Technical Vocabulary Research Articles

A study on the role of multiword expressions in movie English

The purpose of this paper is fourfold: (1) to observe what multiword expressions (MWEs) mean for beginning level English language learners, (2) to watch what kind of MWEs the learners prefer, (3) to find whether individual words could be functionally MWEs, and (4) to discuss if it could be possible for beginning level learners to learn MWEs. To explore the findings, one case study was conducted. Three beginning level college students participated in the experiment. The material was an American action movie, 3 Days to Kill (McG, 2014). The teacher explicitly instructed various types of MWEs based on the movie storyline while the subjects implicitly learned those MWEs. After activities, the subjects were provided with vocabulary lists. Then they had three tests done: vocabulary-recall, summaries of movie scenes, and choice of relevant vocabulary or MWEs which comprised technical vocabulary, general service vocabulary, phrases, compounds, and expressions. The results showed that the subjects subconsciously regarded exam vocabulary as linguistic units, they preferred utterance level expressions, and they functionally used individual words like ‘one-word utterance’ of L1 children. Lastly, it is possible to teach beginning level students MWEs as long as a teacher proceeds with their instructions with content like movie stories.

Indigenous knowledges and colonial sciences in South Asia

ABSTRACT What do we mean when we use the category ‘indigenous knowledges’? What do we mean when we speak of ‘colonial sciences’? This Introduction briefly examines these questions in order to provide a context for the collection of articles presented in this issue on the making of the sciences in colonial South Asia. In doing so, it also addresses related questions: The translation of terms – does the Sanskrit word śāstra correspond to the English science? If not, what does each word mean? And the differences that arise when categories move across disciplines – development studies scholars use the term indigenous knowledges for the knowledge-forms of the original inhabitants of a territory; historians of South Asia and historians of science use it to refer to older forms of knowledge lost to colonial rule. The contributors represent very different disciplines – anthropology, history, history of science and Indology; and bring a variety of methodological approaches to the questions they address. They cover a chronological span stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and address different subjects: the use of technical vocabulary in Sanskrit mathematical astronomy, astrology at universities in Banaras, the making of the Hindi Scientific Glossary, botanical knowledge-making in East India Company India, the philological practices of Vaidyas in Bengal, and Ayurvedic pedagogy in today’s Kerala. A common thread joining the essays appears in the role played by philology in practices as different as the naming of plants, the making of procedural medical knowledge in a gurukula, and the editing of Ayurvedic texts in the context of an expanding print culture in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Stylistics Analysis of The Poem “An Old Man’s Winter Night” by Robert Frost

Stylistics analysis gives an impartial and scientific opinion based on solid quantifiable data and methodical application. It makes use of specific technical vocabulary and notions derived from linguistics. The four layers of language aspects that can be studied stylistically are phonology, graphology, grammar, and semantics. The purpose of this research is to examine the stylistic features of Robert Frost's poem "An Old Man’s Winter Night" through the lens of stylistic analysis. The structure and style of Robert Frost's writing, as well as his subjects, viewpoints, and themes are all examined in this study. Each level has been thoroughly investigated, with attention paid to the phonetic, phonological, graphitic, semantic, and grammatical aspects of language choice. This research is descriptive qualitative with content analysis approach. To attain the purpose, the data is analysed through stylistics devices. Frost employed a variety of stylistic elements to emphasize his point, including alliteration, assonance, tone modulation, denotation, connotation, metaphor, personification, symbolism, and imagery.

Noise is Not Volume Alone – Ambiences and Drony Experiments in Music and Sound Art

Noise is a complex category that has been used to describe instances of disturbance and disruption in technical vocabulary and in many artistic languages. In music, and more precisely, in sound art, noise has been imbued with specific significations that operate as aesthetical signifiers that convey meaning even beyond its intensity of volume. In this article, the theoretical aspects of noise are articulated through the analysis of concerning discourse around the transformations of the concept of sound, which ultimately resulted in the designation of a genre in itself – noise. Furthermore, it is through the enhancement of a ‘sonic turn’ that the notion of listening as a generative aesthetic practice has referred to the body as the main instance of meaning construction in relation to both time and space.

Vocabulary Learning Strategies of Azerbaijani Students and its Relation to their Academic and Technical English Vocabulary Knowledge

With English turning into a global language among the people in all parts of the world, it has played a similarly essential role in the educational system of Azerbaijan. Vocabulary is a vital and inseparable part of the four language skills in the activity of language learning. This research was aimed at investigating the use of various vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs) among Azerbaijani engineering students. Moreover, the overall frequency of strategy use was explored by Azerbaijani learners as high strategy users, medium strategy users, and low strategy users. The study also investigated the students’ academic and technical English vocabulary knowledge, finding that the vocabulary learning strategy use is done in relation to students’ academic and technical English vocabulary knowledge. The descriptive-quantitative research design was employed in this study. Two kinds of research instruments were utilized. A 60-item academic and a 30-item technical vocabulary test and an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies with 23-item were employed. The findings demonstrated that there is not a significant relationship between VLSs and academic and technical English vocabulary knowledge of Azerbaijani engineering students. The research also indicated that meta-cognitive strategies included the most and least frequently used strategies among Azerbaijani learners. Consequently, Azerbaijani engineering students were high strategy users. It is obvious that vocabulary should not be treated as an additional material; on the contrary, syllabus designers and instructors have to put it forward as a vital ability in second or foreign language learning.

Learning Semi Technical Vocabulary in English for Police Purposes: A Case Study

AbstractThis paper will present the results of a case study carried out with the students of Forensic Engineering at the University of Criminal Investigation and Police Studies in Belgrade for two consecutive academic years. The goal of the study was to determine if and to what extent the receptive vocabulary size acquired during previous education will influence the acquision of semi-technical vocabulary covered by two one-semester English courses. The data have been gathered using both a questionnare and relevant tests. The statistical processing of data has enabled better intepretation of the results obtained.

The Accuracy of Business English Curriculum to Students’ Communication Performance: The EFL Students’ Perception

Measuring the accuracy of a private university in Batam Business English course curriculum to the present needs of workplaces in Batam from students’ perception is essential. Because 85% of the university students are working, it is compulsory to maintain the gap low between what students learned in class and what is implemented in the working field. A questionnaire consists of three dimensions (curriculum, communication performance, and motivation) distributed randomly to 60 students from a population (N=328) of the third-semester students programmed Business English course at a private university in Batam. The result suggested that the curriculum needs to add more practices, peer work, and case studies to improve students’ communication performance. Students’ perspectives in the Business English course reflected a new technical vocabulary that needed to practice in a correlated context. The curriculum content’s relevance to the workplace’s contextual needs is moderately related because not all working students used the English language in their workplace. Additional focus on internal and external motivation through group work and peer work is needed to improve students’ communication performance and confidence. Finally, the existing Business English curriculum is reasonably accurate, supporting students’ communication performance, both written and oral, at their workplace.

The study of urban form in Iran

The study of urban form in Iran has not produced a substantial body of knowledge. This paper categorizes the works of Iranian researchers into two main groups. The first group comprises the efforts of individual researchers, forming the origins of this field of study. This group includes studies on individual cities or the history of urban form, explanations of the fundamental concepts of urban morphology, and the use of urban form as a general term. The second group comprises the currently-emerging flow of research. This relies on more precise explanations of urban morphological concepts, addressing urban morphology and its varied methods, including space syntax. These publications are categorized by the scale, methodological approach, elements examined, temporal dimension, cities studied, techniques used, relation to other fields of knowledge, major field of study and reliance on a technical vocabulary of urban morphology. This paper thus presents a critical review of the study of urban form in Iran to reveal gaps of this field of research, and identifies the urban morphology domains that remain unexplored by Iranian scholars.

The study of urban form in Iran

The study of urban form in Iran has not produced a substantial body of knowledge. This paper categorizes the works of Iranian researchers into two main groups. The first group comprises the efforts of individual researchers, forming the origins of this field of study. This group includes studies on individual cities or the history of urban form, explanations of the fundamental concepts of urban morphology, and the use of urban form as a general term. The second group comprises the currently-emerging flow of research. This relies on more precise explanations of urban morphological concepts, addressing urban morphology and its varied methods, including space syntax. These publications are categorized by the scale, methodological approach, elements examined, temporal dimension, cities studied, techniques used, relation to other fields of knowledge, major field of study and reliance on a technical vocabulary of urban morphology. This paper thus presents a critical review of the study of urban form in Iran to reveal gaps of this field of research, and identifies the urban morphology domains that remain unexplored by Iranian scholars.

An Ontological Approach to Enhancing Information Sharing in Disaster Response

Managing complex disaster situations is a challenging task because of the large number of actors involved and the critical nature of the events themselves. In particular, the different terminologies and technical vocabularies that are being exchanged among Emergency Responders (ERs) may lead to misunderstandings. Maintaining a shared semantics for exchanged data is a major challenge. To help to overcome these issues, we elaborate a modular suite of ontologies called POLARISCO that formalizes the complex knowledge of the ERs. Such a shared vocabulary resolves inconsistent terminologies and promotes semantic interoperability among ERs. In this work, we discuss developing POLARISCO as an extension of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Common Core Ontologies (CCO). We conclude by presenting a real use-case to check the efficiency and applicability of the proposed ontology.

Engineering play with blocks as an informal learning context for executive function and planning

AbstractBackgroundEngineering play is an emerging framework for understanding young children's constructive block play as an engineering design process. Few studies have evaluated engineering thinking, language, or behavior in preschool‐age children, especially quantitative evaluations that systematically document specific early engineering behavior. More research is needed to support diverse children's engineering education in ecologically valid classroom contexts and understand relations with the key cognitive domains that predict school readiness.Purpose/HypothesisThe present study investigated the associations of executive functioning and planning skills with preschoolers' engineering play behaviors with wooden unit blocks, tested the moderating role of disability status in these associations, and provided additional reliability and validity data on the Preschool Engineering Play Behaviors (P‐EPB) measure.Design/MethodParticipants were 110 preschoolers (44% female; 25% children with disabilities) observed and coded during 15‐min block play sessions with a peer partner. Children completed separate formal assessments of executive function and planning.ResultsA one‐factor engineering play variable including six behavior categories (i.e., communicating goals, problem‐solving, explaining how things are built/work, following patterns and prototypes, logical and mathematical words, and technical vocabulary) was significantly and positively associated with executive function and planning for children with disabilities.ConclusionsResults provide new knowledge about early engineering measurement and implications for teaching and learning engineering across multiple academic disciplines and with children from diverse developmental backgrounds.

Deutsch als Ausgangssprache für die Erneuerungsbewegung der wirtschaftlich-juristischen Fachsprache in Ungarn

The study presented in this paper reviews the emergence and development of Hungarian economic and legal terminology. It is based on research during which I examined over 1 000 terms from their first publication in specialized dictionaries, through changes in their meaning, all the way to their integration into technical vocabulary or their extinction. My research also focused on the reasons why the colloquial meaning of a term may cause the disappearance of its technical meaning. I conclude my study with examples.

ESP (english for specific purposes) vocabulary to improve reading at an a1.2/ a2.1 english level

The aim of this research was to investigate the use of ESP vocabulary in general English classes to improve English, by using the student-centered learning approach, concentrating mainly on reading skills. For the study case, 123 students of different careers offered at Central University of Ecuador, English A1.2, A2.2 levels, constituted the population studied, during the period May-November 2018. A teacher- made pre-test of basic technical vocabulary knowledge was administered. ESP vocabulary was taught to complement General English structures and grammar. At the end of the semester, a post-test was given to the students to determine the influence of the technical vocabulary in their proficiency. Data analysis showed that the student-centered approach using basic technical vocabulary in general English learning was effective. Furthermore, the results showed that when focusing to student’s needs, degree program students are more motivated to learn and read more academic literature related to their careers.

English Major Students’ Perceptions of Using Animated Cartoons on English Vocabulary Knowledge of Rare Words in Malaysia

The rapid developments throughout language technologies have catered tremendous chances for learning and teaching vocabulary in second language learning. The development of vocabulary knowledge does not merely oscillate in academic vocabulary, high frequency vocabulary and technical vocabulary, English major students should also need to learn low-frequency vocabulary or rare vocabulary which enhance their language proficiency. In order to accommodate students with vocabulary knowledge of rare words, it should come with the best resort of teaching technique that can help them to learn in a meaningful way. One of the rarely used multimedia tools is animated cartoons. This paper aims at exploring the students’ perceptions of using animated cartoons in improving their English vocabulary knowledge of rare words in Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), Terengganu. Employing a semi-structured interview, the qualitative data collection method was conducted. Employing the qualitative data collection method, semi-structured interviews were conducted to six students who learned vocabulary using animated cartoons to obtain their perceptions towards these multimedia materials in improving the English vocabulary knowledge of rare words. The results of semi-structured interviews highlighted the positive responses from the students who preferred animated cartoons as these materials in improving their English vocabulary knowledge of rare words. In conclusion, this study contributes to the current literature on English vocabulary learning of rare words by exposing and underlining the impacts of animated cartoons which provide opportunities for students to encounter a conducive technological-based learning environment.

A Semantic Similarity Model to Compare Heterogeneous Data Sources to Augment Engineering Data with New Failure modes in Automotive Industry

In real life industry, in-time exposure of symptoms and their failure modes observed during fault events provide key signals to system engineers to take necessary corrective actions for effectively arresting product defects. A real-life ontology-based semantic similarity system is employed for automatic comparison of engineering data (comes in the form of design failure mode effect analysis, DFMEA data) with the field repair data collected during product warranty period. Given the complexity of engineering data and the overwhelming volume (hundreds of millions of data points) of field repair data makes identification of new symptoms and failure modes from the first principles an impractical task. Typically, the engineering data is recorded by using technical vocabulary, e.g. unstable electric contact, Seat Belt comfort per MVSS208, whereas the field repair data is highly unstructured in nature. Consequently, we observe following types of noises in the field repair data – abbreviated text entries, inconsistent use of vocabulary (‘seat buckle is damaged’ vs ‘buckle unlatching’), and finally the incomplete text entries. More importantly, limited mental mapping capacity of a human agent limits discovery of new symptoms and failure modes from the industrial scale data. Not surprisingly, the text mining and semantic similarity are gaining a serious attention due to their ability to automatically discover the knowledge assets buried in unstructured text by training machines to compare and link high volume of data. In our approach, initially the key constructs (e.g. symptoms, failure modes) from the data are annotated by using the domain ontology. These constructs are then used to construct pairs of terms and pairs of tuples, which are used to compute pair-to-pair and tuple-to-tuple semantic similarity respectively. Finally, the text-to-text semantic similarity is calculated by combining other two semantic similarity scores. It is used to determine whether new symptoms or failure modes from the field repair data can be used to augment the DFMEA data. The proposed method is implemented as a prototype tool and its performance is validated by using real-life data from automobile domain. On an average, our system has F1 score of 0.75 and 0.78 in discovering and identifying new symptoms and synonym symptoms respectively, whereas it achieved the F1 score of 0.72 and 0.68 in discovering new failure modes and in identifying synonym failure modes respectively. The fault detection rate is improved by 35%, whereas the fault isolation rate is improved by 40.5%.

Materia Medica Tocharo-Hvatanica

AbstractThe two languages once spoken in the oases in the North of the Tarim basin, Tocharian A and B, have preserved many Iranian loanwords. These belong to different chronological layers and are of different dialectal origins. Whereas the oldest layers are now most likely seen as belonging to an unattested Old Iranian dialect, more recent layers have not yet been studied in detail. In this respect, the vocabulary of medical texts represents an important field of enquiry. Most terms come from Middle Indian, but a significant number are of Middle Iranian origin. This component, mostly ingredients and technical vocabulary, seems to be largely of Khotanese origin. The article introduces the material and examines possible scenarios for historical transmission and contact between the North and the South of the Tarim Basin.

Alchemical lexica in Syriac: planetary signs, code names and medicines

Abstract Technical terminology and Decknamen represent key hallmarks of the alchemical literature in different traditions. The opacity of this vocabulary makes the reading of alchemical texts difficult and, in order to cope with similar challenges, Byzantine, Syriac and Arabic scholars soon started compiling technical vocabularies. In my paper I shall investigate two (partially overlapping) lexica, which open the BL Syriac alchemical MSS Egerton 709 and Oriental 1593. On the one hand, I will explore the variety of sources used by the anonymous compiler(s) to assemble these useful tools (Byzantine alchemists as well as the Greek medical tradition; Syro-Arabic lexicography). On the other, particular attention will be given to the structure and mise en page of the two lexica, which will be compared with analogous alchemical dictionaries in the Byzantine (e.g. MS Marcianus gr. 299) and Arabic (e.g. MS Gotha 1261) traditions.

MODERN METHODS OF TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN NON-PHILOLOGICAL UNIVERSITIES

Problems of teaching technical vocabulary, strategies of vocabulary learning are discussed in this article. Besides the author shares her experience of teaching, gives examples of activities she uses in her classes.

Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality

Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality

Epicurus on Justice ‘In Itself’ (καθ᾽ ἑαυτό) (Kuria Doxa 33)

Abstract This paper is a commentary on Epicurus’ Kuria Doxa (KD) 33, according to which “justice is not anything in itself [τι καθ᾽ ἑαυτό].” It explores what it means for something to exist ‘in itself’ in Hellenistic philosophy, speculating on the sources of Epicurean technical vocabulary and suggesting an ontological reading of KD 33.