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

Using Yiddish: Language ideologies, verbal art, and identity among Argentine Jews

This essay focuses on the struggle among conflicting language ideologies that occurs in immigrant communities. Specifically, it analyzes verbal art performed in Spanish and Yiddish among secondgeneration Argentine Jews, the offspring of Eastern European Jews who emigrated to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the prevalence of Spanish in daily communication and the use of Hebrew as an emblematic language, Yiddish is still used in certain poetic speech forms. This analysis addresses the effects of contradictory language ideologies—hegemonic and otherwise—on the performance of verbal art and on performers’ reflections about their speech forms.Fil: Fischman, Fernando Damián. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas. Sección de Antropología Social; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Walt Whitman in Yiddish

Acknowledges that although Jews most frequently appear in Whitman\u27s writing as merely biblical, mythical, symbolic or at least idealized figures, Jews themselves have responded to Whitman quite vigorously in their poetry; discusses and examines the scores of Yiddish poets who have been inspired by Whitman, including Joseph Bovshover, Morris Rosenfeld, A. Eysen, Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, B. Alkvit-Blum, and others

Lexikos at eighteen: an analysis

At eighteen, Lexikos became a major player in the field of linguistics, by being awarded an Impact Factor. This article presents a double analysis of the foundation that led to this success. On the one hand a thorough statistical study is undertaken with regard to all contributors and their contributions to Lexikos. To this end a metadata database was designed, with the aim to answer the question: 'Who publishes what type of material from where and when?' On the other hand a content analysis is carried out which focuses on the actual topics (i.e. 'keywords') in Lexikos. To this end an all-inclusive text corpus containing all the Lexikos material was built, with the aim to answer the question: 'What are the major trends in Lexikos?

Hebrew and Typology

A typological sketch of Heberw through its different stagesUne esquisse typologique de l'Hébreu à travers ses différents stade

Translingual Identity and Art: Marc Chagall\u27s Stride Through the Gate of Janus

This hybrid piece, combining scholarly inquiry in several disciplines (from bilingualism and literary theory to visual art, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis) with the genre of personal essay, explores the concept of multilingual identity and creativity in visual art. Establishing the parallel with the phenomenon of \u27literary translingualism\u27 and exemplifying most salient identity features of several translingual writers, I coin the concept of \u27artistic translingualism.\u27 The essay is focused on multilingual life and art of an immigrant artist, Marc Chagall, and analyzes his several paintings within the framework of three translingual constructs: duality, ambivalence, and liminality. The complexity of translingual identity, and specifically Chagall\u27s, is illuminated by my personal and my family\u27s Jewish Russian roots and immigrant history, amplifying the historical and human context for understanding of exile, multilingualism, and creativity

Research in the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania

This report takes its name from the Computational Linguistics Feedback Forum (CLiFF), an informal discussion group for students and faculty. However the scope of the research covered in this report is broader than the title might suggest; this is the yearly report of the LINC Lab, the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania. It may at first be hard to see the threads that bind together the work presented here, work by faculty, graduate students and postdocs in the Computer Science and Linguistics Departments, and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. It includes prototypical Natural Language fields such as: Combinatorial Categorial Grammars, Tree Adjoining Grammars, syntactic parsing and the syntax-semantics interface; but it extends to statistical methods, plan inference, instruction understanding, intonation, causal reasoning, free word order languages, geometric reasoning, medical informatics, connectionism, and language acquisition. Naturally, this introduction cannot spell out all the connections between these abstracts; we invite you to explore them on your own. In fact, with this issue it’s easier than ever to do so: this document is accessible on the “information superhighway”. Just call up http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cliff-group/94/cliffnotes.html In addition, you can find many of the papers referenced in the CLiFF Notes on the net. Most can be obtained by following links from the authors’ abstracts in the web version of this report. The abstracts describe the researchers’ many areas of investigation, explain their shared concerns, and present some interesting work in Cognitive Science. We hope its new online format makes the CLiFF Notes a more useful and interesting guide to Computational Linguistics activity at Penn

Reflexive constructions in the world's languages

Synopsis: This landmark publication brings together 28 papers on reflexive constructions in languages from all continents, representing very diverse language types. While reflexive constructions have been discussed in the past from a variety of angles, this is the first edited volume of its kind. All the chapters are based on original data, and they are broadly comparable through a common terminological framework. The volume opens with two introductory chapters by the editors that set the stage and lay out the main comparative concepts, and it concludes with a chapter presenting generalizations on the basis of the studies of individual languages

The German Jewish Post-Holocaust Novel: Narrative and a Literary Language for Loss

This dissertation investigates how a constellation of German Jewish post-Holocaust novels confronts the paradox of recovering and recuperating lost stories of Holocaust victims. I analyze how works by Edgar Hilsenrath, Jurek Becker, and Fred Wander reveal a preoccupation with the innumerable stories and testimonies of the individuals who did not survive the Nazi Judeocide to contribute to the archive of experience. These novels gesture toward an epistemological alternative to this loss: they consider possibilities for recovering the unarchivable. These German Jewish authors employ a particular cluster of varied narrative strategies: the dialogic, linguistic and cultural elements of Eastern European Jewish culture, and a literary trope I term the almost lost story, as components of a narrative practice that allows the novels\u27 narrators--and by extension, the readers--to imagine a discursive space for this disnarrated testimony, or anti-archive. This study uncovers the extent to which post-Holocaust German Jewish literature is underpinned by a conception of Ashkenaz that encompasses both German Jewish and Eastern European Jewish culture and thought. My dissertation shows that the problems of trauma, loss, memory, and memorialization in post-1945 German Jewish fiction are above all problems of narrativity