Uncertainty in deliberate lexical interventions

Language managers in their different forms (language planners, terminologists, professional neologists …) have long tried to intervene in the lexical usage of speakers, with various degrees of success: Some of their lexical items (partly) penetrate language use, others do not. Based on electronic networks of practice of the Esperanto speech community, Mélanie Maradan establishes the foundation for a new method to extract speakers’ opinions on lexical items from text corpora. The method is intended as a tool for language managers to detect and explore in context the reasons why speakers might accept or reject lexical items. Mélanie Maradan holds a master’s degree in translation and terminology from the University of Geneva/Switzerland as well as a joint doctoral degree in multilingual information processing and philosophy (Dr. phil.) from the universities of Geneva and Hildesheim/Germany. Her research interests include planned languages (Esperanto studies) as well as neology and corpus linguistics. She works as a professional translator and terminologist in Switzerland

Uncertainty in deliberate lexical interventions

Language managers in their different forms (language planners, terminologists, professional neologists …) have long tried to intervene in the lexical usage of speakers, with various degrees of success: Some of their lexical items (partly) penetrate language use, others do not. Based on electronic networks of practice of the Esperanto speech community, Mélanie Maradan establishes the foundation for a new method to extract speakers’ opinions on lexical items from text corpora. The method is intended as a tool for language managers to detect and explore in context the reasons why speakers might accept or reject lexical items. Mélanie Maradan holds a master’s degree in translation and terminology from the University of Geneva/Switzerland as well as a joint doctoral degree in multilingual information processing and philosophy (Dr. phil.) from the universities of Geneva and Hildesheim/Germany. Her research interests include planned languages (Esperanto studies) as well as neology and corpus linguistics. She works as a professional translator and terminologist in Switzerland

Proceedings

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2011 Workshop Constraint Grammar Applications. Editors: Eckhard Bick, Kristin Hagen, Kaili Müürisep, Trond Trosterud. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 14 (2011), vi+69 pp. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/19231

To Flip or Not to Flip?: Individual Cognitive Differences and L2 Russian Acquisition of Verbal Morphology in a Flipped Classroom

The Elementary Russian curriculum at UVM is a flipped classroom, a relatively new approach to communicative language teaching, in which explicit grammar and vocabulary work is conducted at home and class time is reserved for communication between peers and the instructor. In this thesis, we measured the interactions between teaching methodology, learner cognitive capacity, and language proficiency in the acquisition of Russian as a second language (L2). As a means to investigate proficiency, we tested students’ knowledge of the complex Russian conjugation pattern for present tense. Participants completed cognitive tests measuring working memory (WM) capacity, attention, multi-tasking capacity, and fluid intelligence. These variables were correlated with the proficiency results, which revealed significant relationships between WM and attention capacity. In the present study, WM and attention predict a learner’s performance in the production of Russian verbal morphology

A phonological study on English loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

The general opinion about the way English borrowings enter Mandarin is that English words are preferably integrated into Mandarin via calquing, which includes a special case called Phonetic-Semantic Matching (PSM) (Zuckermann 2004), meaning words being phonetically assimilated and semantically transferred at the same time. The reason for that is that Mandarin is written in Chinese characters, which each has a single-syllable pronunciation and a self-contained meaning, and the meaning achieved by the selection of characters may match the original English words. There are some cases which are agreed by many scholars to be PSM. However, as this study demonstrates, the semantics of the borrowing and the original word do not really match, the relation considered to be “artificial” by Novotná (1967). This study analyses a corpus of 600 established English loanwords in Mandarin to test the hypothesis that semantic matching is not a significant factor in the loanword adaptation process because there is no semantic relation between the borrowed words and the characters used to record them. To measure the phonological similarity between the English input and the Mandarin output, one of the models in adult second language perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1995a), is used as the framework to judge the phonemic matching between the English word and the adapted Mandarin outcome. The meanings of the characters used in recording the loanwords are referred in The Dictionary of Modern Chinese to see whether there are cases of semantic matching. The phonotactic adaptation of illicit sound sequences is also analysed in Optimality Theory (McCarthy 2002) to give an account of phonetic-phonological analysis of the adaptation process. Thus, the percentage of Phono-Semantic Matching is obtained in the corpus. As the corpus investigation shows, the loanwords that can match up both the phonological and the semantic quality of the original words are very few. The most commonly acknowledged phono-semantic matching cases are only phonetic loanwords. In conclusion, this paper argues that the semantic resource of Chinese writing system is not used as a major factor in the integration of loanwords. Borrowing between languages with different writing systems is not much different than borrowing between languages with same writing system or without a writing system. Though Chinese writing system interferes with the borrowing, it is the linguistic factors that determine the borrowing process and results. Chinese characters are, by a large proportion, conventional graphic signs with a phonetic value being the more significant factor in loanword integration process

Towards a linguistic worldview for artificial languages

Wydział NeofilologiiCelem rozprawy była ocena możliwości zastosowania teorii oraz badań empirycznych formułowanych w ramach metodologii tzw. Lubelskiej Szkoły Etnolingwistycznej do lingwistycznej analizy języków sztucznych oraz zaprezentowanie ograniczeń wynikających z takiego podejścia. W części końcowej rozprawy zostały sformułowane następujące wnioski z badań: 1. Języki sztuczne nie stanowią jednolitej grupy, a ich różnorodne cechy wymuszają różne perspektywy przy próbie zastosowania paradygmatu lubelskiego. 2. Obalony został binarny podział na języki sztuczne i naturalne; zaproponowana została skala naturalności/sztuczności. 3. Językiem, który może w ramach Lubelskiej Szkoły Etnolingwistycznej być traktowany jako naturalny jest bez wątpienia esperanto. 4. Wszelkie badania języków sztucznych w ramach paradygmatu lubelskiego wymagają uwzględnienia transferu z innych języków znanych respondentom a także wpływów kulturowych. Wykazano również istnienie JOS typowego dla esperanta i konsekwentnie prezentowanego w następujących obszarach: • koncepty kulturowe związane z Ruchem; • stereotyp esperantysty.The main objective of the present dissertation was to evaluate the applicability of the theory and practice developed within the methodological framework of the so-called Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin to the linguistic analysis of artificial languages and to present the limitations of such an approach. The following research conclusions were formulated: 1. Artificial languages are not a homogeneous group, and their various characteristics necessitate different perspectives in the application of the Lublin paradigm. 2. The binary division between artificial and natural languages is disproved; a scale of naturalness/artificiality is proposed. 3. The language which may be treated as natural within the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin is undoubtedly Esperanto. 4. Any study of artificial languages within this paradigm needs to take into account a transfer from other languages known to the respondents as well as cultural influences. The existence of a linguistic worldview typical of Esperanto and presented consistently in the following areas was proved: • cultural concepts related to the Movement • stereotype of an Esperantis