in Spanish. This work provides original and the illocutionary force of language.

The Instrumental Case in the Diachrony of Russian Reflexive Verbs of Emotion: From Cause to Content

ABSTRACTRussian experiencer-subject reflexive verbs of emotion vary greatly in the syntactic encoding of their stimuli: poražatʹsja ‘be astonished’ takes the dative case, while obižat’sja ‘feel offended’ takes na ‘on’ + the accusative case, etc. Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, we show that, despite synchronic variegation, many reflexive verbs have been undergoing a unidirectional drift during the last three centuries: the instrumental encoding of the stimulus has gradually been giving way to lexically determined patterns. The use of the instrumental was motivated by its semantic profile: it was closely associated with the meaning of cause. This syntactic change echoes changes in the construal of the stimulus, whereby its cause-like components weaken and its content-like components come to the fore. The evidence in favour of this hypothesis includes the semantic differences between the instrumental case and the relevant encoding devices, a gradual decrease in the proportion of stimuli that are inanimate, the development of emotive meanings on the basis of physical meanings in individual verbs and lexicalization by which reflexive verbs become emancipated from their transitive counterparts. Semantic and syntactic scenarios in the development of reflexive verbs are later partially replicated by corresponding periphrastic participial constructions.