Menorah Review (No. 10, Spring, 1987)

Jews by Birth and Jews by Choice: Conversion in Jewish History -- Modernization Theory and Contemporary Jewish History -- The Language of Extermination -- The Predicate Theology of Judaism -- Streams of Depth -- Noah and Universalis

Unangam Tunuu

Syllabus - Practicum on Unangam Tunuu, CoLang 2016This workshop prepares the student for the 3-week practicum focusing on fieldwork on a sleeping or less accessible language using archival materials; the language we focus on (for both the workshop and practicum) is Unangam Tunuu (Eastern Aleut, ISO 6390ale). The workshop class will cover the language and cultural history, linguistic structure, the history of language documentation and description in Unangam Tunuu, and the main resources and foci of previous linguistic research. Students will be required to do the readings and to familiarize themselves with leading articles or reference books in the field, in particular with the Aleut Dictionary and Aleut Grammar by Knut Bergsland. Time permitting, we will do some group activities using these reference sources

Observe the Sons of Ulster Talking Themselves To Death (Chapter in The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability)

Excerpt: Within Irish drama of the late 20\u27h century, the use of language as a marker for lrishness begins to shift away from a focus on accents and Hiberno-English, towards a use of language that attempts to actually establish new truths: truths about relationships and alliances, truths about history, truths about memory, and especially truths about identity. Language becomes the very means of change and hope, in drama that has become concerned with the use of language not as signifier of nation but as reiteration of the stories that might be able to change through that reiteration. What is \u27true\u27 is no longer shaped by someone else\u27s language, but by the incantatory retelling and recasting of stories in versions particularized by individuals. The words themselves become a means for an imposition of identity. Language is not only the tool, but also the subject for discussion and performance. Whereas some others, including Tom Murphy, Christina Reid, and Enda Walsh, have concluded that language does indeed change at least the perception of truth, Frank McGuinness, in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), concludes that language cannot always succeed in its efforts to create a new reality. A play in which eight men try to come to terms with the events leading up to the Battle of the Somme in France during WWI, The Sons of Uifter shows us that language may be able to change personal identity, but it can never change history, desirable though that may be

John D. Feerick to Richard Poff

Letter from John D. Feerick to Representative Richard Poff, regarding language and scope of proposed amendment. Letter discusses legislative history and strategy.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/twentyfifth_amendment_correspondence/1031/thumbnail.jp

Sequential Dialogue Context Modeling for Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a key component of goal oriented dialogue systems that would parse user utterances into semantic frame representations. Traditionally SLU does not utilize the dialogue history beyond the previous system turn and contextual ambiguities are resolved by the downstream components. In this paper, we explore novel approaches for modeling dialogue context in a recurrent neural network (RNN) based language understanding system. We propose the Sequential Dialogue Encoder Network, that allows encoding context from the dialogue history in chronological order. We compare the performance of our proposed architecture with two context models, one that uses just the previous turn context and another that encodes dialogue context in a memory network, but loses the order of utterances in the dialogue history. Experiments with a multi-domain dialogue dataset demonstrate that the proposed architecture results in reduced semantic frame error rates.Comment: 8 + 2 pages, Updated 10/17: Updated typos in abstract, Updated 07/07: Updated Title, abstract and few minor change

Narrative skills in adolescents with a history of SLI in relation to non-verbal IQ scores

There is a debate about whether the language of children with primary language disorders and normal cognitive levels is qualitatively different from those with language impairments who have low or borderline non-verbal IQ (NVIQ). As children reach adolescence, this distinction may be even harder to ascertain, especially in naturalistic settings. Narrative may provide a useful, ecologically valid way in which to assess the language ability of adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) who have intact or lowered NVIQ and to determine whether there is any discernable difference in every day language. Nineteen adolescents with a history of SLI completed two narrative tasks: a story telling condition and a conversational condition. Just under half the group (n = 8) had non-verbal IQs of 85. The remaining 11 had NVIQs in the normal range or above. Four areas of narrative (productivity, syntax, cohesion and performance) were assessed. There were no differences between the groups on standardized tests of language. However, the group with low NVIQ were poorer on most aspects of narrative, suggesting that cognitive level is important, even when language is the primary disorder. The groups showed similar patterns of differences between story telling and conversational narrative. It was concluded that adolescents with a history of SLI and poor cognitive levels have poorer narrative skills than those with normal range NVIQ even though these may not be detected by standardized assessment. Their difficulties present as qualitatively similar to those with normal range NVIQ and narratives appear impoverished rather than inaccurate

Networking Phylogeny for Indo-European and Austronesian Languages

Harnessing cognitive abilities of many individuals, a language evolves upon their mutual interactions establishing a persistent social environment to which language is closely attuned. Human history is encoded in the rich sets of linguistic data by means of symmetry patterns that are not always feasibly represented by trees. Here we use the methods developed in the study of complex networks to decipher accurately symmetry records on the language phylogeny of the Indo-European and the Austronesian language families, considering, in both cases, the samples of fifty different languages. In particular, we support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin and the ‘express train’ model of Austronesian expansion from South-East Asia, with an essential role for the Batanes islands located between the Philippines and Taiwan

A survey of the PEPA tools

This paper surveys the history and the current state of tool support for modelling with the PEPA stochastic process algebra and the PEPA nets modelling language. We discuss future directions for tool support for the PEPA family of languages.