ADJECTIVISH INDONESIAN VERBS: A COGNITIVE SEMANTICS PERSPECTIVE

There has been a deeply rooted belief that parts of speech can be discretely categorized. It is somethingwidely accepted in linguistics. There is a tendency of taking for granted of such an academic beliefTherefore it happens from time to time without being thought critically the degree of its empirical truthThose studying linguistics will sooner or later read many linguistics text books stating that once a word hasits own category, there will be no potential of the word to have another word category. Most people learninglinguistics considered it as something necessary to occur. This linguistic phenomenon is not just taken tobe true, yet it comes to be taken as something conclusive. Factually, there are Indonesian verbs behavingadjectivishly. They are, to some extent, verbs, yet to another one, they are adjectives. It is evidenced by thefact that they have the properties of adjective. These linguistic phenomena demonstrate that there are Indonesian verbs that have stronger quality of their verbness. It means that there are Indonesian verbs thaare verbier than others. Based on the data found, Indonesian transitive verbs have higher potential to behaveadjectivishly than the Indonesian intransitive ones. A certain kind of Indonesian transitive verbs can betreated adjectivishly. This finding shows that the degree of word category discreteness, particularly verb, isnot something clear and cut. There are possibilities to emerge that word categories can, to some extent, be fuzzy. The fuzzy quality can be referred to the attributions of adjective to the Indonesian transitive verbs. Imeans that categorizing word class is not as simple as we thought before

Qualities, objects, sorts, and other treasures : gold digging in English and Arabic

In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined

Recognizing speculative language in biomedical research articles: a linguistically motivated perspective

We explore a linguistically motivated approach to the problem of recognizing speculative language (“hedging”) in biomedical research articles. We describe a method, which draws on prior linguistic work as well as existing lexical resources and extends them by introducing syntactic patterns and a simple weighting scheme to estimate the speculation level of the sentences. We show that speculative language can be recognized successfully with such an approach, discuss some shortcomings of the method and point out future research possibilities.

LELIE - An Intelligent Assistant for Improving Requirement Authoring

International audienceWhen writing or revising a set of requirements, or any technical document, it is particularly challenging to make sure that texts read easily and are unambiguous for any domain actor. Experience shows that even with several levels of proofreading and validation, most texts still contain a large number of language errors (lexical, grammatical, style, business, w.r.t. authoring recommendations), and lack of overall cohesion and coherence. LELIE [a] has been designed to track these errors and, whenever possible, to suggest corrections. LELIE has obviously an impact on the technical writer behavior: LELIE rapidly becomes an essential and user-friendly authoring companion

Learner Corpora without Error Tagging

The article explores the possibility of adopting a form-to-function perspective when annotating learner corpora in order to get deeper insights about systematic features of interlanguage. A split between forms and functions (or categories) is desirable in order to avoid the "comparative fallacy" and because – especially in basic varieties – forms may precede functions (e.g., what resembles to a "noun" might have a different function or a function may show up in unexpected forms). In the computer-aided error analysis tradition, all items produced by learners are traced to a grid of error tags which is based on the categories of the target language. Differently, we believe it is possible to record and make retrievable both words and sequence of characters independently from their functional-grammatical label in the target language. For this purpose at the University of Pavia we adapted a probabilistic POS tagger designed for L1 on L2 data. Despite the criticism that this operation can raise, we found that it is better to work with "virtual categories" rather than with errors. The article outlines the theoretical background of the project and shows some examples in which some potential of SLA-oriented (non error-based) tagging will be possibly made clearer