Linguistic attitudes based on cognitive, affective and behavioral components in respect to Andalusian linguistic variation of Moroccan university students

The present paper aims to study cognitive, behavioral and affective components of attitudes toward Andalusian linguistic modality in learning contexts from 105 Moroccan university students of Spanish as a foreign language. The studied variables were the morphological and syntactic components of the Andalusian linguistic modality and attitudes toward usual linguistic habits according to different communicative situations. Results indicated instruments of the study have the corresponding psychometric properties according to the sample. Results showed morphological and syntactic components are related to attitudes toward different communicative situations of the Andalusian linguistic modality with a higher level of prediction upon standard and informal communicative situations. Regarding demographic variables such as gender did not show significant differences toward grammatical knowledge of Andalusian linguistic modality. However, gender variable showed significant differences toward its usage in a standard context. The study opens new paths of research about attitudes toward both Andalusian linguistic modality and Spanish language according to a dual condition of heritage and foreign language due to multilingual contexts of learning and their difficulties

A Pragmatic Analysis of the Pedagogical Implications of the Use of English Epistemic Modality Written Literary Discourse

This is a pragmatic study of the use of the items of epistemic modality in a literary discourse with the main aims to identify, analyze and describe the ways the items of epistemic modality are used. Their contextual meanings, functions, and implication to the pedagogical attempts are also unfolded. The results of the interpretative and descriptive analysis reveal that the items of epistemic modality are found to be very dominant which also suggests that the genre of narrative fiction is linguistically characterized by the utterances that are established on the basis of knowledge and reasoning. The items of epistemic modality are found to be polysemous and polyfunctional which are reflected pragmatically in the forms of politeness, negotiative and constructive functions. All these lead to the acknowledgement that the use of the items of linguistic modality in literary discourse and their usage for language teaching in the applied linguistic contexts is worth conducting

Linguistic modality and female identity in Chaucer’s "Clerk’s Tale"

While exploring the situated nature of conceptual knowledge, the paper investigates the linguistic construction of identity relative to the language user’s sociocultural situatedness, which is regarded as a derivative of the continuity of language and culture. In this functionally-oriented study, we examine how the situatedness of the language user affects their expression of the selves, which in the article we construe in terms of social roles performed by men and women in a specific cultural community. Importantly, we claim that, although the data are historical in nature, they nevertheless help us address the problem of the elusive nature of human identity, a theme recurring in the linguistic study of subjectivity. We seek to explore the general question of experiential motivation behind the frequency patterns of linguistic usage. We illustrate the issue by referring to the historical data taken from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. The poet’s use of selected modal verbs is contextualized in relation to the late medieval community of his present. We account for the poet’s usage of shul, mot- (in the sense ‘must’), o(u)ght(e), as well as mouen ‘may’, and willen, indicating the need for a more nuanced approach to the way in which the key modal notions of NECESSITY/OBLIGATION are applied in the study of linguistic modality. We thus advocate the adoption of a situated view of the abstract concepts. Furthermore, we argue that the usage patterns concerning the frequency with which the selected modal verbs are used in specific contexts of Chaucer’s narrative might be indicative of the ways in which the identity of a community member was negotiated in the late medieval society of the poet’s present. In conclusion, we indicate the challenges to present-day pragmatic research into the linguistic construction of identity. Specifically, the emphasis is laid on how findings from recent research into situated and social cognition can inform a pragmatic investigation of linguistic subjectivity

Linguistic modality affects the creation of structure and iconicity in signals

Different linguistic modalities (speech or sign) offer different levels at which signals can iconically represent the world. One hypothesis argues that this iconicity has an effect on how linguistic structure emerges. However, exactly how and why these effects might come about is in need of empirical investigation. In this contribution, we present a signal creation experiment in which both the signalling space and the meaning space are manipulated so that different levels and types of iconicity are available between the signals and meanings. Signals are produced using an infrared sensor that detects the hand position of participants to generate auditory feedback. We find evidence that iconicity may be maladaptive for the discrimination of created signals. Further, we implemented Hidden Markov Models to characterise the structure within signals, which was also used to inform a metric for iconicity

Data Poisoning Attacks Against Multimodal Encoders

Traditional machine learning (ML) models usually rely on large-scale labeled datasets to achieve strong performance. However, such labeled datasets are often challenging and expensive to obtain. Also, the predefined categories limit the model's ability to generalize to other visual concepts as additional labeled data is required. On the contrary, the newly emerged multimodal model, which contains both visual and linguistic modalities, learns the concept of images from the raw text. It is a promising way to solve the above problems as it can use easy-to-collect image-text pairs to construct the training dataset and the raw texts contain almost unlimited categories according to their semantics. However, learning from a large-scale unlabeled dataset also exposes the model to the risk of potential poisoning attacks, whereby the adversary aims to perturb the model's training dataset to trigger malicious behaviors in it. Previous work mainly focuses on the visual modality. In this paper, we instead focus on answering two questions: (1) Is the linguistic modality also vulnerable to poisoning attacks? and (2) Which modality is most vulnerable? To answer the two questions, we conduct three types of poisoning attacks against CLIP, the most representative multimodal contrastive learning framework. Extensive evaluations on different datasets and model architectures show that all three attacks can perform well on the linguistic modality with only a relatively low poisoning rate and limited epochs. Also, we observe that the poisoning effect differs between different modalities, i.e., with lower MinRank in the visual modality and with higher Hit@K when K is small in the linguistic modality. To mitigate the attacks, we propose both pre-training and post-training defenses. We empirically show that both defenses can significantly reduce the attack performance while preserving the model's utility

Hungarian books on linguistics

Introducing the following Hungarian books on linguistics: László Cseresnyési: Nyelvek és stratégiák, avagy a nyelv antropológiája [Languages and strategies, or, the anthropology of language]. Tinta Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 2004; Ferenc Kiefer: Lehetőség és szükségszerűség: Tanulmányok a nyelvi modalitás köréből [Possibility and necessity: Papers on linguistic modality]. Tinta Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 2005; Christopher Piñón - Péter Siptár (eds): Approaches to Hungarian, Volume Nine: Papers from the Düsseldorf Conference. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2005