Single Word Form Research Articles

Electronic Catalog of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Graphics: Sign, Letter, Text

Based on the digital archive of F. M. Dostoevsky, containing images and research transcripts of the texts of his notebooks (http://dostoevsky-archive.ru/), work was underway to create a commented corpus of the writer’s graphics in 2020–2023. This article discusses issues that have arisen in the course of practical work on filling the catalog of graphic samples, indicates possible ways to solve them, identifies ways to use the created online database. One of the main practical applications of the developed platform was the ability to use special tools to recognize hard-to-read Dostoevsky records. The choice of the description unit became important: instead of the minimum spelling unit — grapheme, the grammatical category of word forms was used. The emphasis on the word as the main unit of description created conditions for the gradual selection of material for an online dictionary of the writer’s manuscripts, if necessary, coordinating the requirements for graphics (as a description of the external features of the text, sketches) and grammar (as a structure-forming principle). The search for ways to solve the issues that arose resulted in the description of individual word forms: semantic homographs that are different parts of speech, suppletive forms of a word, proper names (including anthroponyms, toponyms, common names, as well as appellatives that are equivalents of proper names — this creates prerequisites for creating a dictionary of names inside the online dictionary of manuscripts). Structurally complex lexical units are also described as a single word form: polynomial synonyms, names, complex conjunctions and prepositions, introductory and phraseological combinations. A separate promising group for the study consisted of Dostoevsky’s author’s signs, hybrid in form: these include both words (“February”) and author’s signs (as symbols or proof-reading signs). When describing Dostoevsky’s calligraphic works, on the one hand, it became obvious that it was necessary to differentiate the variants of the writer’s calligraphic inscriptions, systematize the available knowledge about the peculiarities of his calligraphic handwriting and determine the criteria for selecting and describing the material. On the other hand, it turned out to be possible to use the samples already available in the database as the basis for the attribution of autographs and stationery copies in Dostoevsky’s handwritten legacy. Thus, the created electronic database of Dostoevsky’s graphics turned out to be the optimal platform for solving multidirectional tasks — codicology, textual studies, the study of the author’s language and style, attribution, scientific commentary, onomastics — and, thanks to the software potential embedded in it, has fairly extensive development prospects.

Prosodic words are the domain of emphasis spread: evidence from Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic

Abstract This article, which reports on an experimental study based on data obtained from 86 native speakers of Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic (NRJA), offers empirical evidence that emphasis spread can apply bidirectionally across word edges when they are prosodically word internal. In other words, emphasis can spread from one word to a neighboring (plain) word when the two words form one prosodic word (ω). In order to support this hypothesis, we examine simple construct-state nominals (i.e., nominals consisting of two members), which are widely assumed to behave prosodically as one word in Arabic grammar (see, e.g., Borer, Hagit. 1999. Deconstructing the construct. In Kyle Johnson & Ian Roberts (eds.), Beyond principles and parameters, 3–89. Dordrecht: Kluwer). A simple construct state nominal is mapped onto one ω, as proposed in the current article. Additionally, this article examines instances of construct state nominals in which two words could be members of a ω by cliticization. In this case, a weak form (e.g., a reduced functional word such as an auxiliary verb) is attached to the ω of a lexical word, as an enclitic. The article shows that emphasis spreads across word edges within the ω mapped from a simple construct state nominal or a word along with its enclitics. In so doing, it provides evidence that the domain of emphasis spread is larger than the syllable, morpheme, or single-word form, as proposed by other studies for other Arabic varieties.

A Case Study of Children Language Acquisition: The Form of Questions-Making Processes Employed by Preschoolers

This study shows the forms of questions making by 3 and 5 years old children. Purposive sampling was used to determine the objects of the study.. The forms were found through descriptive qualitative approach by implementing three methods, observation, interview, and note taking techniques to collect the data. To analyze the data, the researchers used data reduction, categorization, and conclusion. The researchers confirmed that there were four kinds of questions-making processes employed by Preschoolers. They were sign form, single word form, double word form or phrase, and clause or sentence. It can be concluded that the differences between those two ages were in term of the frequency of using the forms. The 3 years old child used single and double word forms frequently, while the 5 years old child used double word form or phrase and clause frequently.

NEZİHE ARAZ'IN BALLAR BALINI BULDUM ZAMİR TİYATRO ESERİNDE ZAMİRLERİN İNCELENMESİ

Tam adı Fatma Nezihe ARAZ olan yazar, 1922 yılında Konya'daki dünyaya geldi. Daha çok biyografik eserleriyle tanınan ARAZ, bunun yanı sıra edebiyatın çeşitli sahalarında eserler vermiştir. 20. yüzyılın başarılı kadın yazarlarındandır. Hiç evlenmeyip, kendini yazarlığa vakfetmiştir. 26 Temmuz 2009'da vefat etmiştir. Yaşamı boyunca birçok şahane eser kaleme alan Nezihe ARAZ'ın en dikkat çekici ve değerli eserlerinden biri, şüphesiz, Ballar Balını Buldum isimli tiyatro eseridir. Küçük hacimli, duygusal ağırlıklı, tekke edebiyatının en güzide ismi olan Yunus Emre'nin aynı isimli şiirinden hareketle yazılmış, orijinal bir eserdir. Ballar Balını Buldum eseri, içeriğine bakıldığında, tüm Türk Dil Yapısının izlerini taşıyan bir eserdir. Biz ise bu çalışmada, Nezihe ARAZ'ın adı geçen Ballar Balını Buldum isimli tiyatro eserinde zamirleri inceleyeceğiz. Bilindiği üzere zamirlerin diğer ismi adıllardır. Zamirler yani adıllar, herhangi bir varlığın yerini tutan sözcüklerdir. Cümlenin öznesi, ismi bizzat geçmese de hissedilir konumdadır. Bu hissi veren kelime incelendiğinde, zamir bulunabilir. İşleyeceğimiz üzere zamirler, sözcük durumunda veya ek durumunda olabilir. Sözcük durumunda karşımıza çıkan zamirler yani adıllar, başlı başına müstakil bir kelime iken, ek durumunda olan zamirler ise, isme eklenen belli başlı eklerle karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Çalışmamıza, Türk kadın yazar Nezihe ARAZ'ın hayatı, edebi kişiliği ve eserlerinden kısaca bahsetmek suretiyle başlayacağız. Ardından çalışmamızın ana teması olan zamirleri kısaca tanıttıktan sonra, Ballar Balını Buldum eserinden referansla konu bağlamında incelemelerde bulunacağız.

Cultural evolution leads to vocal iconicity in an experimental iterated learning task

Abstract Experimental and cross-linguistic studies have shown that vocal iconicity is prevalent in words that carry meanings related to size and shape. Although these studies demonstrate the importance of vocal iconicity and reveal the cognitive biases underpinning it, there is less work demonstrating how these biases lead to the evolution of a sound symbolic lexicon in the first place. In this study, we show how words can be shaped by cognitive biases through cultural evolution. Using a simple experimental setup resembling the game telephone, we examined how a single word form changed as it was passed from one participant to the next by a process of immediate iterated learning. About 1,500 naïve participants were recruited online and divided into five condition groups. The participants in the control-group received no information about the meaning of the word they were about to hear, while the participants in the remaining four groups were informed that the word meant either big or small (with the meaning being presented in text), or round or pointy (with the meaning being presented as a picture). The first participant in a transmission chain was presented with a phonetically diverse word and asked to repeat it. Thereafter, the recording of the repeated word was played for the next participant in the same chain. The sounds of the audio recordings were then transcribed and categorized according to six binary sound parameters. By modelling the proportion of vowels or consonants for each sound parameter, the small-condition showed increases of front unrounded vowels and the pointy-condition increases of acute consonants. The results show that linguistic transmission is sufficient for vocal iconicity to emerge, which demonstrates the role non-arbitrary associations play in the evolution of language.

Word Senses as Clusters of Meaning Modulations: A Computational Model of Polysemy.

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic representations are linked to a single word form, which fails to capture important generalizations about how polysemous words are used; in particular, the graded nature of polysemous senses, and the flexibility and regularity of polysemy use. We provide a novel view of how polysemous words are represented and processed, focusing on how meaning is modulated by context. Our theory is implemented within a recurrent neural network that learns distributional information through exposure to a large and representative corpus of English. Clusters of meaning emerge from how the model processes individual word forms. In keeping with distributional theories of semantics, we suggest word meanings are generalized from contexts of different word tokens, with polysemy emerging as multiple clusters of contextually modulated meanings. We validate our results against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy focusing on the gradedness, flexibility, and regularity of polysemous sense individuation, as well as behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. The results provide novel insights into how polysemy emerges from contextual processing of word meaning from both a theoretical and computational point of view.

Conceptual relations predict colexification across languages

In natural language, multiple meanings often share a single word form, a phenomenon known as colexification. Some sets of meanings are more frequently colexified across languages than others, but the source of this variation is not well understood. We propose that cross-linguistic variation in colexification frequency is non-arbitrary and reflects a general principle of cognitive economy: More commonly colexified meanings across languages are those that require less cognitive effort to relate. To evaluate our proposal, we examine patterns of colexification of varying frequency from about 250 languages. We predict these colexification data based on independent measures of conceptual relatedness drawn from large-scale psychological and linguistic resources. Our results show that meanings that are more frequently colexified across these languages tend to be more strongly associated by speakers of English, suggesting that conceptual associativity provides an important constraint on the development of the lexicon. Our work extends research on polysemy and the evolution of word meanings by grounding cross-linguistic regularities in colexification in basic principles of human cognition.

Eski Anadolu Türkçesi Kur'an Tercümelerinde Esmâ-i Hüsnâ'yı Karşılayan Söz Varlığı

Eski Anadolu Türkçesi döneminde yazılmış satır altı Kur’an tercümeleri, Türkçenin söz varlığı açısından zengin veri kaynaklarıdır. Temel amacı, Arapça bilmeyen halkın kendi dilinde Kur’an’ı okuyup anlamasını sağlamak olan bu çevirilerde, mütercimler hem konunun hassasiyeti gereği hem de halkın kullandığı dili temsilen titiz davranmışlardır. Satır altlarında “bire bir kelime çevirisi” şeklinde oluşturulan bu tercümeler, yazıldıkları dönemin dil özelliklerini ortaya koyma bakımından önemli eserlerdir. Tercümeler, Arapça karşısında Türkçenin ifade gücünü göstermesi açısından da ayrı bir öneme sahiptirler. Bu konuda daha önce yapılan benzer çalışmalara ek olarak Kur’an’da Esmâ-Hüsna’nın (Allah’ın en güzel isimleri) geçtiği yerler incelenip aynı Esmâ’nın Türkçedeki farklı karşılıkları da tespit edilmeye çalışılmıştır. Esmâ-i Hüsnâ’ya karşılık gelen ifadeler yapı bakımından sınıflandırılmıştır. Sınıflandırma sonucunda sıfat-fiilllerin ve sıfat-fiil gruplarının Esmâ’ların Türkçe ifadesinde yoğun bir şekilde tercih edildiği görülmüştür. Bir Türkçeleştirme yöntemi olarak karşımıza çıkan bu kullanımlar anlam boyutu ile ayrı bir öneme sahip olan Allah’ın isimlerinin dönem Türkçesine özgü karşılıklarıdır. Kur’an’ın Türkçe çevirilerinde, dilde var olan kelime ihtiyacına Türkçe kelimelerle bu dönemde ne şekilde cevap verildiği ve Türk dilinin kelime türetmede ve söz diziminde nasıl hareket ettiği açıkça görülebilmektedir. Yapılan bu tarz çalışmaların günümüz Türkçesi söz varlığına ve sözlük çalışmalarına katkı sağlayacağı umulmaktadır.

Ajo y agua y otros acortamientos de frases en el español actual

Abstract This article deals with a relatively unusual word-formation process in modern Spanish whereby a new lexeme is created by shortening a phrase, clause or sentence, rather than simply clipping a single word-form. Although this process has been mentioned in passing by several authorities as merely another way of shortening words, the fact that it affects units larger than a single word has been overlooked thus far, hence this detailed consideration. Creating a new lexical item from a larger linguistic unit implies solidifying at least two of its elements into a single form, the final part of which may itself be a clipped word. The process becomes even more complex or playful when homonymy or paronymy is thrown into the mix. Drawing upon a wealth of examples from a range of sources, this study examines the motives for their use, their structure and the relationship between morphology and stress-placement patterns. The last section presents a collection of shortenings of this type which have been documented from various parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

Inflectional Class Complexity In The Oto-Manguean Languages

In this paper we introduce the object of study of this special issue of Amerindia, the inflectional classes of the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico, together with their most relevant typological characteristics. These languages are rich both in the variety of their inflectional systems, and in the way these are split into inflection classes. In effect, the full typological range of possible inflection class systems can be found just in this one stock of languages. This is illustrated through a survey of the variety of morphological forms, assignment principles, and paradigm structure, as well as the effects of combining multiple inflection class systems across different exponents within a single word form.

The representation of some phrases in Arabic word semantic vector spaces

Abstract We demonstrate several ways to use morphological word analogies to examine the representation of complex words in semantic vector spaces. We present a set of morphological relations, each of which can be used to generate many word analogies. 1. We show that the difference-vectors for pairs which have the same relation to each other are similarly aligned. 2. We suggest that addition of difference-vectors is a useful phrase-building operator. 3. We propose that pairs in the same relation may have similar relative frequencies. 4. We suggest that homographs, which necessarily have the same semantic vectors, can sometimes be separated into different vectors for different senses, using frequency estimates and alignment constraints obtained from word analogies. 5. We observe that some of our analogies seem to be parallel, and might be combined. We use Arabic words as a case study, because Arabic orthography includes verb conjugations, object pronouns, definitive articles, possessive pronouns, and some prepositions in single word-forms. Therefore, a number of short phrases, built up of easily perceived constituents, are already present in stock semantic spaces for Arabic available on the web. Similar phrases in English would require including bigrams or trigrams as lemmas in the word embedding, although English derivational morphology allows for other relationships in standard semantic spaces which Arabic does not, for example negation. We make our corpus of morphological relations available to other researchers.

Less is more: why all paradigms are defective, and why that is a good thing

AbstractOnly a fraction of lexemes are encountered in all their paradigm forms in any corpus or even in the lifetime of any speaker. This raises a question as to how it is that native speakers confidently produce and comprehend word forms that they have never witnessed. We present the results of an experiment using a recurrent neural network computational learning model. In particular, we compare the model’s production of unencountered forms using two types of training data: full paradigms vs. single word forms for Russian nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In the long run, the model displays better performance when exposed to the more naturalistic training on single word forms, even though the other training data is much larger as it includes full paradigms for each and every word. We discuss why “defective” paradigms may be better for human learners as well.

What Homophones Say about Words.

The number of potential meanings for a new word is astronomic. To make the word-learning problem tractable, one must restrict the hypothesis space. To do so, current word learning accounts often incorporate constraints about cognition or about the mature lexicon directly in the learning device. We are concerned with the convexity constraint, which holds that concepts (privileged sets of entities that we think of as “coherent”) do not have gaps (if A and B belong to a concept, so does any entity “between” A and B). To leverage from it a linguistic constraint, learning algorithms have percolated this constraint from concepts, to word forms: some algorithms rely on the possibility that word forms are associated with convex sets of objects. Yet this does have to be the case: homophones are word forms associated with two separate words and meanings. Two sets of experiments show that when evidence suggests that a novel label is associated with a disjoint (non-convex) set of objects, either a) because there is a gap in conceptual space between the learning exemplars for a given word or b) because of the intervention of other lexical items in that gap, adults prefer to postulate homophony, where a single word form is associated with two separate words and meanings, rather than inferring that the word could have a disjunctive, discontinuous meaning. These results about homophony must be integrated to current word learning algorithms. We conclude by arguing for a weaker specialization of word learning algorithms, which too often could miss important constraints by focusing on a restricted empirical basis (e.g., non-homophonous content words).

Word Learning: Homophony and the Distribution of Learning Exemplars

ABSTRACTHow do children infer the meaning of a word? Current accounts of word learning assume that children expect a word to map onto exactly one concept whose members form a coherent category. If this assumption was strictly true, children should infer that a homophone, such as “bat”, refers to a single superordinate category that encompasses both animal-bats and baseball-bats. The current study explores the situations that lead children to postulate that a single word form maps onto several distinct meanings, rather than a single superordinate meaning. Three experiments showed that adults and 5-year-old French children use information about the sampling of learning exemplars (and in particular the fact that they can be regrouped in two distinct clusters in conceptual space) to postulate homophony. This unexplored sensitivity and the very possibility of homophony are critically missing from current word learning accounts.

The effect of contextual constraint on parafoveal processing in reading.

Semantic preview benefit in reading is an elusive and controversial effect because empirical studies do not always (but sometimes) find evidence for it. Its presence seems to depend on (at least) the language being read, visual properties of the text (e.g., initial letter capitalization), the type of relationship between preview and target, and as shown here, semantic constraint generated by the prior sentence context. Schotter (2013) reported semantic preview benefit for synonyms, but not semantic associates when the preview/target was embedded in a neutral sentence context. In Experiment 1, we embedded those same previews/targets into constrained sentence contexts and in Experiment 2 we replicated the effects reported by Schotter (2013; in neutral sentence contexts) and Experiment 1 (in constrained contexts) in a within-subjects design. In both experiments, we found an early (i.e., first-pass) apparent preview benefit for semantically associated previews in constrained contexts that went away in late measures (e.g., total time). These data suggest that sentence constraint (at least as manipulated in the current study) does not operate by making a single word form expected, but rather generates expectations about what kinds of words are likely to appear. Furthermore, these data are compatible with the assumption of the E-Z Reader model that early oculomotor decisions reflect "hedged bets" that a word will be identifiable and, when wrong, lead the system to identify the wrong word, triggering regressions.

Helping learners engage with L2 words

The pace at which new words are acquired is influenced by the degree of engagement with them on the part of the learner. Insights from cognitive linguistics into the non-arbitrary aspects of vocabulary can be turned into stimuli for such engagement. The majority of Cognitive Linguists’ proposals for vocabulary teaching aim at helping learners appreciate the way a single word form can develop different meanings. This, however, presupposes knowledge of the ‘basic’ meaning of that word. We report an experiment in which learners under an experimental treatment were stimulated to consider the possibility that the form–meaning link in target words might not be fully arbitrary. The mnemonic effect of this task-induced engagement was assessed in relation to comparison treatments in immediate and delayed post-tests measuring both receptive and productive knowledge. Results show that simply prompting learners to evaluate the form–meaning match of words can foster vocabulary acquisition, although not all target words lends themselves equally well to this type of engagement.

Sub-Word Indexing and Blind Relevance Feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR

The Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) provides document collections, topics, and relevance assessments for information retrieval (IR) experiments on Indian languages. Several research questions are explored in this article: 1) How to create create a simple, language-independent corpus-based stemmer, 2) How to identify sub-words and which types of sub-words are suitable as indexing units, and 3) How to apply blind relevance feedback on sub-words and how feedback term selection is affected by the type of the indexing unit. More than 140 IR experiments are conducted using the BM25 retrieval model on the topic titles and descriptions (TD) for the FIRE 2008 English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi document collections. The major findings are: The corpus-based stemming approach is effective as a knowledge-light term conflation step and useful in the case of few language-specific resources. For English, the corpus-based stemmer performs nearly as well as the Porter stemmer and significantly better than the baseline of indexing words when combined with query expansion. In combination with blind relevance feedback, it also performs significantly better than the baseline for Bengali and Marathi IR. Sub-words such as consonant-vowel sequences and word prefixes can yield similar or better performance in comparison to word indexing. There is no best performing method for all languages. For English, indexing using the Porter stemmer performs best, for Bengali and Marathi, overlapping 3-grams obtain the best result, and for Hindi, 4-prefixes yield the highest MAP. However, in combination with blind relevance feedback using 10 documents and 20 terms, 6-prefixes for English and 4-prefixes for Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR yield the highest MAP. Sub-word identification is a general case of decompounding. It results in one or more index terms for a single word form and increases the number of index terms but decreases their average length. The corresponding retrieval experiments show that relevance feedback on sub-words benefits from selecting a larger number of index terms in comparison with retrieval on word forms. Similarly, selecting the number of relevance feedback terms depending on the ratio of word vocabulary size to sub-word vocabulary size almost always slightly increases information retrieval effectiveness compared to using a fixed number of terms for different languages.

Seligman (2007; 195:609)

In the 15 February 2007 issue of the Journal, in the letter by Seligman (Seligman SJ. Evidence for quasi species in severe acute respiratory syndrome—associated coronavirus deletion mutants. J Infect Dis 2007; 195:609), it should be noted that, in accordance with Journal style, “quasi species” has been spelled as 2 words, whereas many other publications use the single-word form, “quasispecies”; readers doing a search for the term are advised to take this variant treatment into account.

Thai political slang: formation and attitudes towards usage

This study has two main objectives: to determine the formation of slang as used in political news and columns in Thai daily newspapers, and to investigate the participants' attitudes towards slang usage. The data for the analysis of slang formation were collected from two newspapers, namely Thai Rath , and Ma-ti Chon , published from January 2004 to April 2006. The other type of data were the answers to a questionnaire administered to 100 participants grouped according to gender, age, and educational level in order to determine their understanding of the tested slang, and their attitudes towards the usage. The findings indicated that most of the slang words and expressions were formed by the process of compounding, followed respectively by single-word forms, and loan blending. Most words functioned as verbs and verb phrases in the sentences, whereas nouns and noun phrases came second. The metaphorical conceptual meanings of slang largely signified war and the related concepts of fighting, killing, weapons, and arguments. Regarding their understanding, it was found that 70.15 percent of the respondents were able to correctly identify the meaning of slang. In terms of appropriateness, the tested slang was moderately rated as appropriate ( = 2:91) in the given contexts. Generally, the majority of the respondents (71.0%) agreed with political slang usage in newspapers.

Lexical stress encoding in single word production estimated by event-related brain potentials

An event-related brain potentials (ERPs) experiment was carried out to investigate the time course of lexical stress encoding in language production. Native speakers of Dutch viewed a series of pictures corresponding to bisyllabic names which were either stressed on the first or on the second syllable and made go/no-go decisions on the lexical stress location of those picture names. Behavioral results replicated a pattern that was observed earlier, i.e. faster button-press latencies to initial as compared to final stress targets. The electrophysiological results indicated that participants could make a lexical stress decision significantly earlier when picture names had initial than when they had final stress. Moreover, the present data suggest the time course of lexical stress encoding during single word form formation in language production. When word length is corrected for, the temporal interval for lexical stress encoding specified by the current ERP results falls into the time window previously identified for phonological encoding in language production.