Neologisms in Modern English: study of word-formation processes

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

Writing Sumerian, Creating Texts: Reflections on Text-building Practices in Old Babylonian Schools

Sumerian lexical and literary compositions both emerged from the same social sphere, namely scribal education. The complexities of inter-compositional dependence in these two corpora have not been thoroughly explored, particularly as relevant to questions of text-building during the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800–1600 bce). Copying practices evident in lexical texts indicate that students and scholars adopted various methods of replication, including visual copying, copying from memory, and ad hoc innovation. They were not confined to reproducing a received text. Such practices extend to copying literary compositions. A study of compositions from Advanced Lexical Education in comparison with several literary compositions shows a complex inter-dialectic between the corpora, in which lexical compositions demonstrate dependence on literary compositions and vice versa. Thus, Old Babylonian students and scholars could experiment with multiple text-building practices, drawing on their knowledge of the lexical and the literary, regularly creating new versions of familiar compositions

Bilingual newsgroups in Catalonia: a challenge for machine translation

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of a corpus of messages written in Catalan and Spanish, which come from several informal newsgroups on the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia; henceforth, UOC) Virtual Campus. The surrounding environment is one of extensive bilingualism and contact between Spanish and Catalan. The study was carried out as part of the INTERLINGUA project conducted by the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Its main goal is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the e-mail register in the newsgroups in order to assess their implications for the creation of an online machine translation environment. The results shed empirical light on the relevance of characteristics of the e-mail register, the impact of language contact and interference, and their implications for the use of machine translation for CMC data in order to facilitate cross-linguistic communication on the Internet

Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Transfer learning is a vital technique that generalizes models trained for one setting or task to other settings or tasks. For example in speech recognition, an acoustic model trained for one language can be used to recognize speech in another language, with little or no re-training data. Transfer learning is closely related to multi-task learning (cross-lingual vs. multilingual), and is traditionally studied in the name of `model adaptation'. Recent advance in deep learning shows that transfer learning becomes much easier and more effective with high-level abstract features learned by deep models, and the `transfer' can be conducted not only between data distributions and data types, but also between model structures (e.g., shallow nets and deep nets) or even model types (e.g., Bayesian models and neural models). This review paper summarizes some recent prominent research towards this direction, particularly for speech and language processing. We also report some results from our group and highlight the potential of this very interesting research field.Comment: 13 pages, APSIPA 201

Single-word naming in a transparent alphabetic orthography.

The cognitive processes involved in single-word naming of the transparent Turkish orthography were examined in a series of nine naming experiments on adult native readers. In Experiment 1, a significant word frequency effect was observed when matched (i.e. on initial phoneme, letter length and number of syllables) high- and low-frequency words were presented for naming. However, no frequency effect was found in Experiment 2, when an equal number of matched (i.e. on initial phoneme, letter length and number of syllables) nonword fillers were mixed with the target words. A null frequency effect was also found in Experiment 3 when conditions were mixed-blocks, i.e. high- and low frequency were words presented in separate blocks mixed with an equal number of matched nonword fillers. Experiment 4 served the purpose of creating and validating nonwords (to be used in Experiments 5 and 6) that could be named as fast as high- and low-frequency words by manipulating the letter length of nonwords. A significant word frequency effect emerged with both the mixed-block design (Experiment 5) and mixed design (Experiment 6) when the nonword fillers matched the target words in speed of naming. Experiment 7, however, found no frequency effect when high- and low-frequency words were mixed with word fillers that were slower to be named (longer in length) than the target words. In Experiment 8, frequency was factorially manipulated with imageability (high vs. low) and level of skill (very skilled vs. skilled) which found significant main effects for word frequency and level of skill, and a significant 2-way interaction of skill by imageability and a significant 3-way interaction of skill by imageability by frequency. In Experiment 9, however, there was only a main effect for frequency when previously skilled readers performed on the same words used in Experiment 8. These findings suggest that whilst a lexical route dominates in naming the transparent Turkish orthography, an explanation that the readers shut down the operation of this route in the presence of nonword fillers is not entertained. Instead, the results suggest that both routes operate in naming, with the inclusion of filler stimuli and their “perceived difficulty” having an impact in the time criterion for articulation. Moreover, there are indications that a semantic route is involved in naming Turkish only when level of skill is taken into account. Implications of these findings for models of single-word naming are discussed

Effective Vocabulary Teaching Strategies For The English For Academic Purposes Esl Classroom

Vocabulary learning is an important and indispensable part of any language learning process. The author of this thesis focuses on effective vocabulary teaching strategies in the English for Academic Purposes ESL classroom. Drawing on findings obtained from observing three English for Academic Purposes ESL classrooms across the U.S.A, several current databases and his personal experience as a teacher and learner, the author discusses various effective vocabulary teaching strategies in the English for Academic Purposes classroom which could greatly assist English language learners in their journey of language acquisition and therefore expedite the language learning process

Diachronic Morphology: an Overview

A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies Joint Committee on Eastern Europe