7,867 research outputs found
Theoretical issues in the interpretation of Cappadocian, a not-so-dead Greek contact language
Cappadocian is a mixed Greek-Turkish dialect continuum spoken in the Turkish Central Anatolia Region until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s.
Only a few Cappadocian dialects are still spoken in present-day Greece. Since the publication of Thomason and Kaufman’s Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics in 1988, Cappadocian has attracted the attention of historical and contact linguists, because of its unique mixed character. In this paper, I will discuss a number of theoretical issues in the interpretation of the linguistic structure of Cappadocian, focusing on the following topics: (1) the status of loan phonemes and loan morphemes in contact languages, (2) the distinction between code switching and code mixing in relation to Poplack’s Free Morpheme Constraint, (3) the schizoid typology of contact languages
South Arabian and Yemeni dialects
It has traditionally been assumed that with the Islamic conquests Arabic overwhelmed the original ancient languages of the Peninsula, leaving the language situation in the south-western Arabian Peninsula as one in which dialects of Arabic are tinged, to a greater or lesser degree, with substrate features of the ancient South Arabian languages. The ancient Arab grammarians had clear ideas concerning the difference between the non-Arabic languages of the Peninsula and Arabic, including the -t feminine nominal ending in all states and -n versus the -l definite article.. Today, however, we read about ‘Arabic’ dialects that exhibit large proportions of ‘non-Arabic’ features. Here I compare phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic data from several contemporary varieties spoken within historical Yemen – within the borders of current Yemen into southern ‘Asīr – with data from Ancient South Arabian, Sabaean, and Modern South Arabian, Mehri, as spoken in the far east of Yemen. On the basis of these comparisons I suggest that Arabic may not have replaced all the ancient languages of the Peninsula, and that we may be witnessing the rediscovery of descendants of the ancient languages.
The Yemeni and ‘Asīri dialects considered are:
Yemen: Rāziḥīt, Minabbih, Xašir, San‘ani, Ġaylħabbān
‘Asīr: Rijāl Alma‛, Abha, Faif
On the analysis of non-selected datives in Maltese
This paper provides a descriptive overview of extra-argumental or non-selected datives in Maltese, poorly described in existing grammars. We outline an LFG approach to the facts we describe building on existing LFG work and in particular on Kibort (2008)?s approach to dative arguments, extending her approach to the various subclasses of non-selected dative arguments
A Machine Learning Approach For Opinion Holder Extraction In Arabic Language
Opinion mining aims at extracting useful subjective information from reliable
amounts of text. Opinion mining holder recognition is a task that has not been
considered yet in Arabic Language. This task essentially requires deep
understanding of clauses structures. Unfortunately, the lack of a robust,
publicly available, Arabic parser further complicates the research. This paper
presents a leading research for the opinion holder extraction in Arabic news
independent from any lexical parsers. We investigate constructing a
comprehensive feature set to compensate the lack of parsing structural
outcomes. The proposed feature set is tuned from English previous works coupled
with our proposed semantic field and named entities features. Our feature
analysis is based on Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and semi-supervised
pattern recognition techniques. Different research models are evaluated via
cross-validation experiments achieving 54.03 F-measure. We publicly release our
own research outcome corpus and lexicon for opinion mining community to
encourage further research
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