Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

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 edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (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 edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (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

The emergence of noun and verb categories in the acquisition of French

This paper considers whether the child's early vocabulary shows signs of being organized into word categories. Two main kinds of evidence are looked for: 1. differential production of fillers (referred to here more neutrally as Prefixed Additional Elements); ii. relevant phonomoprhological variation for verb-words, and only in them. Results of analyses of natural speech production provided by the longitudinal studies of two French acquiring children followed between the ages of 1;3 and 2;3, show that there is a first period in which words seem to constitute one, formally undifferentiated, set. Differentiation between noun-words and verb-words appears progressively, as evidenced by the differential occurrence of PAEs in prenominal and in preverbal positions, and in the appearance of phonomorphologically relevant variations only in words that are verbs in the language. Looking at connected aspects of language, other péhenomena are observed to occur at the same time, in particular, a significant increase in the production of multiword speech, that becomes the dominant way of expression

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015)

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015) held in conjunction with the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2015) at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, on July 31st 2015. Narratives are at the heart of information sharing. Ever since people began to share their experiences, they have connected them to form narratives. The study od storytelling and the field of literary theory called narratology have developed complex frameworks and models related to various aspects of narrative such as plots structures, narrative embeddings, characters’ perspectives, reader response, point of view, narrative voice, narrative goals, and many others. These notions from narratology have been applied mainly in Artificial Intelligence and to model formal semantic approaches to narratives (e.g. Plot Units developed by Lehnert (1981)). In recent years, computational narratology has qualified as an autonomous field of study and research. Narrative has been the focus of a number of workshops and conferences (AAAI Symposia, Interactive Storytelling Conference (ICIDS), Computational Models of Narrative). Furthermore, reference annotation schemes for narratives have been proposed (NarrativeML by Mani (2013)). The workshop aimed at bringing together researchers from different communities working on representing and extracting narrative structures in news, a text genre which is highly used in NLP but which has received little attention with respect to narrative structure, representation and analysis. Currently, advances in NLP technology have made it feasible to look beyond scenario-driven, atomic extraction of events from single documents and work towards extracting story structures from multiple documents, while these documents are published over time as news streams. Policy makers, NGOs, information specialists (such as journalists and librarians) and others are increasingly in need of tools that support them in finding salient stories in large amounts of information to more effectively implement policies, monitor actions of “big players” in the society and check facts. Their tasks often revolve around reconstructing cases either with respect to specific entities (e.g. person or organizations) or events (e.g. hurricane Katrina). Storylines represent explanatory schemas that enable us to make better selections of relevant information but also projections to the future. They form a valuable potential for exploiting news data in an innovative way.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Pop culturally motivated lexical borrowing: Use of Korean in an English-majority fan forum

I denne oppgaven ser jeg på bruken av popkulturelt motiverte lånord fra koreansk i et engelsk-språklig nettsamfunn for fans av koreansk pop-musikk. Data er hentet fra subredditen /r/kpop og blir analysert kvantitativt og kvalitativt. Frekvensanalyse viser at de mest lånte ordene er slektskapsterminologi, men bruken på koreansk samsvarer ikke med bruken på engelsk. Låningen foregår på tvers av to skriftsystemer så koreansk skrevet med hangeul romaniseres for å tilpasses det latinske skriftsystemet, men følger ingen etablerte romaniseringssystemer. De romaniserte lånordene er integrert i den engelskspråklige rammen og brukes produktivt og kreativt til å produsere språklige nydannelser både som lånord og hybridkonstruksjoner. Bruken av lånord samsvarer kun delvis med bruken på koreansk og denne bruken er i flere tilfeller unik for r/kpop som en markør på gruppetilhørighet. Språklig lek, satire og sarkasme brukes for å distansere brukerne fra andre K-pop fans utenfor r/kpop. Oppgaven er ment som en utforskende studie av et kontemporært fenomen som tidligere ikke har blitt undersøkt i et lingvistisk perspektiv.Lingvistikk mastergradsoppgaveMAHF-LINGLING35

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

English-sourced direct and indirect borrowings in a new lexicon of Polish Anglicisms

In recent decades, Polish has experienced an unprecedented influx of English-sourced borrowings, both overt (loanwords) and covert (calques). This linguistic influence echoes the social, technological, environmental and ideological transformations, with these changes reflected in the Polish lexicon. The paper describes a lexicographic project aimed at updating the Słownik zapożyczeń angielskich w polszczyźnie (A Dictionary of Anglicisms in Polish) that was published in 2010. We discuss the theoretical assumptions, the content and the sources of the data for a new, corpus-based dictionary that is in the making, and illustrate the lexicographic solutions we adopted with regard to both well-established and the most recent direct and indirect Anglicisms. We also address the issue of the frequency and the usage of the latter in present-day Polish

Doing things with words across time. Snapshots of communicative practices in and from the past

Knowing our contextualized (hi)story means being able to understand ourselves and how the world works. This kind of knowledge is key to self-awareness and self-empowerment, which also have a close connection with how we use language to communicate, to develop social interactions, to build relationships, and to project our identity. The diachronic evolution of languages is therefore a crucial part of a social being’s historical situatedness. The account of this evolution, i.e. historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language as a grammatical system, investigating changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. More recently, however, scholarly attention has broadened its scope to include functional aspects of language use, such as strategies and conventions of communicative affordances over time, thus giving rise to historical pragmatics. In this special issue, the contributions encompass three main areas within historical pragmatics: language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), the development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics). In particular, the papers offer complementary insights into communicative practices, examining interactional strategies in classical languages, politeness phenomena in grammar and discourse, the evolution of discursive practices, the pragmatic use of lexemes and the teaching of sociopragmatics. Significantly, the issue presents a cross-linguistic approach, since it considers pragmatic phenomena in English, Korean, Italian, Slavonic languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, thus helping us understand how current discursive forms are in fact both unique and comparable in several languages and cultures

Neologisms in Modern English: study of word-formation processes

http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b2654513~S1*es