Review: Gender shifts in the history of English. Anne Curzan.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.pp. 223 + xii.

Herbert Schendl (2001:9) defines ‘the study of ongoing changes in a language’ as one of the fundamental goals of historical linguistics. Curzan’s book, which examines the historical development of the English gender system, is a work noteworthy not only for historical linguists, but also for experts of gender and language precisely because it attains the aforementioned objective. The book not only gives a well-argued description of the development of English linguistic gender – a fact that makes it a pivotal addition to earlier theories of the field (e.g. Corbett 1991) – but it also utilises its findings to contribute to the research on contemporary gendered language

Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese

Takes a comparative, diachronic perspective on Chinese politeness and its evolution up to the present day, linking diachronic and synchronic approache

Learning language through pictures

We propose Imaginet, a model of learning visually grounded representations of language from coupled textual and visual input. The model consists of two Gated Recurrent Unit networks with shared word embeddings, and uses a multi-task objective by receiving a textual description of a scene and trying to concurrently predict its visual representation and the next word in the sentence. Mimicking an important aspect of human language learning, it acquires meaning representations for individual words from descriptions of visual scenes. Moreover, it learns to effectively use sequential structure in semantic interpretation of multi-word phrases.Comment: To appear at ACL 201

Stochastic model of hysteresis

The methods of the probability theory have been used in order to build up a new model of hysteresis. It turns out that the reversal points of the control parameter (e. g., the magnetic field) are Markov points which determine the stochastic evolution of the process. It has been shown that the branches of the hysteresis loop are converging to fixed limit curves when the number of cyclic back-and-forth variations of the control parameter between two consecutive reversal points is large enough. This convergence to limit curves gives a clear explanation of the accommodation process. The accommodated minor loops show the return-point memory property but this property is obviously absent in the case of non-accommodated minor loops which are not congruent and generally not closed. In contrast to the traditional Preisach model the reversal point susceptibilities are non-zero finite values. The stochastic model can provide a good approximation of the Raylaigh quadratic law when the external parameter varies between two sufficiently small values.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure

Funkcióváltás a szovjet katonai objektumok helyén. Barnamezős katonai területek újrahasznosítása hat magyar megyeszékhelyen.

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