Text Units Research Articles

An Algorithm for Finding Equivalence in Referential Relations

Establishing referential relations in discourse is one of the most relevant but difficult to model problems of automatic text analysis. Reference means attributing a textual unit (linguistic expression) to a non-linguistic object (referent). The correct interpretation of the statement in the analyzed text requires solving the referent of the textual reference about the object, that is, the reference of the textual expression. In this work, a model for resolving referential relations is proposed. The method used to solve the referential relationship is finding equivalence, that is, by calculating the degree of similarity of possible elements in the word, the similarity in the referential relationship is calculated, and as a result, the relationship value of the referent in the sequence of sentences is obtained. These opportunities will be a new beginning for solving referential relationships in the Kazakh language. Based on the possibilities of computer technology, this direction in developing language education creates a great opportunity for extensive research and analysis at various levels of the language treasure as a bright mirror of the spiritual and material culture of the people.

Эмоциональная доминанта текста: некоторые лингвистические аспекты исследования

The article reviews the aspects of research into the text emotional dominant by linguistic methods, which allow to limit variability of the meaning interpretation. The relevance of the research topic is determined by the lack of competent studies on the methods of emotional dominant disclosure in the text content. Despite certain scientific and practical significance, modern text linguistics and linguistics of emotions demonstrate relative unevenness in the procedures of analysis development, which are, however, likely to clarify a number of theoretical problems: to make distinction between the concepts of psychological and textual dominants, subjective comprehension of the text and its objective contents; to extract the emotional constituent from the generalized content dominant in the text; to state correlation between a set of emotive signs and communicative aims of the author by means of multidimensional and multistaged analysis. In the article the emotional texts are studied by means of linguistic methods of semantic and contextual analysis, emotive analysis of language and text units and modificational procedure of keywords determination with the aim to identify the emotional dominant and define its characteristics proceeding from the signs unity to the generalized emotional content of the text, then to the conceptual dominants and communicative goals of the text composer. The analysis led to revelation of the following emotional characteristics in the text content: emotive complexes, emotional attractors, false dominant, random stimulus, false determination of emotion. The identified parameters and approaches to the analysis should foster studies on the linguistic aspect of the emotional text dominant, as well as refine practical methods for its accurate determination in modern textual contents.

On Practical Uses of Ten Sefirot: Material Readings in an Early Modern Kabbalistic Collectaneum (MS Michael 473)

AbstractBy the end of the sixteenth century, textual manifestations of kabbalah—a variety of Jewish mysticism that first emerged in medieval Provence and Catalonia—achieved the status of elite but authoritative lore in Eastern and Central Europe, even if at times they stirred religious opposition. At the same time, and especially in the seventeenth century, the so-called practical kabbalah, associated with magic and a talismanic approach to religious ritual, gained substantial popularity among Ashkenazi (i.e., Eastern and Central European) Jews. This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. By zooming in on a single codex, this article foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts. The article showcases a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, in order to focus on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.

Navigating early Chinese daybook divination manuals

In Early China, ‘daybook’ (rishu 日書) divination manuals were consulted to determine auspicious times for a variety of life events. Recent discoveries of daybook manuscripts written upon bound bamboo strips have revealed much about how these manuals were compiled in the first centuries BC. Multiple different divination systems appear on the same manuscript, resulting in a confusion of running text, lists, and diagrams. In order to navigate these manuscripts efficiently, daybook compilers utilized certain strategies to aid their users. Taking the Han period Zhoujiazhai 周家寨 daybook as a case study, this article surveys the strategies employed in this manuscript to differentiate textual units. Attention is given to the materiality of the writing support, judicious framing with empty space, features of the calligraphy, punctuation usage, indexing, and the presence of both explicit titles and embedded identifiers.

Model and Data Integrated Transfer Learning for Unstructured Map Text Detection

The emergence of the third information wave makes extensive maps available to be generated by volunteered ways, never specially designed and generated by professional institutes alone. These large-scale images-based volunteered maps created by the public provide plentiful geographical information regarding a place while posing a challenge for recognizing the unstructured text in these maps for previous approaches to standard map text detection. Map text or map annotations denote the critical element of map content. To achieve the detection of unstructured map text, this paper proposed an integrated data-based and model-based transfer learning model, which mainly respectively included data augmentation techniques and adaptive fine-tuning, to reinforce the state-of-the-art CNNs by transferring the OCR knowledge for detecting the unstructured text units in volunteered maps. The experiment proved that our proposed framework can effectively reinforce the state-of-the-art CNN in detecting unstructured map text. We hope our research results can contribute to unstructured map text detection and recognition.

К вопросу о специфике юридического перевода (на материале немецкого, французского и испанского языков)

Legal terms are not uniform at the international level, but they are closely connected with a national legal system. This implies serious conceptual inconsistencies. The above-mentioned systemic connection leads to the fact that either boundaries of terms’ meanings belonging to different jurisdictions or the degree of their explication may vary. Despite some similarities in legal systems, primarily of European countries, each state has its own legal order, conceptual and terminological systems, specific legal rules, forms and procedures of judicial proceedings. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main causes of difficulties in translation of legal terminology from German, French and Spanish languages. To achieve this goal, the following tasks have been set in the research: to analyze the specifics of legal language and of legal documents translation as well as the issues of equivalency in legal translation; to select the samples from the above-mentioned languages that clearly demonstrate difficulties in translation of texts from such branches as civil and criminal law, administrative and civil codes, etc. The problems a translator faces due to the socio-cultural content of legal terms can be solved by means of various resources. As research methods the authors have used the method of comparison, typical for a comparative law, the method of continuous sampling of legal terminological units in French, Spanish and German legal texts, comparative analysis of terms and their translated equivalents, and the method of written translation. The results of the conducted analysis will be useful both for further studies of legal discourse and in theoretical and practical classes on legal text translation.

Cognitive Term Frame: Creation of a Dictionary Entry on the Basis of a Specialized Text Corpus

The study deals with testing a specialized text corpus on the example of a number of cognitive linguistic terms with the hypernym frame. The corpus includes a subcorpus of scientific texts and a subcorpus of journalistic texts. The former is represented by 13 journals indexed in the RSCI; the latter one is represented by 10 significant Russian newspapers & magazines. The collected texts were lemmatized and tokenized, as well as automatically marked up using the Universal Dependencies standard. The corpus is used for creating a learner’s cognitive linguistic term dictionary. This lexicographic source includes 60 major terms in the university disciplines within cognitive sciences. The novelty of the approach is due to the thesaurus-encyclopedic type of dictionary which allows scholars to describe the word both as a term (a minimal component of scientific knowledge) and as a unit of scientific text in its various collocations and ontological relations (synonymy, quasi-synonymy, class-subclass; polysemy, etc.). The basis for describing the term systemic relations is corpus statistics: analysis of concordances, collocations, and n-grams. The results of using a specialized text corpus are presented on the example of a terminological field with the dominant frame. With the help of concordance lists, contexts of term usage are revealed and its derivational relations are established. The semantic and grammatical relationships of the term are characterized through n-grams analysis. Synonyms, hyponyms, hyperonyms of the term are described based on the study of collocations. The Dashinimaeva-Wang hypothesis about the links between the terms ‘concept’, ‘frame’, ‘gestalt’, and ‘image’ was also tested. Briefly characterized were the semantic transformations of the scientific term in the media discourse. Besides, systemic relations of the terms identified on the basis of corpus statistics were confirmed by the method of interpretative analysis of the contexts obtained from concordance lists. The data of automatically selected associative measures also largely agree with the results of the associative experiment carried out in the framework of the study.

Extend the context! Measuring explicit and implicit populism on three different textual levels

Abstract This paper focuses on a methodological question regarding a content analysis tool in populism studies, namely the explicit and implicit populism approach. The study argues that scholars adopting this approach need to conduct content analysis simultaneously on different coding unit lengths, because the ratio of explicit and implicit messages varies significantly between units such as single sentences and paragraphs. While an explicit populist message consists of at least one articulated dichotomy between the “good” people and the “harmful” others, implicit populism implies that only one of the core features of the populist style is present: either people-centrism or antagonism. Due to the often fractured and occasionally dichotomous nature of populist styles, this research revolves around the idea that the explicit and implicit populist content analysis method should be performed on coding units of different lengths, as these units can yield significantly different results in the detection of populist styles. Hybrid content and statistical analyses were operationalized to scrutinize to what extent explicit, implicit, or non-populist styles change in three coding unit types with diverging lengths. The outcome supports the following suggestion: Explicit and implicit populism demand scrutiny simultaneously on one narrow and one extended textual unit.

Then Zipporah took a Flint … Circumcision as a Rite of Passage in Exod 4,24-26

ABSTRACT This article about Exod 4,24-26 argues that God is willing to kill Moses since he had not circumcised his son. The ritual described in the textual unit is an example of circumcision as a life cycle ritual at the threshold of adulthood. Originally, circumcision in ancient Israel was not carried out on boys at the eighth day after birth. As a result of the construction of a new identity after the return from exile, the age of circumcision changed from early puberty to newborn. Exod 4,24-26 offers a glimpse at the earlier custom.

Specificity of Dictionary Description of Abbreviation Appellatives and Onyms

The article is focused on the comparison of abbreviations-appellatives and abbreviations onyms, units that are abbreviated equivalents of divided common nouns and proper nouns respectively. It is not customary in Russian language studies to differentiate abbreviations according to the above categories, and, as a consequence, abbreviated appellatives and onyms are considered to be identical language units in terms of their origin and purpose. The aim of this work is to establish the basic differences between abbreviated appellatives and onyms and to substantiate the obligatory nature of this distinction in their research and description. The relevance of the research is determined by the need to develop a new approach to the lexicographic description of abbreviations, which emerged in connection with the modern trend to create multi-informative dictionaries of abbreviations. The study’s novelty stems from its identification of the specific features of abbreviations-appellatives and abbreviations-onyms as lexicographic units for the first time. The article contains a brief review of theoretical studies and dictionaries of abbreviations, which form a general idea of the established tradition of studying abbreviations. Different mechanisms of abbreviations appellatives and abbreviations-onyms formation and their influence on the functioning of linguistic units in texts are considered. On the basis of the published dictionaries of abbreviations the peculiarities of the dictionary description of abbreviations apellatives and abbreviations-onyms are established. The author reviews dictionary entries from specialized dictionaries, which can be offered as models of differentiated vocabulary description of abbreviated appellatives and onyms.

Когнитивные механизмы персуазивности политического дискурса

The article deals with the persuasiveness of political discourse from a cognitive perspec-tive. The research object is text units with the semantics of purpose functioning in the contexts of persuasive speech in natural dialogues of the reciprocal-response type. These units were obtained for the study from transcripts of political interviews with representatives of the Russian political elite using the unselected sam-plingmethod. The paper aims to describe cognitive models (frames, situational models) of natural language interaction (and persuasion) in discourse of the argumentative type and to identify cognitive mechanisms. The key concept used is persuasiveness, which, as applied to contexts with the semantics of purpose and viewed from a cognitive perspective, is understood in the paper as a change in the initial knowledge of the addressee or (in the absence of such knowledge) as its formation at the time of communication in the course of interaction, and which is presented as a unidirectional strategic action (as opposed to communicative). Using the methods of discourse analysis and elements of conversational analysis, basing on the principles of frame semantics and sociolinguistics, the author describes the cognitive mechanisms of 6 cognitive models of the persuasive argumentative discourse, including causative and circular, built on the principle of circularcomposition. Each model was studied through selection and detailed consideration of priority cognitive tools. The paper identifies groups of cognitive mechanisms in terms of their functionality, describes options for their inclusionboth in a dialogically directed discourse (within the framework of speech interaction) and in the process of speech as a strategic action performed solely for the purpose of persuasion.

Теонимы как репрезентанты геокультурного образа Древнего Египта в стихотворениях И. А. Бунина 1903-1907 гг.

The paper deals with the mythological names representing the geocultural image of Ancient Egypt in I. A. Bunin’s poems of 1903 —1907. The relevance of the topic is explained by the interest of linguists in the onomastic code of I. A. Bunin’s prose and poetry, the little-studied oriental vocabulary and the appellative-onymic relationships in his artistic heritage. A group of theonyms, the referents of which are known to the reader to a varying degree, is considered as the means of verbalising the geocultural image of Ancient Egypt. Among the theonyms one can find both common units, namely Ra, Osiris, Seth and individual author’s bi-lexemes like Shakal-Anubis (Jackal-Anubis), Ra-Osiris, Jastreb-Gor (Hawk-Horus), formed in a compound way. In the I.A. Bunin’s poetry, the presence of onimicized appellatives Otec (Father), Syn (Son) and Shakal (Jackal) is marked, acting as contextual synonyms to the theonomies of Osiris, Hawk-Horus and Anubis. Acting as key units of the poetic text and referring to specific mythological plots, theonyms interact with other semantic types of onyms: toponyms Cairo, Gizekh, Thebes, hydronyms Nile and Merida, the acronym Sirius, ecclesionyms Ali, Memnon, as well as appellatives such as pustynya (desert), solnce (sun), sfinks (sphinx), more (sea), rassvet (dawn), nebosklon (skyline) etc. Together, these units form a single semantic context presenting the philosophical reflection of the author. The implementation of textual connections of theonyms ensures the formation of the geocultural image of Ancient Egypt in the individual author’s picture of the world at the intersection of mythological ideas about the Heliopolis Ennead and real knowledge of the ancient historical region.

Paralanguage in Natural Language Texts

In oral communication natural language is always combined with nonverbal signs of various nature, in particular paralanguage signs. The present paper describes usages and functions of lexical paralanguage units in Russian texts, mainly texts of anecdotes, where these units serve as a key to comic effect. The article analyzes examples of nonverbal imitation of speech pathology and ethnic, social, professional and other peculiarities of human communicative behavior. The paper describes some functions of paralinguistic signs such as their ability to imitate specific acts of pronunciation, to substitute taboo speech units or to denote other real actions. The authors pay attention to the form, meaning and usage of paralanguage units in Russian. Some of the units regarded are supplied with semantic descriptions and with descriptions of spheres of their usage. The article establishes syntactic function of paralanguage units in dialogues. Paralinguistic units constitute the class of so-called signalatives, which do not denote propositions but indicate peoples’ emotions or their mental activity

REVISITING SYNTAX OF COHERENT SPEECH

This scientific article deals with the issue of syntax of coherent speech; the relationship between the sentence and the utterance is defined; it is substantiated that the transformation of a sentence (abstract speech unit, sentence scheme) into an utterance (speech unit) of great importance acquires meaningful segmentation essential for a certain situation, corresponding communicative task. To analyse the structural, semantic and pragmatic manifestations of the real language process, the functioning of syntactic units in terms of communicative nomination, the text introduces the concept of discursive utterance, taking into account a set of extralinguistic, pragmatic, psychological factors. It is proved that the concept of a textual communicative unit is most closely related to the theory of discourse - a discursive utterance - a textual combination of parcelled or segmented parts of a sentence or independent predicative units united thematically, which are related to a complete syntactic unit - a grammatical simple or complex sentence.

«Заумная пра-образность» и «словоновшество» в стихотворениях А. Крученых о временах года

The aim of the study is to describe the means of linguistic embodiment of the images of the seasons in A. Kruchyonykh’s poetry based on the methodological apparatus of the linguistics of creativity. The paper considers the ways of verbalisation of the poet’s ideas about the seasons within a broad conceptual framework of the ideological and aesthetic attitudes of zaum poetry in the early XX century. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the creatability and functional single-use character of A. Kruchyonykh’s verbal innovations, which are used to denote seasonal states of nature unconventionally reinterpreted by the poet. The scientific originality of the study lies in taking a comprehensive approach to analysing the manifestations of the poet’s verbal creativity (1) at the macro level of the poetic text as a unified artistic and semantic whole and (2) at the micro level of nonce naming units as separate textual units. As a result, it has been shown that the linguistic realisation of the analysed images of A. Kruchyonykh is conditioned by the author’s intention to deautomatise the reader’s perception of the text using nonce words of varying degrees of interpretability, sound symbolism techniques and tropes designating intermodal sensations.

СТАНОВЛЕНИЕ И РАЗВИТИЕ РЕКЛАМЫ В РОССИЙСКОЙ ПРОВИНЦИИ В ПОСЛЕДНЕЙ ЧЕТВЕРТИ XIX ВЕКА (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ ГАЗЕТЫ «ЕКАТЕРИНБУРГСКАЯ НЕДЕЛЯ»)

The article deals with the formation and development of newspaper advertising in the Perm province in the last quarter of the 19th century. The advertisements placed in the first private newspaper of the region called “Yekaterinburgskaya Nedelya” (“Ekaterinburg Week”, 1879–1896) are analyzed. The main functions of advertising, its content, features and significance are shown. Newspaper advertising, which makes it possible to present the maximum amount of various information in the minimum number of text units, was a kind of “cut” of the daily life of a provincial society. Advertising products demonstrate the relations between material and spiritual needs, range of interests, leisure and work activities of the inhabitants of the Russian provinces. A significant place in the newspaper was given to private announcements that did not have a pronounced nature of advertising, but were such in essence. They were called upon to help the population of the province in solving a number of everyday problems. Newspaper advertising successfully fulfilled its main task – it stimulated the sale of goods, sales growth, thereby activating the development of market relations in the region. This testified to the natural process of commercialization of the press, including the provincial one. A certain imprint on the advertising products of the first private newspaper of the Perm province was imposed by the mining specificity of the region. Being a barometer of the social life of the region, “Ekaterinburg Week” reflected on its pages the changes that took place in the process of the formation of the advertising business in the Russian Empire in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Text-Work and Its Units: Key Textforms and Textform Keys

The article examines the semantic organization of text-work by means of textual units, which convey meaning, unlike linguistic units, which convey significance. Textual units differ: a) in structure — simple (indivisible in meaning) and complex; b) by origin — unoriginal (quotations) and original; c) by function — neutral and marked: key units that accumulate meaning, and unit-keys that reveal meaning; d) by semantic volume — intratextual and intertextual; e) by position in the text — structurally marked and structurally unmarked. Certain formal and functional ways of their use in a text allow to identify textual units: repetition, their use for explanation or replication. In the Russian philological tradition, these units were called “symbols” [Vinogradov, 1980], “abbreviations of meaning” [Bakhtin, 1986], “narrative keys” [Toporov, 1983; Nikolaeva, 2012]. The author of the present article introduces the term “textforms” (“key textforms” and “textform keys”) which makes it possible to view textual forms as units of text grammar and grammatical forms as units of language grammar. The article presents an analysis of textforms that organize the semantic dimension of texts of confessional culture (“The Tale of Boris and Gleb”) and texts of secular culture that differ in artistic principles and forms of presentation of these principles (Pushkin’s novel “The Captain’s Daughter” and Brodsky’s poem “December in Florence”).

PHRASEOLOGY IN THE FRENCH LITERARY TEXT: FUNCTIONAL AND SEMANTIC ANALYSIS (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF ANNA GAVALDA'S NOVELS “35 KILOS D'ESPOIR” AND “JE L'AIMAIS”)

Statement of the problem. The article is devoted to the important but insufficiently studied problem of Romance linguistics, particularly French, related to the analysis of the phraseology of the French literary text from the point of view of semantics and functioning. The study of the semantic paradigm and the functional features of phraseological units used in a literary text make it possible to better reveal the author's picture of the world, as well as the emotional sphere of characters, which often determines their actions. In addition, the occasional use of phraseological units can increase their expressiveness, create a stylistic effect that causes the appearance of additional semantic meanings, which requires a separate study. Results. In the article, the most representative semantic groups of usual phraseological units in the French literary text are revealed, the most common types of occasional use of phraseological units are determined, the reasons and results of their occasional use are established. Conclusion. The results of the semantic analysis of phraseological units in the French literary text on the example of the studied novels by Anna Gavalda testify to the anthropocentric nature of the author's picture of the world, the multiplicity and semantic diversity of phraseological units in them, the prevalence of their occasional use, as well as their role in revealing the author's picture of the world, the emotional sphere, the internal and external qualities of the characters, and creating a stylistic effect.

Strategies to Increase Willingness to Receive a COVID-19 Vaccine among Nursing Home Staff.

Nursing home (NH) staff and residents have been prioritized to receive COVID-19 vaccinations. However, NH staff have been hesitant. This study explored what strategies were used to overcome this hesitancy and which of these were found to be important by NH staff to increase their willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine. This study employed a sequential exploratory qualitative design. The COVID-19 MINUTES study aimed to describe the challenges presented by, responses to, and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in NHs. The minutes of COVID-19 outbreak teams (COTs) in Dutch long-term care organizations (n = 41) were collected and coded using content analysis. Textual units from December 2020 to April 2021 that regarded strategies to increase staff's vaccination willingness (n = 67) were selected. Subsequently, to validate these data, two panels of NH healthcare workers (HCWs) and policy workers (PWs) (n = 8) selected, discussed, and ranked the strategies that they found to be important using a modified nominal group technique. The strategies described in the minutes included financial reimbursements, personal contact, story sharing, logistics support, role models, visual information, and written information. Except for financial reimbursement, all these strategies were considered important or very important by the panel participants. Some organizations combined multiple strategies. The strategies that were found important in combination may be used more broadly and should be developed further with the involvement of HCWs.

STATISTICAL DATA ON THE COMPATIBILITY OF THE VERB ‘НАЧАТИ’ IN RUSSIAN СHRONICLES OF THE XIV-XV CENTURIES

This article provides a description of the compatibility features of the verb ‘начати’ in the Old Russian language. The material for this study was electronic transcriptions of the most ancient Russian Chronicles, published on the portal “Manuscript: Slavic Written Heritage”. Within the framework of this work, a quantitative-statistical research method was used, which allows not only to determine the number of occurrences of a particular language unit, but also to statistically substantiate the combinatorial nature of the components with each other. To obtain statistical data on the compatibility of the verb ‘начати, the module of n-grams of the IAS “Manuscript” was used, which makes it possible to identify text combinations with a different number of components and analyze the frequency of functioning of language units in texts. As part of this work, we used the T-score measure, which allows us to determine the most frequent combinations, as well as to identify how non-random the strength of the connection between words in a phrase is. The analysis of statistical data confirms the effectiveness of the use of association measures when working with the Old Russian text. It was revealed that the verb ‘начати’ is most often combined with the infinitive of imperfective verbs. The dictionaries used in the work demonstrate a fairly wide semantics for the verb ‘начати’. In the chronicle text, we recorded the functioning of this unit in only two meanings.