742 research outputs found

    Patterns and Variation in English Language Discourse

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    The publication is reviewed post-conference proceedings from the international 9th Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English, held on 16–17 September 2021 and organised by the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University in Brno. The papers revolve around the themes of patterns and variation in specialised discourses (namely the media, academic, business, tourism, educational and learner discourses), effective interaction between the addressor and addressees and the current trends and development in specialised discourses. The principal methodological perspectives are the comparative approach involving discourses in English and another language, critical and corpus analysis, as well as identification of pragmatic strategies and appropriate rhetorical means. The authors of papers are researchers from the Czech Republic, Italy, Luxembourg, Serbia and Georgia

    Ditransitives in germanic languages. Synchronic and diachronic aspects

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    This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family

    Advances in automatic terminology processing: methodology and applications in focus

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    A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The information and knowledge era, in which we are living, creates challenges in many fields, and terminology is not an exception. The challenges include an exponential growth in the number of specialised documents that are available, in which terms are presented, and the number of newly introduced concepts and terms, which are already beyond our (manual) capacity. A promising solution to this ‘information overload’ would be to employ automatic or semi-automatic procedures to enable individuals and/or small groups to efficiently build high quality terminologies from their own resources which closely reflect their individual objectives and viewpoints. Automatic terminology processing (ATP) techniques have already proved to be quite reliable, and can save human time in terminology processing. However, they are not without weaknesses, one of which is that these techniques often consider terms to be independent lexical units satisfying some criteria, when terms are, in fact, integral parts of a coherent system (a terminology). This observation is supported by the discussion of the notion of terms and terminology and the review of existing approaches in ATP presented in this thesis. In order to overcome the aforementioned weakness, we propose a novel methodology in ATP which is able to extract a terminology as a whole. The proposed methodology is based on knowledge patterns automatically extracted from glossaries, which we considered to be valuable, but overlooked resources. These automatically identified knowledge patterns are used to extract terms, their relations and descriptions from corpora. The extracted information can facilitate the construction of a terminology as a coherent system. The study also aims to discuss applications of ATP, and describes an experiment in which ATP is integrated into a new NLP application: multiplechoice test item generation. The successful integration of the system shows that ATP is a viable technology, and should be exploited more by other NLP applications

    Being Friendly is Difficult. Psycholinguistic Experiments on Agentivity in Copular Constructions

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    Agentivity in copular constructions such as Sophia is being friendly, compared to its non-agentive counterpart Sophia is friendly, is a phenomenon that has received some attention in the theoretical debate but has not been widely investigated in psycholinguistics. The implications of Sophia’s voluntary control over her deliberate actions, which arise in the former sentence, seem to stem from the interplay between the subject, the verb, and the adjective. Truthfully, there is not much more to the sentence itself. In comparison, Sophia is friendly can be interpreted both as a state and as an event. Neither the predicate nor the verb in isolation can explain how agentivity comes about. Furthermore, the restrictions on the utterance’s agent are vague and flexible. Two theoretical accounts explain the agentivity effect by means of either underspecification or coercion. According to the Underspecification Account, the copula is semantically undetermined and adapts to the requirements of its lexical context as they arise. The adjectival predicate dictates the availability of the agentive interpretation. The Coercion Account postulates that the copula is lexically stative. The state interpretation of the copula-predicate combination is constructed compositionally, but the agentive reading is the result of reinterpreting the utterance as an activity. Underspecification and coercion are reflected in differing ways during processing. The former is effortless, whereas the latter elicits an increase in processing effort and a decrease in naturalness or sensicality. In a series of offline and online experiments on German copular sentences, the predictions of the Underspecification Account and the Coercion Account are put to a test. The results point to the stative nature of the copula, in line with the Coercion Account’s hypothesis. The availability of an adjective’s agentive interpretations appears to hinge on the specific circumstances. However, some degree of uncertainty remains in relation to the subtle nature of agentive coercion effects

    The German indefinite pronoun 'ein(er)'. Interpretation and discourse linking

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    This dissertation is an in depth investigation of structural, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the German indefinite pronoun 'ein(er)'. Focusing on the differentiation between an elliptic and a partitive interpretation, it illustrates the importance of investigating different types of discourse linking as well as brings together different topics and research questions, such as anaphoric reference, the structural makeup of pronouns, ellipsis, and partitivity, that previously have been mostly treated separately in the literature. The German pronoun 'ein(er)' shows a number of interesting semantic and pragmatic properties as it can be interpreted in many different ways, e.g. it can refer to an unknown human referent or to a member of a set that is present in the discourse. Importantly, some of these interpretations are anaphoric, the pronoun thus takes part in discourse linking. Taking formal considerations, semantic restrictions and discourse requirements into account, I propose a new classification of six different interpretations of the pronoun 'ein(er)': independent, impersonal, cataphoric, elliptic, partitive, and lexicalized. Importantly, I argue that there are two types of anaphoric interpretations of the indefinite pronoun 'ein(er)': a simple elliptic interpretation that is due to the ellipsis of a simple noun phrase, and a partitive interpretation which is based on a canonical partitive phrase. The dissertation furthermore presents new experimental evidence from three rating studies that concentrate on interpretational preferences in examples where 'ein(er)' is in principle ambiguous between an elliptic, a partitive, and an independent interpretation. It is shown that the different types of linking involved affect interpretational preferences and that the factor grammatical role interacts with it. The experimental data thus highlights the importance of investigating different types of discourse linking and the role of indefinite pronouns in discourse

    On the intricate relation between theory and description: A linguist’s look at The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

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    On the intricate relation between theory and description: A linguist’s look at The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

    Artificial intelligence for understanding the Hadith

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    My research aims to utilize Artificial Intelligence to model the meanings of Classical Arabic Hadith, which are the reports of the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. The goal is to find similarities and relatedness between Hadith and other religious texts, specifically the Quran. These findings can facilitate downstream tasks, such as Islamic question- answering systems, and enhance understanding of these texts to shed light on new interpretations. To achieve this goal, a well-structured Hadith corpus should be created, with the Matn (Hadith teaching) and Isnad (chain of narrators) segmented. Hence, a preliminary task is conducted to build a segmentation tool using machine learning models that automatically deconstruct the Hadith into Isnad and Matn with 92.5% accuracy. This tool is then used to create a well-structured corpus of the canonical Hadith books. After building the Hadith corpus, Matns are extracted to investigate different methods of representing their meanings. Two main methods are tested: a knowledge-based approach and a deep-learning-based approach. To apply the former, existing Islamic ontologies are enumerated, most of which are intended for the Quran. Since the Quran and the Hadith are in the same domain, the extent to which these ontologies cover the Hadith is examined using a corpus-based evaluation. Results show that the most comprehensive Quran ontology covers only 26.8% of Hadith concepts, and extending it is expensive. Therefore, the second approach is investigated by building and evaluating various deep-learning models for a binary classification task of detecting relatedness between the Hadith and the Quran. Results show that the likelihood of the current models reaching a human- level understanding of such texts remains somewhat elusive

    A distributional investigation of German verbs

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    Diese Dissertation bietet eine empirische Untersuchung deutscher Verben auf der Grundlage statistischer Beschreibungen, die aus einem großen deutschen Textkorpus gewonnen wurden. In einem kurzen Überblick ĂŒber linguistische Theorien zur lexikalischen Semantik von Verben skizziere ich die Idee, dass die Verbbedeutung wesentlich von seiner Argumentstruktur (der Anzahl und Art der Argumente, die zusammen mit dem Verb auftreten) und seiner Aspektstruktur (Eigenschaften, die den zeitlichen Ablauf des vom Verb denotierten Ereignisses bestimmen) abhĂ€ngt. Anschließend erstelle ich statistische Beschreibungen von Verben, die auf diesen beiden unterschiedlichen Bedeutungsfacetten basieren. Insbesondere untersuche ich verbale Subkategorisierung, SelektionsprĂ€ferenzen und Aspekt. Alle diese Modellierungsstrategien werden anhand einer gemeinsamen Aufgabe, der Verbklassifikation, bewertet. Ich zeige, dass im Rahmen von maschinellem Lernen erworbene Merkmale, die verbale lexikalische Aspekte erfassen, fĂŒr eine Anwendung von Vorteil sind, die Argumentstrukturen betrifft, nĂ€mlich semantische Rollenkennzeichnung. DarĂŒber hinaus zeige ich, dass Merkmale, die die verbale Argumentstruktur erfassen, bei der Aufgabe, ein Verb nach seiner Aspektklasse zu klassifizieren, gut funktionieren. Diese Ergebnisse bestĂ€tigen, dass diese beiden Facetten der Verbbedeutung auf grundsĂ€tzliche Weise zusammenhĂ€ngen.This dissertation provides an empirical investigation of German verbs conducted on the basis of statistical descriptions acquired from a large corpus of German text. In a brief overview of the linguistic theory pertaining to the lexical semantics of verbs, I outline the idea that verb meaning is composed of argument structure (the number and types of arguments that co-occur with a verb) and aspectual structure (properties describing the temporal progression of an event referenced by the verb). I then produce statistical descriptions of verbs according to these two distinct facets of meaning: In particular, I examine verbal subcategorisation, selectional preferences, and aspectual type. All three of these modelling strategies are evaluated on a common task, automatic verb classification. I demonstrate that automatically acquired features capturing verbal lexical aspect are beneficial for an application that concerns argument structure, namely semantic role labelling. Furthermore, I demonstrate that features capturing verbal argument structure perform well on the task of classifying a verb for its aspectual type. These findings suggest that these two facets of verb meaning are related in an underlying way

    Headedness and/or grammatical anarchy?

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    Synopsis: In most grammatical models, hierarchical structuring and dependencies are considered as central features of grammatical structures, an idea which is usually captured by the notion of “head” or “headedness”. While in most models, this notion is more or less taken for granted, there is still much disagreement as to the precise properties of grammatical heads and the theoretical implications that arise of these properties. Moreover, there are quite a few linguistic structures that pose considerable challenges to the notion of “headedness”. Linking to the seminal discussions led in Zwicky (1985) and Corbett, Fraser, & Mc-Glashan (1993), this volume intends to look more closely upon phenomena that are considered problematic for an analysis in terms of grammatical heads. The aim of this book is to approach the concept of “headedness” from its margins. Thus, central questions of the volume relate to the nature of heads and the distinction between headed and non-headed structures, to the process of gaining and losing head status, and to the thought-provoking question as to whether grammar theory could do without heads at all. The contributions in this volume provide new empirical findings bearing on phenomena that challenge the conception of grammatical heads and/or discuss the notion of head/headedness and its consequences for grammatical theory in a more abstract way. The collected papers view the topic from diverse theoretical perspectives (among others HPSG, Generative Syntax, Optimality Theory) and different empirical angles, covering typological and corpus-linguistic accounts, with a focus on data from German

    Headedness and/or grammatical anarchy?

    Get PDF
    In most grammatical models, hierarchical structuring and dependencies are considered as central features of grammatical structures, an idea which is usually captured by the notion of “head” or “headedness”. While in most models, this notion is more or less taken for granted, there is still much disagreement as to the precise properties of grammatical heads and the theoretical implications that arise of these properties. Moreover, there are quite a few linguistic structures that pose considerable challenges to the notion of “headedness”. Linking to the seminal discussions led in Zwicky (1985) and Corbett, Fraser, & Mc-Glashan (1993), this volume intends to look more closely upon phenomena that are considered problematic for an analysis in terms of grammatical heads. The aim of this book is to approach the concept of “headedness” from its margins. Thus, central questions of the volume relate to the nature of heads and the distinction between headed and non-headed structures, to the process of gaining and losing head status, and to the thought-provoking question as to whether grammar theory could do without heads at all. The contributions in this volume provide new empirical findings bearing on phenomena that challenge the conception of grammatical heads and/or discuss the notion of head/headedness and its consequences for grammatical theory in a more abstract way. The collected papers view the topic from diverse theoretical perspectives (among others HPSG, Generative Syntax, Optimality Theory) and different empirical angles, covering typological and corpus-linguistic accounts, with a focus on data from German
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