Developing a Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages

National Foreign Language Resource CenterThe fluctuating fortunes of Northern Territory bilingual education programs in Australian languages and English have put at risk thousands of books developed for these programs in remote schools. In an effort to preserve such a rich cultural and linguistic heritage, the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages project is establishing an open access, online repository comprising digital versions of these materials. Using web technologies to store and access the resources makes them accessible to the communities of origin, the wider academic community, and the general public. The process of creating, populating, and implementing such an archive has posed many interesting technical, cultural and linguistic challenges, some of which are explored in this pape

A grammar of Kalamang : The Papuan language of the Karas Islands

This thesis is a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 130 people on the biggest of the Karas Islands. This grammar is based on 11 months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a corpus of more than 15 hours of spoken Kalamang recorded and transcribed between 2015 and 2019. The grammar covers a wide range of topics beyond a phonological and morphosyntactic description, including prosody, narrative styles, and information structure. More than 1000 examples illustrate the analyses, and are where possible taken from naturalistic spoken Kalamang. The descriptive approach in this grammar is informed by current linguistic theory, but is not driven by any specific school of thought. Comparison to other eastern Indonesian languages is taken into account whenever it is deemed helpful. Kalamang has several typologically interesting features, such as unpredictable stress, minimalistic give-constructions consisting of just two pronouns, aspectual markers that follow the subject, and the NP and predicate – rather than the noun and verb – as important domains of attachment.This grammar is accompanied by a an openly accessible archive of linguistic and cultural material (http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-C3E8-1@view) and a dictionary (dictionaria.clld.org/contributions/kalamang), and serves as a document of one of the world’s many endangered languages

A grammar of the Neverver language of Malakula (Vanuatu)

A grammar of the Neverver language of Malakula (Vanuatu) is a synchronic account of the endangered Neverver language spoken by the Mindu and Sakhan peoples. The description is one outcome of a larger project to document the Neverver language, and it is based on a large and varied corpus of communicative events collected from Neverver speakers residing in the villages of Limap and Lingarakh. The description includes an account of the phonological system of the language, where complex segments with prenasalisation, including bilabial and alveolar trills, contrast with plain segments. Heterogeneous and geminate sequences of consonants are permitted in the language, provided syllable onsets and codes are simple. Epenthesis can be employed to ensure that the maximal CVC syllable template is adhered to. The nominal system displays classes of common, personal, and local nouns, along with independent pronouns, and a set of pronominal-nouns. Possessive constructions suggest an earlier system based on the semantic notion of alienability; today constructions are formed by a combination of semantic and phonological properties. The nominal modifying particle is employed in one type of possessive construction, as well as in relative clauses with definite heads. Verbs are either inherently transitive or intransitive; valency increase is achieved with suffixation, while valency decrease can be achieved with reduplication. Reduplication is common in the corpus and typically serves as a marker of low transitivity. In keeping with the basic constraint on syllable structure, the reduplicative prefix has a CV(C) template. In terms of verbal morphology, Neverver is a mood-prominent language, with all verbal predicates being marked for either realis or irrealis mood. Further tense/aspect distinctions can be indicated with optional verbal morphology. The basic word order of verbal predicates is SVO, and the language is both head-initial and head-marking. A number of complex constructions have been identified in the language. Complex nuclei, including incorporated objects and nuclear serial verb constructions, contrast structurally with core serial verb constructions. Concordant mood marking characterises core serial constructions, while sentential complements display varying patterns of mood dependency. Adverbial subordination and subordinating tail-head linkage contrast with coordinate structures, including syndetic coordination and juxtaposition. A variety of inter-propositional semantic relations are expressed through these complex structures

Sociomedical interaction in English: towards virtual hospital

In the study of Medical English, encouraging medical undergraduates to reflect on the medical content of texts and genres proposed and sometimes imposed by society, as relevant to health and healthcare is an indispensable component for online student-teacher interactions. In keeping with the principles underlying CDA (critical discourse analysis), linkages and comparisons between texts belonging to different genres are explored in relation to set of thematically-related texts relating to health aspects of water and foodstuffs. The paper presents a three-tier model for the qualitative analysis of individual texts and describes their typical make-up in terms of three broad categories of social contexts: individual, community and international/institutional levels. The model of analysis lends itself to quantitative, as well as qualitative, analysis of the ratio between medical and non-medical information in health texts, leading to the prospect of automatic on-line quantification in a computer template/ platform that can guide teacher-learner interactions and comparisons of texts, thus ensuring that understanding of the forms and functions of today’s complex hybrid healthcare texts is kept on a sure footing. Hence, thanks also to the efforts of the classroom teacher, the future global doctor will be empowered to shape his or her own ethical code in way which is likely to be more objective and balanced

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available

The semantic transparency of English compound nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families

Search beyond traditional probabilistic information retrieval

"This thesis focuses on search beyond probabilistic information retrieval. Three ap- proached are proposed beyond the traditional probabilistic modelling. First, term associ- ation is deeply examined. Term association considers the term dependency using a factor analysis based model, instead of treating each term independently. Latent factors, con- sidered the same as the hidden variables of ""eliteness"" introduced by Robertson et al. to gain understanding of the relation among term occurrences and relevance, are measured by the dependencies and occurrences of term sequences and subsequences. Second, an entity-based ranking approach is proposed in an entity system named ""EntityCube"" which has been released by Microsoft for public use. A summarization page is given to summarize the entity information over multiple documents such that the truly relevant entities can be highly possibly searched from multiple documents through integrating the local relevance contributed by proximity and the global enhancer by topic model. Third, multi-source fusion sets up a meta-search engine to combine the ""knowledge"" from different sources. Meta-features, distilled as high-level categories, are deployed to diversify the baselines. Three modified fusion methods are employed, which are re- ciprocal, CombMNZ and CombSUM with three expanded versions. Through extensive experiments on the standard large-scale TREC Genomics data sets, the TREC HARD data sets and the Microsoft EntityCube Web collections, the proposed extended models beyond probabilistic information retrieval show their effectiveness and superiority.

Word Ways v.52 no.1 Complete Issue

All of the articles in this issue in one complete document