Dative radial category in Old Church Slavonic and Modern Russian

In this paper, the semantic roles expressed by the Dative case in Modern Russian and Old Church Slavonic are described in terms of radial categories. The corpus data shows that the radial category of the Dative case has changed since Old Church Slavonic. The radial category in Modern Russian is smaller, and it includes fewer subcategories than attested in Old Church Slavonic. The change of the category prototype could explain the changes in the category of the Dative case. Recipient is postulated to be the prototype of the Dative case category in Modern Russian, while Direction appeared to be the best prototype for Old Church Slavonic data.

A longer shortlist increases the consideration of female candidates in male-dominant domains

Making it onto the shortlist is often a crucial early step toward professional advancement. For underrepresented candidates, one barrier to making the shortlist is the prevalence of informal recruitment practices (e.g., colleague recommendations). The current research investigates informal shortlists generated in male-dominant domains (e.g., technology executives) and tests a theory-driven intervention to increase the consideration of female candidates. Across ten studies (N = 5,741) we asked individuals to generate an informal shortlist of candidates for a male-dominant role and then asked them to extend the list. We consistently found more female candidates in the extended (versus initial) list. This longer shortlist effect occurs because continued response generation promotes divergence from the category prototype (e.g., male technology executives). Studies 3-4 supported this mechanism and Study 5 tested the effect of shortlist length on selection decisions. This longer shortlist intervention is a low-cost and simple way to support gender equity efforts.

Coatsandbrasandjeans– andclothes, too: lexical contrast between hyperonyms and hyponyms

A special case of lexical contrast involves contrasting a hyperonym and a hyponym (as inclothes and socks), leading to the narrowing of the hyperonym's sense. However, not all hyperonym/hyponym pairs are amenable to contrast (e.g.?animals and cats). While category prototype structure forms a strong motivating and constraining factor for hyperonym/hyponym contrast (e.g. Lehrer 1990), what is lacking in previous work is a systematic consideration of the co-hyponyms in real language use. To that end, data from the GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013) were used to investigate which terms for items of clothing (e.g.coat,bra,jeans) can be contrasted with their hyperonym (eitherclothesorclothing). While marginal members of theitem of clothingcategory (e.g.belt,hat) have a stronger potential for contrasting with the hyperonym, even prototypical hyponyms (e.g.shirt,jeans) contrasted withclothes/clothingin at least some contexts. Language users can therefore manipulate category boundaries to meet their discourse needs, exploiting a range of dimensions of difference to create contrast. Many clothing terms were also found to contrast more readily withclothesthan withclothing, suggesting that the meaning ofclothesis generally narrower than that of its near-synonymclothing.

The Modulating Influence of Category Size on the Classification of Exception Patterns

Generalization gradients to exception patterns and the category prototype were investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants first learned categories of large size that contained a single exception pattern, followed by a transfer test containing new instances that had a manipulated similarity relationship to the exception or a nonexception training pattern as well as distortions of the prototype. The results demonstrated transfer gradients tracked the prototype category rather than the feedback category of the exception category. In Experiment 2, transfer performance was investigated for categories varying in size (5, 10, 20), partially crossed with the number of exception patterns (1, 2, 4). Here, the generalization gradients tracked the feedback category of the training instance when category size was small but tracked the prototype category when category size was large. The benefits of increased category size still emerged, even with proportionality of exception patterns held constant. These, and other outcomes, were consistent with a mixed model of classification, in which exemplar influences were dominant with small-sized categories and/or high error rates, and prototype influences were dominant with larger sized categories.