Set Of Lexical Items Research Articles

Discursive Quads: New Kinds of Lexical Co‐occurrence Data With Linguistic Concept Modelling

AbstractThis paper introduces linguistic concept modelling, a new computational approach to humanities‐driven analysis of meaning in large text collections, and presents illustrative examples of the approach applied to over one billion words of printed Early Modern English contained in Early English Books Online (Text Creation Partnership edition). Linguistic concept modelling methods and innovations are described in detail, and justified as a unique, new, powerful means for studying meaning in texts in relation to individual lexical items, sets of lexical items and entire text collections. Linguistic concept modelling is compared to established approaches of distributional semantics and topic modelling, to show how linguistic concept modelling overcomes the limitations of those approaches to support humanities research. Examples demonstrate how our approach can be used to explore and analyse semantic, pragmatic and discursive meaning in texts, highlighting the novel observations that our approach affords, and its benefits for humanities scholars.

Transnationalism in recent fictionalized texts on East Africa

Recent fictionalized texts on East Africa and on the political turmoil that began just before the 1994 Rwanda genocide, later morphing across the Great Lakes, provide insightful contrasts to the scholarship on transnationalism. Concentrating on two agents that foreground these alterities, ‘the soldier who refuses’ and ‘the refugee’, the article disaggregates this region’s heterotopias. The argument is that, in their walking away from civil wars in East Africa to Southern Africa, these subjects provide an original set of lexical items to interpret new but fragile peoples who break free from the nation state.At the same time, the unique grammar broadens the methodology for considering the ‘Indian Ocean’ as a topic that recurs in studies on East Africa. In this reading, the discussion works with the cultural studies concept of ‘walking’, as its politics of terra firma centres on guerrilla tactics and on how they weaken the postcolony.The first part of the article attempts a review of the cartographies of East Africa.The second section closely considers how the representations of these sets of heterotopias in select fiction on East Africa render this region transnational.

An investigation into the role of gesture in enhancing children's vocabulary command

The primary aim of the current study was to explore whether non-linguistic conventions, especially gesture, have a significant impact on children's vocabulary learning. Fifty male and female Iranian children aged between 3 and 6 years of age (mean age = 3.5) from two classes of a language institute were taught a set of lexical items using two different teaching procedures: one employing linguistic conventions only, without gesture, and the other through a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic approaches. The data analysis revealed that non-linguistic conventions, including gesture, significantly influence children's learning of vocabulary items. The study contributes to the literature examining vocabulary and gesture and may inform early years practitioners' approaches to vocabulary teaching.

Complex predicates, eventivity, and causative-inchoative alternation

The paper examines syntax and semantics of complex predicates in Ossetian, an Iranian language spoken in the Central Caucasus. Ossetian, being a language where complex predicates participate in the causative-inchoative alternation, offers us an opportunity to investigate a case where the alternation is blocked by telicizing prefixes if the non-verbal component is not eventive. To account for this effect, an analysis is developed in which eventive and non-eventive non-verbal components are integrated into the event structure in considerably different ways. Eventivity/non-eventivity determines different attachment options for telicizing prefixes, hence constrains the spell-out of the whole structure in different ways. As a consequence of this, for one class of complex predicates, but not for the other, both causative and inchoative prefixed configurations can be spelled out by the same set of lexical items, and the alternation obtains.

When movement and base-generation compete

Economy constraints in Minimalist syntax are usually taken to be universal. If an economy constraint C penalizes a derivation/representation in language A, it will also do so in language B. This paper presents a type of crosslinguistic variation that casts serious doubts on this assumption, namely the distribution of resumptive relatives vis-a-vis gap relatives. It is shown that while resumption is a last resort in languages like Zurich German, i.e. occurring only when gap relatives are barred, it can be an optional strategy in languages like Hebrew/Irish, thus occurring in the same environment as gap relatives. For the first type of language this implies that gap and resumptive relatives are in the same reference set and compete and that gap relatives block resumptive relatives. Gap relatives are shown to involve movement while resumptive relatives are derived by base-generation in Zurich German. Since a different set of lexical items is involved in the two derivations the reference set must be based on identical LFs rather than identical numerations. However, once this is established it is surprising that no blocking obtains in the second group of languages. Several options to solve this problem will be evaluated. It will be shown that the variation is best modeled by means of different rankings of interacting and violable constraints. The ban against resumption will be subsumed under a general constraint that penalizes External Merge. The paper is organized as follows: section one introduces basic facts about relativization in Zurich German. Section two explains the distribution of resumptives in Zurich German relatives. Section three discusses possible analyses of resumption under the assumption that gap and resumptive relatives are based on the same numeration. Section four reviews possible economy constraints that block resumption. Section five addresses pseudo-optionality. Section six shows that cross-linguistic variation requires a different interpretation of economy constraints, and section seven concludes the paper. 1

Zero Derivation in English: Base-Identity and Constraint Indexation

This paper argues that stress patterns that occur in zero derivation is best analyzed in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1995) in terms of faithfulness and lexically indexed markedness constraints. This approach is shown to capture distinctions between generality and exceptionality of stress patterns in zero derivation. Based on a variety of evidence, I argue that zero-derived forms should be faithful to their base, and that exceptions to the patterns are confined only to a restricted set of words. Assuming that a single constraint can be multiply instantiated in a constraint hierarchy, and each instantiation may be indexed to apply to a particular set of lexical items (cf. Fukuzawa, 1999; Ito & Mester, 1999, 2001; Kraska-Szelenk, 1997, 1999; Pater, 2000), I specifically claim that the lexically indexed markedness constraint WORD STRESSL outranks the faithfulness constraint Base-Identity, which in turn ranks above the general markedness constraint WORD STRESS. It is shown that with the constraint ranking, all the stress patterns that occur in zero derivation can be accounted for straightforwardly. In so doing, I also show that under the analysis adopted in this paper, the prediction that new zero-derived forms always retain the stress pattern of the base is borne out from the high ranking of the faithfulness constraint Base-Identity.

Intertextuality as Source and Evidence for Indirect Indexical Meanings

AGoogle search conducted on a single Mock Spanish lexical item, "manana," produces an intertextual series comparable to the kind of exposure to multiple tokens of Mock Spanish that English speakers might encounter over a much longer period of time. Tokens of "manana" are consciously associated with Spanish speakers and exhibit a narrow range of "keys," ranging from the jocular to the pejorative. The pejorative senses of /man'yane/ are sometimes accompanied by overtly negative stereotyping of Spanish speakers. The properties of the intertextual series support hypotheses previously developed about the indexical functions of Mock Spanish, a set of lexical items that can be used to create a particular colloquial tone in most varieties of English.

Lexical Variation among Western Australian Primary School Children

This paper investigates the use of Australianisms by Western Australian primary school students. A selected set of lexical items from Bryant (1989a) were used in the study. Results showed less use of some items deemed to be indicative of Western Australia by Bryant and some infiltration of terms from the eastern states, clearly caused by internal migration. Other changes could be attributed to changes in Australian lifestyles generally and American television.

Lexical Frequencies in a 300 Million Word Corpus of Australian Newspapers. Analysis and Interpretation

Corpus linguistics, descriptive, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics use corpora and generalise their findings beyond the samples contained in them. That raises the problem of the representativity of the data base and of the application of methods for the presentation of findings. Although this paper originated in the context of the pluricentricity of English in the lexis of mainstream Australian English (mAusE), it was inspired by the current debates about corpus methodology (Kretzschmar et al. 1987). It is based on a large newspaper corpus that extends over a period of six years. It studies the distribution patterns of a small set of lexical items that are derived from Aboriginal languages or relate to Aboriginal concerns. While there appears to be a fairly consistent stable core, these items manifest significant differences in occurrence over the six-year period and in the media outlets and that raises the questions of what a replicate study of these items (or of others) would find and whether a corpus can claim to be representative in the first place.

Inference and word meaning: The case of modal auxiliaries

In this paper I will present and defend an analysis of (a sample of) the English modal auxiliary verbs using a relevance-theoretic semantic and pragmatic framework. I will start by discussing previous analyses of modality in English with an eye to explaining how a cluster of related meanings — epistemic, root, and other — is expressed by the same set of lexical items. I will then go on to develop a unitary semantic approach to the English modals, treating them as (mostly) incomplete propositional operators. After defending the details of my semantic account, I will show how the proposed semantics can give rise to the range of root interpretations modal verbs can receive in context. Epistemic interpretations require some further theoretical machinery, which will make crucial use of the notion of metarepresentation. Finally, I will sketch the differences between natural-language interpretations of modal operators and their alethic/logical uses.

Semantic Differentiation in the Acquisition of English as a Second Language

I analyzed the mental organizations of two sets of fuzzy lexical items by 70 native speakers (NSs) of English and 185 learners of English as a second language (ESL). They provided pair‐wise comparisons of a set of degree adverbs and a set offrequency terms, respectively. I subjected their judgments to unidimensional scaling and circular triad analysis, which indicated that: (a) despite their apparent familiarity with the items, ESL learners' semantic organizations deviated from the NSs' model; (b) the location and extent of semantic mismatch can be identified at different levels of ESL proficiency; (c) consistent approximation to the target model improved as ESL proficiency improves; (d) the structural stability of an individual's private semantic model is not readily generalizable between sets of lexical items or levels of proficiency; and (el consensus among ESL learners improves as proficiency increases. The findings suggest that a discernible approximative pattern exists in the acquisition of ESL semantics, with the differentiation of certain words acquired before the differentiation of others.

Concurrent, object-oriented natural language parsing: the ParseTalk model

The ParseTalk model of concurrent, object-oriented natural language parsing is introduced. It builds upon the complete lexical distribution of grammatical knowledge and incorporates inheritance mechanisms in order to express generalizations over sets of lexical items. The grammar model integrates declarative well-formedness criteria constraining linguistic relations between heads and modifiers, and procedural specifications of the communication protocol for establishing these relations. The parser's computation model relies upon the actor paradigm, with concurrency entering through asynchronous message passing. We consider various extensions of the basic actor model as required for distributed natural language understanding and elaborate on the semantics of the actor computation model in terms of event type networks (a graph representation for actor grammar specifications) and event networks (graphs which represent the actor parser's behavior). Besides theoretical claims, we present an interactive grammar/parser workbench, a graphical development environment with various types of browsers, tracers, inspectors and debuggers, that has been adapted to the requirements of large-scale grammar engineering in a distributed, object-oriented specification and programming framework.

Words and Scenes in a Didactic Lexicon

On of the major concerns in the tradition of foreign language teaching has been the question of how FL learners learn new vocabulary. This issue comprises two questions, i.e. how are FL words grasped in their complex meanings and how are they remembered? In this paper this dual issue is tackled by proposing the notion of a didactic lexicon, which is seen as an optimal presentation of word meanings. This contribution discusses Fillmore's 'Scenes-and-frame semantics' and the contextual approach to vocabulary learning and describes an experiment in contextual vocabulary learning and testing. A didactic lexicon is defined as a variabele set of lexical items explained in ordinary language, possibly with the help of visual materials or trans-lations, enabling the learner to build up the strongest possible associations between FL words and their prototypical scenes, and revealing the underlying structure of the lexicon of the FL. Finally some strategies for developing a 'didactic' lexicon are presented.