34,795 research outputs found

    The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: a behavioral profile analysis

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    This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir (‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver (‘see’) and mirar (‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e. which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception

    SimLex-999: Evaluating Semantic Models with (Genuine) Similarity Estimation

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    We present SimLex-999, a gold standard resource for evaluating distributional semantic models that improves on existing resources in several important ways. First, in contrast to gold standards such as WordSim-353 and MEN, it explicitly quantifies similarity rather than association or relatedness, so that pairs of entities that are associated but not actually similar [Freud, psychology] have a low rating. We show that, via this focus on similarity, SimLex-999 incentivizes the development of models with a different, and arguably wider range of applications than those which reflect conceptual association. Second, SimLex-999 contains a range of concrete and abstract adjective, noun and verb pairs, together with an independent rating of concreteness and (free) association strength for each pair. This diversity enables fine-grained analyses of the performance of models on concepts of different types, and consequently greater insight into how architectures can be improved. Further, unlike existing gold standard evaluations, for which automatic approaches have reached or surpassed the inter-annotator agreement ceiling, state-of-the-art models perform well below this ceiling on SimLex-999. There is therefore plenty of scope for SimLex-999 to quantify future improvements to distributional semantic models, guiding the development of the next generation of representation-learning architectures

    Lexical typology through similarity semantics: Toward a semantic map of motion verbs

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    This paper discusses a multidimensional probabilistic semantic map of lexical motion verb stems based on data collected from parallel texts (viz. translations of the Gospel according to Mark) for 100 languages from all continents. The crosslinguistic diversity of lexical semantics in motion verbs is illustrated in detail for the domain of `go', `come', and `arrive' type contexts. It is argued that the theoretical bases underlying probabilistic semantic maps from exemplar data are the isomorphism hypothesis (given any two meanings and their corresponding forms in any particular language, more similar meanings are more likely to be expressed by the same form in any language), similarity semantics (similarity is more basic than identity), and exemplar semantics (exemplar meaning is more fundamental than abstract concepts)

    Learning by Seeing by Doing: Arithmetic Word Problems

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    Learning by doing in pursuit of real-world goals has received much attention from education researchers but has been unevenly supported by mathematics education software at the elementary level, particularly as it involves arithmetic word problems. In this article, we give examples of doing-oriented tools that might promote children\u27s ability to see significant abstract structures in mathematical situations. The reflection necessary for such seeing is motivated by activities and contexts that emphasize affective and social aspects. Natural language, as a representation already familiar to children, is key in these activities, both as a means of mathematical expression and as a link between situations and various abstract representations. These tools support children\u27s ownership of a mathematical problem and its expression; remote sharing of problems and data; software interpretation of children\u27s own word problems; play with dynamically linked representations with attention to children\u27s prior connections; and systematic problem variation based on empirically determined level of difficulty

    The emotional weight of "I love you" in multilinguals' languages

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    The present paper considers the perceived emotional weight of the phrase I love you in multilinguals’ different languages. The sample consists of 1459 adult multilinguals speaking a total of 77 different first languages. They filled out an on-line questionnaire with open and closed questions linked to language behavior and emotions. Feedback on the open question related to perceived emotional weight of the phrase I love you in the multilinguals’ different languages was recoded in three categories: it being strongest in (1) the first language (L1), (2) the first language and a foreign language, and (3) a foreign language (LX). A majority of speakers felt I love you was strongest in their L1. Participants offered various explanations for their perception. Statistical analyses revealed that the perception of weight of the phrase I love you was associated with self-perceived language dominance, context of acquisition of the L2, age of onset of learning the L2, degree of socialization in the L2, nature of the network of interlocutors in the L2, and self-perceived oral proficiency in the L2

    Towards a quantum evolutionary scheme: violating Bell's inequalities in language

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    We show the presence of genuine quantum structures in human language. The neo-Darwinian evolutionary scheme is founded on a probability structure that satisfies the Kolmogorovian axioms, and as a consequence cannot incorporate quantum-like evolutionary change. In earlier research we revealed quantum structures in processes taking place in conceptual space. We argue that the presence of quantum structures in language and the earlier detected quantum structures in conceptual change make the neo-Darwinian evolutionary scheme strictly too limited for Evolutionary Epistemology. We sketch how we believe that evolution in a more general way should be implemented in epistemology and conceptual change, but also in biology, and how this view would lead to another relation between both biology and epistemology.Comment: 20 pages, no figures, this version of the paper is equal to the foregoing. The paper has meanwhile been published in another book series than the one tentatively mentioned in the comments given with the foregoing versio

    O Auto da Compadecida - A Dog's Will: an analysis of the translation of idioms in the English subtitle

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    TCC (Graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro de Comunicação e ExpressĂŁo. Letras InglĂȘs.The objective of this study is to analyse the English subtitles of the Brazilian film O Auto da Compadecida – A Dog’s Will (Arraes, 2000) – in order to verify which strategies were used in the translation of idioms and fixed expressions. The choices of translation strategies were described based on concepts discussed within Translation Studies (TS). The results reveal that despite the technical constraints of subtitling, especially with regard to time and space, the translator managed to use strategies, albeit varied, that reproduced the idioms in the subtitles, which shows an understanding of the important role of these elements in the mood of the film. / / / Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar as legendas em lĂ­ngua inglesa do filme brasileiro O Auto da Compadecida (Arraes, 2000) a fim de verificar quais estratĂ©gias foram utilizadas na tradução de expressĂ”es idiomĂĄticas. As escolhas de estratĂ©gias de tradução foram descritas com base em conceitos discutidos no campo dos Estudos da Tradução. Os resultados revelam que apesar das limitaçÔes tĂ©cnicas da legendagem, especialmente com relação ao tempo e espaço, o tradutor conseguiu usar estratĂ©gias, embora variadas, que reproduziram as expressĂ”es idiomĂĄticas nas legendas, o que mostra uma compreensĂŁo do importante papel destes elementos no espĂ­rito do filme

    Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

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    Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellĂ€ (in front of) and jĂ€ljessĂ€ (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellĂ€ (in front of) and jĂ€ljessĂ€ (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

    Presentational/Existential Structures in Spoken versus Written German: Es Gibt and SEIN

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    This article presents a synchronic, corpus-based examination of spoken German with regard to the distribution and function of presentational/ existential es gibt NP and a range of SEIN NP structures such as da SEIN , locative SEIN , es SEIN , and zero-locative SEIN . In particular, the use of da SEIN has been neglected in previous research. While es gibt is equally frequent in the spoken and written data, SEIN structures are typical of spoken German only, with da SEIN being the most frequent. The article concentrates on clauses with indefinite NPs, while the presentation of events with da and wider da-usage in spoken German are also considered

    Distributional Sentence Entailment Using Density Matrices

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    Categorical compositional distributional model of Coecke et al. (2010) suggests a way to combine grammatical composition of the formal, type logical models with the corpus based, empirical word representations of distributional semantics. This paper contributes to the project by expanding the model to also capture entailment relations. This is achieved by extending the representations of words from points in meaning space to density operators, which are probability distributions on the subspaces of the space. A symmetric measure of similarity and an asymmetric measure of entailment is defined, where lexical entailment is measured using von Neumann entropy, the quantum variant of Kullback-Leibler divergence. Lexical entailment, combined with the composition map on word representations, provides a method to obtain entailment relations on the level of sentences. Truth theoretic and corpus-based examples are provided.Comment: 11 page
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