Vague Words Research Articles

David Pierce, James Joyce's Portrait: A New Reading (review)

David Pierce, James Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019), xiii+209 pages Many who read and teach Irish literature will associate David Pierce with his expansive and inclusive 2000 anthology, Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century. His latest book, James Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading, attempts something different: to be a moderately sized, user-friendly interpretation of Joyce’s classic for twenty-first-century students. Neither a guide nor a commentary, it seeks to enrich a young person’s own reading of the Portrait, providing just enough context and study of parallel texts so that this generation may have a genuine and meaningful encounter with Joyce’s book. Those of us who regularly teach the Portrait share this book’s goal: we know well the challenges and the possibilities. Few of us, however, will have Pierce’s mastery of the subject and ability to judge what should (and should not) accompany a student’s first experience with the book; and for this, we teachers, along with general readers, are much indebted to him. His view of the Portrait is clear and convincing: it is a novel, not an autobiography nor a historical documentary, and its primary subject is writing. More specifically, it is about language and style. Characters matter, and so do settings, but these are secondary to perspective and theme. Pierce asserts that ‘A Portrait is a study in the relationship between narrative and discourse, how a story is told and what we readers make of such a story. It is a study in what was happening then and what it perhaps means to us now’ (8). There is plenty of room for readers here: they are co-creators of this text, not simply receivers or respondents, and they have much rewarding work to do. Pierce has always been interested in the ‘gap’: in his anthology, these were the voices of the dispossessed and the forms not previously regarded as canonical. In this book, he focuses on the internal gaps Joyce placed in the text, such as who or what is narrating certain passages, or the meanings of some important but vague words: ‘smugging’ or ‘soul’, for example. In these sections, Pierce supplies a broad range of ideas from respected Joyceans, and offers his own opinion; but he allows the reader to fill in the gaps, just as Joyce does. His Joyce is not the cold ironist of many twentieth-century critics, and he is definitely not the looming figure that John Banville sees crowding out successive Irish writers. Rather, Pierce’s Joyce resembles the one Seamus Heaney portrayed in ‘Station Island’: he is the friend of twenty-first-century readers and writers, who asks them to listen to the past and then strike their own note in the present. Many Studies • volume 109 • number 435 344 Autumn 2020: Book Reviews of my students agree with Pierce that ‘Joyce can be a surprisingly comforting figure, especially when it comes to getting through a difficult time’ (34). However, today’s readers cannot connect with the Portrait unless they grasp some central themes: freedom, pre-eminently, but also fathers and sons, religion, sexuality, memory, nationality, and so forth.To clarify and to contextualise them, Pierce’s third chapter presents Joyce’s notions alongside those of Yeats. He follows this with a chapter showing how the Portrait grew out of the aesthetic movement, taking cues from similar works produced by J K Huysmans, Walter Pater, George Moore, and Oscar Wilde. This is an important corrective, since the younger Joyce’s work was still in dialogue with writers of the 1880s and ‘90s, and with more than just Ibsen, Dante, and the exemplars Stephen Dedalus lists in the Portrait. Still, Pierce shows how Joyce also broke much new ground, in narration and especially in his focus on the earthly, the daily, and the habitual, that begins in the Portrait and comes to fruition in Ulysses. A real strength of the book is Pierce’s strict separation in his treatments of the text (Chapter 1) and the author (Chapter 2). His close reading of the Portrait’s first chapter is especially insightful. The timeline of Joyce’s life...

Evaluation of Software Requirement Specification Based on IEEE 830 Quality Properties

Software requirement specification (SRS) documented an essential requirement of software and its external interface. Many studies found the quality of SRS, but lack of the informality organizing of document and representation of functional requirement. This paper aims to evaluate the quality properties of the software requirement specification (SRS). There are four quality properties to be assessed, which are completeness, correctness, preciseness, and consistency. Completeness quality is used to evaluate the structure of the SRS document; meanwhile, the other three qualities used to evaluate the functional requirement. The measurement for each quality properties has been proposed in the previous study. The evaluation process involves a few stages. In short, the prototype would extract text through the provided document, do a calculation, and came out with the result in the form of a similarity percentage. The prototype designs in such ways it minimizes the user interference. Those resulted in reducing human error. Corpus contains libraries of term and topic are expected to increase the reliability of detection. The corpus includes topics extracted from IEEE 830 standard, vague word, terms represent Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operation, and terms denote possible datatype. The extracted functional requirement would be refined based on the Requirement Boilerplate (RB) template. RB adopted in the study to ensure the consistency of functional refinement requirements. The percentage of similarity is determined based on comparison with IEEE 830 standard. The rate of the result of each quality properties reflects the quality of the software requirement specification.

Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture I: Vagueness and Communication

I can say that a building is tall and you can understand me, even if neither of us has any clear idea exactly how tall a building must be in order to count as tall. This mundane fact poses a problem for the view that successful communication consists in the hearer’s recognition of the proposition a speaker intends to assert. The problem cannot be solved by the epistemicist’s usual appeal to anti-individualism, because the extensions of vague words like ‘tall’ are contextually fluid and can be constrained significantly by speakers’ intentions. The problem can be seen as a special case of a more general problem concerning what King has called “felicitous underspecification.” Traditional theories of vagueness offer nothing that can help with this problem. Appeals to diagonalization do not help either. A more radical solution is needed.

Paradoxo de Sorites: uma reflexão semântica sobre vagueza

No cotidiano, usamos palavras e expressões vagas sem muitas vezes pensarmos sobre isso ou causarmos estranheza em nossos interlocutores. São predicados de vagueza, nos quais a propriedade de ser vago pode não ser tão explícita. Esses predicados são casos incertos ou com a fronteira semântica limítrofe, o que dificulta a clareza da extensão do predicado em si. O objetivo principal deste trabalho, é avaliar os encadeamentos soríticos em uma interface entre a linguística e a lógica. Visto que a vagueza é observada nessas duas áreas do conhecimento. Na lógica, esse tipo de predicado possibilita o desenvolvimento do chamado paradoxo de Sorites, cujo argumento pode ser construído por encadeamento das premissas ou por indução matemática. Usamos, nesse trabalho, o estudo filosófico da vagueza e do paradoxo (PETRILLO, 2005) e, também, o estudo linguístico, em uma semântica de condições de verdade (CHIERCHIA; MCCONNELL-GINET, 1990), para refletirmos sobre como a vagueza é tratada na linguagem.

TABOO LANGUAGE IN MALAY PANAI LANGUAGE OF LABUHAN BILIK DIALECT

This research dealt with the identification of taboo language in Malay Panai Language of Labuhan Bilik Dialect. It is a language spoken by people living in Labuhan Bilik village, Panai Tengah district, Labuhan Batu, Rantau Prapat. The objective of this research was to describe the classification of the taboo words in Malay Panai Language of Labuhan Bilik Dialect (MPLLBD). The research applied was descriptive qualitative approach. The data were collected through observation, recording, and field notes. Then, the data were analyzed by identifying taboo words and categorizing them into the types of taboo words. Thus, each of the taboo words were presented in some examples of utterances in the language. Some words were considered taboo or not depending on the context in which they were used. The finding shows that taboo words in MPLLBD could be either implicit or explicit. In conclusion, there were some classifications of taboo words in the language which were related to the utterances of sex, death, excretion, body function, religion, animals, vague words, and disease.

An Analysis of Korean-English Translation Errors in Google Translate

The purpose of this study is to identify types of errors that occur when using Google Translate and to suggest more effective ways to benefit from machine translation translators. The topics in the 30 news articles dealt with health and diet. The researchers directed the error analysis by comparing the English translation of the original Korean text with the eleven categories and their sub-categories. Among those translated by the Google Translate Program, according to our research, the number of sentences that contained errors was 365 (67.2%) and that of correct sentences was 178 (32.8%). Sentence structure errors, the highest of the eleven categories, recorded 172 (21.31%) cases, followed by nouns with 143 (17.72%), and verbs with 119 (14.75%). The findings emphasize the need to learn how to use machine translators effectively. Finally, Google Translate users need to avoid using complex sentences and vague words when translating Korean text into English.

Toward a Philosophical Definition of Intelligence

ABSTRACTWhat is intelligence? A short question, which is difficult to answer. In fact, there is no general agreement on the definition of intelligence. A good philosophical analysis starts with intuitions, which can be found in the literature. After the recollection of these intuitions and their discussion, it is necessary to add some rational justifications of them. I want to express a general definition of intelligence, whose formulation is indebted to a philosophical analytic approach that considers some different alternatives. Intelligence is a vague word and it has different meanings. In fact, the intelligence studies are so rich but they pose some particular philosophical problems. Philosophy defines complex and complicated words in a simple and coherent way. I want to defend a definition, which is philosophically consistent and meaningful for intelligence studies. Is this a good way to solve such a complex problem? As Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”.

A calendar method of collecting remittance use data in a remittance dependent setting of Nepal

This methodological paper describes the design and refinement of a calendar method of collecting data on remittance receipt and remittance use and its piloting in a rural remittance dependent setting of Nepal. Much of the previous national surveys collected remittance receipt and remittance use cross-sectional data that used a time frame ranging from 12 to 24 months. These surveys collected remittance receipt data by asking, ‘How much money has he/she sent in the past 12 months or 2 years?’ We believe that the long time frame of one to two years adds burden to respondents for unnecessary calculations and is prone to re-call bias. Moreover, these surveys used vague words such as ‘capital formation’ or ‘daily consumption’ to measure the uses of remittances. Thus, the instrument perse is unreliable posing threats to collecting valid responses. Considering these flaws, in 2013, we designed a calendar with shorter timing cues and simple words for collecting longitudinal data on remittance receipt and remittance use. First, we describe the calendar design process. Next, we provide descriptive results of household responses on the amount of remittance received and the remittance used on various socio-economic and cultural dimensions of household activities. The implications of the insights gained from this study are discussed.

Glosa do wyroku federalnego Sądu Apelacyjnego dla 4. Okręgu z 25 maja 2017 roku w sprawie International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump, 857 F. 3D 554 (4th CIR. 2017)

The reviewed judgment refers to constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order No. 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States”. The given legal act places temporary limits on travel to the U.S. from six predominantly Muslim countries, while the screening and vetting procedures would be reviewed. Federal Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that Executive Order, although “in text speaks with vague words of national security”, actually “in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination”, thus violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Court’s opinion is unconvincing. Firstly, the Court wrongly applied U.S. Supreme Court case law on immigrant policy. Secondly, the Court unduly considered statements made by Donald Trump during the presidential campaign to conclude that an unambiguous and religiously neutral Order was motivated by anti-islam animus. Thirdly, the Court misapplied the Establishment Clause jurisprudence to the given case. In the Author’s view, federal Court of Appeal instead of acting as a guardian of the Constitution, put itself in the position of a reviewer and censor of political activity.

A Corpus-Based Stylistic Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Maritime Fiction

A corpus-based stylistic analysis of Joseph Conrad’s maritime fiction is employed to illustrate the literary value of texts and corpus data. This paper discusses Conrad’s particular styles in vocabulary variety, word class complexity, keywords and key cluster patterns. Data on the frequency and distribution of individual words and recurrent phraseology are analysed to prove that negative and vague words are probably a typical style of Conrad. By looking at the semantic preference of collocates co-occurring with nodes, images of sea and ship represented in Joseph Conrad’s maritime fiction are discussed to show how Conrad’s background as a former sailor for 19 years and his personal religious belief make his description of sea and ship more subtle, alive and close to reality.

The Use of Mother Tongue in Moroccan Classes of English

This study deals with one of the most contentious phenomena in English language teaching, meaning here the use of mother tongue, Arabic, in teaching English as a foreign language. The study at hand aims at examining the degree to which Arabic is used in Moroccan High School classes of English. It reflects and explores the attitudes of high school instructors towards the usage of Arabic and their reasons behind using it. It also aims at investigating which gender uses Arabic more in classes of English. Besides, this paper tries to discuss the relationship between the use of the mother tongue and years of teaching experience. The findings of this study which were accumulated through a questionnaire and classroom observations suggest that Arabic is rarely used in the high school classrooms of English by teachers. Furthermore, the findings indicate that Arabic is used more by teachers in order to translate vague or difficult words and concepts.

Some principles of causal analysis in genetics

The science of genetics is concerned with differences between organisms belonging to the same species, or to species which can be crossed. It is not concerned with all such differences. If we have two dogs, one with straight legs, the other with bent legs, the difference may be due to the fact that the bent-legged dog had a diet insufficient in vitamin D, or that his father was a dachshund. The geneticist is concerned with the latter case. The difference may also turn out to be inexplicable in terms of our present knowledge. Now if an observed quantity or quality varies as the result of a number of conditions, we shall try to analyse the variation by keeping all but one of these conditions constant, and varying the remaining one. Thus if we wish to analyse the variation in the volume of a gas we shall first keep its temperature constant, and obtain Boyle’s law; then keep its pressure constant, and obtain Charle’s law. It is obvious that if we are studying the genetics of a character which varies appreciably in response to environment we shall try to keep the environment constant. We shall see that all our dogs receive the same amount of vitamins, sunlight, and so on, so far as possible. This is an ideal which we cannot even approach asymptotically. For it turns out that high frequency radiation and particles of high velocity are very important components of the environment, causing heritable changes by a process called mutation. Even if we could conduct our experiments behind 30 metres of lead the fact that mutation has a temperature coefficient is enough to show that it depends in part on energy fluctuations which are uncontrollable. Secondly we do not know a priori how long our constant environment must operate. In mammals it is no use to stabilise it after birth. For example in the guinea-pig the children of young mothers are more likely than those of old mothers to have extra toes. The question as to how long the environment must remain uniform to eliminate variation due tu [sic] its diversity it [sic] is an empirical question. The affirmation or denial of Lamarckism depends on how it is answered. In a sufficiently constant environment variation still occurs, and it is found that the children of different parents differ. The difference may or may not be an example of heredity in the ordinary sense of that word, namely resemblance between parents and offspring. Thus in Matthiola a yellow flowered plant will give all yellow offspring, and a red plant will give all, or at any rate many, red offspring. Also some parents will give all normal flowered offspring, others a majority with double flowers, in which the presumptive reproductive organs are represented by petals. We cannot however say that doubleness is inherited (I discuss later the meaning of this distressingly vague word), because double-flowered plants are always completely sterile. How are we to minimise the difference between the progeny of different parents? In other words, how are we to approximate to a genetically homogeneous population? The answer to this question is given by experiment, and rests on well-verified theory. There are three main methods. We may obtain a clone, that is to say a group of individuals related only by mitotic, and not meiotic, nuclear divisions. Such are a group of tulips of a named variety derived by vegetative reproduction from a single individual, or a pair of human monozygotic twins. We may obtain a pure line by prolonged inbreeding or by brother sister mating (though here of course we really have a pure line of females and another of males in bisexual organisms). Such are the named varieties of wheat, and a few lines of mice and rats. Finally we may use the first generation of hybrids between two pure lines. It can be shown theoretically that the variance in a population is reduced to a millionth after 10 generations of self-fertilisation or 30 of brother-sister mating. 1 Haldane, JBS. Some Principles of Causal Analysis in Genetics. Erkenntnis 1936; 6: 346-357. Reprinted with the kind permission of Mrs Lois Godfrey.

A admiração à luz dos corpos

This paper studies the field of admiração in their two meanings in Portuguese, namely: veneration/respect and surprise, using the framework suggested in Belinda Maia’s PhD thesis (Maia 1994/1996). After presenting briefly her findings and methodology, we investigate (i) the distribution of the vague words of the field of admiração by the two meanings, and discuss the heuristics used in its rule-based distinction; (ii) the distribution of admiração by genre, tense and person; (iii) its presence in negative sentences; and (iv) its antonym(s).

Vague words in Law in Order: Special Victims Unit

TV series have been a source of input for English language learners, especially the ones interested in real language use. There are studies that show how close to real life some TV shows are (ORFANO, 2010). For this study a corpus of a TV series - Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) - was compiled. This corpus is composed of 6 episodes (44.400 words). The analysis considered that every Law and Order episode carries investigation and court scenes. The main point of this investigation is to analyze the use of vague words such as any, anything, anyone, anybody, anyway, and anywhere in the TV show. An analysis of the episodes showed that these words occurred 139 times with a frequency distribution that varied in the investigation and court scenes. The results may reveal that more formal contexts, represented in the TV series by the court scenes, do not favor the use of vague language. In such argumentative contexts speakers tend to be more precise.

Legemidlers pakningsvedlegg – ulik informasjon om like preparater

Package inserts should convey important information and promote correct, safe and effective use of medicines. The purpose of this study was to investigate possible differences in the information on package inserts between a selection of generic medicines on the substitution list of the Norwegian Medicines Agency. We based our investigation on the 25 most commonly used drugs in Norway. Eight of these drugs were excluded since they were not listed or did not have generic equivalents on the substitution list. For the remaining 17 drugs we procured the package inserts for a total of 71 medicines and compared the texts. Differences which we judged to be a possible source of worry or confusion for the patient were included. There was only one drug for which the package inserts for all the medicines were almost identical. For three other drugs there were consistently few differences. For the remaining 13 drugs (76%) there were cosiderable differences between the package inserts. There were generally fewest differences in the information on indications for use and most in the information on side effects. In many cases medical expressions without further explanation and unclear and vague words and expressions were used. There are significant differences in the information in package inserts for generic medicines. This may lead to confusion, uncertainty and poorer patient compliance. The treating doctor should inform patients who are prescribed a generic medicine that the information on the package insert may vary, but that the medicines nevertheless have equal therapeutic value.

A Vague Words Retrieval Method in a Relational Database

In this paper, we propose a vague words retrieval method over text field of relational databases. This method is expected to get an ideal retrieval result from text field of relational databases when a set of incorrect keywords is submitted. The solution to this issue is: to create a “hot words library”, then let the input incorrect keywords match with the word of “hot words library”, based on the modified dynamic programming algorithm of k-difference approximate string matching. Finally, Experiments show that this solution has a good query performance.

Vague expression and its translation in medical English

In real life,vague expression is ubiquitous in any nation and any language.Medical English,as a branch of English for Science and Technology ( EST ),is typical in accuracy of word use.However,like other kind of language,it adopts vague expression,too.Vague expression plays an important role in medical practice.In communication of medical practitioners and patients,appropriate vague expression will improve language expression and communication efficiency.In medical English,the vague words that express approximate,presuming,or uncertain meaning are usually used to replace the exact meaning words.The correspondent translation methods such as literal translation,meaning translation,specialization etc can be used according to the different context. Key words: Medical English; Vague expression; Translation

Semantic plasticity and epistemicism

This paper considers the connections between semantic shiftiness (plasticity), epistemic safety and an epistemic theory of vagueness as presented and defended by Williamson (1996a, b, 1997a, b). Williamson explains ignorance of the precise intension of vague words as rooted in insensitivity to semantic shifts: one’s inability to detect small shifts in intension for a vague word results in a lack of knowledge of the word’s intension. Williamson’s explanation, however, falls short of accounting for ignorance of intension.

Black dogs and blue words: depression and gender in the age of self-care

His 'black dog' - that was how Winston Churchill referred to his own depression. Today, individuals with feelings of sadness and irritability are encouraged to 'talk to your doctor'. These have become buzz words in the aggressive promotion of wonder-drug cures since 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration changed its guidelines for the marketing of prescription pharmaceuticals. Black Dogs and Blue Words analyzes the rhetoric surrounding depression. Kimberly K. Emmons maintains that the techniques and language of depression marketing strategies - vague words such as 'worry', 'irritability', and 'loss of interest' - target women and young girls and encourage self-diagnosis and self-medication. Further, depression narratives and other texts encode a series of gendered messages about health and illness. As depression and other forms of mental illness move from the medical-professional sphere into that of the consumer-public, the boundary at which distress becomes disease grows ever more encompassing, the need for remediation and treatment increasingly warranted. Black dogs and Blue Words demonstrates the need for rhetorical reading strategies as one response to these expanding and gendered illness definitions.

Verbal Control Robot which Interprets Vague Expression

This paper discusses the development of the interpretation system for the mobile robot manipulation which maps linguistic command with vague expression issued by a human operator to an appropriate quantity. The system allows the operator to use only few kinds of vague expressions, as can be seen in the case when a human instructs some other person orally. The problem here is to find an appropriate quantity for each operator because the quantity corresponding to the vague word which is implied by the operator differs when operator changes. To cope with the difficulty, this paper proposes the distance type fuzzy reasoning algorithm with iterative learning scheme that can accommodate individual difference on how to quantify the vague expression. The experiment has been carried out to examine the change in the number of instructions required to guide the mobile robot to destination. The result of the experiment shows that the number of instructions necessary for achieving the guidance task decreases in almost all cases, which implies the validity of the proposed system.