Language Utterances Research Articles

Zur Konstruktion der sozialen Indexikalität der Sprache: von „Kollektiv‟ zu „Team‟. Und via Coronavirus-Pandemie zurück?

The present paper aims to contribute to the discussion about the social indexicality of the linguistic sign. The analysis relates to the research question of how a language sign or utterance, used in a particular socio-cultural context, takes on socially relevant meanings. The analysis is informed by the concept of social indexicality and social meaning in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Social meaning is reflected as a type of pragmatic meaning of a linguistic form that can become a pointer to (or an index of) the social identities and the typical social contexts. Social meaning acts as an index of the context in which the linguistic unit is expected and appropriate. Social meanings are anchored through social practice. The article analyzes the contextualization of the word collective in German social discourse and thus information is obtained about the social meaning that communicants attach to the concept of collective in communicative interaction. It is revealed that the word collective became an indicator for the social practice of the German Democratic Republic and took the rank of a social index. The “having to fit into the community” praxis, typical for the past, the uniformity of society in GDR made the collective an undesirable word. Since 2020, the return of the lexeme has been recorded in active use to mark the realities that came with the pandemic and the limitation of individual freedom. The ties between a linguistic form and the practice in which it receives its social voice is explained. The study was carried out on the basis of the “Digital Dictionary of the German Language” as a corpus-based discourse analysis. The corpus of electronic texts on the coronavirus pandemic (the corona corpus) was examined. 

Linguistically Responsive Instruction for Latinx Teacher Candidates: Surfacing Language Ideological Dilemmas

AbstractThis qualitative study explored Linguistically Responsive Instruction (LRI) for linguistically diverse Latinx preservice Teacher Candidates (TCs) at a tertiary institution in the southwest region of the United States. To provide an example of preparing TCs to engage in LRI by helping them reflect upon ideological orientations, we operationalized LRI as a series of three reflective tasks—language portraits, ideology trees, and utterance analysis—designed to pose linguistic ideological dilemmas (LIDs) for participants. Findings from multimodal thematic analysis suggest that during the study, engaging in LRI afforded teacher candidates space to explore tensions surrounding broader ideologies in circulation (ideological infrastructures), as well as personal ideological orientations towards themselves, their future learners, and society. These tensions generated dilemmas that caused participants to engage in language and ethnicity gatekeeping in ways that revealed the impact of institutionalized ideological stances toward linguistically and ethnically diverse speakers. Implications include (1) potential ways for faculty and students interested in LRI implementation to interrogate sociopolitical dimensions of language use across disciplines, (2) better understanding of whether and what type of ideological clarity may emerge from LRI in tertiary classrooms, and (3) how LRI might contribute to the disruption of less nuanced approaches to serving linguistically diverse learners in higher education.

Language and Movement Synchronization in Dyadic Psychotherapeutic Interaction - A Qualitative Review and a Proposal for a Classification.

In individual psychotherapy verbal communication and movement synchronization are closely interrelated. The microanalysis of timing, rhythm and gestalt of movement has established dynamic movement coordination as a systemic property of the dyadic interaction. Movement synchronization supports and enhances the unfolding of linguistic meaning. In order to substantiate the importance of the concept of synchrony for adult psychotherapy we review evidence from developmental psychology and discuss approaches to measure synchrony with particular reference to the naturalistic setting of dyadic psychotherapy. As the concept of synchrony is still ambiguous, and the respective interactional phenomena are ephemeral and fluid, in the current paper we suggest a set of five criteria for the description of synchronization in general terms and eight additional criteria which specifically enable the description of phenomena of movement synchronization. The five general dimensions are: (1) context, (2) modality, (3) resources, (4) entrainment, and (5) time-lag. The eight categories for the description of movement synchrony are: (1) spatial direction, (2) amplitude, (3) sinuosity, (4) duration, (5) event structure, (6) phase, (7) frequency, and (8) content. To understand the process of participatory sense-making and the emergence of meaning in psychotherapy, synchrony research has to cope with the multimodality of the embodied interaction. This requires an integrated perspective of movement and language. A system for the classification of synchrony phenomena may contribute to the linking of variations and patterns of movement with language and linguistic utterances.

Experiences of linguistic understanding as epistemic feelings

Language understanding comes with a particular kind of phenomenology. It is often observed that when listening to utterances in a familiar language, competent language users can have experiences of understanding the meanings of these utterances. The nature of such experiences is a much debated topic. In this paper, I develop a new proposal according to which experiences of understanding are a particular kind ofepistemic feelings of fluencythat result from evaluative monitoring processes. The perceptual experience that accompanies linguistic comprehension results from the deployment of early stage auditory processes of speech perception that lead to the recognition of words.

A Speech Planning Account of Guarani Grammatical Borrowings in Paraguayan Spanish

Abstract Previous studies view the use of Guarani grammatical morphemes in Paraguayan Spanish simply as grammatical borrowings (if one focuses on the morphosyntactic status of mixed forms) or as an ill-defined “interference”. But so far there has been no examination of the bilingual planning mechanisms that license and constrain these language mixes. In this paper, I explore the idea that the emergence of grammatical borrowings can be explained by message conceptualization procedures that are influenced by asymmetries in each language’s cognitive dominance. This work thus contributes to our understanding of language contact by applying what we know about language processing and utterance planning to explaining the outcomes observed in language mixing. In so doing, I hope to facilitate a tighter integration between the psycholinguistic planning and language contact literatures.

Tracking Child Language Development With Neural Network Language Models

Recent work on the application of neural networks to language modeling has shown that models based on certain neural architectures can capture syntactic information from utterances and sentences even when not given an explicitly syntactic objective. We examine whether a fully data-driven model of language development that uses a recurrent neural network encoder for utterances can track how child language utterances change over the course of language development in a way that is comparable to what is achieved using established language assessment metrics that use language-specific information carefully designed by experts. Given only transcripts of child language utterances from the CHILDES Database and no pre-specified information about language, our model captures not just the structural characteristics of child language utterances, but how these structures reflect language development over time. We establish an evaluation methodology with which we can examine how well our model tracks language development compared to three known approaches: Mean Length of Utterance, the Developmental Sentence Score, and the Index of Productive Syntax. We discuss the applicability of our model to data-driven assessment of child language development, including how a fully data-driven approach supports the possibility of increased research in multilingual and cross-lingual issues.

Discussion as a Modern Method of Teaching Foreign Languages to Students of the «Tourism» Major

The study considers the issues of discussion in education and in the training of students of the «Tourism» major. Tourism is one of the most popular majors among the students. Working in the tourism industry person must have professional skills and a high level of knowledge of foreign languages. While applying theoretical knowledge into practice, some complications occur for the students. The ability to produce clearly utterances in a foreign language widens professional possibilities of future specialists of tourism industry. The problem-solving approach helps students to put appropriative knowledge into practice and to develop communicative skills. The creation of problem situations is a promising approach, which we can conceive as a principle of education and as a method of education. This new didactic approach can be used at all stages of the educational process. Discussion is one of the problem-solving methods in teaching foreign languages. The author analyses the modern forms of discussion. The aim of the research is to draw attention of the foreign languages teachers to the discussion as a pedagogical technology and to point out the importance of application of this modern pedagogical method in teaching foreign languages and education of students of the «Tourism» major. The article outlines different forms of discussion and considers the debating process and content for the foreign languages teachers to adapt this technology to their objects and aims. The author concludes the effectiveness of using discussions on foreign language lessons and gives the recommendations of the discussion and debates application in the teaching process. This method can be used for many majors. In this article the author shows the effectiveness of using discussions on foreign language lessons for students of the «Tourism» major. The usage of this method will foster achievement of the forecast results in mastering not only lexical skills but also communicative skills to work successfully in the travel industry.

Tracking Interaction States for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

The task of multi-turn text-to-SQL semantic parsing aims to translate natural language utterances in an interaction into SQL queries in order to answer them using a database which normally contains multiple table schemas. Previous studies on this task usually utilized contextual information to enrich utterance representations and to further influence the decoding process. While they ignored to describe and track the interaction states which are determined by history SQL queries and are related with the intent of current utterance. In this paper, two kinds of interaction states are defined based on schema items and SQL keywords separately. A relational graph neural network and a non-linear layer are designed to update the representations of these two states respectively. The dynamic schema-state and SQL-state representations are then utilized to decode the SQL query corresponding to current utterance. Experimental results on the challenging CoSQL dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves better performance than other published methods on the task leaderboard.

Learning Contextual Representations for Semantic Parsing with Generation-Augmented Pre-Training

Most recently, there has been significant interest in learning contextual representations for various NLP tasks, by leveraging large scale text corpora to train powerful language models with self-supervised learning objectives, such as Masked Language Model (MLM). Based on a pilot study, we observe three issues of existing general-purpose language models when they are applied in the text-to-SQL semantic parsers: fail to detect the column mentions in the utterances, to infer the column mentions from the cell values, and to compose target SQL queries when they are complex. To mitigate these issues, we present a model pretraining framework, Generation-Augmented Pre-training (GAP), that jointly learns representations of natural language utterance and table schemas, by leveraging generation models to generate high-quality pre-train data. GAP Model is trained on 2 million utterance-schema pairs and 30K utterance-schema-SQL triples, whose utterances are generated by generation models. Based on experimental results, neural semantic parsers that leverage GAP Model as a representation encoder obtain new state-of-the-art results on both Spider and Criteria-to-SQL benchmarks.

Improving Tree-Structured Decoder Training for Code Generation via Mutual Learning

Code generation aims to automatically generate a piece of code given an input natural language utterance. Currently, among dominant models, it is treated as a sequence-to-tree task, where a decoder outputs a sequence of actions corresponding to the pre-order traversal of an Abstract Syntax Tree. However, such a decoder only exploits the pre-order traversal based preceding actions, which are insufficient to ensure correct action predictions. In this paper, we first throughly analyze the context modeling difference between neural code generation models with different traversals based decodings (preorder traversal vs breadth-first traversal), and then propose to introduce a mutual learning framework to jointly train these models. Under this framework, we continuously enhance both two models via mutual distillation, which involves synchronous executions of two one-to-one knowledge transfers at each training step. More specifically, we alternately choose one model as the student and the other as its teacher, and require the student to fit the training data and the action prediction distributions of its teacher. By doing so, both models can fully absorb the knowledge from each other and thus could be improved simultaneously. Experimental results and in-depth analysis on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We release our code at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/CGML.

Morfem Terikat Bahasa Melayu Riau Dialek Tanjung Balai Karimun

This study discusses the types and grammatical meanings of the morpheme bound to the Riau Malay language, Tanjung Balai Karimun dialect. This study uses a qualitative approach and descriptive method which aims to describe the type of bound morpheme of the Riau Malay language in the Tanjung Balai Karimun dialect and to describe the grammatical meaning of the bound morpheme in the Riau Malay language in the Tanjung Balai Karimun dialect. The object of this research is the Riau Malay language utterance in the Tanjung Balai Karimun dialect used by the people of Tanjung Balai Karimun. Data obtained by fishing techniques, interview techniques, and recording techniques, identified into the form and meaning of the bound morpheme, classified data based on the form and meaning of the bound morpheme and analyzed based on the form and meaning of the bound morpheme in the Riau Malay language, Tanjung Balai Karimun dialect. Morpheme is tied to the Riau Malay language, the Tanjung Balai Karimun dialect, which is then formulated into a conclusion. Based on classifying and analyzing the data, it was concluded that there were five types of bound morphemes, namely: prefix, infix, suffix, confix, and symulfix. The total number of data on the morpheme bound to the Riau Malay language, Tanjung Balai Karimun dialect is one hundred and twenty four.

Self-segmentation of pass-phrase utterances for deep feature learning in text-dependent speaker verification

In this paper, we propose a novel method to segment and label pass-phrase utterances for training deep neural network (DNN) bottleneck (BN) features for text-dependent speaker verification (TD-SV). Specifically, gender-dependent hidden Markov models (HMMs) for monophones are first trained using the pass-phrase utterances that are disjoint from evaluation. Next, the trained HMMs are speaker-adapted and then used for segmenting and labeling these training utterances at the phone level. The resulted labeled data is subsequently used for training DNN models to discriminate gender-dependent phones for the purpose of extracting phone-discriminant BN features. This is in contrast to conventional approaches that apply a general-purpose, speaker-independent automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for generating segmentation and labels. The proposed method eliminates the need for a separate ASR system, which can additionally have the disadvantage of mismatch with the pass-phrase utterances in terms languages, dialects, domains, acoustic conditions and so on. Experiments are conducted on the RedDots challenge 2016 database of TD-SV using short utterances with Gaussian mixture model-universal background model and i-vector techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields lower error rates in TD-SV when compared to a set of existing methods. A thorough ablation study further confirms the effectiveness of the method. Fusion in both score and feature levels also shows the complementary nature of the proposed features.

The Typology of the Fundamental Structures of Utterances in the Romanian Language

Starting from the concept of „fundamental structure of the utterance”, the article analyzes the semantic models of the utterances in the Romanian language. By applying this method, the whole variety of concrete utterances in speech can be presented in the form of a finite list of syntactic structures. In this way, the research pursues a double purpose: on the one hand, to describe semantically the fundamental structures of the utterances and, on the other hand, to make an inventory of the standard structures of the possible utterances in Romanian for their subsequent analysis in various ways.

Capitalization Roles in Subtitled Igbo Movies: The Translator’s Aid

The study revolves around capitalization roles in subtitled Igbo movies: The translator’s aid by focusing on the relevance of the translator in making sure that the right information is appropriated. The study shows that capitalization is the writing of a word of a particular language with its first letter in uppercase or big letters while the remaining letters in lowercase or small letters. However, capitalization error is involved with wrong use or application of capitalization in written utterances of a particular language. In other to have the right message in the movie used for the study, this research adopted the methodology of description in its design in order to account for the movie used for the study. In doing this, the researcher played and replayed the movie in order to describe the information correctly and also, recognizing the different places capitalizations are used or should set in. The study finds out that there is need to avoid capitalization errors in any written information and concludes by recommending the translators services or aid, as it will help to make available the supposed and worth having information in the target language.

The manner of use, the uses and sub-uses of terms in social sciences: from the functional approach to natural language to applied semiotics and the philosophy of science

Abstract The functional approach to natural language (FANL) emerged in the late 1960s. It focused on the use and the sub-use of language expressions, taking into account role of the language context and the extra-linguistic situation of a given statements. This approach referred, both conceptually and methodologically, to the tradition of British analytical philosophy of language on the one hand, and to the achievements of the Lvov-Warsaw School on the other. It seems that despite the passage of more than half a century since its inception, this approach has lost nothing of its relevance and its cognitive value, and may even provide inspiration for the exploration new research areas concerning the formulation of language utterances. The aim of this article is to show the potential applications of the FANL as a specific semiotic concept in the field of the philosophy of social sciences. The paper points out how the functional conception can be successfully used in methodological analyses of the logical methodology of social sciences. The case studies presented in the article refer to the research practice of social sciences. Examples of the use and sub-uses of terms are discussed in the light of the polyparadigmatic structure of social sciences and the differences in research patterns accepted by given scientific collectives.

Technology Enhanced Learning Using Humanoid Robots

In this paper we present a mixture of technologies tailored for e-learning related to the Deep Learning, Sentiment Analysis, and Semantic Web domains, which we have employed to show four different use cases that we have validated in the field of Human-Robot Interaction. The approach has been designed using Zora, a humanoid robot that can be easily extended with new software behaviors. The goal is to make the robot able to engage users through natural language for different tasks. Using our software the robot can (i) talk to the user and understand their sentiments through a dedicated Semantic Sentiment Analysis engine; (ii) answer to open-dialog natural language utterances by means of a Generative Conversational Agent; (iii) perform action commands leveraging a defined Robot Action ontology and open-dialog natural language utterances; and (iv) detect which objects the user is handing by using convolutional neural networks trained on a huge collection of annotated objects. Each module can be extended with more data and information and the overall architectural design is general, flexible, and scalable and can be expanded with other components, thus enriching the interaction with the human. Different applications within the e-learning domains are foreseen: The robot can either be a trainer and autonomously perform physical actions (e.g., in rehabilitation centers) or it can interact with the users (performing simple tests or even identifying emotions) according to the program developed by the teachers.

“Pseudo-values” in modern Russian media discourse: The experience of logical analysis of implicit evaluativeness in the language of print media

The author of this article examines some specific language mechanisms for expressing a special type of implicit evaluativeness in modern Russian media discourse. The author proceeds from the assumption of the existence of so-called “pseudo-values” in the communicative environment of society, which are understood as non-unconditional values. It is noted that the diagnostic, representative context for identifying values of this type in the speech practice of Russian native speakers is a statement that includes a meta-language commentary “v khoroshem smysle (slova)” (“in a good sense (of the word)”). The goal of the study is to identify the main models of language representation of so-called pseudo-values in modern Russian media discourse. The main research methods are the method of logical analysis of implicit information in language utterances and the method of contextual analysis of metalanguage elements of the text. Based on the material of the Newspaper Corpus as part of the Russian National Corpus, the work shows that values of the new Russian reality, declared as positive in the media, such as a career, competition, individualism, “the West”, fashion, etc., actually act as pseudo-values that are not regarded by native speakers in usage as unconditionally positive ones. This is confirmed by the very possibility of using these nominations in mass media discourse with a clarifying meta-language indicator “v khoroshem smysle (slova)”. Special attention is also paid to the use of this meta-language commentary as a conscious means of speech influence and a language manipulation technique. It is concluded that the use of contexts with the said reflexive in media discourse always has the character of an internal polemic: the speaker diverges from the value stereotypes assigned to the depicted phenomena and concepts in an objective language evaluation, in generally accepted nominations, and in the direction of both increasing the evaluation register and lowering it.

Noun Phrase in Mandailing Language

This paper discusses on the rules of Noun Phrase (NP) in Mandailing language. The objectives are firstly to structurally examine the phrase structure rules (PSR) of NP in Mandailing language and to investigate the constituents of each rules in NP. The method is descriptive qualitative with a case study. The data taken from the native speakers of Mandailing language through interviewing. The data are the utterances of Mandailing language in daily conversation. The analysis is based on the use of X-Bar theory, to see how NPs in Mandailing language are hierarchically governed and presented in tree diagram. Thus, the findings showed that there are five major rules of NP in Mandailing language, (a) single noun as headword, (b) pre-modifier preceedes head noun, (c) post-modifiers follows head noun, (d) head noun between pre-modifier and post-modifier, and (e) complex NP with coordinative conjunction. Also, there is found particle na to relate NP with the complement such as AP. To summarize, Mandailing language has similar patterns of word order with Indonesia language. Overall, this research gives contribution to provide a deep understanding in studying morphosyntactic in linguistics especially phrase structures beyond the effort on exploring and revitalizing a regional language in Indonesia.

КОДОВЫЕ ПЕРЕКЛЮЧЕНИЯ НА СИЦИЛИЙСКИЙ ДИАЛЕКТ В РОМАНЕ ДЖ. КУЛИККЬЯ «SICILIA, O CARA. UN VIAGGIO SENTIMENTALE»

The aim of this article is to identify the pragmatic functions of code-switching to the Sicilian dialect of the Italian language in the autobiography of the contemporary Italian writer G. Culicchia. Code switches studied by contact linguistics are the embedded language units of different levels in the matrix language utterance. The author uses I. Y. Mishintseva and G. N. Chirsheva's classification of pragmatic functions for studying code switches in literary works. The foreign language units in G. Culicchia’s work perform two groups of functions: functions characteristic of fiction (creating the effect of communication in the Embedded Language in the literary work) and those characteristic of spoken language (topic-related, metalinguistic, citing and emotional functions). The topic-related function of codeswitches is used to convey Sicilian culture realities as well as the direct speech of the author’s Sicilian relatives. The metalinguistic function of the code-switches under analysis involves introducing the reader to pronunciation and lexical features of the Sicilian dialect. The citing function means the author’s citing of Sicilian proverbs and sayings. The emotional function consists in expressing the author’s emotions and feelings towards Sicily and Sicilian relatives. Thus, the pragmatic functions show that the code-switches under analysis are the source of subjective and objective information in the novel. The Sicilian code-switches have a graphic feature in the novel: all of them are printed in italics. The italic type as a graphic stylistic device is used to logically separate Sicilian words from Italian lexis, to convey emotions, to separate the author’s Italian speech from the other characters’ Sicilian dialect.

A Functional Analysis of Teacher Talk in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom at Al-Asmariya University

This study is conducted to concentrate on the analysis of classroom discourse, specifically, teaches talk in the EFL classroom at Al-Asmariya Islamic University, Zliten. It attempts to realize the interpersonal meaning built in the male and female teachers' interaction in the classroom, and the difference between the male and female roles based on the interactional MOOD ANALYSIS of Systemic Functional Grammar model which is presented by Halliday (1985, 1994, 2004 & 2014). In this study, discourse analysis and descriptive-qualitative textual analysis are applied as research methods. The data were collected through the method of observations by recording the conversation between the teachers and the students during the lectures. Questionnaire is used in the study to collect more data and support analysis. The utterances of the spoken language collected were analysed within the concept of SFG. The analysis was performed on the Mood structure of the clause in order to realize the interpersonal meaning constructed in the interaction. (Bloor and Bloor, 2013) clarifythat Functional Grammar is the study of how meanings are built up through the choices of words and other grammatical structures. The study resulted in that the speech functions had been used differently by the male and female teachers to create the interpersonal metafunction in their interaction with the students. The female teacher tended to apply interrogative clauses of Mood dominantly while the male teacher used declarative clauses mostly. Therefore, they play different roles in the teaching process.