bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Real space blends in spoken language
Authors: MacGregor David
Published: September 2007

In analyzing the use of space in American Sign Language (ASL), Liddell (2003) argues convincingly that no account of ASL can be complete without a discussion of how linguistic signs and non-linguistic gestures and gradient phenomena work together to create meaning. This represents a departure from the assumptions of much of linguistic theory, which has attempted to describe purely linguistic phenomena as part of an autonomous system. It also raises the question of whether these phenomena are peculiar to ASL and other sign languages, or if they also apply to spoken language. In this paper, I show how Liddell’s approach can be applied to English data to provide a fuller explanation of how speakers create meaning. Specifically, I analyze Jack Lemmons’ use of space, gesture, and voice in a scene from the movie “Mr. Roberts”.
Gestural communication of apes
Authors: Pika Simone , Liebal Katja , Call Josep , Tomasello Michael
Published: September 2007

Gestural communication of nonhuman primates may allow insight into the evolutionary scenario of human communication given the flexible use and learning of gestures as opposed to vocalizations. This paper provides an overview of the work on the gestural communication of apes with the focus on their repertoire, learning mechanisms, and the flexibility of gesture use during interactions with conspecifics. Although there is a variation between the species in the types and numbers of gestures performed, the influence of ecology, social structure and cognitive skills on their gestural repertoires is relatively restricted. As opposed to humans, apes do not use their gestures referentially nor do their gestures show the symbolic or conventionalized features of human gestural communication. However, since the gestural repertoires of apes are characterized by a high degree of individual variability and flexibility of use as opposed to their vocalizations it seems plausible that the gestures were the modality within which symbolic communication first evolved.
How does linguistic framing of events influence co-speech gestures?
Authors: Özyürek Aslı , Kita Sotaro , Allen Shanley E.M. , Furman Reyhan , Brown Amanda
Published: September 2007

What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and how gestural representations of events change with differences in the preferred semantic and syntactic encoding possibilities of languages. Here we provide large scale semantic, syntactic and temporal analyses of speech- gesture pairs that depict 10 different motion events from 20 Turkish and 20 English speakers. We find that the gestural representations of the same events differ across languages when they are encoded by different syntactic frames (i.e., verb-framed or satellite-framed). However, where there are similarities across languages, such as omission of a certain element of the event in the linguistic encoding, gestural representations also look similar and omit the same content. The results are discussed in terms of what gestures reveal about the influence of language specific encoding on on-line thinking patterns and the underlying interactions between speech and gesture during the speaking process.
The literal and metaphorical inscription of gesture in religious discourse
Authors: Jackson Peter
Published: September 2007

This paper explores the ways in which gestures, understood in their widest sense as “technical gestures,” are used in metaphorical language to highlight aspects of cultural transmissions and religious actions. By selecting a few examples from different textual traditions, an attempt is made to show that the metaphorical inscription of gesture in religious discourse reflects the very notion of religion. Contrary to what may be expected, however, this notion is less concerned with aspects of belief than with recollection and scrupulosity. The metaphors at stake also seem to thematize some of the problems and paradoxes associated with a tradition that has to keep something intact by giving it away.
Structuralism, contextualism, dialogism
Authors: Nerlich Brigitte
Published: September 2007

In the 1930s lexical semantics came under the influence of Saussurean structuralism and Gestalt psychology. The study of whole lexical fields and the structure of these fields replaced a historical semantics focusing on single words and the classification of the transitions between the meanings of these words over time according to different sets of criteria. At the same time contextualism, the study of meaning in its pragmatic context of language use, began to attract the attention of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists of language. Fully aware of the emergence of structuralism and contextualism, Volo‰inov and Baxtin began to develop their theories of meaning, society and literature, later called dialogism. All three movements dealt with the relativity of meaning, as relativity in a semantic field, as relativity in social context, and as relativity in social interaction and dialogue. This article demonstrates how, in a sometimes hidden dialogue with their Western contemporaries, Valentin Nikolaeviã Volo‰inov (1895–1936) and Mixail Mixajloviã Baxtin (1895–1975) developed new ‘relativistic’ theories of meaning, novel theories of pragmatics (speech acts), and modern theories of verbal interaction.
Identities, differences, and analogies
Authors: Harris Roy
Published: September 2007

This paper examines the problem of differential identification as posed in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. The solution proposed by Ducrot seems unlikely to have been Saussure’s own and would result in recognizing a proliferation of variants for every sign in the system. Saussure’s analogy with handwriting appears to provide a more promising line of approach, but in the end leads to no less intractable difficulties.
The unconscious and the social in Saussure
Authors: Joseph John E.
Published: September 2007

Saussure stood between two figures, Whitney and Meillet, each of whom was relentlessly opposed to the dominant psychological establishment of his time. Saussure himself was much more ambivalent about psychology, never portraying it as standing in clear opposition to the interests of linguistics or sociology as the others did. Yet among the many changes that took place in his general linguistics courses between the First in 1907 and the Second in 1908–1909 was a withdrawal from the topic that was at the heart of the Neogrammarian psychology of language, analogy. With it came withdrawal from all but a few psychological considerations, and a proportionate increase in the number of sociological ones. In particular, the role of the unconscious mind in insulating language from deliberate change was taken over by the force of the social group. The timing of this shift coincides with that of the publication of Sechehaye (1908), inspired by Saussure and dedicated to him by his colleague and former student, and the abrupt dismissal of the book by Saussure’s friend and confidante Meillet as being entirely psychological with no interest in or for sociology. Saussure shared many of Meillet’s concerns about the autonomy of linguistic science, and his shift from the psychological to the social may have been more directly motivated by Meillet’s reactions than has been generally recognised – not least because Meillet would later portray the direction of influence as flowing unilaterally from Saussure to himself, as a way of securing Saussure’s posthumous authority for his ongoing programmatic calls for a sociologically-based linguistics.
Albertus (1573) and Ölinger (1574)
Authors: McLelland Nicola
Published: September 2007

This article adapts Linn’s ‘stylistics of standardization’ concept, which Linn (1998) has used to compare Norwegian and Faroese grammarians, to look at grammaticization processes in the first two grammars of German (Albertus 1573, Ölinger 1574). While both are clearly indebted to traditional Latin grammar and humanist ideals, these two grammars differ interestingly in the picture of the language that emerges from their metalanguage and structural principles. In his reflection on the language, his structuring and naming of linguistic phenomena and his attitudes to variation, Ölinger is the practical pedagogue, who imposes systematicity and aims for a one-to-one form-function relationship. Albertus on the other hand, though he too envisages his grammar being used for learning German, has a more cultural patriotic motivation, celebrating the richness and variety of German, worthy to be ranked alongside Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Albertus and Ölinger thus come up with quite different versions of the (as yet arguably non-existent) High German language. Each grammar yields a different subset of possible forms, reminding us that grammar-writing is always a task of creative construction.
Linde’s dictionary
Authors: Adamska-Sałaciak Arleta
Published: September 2007

Samuel Linde (1771–1847), author of the first major monolingual dictionary of Polish, was a native speaker of German. This, together with the complex political situation in which his work originated and proceeded – in Leipzig, Warsaw and Vienna – led to many doubts not only as to the author’s linguistic competence, but also regarding his national allegiance and political sympathies, an aspect not unimportant in an era when Poland did not exist as an independent political entity. Despite all this, the finished 4-volume work (Warsaw, 1807–1814), whose compilation, production, content and structure are discussed in this paper, has proved to be of lasting importance for Slavic lexicography.
Syllabisme et morphématisme dans la linguistique russe
Authors: Comtet Roger
Published: September 2007

Le morphème, associé au phonème et à la synchronie de la langue, est conceptualisé dès les années 1880 à Kazan’ par Jan Baudouin de Courtenay et Mikołaj Kruszewski; c’est l’aboutissement dans la pensée linguistique russe d’un long conflit entre le syllabisme associé au mot et l’intuition morphématique. On y retrouve aussi bien des influences étrangères, surtout allemandes, que des traditions grammaticales et culturelles appliquées au matériau spécifique de la langue russe. Ce conflit perdure de nos jours dans les conceptions opposées des écoles de phonologie de Moscou et de Saint-Pétersbourg.
Phonetics and speaking machines
Authors: Fagyal Zsuzsanna
Published: September 2007

This paper shows that in the 17th century various attempts were made to build fully automatic speaking devices resembling those exhibited in the late 18th-century in France and Germany. Through the analysis of writings by well-known 17th-century scientists, and a document hitherto unknown in the history of phonetics and speech synthesis, an excerpt from La Science universelle (1667[1641]) of the French writer Charles Sorel (1599–1674), it is argued that engineers and scientists of the Baroque period have to be credited with the first model of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis engines using unlimited vocabulary.
The description of the indigenous languages of Portuguese America by the Jesuits during the colonial period
Authors: Zwartjes Otto
Published: September 2007

The paper explores three grammars of two indigenous languages of Brazil written in Portuguese during the colonial period: two grammars of the Tupi language composed by José Anchieta (1534–1597) in 1595 and Luís Figueira (1575–1643) in 1621 (2nd ed., 1687), and one grammar of the Kiriri language, written by Luis Vincêncio Mamiani (1652–1730) in 1699. Although most studies agree that these grammars were based on a Latin framework, they usually do not specify which grammar in particular served as a model. It is known, however, that the Latin grammar by Manuel Álvares (1526–1582), first published in 1572, became the main Latin school grammar for Jesuits all over the world. This article tries to give answers to questions such as why did the Jesuits favour this grammar, which grammars were used by them before 1572, how did the Portuguese missionaries in Brazil adapt or copy Álvares’ model, which parts of speech did they particularly use, and which definitions did they select and which elements did they discuss, add or omit?
August Wilhelm Schlegels Unterscheidung des ‘Synthetischen’ und des ‘Analytischen’ Sprachbaus
Authors: Bär Jochen A.
Published: September 2007

August Wilhelm Schlegels (1767–1845) 1818 zum ersten Mal vorgetragene Unterscheidung von synthetischen und analytischen Sprachen hat in der Sprachtypologie große Wirkung entfaltet. Sie wird allerdings in historisch gesehen unangemessener Weise aufgegriffen, wenn der geistesgeschichtliche Kontext vernachlässigt wird, in dem sie entstanden ist. Es handelt sich dabei um Schlegels frühromantische Theorie von der Repoetisierung der Sprache, die drei Stufen der Sprachentwicklung annimmt: Jede Sprache ist erstens ursprünglich poetisch, was hier soviel heißt, als daß zu Beginn der Geschichte des menschlichen Bewußtseins alle Vermögen des Menschen – Sinnlichkeit, Phantasie, Verstand usw. – in harmonischer Übereinstimmung gewirkt haben. Sie wird zweitens prosaisch, d.h., sie verliert ihre Poetizität (wenngleich nie völlig) im Zuge ihrer Ausbildung zu Verstandeszwecken. Das heißt drittens jedoch nicht, daß sie nicht wieder poetisch werden könne und solle; genau dies ist Schlegels Anliegen. Er will freilich nicht den Ausgangszustand als solchen wiederherstellen, sondern der Sprache durch eine Synthesis von ursprünglicher Poetizität und Prosa eine neue Qualität geben. Dieses Programm findet seine genaue Analogie in der frühromantischen Literaturtheorie und ihrem Postulat einer ‘progressiven Universalpoesie’, das Schlegels Bruder Friedrich (1772–1829) aufgestellt hat. Während für einen Autor wie Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) alle Sprachen gleichermaßen wertvoll und in gleichem Maße Gegenstand des Sprachstudiums sind, beinhaltet Schlegels Unterscheidung eine Wertung und impliziert Arbeit an einer Resynthetisierung, das heißt für ihn: einer Verbesserung der Sprache. Die Frage stellt sich, ob Schlegel unter diesem Aspekt zu Recht zu den Gründervätern der vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft und der Sprachtypologie gezählt werden kann.
Gengo seikatsu
Authors: Heinrich Patrick
Published: September 2007

The indigenous concept of language life developed out of dialectology and attempts to establish a modern standard language. At first, language life existed above all merely as a label for the joint study of Japanese and its speakers and it only became an essential component of Japanese linguistics after 1945. Within the post-war studies a distinction can be drawn between an empirical approach at the National Japanese Language Research Institute and a theoretical approach by Motoki Tokieda (1900–1967). A first wave of language life studies subsided in the 1960s, the empirical approach was, however, revived and further developed in the seventies finding support in sociolinguistics. Language life was finally displaced by sociolinguistics in the mid-eighties.
Vološinov and Cassirer
Authors: Lähteenmäki Mika
Published: September 2007

Recently, it has been suggested that Valentin Vološinov (1895–1936) plagiarised Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). This claim is to be seen as grossly overstated, although Vološinov obviously benefited from Cassirer’s work on language. This article compares Vološinov’s and Cassirer’s concepts of the sign and discusses their views concerning the relation between language and reality. There are fundamental differences between their views on the nature of the sign which mainly stem from the fact that they are committed to different philosophical paradigms. Thus, the validity of the claims according to which philosophical sources of the dialogical conception of the sign can be found in Cassirer’s works should be seriously questioned.
Las primeras gramáticas mesoamericanas
Authors: de León-Portilla Ascensión Hernández
Published: September 2007

On the basis of an analysis of ten grammars of different Meso-American indigenous languages crafted by missionaries during the 16th century, the author attempts to dress an inventory of the specific linguistic traits that characterizes them. These characteristics highlight the efforts which the authors had to make in order to penetrate these unknown and typologically distant languages from those studied at the time of the Renaissance. The present article points out that the missionaries, who had no formal linguistic training, made use of principles of classic hermeneutics, of analogy and anomaly, in order to analyze the function of the word in these new languages. It also establishes the value of these missionary grammars for the philology of the Meso-American indigenous languages, which is only at a beginning.
À Propos de la réflexion phonologique de F. de Saussure
Authors: Engler Rudolf , Vilkou-Poustovaïa Irina
Published: September 2007

Saussure’s reflections on phonology are still today largely unknown. This has several reasons. Until recently, little documentation had been available to prove Saussure’s interest in the subject. Prague phonologists had given a particular interpretation of his general linguistics; the 1916 text of his lectures had led to many different and even contradictory interpretations. Praguean phonology has found its just place within the phonetic sciences, and recent discoveries of hitherto unknown texts from Saussure’s hand now reveal that he indeed put himself many important questions concerning the sound structure of language. Elements of these deliberations should lead to a more adequate reading of the Cours. In fact, these newly found texts suggest that Saussure was after a much more rigorous phonological treatment of which he had already provided evidence in his Mémoire, and which he talked about to his students later on.
The divine and the grammarian
Authors: Poole William
Published: September 2007

This paper discusses the theological background of the linguistic ideas of the three major universal language-planners writing and publishing in England in the 17th century, John Wilkins, George Dalgarno, and Francis Lodwick. Through an examination of these men’s attitudes to the three biblical sites central to early modern linguistics – the accounts of Adam naming the beasts, the fall of man, and the Confusion of Tongues at Babel – it is demonstrated that Wilkins, Dalgarno, and Lodwick held different views on these events and their linguistic ramifications. Wilkins and Dalgarno disagreed about the nature and perseverance of the original Adamic language. Francis Lodwick proposed a far more radical solution: under the influence of the French heretic Isaac La Peyrère, he proposed that men had existed, polygenetically, since long before Adam, and that language hence did not originate with Adam. This paper therefore significantly qualifies the intellectual coherency of the ‘universal language movement’, and does so by the use of hitherto almost entirely neglected manuscript material.
Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India
Authors: Trautmann Thomas R.
Published: September 2007

British India was an especially fruitful site for the development of historical linguistics. Four major, unanticipated discoveries were especially associated with the East India Company: those of Indo-European, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-Aryan nature of Romani. It is argued that they came about in British India because the European tradition of language analysis met and combined with aspects of the highly sophisticated Indian language analysis. The discoveries of Indo-European and Dravidian, the subject of this article, were connected with the British-Indian cities of Calcutta and Madras, respectively, and the conditions under which they came about are examined. The production of new knowledge in British India is generally viewed through the lens of post-colonial theory, and is seen as having been driven by the needs of colonial governance. This essay sketches out a different way of looking at aspects of colonial knowledge that fall outside the colonial utility framework. It views these discoveries and their consequences as emergent products of two distinct traditions of language study which the British and the Indians brought to the colonial connection. If this is so, it follows that some aspects of modernism tacitly absorb Indian knowledge, specifically Indian language analysis. Indian phonology, among other things, is an example of this process.
Leonard Bloomfield
Authors: Tomalin Marcus
Published: September 2007

This paper considers various aspects of Leonard Bloomfield’s (1887–1949) interest in contemporaneous mathematics. Specifically, some of the sources from which he obtained his mathematical knowledge are discussed, as are his own proposals for a linguistics-based solution to the foundations crisis which preoccupied leading mathematicians during the first half of the 20th century. In addition, his attitude towards the role of meaning in linguistic theory is reassessed in the light of his knowledge of Hilbertian Formalism.
Wissenschaftsrhetorik
Authors: Roth Kersten Sven
Published: September 2007

Der vorliegende Aufsatz geht von der Annahme aus, dass der Schlüssel zum Gesamtwerk des Frühaufklärers Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) nicht in dessen von seinen Zeitgenossen bevorzugt rezipierten und kritisierten poetologischen Arbeiten zu suchen ist, sondern außer in den grammatologischen in seinen Schriften zur Rhetorik, insbesondere in der Ausführlichen Redekunst von 1759. Er interpretiert diese als den Versuch, die vom Untergang bedrohte Redekunst in das ‘kritische Zeitalter’ zu retten und in strikter Abgrenzung von der antiken Topik einerseits wie der zeitgenössischen höfischen ‘Complimentierkunst’ andererseits eine vernunftgerechte Wissenschaftsrhetorik zu konzipieren. In das Zentrum des Interesses rückt damit der Umgang mit dem Paradoxon aus Wahrheits- und Wirksamkeitsanspruch als zeitloses Problem des Wissenstransfers. Entsprechend versucht der Aufsatz, die Aktualität dieses Problems und damit auch den Wert der Gottschedschen Rhetorik für die moderne (populär)wissenschaftliche Textproduktion aufzuzeigen.
The centenary of the first publication of Saussure’s sign theory – odier (1905)
Authors: Joseph John E.
Published: September 2007

The 1905 bookEssai d’analyse psychologique du méchanisme du langage dans la compréhensionby Henri Odier (1873–1938) is noteworthy for containing the first published report of details of the sign theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). This article discusses those details and Odier’s interpretations of them, which stray considerably from what Saussure intended, to judge from his later lectures. Because it is known that Saussure owned a copy of Odier’s book and he appears to have read it carefully, an examination is made of significant references Odier makes to other work. Finally, the negative review of Odier’s book by Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) is considered.
The problem of Joseph Priestley’s (1733–1804) descriptivism
Authors: Hodson Jane
Published: September 2007

Joseph Priestley’s (1733–1804)Rudiments of English Grammar(1761, second revised edition 1768) has often been interpreted as demonstrating that, unlike most 18th-century grammarians, Priestley took a descriptive approach towards the study of language. This article argues that such a characterisation both of Priestley’s work and that of his contemporaries is misleading. The article offers a reappraisal of Priestley’sGrammar, demonstrating that the idea of linguistic perfectibility is central to his linguistic ideas, but that it has often been overlooked by modern commentators. The two editions of Priestley’sGrammarare assessed, and it is argued that the substantial alterations that he makes for the second edition reveal a grammarian struggling to bring order to the study of the English language.
A 19th-century speaking machine
Authors: Battaner Moro Elena
Published: September 2007

The Tecnefón is a speaking machine developed in Spain in the 1860s by Severino Pérez y Vázquez. Pérez’s main book on the Tecnefón was published in 1868. Within the context of speaking machines designed from the 18th century onwards, the Tecnefón is built on an acoustical basis; hence it is different from W. von Kempelen’s device, which tried to ‘replicate’ the phonatory system. The Tecnefón has three main parts: a drum that generates sound (the source), an air chamber to hold such sound, and a set of tubes, chambers, and other artefacts propelled by a keyboard. Pérez created a prototype of a speaking machine that performed five vowels and six consonants, so it could ‘speak’ many sentences in Spanish. To this he added accent and intonation with a lever. However, the Tecnefón was never finished due to institutional circumstances that prevented Pérez from pursuing his research.
Computer graphics in the cockpit
Authors: Theunissen Erik , Etherington Tim
Published: September 2007

Spatially integrated data presentation for electronic flight displays was first proposed over forty years ago. Yet, in current state-of-the-art cockpits, only 2-D instruments are depicted on the electronic displays. The first part of this paper will discuss today’s state-of-the-art in 3-D computer graphics in relation to the graphics used in today’s electronic flight displays and illustrate how properties of the display medium, system requirements, image generation capabilities and current practices influence the design. The second part will discuss the design rationale behind a synthetic vision display format in the light of the requirements and constraints.
Serifs, sans serifs and infant characters in children’s reading books
Authors: Walker Sue , Reynolds Linda
Published: September 2007

This paper describes part of the work of the Typographic Design for Children project at The University of Reading. The aim was to find out whether children found serif or sans serif types easier or more difficult to read, and whether they found text with infant characters (e.g. variants of ‘a’ and ‘g’) easier or more difficult to read. We listened to 6-year-old children reading in a classroom, using specially-designed, high quality test material set in Gill Sans and Century with and without infant characters. We also asked children for their views about the typefaces used. We used miscue analysis to study tapes of children’s reading to see whether more errors occurred in text set in a particular typeface. The substitution category of miscue was explored in more depth to see whether differences were attributable to typeface. The results show that children in our test group could read text set in Gill and Century equally well.
The graphical forms, visual-verbal resonances, meanings and semiosis of the Red Cross symbols
Authors: Murungi Havi , McLaren Ian , Chen Robert
Published: September 2007

We investigated the semiosis of pictorial, schematic, and abstract symbols using current and proposed emblems for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Cross-cultural symbol-referent ratings of correspondence suggested the symbols could all be considered icons and indexes of the referents. Mean comprehensibility estimation scores differed significantly between familiar and unfamiliar symbols. Pictorial graphical form and symbol familiarity did not appear to constrain interpretations in the open-ended comprehension test. Thus at the referent denotation level, the symbols appeared to be simultaneously iconic and indexical, and at the symbol interpretation level, they appeared to be simultaneously iconic and symbolic. The findings suggest that symbol semiosis, rather than graphical form, is a more practical method for deciding the type of symbol one would use to communicate specific types of messages.
The construction of records in Dutch police interrogations
Authors: Komter Martha L.
Published: September 2007

Police records in the Netherlands should be written as much as possible in the suspect’s ‘own words’. However, they show a curious mix of legal phrases and colloquialisms. They are drawn up as first person monologues, which obscures the interactional nature of the interrogation. This article sheds light on the interrelations between the interrogation and the recording of it, showing how the interaction in the interrogation affects what is written down, and how the recording activities affect the interaction in the interrogation. Moreover, it illuminates some of the discrepancies between actual practice and the recommendations in police manuals. What appears to have a significant effect on the interrogation is the practice of contemporaneous typing of the records. The resulting question-answer-typing format favors some interrogation and recording techniques over others. This may explain why it is often not the suspect’s ‘own words’ that are recorded, but those of the interrogator.
Taking Mendeleyev’s correspondence course
Authors: Ruecker Stan , Liepert Susan
Published: September 2007

Through an examination of the organizational principles behind a highly successful visual information design employing rich prospect – Mendeleyev’s periodic table of the elements – this paper provides a set of principles for designers interested in creating tools for use in association with rich-prospect browsing interfaces. These principles emphasise the value of simultaneous structures visualized across the full range of available information, and include: the establishment of multiple matrices for pattern-finding, compression and inclusion, provision of a legend or key to the system, and the creation of potentially productive negative spaces. Interface strategies based on Mendeleyevian principles should be particularly useful for accessing large bodies of digital documents such as those often found in the humanities, maximizing the preretrieval research potential of a collection.
Designing diagrammatic notation for interval analysis
Authors: Kulpa Zenon
Published: September 2007

The diagrammatic notation developed by the author for a branch of mathematics called interval analysis is reviewed. Some general aspects of applying information design in science, especially mathematics, are briefly discussed. Then the most important interval analysis diagrams are described, with a discussion of certain elements of their design and development process.
Quantifying the shift towards empirical methods
Authors: Sampson Geoffrey
Published: September 2007

In recent decades there has been a trend towards greater use of empirical data, for instance corpus data, within linguistics. I analyse a sample of linguistics articles from the past half-century in order to establish a detailed profile for this trend. Based on consistent criteria for classifying papers as evidence-based, intuition-based, or neutral, the resulting profile shows that the trend (i) is real, but (ii) is strikingly weaker in general linguistics than in the special subfield of computational linguistics, and (iii) appears to have begun to go into reverse.
Syllable Contractions in a Mandarin Conversational Dialogue Corpus
Authors: Tseng Shu-Chuan
Published: September 2007

The issue of processing and understanding spontaneous speech interests speech engineers and linguists, because spontaneous speech is the most natural and the most frequent form of language used for communication. However, the lack of well-defined databases of spontaneous speech prohibits the scale and the depth of spontaneous speech research to a great extent. By using the methodology of corpus linguistics, this paper shows that linguistic theories can be examined, approved or disproved by quantitative empirical analyses. The studies introduced in this paper contain a pioneering work on corpus-based analyses of syllable contractions in spontaneous Mandarin by construing spontaneous Mandarin database incorporated with linguistic considerations into the spontaneous speech phenomena. Corpus-based results presented in this paper not only confirm characteristics of syllable contraction with respect to Chinese phonology, but also provide new insights into lexical factors that influence the production of syllable contractions.
Two methods for extracting “specific” single-word terms from specialized corpora
Authors: Lemay Chantal , L'Homme Marie-Claude , Drouin Patrick
Published: September 2007

Recently, corpus comparison has been used by a number of researchers for extracting single-word terms (SWTs) from specialized corpora. It is viewed as a means to supplement multi-word term (MWT) extraction, the focus of which is on noun phrases. However, little is known about the value of this technique in a terminological setting. This paper examines two different methods for finding French SWTs in the field of computing. The first one (M1) compares the specialized corpus to a corpus considered to be a reflection of language as a whole. The second one (M2) breaks down the specialized corpus into six topical subcorpora that are compared in turn to the entire specialized corpus. The calculation relies on standard normal distribution and is carried out by a program calledTermoStat. The specific units produced by both methods are then evaluated by comparing them to the contents of two specialized dictionaries. We also compare the results yielded by the two methods. Results show that precision is fair (approximately 50%of units extracted by both methods can be found in specialized dictionaries). However, recall is lower in both methods. Results also reveal that, even though M1 yields better results that M2, both methods are useful for identifying SWTs and should be considered in terminological work.
A critique of the concept of semantic prosody
Authors: Whitsitt Sam
Published: September 2007

The concept of semantic prosody was introduced to the public by Bill Louw in 1993, and has become one of the more important concepts in corpus linguistics. However, while other concepts such as collocation, colligation and semantic preference are relatively unproblematic, one cannot say the same for semantic prosody. At present, it is defined in at least three, distinctly different ways, and more significantly, these differences remain largely undiscussed. This article offers a detailed analysis of Louw's concept of semantic prosody (in Sections 1 through 3), and hopes to demonstrate that the concept and the arguments for it are unconvincing. Concluding the article (Sections 4 and 5) is a brief reflection on the paradox created by Louw's use of metaphor in his definition of semantic prosody.
New generation corpus-based frequency dictionaries
Authors: Čermák František , Kren Michal
Published: September 2007

With a brief outline of the history of frequency dictionaries of the past, a renewed need for these dictionaries, based on modern large corpora, is observed. A linguistic background and some criticism of what has been done is offered. It is stressed that, next to the traditional and predominant paradigmatic approach, at least some attention should be paid to syntagmatic or combinatorial aspects of the lexis as well, as these are readily available in modern corpora. Against this background, solution to this need and projection of corpus possibilities is presented as it has been realized in the recent large Frequency Dictionary of Czech (Frekvencní slovník cetiny). A brief discussion of the linguistic and lexicographic problems is followed by a brief step-by-step description of technical solution.
The use of conjunctive adverbials in the academic papers of advanced Taiwanese EFL learners
Authors: Chen Cheryl Wei-yu
Published: September 2007

The current study explores the use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in two corpora compiled by the author. The learner corpus consists of 23 final papers contributed by 10 MA TESOL students from Taiwan while the control corpus contains 10 journal articles from two prestige international TESOL journals. On the quantitative dimension, student writers were found to slightly overuse connectors when the analysis was based on word-level. Additionally, the qualitative analysis revealed that certain CAs (e.g. besides, therefore) were used inappropriately by some of the learners. The paper ends with several teaching suggestions on how to help student writers master the complex system of conjunctive adverbials in English.
From n-gram to skipgram to concgram
Authors: Cheng Winnie , Greaves Chris , Warren Martin
Published: September 2007

Uncovering the extent of word associations and how they are manifested has been an important area of study in corpus linguistics since the 1960s (Sinclair et al. 1970). This paper defines and describes a new way of categorising word association, the concgram, which constitutes all of the permutations of constituency and positional variation generated by the association of two or more words. Concgrams are identified without prior input from the user (other than to set the size of the span) employing a fully automated search that reveals all of the word association patterns that exist in a corpus. This study argues that concgrams represent more fully word associations in a corpus. Most concgrams seem to be non-contiguous, and show both constituency (AB, ACB) and positional (AB, BA) variations. Further studies of concgrams will help in the task of uncovering the full extent of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1987).
Multiple modification in English and Spanish NPs
Authors: Ramón García Noelia
Published: September 2007

This paper is an English-Spanish corpus-based contrastive study of multiple modification within the boundaries of the noun phrase. This issue is particularly problematic when comparing English and Spanish, and causes difficulties in foreign language learning as well as in translation processes between the two languages. The aim of this study is to unveil the interaction between meaning and grammar in this linguistic area in English and Spanish, revealing the different grammatical structures used in the two languages to actualise a particular meaning. The approach followed in this paper is a functional one (Bondarko 1991; Chesterman 1998). The empirical data on which the study is based are instances of authentic language in use extracted from two large monolingual reference corpora, Cobuild/Bank of English and CREA (Reference Corpus of Contemporary Spanish). The contrastive analysis consists of three stages: description, juxtaposition and a contrastive stage in which functional-semantic correspondences are suggested on the basis of meaning.
Two quantitative methods of studying phraseology in English
Authors: Stubbs Michael
Published: September 2007

Word frequency lists are a standard resource for many theoretical, descriptive and applied questions. However, due to severe problems of definition, there are no equivalent lists which give the frequency of phrases. This paper proposes two independent methods of studying the frequent phraseology of English. First, using a data-base of the most frequent collocations between word-forms in a 200-million word corpus, the strength of attraction between pairs of content words is discussed. Second, using a corpus of 2.5 million words, some of the most frequent phrases, in the sense of strings of uninterrupted word-forms, are identified, and their lexical, grammatical and semantic features are discussed.
Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies
Authors: Mair Christian , Hundt Marianne , Leech Geoffrey N. , Smith Nicholas
Published: September 2007

The paper presents a comparison of tag frequencies in two matching one-million word reference corpora of British standard English, the 1961 LOB-corpus and its 1991 “clone” produced at Freiburg. Both corpora were tagged using a version of the CLAWS part-of-speech-tagger developed at Lancaster, and part of the material was post-edited manually in Freiburg to assess the accuracy of the automatic procedure. The comparison of tag frequencies is an essential complement to work on recent linguistic change carried out on the untagged material, because this work has been based on the – so far unverified – assumption that tag frequencies have remained constant over the thirty-year period in question. In addition, the paper discusses some common and partly contradictory claims about the prevalence of a “nominal” style in present-day written English. It is shown that while part-of-speech frequencies have not remained constant over the period investigated, the shifts are usually not big enough to invalidate the results obtained in analyses of the untagged material. With regard to style, the material shows a significant rise in the frequency of nouns, which, however, is not paralleled by a corresponding decrease in verbs.
From translational data to contrastive knowledge
Authors: Kraif Olivier
Published: September 2007

Textual aligning consists in pairing segments (e.g. sentences or phrases) that are translational equivalents across corpora of translations. An interesting application of textual aligning is the automatic extraction of bilingual lexicons. As it has been pointed out during previous evaluation campaigns, such as Arcade, lexical aligning remains problematic. In order to solve problems of consistency linked with the concept of translational compositionality, a redefinition of lexical aligning task is proposed, introducing the concept of lexical correspondence. Simple techniques dedicated to lexical correspondences extraction are then evaluated. Thus, it appears that adapted statistical filters allow to extract very accurately significant regularities that are relevant at the contrastive level. More generally, these methods prove to be adapted not only for bilingual lexicons extraction: they could be used to study a wide range of contrastive phenomena on empirical basis.
Automatic acquisition of verb subcategorization information by exploiting mininal linguistic resources
Authors: Kermanidis Katia Lida , Fakotakis Nikos , Kokkinakis George
Published: September 2007

A set of well known statistical filtering methods (binomial hypothesis testing, log-likelihood ratio, t-test, thresholds on relative frequencies) is used on Modern Greek and English corpora in order to automatically acquire verb subcategorization frames that are not limited in number and are not known beforehand. As sophisticated linguistic resources and tools are not available for most languages (including Modern Greek), pre-processing of our corpora reaches merely the stage of elementary, intrasentential, non-embedded phrase chunking. By forming, permutating and counting subsets of the verb's neighboring set of phrases, and by applying the statistical filters mentioned previously, valid syntactic frames of verbs are detected. The results achieved were comparable to and, in several cases, better than the ones of previous approaches, even approaches utilizing richer resources. Incorporating the extracted list of frames into a shallow parser, the performance of the latter increases by almost 6%, showing thereby the importance of the acquired knowledge.
Clause alignment for Hong Kong legal texts
Authors: Kit Chunyu , Webster Jonathan J. , Sin King-Kui , Pan Haihua , Li Heng
Published: September 2007

In this paper we report on our recent work in clause alignment for English-Chinese bilingual legal texts using available lexical resources including a bilingual legal glossary and a bilingual dictionary, for the purpose of acquiring examples at various linguistic levels for example-based machine translation. We present our formulation of an appropriate measure for the similarity of a candidate pair of clauses with respect to matched lexical items and the corresponding implementation of an effective algorithm for clause alignment based on this similarity measure. Experimental results show that the similarity measure and the lexical-based clause alignment algorithm, though very simple, are very effective, with a performance of 94.6% alignment accuracy. It confirms our intuition that lexical information gives a reliable indication of correct alignment. The significance of this lexical-based approach lies in both its simplicity and effectiveness.
Planning and the neurotechnology of social behaviour
Authors: Meenan Suzanne , Lindsay Roger
Published: September 2007

The human brain has a remarkable ability to generate plans for sequences of actions that allow human agents to co-operate with and to manipulate the behaviour of others. It is widely claimed that the operations underlying plan developments, behaviour sequencing and inhibition of inappropriate responses to the environment are carried out in the prefrontal cortex. This implies that the prefrontal cortex is a natural system with the capacity to utilise cognitive technology. The present paper argues that social competence is a manifestation of action planning in which other agents feature as plan elements. Accordingly, plans that involve other agents are expected to be more complex than plans which do not. In the light of evidence that negative information makes particularly heavy processing demands, social judgements involving prohibition or unacceptability are expected to create most difficulty for the human action planning system. These assumptions were tested by measuring the ability of patients with prefrontal injuries to detect anomalous action sequences, using a specially constructed Action Acceptability Test. It was hypothesised that if the frontal lobes play a major role in action planning, patients with frontal lobe injuries should show impaired ability to detect faulty action plans, particularly when such plans relate to complex social action sequences, and action sequences involving unacceptable behaviours.

The hypotheses were generally supported as frontal-injury patients proved to be worse at detecting both complex social sequences and deviant action sequences than participants with non-frontal injuries and normal control participants. The results of the study are consistent with the view that human social competence results from the cognitive processes associated with action planning and the data also supports the claim that action planning processes are specifically disrupted by damage to the prefrontal cortex.

The findings provide some confirmation for the Cognitive Technology perspective, in that action planning does seem to be physically associated with a specific brain area, and including social agents and deviations from acceptability in action plans do seem to be manipulations that operate to make action plans more difficult to process, hence causing more errors in individuals with damage to the prefrontal cortex. The results also provide some encouragement for the belief that new cognitive tools can be constructed that link brain processes to other levels of description, such as social behaviour. The Action Acceptability Test, a prognostic tool developed to predict the social competence of frontal-injury patients, is offered as one such example.
Dialogue-based human-computer interfaces and active language understanding
Authors: Fitzgerald Will , Firby R. James
Published: September 2007

Recent developments in speech, network and embedded-computer technologies indicate that human–computer interfaces that use speech as one or the main mode of interaction will become increasingly prevalent. Such interfaces must move beyond simple voice commands to support a dialogue-based interface if they are to provide for common requirements such as description resolution, perceptual anchoring, and deixis. To support human–computer dialogue effectively, architectures must support active language understanding: that is, they must support the close integration of dialogue planning and execution with general task planning and execution.