Semantic Shift Research Articles

Affect as a proxy for literary mood

We propose to use affect as a proxy for mood in literary texts. In this study, we explore the differences in computationally detecting tone versus detecting mood. Methodologically we utilize affective word embeddings to look at the affective distribution in different text segments. We also present a simple yet efficient and effective method of enhancing emotion lexicons to take both semantic shift and the domain of the text into account producing real-world congruent results closely matching both contemporary and modern qualitative analyses.

Theoretical Review of Research to Date on Competences 4.0—What Do We Know about Competences in Industry 4.0? A Status Quo Analysis

This article analyses competences 4.0 models created in the context of the concept of Industry 4.0. A literature review and bibliometric analyses were used to show the semantic shift of this concept over time. The results show that the 4.0 competences created in the context of Industry 4.0 assume that the skills they represent are needed in the labor market. Moreover, in most cases, analyses of competences 4.0 are carried out considering separate perspectives by researchers representing different scientific disciplines. Refining and fine-tuning a universal and detailed model of competences 4.0 is strongly recommended to bridge the gap between other scientific disciplines. Furthermore, this article presents competences 4.0 from a much broader perspective, including linguistic competences that stem from the wider domain of the ability to communicate within social competences. Linguistic competences are also interrelated with some aspects of cognitive competences. This approach makes this study completely novel and aims to present the most comprehensive and universal 4.0 model to date.

VOLYN FOLK GEOGRAPHICAL TERMS FOR DENOTING SWAMP: STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES

The article is devoted to the study of folk names of bogs in Volyn region. The folk names of bogs collected by the author and published in the dictionary reflect the attitudes and perceptions of the local population, and also contain important information about the characteristics and features of bogs. The study of such names can contribute to the preservation of the cultural heritage associated with natural objects, enrichment of scientific terminology, and understanding of lexical and semantic features of the linguistic worldview. These names may contain valuable information about local conditions, flora, geographical features and ecological status of the bogs, which contributes to deeper understanding of the relationship between humans and the natural environment. In addition, the folk names of bogs can serve as additional sources of information for classifying and identifying different types of bogs in Volyn Polissia, as well as identifying local terminological variations and features. The linguistic approach helps to identify local terminological variations and features that are reflected in the lexical composition and semantics. The study is relevant for understanding the lexical fund, linguistic diversity and cultural heritage associated with the Volyn thelmography. The sphere of functioning, semantic shifts and peculiarities of the meaning of thelmographic terms influence the area of distribution of folk geographical terms. This lexical class is based on well-known terms, mainly of Proto-Slavic origin, which have wide semantic possibilities. In the studied area, folk geographical terms for swamps are represented by semantic, phonetic and grammatical variants and derivatives. The core of the analyzed lexical class is well-known terms, mostly of ProtoSlavic origin: брід, болoто, гать, гребля, трясовuнa, etc., which are characterized by wider semantic possibilities. In many subdialects, these lexemes are represented by dialectal phonetic variants: трасовuнa, трасовuско, грaбля, etc. Folk geographical terminology, in comparison with other language layers, is not characterized by imagery or emotionally expressive means. This folk geographical terminology, which partially leaves a trace in place names, is one of the oldest in origin. In addition to linguistic research, the study of folk geographical terminology can be useful for natural, historical, ethnological and other sciences.

The metamorphoses in the exposition of certain isiXhosa words

This article employed a historical and political theory to argue for the metamorphoses in the exposition of randomly selected isiXhosa words for the very reason that some semantic meanings in the isiXhosa domain have undergone an evolution. Qualitative research methodology and the two theories operate in a relationship to underline the historical meanings of certain isiXhosa words, and how political forces influenced their evolution. During the discourse, it becomes evident that semantic shift in the isiXhosa language occurs for various reasons other than political factors and through different processes. The final argument suggests that there is a gap in the paradigm of isiXhosa linguistics. Such a task is facing isiXhosa linguists and ought to be contested.

Semantics of verbs of thought in the Ob-Ugric languages

Introduction. The article describes the semantics of verbs of mental activity in the Mansi and Khanty languages. The relevance of the topic is determined by the lack of research devoted to the analysis and semantic classification of verbal lexico-semantic groups, primarily in comparative terms. The purpose of the work is to reveal the internal organization of the verbs of cognition and understanding “to know”, “to understand”, “to learn”, “to notice” in the Ob-Ugric languages and to characterize the semantic relations between their members. Materials and Methods. The article is based on the verbs of mental activity of the Mansi (Sosvinsky dialect) and Khanty (Kazim dialect) languages received by the authors from informants and extracted from dictionaries of the Khanty and Mansi languages and texts. When working on the material, component analysis, the method of contextual (distributive) analysis were used. Results and Discussion. For the first time, the lexico-semantic group of the verbs of thought (“to know”, “to understand” and their analogues) of the Ob-Ugric languages was studied; differential signs of the semantics of the verbs under study were revealed, the relationships of these verbs and the peculiarities of their compatibility, primary and derived lexico-semantic variants of the meanings of these verbs were determined, their aspectual variants were partially revealed. The main verbs of the group are described and their signs are indicated; the semantic structure of polysemous verbs is determined. Conclusion. Comparison of the semantic structures of similar words in the Ob-Ugric languages allows us to conclude that the main distinguished meanings of the verbs of knowledge and understanding coincide in the studied dialects, however, each language has specific meanings and special semantic shifts in meanings.

A Change of Viewpoint in Translating Indonesian Novel Upacara into English

This research focuses on the translation of the Indonesian novel entitled Upacara into English. It deals with a change of viewpoint, including a change of perspective and a change of category of thought, which is categorized as a semantic shift under one of the translation procedures, namely modulation. The change occurs due to some factors, and one of them is the different cultural backgrounds between the author and the translator. Upacara is taken as the data source together with its translation Ceremony in English due to the fact that the novel involves the use of specific terms or expressions or words used in the preparation and the process of proceeding a ceremony in the life of Dayak tribes and these lead to the semantic shifts in the English target text. The cases of modulation found in the target text are significant. Using the descriptive qualitative method, the objectives of this research are to identify the types of modulation identified in the target text and the kinds of words which are being semantically shifted or modulated. The results show that the modulation found is not all of the types of free modulation, and the words which are modulated do not necessarily deal with the cultural words. There are some words or expressions which are semantically shifted out of all types of modulation. In the translation of the Indonesian novel Upacara into English Ceremony, the semantic shift under the modulation translation procedure covers both cultural and non-cultural words.

Понятие "воровство": стратегия номинации в кельтском ареале

The work concerns itself with studying the way the notions thief and theft, which the author considers to be rather late and secondary, are realized in Celtic languages in diachronic perspective. The author constructs the original four-component model of the contemporary notion theft, and traces, on the basis of comparative material, the development of the original notions the model is based on (a secret action, deprivation through the distancing stage, doing harm, agence’s personal interest). Those notions prove to be basic for the emergence and development of corresponding terms during linguistic and social evolution. The verbal use of the tablets against thieves from Roman Bath is analyzed and a new interpretation of the French voler fly - voler steal is geven. The work also suggests the novel etymology for the main verb for stealing in Modern Irish – goid, based on early uses of the verb meaning “distancing” and later – “deprivation”. Examples from the Life of Saint Brigit gives the possibility to see the difference of contextual use and meaning changes of the term used by the same author. At the same time late poetry could give examples of the use of Nomen agentis in the meaning not "thief' but depriver. gaduidhe na geamhoidhche - (17 c.) is not a person who stels something but rather a man who deprives a winter night from its coldness and darkness. The author suppose, it is not a metaphor but an old meaning of the stem. The new etymology of Irish verb to steal is supported by comparison with Old Greek verb and also Chek verb otchugdit in the meaning the steal, jus from the supposed lexeme - thujoj (an early borrowing in Slavonic from a Germanic language). At the same time, the semantic shift could be universal.

AN ACCOUNT OF SEMANTIC CHANGE IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH AND ITS IMPACT ON ITS INTELLIGIBILITY AND ACCEPTABILITY

This study focused on Pakistani English in the context of the distinct features that stem from the sociocultural context in which English is being used. The study used Weinreich’s (1968) framework of language contact which outlines the pattern of language interaction and offers an explanation for linguistic change, as a theoretical cornerstone in the study of the semantic shift in the Pakistani variant of English, which lends this variety its Pakistani flavor. The objective of this study, which used four literary texts as data sources, was to examine the manner in which Pakistanis' sociocultural environment and experiences affect the meanings of some words that have both English and Pakistani origins, leading to extensions or outright variations in the meanings of some words of both English and Pakistani origin as they are incorporated into the lexicon of Pakistani English. The study highlights that these semantic variations are signs of the sociocultural dynamics of Pakistani society, which lead to linguistic variation among English varieties. The semantic variations prove that using the British variety as the benchmark for evaluating Pakistani English’s intelligibility and acceptability would be at odds with Pakistani sociocultural reality. Pakistani English, therefore, has to be assessed on its own grounds as a distinct variety. Keywords: Pakistani English; Semantic Shift; Semantic change; Semantic Variation; Intelligibility and Acceptability.

Developing a trilingual glossary for the physico-chemical properties of alternative sources of edible potash (culiash) from unripe plantain peelings (UPP)

Due to the rising correlation between food additives and several health disorders, it is important that researchers in this area disseminate their findings to rural artisans, translators, indigenous newscasters and consumers. This will promote healthy living and consequently reduce health risks which may be associated with artificial food additives. However, this has been quite challenging in that it has been hampered by the lack of indigenous technical terms, especially in the Igbo language. Against this backdrop, this study develops a trilingual glossary for the physico-chemical properties of alternative sources of edible potash (UPP). The convenience sampling technique was employed in selecting twenty female participants who were not above 50 years of age from the Mbaise community, a town in Imo State of Nigeria. Personal interviews, observation/participation and documentation in the field were the primary sources of data collection, while the secondary sources included textbooks, journals, theses, dissertations, magazines, newspaper articles and the internet. The chemical compositions of the edible ash were ascertained using standard analytical methods. To generate its technical terms, four major linguistic principles (indigenisation, terminologisation, semantic shift, paraphrasing with explanation and compounding) were applied in developing equivalent terms in the Igbo language. Findings show that indigenisation and compounding are more productive in the development of terms in the Igbo language for the physico-chemical properties/constituents of alternative sources of edible potash than pure loaning. Terminographers are encouraged to standardise these developed terms while working to fill the gap of terminology scarcity in African languages.

Влияние контекстов на формирование словарных значений лексем

<p>The aim of the article is identification and study of contextual meanings of words appearing in journalistic texts reflecting changes in public consciousness that have affected their dictionary meanings. The material for this work was selected dictionaries of the Russian language and modern Russian-language journalistic texts, including texts from the Internet. This material uses contextual analysis for words that are supplemented with meanings at the moment, or have already significantly changed their lexical meanings, which in turn proves the validity of the hypothesis that prognosticality is an integral property of a journalistic text. The analysis showed that before semantic shifts of words are recorded in dictionaries, they are, first of all, repeatedly contextually reproduced in journalistic style texts. The study of the contextual meanings of axiologically colored words revealed the transformations taking place in the system of social ethics.</p>

Mistrz. Krtka historia sowa w polszczynie (badania korpusowe)

In this article, I analysed the history of the occurrence of one lexeme in Polish in the last 200 years: master (pol. mistrz). With data from Polish language corpora, I traced its frequency and examined its semantics and its transformations. Corpus analyses confirmed the semantic shifts taking place from the meaning of teacher, guide to the meaning of sport; also revealed a new ironic semantic shade of the analysed word. The second aim of the article was to develop postulates for corpus-based semantic research. These are: firstly, semantic analyses should be carried out on relatively small corpora; secondly, there is an urgent need to develop a (semi-)automatic tool for semantic analysis on corpus data (the linguistic basis for computer science work in this direction can be found here in the mental dictionary of A. Wierzbicka).

«Живая религия» и «вернакулярная религия». Проблема концептуализации терминов

The conceptual network used in modern religious studies is being constantly updated and supplemented with new terms, while “classical” concepts are undergoing semantic shifts as well. This paper is focused on the history of the notions of lived religion and vernacular religion, which entered the scientific lexicon in the late 20th century. Both terms relate to the study of everyday life and its philosophical understanding and are based on extensive empirical research as well as anthropological data. The concepts of lived religion and vernacular religion were proposed by scholars as an alternative to the traditional and widespread binary schemes for describing religion, which contrast the high/low, elite/folk and institutionalized/non-institutionalized forms of religion. The genesis and spread of these concepts reflected the general trend, which consists in refraining from applying a uniform Western European model and denominational theological discourse to the variable phenomena of religious experience. The term lived religion, which originated in memoirs and biographical literature, characterized the personal experience of Christians, extending to the daily religious practices of various traditions. Vernacular religion goes back to the Latin word vernaculus, which had been used to describe something native, local, domestic and, later, to distinguish the local language from the official Latin. The term was proposed by philologists to solve religious problems of studying unorganized, spontaneous, everyday and individual forms of manifestation of religion. Currently, both terms are being successfully used, including in Russian scientific discourse, in religious studies on various phenomena of materialization, kitsch, gender and many other aspects of religion.

An Analysis of Lexico-Semantic Variations in Pakistani English Newspaper Corpus

The present study focuses on the corpus-based lexico-semantic analysis of Pakistani English to identify the variations in the language of newspapers. It also investigates how Pakistani English newspapers consider their readers' cultural and social ideals for intelligible contact while selecting language posts. As a result, they often deviate from the native norms of the language adopting many indigenous linguistic features and emerging new varieties of New English to define their tasks easier in order not only to facilitate but to attract people’s attention. Therefore, Moag’s model on New Englishes, Boas’s theory of cultural relativism, and Kachru’s Theory of Nativisation and Acculturation with the conception of the Outer Circle (1986) mainly connected to institutionalize Second Varieties of English have been used for the theoretical analysis within Pakistani context dependent socio-cultural scenario. The usage of these lexical items shows that Pakistani English is derived from the source, namely, Standard British English, for example, shadi hall, Jihadi outfits, etc. These lexical item categories followed in coinage, borrowing, idiomatic collocations, and semantic shift. This study also attempts to create lexicographical entries to represent the diverse Pakistani English and become available to society's educational and global communication. The study purposively compiled the 2 million corpora from the websites of two major Pakistani English Newspapers, The Nation and The News, and then analyzed it by using corpus software tools Antconc 3.5.8w to search for the key terms and to identify these elements of the stance. The study's finding highlights the New English variety of Pakistani English Newspapers and the adapted lexemes used in the local sociolinguistics context. One of the study's most significant findings shows that the New Englishes lexemes are infused with Islamic, historical, and social culture, highlighting the diverse local colours adapted to the Pakistani setting. The New Englishes in Pakistan comprises the amalgamation of Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and English lexemes. The study also broadens the horizon of society's educational and communicational usage while maintaining the endonormative standard.

SciLander: Mapping the Scientific News Landscape

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the spread of misinformation on social media and the Web as a whole. The phenomenon dubbed `infodemic' has taken the challenges of information veracity and trust to new heights by massively introducing seemingly scientific and technical elements into misleading content. Despite the existing body of work on modeling and predicting misinformation, the coverage of very complex scientific topics with inherent uncertainty and an evolving set of findings, such as COVID-19, provides many new challenges that are not easily solved by existing tools. To address these issues, we introduce SciLander, a method for learning representations of news sources reporting on science-based topics. We extract four heterogeneous indicators for the sources; two generic indicators that capture (1) the copying of news stories between sources, and (2) the use of the same terms to mean different things (semantic shift), and two scientific indicators that capture (1) the usage of jargon and (2) the stance towards specific citations. We use these indicators as signals of source agreement, sampling pairs of positive (similar) and negative (dissimilar) samples, and combine them in a unified framework to train unsupervised news source embeddings with a triplet margin loss objective. We evaluate our method on a novel COVID-19 dataset containing nearly 1M news articles from 500 sources spanning a period of 18 months since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Our results show that the features learned by our model outperform state-of-the-art baseline methods on the task of news veracity classification. Furthermore, a clustering analysis suggests that the learned representations encode information about the reliability, political leaning, and partisanship bias of these sources.

Из истории названий не‑ бесных светил в миноритарных иранских языках Памиро-Гиндукушского ареала

The names of celestial bodies in the languages of the Pamir-Hindu Kush area are etymologically heterogeneous. The differences are not accidental: they are evidence of social and cultural phenomena and processes in the history of the peoples inhabiting the area. The present article examines some of the history of this areal lexical group. The article identifies etymologically different designations for the Sun that stem from the worldview traditions of the local population. These date back to ancient times, when the Sun was believed to be both a celestial body and a supreme deity. The Proto-Iranian name for the Sun saw continued use in some languages, but was replaced in others by the names of deities revered in particular eras: at first this was the Indo-Iranian deity Mithra, and later the supreme deity of the Zoroastrians, Ahura Mazda. In the extinct literary languages of the Middle Ages, there are expressions testifying to the deification of the Moon which are not noted in the minority languages of this area. The name for ‘star’ in the languages of the area is derived from a single Proto-Iranian root which can be traced back to the IE *stēr- ‘star’. Another Iranian term used to designate ‘star’, appearing also with the meanings ‘zodiac constellation, zodiac sign, etc.’ and deriving from the IE variant for ‘night’ — *nokwt, *n˚kwter- — is attested mainly in medieval Middle Persian and Parthian documents, as well as in texts in classical Persian; in Old Iranian texts it is not documented as an independent word. In this regard, Wakhi, one of the minority languages of the Pamir-Hindu Kush area, is the only living Iranian language to have retained reflexes of this Indo-European base, although of its other variant. The Pamir-Hindu Kush names of celestial bodies examined in this article exhibit originality thanks to lexical substitutions, unusual word formation models, semantic shifts and the preservation of a deep Indo-Iranian archaic reflex.

1900년대 외국어 기술 설화집의 지형도 연구

This study focuses on a collection of Korean tales written by foreign languages published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: to analyze the dual aspects of translation and to examine the translated Korea embodied in the tales. When conducting oral literature research centered on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is still a major problem to specify the scope and methodology. One of key feature of this period is the publication of collections in foreign languages other than Korean and Hanmun. This is a clear indication of the heterogeneity of the period, but it also proves the need for the finalization of the field and the diversification of methodologies. In this study, I will interpret these texts from the perspective of Korean literary studies. From a perspective distinct from that of Korean tales, foreign language tales are described in another language, and the concept of their description, or translation, must be examined. This can be seen as a process of dual translation, in which Korean tales described in foreign languages first undergo a semantic and discursive shift in which Korean texts are transformed into foreign languages, and at the same time, a process of universal transformation based on the identity of the orality itself. Based on this, the related foreign language tales can be chosen and categorized, which is not only a classification of texts but also a possibility of categorizing the research area. Also, in this essay, translation encompasses the rewriting of tales. It is through the rewriting of tales that the intercommunication between Korean tales and the early 1900s context that surrounded them is revealed. Focusing on one of the most prolific tales in the collection, The Rabbit and Turtle, I will examine how Korea has been translated through the story world.

Performative Cinematic Acts of Form in the Baltic New Wave Documentary: The Old Man and the Land, Ruhnu, and Bridges of Time

This article explores via John L. Austin’s speech act theory the poetic manifestations of three Baltic documentary films: Bridges of Time, The Old Man and the Land and Ruhnu. The aim is to illustrate the way in which the Austinian division between the constative and the performative articulates the meaning-making process in these documentaries. This is done on two levels: on a larger scale the analysis looks at how Bridges of Time serves as a single performative speech act, establishing the Baltic New Wave phenomenon through its own aesthetic style; in a more detailed level, the article examines two examples from the aesthetic movement to demonstrate how they avoid reproducing a given reality by creating a semantic shift away from the surface structure in order to connote a rustic pre-occupation sensibility.

How to Conquer the Liar and Enthrone the Logical Concept of Truth

This article informally presents a solution to the paradoxes of truth and shows how the solution solves classical paradoxes (such as the original Liar) as well as the paradoxes that were invented as counterarguments for various proposed solutions (“the revenge of the Liar”). This solution complements the classical procedure of determining the truth values of sentences by its own failure and, when the procedure fails, through an appropriate semantic shift allows us to express the failure in a classical two-valued language. Formally speaking, the solution is a language with one meaning of symbols and two valuations of the truth values of sentences. The primary valuation is a classical valuation that is partial in the presence of the truth predicate. It enables us to determine the classical truth value of a sentence or leads to the failure of that determination. The language with the primary valuation is precisely the largest intrinsic fixed point of the strong Kleene three-valued semantics (LIFPSK3). The semantic shift that allows us to express the failure of the primary valuation is precisely the classical closure of LIFPSK3: it extends LIFPSK3 to a classical language in parts where LIFPSK3 is undetermined. Thus, this article provides an argumentation, which has not been present in contemporary debates so far, for the choice of LIFPSK3 and its classical closure as the right model for the truth predicate. In the end, an erroneous critique of Kripke-Feferman axiomatic theory of truth, which is present in contemporary literature, is pointed out.

Changing word meanings in biomedical literature reveal pandemics and new technologies

While we often think of words as having a fixed meaning that we use to describe a changing world, words are also dynamic and changing. Scientific research can also be remarkably fast-moving, with new concepts or approaches rapidly gaining mind share. We examined scientific writing, both preprint and pre-publication peer-reviewed text, to identify terms that have changed and examine their use. One particular challenge that we faced was that the shift from closed to open access publishing meant that the size of available corpora changed by over an order of magnitude in the last two decades. We developed an approach to evaluate semantic shift by accounting for both intra- and inter-year variability using multiple integrated models. This analysis revealed thousands of change points in both corpora, including for terms such as ‘cas9’, ‘pandemic’, and ‘sars’. We found that the consistent change-points between pre-publication peer-reviewed and preprinted text are largely related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also created a web app for exploration that allows users to investigate individual terms (https://greenelab.github.io/word-lapse/). To our knowledge, our research is the first to examine semantic shift in biomedical preprints and pre-publication peer-reviewed text, and provides a foundation for future work to understand how terms acquire new meanings and how peer review affects this process.

The discourse uses of the verb dire ‘to say’ in Vernacular French: A corpus-based exploration

This article provides a descriptive account of the major uses of the speech verb dire “to say” in Vernacular French. CLAPI Corpus (Corpus de Langue Parlée en Interaction), which is a multimedia database of corpora recorded in real situations (i.e. professional, institutional, commercial, didactic, and medical) is used. Five major uses of the verb dire are found, namely quotative (speech) dire, epistemic dire¸ evocative dire, desiderative dire, and copular dire. Unlike quotative dire, epistemic dire, evocative dire, desiderative dire and copular dire are restricted in terms of their occurrences (with varying degrees between them). For instance, the verb dire under some of these uses does not take place in the perfect tense, while under other uses it is only restricted to a specific type of subjects (i.e. the demonstrative pronoun ça). We take these restrictions as evidence that this verb undergoes different stages of grammaticalization. Therefore, the study concludes that the verb dire is a target of a grammaticalization process that causes the semantic shift that the verb dire in Spoken French witnesses.