Semantic Vagueness Research Articles

The Impact of Lexical Attrition on the English Reading Ability of Junior High School Students

This paper explores the impact of lexical attrition on the English reading ability of junior high school students. It analyzes the cognitive development characteristics of junior high school students and the factors affecting lexical attrition. The study finds that lexical attrition has a significant impact on junior high school students' English reading ability, including reduced vocabulary size, lexical semantic vagueness, and memory decline. To address these issues, the paper proposes several strategies, such as optimizing vocabulary teaching methods, strengthening the combination of reading training and vocabulary consolidation, creating a favorable English learning environment, and developing students' self-directed learning abilities. The paper concludes that effective vocabulary instruction and strategies are essential to prevent or minimize lexical attrition and improve students' English reading skills.

Visualization as irritation: producing knowledge about medieval courts through uncertainty.

Visualizations are ubiquitous in data-driven research, serving as both tools for knowledge production and genuine means of knowledge communication. Despite criticisms targeting the alleged objectivity of visualizations in the digital humanities (DH) and reflections on how they may serve as representations of both scholarly perspective and uncertainty within the data analysis pipeline, there remains a notable scarcity of in-depth theoretical grounding for these assumptions in DH discussions. It is our understanding that only through theoretical foundations such as basic semiotic principles and perspectives on media modality one can fully assess the use and potential of visualizations for innovation in scholarly interpretation. We argue that visualizations have the capacity to "productively irritate" existing scholarly knowledge in a given research field. This does not just mean that visualizations depict patterns in datasets that seem not in line with prior research and thus stimulate deeper examination. Complementarily, "irritation" here consists of visualizations producing uncertainty about their own meaning-yet it is precisely this uncertainty in which the potential for greater insight lies. It stimulates questions about what is depicted and what is not. This turns out to be a valuable resource for scholarly interpretation, and one could argue that visualizing big data is particularly prolific in this sense, because due to their complexity researchers cannot interpret the data without visual representations. However, we argue that "productive irritation" can also happen below the level of big data. We see this potential rooted in the genuinely semiotic and semantic properties of visual media, which studies in multimodality and specifically in the field of Bildlinguistik have carved out: a visualization's holistic overview of data patterns is juxtaposed to its semantic vagueness, which gives way to deep interpretations and multiple perspectives on that data. We elucidate this potential using examples from medieval English legal history. Visualizations of data relating to legal functions and social constellations of various people in court offer surprising insights that can lead to new knowledge through "productive irritation."

The Problem of Semantic Shift in Modern Russian: Corpus Research on the Example of a News Media Discourse

This study discusses the issue of semantic shifts observed in high-frequency words, such as discourse, paradigm, narrative , in the news media discourse in the Russian language. It is shown that one of the effective methods of research is corpus analysis, for which an author’s corpus was created based on a random sample of texts of news articles published on the portal of the state news agency RIA Novosti over 2020-2023. Dynamic processes in the semantics of the analyzed highfrequency words were studied on the material of the National Corpus of the Russian language for the period 2000-2019. When considering the results obtained by the corpus analysis method, it was found out that, being initially the linguistic term, “narrative” turned into a functional proforma as a result of a semantic shift that occurred due to the diversity of newly acquired meanings, i.e. there was a modification of the original meaning of the word ‘ story, narration’ , which made the world into the universal one. The classical meaning of the word ‘ paradigm’ , characteristic of linguistics, is not represented in journalism, in the news media discourse it has been given other connotations such as scheme, model, idea, situation , which have moved into the core, nuclear area from the position of the near periphery. Some values are unique, so they have a small frequency (ipm). The interdisciplinary term “discourse” has turned into a term with vague semantics, but, unlike “narrative”, it is not a universal professional form, although it denotes processes occurring in various social spheres. It is shown that the semantic shift is not identical to the increase in the meaning of the word and is not determined strictly contextually. It is necessary to distinguish between the concept of semantic shift and the appearance of new meanings of the word, since the former is fixed in non-standard contexts and the demonstrated meaning cannot be clearly defined. In the course of the study, it was possible to establish that not all semantic shifts should be classified as erroneous, since it depends on the sphere in which the shift was detected. The use of the considered words in a different meaning is not profane, since the mobility of the lexical level of the language leads to transformations in speech and media discourse, allowing the appearance of texts stylistically close to the spoken style. Thus, we have identified and confirmed quantitatively the process of transformation of the words selected for analysis into pro-forms used as substitutes for a wide range of concepts.

Nothing to Say but the Unsayable: How Locke’s Linguistic Functionalism Turned into Leopardi’s Analogical Language

Abstract This article explores the so-far uncharted filiation of Leopardi’s understanding of language from Locke’s linguistic theory outlined in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In following Kristeva’s belief that language theories are predicated upon theories of the subject and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the communicative power of the body, the article looks at the reverberations that Leopardi’s teoria del piacere (understood as an anthropological system) exerts on his theory of language and builds a neck-to-neck comparison with Locke’s linguistic functionalism. In underlining Locke’s important role for Leopardi’s theory of language, this work shows how the latter distances himself from the functionalism of Locke’s Essay by theorizing a language built on semantic vagueness and indefiniteness. This language is based on the epistemological conviction that ideas do not exist as immaterial products of the mind but rather are always incarnate in the physicality of language. In defining this kind of language as analogical, the article argues that for Leopardi the linguistic act takes the shape of a bodily gesture: language, then, is not just the concrete translation of a mental process but the movement of an embodied mind. In this sense, rather than expressing the mathematical coincidence of signifier and signified of a langue des calculs, Leopardi’s language voices the leftovers of expression, the semantic excess that Locke’s functionalism generally considers to be an error of an unsuccessful communicative act.

Collective Human Opinions in Semantic Textual Similarity

Abstract Despite the subjective nature of semantic textual similarity (STS) and pervasive disagreements in STS annotation, existing benchmarks have used averaged human ratings as gold standard. Averaging masks the true distribution of human opinions on examples of low agreement, and prevents models from capturing the semantic vagueness that the individual ratings represent. In this work, we introduce USTS, the first Uncertainty-aware STS dataset with ∼15,000 Chinese sentence pairs and 150,000 labels, to study collective human opinions in STS. Analysis reveals that neither a scalar nor a single Gaussian fits a set of observed judgments adequately. We further show that current STS models cannot capture the variance caused by human disagreement on individual instances, but rather reflect the predictive confidence over the aggregate dataset.

On solving textual ambiguities and semantic vagueness in MRC based question answering using generative pre-trained transformers.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is one of the most challenging tasks and active fields in natural language processing (NLP). MRC systems aim to enable a machine to understand a given context in natural language and to answer a series of questions about it. With the advent of bi-directional deep learning algorithms and large-scale datasets, MRC achieved improved results. However, these models are still suffering from two research issues: textual ambiguities and semantic vagueness to comprehend the long passages and generate answers for abstractive MRC systems. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Extended Generative Pretrained Transformers-based Question Answering (ExtGPT-QA) model to generate precise and relevant answers to questions about a given context. The proposed architecture comprises two modified forms of encoder and decoder as compared to GPT. The encoder uses a positional encoder to assign a unique representation with each word in the sentence for reference to address the textual ambiguities. Subsequently, the decoder module involves a multi-head attention mechanism along with affine and aggregation layers to mitigate semantic vagueness with MRC systems. Additionally, we applied syntax and semantic feature engineering techniques to enhance the effectiveness of the proposed model. To validate the proposed model's effectiveness, a comprehensive empirical analysis is carried out using three benchmark datasets including SQuAD, Wiki-QA, and News-QA. The results of the proposed ExtGPT-QA outperformed state of art MRC techniques and obtained 93.25% and 90.52% F1-score and exact match, respectively. The results confirm the effectiveness of the ExtGPT-QA model to address textual ambiguities and semantic vagueness issues in MRC systems.

The Retrospective View on an Epoch as a Source for Dramatization of a Prosaic Narrative in Ukraine and Poland: Exemplified by Andrzej Kuśniewicz and Vasyl Zemliak

The article is aimed at comparing two dilogies: On the Way to Korinthos (1964) and The Zones (1971) by the Polish writer A. Kuśniewicz (1904–1993) at one side and The Swan Flock (1971) and Green Mills (1976) by the Ukrainian writer V. Zemliak (1923–1977) on the other. Both works look like the recollections and chronicles and deal with the same epoch (the first half of the 20th century) and the neighboring Ukrainian localities (Galicia and Podillia). Besides the form of personal recollections, the narration in the 1st person exactly reflects the authors’ attitude towards the epoch that imparts substantiation for the comparative discussion of the works. One detects obvious revelation of dramatic properties associated with myth-making intentions inherent for the narratives. Although an account on personal biography given in the form of recollections contains no pretext for developing actions’ lines. It is the mystery that imparts dramatic properties to the works. The issue of these properties is arisen as the problem of textual motivation in view of the absence of plot with its macroscopic predicative ties. In particular, the problem of motivation is depicted as the consequence of textual heterogeneity as the result of parcellation inherent to memory. Respectively mnemonic reasons of textual disjunction are still to be further traced in the spontaneity of events that makes their motivation problematic where wonder replaces reasonable ties of things. The narrator’s memory restores events of the past through their ritualistic meaning as the parts of some thorough actions, and in this sense it is approaching the myth. This procures productive field for the problem of motivation to be solved with the means of aspectology. Such approach enables discovering the priority of preponderantly static aspect in opposite to the aspect of transition from one situation to another as in realistic prose. The prevalence of details presupposes the aspect of singularity where events are given as partial and irretrievable. It entails the prevalence of spontaneous motivation with contingent determination so that the partiality of details turns into the contingency of the world’s image. There arise semantic vagueness and ambivalence, places of indefiniteness (the term of R. Ingarden) those refer to the latent contents as in the dramatic performance. Partiality and contingency result in the necessity of referring the details towards the presupposed entirety as in synecdoche. Accordingly, the problem of fatalism as the primeval source of dramatics is arisen.

Semantic Vagueness in Psychiatric Nosology

Many discussions in the philosophy of psychiatry hinge on, among other things, the concepts of disorders, the role of underlying mechanisms, and the merits of various diagnostic models. Yet, some such disputes rest on assumptions about vagueness in the sense of susceptibility to the Sorites paradox as opposed to mere uncertainty in clinical practice. Studying borderline cases of psychiatric conditions—those where it is indeterminate whether applying a diagnosis is appropriate—may shed light on broader debates about the nature and boundaries of these conditions. In this article, I will argue that if psychiatric vagueness exists, then some instances of it stem at least partially from how we describe the world instead of the state of the world or what we know about it. In other words, vagueness in psychiatric terms and concepts is at least in part semantic and neither solely epistemic nor solely ontic. On this view, slight differences in how various linguistic communities apply diagnostic terms modify their referents, making their precise extension indeterminate. This implies that we can sometimes answer questions about diagnosis by settling disagreements about language, which may provide traction in debates about the philosophy of nosology and help inform psychiatric practice.

A new corpus annotation framework for Latin diachronic lexical semantics

AbstractWe present a new corpus-based resource and methodology for the annotation of Latin lexical semantics, consisting of 2,399 annotated passages of 40 lemmas from the Latin diachronic corpus LatinISE. We also describe how the annotation was designed, analyse annotators’ styles, and present the preliminary results of a study on the lexical semantics and diachronic change of the 40 lemmas. We complement this analysis with a case study on semantic vagueness. As the availability of digital corpora of ancient languages increases, and as computational research develops new methods for large-scale analysis of diachronic lexical semantics, building lexical semantic annotation resources can shed new light on large-scale patterns in the semantic development of lexical items over time. We share recommendations for designing the annotation task that will hopefully help similar research on other less-resourced or historical languages.

Проблема неопределенности в аналитической метафизике

The article is devoted to vagueness as a problem of analytical metaphysics. The specificity of the consideration of vagueness by philosophers-analysts lies in the appeal to the ancient sources of this problem and in the explication of its essential characteristics from the aporias of Eubulides. Modern metaphysical theories consider vagueness as a general term for those phenomena that: a) either demonstrate borderline cases, b) either do not have clear boundaries, c) or do not have strictly defined identity conditions. In modern metaphysics ontological, semantic and epistemic types of vagueness are distinguished. However, not all of them are equally valid. All cases of “ontological vagueness” ultimately come down either to the limitations of our cognitive tools, or to a language that is unable to unam­biguously “grasp” the essence of an object. Therefore, the ontological type of vague­ness seems to be insufficiently substantiated. Semantic vagueness is considered as a phenomenon that belongs only to the sphere of semantics (language) or concepts and is not a characteristic feature of the ontology of the world. Epistemic vagueness is thematicized as a kind of “ignorance”.

Author-Driven Computable Data and Ontology Production for Taxonomists

Author-Driven Computable Data and Ontology Production for Taxonomists

Metaphors of emotions: towards a data-driven formalization

Formalization of natural language metaphors is a notorious problem in artificial intelligence and in other overlapping domains. It is semantic vagueness that makes metaphors resistant to formulaic or algorithmic descriptions. Great effort has been invested into modeling metaphors computationally but the issue remains methodologically uncertain and needs further research. This paper works on a practical solution to the problem how metaphorical meaning can be represented in a way suitable for computation. The research agenda of this paper is interdisciplinary; it brings together an algebraic heuristic-driven theory for metaphors developed in artificial intelligence and an applied theory of meaning that comes from cognitive linguistics. This agenda postpones theoretical speculation and argument and is solely solution-focused, which contributes to the value of this paper’s attempt to bridge the cognitive science disciplines whose compatibility, though declared, is seldomdemonstrated in a piece of practical research.This paper works with metaphors of human emotions that are linguistically manifested in modern English discourse. Emotions by virtue of their ineffability as qualia are rich in metaphorical conceptualizations and serve the research agenda well. This paper in a meaningful way exposes and ranks designated properties of the FEAR, SADNESS, HAPPINESS, and RELAXATION/SERENITY concepts and arranges these properties into general-purpose ontologies that explicitly specify metaphorically preferred emotion conceptualizations and are good candidates for computation. In prospect, this paper will account for some theoretical aspects of the research and probe the algorithmic and repetitive nature of schemas that license metaphorical expressions in natural language.

Fuzzy Language Processing in Translation of Literature: A Case Study of Dr. Zha’s Diary of Fighting the COVID-19

Aesthetics is a subject focusing on studying the nature and significance of beauty (including beauty in language, art, literature, etc.). Moreover, the development of aesthetics, within the broader context of literary systems, is of significant importance. Chinese Literature (which in essence differs from that of English Literature) expresses beauty using its unique ways, especially with the employment of fuzzy language (also known as “vague language”). By including a certain degree of “fuzziness”, Chinese Literature grants readers room fir imagination. However, the process of translating Chinese fuzzy language into other languages is not an easy feat to accomplish. Such translations can, to a large extent, seriously affect the original meaning of the text. To explore proper ways of “fuzzy language” translation, this paper ventures to analyze the processing methods used in the translated work “Dr. Zha’s Diary of Fighting the COVID-19”. Categorizing vague language into three perspectives, namely, semantic vagueness, cultural vagueness and rhetorical vagueness, the paper analyzes the way to tackle fuzzy language with 16 detailed cases. Based on the case analyses, the paper proposes that the proper translation of fuzzy language in literature will be more conducive for readers to appreciate the works and helps to improve the translation quality. By exploring the ways of processing fuzzy language, this paper hopes to bring some suggestions and inspiration to other researchers.

Semantically related borrowings mentor — kouč — tutor in the Czech and Russian languages

The change in the vocabulary of the Russian and Czech languages is largely due to borrowings. Different interpretations of the semantics of words and vague semantics do not affect the popularity of these words among native speakers. The article describes the search for an accurate translation and semantic systematization of the synonymic series mentor (ментор) — kouč (коуч) — tutor (тьютор) in the Czech and Russian languages. The proximity of the meanings of the the quasi-synonyms leads to difficulties in revealing the specifics of each word. Due to the similarity of the organization of the grammatical systems of the Russian and Czech languages and due to the similar process of the globalization in both languages the comparative approach is used. The research was carried out on the material of the search engines Google.ru, Seznam.cz, as well as the Czech database Neomat. In certain contexts these words are interchangeable with units from the recipient language, but in a relationship of complete synonymy, in our opinion, there is only a pair ментор — наставник in Russian language. We also noted the reasons for the active use of such foreign words: firstly, the absence of a functional-semantic equivalent in the receiving languages, and secondly, the assessment of such vocabulary as socially prestigious, fashionable, to which attention is paid.

Requesting Examples in Psychodiagnostic Interviews

As part of a larger research project on understanding change in helping professions, this paper investigates into therapists’ requesting examples and their interactional and sequential contri-bution to clients’ change. Requesting examples by therapists in psychodiagnostic interviews explicitly or implicitly criticize the patient’s prior turn as insufficient, i.e. as unclear, vague, or as too general. Such a request opens a retro-sequence (Schegloff 2007) and in the following provides for a description that both helps clarify the semantic vagueness and evinces psychic or relational aspects of the topic at hand. While the patient’s insufficient presentation is initi-ated by a prior request of the therapist, the patient’s example presentation is regularly fol-lowed by the therapist’s summarizing comments or by further requests focusing on the pa-tient’s problem. Requesting examples thus are a particular case of requests that follow ‘ex-pandable responses’ as described by Muntigl & Zabala (2008); they follow the same sequential organization, yet, given that they make examples conditionally relevant, they are more specif-ic. With the help of this sequential organization both participants co-construct elements of common knowledge. Such an ‘interplay of understanding’ (Voutilainen & Peräkylä 2014) al-lows the therapist to pursue the overall aim of therapy, i.e. to increase the patients’ awareness of their distorted perceptions, and thus to pave the way for change. The data comprises of 16 videotaped first interviews following the manual of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Di-agnostics (OPD Task Force 2009). It was collected in cooperation with the Clinic for General Internal Medicine and Psychosomatic at the University Clinic of Heidelberg.

Perpetually Astride Eden\u2019s Boundaries: The Limits to the \u2018Limits of Law\u2019 and the Semiotic Inconsistency of \u2018Legal Enclosures\u2019

Legal systems can be metaphorically taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures. The ancient world has given us at least three literary loci that display the self-disruptive significance of this kind of metaphor if assumed as a practical guideline in the attempt to steer human experience. The first such loci can be traced in biblical Eden; the second one in the Phaeacian garden described in Homer’s Odyssey; the third in the stories of the first and second mythical Athens included in Plato’s Timaeus and Republic. In all these tales, human beings ineluctably end up straying across the semantic-spatial borders which certain categories and rules have given them to encompass their experience. All these literary loci offer both a semio-cognitive and a constitutional lesson for lawyers and sovereigns. My intention is to exploit these lessons to show that the most relevant limit of legal systems, if taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures, consists precisely in their inability to constitutively limit themselves and their semiotic borders. This inaptitude is due, in my view, to the semiotic ‘exceedance’ of the phrastic, or descriptive parts of legal rules even more than the semantic vagueness of the values underlying their legitimacy. Any attempt to define the semantic and spatial boundaries of human experience by means of verbal enunciations implies the use of categorical schemes to define the legitimate and/or forbidden behaviors. But categorical schemes, in turn, comprise boundaries that draw protean verges between the inside and the outside of each category. The categorical ‘inside’ compellingly tends to exceed its borders so as to protrude out toward what is outside the category. In turn, the ‘outside’ shows, more often than not, continuities with the axiological/teleological patterns underpinning the semantic boundaries of legal rules. Any attempt to limit the competence/extension of law, if taken in its semantic/spatial significance, would seem to unveil what law could or should be, but is not. Relying on the above literary loci, I will try to demonstrate that this apparently contradictory implication is inherent in the dialectic between equality/universality and difference/plurality that makes up categorization itself, and thereby the semiotic prerequisites to considering any legal rule.

K současné terminologii restaurování knižní vazby

The article deals with the current terminology of conservation and historical book binding. The introduction mentions the different paradigms of a scientific examination of a book artefact and lists the fundamental differences between restoration and conservation approaches. The issue of accurate designation is discussed with regard to the technology of book binding, divided in more detail into characteristic structural, protective and decorative elements of the binding and book block, including the typology of the bindings, the sewing structure and the writing material. The etymological development of scientific terminology is treated in connection with a multidisciplinary overlap, theorists and authorities of the field, traditionalism and social usage, the scientific paradigm and normative interpretations, borrowings and literal translations from foreign languages. The study also indicates the semantic vagueness and multiplicity of expressions. In conclusion, the question is raised as to whether it is currently acceptable at all to change the traditional and long-established terminology of historical book binding.

Notions of Atmosphere: Toward the Limits of Narrative Understanding

The change of methodological paradigms, introduced by postclassical narratology and especially its cognitivist orientation, has thus far not reflected on the phenomenon of atmosphere. This is somewhat surprising, if we consider that the contemporary conceptualization of atmosphere and the increased interest in the questions it brings forth arise from new phenomenology and phenomenological aesthetics, fields that have directly initiated the development of postclassical narratology. Starting with the phenomenological concept of atmosphere of M. Merleau-Ponty and H. Schmitz (atmosphere as an ecstasy of experience, a specific modus of presence with a quasi-objective and inter-subjective status fitting into the extra-linguistic framework, atmospheric perception as seizing the surfaceless space) and the aesthetic relevance of the concept (G. Böhme, T. Griffero, E. Fischer-Lichte), this article presents the terminological instability and semantic vagueness of atmosphere and related terms within the narratological discourse of M. Bal, G. Prince, M.L. Ryan and P. Abbott (atmosphere as receptive and narrative disposition, the accompanying factor of morphological categories, the thematic-psychological distinctive characteristic of genre). The primary objective of the paper is to reexamine the methodological legitimacy of the concept of atmosphere, both regarding the limits of narrative understanding and its interpretative potential which might become relevant within cognitive theories of intertextuality (E. Panagiotidy, M. Juvan), while also being a humanistic response to the challenges of new epistemological paradigms and a return to the transcendental essence of literature.

Da eine oder mehrere betroffen …

AbstractBased on a corpus study conducted using the GerManC corpus (1650–1800), the paper sketches the functional and sociosymbolic development of subordinate clause constructions introduced by the subjunctorda‘since’ in different text genres. In the second half of the 17thand the first half of the 18thcentury, thedaclauses were characterized by semantic vagueness: Besides temporal, spatial and causal relations, the subjunctor established conditional, concessive, and adversative links between clauses. The corpus study reveals that different genres are crucial to the readings ofdaclauses. Spatial and temporal usages, for example, occur more often in sermons than in other genres. The conditional reading, in contrast, strongly tends to occur in legal texts, where it displays very high frequency. This could be the reason whydaclauses carry indexical meaning in contemporary German and are associated with formal language. Over the course of the 18thcentury, the causal usages increase in all genres. Surprisingly, these causaldaclauses tend to be placed in front of the matrix clause despite the overall tendency of causal clauses to follow the matrix clause.

Moral Vagueness as Semantic Vagueness

Does moral vagueness require ontic vagueness? A central challenge for nonontic treatments of moral vagueness arises from the referential stability of moral terms across small changes in how they ar...