Language Utterances Research Articles

THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF THE PHATIC COMMUNION IN PALEMBANG LANGUAGE

This study aims to describe the form and function of phatic communion in Palembang. This research is a descriptive study. The object of this research is the phatic communion in Palembang language utterances. The data were collected using listening techniques and recording speeches containing phatic phrases. Data are classified and analyzed based on the form and function of phatic expressions. Based on the results of observations and data analysis, 16 phatic phrases are used in Palembang language utterances. The sixteen utterances are in the form of phatic particles, phatic words, and phatic phrases. The function of the Palembang language phatic communion, namely to start a conversation or get the listener's attention; expresses disappointment, pique, disbelief, amazement; confirms justification /argumentation; express personal closeness; refine requests; maintaining and ending conversations, etc.
 Keywords:
 Phatic Communion, Form of Phatic, Function of Phatic, Palembang Language

Naming in Two Modalities: Manual and Mouth Gestures in Hearing and Deaf Children

Studies on various sign languages have pointed out that some kind of mouth action co-occur in sign language utterances together with other body components. Although the consistency of such phenomenon has been studied in adult signing, no research has been conducted so far on the mouth actions occurring in the signing of school-aged children. In this paper, mouth actions will be described in a developmental perspective and paralleled with co-speech gestures of hearing children. In particular, mouth actions and manual gestures will be investigated in two groups of 10 bilingual Italian/Italian Sign Language (LIS) deaf and hearing children (from 6 to 14 yrs old) by using a naming task. The aim is to parallel quantitatively and qualitatively mouth actions and co-verbal gestures in order to understand their role with respect to sign and vocal naming. Furthermore, three adult signers were considered as models for understanding the typology and occurrence of mouth action in adult signing and compare it with children signing.

Oral Language and Emergent Literacy Strategies Used by Australian Early Childhood Teachers During Shared Book Reading

AbstractThe use of shared book reading is regarded as valuable to support young children to build their oral language and emergent literacy skills in preschool classrooms. Quantitative and qualitative features of early childhood teachers’ (ECTs’) shared book reading practices are important contributors to quality shared book reading experiences. The aim of this study was to gain in-depth insights about the range and frequency of extratextual oral language and emergent literacy utterances (utterances beyond the story text) used by ECTs during shared book reading with preschoolers as well as their use of paralinguistic and nonverbal features. Video-recordings were made of 32 ECTs engaging in shared book reading with their four-year-old preschool class. ECTs’ extratextual utterances and their paralinguistic and nonverbal features were classified using a validated observational checklist: The “Emergent Literacy and Language Early Childhood Checklist for Teachers” (ELLECCT). Results showed ECTs frequently used responsive statements such as commenting on the story or acknowledging or imitating children’s utterances in book-related talk. ECTs most commonly asked closed questions during shared book reading and regularly used paralinguistic and nonverbal features such as prosody and volume in order to engage children. In contrast, ECTs used only a limited range of dialogic reading prompts and explicit vocabulary strategies and only infrequently expanded children’s utterances. Notably, ECTs rarely used strategies to target children’s print knowledge or phonological awareness. Although extratextual dialogue was used regularly by ECTs during shared book reading, targeted techniques that are known to build oral language and emergent literacy were not consistently demonstrated. These results suggest missed opportunities for preschool children to benefit from shared book reading.

Pembelajaran Bahasa dan Sastra Berbasis Karakter pada Tingkat SMP

Literature learning becomes a means of forming students' character. This is in accordance with the expectations of the 2013 curriculum which prioritizes aspects of attitude in the formation of students' character. Literary learning must prioritize character building by choosing literary works that contain positive values that can be internalized in students' personalities. Language as a communication tool is one of our means to formulate goals and objectives, when using language as a communication tool, we already have certain goals. As social beings who need other people, humans can use several ways to communicate, namely through verbal and non-verbal. Through language we can find out a person's personal reflection, point of view, origin of language and country, understanding, education, and a person's character or personality can be studied from the spoken language utterances. Character education with the Indonesian language learning process has a correlation with one another. The purpose of this study is to describe the role of language learning in character building of elementary school students. The results of this study are expected to provide a reference for elementary school teachers, especially lower grade teachers, to use language as a means of forming children's character. This research is a theoretical study using a qualitative descriptive method. The results of the study show that language learning in elementary schools, especially in lower grades, plays a major role in the formation of children's character, such as friendly character, courtesy, self-confidence, respect for others, nationalism, and mutual respect, both through mother tongue and Indonesian. as the national language.

An Analysis of Intonation Patterns of English Interrogative Sentences Produced by Undergraduate Students in District Mansehra

This research intends to discover the tonal configurations of English Interrogative sentences used by undergraduate students of English in District Mansehra. The intonation patterns of English interrogative sentences used by undergraduate students were compared with those of native speakers of English. An experimental design was used to collect data from a sample of eighteen students (nine female and nine male) in the form of recordings and was run on PRAAT software to identify the intonation configuration of the recorded utterances. The analysis showed that non-native speakers used a variety of intonation patterns in the utterances of English language. In the comparison with the results of utterances by native speakers, it was observed that in yes/no questions, there was a slight difference between the percentages. Contrastively, in wh-questions, a significant difference was observed, as native speakers used a High-Low pattern whereas non-native speakers used the opposite one.

Debiasing NLU Models via Causal Intervention and Counterfactual Reasoning

Recent studies have shown that strong Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models are prone to relying on annotation biases of the datasets as a shortcut, which goes against the underlying mechanisms of the task of interest. To reduce such biases, several recent works introduce debiasing methods to regularize the training process of targeted NLU models. In this paper, we provide a new perspective with causal inference to find out the bias. On one hand, we show that there is an unobserved confounder for the natural language utterances and their respective classes, leading to spurious correlations from training data. To remove such confounder, the backdoor adjustment with causal intervention is utilized to find the true causal effect, which makes the training process fundamentally different from the traditional likelihood estimation. On the other hand, in inference process, we formulate the bias as the direct causal effect and remove it by pursuing the indirect causal effect with counterfactual reasoning. We conduct experiments on large-scale natural language inference and fact verification benchmarks, evaluating on bias sensitive datasets that are specifically designed to assess the robustness of models against known biases in the training data. Experimental results show that our proposed debiasing framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art debiasing methods while maintaining the original in-distribution performance.

Wadanan as a Manifestation of Harassing Face (Study of Conversational Implicature in Osing Language)

Wadanan utterances were the research objects. The research problems were related to how the manifestation of harassing the face in wadanan utterances in the Osing language and the context of wadanan implicatures as a manifestation of harassing the face. The objectives of this study consisted of (1) to describe the manifestation of harassing face in wadanan utterances in the Osing language and (2) the context of wadanan implicatures as a manifestation of harassing face in the Osing language.The design of this study was qualitative descriptive. The data source was wadanan utterances in the Osing language. The data collection method of this study used direct observation with note-taking techniques. The procedure used in this study were: data presentation stage, data analysis, and data presentation from data analysis results. Wadanan utterances data obtained were presented descriptively.The results showed four manifestations of wadanan utterances harassing faces in the Osing language, namely with harsh words, with cynicism, ridicule, and expressions of disappointment, forbidding, and complaining.

Towards retrieval-based conversational recommendation

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) have attracted immense attention in the past few years. The most recent approaches rely on neural models trained on recorded dialogs between humans, implementing an end-to-end learning process. These systems are commonly designed to generate responses given the user’s utterances in natural language. One main challenge is that these generated responses both have to be appropriate for the given dialog context and must be grammatically and semantically correct. Recent studies however highlighted that current generation-based systems often struggle to provide such responses. An alternative to generation-based approaches is to retrieve responses from pre-recorded dialog data and to adapt them if needed. Such retrieval-based approaches were successfully explored in the context of general conversational systems, but have received limited attention in recent years for CRS. In this work, we re-assess the potential of such approaches and design and evaluate a novel technique for response retrieval and ranking. A user study (N = 90) revealed that the responses by our system were on average of higher quality than those of two recent generation-based systems. We furthermore found that the quality ranking of the two generation-based approaches is not aligned with the results from the literature, which points to open methodological questions. Overall, our research underlines that retrieval-based approaches should be considered an alternative or complement to language generation approaches.11This work continues and significantly extends our research presented in Manzoor and Jannach (2021).

A tale of four parsers: methodological reflections on diagnostic evaluation and in-depth error analysis for meaning representation parsing

We discuss methodological choices in diagnostic evaluation and error analysis in meaning representation parsing (MRP), i.e. mapping from natural language utterances to graph-based encodings of semantic structure. We expand on a pilot quantitative study in contrastive diagnostic evaluation, inspired by earlier work in syntactic dependency parsing, and propose a novel methodology for qualitative error analysis. This two-pronged study is performed using a selection of submissions, data, and evaluation tools featured in the 2019 shared task on MRP. Our aim is to devise methods for identifying strengths and weaknesses in different broad families of parsing techniques, as well as investigating the relations between specific parsing approaches, different meaning representation frameworks, and individual linguistic phenomena—by identifying and comparing common error patterns. Our preliminary empirical results suggest that the proposed methodologies can be meaningfully applied to parsing into graph-structured target representations, as a side-effect uncovering hitherto unknown properties of the different systems that can inform future development and cross-fertilization across approaches.

Counter-Text as a Tool of Psycholinguistic Diagnosing Comprehension of Foreign Language Utterance

The research built on the anthropological approach to text comprehension links philosophical and psycholinguistic perspectives of speech perception. The article analyzes the factors influencing adequate comprehension when perceiving foreign language oral speech, in terms of testees’ approximately similar level of language competence and linguo-psychic characteristics. The object of research is counter-texts defined as those fixed in written form samples of а recipient’s internal speech emerging in the process of perceiving utterances. A counter-text reveals intertextual links between two pictures of the world – the author’s and recipient’s ones, wherein a new formation is a projection of a recipient’s consciousness on the initial text. Using the technique of counter-textual analysis, we were able to ascertain students’ individual strategies of understanding instrumental in adequate comprehending foreign language utterance. These strategies are retelling, translation and assertion, i.e. the ones that fix in recipient’s consciousness sense knots of the utterance for further cognitive processing. It has been established that understanding is marked by a small number of deviations from the author’s idea when, firstly, a recipient has a rather wide cultural scope, which provides points of coincidence of dominant knots of the communicant and recipient, and, secondly, he or she has verbal thinking. The received data also bears evidence to the fact of negative impact of creative thinking mechanisms that can distort the initial sense of the utterance.

POTRET BAHASA JAWA RAGAM KRAMA MASYARAKAT PESISIRAN KOTA SEMARANG

The research described the proficiency degree, selection of <em>krama </em>lexicon, and deviation of Javanese speech levels usage. The data is taken from <em>krama lugu</em> dan <em>krama inggil</em> that is gathered through structured and in-depth interviews. Sociolinguistics approach with the the utilization of both quantitative and qualitative method is used in analysis data. Quantitative analysis is used to measure krama lexicon’s proficiency degree. Meanwhile, qualitative analysis is utilized to reveal some factors that become the background of krama lexicon selection and deviation of speech levels usage in a polite utterance. The qualitative analyze employs method: <em>bagi unsur langsung</em> (BUL), permutation, and substitution. The result shows that the proficiency degree of <em>krama</em> lexicon of Semarang coastal society Javanese speaker’s is 38,1% (qualified as: less good). Another findings of the research is the lexicon krama’s deviation in Semarang coastal’s Javanese language utterance. The deviation is measured with the standard parameter of Javanese Language (prescriptive), such as: (1) the overlaps of Javanese language utterance, (2) self-<em>kramanisasi</em>, and (3) interference of Javanese language and Indonesian language. That deviations caused of an error in language inheritance, a low proficiency in lexicon <em>krama</em>, and the lack of comprehension of understanding Javanese speech levels usage.

Warm (for Winter): Inferring Comparison Classes in Communication.

The meanings of natural language utterances depend heavily on context. Yet, what counts as context is often only implicit in conversation. The utterance it's warm outside signals that the temperature outside is relatively high, but the temperature could be high relative to a number of different comparison classes: other days of the year, other weeks, other seasons, etc. Theories of context sensitivity in language agree that the comparison class is a crucial variable for understanding meaning, but little is known about how a listener decides upon the comparison class. Using the case study of gradable adjectives (e.g., warm), we extend a Bayesian model of pragmatic inference to reason flexibly about the comparison class and test its qualitative predictions in a large‐scale free‐production experiment. We find that human listeners infer the comparison class by reasoning about the kinds of observations that would be remarkable enough for a speaker to mention, given the speaker and listener's shared knowledge of the world. Further, we quantitatively synthesize the model and data using Bayesian data analysis, which reveals that usage frequency and a preference for basic‐level categories are two main factors in comparison class inference. This work presents new data and reveals the mechanisms by which human listeners recover the relevant aspects of context when understanding language.

Natural language understanding for argumentative dialogue systems in the opinion building domain

This paper introduces a natural language understanding (NLU) framework for argumentative dialogue systems in the information-seeking and opinion building domain. The proposed framework consists of two sub-models, namely intent classifier and argument similarity. Intent classifier model stack BiLSTM with attention mechanism on top of pre-trained BERT model and fine-tune the model for recognizing the user intent, whereas argument similarity model employs BERT+BiLSTM for identifying system arguments the user refers to in his or her natural language utterances. Our model is evaluated in an argumentative dialogue system that engages the user to inform him-/herself about a controversial topic by exploring pro and con arguments and build his/her opinion towards the topic. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we collect user utterances for the interaction with the respective system labelling intent and referenced argument in an extensive online study. The data collection includes multiple topics and two different user types (native English speakers from the UK and non-native English speakers from China). Additionally, we evaluate the proposed intent classifier and argument similarity models separately on the publicly available Banking77 and STS benchmark datasets. The evaluation indicates a clear advantage of the utilized techniques over baseline approaches on several datasets, as well as the robustness of the proposed approach against new topics and different language proficiency as well as the cultural background of the user. Furthermore, results show that our intent classifier model outperforms DIET, DistillBERT, and BERT fine-tuned models in few-shot setups (i.e., with 10, 20, or 30 labelled examples per intent) and full data setup.

A Review of Plan-Based Approaches for Dialogue Management

Dialogue systems deliver a more natural mean of communication between humans and machines when compared to traditional systems. Beyond input/output components that understand and generate natural language utterances, the core of a dialogue system is the dialogue manager. The aim of the dialogue manager is to mimic all cognitive aspects related to a natural conversation and it is responsible for identifying the current state of the dialogue and for deciding the next action to be taken by a dialogue system. Artificial intelligence (AI) planning is one of the techniques available in the literature for dialogue management. In a dialogue system, AI planning deals with the action selection problem by treating each utterance as an action and by choosing the actions that get closer to the dialogue goal. This work aims to provide a systematic literature review (SLR) that investigates recent contributions to plan-based dialogue management. This SLR aims at answering research questions concerning: (i) the types of AI planning exploited for dialogue management; (ii) the planning characteristics that justify its adoption in dialogue system; (iii) and, the challenges posed on the development of plan-based dialogue managers. The present SLR was performed by querying four scientific repositories, followed by a manual search on works from the most eminent authors in the field. Further works that were cited by the retrieved papers were also considered for inclusion. Our final corpus is composed of forty works, including only works published since 2014. The results indicate that AI planning is still an emerging strategy for dialogue management. Although AI planning can offer a strong contribution to dialogue systems, especially to those that require predictability, some relevant challenges might still limit its adoption. Our results contributed to discussions in the field and they highlight some research gaps to be addressed in future studies.

Семантика императивных высказываний в современном киргизском языке

The cognitive features of imperative utterances in the modern Kyrgyz language have been investigated. As you know, the imperative has two different meanings: one means urgency, necessity and importance, and the other - attempts to influence the actions of other people. Imperative means something extremely important or necessary. It also means order. The analyzed imperative statements are considered in the mainstream of conceptual grammar, which allows you to highlight syntactic concepts, or mental images that stand behind linguistic signs and are reflected in the analyzed syntactic structures. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe imperative utterances in the Kyrgyz language, to reveal the mechanisms for changing the prototypical meaning of the verb lexicon in the structure of the imperative using theories such as the theory of functional styles, the theory of discourse, the theory of speech acts and the theory of grammar of constructions. The relevance of the article is due to the need to study the semantic features of the imperative statements of the modern Kyrgyz language. The purpose of this work is to show the features of imperatives, to carefully study the types and functions of imperatives in the Kyrgyz language. The data were analyzed using a comparative analysis to find out the differences and similarities of the imperatives of the Kyrgyz language with other languages. The study belongs to qualitative research, as it was conducted using the method of contrast analysis as a comparison of languages. The object of the research is the data imperatives were taken from the sources that were needed for the research.

How accentuation influences the processing of emotional words in spoken language: An ERP study

Pitch accent marks information structure in utterances in many languages but little is known about the effects of accent on the perception of emotional word meaning. The present study explored the processing of accentuation and its influence on the semantic integration of emotional words during spoken sentence comprehension. Twenty-five participants were presented with sets of spoken Chinese sentences while accentuation and emotional meaning of the adjectives were orthogonally manipulated. An implicit task required the recognition of words contained in the sentences, whereas an explicit task required judging the presence of an accented or emotional word. In the ERPs to the adjectives, accentuation induced a long-lasting anterior negativity starting around 150–250 ms and a late posterior positivity. More importantly, emotionally negative words elicited larger negativities between 300 and 700 ms as compared to neutral words but only when they were accented. Interestingly, these negativities showed a parietal N400-typical distribution when accent was implicit but strongly overlapped with the accent-induced anterior negativity when accent was task-relevant. Hence, accentuation may enable the processing of emotional meaning by directing attention towards the accented words. When accent and emotion are explicit parts of the task, similar frontal attentional networks are activated by emotion as by accent alone. In contrast, when accent and emotion are implicit to the task, emotion appears to merely activate parietal networks, typical for semantic integration effects. Together, these results suggest that accentuation plays an important role in spoken sentence comprehension, deserving further study.

ANALISIS DIKSI PADA PIDATO PELAKU USAHA NASIONAL DENGAN KAJIAN PRAGMATIK

This study aims to find diction in the speeches of national business actors in pragmatic studies. This type of research is descriptive-qualitative, with a pragmatic theory approach. The data source of this research is the speech of national business actors and the data of this research is that the speech in it contains several dictions. Data collection techniques in this study using documentation techniques. The data to be studied has been previously documented, this aims to assist researchers in obtaining the desired data. Data collection in this study was carried out by recording language utterances in the form of sentence fragments that had a complete context. The data is identified based on the form of diction and the data is collected and sorted systematically based on the identification and classification data format that has been determined. Based on the results of data analysis, found two results of diction analysis, language power, consisting of persuasive power, critical power, egocentrism power (I-ness), clear power (informative), awakening power, commanding power and provocative power.

Code Mixing Among Millennials of Banggai Ethnic

This research aims to identify code-mixing types employed among millennials of Banggai ethnic. This descriptive qualitative research uses conversation in 10 language use activities as the data source. The data are utterances containing code mixing. Data collection techniques involve field observation, by recording participant conversations in 10 activities. Participants are millennials in Banggai who are native speakers of Banggai language who use Banggai language in in their daily life. The researchers sort the utterances to separate data and non-data in recorded conversations. Data analysis code mixing identification and classification. The researchers interpret the results of the analysis based on the theory and present them in the form of description. The results of this study indicate that Banggai millennials employ all forms of code mixing in all conversational activities studied. The forms include insertion, alternation and congruent lexicalization. In other words, participants insert Indonesian words, phrases, clauses and dialects into their Banggai language utterances during conversation. The tendency to insert Indonesian in the utterances of Banggai millennials is an alarming signal for the continuity and the existence of the Banggai Language. Losing the local language will eliminate the Banggai culture at the same time. The results of observations in 10 conversational activity settings showing the mixing of Banggai language code with Indonesian reflect the signal. There are needs of serious efforts from the Banggai Laut Government and a traditional apparatus based in Banggai Laut, to make Banggai language into the language of instruction, which continue to live and sustainable in society, as it is related to the central position of Banggai Laut , as the center of the Banggai Kingdom.

Profiling of the Ethical Concepts Good / Evil and Justice from the Etymological Perspective

The paper gives a comprehensive insight into the peculiarities of concept profiling through defining the related etymological domains. The aim of the paper is to reveal the peculiarities of the profiling of the concepts GOOD / EVIL and JUSTICE through elucidating their source domains from an etymological perspective. The choice of the analysed ethical concepts is stipulated by their higher contextual actualization frequency, as compared with the other ethical concepts, according to the data obtained from British National Corpus. The research method of trajector / landmark alignment used in this work is based on R. Langacker’s views on the profiling of concepts in language utterances and on the tenets of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The novelty of this approach consists in the fact that it was elaborated and tailored for the analysis and explanation of the onomasiological principles of ‘wrapping’ abstract ethical concepts into the language form. The underlying idea is that abstract categories were conceptualized on the basis of background central life experience and knowledge of concrete things. It is argued that such things were the source domains in ontological cross-domain mappings for the target ethical concepts. The current research into the source domain etymons of the ethical categories made it possible to determine the underlying images, which are the core for drawing metaphorical correspondences between source and target concepts. The etymological layer of source domain lexicalizers revealed the intrinsic psychological mechanisms of human cognition and perception of the world, which consist in the inherent proclivity of the human mind to make metaphorical parallels in the direction from daily, central experience to complex abstract ideas and notions. The results made it possible to develop the matrix model of the analysed concepts, which was further developed into a ‘conceptual edifice’ multi-layer model, which reveals the conceptualization paths along which the human mind classifies and categorizes abstract ethical ideas.

Zwiększenie czytelności wypowiedzi w polskim języku migowym przez animowaną wirtualną postać. Badania użytkowników z wykorzystaniem nowych technologii

Research in construction of sign language avatars, which are computer-generated representations of linguistic phenomena, can be used to arrive at solutions facilitating communication with hearing-impaired persons. The clarity of content of the sign communication is particularly important for its recipient. As part of its project “How to Increase the Comprehensibility of Utterances in the Polish Sign Language through Animated Virtual Assistant”, the research network Łukasiewicz- Instytut Technik Innowacyjnych EMAG from Katowice (Ł-EMAG)23 has undertaken research with a view to evaluating the efficacy of the Polish Sign Language (PJM) through a virtual assistant; the other objective is to single out those traits which most contribute to satisfactory reception and comprehension of communication. The present article reports on the comparative studies conducted so far, which include surveys and in-depth interviews with hearing-impaired users of sign language by means of dedicated research tools. The first (introductory) stage consisted in gathering users’ opinions on the comprehensibility of the sign language of the first created avatar, including features which either facilitate of hinder communication as well as the level of experience of hearing-impaired persons in the use of on-line translators. In the second stage, a model of a 3D virtual assistant was developed, which took into consideration all the above-mentioned features facilitating or hindering communication. This part of the research yielded data concerning the comprehensibility of the virtual avatar as well as users’ comparison of the two avatars.