A note on the emotive origins of syntax

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Andreas Trotzke

Abstract In this note, I ask what (if any) linguistic means above the word level might have already been in place before our full-blown syntactic capacity involving recursive Merge has evolved. I argue that the ‘pre-Merge era’ might have been characterized by paratactic emotive utterances comparable to root small clauses in modern languages. At the end of this contribution, this new emotive perspective on so-called ‘living linguistic fossils’ is extended to the core syntactic property of displacement, which features an augmentation strategy in the form of multiple copies that is reminiscent of doubling and reduplication processes involved in conveying expressive meaning components.

This volume offers an overview of current research on grammatical number in language. The chapters Part i of the handbook present foundational notions in the study of grammatical number covering the semantic analyses of plurality, the mass–count distinction, the relationship between number and quantity expressions and the mental representation of number and individuation. The core instance of grammatical number is marking for number distinctions in nominal expressions as in English the book/the books and the chapters in Part ii, Number in the nominal domain, explore morphological, semantic, and syntactic aspects of number marking within noun phrases. The contributions examine morphological marking of number the relationship between syntax and nominal number marking, and the interactions between numeral classifiers with semantic number and number marking. They also address cases of mismatches in form and meaning with respect to number displayed by lexical plurals and collective nouns. The final chapter reviews nominal number processing from the perspective of language pathologies. While number marking on nouns has been the focus of most research on number, number distinctions can also be found in the event domain. Part iii, Number in the event domain, presents an overview of different linguistic means of expressing plurality in the event domain, covering verbal plurality marking, pluractional modifiers of the form Noun preposition Noun, frequency adjectives and dependent indefinites. Part iv provides fifteen case studies examining different aspects of grammatical number marking in a range of typologically diverse languages.


2019 ◽  
pp. 183-202
Author(s):  
Mariia Onyshchuk

The study analyzes lexemes and word combinations of colloquial style, slang and low colloquial language, performs their comparative analysis at word level, looks into the transformational patterns that the structures undergo during literary translation into English and Russian, and discusses the advantages and flaws of the applied translation strategies through suggesting adequate translation solutions. In the article, the argument is made that the translation strategies of substandard lexis reflect the interdisciplinary nature of expressive meaning and connotation which can be conveyed differently through various language levels during literary translation.


1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 5464-5472
Author(s):  
S G Holmes ◽  
M M Smith

Yeast autonomously replicating sequence (ARS) elements are composed of a conserved 11-base-pair (bp) core consensus sequence and a less well defined 3'-flanking region. We have investigated the relationship between the H4 ARS core consensus sequence and its 3'-flanking domain. The minimal sequences necessary and sufficient for function were determined by combining external 3' and 5' deletions to produce a nested set of ARS fragments. Sequences 5' of the core consensus were dispensable for function, but at least 66 bp of 3'-flanking domain DNA was required for full ARS function. The importance of the relative orientation of the core consensus element with respect to the 3'-flanking domain was tested by precisely inverting 14 bp of DNA including the core consensus sequence by oligonucleotide mutagenesis. This core inversion mutant was defective for all ARS function, showing that a fixed relative orientation of the core consensus and 3'-flanking domain is required for function. The 3'-flanking domain of the minimal functional H4 ARS fragment contains three sequences with a 9-of-11-bp match to the core consensus. The role of these near-match sequences was tested by directed mutagenesis. When all near-match sequences with an 8-of-11-bp match or better were simultaneously disrupted by point mutations, the resulting ARS construct retained full replication function. Therefore, multiple copies of a sequence closely related to the core consensus element are not required for H4 ARS function.


Author(s):  
James A. Anderson

Digital computers are “protean” in that they can become almost anything through software. Their basic design elements came from a 19th-century British tradition in logic, exemplified by Boole and Babbage. It seemed natural to have logic realized in hardware. This tradition culminated in the work of Alan Turing who proposed a universal computing machine, now called a Turing machine, based on logic. Although hardware that computes logic functions lies at the core of digital hardware, low-level practical machine operations are grouped together in “words.” Programs are based on hardware operations controlling computation at the word level. This chapter presents a detailed example of what a computer does when it actually “computes.” Because human cognition finds it hard to use such an alien device, there is a brief discussion of how programming became “humanized” with the invention of software tools like assembly language and FORTRAN.


2018 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 348-368
Author(s):  
Вадим [Vadim] Юрьевич [IUr'evich] Меликян [Melikian] ◽  
Анна [Anna] Васильевна [Vasil'evna] Меликян [Melikian]

The phenomenon of syntactic semioimplicationSemioimplicative meaning is a “derived,” secondary meaning. The typical example of a semioimplicative meaning in syntax is the use of the positive constructions in the meaning of the negative ones and vice versa (converted meaning). The semioimplicative sentence interpretation scarcely has logical limitations. Most sentences, given the right intonation, can undergo an enantiosemic conversion. The ironical negation can be hidden in practically each sentence. In this article we single out and parameterize the main conditions of such semioimplication and the kinds of language means triggering the semioimplicative mechanism. Besides, we draw attention to the ways of expressing diverse connotations organically linked with the very process of syntactic constructions semioimplication and consistently caused by it. The core of semioimplicative structures is constituted by constructions that are able to express two meanings: direct and transferred (in this case, opposite) meaning. We have termed them “symmetrical” constructions. The sentence models with one meaning opposite to the form expressing it and also the models opposite in sign but not correlated according to some morphological characteristics serve as the periphery of semioimplication (“nonsymmetrical” constructions). The models that possess any language means facilitating their reconsideration as their own opposites are called the “specialized” models in the research. The “non-specialized” models do not have such qualities. The ability to express two opposite meanings can potentially take place on different levels of the sentence model concretization: abstract (syntactic), morphological, general lexical and concrete lexical (i.e., on the level of speech model realization). Each of the types of opposition, both objective and evaluative ones, has its own means of specialization. In the sphere of enantiosemical and evaluative opposition of the sentence meaning the dominating development line of the semioimplication phenomenon is the pursuit of maximal language expressivity, on the one hand, and of monosemanticity, accuracy, and effectiveness, on the other hand. The tendency toward language means economy turns out to be weak in this case. The reason for this process consists in the desire to assign these sentences to the sphere of the expressive syntax by using them exclusively in the secondary, ironical and most expressive meaning. As a result, the nonsymmetrical (the maximally specialized) constructions are 1.5 times more numerous than the symmetrical constructions (ones with moderate specialization). We find research of this subject-matter in its functional-communicative, cognitive, discoursive and pragmatic-linguistic aspects to be to a topical and worthwhile endeavor. Zjawisko semioimplikacji składniowejZnaczenie semioimplikacyjne to znaczenie „pochodne”, wtórne. Typowym przykładem występowania znaczenia semioimplikacyjnego w składni jest używanie konstrukcji pozytywnych w znaczeniu negatywnym i vice versa (konwersja znaczenia). Semioimplikacyjna analiza zdania praktycznie nie napotyka na logiczne ograniczenia. Większość zdań, jeśli towarzyszy im odpowiednia intonacja, w określonych kontekstach może ulegać enantiosemantycznej konwersji: ironiczne zaprzeczenie może skrywać się w praktycznie każdym zdaniu. W tym artykule identyfikujemy i parametryzujemy podstawowe warunki takiej semioimplikacji oraz rodzaje środków językowych, jakie inicjują mechanizm semioimplikacyjny. Zwracamy także uwagę na sposoby wyrażenia różnorakich konotacji związanych organicznie z samym procesem semioimplikacji struktur składniowych i regularnie przez nią wywoływanych. Rdzeniem struktur semioimplikacyjnych są konstrukcje mogące wyrażać oba znaczenia: dosłowne i przenośne (tu: przeciwstawne). Określiliśmy takie konstrukcje mianem „symetrycznych”. Za peryferia zbioru konstrukcji semioimplikacyjnych (za konstrukcje „niesymetryczne”) można uznać modele zdań mających tylko jedno znaczenie, które jednak jest przeciwstawne w stosunku do wyrażającej go formy, oraz modele o przeciwnym znaku, ale nieskorelowane pod względem niektórych parametrów morfologicznych. Modele zdań dysponujące środkami językowymi ułatwiającymi zmianę ich znaczenia na przeciwstawne nazywamy „wyspecjalizowanymi”. Modele „niewyspecjalizowane” nie dysponują takiego rodzaju środkami. Zdolność wyrażania dwóch przeciwstawnych znaczeń może potencjalnie zachodzić na różnych poziomach konkretyzacji modelu: abstrakcyjnym (składniowym), morfologicznym, leksykalnym ogólnym i leksykalnym konkretnym (tzn. na poziomie językowej realizacji modelu). Każdy z typów przeciwstawności, czy to przedmiotowej czy wartościującej, dysponuje własnymi środkami specjalizacji. W sferze enantiosemicznej i wartościującej przeciwstawności znaczeń zdania dominującym kierunkiem rozwoju zjawiska semioimplikacji jest dążenie, z jednej strony, do maksymalnej wyrazistości języka, z drugiej zaś – do jego jednoznaczności, precyzji, efektywności. Tendencja do zwiększania ekonomii środków językowych okazuje się w badanym przypadku słabsza. Przyczyną tego procesu jest dążenie do trwałego przypisania takich zdań ekspresyjnej sferze składni za sprawą używania ich wyłącznie w drugim, ironicznym, a zarazem bardziej ekspresyjnym znaczeniu. W rezultacie konstrukcji niesymetrycznych (maksymalnie wyspecjalizowanych) jest w przybliżeniu 1,5 raza więcej niż konstrukcji symetrycznych (umiarkowanie wyspecjalizowanych). Uważamy za wskazane dalsze badania nad zarysowaną tu tematyką w jej aspekcie funkcjonalno-komunikacyjnym, kognitywnym, dyskursywnym i pragmalingwistycznym.


Author(s):  
Qi Zhang ◽  
Jingjie Li ◽  
Qinglin Jia ◽  
Chuyuan Wang ◽  
Jieming Zhu ◽  
...  

Nowadays, news recommendation has become a popular channel for users to access news of their interests. How to represent rich textual contents of news and precisely match users' interests and candidate news lies in the core of news recommendation. However, existing recommendation methods merely learn textual representations from in-domain news data, which limits their generalization ability to new news that are common in cold-start scenarios. Meanwhile, many of these methods represent each user by aggregating the historically browsed news into a single vector and then compute the matching score with the candidate news vector, which may lose the low-level matching signals. In this paper, we explore the use of the successful BERT pre-training technique in NLP for news recommendation and propose a BERT-based user-news matching model, called UNBERT. In contrast to existing research, our UNBERT model not only leverages the pre-trained model with rich language knowledge to enhance textual representation, but also captures multi-grained user-news matching signals at both word-level and news-level. Extensive experiments on the Microsoft News Dataset (MIND) demonstrate that our approach constantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.


1999 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-496
Author(s):  
Cheryl Eason

This volume, the third in the Studies in Bilingualism series from the European Science Foundation's research on adult immigrants' L2 acquisition, begins with the observation that we have widely accepted the idea that learners' varieties and the transitions from one variety to the next are systematic, yet we have little research that records this systematicity. This study does exactly that by following for 30 months 10 L2 learners' developing linguistic means for indicating spatial relations. Carroll reports on two Italian speakers acquiring English; Becker on four Italian speakers and a Turkish speaker acquiring German; and Giacobbe, Perdue, and Porquier on two Spanish speakers and a Moroccan Arabic speaker acquiring French. To elicit the core data, the researchers asked the learners to describe pictures and to provide stage directions for a scene they had viewed to someone who had not seen it.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-535
Author(s):  
M. Mirjalilova

At present, special attention is paid in the cognitive linguistics to the problem of linguistic units that represent different knowledge structures. Phraseological units, being one of the core linguistic means of verbalization of different knowledge structures, are ought to be analyzed thoroughly. Further to this, idiomatic expressions and proverbs are vital signals in verbalization of cultural values and national specific concepts which leads to the necessity of linguo-cultural analysis of these units. This article is aimed to analyze phraseological units with the fire component in English language according to cultural and cognitive parameters and to identify cultural values and cognitive models that are presented by these expressions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (193) ◽  
pp. 212-217
Author(s):  
Svitlana Druzhbiak ◽  
◽  
Khrystyna Kiselova ◽  

The article examines the influence of COVID-19 on the semantics dynamics of the term "crisis" in German economic terminology. The appearance of the influence of extralingual factors on the formation of the term was analyzed and the change or the appearance of a new emotional coloring in some terms was singled out. First of all, COVID-19 has made irreparable changes to a large number of existing, standardized terms. Coronavirus has acted as a powerful extra-lingual factor, changing the lexical meaning of words as quickly as we get news of new anti-coronavirus incidence records. Environment, society, live standard - these are the factors that can influence the emergence of negative or positive emotional colors. Extralinguistic factors of terminological nomination are closely correlated with the specifics of a particular field of scientific knowledge, with the conditions of its formation and development, thus participating in the formation of certain patterns and advantages in the choice of linguistic means to represent scientific concepts and to determine certain features of nominative originality. For some extralinguistic factors there is a direct connection with the traditional linguistic aspects of terminological nomination, such as, for example, the motivation of terms, methods of term formation, the specifics of term elements. The importance of one or another extralinguistic factor can be confirmed quantitatively, and this is done with the help of mathematical methods of analysis of language material. German terminology is a system built on the principles of field organization. The core of this system is terminological vocabulary, which means codified, systematized terminology. Various long-term studies of German terms have identified several features of this lexical layer. The conducted research is quite valuable in the linguistic environment. It can be classified as "non-standard", as research in this area has not yet been conducted and the topic of German economic terminology related to COVID-19 and the concept of "Crisis" remains open. A lot of work has been done to find definitions, but also a great achievement of my work is to create the own definitions based on context.


Author(s):  
Chuhan Wu ◽  
Fangzhao Wu ◽  
Mingxiao An ◽  
Jianqiang Huang ◽  
Yongfeng Huang ◽  
...  

Personalized news recommendation is very important for online news platforms to help users find interested news and improve user experience. News and user representation learning is critical for news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn these representations based on single news information, e.g., title, which may be insufficient. In this paper we propose a neural news recommendation approach which can learn informative representations of users and news by exploiting different kinds of news information. The core of our approach is a news encoder and a user encoder. In the news encoder we propose an attentive multi-view learning model to learn unified news representations from titles, bodies and topic categories by regarding them as different views of news. In addition, we apply both word-level and view-level attention mechanism to news encoder to select important words and views for learning informative news representations. In the user encoder we learn the representations of users based on their browsed news and apply attention mechanism to select informative news for user representation learning. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show our approach can effectively improve the performance of news recommendation.


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