Source Words Research Articles

Measuring the semantic headedness of English blends with token-based semantic vector space modeling: a corpus-based study

Abstract This article analyzes the semantic headedness of English blends with distributional semantics methods. The semantic head of a blend is the source word that transfers its semantic information to the blend as a whole. For example, a sitcom is a kind of comedy. But is FedEx a kind of express, and is wi-fi a kind of fidelity? We use corpus data and token-based semantic vector space modeling in order to address these questions. Specifically, we investigate whether Plag’s ternary division of endocentric, exocentric, and coordinative compounds based on semantic headedness can also be applied to English blends, and whether the general tendency of semantic right-headedness can be observed for all three subtypes. We analyze a dataset of fifty-five blends and their respective source words, using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the English Web Corpus 2021. We measure the degree of semantic similarity between each blend and its two source words. The results show that for most endocentric blends, the hypothesis of semantic right-headedness holds true. At the same time, exocentric blends and coordinative blends are shown to behave differently. We conclude that Plag’s classification offers a useful point of departure for the semantic analysis of blends and that distributional semantics methods can provide new insights into their semantic behavior.

“WITH A MILLION PRODUCTS OUT THERE, HOW DO YOU ADVERTISE? YOU DON’T. YOU ODDVERTISE.”: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF SOME -VERTISE, -VERTISING, AND -VERTISEMENT LEXICAL BLENDS IN ENGLISH

The paper deals with certain formal and semantic aspects of 197 English lexical blends the right-hand elements of which are the splinters -vertise (← advertise), -vertising (← advertis- ing), and -vertisement (← vertisement). It aims to give a detailed analysis of the formal as well as semantic behavior of the three splinters. The formal analysis of the data shows that all three splinters prefer to be combined with full left-hand elements, thus forming relatively transparent structures. The semantics of the analyzed blends indicates that the primary meanings of the source words advertise, advertising and advertisement, respectively, have remained unchanged, i.e. that the splinters -vertise, -vertising, and -vertisement simply represent abbreviated forms of their respective source words. Finally, the results of the analysis of the -vertise, -vertising, and -vertisement blends suggest quite strongly that, in the people’s constant battle for attention and profit, almost everything can be a billboard nowadays, from parts of the human body (e.g. legver- tising), animals (e.g. sheepvertising) to roofs (e.g. roofvertisement), sky (e.g. skyvertisement) and even egg shells (e.g. egg-vertising).

Source Word versus Target Poem

Source Word versus Target Poem

Improving neural machine translation by word translations

Transformer-based neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the machine translation paradigm. These models learn the translation knowledge from the bilingual corpus through the attention mechanism automatically. This differs from the way human translators approach sentence translation, where prior knowledge plays a significant role. Inspired by this, a word translation augmentation (WTA) method is proposed to improve the Transformer-based NMT model. The main steps are as follows: Firstly, constructing the word alignment rules based on the training set. Next, generating the translation rules for source words according to the word alignment rules. Lastly, incorporating the potential translation candidates for each source word into the NMT model during the training and testing procedure. In addition, the WTA method introduces the idea of Mixup for translation candidates of a source word and employs two augmentation strategies to augment the encoder. The results of experiments on several translation tasks with high-resource and low-resource indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the corresponding strong baseline, and the improvement in BLEU score achieved ranges from 0.42 to 0.63.

Enhancing Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Bi-directional Translation Pair Retrieving

Most Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) methods retrieve word translation pairs by finding the closest target word for a given source word based on cross-lingual word embeddings (WEs). However, we find that solely retrieving translation from the source-to-target perspective leads to some false positive translation pairs, which significantly harm the precision of BLI. To address this problem, we propose a novel and effective method to improve translation pair retrieval in cross-lingual WEs. Specifically, we consider both source-side and target-side perspectives throughout the retrieval process to alleviate false positive word pairings that emanate from a single perspective. On a benchmark dataset of BLI, our proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. It demonstrates effectiveness and robustness across six experimental languages, including similar language pairs and distant language pairs, under both supervised and unsupervised settings.

Improving linear orthogonal mapping based cross-lingual representation using ridge regression and graph centrality

Orthogonal linear mapping is a commonly used approach for generating cross-lingual embedding between two monolingual corpora that uses a word frequency-based seed dictionary alignment approach. While this approach is found to be effective for isomorphic language pairs, they do not perform well for distant language pairs with different sentence structures and morphological properties. For a distance language pair, the existing frequency-aligned orthogonal mapping methods suffer from two problems - (i)the frequency of source and target word are not comparable, and (ii)different word pairs in the seed dictionary may have different contribution. Motivated by the above two concerns, this paper proposes a novel centrality-aligned ridge regression-based orthogonal mapping. The proposed method uses centrality-based alignment for seed dictionary selection and ridge regression framework for incorporating influential weights of different word pairs in the seed dictionary. From various experimental observations over five language pairs (both isomorphic and distant languages), it is evident that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods in the Bilingual Dictionary Induction(BDI) task, Sentence Retrieval Task(SRT), and Machine Translation. Further, several analyses are also included to support the proposed method.

English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese: false friend cognates and English vocabulary acquisition

Abstract Research on loanword semantics seldom investigates systematic patterns of change because semantic change is not nearly as constrained and predictable as phonological change. Hong Kong is a bilingual city of English and Chinese/Cantonese, where people frequently use English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese (ELCs). Drawing upon the notion of cognates, this questionnaire-based study examines the extent to which Hong Kong Cantonese speakers are aware of the contrasts in meaning between ELCs and the English words from which they have been borrowed. Three ELCs that are false friend cognates with their English source words were selected to be included in the study. Respondents who completed the questionnaire included a group of native English speakers (N = 19) and a group of native Cantonese speakers (N = 107). Their responses were compared and contrasted through both qualitative and quantitative methods. The results show that the ELCs affect the Cantonese speakers’ understanding of the English source words. The English proficiency of native Cantonese speakers has been identified as a contributing factor that correlates with the accuracy of understanding word meanings. This study delineates the relationship between false friend cognates, ELCs and English vocabulary acquisition. It offers pedagogical implications for vocabulary learning and teaching in bilingual contexts.

Phonological Construction of Indonesian Blends

Blends are formed by joining two clipped words into one. For example, in English, ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’ are joined to become ‘brunch’. While studies of blends usually focus on the morphological aspect, this study aims at describing the phonological aspects of blend formation, particularly the syllable formation of Indonesian blends. Moreover, the phonological constraints for blend formation are also investigated. The data were obtained from observing blending words used in daily conversations, as well as in media such as television and online news. To gather the data, the researcher asked each of her 20 students to find five samples of Indonesian blends. As a result, as many as 100 Indonesian blends were found. The data were then categorized based on their syllable structures and the phonological constraints for blend formation were analyzed using optimality theory. The results showed that blending words can be categorized into six types, which are (CVC+CVC), (CV+CVC), (CV+CVC), (V+CVC), (CV+CV), and (VC+CVC). For example, the second type (CV + CVC) ‘mager’ is formed from the first part of the first source word and the first part of the second source word as in ‘malas’ and ‘gerak’. Moreover, there are some possible constraints that make a new blend acceptable or unacceptable in Indonesian, such as the recognizability of blend from its source words and the semantic similarity of the blend with the already existing word. For example, the word ‘mantul’ is acceptable blend of mantap + betul, since ‘mantul’ already exists but it has different meaning. The results of this study imply that forming new words by blending the already existed words is still possible, but their acceptance or usage depend on the users’ familiarity with phonological knowledge.

On the Chinese resistance to lexical borrowing: a writing-driven self-purification system

The Chinese language is known for its resistance to lexical borrowing. Transliterations can hardly be retained in this language that use pre-existing characters to simply transcribe the pronunciation of the source word in the donor language. This exclusion can be attributed to the ideographic nature of Chinese characters. Given the stable graphic-meaning correspondence, novel use of characters is expected to be consistent with their usage in previous literature, while the association between the graphic form and the phonetic form has always been loose, rendering it meaningless to use characters as a mere phonetic representation. Here writing is having an effect on the assimilation of loanwords, and more generally, the purist language ideology, which runs counter to the traditionally assumed derivative position of writing, thus shedding light on the implicit effect of writing on language ideology.

Loanwords and polysemy: An investigation of specialized domain lexis in Middle English

This study investigates the polysemy of French loanwords in Middle English, analysing the attested senses of loan lexis in three occupational domains. Senses recorded in the Dictionnaire du moyen français and the Anglo-Norman dictionary were compared with corresponding lexical entries in the Middle English dictionary. Out of over 100 Middle English items borrowed from French, it is found that the great majority were polysemous in ways reflecting the source language semantics. This outcome contrasts with the usual finding that foreign borrowing in modern contexts produces monosemous loanwords. The conclusion is therefore drawn that the process of borrowing from French was of a different nature in the English medieval period. It is argued that bilingual users of French were agents of borrowing who replicated source word polysemy in their English. The likelihood that senses matching those of the French etymon arose in Middle English independently of source language polysemy is considered, but rejected.

КОГНІТИВНИЙ СТИЛЬ ТЛУМАЧА ЯК ЧИННИК ВИБОРУ ПЕРЕКЛАДАЦЬКОЇ СТРАТЕГІЇ У ЦІЛЬОВОМУ ТЕКСТІ (НА ПРИКЛАДІ АНГЛО-УКРАЇНСЬКИХ ПЕРЕКЛАДІВ П'ЄСИ Б. ШОУ "ПІГМАЛІОН")

The article focuses on translator’s cognitive style as an important factor that determines translation strategies and techniques while rendering a source text into a target language. In particular, the study analyses and compares the cognitive styles of Oleksandr Mokrovolskyi and Mykola Pavlov, Ukrainian translators of the play ‘Pygmalion’ by George Bernard Shaw. The relevance of the paper is stipulated by the need to provide theoretical justification for the differences in cognitive styles of the interpreters. The theoretical justification can help to explain interpreters’ successful or unsuccessful translation decisions. The results of the investigation can be used while rendering English texts into Ukrainian. The investigation is carried out using the method of contrastive analysis of the source and target texts as a main one. The comparison between O. Mokrovolskyi’s and M. Pavlov’s cognitive styles are drawn on the basis of the analysis of the translation strategies and techniques used by them while rendering cockney, a social dialect used by people from the East End of London; and interpreting associations of source precedent names and verbal poetic images in the target text. The article proves that translator’s cognitive style manifests itself in translation strategy of keeping or changing the stylistic tone of the original text. M. Pavlov uses stylistically marked vocabulary to render cockney and stylistically neutral lines more often than O. Mokrovolskyi does. The paper notes that the translator’s creative cognitive activity can also manifest itself in using the translation technique of so-called ‘explicative asymmetry’. The mentioned technique involves using target lexical units that are not considered to be equivalents for source words in order to reveal the author’s ideas better. It should be mentioned that the ‘explicative asymmetry’ technique usually causes conceptual shift. The investigation proves that while rendering English precedent names into Ukrainian M. Pavlov tends to use transformations that cause conceptual shift whereas O. Mokrovolskyi does not use the technique of explicative asymmetry very often. The author expresses the opinion that the technique of ‘explicative asymmetry’ helps to interpret associations of source precedent names in the target text. While rendering English idioms into Ukrainian both the translators use the ‘explicative asymmetry’ technique that causes conceptual shift to reveal the author’s ideas better.

THE WORD-FORMATION POTENTIAL OF THE WORD-FORMATION NEST WITH THE ORIGINAL WORDS "ZAN"

In this article, the word-formation potential of the word-formation nest with the original word "zan" (law) is determined based on the analysis of the word-formation nest formed from this word. The works of such scientists as N. Oralbai, O. Tokkozhaeva, A. Salkynbai, K. Kurmanaliev, B. Yessimseitov, N. Kokisheva, T. Tokhtarov, D. Kuandykov, who studied the problem of the word-formation nest, are considered. A mandatory element of the word–formation nest is the source word. The original word, it is commonly called the top, plays a very important role in the formation of the word-formation nest, affects its structure, the semantic relations of single-root words in the structure of the nest. It is part of all derived words, determines their meaning. To date, the vertices in the nests can be: nouns, adjectives, numerals, verbs, adverbs. The article analyzes one of the main concepts of legal discourse – the word "law" from the point of view of the word-formation nest. 43 derived words are determined, 24 of them are terms formed in the word-formation nest by synthetic, analytical, lexico-semantic methods of word formation. The identification of synchronous word-formation potential requires the determination of the volume, depth of word–formation nest. At the same time, it was found that the volume of analyzed word-formation nest and their structure depend primarily on the volume of the lexico-semantic space of the source words. The more extensive the system of meanings a word has, the more voluminous its word-formation nest. The dependence of the volume of word-formation nest on the frequency of use of their source words was also revealed. The word-formation potential of the original words is also revealed by the depth of the word-formation nest, which means the number of syntagmatic, paradigmatic units in this particular word-formation nest. Linguistic data are collected from the Explanatory Dictionary of the Kazakh language, the Dictionary of Legal Terms and the Textbook Customs Law of the Republic of

TYPES OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN LITERARY TRANSLATION

In this article, the word-formation potential of the word-formation nest with the original word "zan" (law) is determined based on the analysis of the word-formation nest formed from this word. The works of such scientists as N. Oralbai, O. Tokkozhaeva, A. Salkynbai, K. Kurmanaliev, B. Yessimseitov, N. Kokisheva, T. Tokhtarov, D. Kuandykov, who studied the problem of the word-formation nest, are considered. A mandatory element of the word–formation nest is the source word. The original word, it is commonly called the top, plays a very important role in the formation of the word-formation nest, affects its structure, the semantic relations of single-root words in the structure of the nest. It is part of all derived words, determines their meaning. To date, the vertices in the nests can be: nouns, adjectives, numerals, verbs, adverbs. The article analyzes one of the main concepts of legal discourse – the word "law" from the point of view of the word-formation nest. 43 derived words are determined, 24 of them are terms formed in the word-formation nest by synthetic, analytical, lexico-semantic methods of word formation. The identification of synchronous word-formation potential requires the determination of the volume, depth of word–formation nest. At the same time, it was found that the volume of analyzed word-formation nest and their structure depend primarily on the volume of the lexico-semantic space of the source words. The more extensive the system of meanings a word has, the more voluminous its word-formation nest. The dependence of the volume of word-formation nest on the frequency of use of their source words was also revealed. The word-formation potential of the original words is also revealed by the depth of the word-formation nest, which means the number of syntagmatic, paradigmatic units in this particular word-formation nest. Linguistic data are collected from the Explanatory Dictionary of the Kazakh language, the Dictionary of Legal Terms and the Textbook Customs Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The translation of an Italian procura alle liti into English: word-by-word rendering or functional translation?

Ad hoc corpora are considered effective to deliver native-like technical (and legal) translation. This paper explores how the translation of a system-specific document such as an Italian procura alle liti (power of attorney to appear in court) can be addressed. Translating this legal document may be problematic due to the fact that it is not recurrent in the common law system, which contemplates other types of special powers of attorney (PoAs). This paper explores whether and to what extent a corpus-based translation is possible when L2 parallel texts are difficult to find in native contexts. To this aim, a translation project with technical translators and lawyers is carried out. The participants compose an ad hoc corpus which they consult as a language reference tool. The paper findings report that the translators' corpus-based translation is mostly a word-by-word rendering of the source text, which may sound unnatural to an expert of the field. The lawyers' translation partly deviates from source words, but addresses the communicative function of the source text. The paper highlights the need for a balance between the two strategies, for example by focusing on textual functionality and/or paraphrasing, although at the cost of a reduced formulaicity.

METAPHORICAL WAY OF FORMING APPLIED GEOMETRY TERMS IN THE MODERN KAZAKH LANGUAGE

The present article is devoted to the presentation of the results of the study of one of the possible ways of appearance of terms in the field of applied geometry, namely metaphorization in the terminology of the Kazakh language. Despite the fact that there are enough works on metaphor, but there are no works on the study of metaphorical nomination in the terminology of applied geometry in the Kazakh language. This determines the novelty of this work. The purpose of this research is to study productive metaphorical models used in the formation of terms of applied geometry in the Kazakh language. For this purpose, the essence of metaphor and metaphorical transfer is considered, the ways of formation of terms of applied geometry by metaphorization are analyzed. The analysis of the sphere- the source of metaphorical transfer and the definition of the functions of geometric metaphor is carried out. The study presents the types of metaphor formation, as well as a detailed analysis of their models. The definitions of the studied terms of applied geometry are considered in the article, and the lexical meanings of the source words and their semantic components involved in the transfer of meaning are highlighted. The most common types of metaphors are identified. It has been revealed that anthropomorphic metaphorization is one of the most effective ways of forming terms of applied geometry in Kazakh terminology.

ON THE FREQUENCY OF WORDS IN DERIVATIONAL PAIRS

When studying the frequency indicators of derivative lexemes, hypotheses were put forward about their possible connection with the nature of motivation. However, due to the great laboriousness of manual quantitative analysis, this connection was demonstrated on the material of relatively small samples and for groups of derivative words predetermined by the researcher. Given the availability of data on individual derivational types, there is still no general picture of the correlation of frequency indicators in different word-formational structures. In this paper, the material of the linguistic database “MorphyNetˮ and the “New frequency dictionary of Russian vocabularyˮ is involved in the study. As a result of an automated analysis of more than 50 000 derivational pairs in the Russian language, some types of correlations between the frequency indicators of the source word and of the derived word have been established. Several derivational types have been identified, which are characterized by a certain kind of such correlation. It is concluded that higher frequency rates of the derived word compared to the frequency of the source word may indicate a weakening or modification of the word-formational relations between them.

A Semantic Analysis of Blends in Promotional Advertisements During the 2021 Chinese New Year in Malaysia

This paper presents the word-formation of blending in promotional advertisements, specifically for Chinese New Year celebrations in Malaysia. Blending is a process that combines two or three parts of source words (SWs) which either one has shortened infuse and/or where there is a phonological or graphic overlap of source words (e.g., moo-tastic  moo + fantastic, and Ox-picious  Ox + auspicious). These kinds of words describe a new invention or phenomenon that combines the definitions of the attribute of the two existing things. This study, which applied qualitative methods, examines the meaning of blends and the blending creativity in coining new words in promotional advertisements during the 2021 Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year which is also the Year of Golden Ox. In other words, the Lunar New Year which falls on February 12 in 2021 says hello to the Year of the Golden Ox and bids farewell to the Year of the Golden Rat in the previous year. Hence, this paper analyses 70 blends from promotional ads to measure the semantic, phonological, graphemic, and/or formal motivation of blending and investigate the meaning of blends. Researchers conclude the distinguishing features of blends in promotional ads overlap full words and wordplay, examining the graphological, phonological, stylistic, and semantic motivations. This study highlights that a set of words are chosen as the theme to coin new words each year, especially during the festival season (e.g., ox, moo). Blends are believed to effectively spread a message and attract attention to an idea or a product.

Listening like a native: Unprofitable procedures need to be discarded

AbstractTwo languages, historically related, both have lexical stress, with word stress distinctions signalled in each by the same suprasegmental cues. In each language, words can overlap segmentally but differ in placement of primary versus secondary stress (OCtopus, ocTOber). However, secondary stress occurs more often in the words of one language, Dutch, than in the other, English, and largely because of this, Dutch listeners find it helpful to use suprasegmental stress cues when recognising spoken words. English listeners, in contrast, do not; indeed, Dutch listeners can outdo English listeners in correctly identifying the source words of English word fragments (oc-). Here we show that Dutch-native listeners who reside in an English-speaking environment and have become dominant in English, though still maintaining their use of these stress cues in their L1, ignore the same cues in their L2 English, performing as poorly in the fragment identification task as the L1 English do.

Frequency effects in Spanish phonological speech errors: Weak sources in the context of weak syllables and words.

The present study examines the effects of the frequency of phoneme, syllable, and word units in the Granada corpus of Spanish phonological speech errors. We computed several measures of phoneme and syllable frequency and selected the most sensitive ones, along with word (lexeme) frequency to compare the frequencies of source, target, and error units at the phoneme, syllable, and word levels. Results showed that phoneme targets have equivalent frequency to matched controls, whereas source phonemes are lower in frequency than chance (the Weak Source effect) and target phonemes (the David effect). Target, source, and error syllables and words also were of lower frequency than chance, and error words (when they occur) were lowest in frequency. Contrary to most current theories, which focus on faulty processing of the target units, present results suggest that faulty processing of the source units (phonemes, syllables, and words) is an important factor contributing to phonological speech errors. Low-frequency words and syllables have more difficulty ensuring that their phonemes, especially those of low frequency, are output only in their correct locations.

Meaning differences between English clippings and their source words: A corpus-based study

Abstract This paper uses corpus data and methods of distributional semantics in order to study English clippings such as dorm (< dormitory), memo (< memorandum), or quake (< earthquake). We investigate whether systematic meaning differences between clippings and their source words can be detected. The analysis is based on a sample of 50 English clippings. Each of the clippings is represented by a concordance of 100 examples in context that were gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We compare clippings and their source words both at the aggregate level and in terms of comparisons between individual clippings and their source words. The data show that clippings tend to be used in contexts that represent involved text production, which aligns with the idea that clipped words signal familiarity with their referents. It is further observed that individual clippings and their source words partly diverge in their distributional profiles, reflecting both overlap and differences with regard to their meanings. We interpret these findings against the theoretical background of Construction Grammar and specifically the Principle of No Synonymy.