Immediate recall as a secondary text: Referential parameters, pragmatics and propositions

Since the process of recalling combines comprehension and speech production, it is viewed as an extremely complex though understudied linguo-cognitive phenomenon. Recalls as secondary texts or text derivatives are also considered to be a good material to explore cognitive aspects of secondary texts production, information conversion procedures and types of transformations of primary texts. The notion of ‘secondary texts’ also implies multiplicity, as an original text may be retranslated into numerous secondary texts different in quality and degree of completeness. The purpose of the study is to model the propositional secondary retold texts and to identify the specifics of the recipients’ interpretation of the main event in the text. It is aimed at discriminating the differences between the primary expository text and its 134 immediate recalls produced by 15-year old native Russian speakers. In order to reveal the specifics of the propositional content of a primary expository text and its recalls, their recipients used the following methodological operations: The description and interpretation of the semantic roles of the first and second arguments aligned to predicates on the basis of the verbs’ semantic properties; the employment of the psycholinguistic model of the utterances generation; the characteristic of memory as a complex of cognitive and mnemic processes; the definition of cognitive-semantic discourse structures; and the understanding of a proposition as a stable component of an utterance independent of the surface grammar. The comparison of the original text and its recalls with the use of innovative “denotative maps” enabled us to define successful and unsuccessful expression of propositional structures and the main idea of the original text. The classification of texts includes four groups based on the number of the reproduced propositions and types (weak or successful) of the reflection of the primary text denotative card. The authors designed and successfully implemented an innovative 11 stage- algorithm of revealing patterns of a printed text comprehension and its immediate recalls including the primary visual perception of the text, its primary interpretation, reading, encoding, reflection, preparation for an oral presentation, desobjectivation (distribution of semantic roles), interpretation, reflection, oral implementation and text. The work fills in certain gaps in the research, such as the specifics of immediate recalls production, identification of changes in propositional structures of immediate recalls, and expanding the corpus of semantic roles similar to Frame Net. The findings can be successfully applied in natural language processing and linguistic didactics

The history of corpus linguistics (on the example of the english language corpora)

© 2020 Tomsk State University. All rights reserved. The aim of the research is to review the milestones in the development of corpus linguistics and present an original classification of the main periods in formation and development of English-language corpora which includes the following four periods: (a) the “pre-electronic” period or the period of text archives which lasted for over several centuries and finished in the 1960s; (b) “the first generation” covers the period from the 1960s to the mid-1990s; (c) “the second generation” period of megacorpora corresponds to the last decade of the 20th century; (d) the third generation period of gigacorpora started in the mid-2000s. The pre-electronic corpora and concordances lacked a unified system of text collection, views on representative size, and sources of corpora. In this period, there were developed the basic principles of concordance collection, the KWIC system, lemmatization. The first generation corpora were mostly compiled for the study of certain genres and/or speech of certain groups of people. These corpora typically contained texts with a limited number of tokens, usually no more than 2,000. Among the most significant achievements of that period are The Brown Corpus and the London-Oslo-Bergen corpus, the first reference corpora, which were used for lexical and grammatical studies of “language in use”, the first concordance software (CLOC, COCOA), and the first automatic tagging software (TAGGIT). By the early 1990s, the following terms were introduced, specified and defined: “corpus linguistics”, “metatext”, “tagging”, “concordancer”, “POS-tagging”, “tokenization”, “segmentation”, “parsing”. The problem of a standardized corpus, its compilation, and tagging were addressed in the project of Text Encoding Initiative (1987). The annotation patterns of that period began requiring POS, syntactic, semantic, and other tagging. Concordances of the mid-2000s became faster and more user friendly. Representativeness in corpora was achieved by the presence of texts of spoken and written speech in various communicative events. Therefore, the referential corpora of the second generation (BNC, ANC) represent the national language with a wide range of both written and spoken genres in many territorial dialects. The size of the third generation corpora or gigacorpora (COCA, Google Books) was increased to several billion tokens, and they became dynamic. The installed software enables tracking the form, meaning, and use of words and n-grams in written and spoken texts in a number of languages covering several historical periods. Modern concordances are also tools for compilation of small subcorpora and contrasting the obtained results with those of the larger corpora (BNC, COCA)

Semantics of wainamoinen’s proper names in kalevala

© 2020, Universidad del Zulia. All rights reserved. The article presents semantic analysis of proper names of Wainamoinen, one of the major characters of the Finnish epos Kalevala. The comparative analysis revealed the following layers of information in Wainamoinen’s proper names: a transparent inner form of names (Väinämäinen/ Wainamoinen, Väinö/ Waino, Suvantolainen/ Suwantolainen, Uvantolaynen, Osmoynen, Kalevainen, Kalevalainen) of finnish origin, language and lack of transparency of Wainamoinen’s names in English, an additional connotation formed by the morphological structures of the names and a social status, dependent on the relationship of the addresser and the addressee

The structure of cross-linguistic differences: Meaning and context of ‘readability’ and its Russian equivalent ‘chitabelnost’

© 2020 National Research University Higher School of Economics. All rights reserved. The article presents the results of an original study aimed at finding (1) frequency fluctuations of the term ‘readability’ in American discourse and its Russian equivalent ‘chitabelnost’ in Russian discourse over the period from 1920s to the present; and (2) semantic similarities and differences between the English term ‘readability’ and its Russian equivalent ‘chitabelnost’ over the same period of time. A contrastive analysis of the words testified to inconsiderable differences in the semantic structures of the terms in the period under study: the term ‘readability’ has been used with the following meanings: (1) ‘the quality of being legible or decipherable’ and (2) ‘the quality of being easy or enjoyable to read’. The Russian equivalent ‘chitabelnost’ has two contemporary meanings similar to the aforementioned English meanings as well as the obsolete ‘library book checkouts’. With the help of the Google NgramViewer, we identified the 1980s frequency peak of both terms when the modern notion of the concepts was formed. The research into the topical context of readability as ‘the quality of being easy or enjoyable to read’ demonstrated empiricist tendencies in American studies focused on two types of parameters, i.e. the ‘objective’ parameters of texts, i.e. sentence length, word counts, number of high/low frequency words, ratio of high/low frequency words to total words, sentence complexity, etc. and ‘individual’ variables affecting a potential reader, such as ‘word familiarity’, cognitive and linguistic abilities, cultural and topic knowledge, etc. The Russian school’s view, until the 1970s, had traditionally been more holistic and ‘biased’ towards an individuals’ factors. The results of the study have the potential to contribute to cross-linguistic research in the area of text readability assessment, semantics, and scientific literature searches

Investigating the differences between prepared and spontaneous speech characteristics: Descriptive approach

© 2020 Lifescience Global. In the modern EFL paradigm, pre-task planning time is viewed as a norm. Pre-task planning time is one of the central concerns of teachers, test-developers, as well as researchers. Pre-task planning is planning a speech before performing a task, and it also involves rehearsal and strategic planning. The paper addresses the problem of pre-task planning advisability for A2 Russian EFL speakers. The research presented in this paper examines the structure, breakdown, repair, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity as well as the accuracy of the discourse produced by 145 Russian participants of the English language competition held in Kazan, Russia, in January 2020. The discourse analysis revealed that the pre-task time is used by A2 EFL speakers not only to focus on a dialog but also to elicit a topic text from memory, thus focusing on form rather than meaning. Hence, in A2 tests prioritizing meaning over form and measuring the ability for spontaneous speech, the one-minute pre-task planning time is viewed as questionable