bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Wincenty Lutosławski (1863–1954): Philosophe, helléniste ou fondateur sous-estimé de la stylométrie?
Authors: Pawłowski Adam , Pacewicz Artur
Published: February 2014

Stylometry is a branch of linguistics concerned with the quantitative description of stylistic proprieties of texts. In certain cases, it allows one to solve problems of authorship of disputed texts and to discover the probable chronology of works by a given author. An historical overview of stylometry demonstrates that there was no single scholar whose work could be considered decisive in its development. At the same time, perusal of studies devoted to the history of stylometry shows that their authors treat the available material selectively, preferring some scholars while wholly disregarding others. Wincenty Lutosławski (1863–1954) is a good example of a scholar forgotten (or underestimated) by contemporary researchers. However, it was he who coined the term ‘stylometry’ already at the end of the 19th century and defined the principles of this ‘new science’. This paper presents and discusses the following issues : the importance of chronology in the interpretation of Platonic philosophy, the definition and objectives of stylo­metry, the most important platonic chronologies, a description and evaluation of Lutosławski’s contribution to the development of stylometric methodology, and the origins of stylometry. Finally, we shall try to (re)determine Lutosławski’s position in the history of the language sciences.
The Linguistic Thought of Friedrich August Wolf: A reconsideration of the relationship between classical philology and linguistics in the 19th century
Authors: Haug Dag T.
Published: February 2014

This paper examines the linguistic thought of Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), the founder of modern classical philology, and tries to show that contrary to what is commonly assumed, grammar played an important role in his research program for a ‘science of antiquity’. Specifically, Wolf encouraged the study of philosophical grammar, which was the leading linguistic paradigm in Germany around 1800, and he developed an original theory of tense within this methodological framework. But philosophical grammar would appear obsolete soon after the establishment of historical-comparative linguistics and this, it is argued, is an important reason for the enmities in the first half of the 19th century between Indo-Europeanists and the Classical scholars who stayed within the old linguistic paradigm.
Deconstructing Female Conventions: Ann Fisher (1719–1778)
Authors: Rodríguez-Gil Maria E.
Published: February 2014

This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.
James Merrick (1720–1769): Poet, scholar, linguist
Authors: Tieken-Boon van Ostade Ingrid
Published: February 2014

At the end of the preface to hisShort Introduction to English Grammar(1762) Robert Lowth (1710–1787) makes an appeal for comments on his work. This article analyses his correspon­dence with James Merrick (1720–1769), a friend and fellow scholar, written between December 1761 and October 1764, in which he receives such comments. The discussion is an illustration of the current debate at the time as to whether Custom or Propriety should be invoked in deciding on correct usage. It shows first and foremost that Lowth’s attitude to grammar was focussed on the level of usage rather than the structure of the language.
‘An Inversion of Opticks’: Glimpses of English in the Hindustani Scholarship of John Gilchrist (1759–1841)
Authors: Steadman-Jones Richard
Published: February 2014

This paper focuses on the linguistic work of John Gilchrist (1759–1841), one of the first British grammarians to produce a detailed and systematic study of the language known in the 18th century as ‘Hindustani’. An interesting feature of Gilchrist’s grammatical texts is the fact that, within the framework of a grammatical account of a South Asian language, they often include short passages discussing contemporary problems in the analysis of English. In these passages, Gilchrist engages directly with the work of writers such as John Horne Tooke, Samuel Johnson, Robert Lowth, and Thomas Sheridan, taking up a position in relation to their work and drawing upon his research on Hindustani to support or challenge their analyses of English. In one typical example, discussed in this paper, he mobilises evidence from his own work in support of Thomas Sheridan’s innovative account of the vowel in words such as mine and thine, an analysis that characterises this sound as a diphthong rather than a simple articulation. In the light of Gilchrist’s later visibility as a political radical, some commentators have seen his allusions to Horne Tooke as evidence that his linguistic work has a demonstrably radical character. However, the diversity of the thinkers with whom Gilchrist engages suggests that it is better to interpret his interventions in the analysis of English as attempts to build a reputation as a scholar, not only in the colony but in the metropolis as well. As such, the passages in which Gilchrist discusses the nature of English can be seen as political in the sense that they helped him to find a platform from which he could voice his radical ideas. But they do not always constitute a radical account of the language itself, their importance lying in the opportunities they offered for self-promotion and, indeed, self-transformation.
Howard N. Rose’sThesaurus of Slang(1934): Its purpose, structure, contents, reliability, and sources
Authors: Coleman Julie
Published: February 2014

This paper is a re-examination of Howard N. Rose’sThesaurus of Slang(1934): of its purpose, structure, contents, reliability, and sources. Contemporary reviewers were largely unimpressed, and their criticisms are also considered. Despite its undoubtedly poor quality, Rose’s work provides some interesting insights into attitudes towards American English, the power of the word “thesaurus”, and the partiality of the reviewing process.
Missionary Contributions to Bantu Languages in Tanzania: James Thomas Last (1850–1933) and the Vidunda language
Authors: Legere Karsten
Published: February 2014

This paper deals with linguistic work by the lay missionary James Thomas Last (1850–1933), who was among the first Europeans to live up-country in what is now Tanzania. In the course of a seven-year stay he was exposed to African languages which have only partly been known outside Africa. Last collected linguistic data that culminated 1885 in the publication of the Polyglotta Africana Orientalis. This book is a collection of 210 lexical items and sentences elicited in or translated into 48 African languages, and supplemented by entries for some other languages. In order to demonstrate the relevance as well as the inconsistencies of this missionary’s contribution, special attention is paid to the book section on the Vidunda language currently spoken by approximately 10,000 people in Central Tanzania. It turns out that approximately 75 per cent of the Vidunda entries are still acceptable today. The data even provides insight into the grammatical set-up of Vidunda (e.g., the noun classes and constituents of the noun phrase). Less relevant are the verbal paradigms. In a nutshell, Last produced material which had for many years been the sole source of lexical and grammatical information about the Vidunda language.
Saussure’s Notes of 1881–1885 on Inner Speech, Linguistic Signs and Language Change
Authors: Joseph John E.
Published: February 2014

This article analyses previously unpublished notes by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) contained in a single large register which he used in the first half of the 1880s. The earliest pages include his detailed reactions to La parole intérieure (1881) by Victor Egger (1848–1909). Although these reactions are sometimes hostile, the later notes, dated December 1884 and March 1885, appear to build on ideas he encountered in Egger. These notes — probably connected to his course on Gothic and Old High German grammar at the École des Hautes Études in Paris — show to what extent the account of language associated with his lectures on general linguistics of 1907–1911 was already present in his teaching a quarter of a century earlier.
Sinclair, lexicography, and the Cobuild Project
Authors: Moon Rosamund
Published: February 2014

This paper discusses John Sinclair’s work in the field of lexicography by focussing on the first edition of the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987), which was written within the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, and of which Sinclair was Editor in Chief. It provides theoretical and lexicographical background to the Cobuild Project, and reviews aspects of the first dictionary which were especially innovative, including its corpus basis, treatment of phraseology, and approach to the representation of meaning. It concludes by reflecting on the overall impact of Cobuild and Sinclair’s ideas.
The alignment of form and function
Authors: Brown Dunstan , Tiberius Carole , Corbett Greville G.
Published: February 2014

This paper analyses constraints on inflectional syncretism and inflectional allomorphy using frequency information. Syncretism arises where one form is associated with more than one function, whereas inflectional allomorphy occurs where there is more than one inflectional class, and a single function is associated with two or more forms. If high frequency is associated with more differentiation on both sides, we expect, on the one hand, that a frequent function will have a high number of forms and, on the other, that a frequent form will have a high number of functions. Our study focuses on Russian nominals, in particular nouns, which exhibit both syncretism and inflectional allomorphy. We find that there is a relationship between frequency and differentiation, but that it is not exceptionless, and that the exceptions can be understood in terms of the use of referrals as default rules.
Distance Between Languages as Measured by the Minimal-Entropy Model; Plato’s Republic—Slovenian Versus 15 Other translations
Authors: Jakopin Primoz
Published: February 2014

In this paper, a language model, based on probabilities of text n-grams, is used as a measure of distance between Slovenian and 15 other European languages. During the construction of the model, a Huffman tree is generated from all the n-grams (n= 1to 32, frequency 2 or more) in the training corpus of Slovenian literary texts (2.7 million words), and appropriate Huffman codes are computed for every leaf in the tree. To apply the model to a new text sample, it is cut into n-grams (1–32) in such a way that the sum of model Huffman code lengths for all the obtained n-grams of new text is minimal.

The above model, applied to all (16) translations of Plato’s Republic from the TELRI CD ROM, produced the following language order (average coding length in bits per character): Slovenian (2,37), Serbocroatian (3,77), Croatian (3,84), Bulgarian (3,96), Czech (4,10), Polish (4,32), Russian (4,46), Slovak (4,46), Latvian (4,74), Lithuanian (4,94), English (5,40), French (5,67), German (5,69), Romanian (5,76), Finnish (6,11), and Hungarian (6,47).
The Importance of the Syntagmatic Dimension in the Multilingual Lexical Database
Authors: Petrauskaitė Rūta
Published: February 2014

This paper describes the idea behind a multilingual database (Muldi) designed to incorporate five constituent parts: monolingual and multilingual corpora, monolingual lexicons, lists of translation equivalents, and terminological records. The emphasis in Muldi is on the presentation, analysis, and description of syntagmatic information contained in lexical items. Types of translation equivalents as well as the problem of relationship between dictionary and corpus translation equivalents is also considered.
Bridge Dictionaries as Bridges Between Languages
Authors: Skoumalová Hana
Published: February 2014

Bridge dictionaries are a new sort of dictionary for learners of English. They are based on the monolingual Cobuild learners’ dictionaries, and they are partly translated—they contain translated definitions and translation equivalents. This paper shows the possible ways of exploiting Bridge dictionaries for creating new bilingual or multilingual dictionaries.

One possible way is to extract corresponding translation equivalents, edit them, and make a new printed dictionary. As both sides of such a dictionary were originally created as translations from English, the dictionary requires quite a lot of lexicographic work.

Another possibility is to create an electronic version of the dictionary “as is”. For this purpose, it is necessary to convert the dictionary first into SGML format and define its DTD. This format can then serve as a standard for future Bridge dictionaries and adding new language modules to existing dictionaries would be quite easy.
Procedures in Building the Croatian-English Parallel Corpus
Authors: Tadic Marko
Published: February 2014

This contribution gives a survey of procedures and formats used in building the Croatian-English parallel corpus which is being collected at the Institute of Linguistics at the Philosophical Faculty, University of Zagreb. The primary text source is the newspaper Croatia Weekly which has been published from the beginning of 1998 by HIKZ (Croatian Institute for Information and Culture). After a quick survey of existing English-Croatian parallel corpora, the article copes with procedures involved in text conversion and text encoding, particularly the alignment. There are several recent suggestions for alignment encoding, and they are listed and elaborated at the end of the article.
A test of a cultural model of conflict styles
Authors: Kim Min-Sun , Lee Hye-ryeon , Kim In Duk , Hunter John E.
Published: February 2014

The primary aim of this study is to test a process model of cultural conflict styles. Specifically, we propose a theoretical framework for illuminating the relationship between individual-level equivalents of cultural variability dimensions and the face-maintenance dimensions, which, in turn, serve as guiding motives or criteria for selecting conflict strategies. In the model, it was predicted that the greater the individual’s construal of self as independent, the higher the concern for self-face maintenance, which, in turn, leads to the higher preference for forcing (dominating) conflict styles. In a separate path, it was also predicted that the greater the individual’s construal of self as interdependent, the higher the concern for other-face maintenance, which, in turn, leads to the higher preference for nonforcing (obliging, avoiding, integrating, and compromising) conflict styles. Data to test the proposed model were drawn from undergraduates of diverse cultural backgrounds, studying in Hawai‘i. After being presented at random with one of the three conflict situations, participants rated the scales measuring conflict styles, face maintenance dimensions, as well as scales to measure the independent and interdependent dimensions of their self-construals. The theoretical path model was supported by the data except for one path. The implications of the model for theory and practice are discussed.
Exploring Language Stereotypes in Post‑colonial Hong Kong through the Matched-guise Test
Authors: Lai Mee Ling
Published: February 2014

After the change of sovereignty in Hong Kong from Britain to China on July 1st, 1997, the status of Putonghua (the language of the new Chinese ruler) has been formally recognized in addition to Cantonese (the vernacular language) and English (the international and ex-colonizer’s language). Four years after the political handover, a Matched-guise test was conducted on a total of 1048 local Hong Kong Secondary 4 students. The aim of this study was to ascertain the respondents’ subjective reactions towards the three languages when the city was undergoing significant political and socio-economic changes. The results showed that the Cantonese guise was rated the highest on traits of solidarity, the English guise the highest on traits of power, whereas the Putonghua guise was rated the lowest in both dimensions. Although the study started from a micro perspective investigating the attitudes of the respondents towards the three target languages and their speakers, the research results helped to reveal the vitality of the three target languages in post-colonial Hong Kong and suggest directions for language education.
The Arrangement of Letters
Authors: Kirkpatrick Andy
Published: February 2014

In this article I first discuss a genre of writing, the Ars Dictaminis, which became popular in Europe from the 11th century and which flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries. In particular I consider the arrangement of letters as advised in Ars Dictaminis treatises and show its influence from Cicero. I then briefly review key tenets of Chinese rhetoric and compare the arrangement of Ars Dictaminis letters with the arrangement of Chinese letters of request recently written by Mainland Chinese. The remarkable similarities in the arrangement of these two sets of letters are noted. Given these similarities I conclude by arguing that the relative status and power of writer and recipient exerts at least as strong an influence on the arrangement of texts as any cultural tradition.
A historical and collexeme analysis of the development of the compromiser fairly
Authors: Margerie Hélène
Published: February 2014

This paper discusses the historical evolution of fairly as a compromiser. Rather, which had already developed into a compromiser by the time fairly started going down the same cline, provides the background for the study of the grammaticalisation of fairly. Based on electronic corpora, the distinctive collexeme analysis I propose (Stefanowitch and Gries 2003) focuses on the collocational preferences exhibited by the two compromisers when combining with an adjective, from the origins of fairly as a compromiser in the early nineteenth century to the present day. The difference in the polarity of the adjectives they modify indicates their complementary distribution. Finally the semantic origin of the two forms provides some insights into the specificities they developed as moderators, showing signs of persistence, as defined in the framework of grammaticalisation, and of subjectification (Traugott 1988, 1995).
Nominal constituents in French lexifier creoles
Authors: Déprez Viviane
Published: February 2014

The paper offers a comparative study of the syntactic structure of nominal constituents in French Lexifier Creoles (FLC). In spite of the superficial variability observed in the distribution of FLC determiners, the paper argues that FLC have a common functional architecture and presents both conceptual and empirical arguments in support of this view. Variability, the paper proposes, is the result of extensive phrasal movement inside this common architecture that is triggered by the functional heads of FLC. Whether a given FLC determiner is a functional head or not is taken to reflect grammaticalization processes modeled in the Minimalist framework. This novel approach to grammaticalization and particularly to ‘semantic bleaching’ is shown to have a structuring effect that accounts for the ordering differences manifest across FLC determiners.
Au delà de l’espace et du temps
Authors: Adler Silvia , Asnes Maria
Published: February 2014

The present paper deals with the preposition au-delà de as a scalarity marker in three languages — French, English and Hebrew — representing each a distinct family: Roman, Germanic and Semitic, respectively. Our study is performed in the theoretical framework of the semantics of degree (cf. J. Hay, C. Kennedy, B. Levin 1999 ; C. Kennedy & L. McNally 1999 ; C. Piñón 2000 ; C. Kennedy 2001 ; C. Kennedy & B. Levin 2002 ; P. Caudal & D. Nicolas 2003, among others). Most of the current studies concentrate on the analysis of scalar and comparative modifiers. However, little has been said about the prepositional environment. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to find out what makes a prepositional phrase capable of measuring a property or an event on a degree scale.
Between the real and the unreal
Authors: Messina Simona
Published: February 2014

In this paper I present a work in progress concerning the mimesis of Italian speech, which is possible to study not only into the two traditional forms of language — written and spoken — but also in broadcast language of tv series. In order to find examples of mimesis of spoken language which are as close as possible to the contemporary linguistic reality, I have excluded all specialised TV programmes which cater for specific contents and sectorial registers and I concentrate on television stories of TV fiction.

 Tv fiction can be divided up into various narrative formulae and, depending on the subject matter, in different macrocategories. I have focused my study on a particular kind of fiction based on realistic serial format: family fiction, which narrates the daily life of a family or group of families whose stories become entwined in a succession of petty or major events where the language must necessarily draw on colloquial Italian.

 The corpus analysed in this first phase of the research project was taken from two series: La famiglia Benvenuti (1968) and Un medico in famiglia (1998). I have selected a shortlist of phenomena which best match up to the characteristics of spontaneous speech, grouped in four areas of analysis: 1: Register and lexical–grammatical phenomena; 2: Linguistic commonplaces; 3: The polyvalent ‘che’; 4: Mechanisms of segmentation and focalisation.
A metagrammar for French predicative nouns developed and tested through tree adjoining grammar formalism
Authors: Barrier Sébastien
Published: February 2014

In the study we describe in our thesis, we analyze « verb (+preposition) + noun » or « noun + verb » French combinations, known as support verb patterns (also known as light verb patterns in English). The grammar we describe is intended to comply not only with tree adjoining grammar formalism, but also with a more abstract language called metagrammar. In order to build an accurate and realistic syntactic lexicon, we use a corpus from the French daily Le Monde (developed at Paris 7 University), so as to represent only the most productive predicative nouns. The corpus allows us as well to check the regularities of support verb patterns in contemporary French. Applying our low-level grammar to a series of test sentences enables us to make sure that sentences whose descriptions used to be impossible or unsatisfactory may be adequately parsed.
Right-dislocation in Catalan: Its discourse function and counterparts in English
Authors: Mayol Laia
Published: February 2014

This paper presents a corpus study of right dislocation (RD) in Catalan and discusses crosslinguistic differences of information packaging between English and Catalan. The Catalan corpus consists of 93 RDs which have been coded according to three parameters: (1) the point where the entity in the right-dislocated constituent had appeared in the discourse, (2) consequences of eliminating the right-dislocated constituent and (3) consequences of restoring the canonical order. I argue that RD in Catalan is a means to structure information in a coherent way by displacing old information from the main clause. Three main types of RDs can be found: (1) RDs which activate an entity which was no longer accessible in the discourse and make it highly salient, while still marking its discourse-old status; (2) RDs which make explicit an implicit, never textually mentioned, referent and places it in a discourse-old information position. (3) RDs referring to entities mentioned in the previous sentence. Such RDs convey an additional meaning, some ‘emotional content’, having to do with the expression of opposition or emphasis. In order to analyse crosslinguistic differences, an English text and its Catalan translation have been used. The Catalan translation contained 42 instances of RD, while the English text contained none, which shows that the two languages use different strategies to encode information packaging. The Catalan translation uses RDs mostly in cases in which the English original repeats the same phrase in two consecutive utterances and in utterances which convey contrast or opposition.
The role of discourse topic and proximity for demonstratives in German and Russian
Authors: Averintseva-Klisch Maria , Consten Manfred
Published: February 2014

This article discusses the textual functions of demonstratives in German and Russian in terms of ‘discourse topicality’ and ‘proximity’, thus covering a broad range of referential phenomena within a unified approach. It shows that — in spite of important grammatical differences between German and Russian — anaphoric and deictic uses of demonstratives are ruled by the same principles in both languages.
Cohesive explicitness and explicitation in an English-German translation corpus
Authors: Hansen-Schirra Silvia , Neumann Stella , Steiner Erich
Published: February 2014

Explicitness or implicitness as assumed properties of translated texts and other texts in multilingual communication have for some time been the object of speculation and, at a later stage, of more systematic research in linguistics and translation studies. This paper undertakes an investigation of explicitness/implicitness and related phenomena of translated texts on the level of cohesion. A corpus-based research architecture, embedded in an empirical research methodology, will be outlined, and first results and possible explanations will be discussed. The paper starts with a terminological clarification of the concepts of ‘explicitness’ and ‘explicitation’ in terms of dependent variables to be investigated. The two terms — and their usage by other scholars — will be discussed. An electronic corpus will then be described which provides the empirical data and techniques for information extraction. For the investigation carried out using our corpus, indicators will then be derived on the basis of which operationalizations and hypotheses can be formulated for patterns of explicitation occurring between source and target texts. Some initial results relating to cohesive explicitness and explicitation in the data will be presented and discussed, with particular attention being paid to the areas of ‘reference’, ‘substitution‘, ‘ellipsis’, ‘conjunction’, and ‘lexical cohesion’. First attempts will also be made at explaining the findings.
A method for investigating coreference in translations and originals
Authors: Kunz Kerstin
Published: February 2014

Coreference is one essential strategy of coherence and cohesion as it establishes connectivity in texts. This connection is evoked by linguistic devices on the text surface but has to be interpreted mentally as a relation between extralinguistic referents. Since translators are concerned with the reception of connectivity in source texts and the production of the same kind of connectivity in target texts coreference is an important process taking place in translation. The present paper deals with the elaboration of a method for investigating nominal coreference in originals and translations. In order to build parameters for the empirical analysis of coreference in English and German corpora we provide an overview over various mechanisms affecting the creation of coreference relations in source and target texts. We take account of linguistic as well as extralinguistic aspects as interdependent and interacting factors potentially causing shifts in coreference. The model we establish on the basis of these considerations allows us to investigate nominal coreferring expressions as well as analyse the relation of reference identity created between these expressions. Hence, our model facilitates exhaustive research on a very fine-grained scale. It allows us to capture differences on the lexicogrammatical as well as on a semantic and conceptual level and, thus, paves the way for interpretation on a more conceptual level.
L’expérience suédoise en matière d’enseignement des langues-cultures d’origine
Authors: Cabau-Lampa Béatrice
Published: February 2014

L’enseignement des langues-cultures d’origine dans le cadre scolaire — comme celui du suédois langue seconde — constitue l’un des principaux volets de la politique sociale suédoise qui a attiré l’attention des observateurs étrangers il y a plusieurs années. On est en droit de se demander comment et pourquoi les autorités suédoises ont fait preuve d’une telle générosité en matière de moyens d’éducation offerts aux enfants de migrants. Par ailleurs, il convient de s’intéresser à ce qui reste du fameux « modèle suédois » dans ce domaine. C’est ainsi que dans un premier temps, cet article étudiera brièvement les données constitutives du milieu éducatif suédois puis, les différentes questions liées à la mise en place de l’enseignement des langues-cultures d’origine (réglementation, organisation, participation, ressources, formation des enseignants...). Enfin, il exposera les nouvelles perspectives dans lesquelles a été envisagé cet enseignement selon le contexte suédois des années 1990, à savoir la réorganisation des cadres d’enseignement/apprentissage et l’apparition d’établissements libres bilingues.
Global English and local language policies
Authors: Phillipson Robert
Published: February 2014

The paper analyses the mythology and imagery underpinning global English, the many labels used to describe English, and the transition from an imperialist language into one that meshes with ongoing processes of Europeanisation and Americanisation, largely through the influence of transnational corporations. EU language policy does not represent a counterweight to an expansion of English, which constitutes a threat to other languages. Implications are drawn for Danish, the dominant language hitherto, and for foreign and immigrant languages, in Denmark, a country that traditionally has a laissez-faire attitude to language policy. Building on a wealth of research evidence and experience in other countries, an ABC of language policy for Denmark is articulated. It covers an Action plan, links with Business, Consultation, Diversification of languages and ways of learning them, Europeanisation, proper Funding through co-ordination between relevant government departments, Goals that reflect local and global needs, policies that respect the linguistic Human rights of speakers of all languages in Denmark, and resistance to linguistic Imperialism.
Ricadute metalinguistiche dell’insegnamento dell’esperanto sulla lingua materna dell’alunno
Authors: Pinto Maria A. , Corsetti Renato
Published: February 2014

Due gruppi di alunni di una scuola media italiana, comparabili tra loro per molti aspetti, hanno preso parte ad un esperimento sugli effetti dell’apprendimento dell’esperanto relativamente alle loro abilità metalinguistiche. Il gruppo che ha seguito un corso di esperanto per un intero anno scolastico ha avuto dei risultati migliori in test di abilità metalinguistiche sviluppati e validati indipendentemente da questo esperimento rispetto al gruppo di controllo. Pertanto, i risultati dell’esperimento sono del tutto in linea con le ipotesi prefissate, e cioè che l’insegnamento dell’esperanto avrebbe avuto un’influenza positiva sulle abilità metalinguistiche degli alunni. I risultati dei test mostrano chiaramente che all’inizio dell’anno scolastico entrambi i gruppi erano allo stesso livello sia per quanto riguarda le risposte “linguistiche” sia per quanto riguarda quelle “metalinguistiche” del test. Il test, infatti, richiede sia risposte linguistiche che metalinguistiche, in altre parole si devono dare le giustificazioni per le risposte linguistiche indicate. Questi risultati sono in linea con i risultati di ricerche precedenti sugli effetti propedeutici dell’esperanto e sottolineano i potenziali vantaggi dell’educazione bilingue per tutti i bambini. Confermando la validità dell’educazione bilingue dei bambini, gli autori chiedono che verifiche simili siano fatte relativamente a bambini con diverse età e con diverse lingue materne.
Foreign language planning
Authors: Payne Mark
Published: February 2014

Drawing on empirical research and established language planning theories and ideas, this paper presents a conceptual framework model to support foreign language planning. The key focus is foreign or second language planning at secondary school level. Whilst foreign language planning is not a new phenomenon, this paper argues for a reconfigured perspective on this often under-examined issue.
From liturgy to technology
Authors: Djité Paulin G.
Published: February 2014

Language is generally not perceived as playing a significant role in the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, and therefore not thought of or mentioned in trying to work out solutions to this situation. The absence of linguistic input in development planning in Africa is one of the key reasons why the majority of the African people are left “on the edge of road.” This paper argues for a language sensitive and linguistically informed approach to technology transfer and development problems. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can serve to promote African languages much better than religion ever did, and language policies and language-in-education policies in Africa need to be cog­nisant and take advantage of the opportunities the digital era offers the Continent. Whilst, according to Ferguson, “religion has been one of the most powerful forces leading to language change and language spread,” African languages have yet to overcome the linguistic barrier to participation in knowledge societies, and most of them have no interface with science and information technology (e.g. the Internet). Why can’t African languages be languages of technology? How can this be achieved?
Language and identity in East Timor
Authors: Taylor-Leech Kerry
Published: February 2014

Language choice in the newly independent Republic of East Timor can be usefully examined in the wider context of language policy in multilingual states. The present article reports on ethnographic research investigating official and popular discourses of language and identity in East Timor and the role of past and present language policies and practices in shaping national and social identity. It focuses on the discursive reconstruction of identity through five official instruments of language policy development. Hostile discourses in the Australian and Indonesian press towards the choice of Portuguese (the former colonial language) and Tetum (the endogenous lingua franca) as official languages provided the context for the investigation. A persistent theme in these discourses is that English and/or Indonesian would be preferable choices. The article puts these discourses into perspective by presenting findings from two data sets: (i) the 2004 National Census and (ii) analysis of the discourses of 78 participants in semi-structured interviews and student focus groups. The census shows clear signs of the revival of Portuguese and the reinvigoration of Tetum. It also shows how diverse linguistic identities have become in East Timor. The research findings show that there is less hostility to official language policy than claimed in the Australian and Indonesian press. However, the findings also emphasise the urgent need to reconstruct an inclusive, plurilingual national identity that can encompass diversity.
Lexical and relational influences on the processing of Chinese modifier-noun compounds
Authors: Ji Hongbo , Gagné Christina L.
Published: February 2014

The data from three experiments indicate that recent exposure to a similar Chinese modifier­-noun compound (e.g., 书柜, book cabinet or 饼店, cookie store) influences the ease of processing a subsequent compound (e.g., 书店, book store) by increasing the availability of the lexical entries for the individual constituents, and by altering the availability of the relation (e.g., noun FOR modifier) used to bind the two constituents. The results imply that theories and models about compound processing should take the representation of relational information into account and should be able to accommodate the influence of relation availability.
Lexical dynamics for low-frequency complex words
Authors: Baayen R. H. , Wurm Lee H. , Aycock Joanna
Published: February 2014

In this study we examine the word recognition process for low-frequency morphologically complex words. One goal of the study was to replicate and expand upon findings suggesting facilitative effects of morphological relatives of a target word. A second goal was to demonstrate the need for a reinterpretation of root and surface frequency effects, which traditionally have been taken as indicators of parsing-based and memory-driven processing, respectively. In a first study, we used the same stimuli across auditory and visual lexical decision and naming. Mixed-effects statistical modeling revealed that surface frequency was a robust predictor of RTs even in the very low end of the distribution, but root frequency was not. Also, the nature of the similarity between a target and its lexical competitors is crucial. Measures gauging the influence of morphological relatives of the target were facilitative, while measures gauging the influence of words related only in form were inhibitory. A second study analyzing data from the English Lexicon Project, for a large sample of words from across the full frequency range, supports these conclusions. An information-theoretical analysis of root and surface frequency explains why surface frequency must be the most important predictor, with only a marginal role for root frequency.
Meher Baba’s Silent Semiotic Output
Authors: Sanjinés José
Published: February 2014

Much has been written about the life and work of Meher Baba (1894–1969), a spiritual master who gave up speaking at age thirty-one. Despite observing silence for the rest of his life, about forty-four years, Meher Baba remained highly eloquent and prolific. He continued to communicate both colloquially and metaphysically, which included giving detailed explanations on the origin and nature of existence. During most of his life he used a series of nonverbal systems that culminated in a sui generis gestural language. This progression of semiotic modalities is inseparable from the meaning of Meher Baba’s message. We look at this unfolding semiosis from the angle of a transcendental experience—the state of awakened deep sleep, turiya, that Heinrich Zimmer calls simply the silence.
Wrapping Transcendence: The Semiotics of Reliquaries
Authors: Leone Massimo
Published: February 2014

After pinpointing the semiotic mechanism of relics, this essay highlights the danger of their being turned into fetishes with reference to the Tractatus Garsiae, a hilarious medieval parody that wittily uncovers the semiotic proximity between the collection of fetishized relics and that of fetishized money. In subsequent sections I point out how reliquaries have been adopted as an antidote to the fetishizing of relics and explain how that works through a theoretical analysis of the human anthropology of wrapping. After indicating some possible directions for further analysis (in order to deepen the typological and comparative knowledge of reliquaries), I conclude the essay by focusing on a case study of a pragmatically felicitous instance of a reliquary: the semiotic “open work” of Francis Xavier’s seventeenth-century reliquary in Goa.
Signs of Life: Grounding the Transcendent in Japanese Memorial Objects
Authors: Irizarry Joshua A.
Published: February 2014

Memorial tablets (ihai) and memorial portraiture (iei) are important parts of Japanese funerary ritual, serving as focal points during the wake, funeral, and subsequent ritual observances. Far more than static material representations of the deceased or the social relationships they inhabited, these memorial objects display a complex and complementary relationship with the deceased and serve to ground the persistent spirit of the departed (known as hotoke), which is simultaneously of this world and transcendent to it. Furthermore, I demonstrate how both everyday and ritual interactions with ihai and iei reveal a dynamic and decades-long semiotic process that guides this entity through its transformation from a living human being through a “lifetime” as a hotoke and, ultimately, into a household ancestor.
Hearing Transcendence: Distorted Iconism in Tōru Takemitsu’s Film Music
Authors: Lehrich Christopher I.
Published: February 2014

Tōru Takemitsu (1930–96), dean of Japanese composers, wrote scores for 100 films. In many cases, he faced the task of giving presence to an unseen, suprahuman force or being. This article deploys musical semiotics and topic theory to examine a gesture I call “distorted iconism,” in which an aural resemblance is altered so as to suggest transcendence. I analyze distorted iconism in Takemitsu’s film work, looking initially at Kwaidan, Hi-Matsuri, and Woman in the Dunes. In these films, Takemitsu needed to indicate that what we see is insufficient, and used such devices as delayed sonic cues, distorted instrumental sound, and strongly marked static music to create a sacred space in which the unseen and transcendent manifests. I use these examples to set up a close investigation of Ran, in which Takemitsu effects complex layers of meaning that both enrich and subtly contradict the director’s vision.
The signature of dissipation in the mass–size relation: are bulges simply spheroids wrapped in a disc?
Authors: Berg Trystyn A. M. , Simard Luc , Mendel Trevor J. , Ellison Sara L.
Published: February 2014

The relation between the stellar mass and size of a galaxy's structural subcomponents, such as discs and spheroids, is a powerful way to understand the processes involved in their formation. Using very large catalogues of photometric bulge+disc structural decompositions and stellar masses from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Seven, we carefully define two large subsamples of spheroids in a quantitative manner such that both samples share similar characteristics with one important exception: the ‘bulges’ are embedded in a disc and the ‘pure spheroids’ are galaxies with a single structural component. Our bulge and pure spheroid subsample sizes are 76 012 and 171 243, respectively. Above a stellar mass of ∼1010 M⊙, the mass–size relations of both subsamples are parallel to one another and are close to lines of constant surface mass density. However, the relations are offset by a factor of 1.4, which may be explained by the dominance of dissipation in their formation processes. Whereas the size–mass relation of bulges in discs is consistent with gas-rich mergers, pure spheroids appear to have been formed via a combination of ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ mergers.
Feeding biomechanics inAcanthostegaand across the fish–tetrapod transition
Authors: Neenan James M. , Ruta Marcello , Clack Jennifer A. , Rayfield Emily J.
Published: February 2014

Acanthostegais one of the earliest and most primitive limbed vertebrates. Its numerous fish-like features indicate a primarily aquatic lifestyle, yet cranial suture morphology suggests that its skull is more similar to those of terrestrial taxa. Here, we apply geometric morphometrics and two-dimensional finite-element analysis to the lower jaws ofAcanthostegaand 22 other tetrapodomorph taxa in order to quantify morphological and functional changes across the fish–tetrapod transition. The jaw ofAcanthostegais similar to that of certain tetrapodomorph fish and transitional Devonian taxa both morphologically (as indicated by its proximity to those taxa in morphospace) and functionally (as indicated by the distribution of stress values and relative magnitude of bite force). Our results suggest a slow tempo of morphological and biomechanical changes in the transition from Devonian tetrapod jaws to aquatic/semi-aquatic Carboniferous tetrapod jaws. We conclude thatAcanthostegaretained a primitively aquatic lifestyle and did not possess cranial adaptations for terrestrial feeding.
Endocranial morphology of PalaeocenePlesiadapis tricuspidensand evolution of the early primate brain
Authors: Orliac Maeva J. , Ladevèze Sandrine , Gingerich Philip D. , Lebrun Renaud , Smith Thierry
Published: February 2014

Expansion of the brain is a key feature of primate evolution. The fossil record, although incomplete, allows a partial reconstruction of changes in primate brain size and morphology through time. Palaeogene plesiadapoids, closest relatives of Euprimates (or crown-group primates), are crucial for understanding early evolution of the primate brain. However, brain morphology of this group remains poorly documented, and major questions remain regarding the initial phase of euprimate brain evolution. Micro-CT investigation of the endocranial morphology ofPlesiadapis tricuspidensfrom the Late Palaeocene of Europe—the most complete plesiadapoid cranium known—shows that plesiadapoids retained a very small and simple brain.Plesiadapishas midbrain exposure, and minimal encephalization and neocorticalization, making it comparable with that of stem rodents and lagomorphs. However,Plesiadapisshares a domed neocortex and downwardly shifted olfactory-bulb axis with Euprimates. If accepted phylogenetic relationships are correct, then this implies that the euprimate brain underwent drastic reorganization during the Palaeocene, and some changes in brain structure preceded brain size increase and neocortex expansion during evolution of the primate brain.
Distinctive convergence in Australian floral colours seen through the eyes of Australian birds
Authors: Burd Martin , Stayton C. Tristan , Shrestha Mani , Dyer Adrian G.
Published: February 2014

We used a colour-space model of avian vision to assess whether a distinctive bird pollination syndrome exists for floral colour among Australian angiosperms. We also used a novel phylogenetically based method to assess whether such a syndrome represents a significant degree of convergent evolution. About half of the 80 species in our sample that attract nectarivorous birds had floral colours in a small, isolated region of colour space characterized by an emphasis on long-wavelength reflection. The distinctiveness of this ‘red arm’ region was much greater when colours were modelled for violet-sensitive (VS) avian vision than for the ultraviolet-sensitive visual system. Honeyeaters (Meliphagidae) are the dominant avian nectarivores in Australia and have VS vision. Ancestral state reconstructions suggest that 31 lineages evolved into the red arm region, whereas simulations indicate that an average of five or six lineages and a maximum of 22 are likely to have entered in the absence of selection. Thus, significant evolutionary convergence on a distinctive floral colour syndrome for bird pollination has occurred in Australia, although only a subset of bird-pollinated taxa belongs to this syndrome. The visual system of honeyeaters has been the apparent driver of this convergence.