Relating Language to Other Cognitive Systems: An Abridged Account

An important research direction in cognitive science consists of cross-comparing the forms of organization exhibited by different cognitive systems, with the long-range aim of ascertaining the overall character of human cognitive organization.  Relatively distinct major cognitive systems of this sort would seem to include: (different modalities of) perception, motor control, affect, reasoning, language, and cultural structure.  The general finding is that some properties of organization are shown by only one system, some by several, and some by all.  This arrangement is called the "overlapping systems model of cognitive organization".  This paper demonstrates the model by comparing properties of organization across language and vision. Language is first shown to represent certain features of cognitive organization not well realized in vision, such as the representation of "reality status", with such member notions as factual, conditional, potential, and counterfactual.  In turn, vision is shown to represent certain features of organization not well realized in language, such as symmetry, rotation, dilation, and pattern of distribution.  Finally, both language and vision are shown to represent certain features of organization in common, such as the schematization of spatial relations between objects

Path to Realization: A Typology of Event Conflation

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 480-51

Children's verbalizations of motion events in German

Recent studies in language acquisition have paid much attention to linguistic diversity and have begun to show that language properties may have an impact on how children construct and organize their representations. With respect to motion events, Talmy (2000) has proposed a typological distinction between satellite-framed (S) languages that encode PATH in satellites, leaving the verb root free for the expression of MANNER, and verb-framed (V) languages that encode PATH in the verb, requiring MANNER to be expressed in the periphery of the sentence. This distinction has lead to the hypothesis (Slobin 1996) that MANNER should be more salient for children learning S-languages, who should have no difficulty combining it with PATH, as compared to those learning V-languages. This hypothesis was tested in a corpus elicited from German children and adults who had to verbalize short animated cartoons showing motion events, and the results are compared with previous analyses of French and English corpora elicited in an identical situation (Hickmann et al. 2009). As predicted, and as previously found for English, German children from three years on systematically express both MANNER (in the verb root) and PATH (in particles), in sharp contrast to French children, who rarely package MANNER and PATH together. These results suggest that, when they are engaged in communication, children construct spatial representations in accordance with the particular properties of their mother tongue. Future research is necessary to determine the extent to which cross-linguistic differences in production may reflect deeper differences in the allocation of attention and in conceptual organization

Spatial structuring in spoken and signed language

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Children's verbalizations of motion events in German

Recent studies in language acquisition have paid much attention to linguistic diversity and have begun to show that language properties may have an impact on how children construct and organize their representations. With respect to motion events, Talmy (2000) has proposed a typological distinction between satellite-framed (S) languages that encode PATH in satellites, leaving the verb root free for the expression of MANNER, and verb-framed (V) languages that encode PATH in the verb, requiring MANNER to be expressed in the periphery of the sentence. This distinction has lead to the hypothesis (Slobin 1996) that MANNER should be more salient for children learning S-languages, who should have no difficulty combining it with PATH, as compared to those learning V-languages. This hypothesis was tested in a corpus elicited from German children and adults who had to verbalize short animated cartoons showing motion events, and the results are compared with previous analyses of French and English corpora elicited in an identical situation (Hickmann et al. 2009). As predicted, and as previously found for English, German children from three years on systematically express both MANNER (in the verb root) and PATH (in particles), in sharp contrast to French children, who rarely package MANNER and PATH together. These results suggest that, when they are engaged in communication, children construct spatial representations in accordance with the particular properties of their mother tongue. Future research is necessary to determine the extent to which cross-linguistic differences in production may reflect deeper differences in the allocation of attention and in conceptual organization

Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: insights for the next generation in automatic plagiarism detection

[EN] Although paraphrasing is the linguistic mechanism underlying many plagiarism cases, little attention has been paid to its analysis in the framework of automatic plagiarism detection. Therefore, state-of-the-art plagiarism detectors find it difficult to detect cases of paraphrase plagiarism. In this article, we analyze the relationship between paraphrasing and plagiarism, paying special attention to which paraphrase phenomena underlie acts of plagiarism and which of them are detected by plagiarism detection systems. With this aim in mind, we created the P4P corpus, a new resource that uses a paraphrase typology to annotate a subset of the PAN-PC-10 corpus for automatic plagiarism detection. The results of the Second International Competition on Plagiarism Detection were analyzed in the light of this annotation.The presented experiments show that (i) more complex paraphrase phenomena and a high density of paraphrase mechanisms make plagiarism detection more difficult, (ii) lexical substitutions are the paraphrase mechanisms used the most when plagiarizing, and (iii) paraphrase mechanisms tend to shorten the plagiarized text. For the first time, the paraphrase mechanisms behind plagiarism have been analyzed, providing critical insights for the improvement of automatic plagiarism detection systems.We would like to thank the people who participated in the annotation of the P4P corpus, Horacio Rodriguez for his helpful advice as experienced researcher, and the reviewers of this contribution for their valuable comments to improve this article. This research work was partially carried out during the tenure of an ERCIM "Alain Bensoussan" Fellowship Programme. The research leading to these results received funding from the EU FP7 Programme 2007-2013 (grant no. 246016), the MICINN projects TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0 and TEXT-KNOWLEDGE 2.0 (TIN2009-13391), the EC WIQ-EI IRSES project (grant no. 269180), and the FP7 Marie Curie People Programme. The research work of A. Barron-Cedeno and M. Vila was financed by the CONACyT-Mexico 192021 grant and the MECD-Spain FPU AP2008-02185 grant, respectively. The research work of A. Barron-Cedeno was partially done in the framework of his Ph.D. at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Vila, M.; Martí, MA.; Rosso, P. (2013). Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: insights for the next generation in automatic plagiarism detection. Computational Linguistics. 39(4):917-947. https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00153S917947394Barzilay, Regina. 2003. Information Fusion for Multidocument Summarization: Paraphrasing and Generation. Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, New York.Barzilay, R., & Lee, L. (2003). Learning to paraphrase. Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology - NAACL ’03. doi:10.3115/1073445.1073448Barzilay, Regina and Kathleen R. McKeown. 2001. Extracting paraphrases from a parallel corpus. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2001), pages 50–57, Toulouse.Barzilay, R., McKeown, K. R., & Elhadad, M. (1999). Information fusion in the context of multi-document summarization. Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics -. doi:10.3115/1034678.1034760Bhagat, Rahul. 2009. Learning Paraphrases from Text. Ph.D. thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.Cheung, Mei Ling Lisa. 2009. Merging Corpus Linguistics and Collaborative Knowledge Construction. Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, Birmingham.Cohn, T., Callison-Burch, C., & Lapata, M. (2008). Constructing Corpora for the Development and Evaluation of Paraphrase Systems. Computational Linguistics, 34(4), 597-614. doi:10.1162/coli.08-003-r1-07-044Dras, Mark. 1999. Tree Adjoining Grammar and the Reluctant Paraphrasing of Text. Ph.D. thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.Faigley, L., & Witte, S. (1981). Analyzing Revision. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 400. doi:10.2307/356602Fujita, Atsushi. 2005. Automatic Generation of Syntactically Well-formed and Semantically Appropriate Paraphrases. Ph.D. thesis, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara.Grozea, C., & Popescu, M. (2010). Who’s the Thief? Automatic Detection of the Direction of Plagiarism. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 700-710. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-12116-6_59GÜLICH, E. (2003). Conversational Techniques Used in Transferring Knowledge between Medical Experts and Non-experts. Discourse Studies, 5(2), 235-263. doi:10.1177/1461445603005002005Harris, Z. S. (1957). Co-Occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic Structure. Language, 33(3), 283. doi:10.2307/411155KETCHEN Jr., D. J., & SHOOK, C. L. (1996). THE APPLICATION OF CLUSTER ANALYSIS IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT RESEARCH: AN ANALYSIS AND CRITIQUE. Strategic Management Journal, 17(6), 441-458. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-0266(199606)17:63.0.co;2-gMcCarthy, D., & Navigli, R. (2009). The English lexical substitution task. Language Resources and Evaluation, 43(2), 139-159. doi:10.1007/s10579-009-9084-1Recasens, M., & Vila, M. (2010). On Paraphrase and Coreference. Computational Linguistics, 36(4), 639-647. doi:10.1162/coli_a_00014Shimohata, Mitsuo. 2004. Acquiring Paraphrases from Corpora and Its Application to Machine Translation. Ph.D. thesis, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara.Stein, B., Potthast, M., Rosso, P., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stamatatos, E., & Koppel, M. (2011). Fourth international workshop on uncovering plagiarism, authorship, and social software misuse. ACM SIGIR Forum, 45(1), 45. doi:10.1145/1988852.198886

Discourse and religion in educational practice

Despite the existence of long-held binaries between secular and sacred, private and public spaces, school and religious literacies in many contemporary societies, the significance of religion and its relationship to education and society more broadly has become increasingly topical. Yet, it is only recently that the investigation of the nexus of discourse and religion in educational practice has started to receive some scholarly attention. In this chapter, religion is understood as a cultural practice, historically situated and embedded in specific local and global contexts. This view of religion stresses the social alongside the subjective or experiential dimensions. It explores how through active participation and apprenticeship in culturally appropriate practices and behaviors often mediated intergenerationally and the mobilisation of linguistic and other semiotic resources but also affective, social and material resources, membership in religious communities is constructed and affirmed. The chapter reviews research strands that have explored different aspects of discourse and religion in educational practice as a growing interdisciplinary field. Research strands have examined the place and purpose of religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular in English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes and the interplay of religion and teaching and learning in a wide range of religious and increasingly secular educational contexts. They provide useful insights for scholars of discourse studies to issues of identity, socialisation, pedagogy and language policy