scholarly journals Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1824) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gil ◽  
Yeshayahu Shen
Keyword(s):  
National Language ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Thematic Role ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Political Complexity ◽  
Regional Language ◽  
Evolutionary Inference ◽  
Bidirectional Relations ◽  
Conceptual Hierarchies ◽  
Linguistic Structures

Metaphors, a ubiquitous feature of human language, reflect mappings from one conceptual domain onto another. Although founded on bidirectional relations of similarity, their linguistic expression is typically unidirectional, governed by conceptual hierarchies pertaining to abstractness, animacy and prototypicality. The unidirectional nature of metaphors is a product of various asymmetries characteristic of grammatical structure, in particular, those related to thematic role assignment. This paper argues that contemporary metaphor unidirectionality is the outcome of an evolutionary journey whose origin lies in an earlier bidirectionality. Invoking the Complexity Covariance Hypothesis governing the correlation of linguistic and socio-political complexity, the Evolutionary Inference Principle suggests that simpler linguistic structures are evolutionarily prior to more complex ones, and accordingly that bidirectional metaphors evolved at an earlier stage than unidirectional ones. This paper presents the results of an experiment comparing the degree of metaphor unidirectionality in two languages: Hebrew and Abui (spoken by some 16 000 people on the island of Alor in Indonesia). The results of the experiment show that metaphor unidirectionality is significantly higher in Hebrew than in Abui. Whereas Hebrew is a national language, Abui is a regional language of relatively low socio-political complexity. In accordance with the Evolutionary Inference Principle, the lower degree of metaphor unidirectionality of Abui may accordingly be reconstructed to an earlier stage in the evolution of language. The evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality in metaphors argued for here may be viewed as part of a larger package, whereby the development of grammatical complexity in various domains is driven by the incremental increases in socio-political complexity that characterize the course of human prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

scholarly journals Tense–aspect–mood marking, language-family size and the evolution of predication

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1824) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gil
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Finding ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Thematic Role ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Living Fossil ◽  
Role Assignment ◽  
Political Complexity ◽  
Evolutionary Inference ◽  
Linguistic Structures

This paper proposes a Complexity Covariance Hypothesis, whereby linguistic complexity covaries with cultural and socio-political complexity, and argues for an Evolutionary Inference Principle, in accordance with which, in domains where linguistic complexity correlates positively with cultural/socio-political complexity, simpler linguistic structures are evolutionarily prior to their more complex counterparts. Applying this methodology in a case study, the covariance of linguistic and cultural/socio-political complexity is examined by means of a cross-linguistic survey of tense–aspect–mood (TAM) marking in a worldwide sample of 868 languages. A novel empirical finding emerges: all else being equal, languages from small language families tend to have optional TAM marking, while languages from large language families are more likely to exhibit obligatory TAM marking. Since optional TAM marking is simpler than obligatory TAM marking, it can, therefore, be inferred that optional TAM marking is evolutionarily prior to obligatory TAM marking: a living fossil. In conclusion, it is argued that the presence of obligatory TAM marking, correlated with the more highly grammaticalized expression of thematic-role assignment, is a reflection of a deeper property of grammatical organization, namely, the grammaticalization of predication. Thus, it is suggested that the development of agriculture and resulting demographic expansions, resulting in the emergence of large language families, are a driving force in the evolution of predication in human language. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

scholarly journals Word and Chracter Segmentation in Devnagari and Odia Script – A Comparitive Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 377-382
Keyword(s):  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Character Segmentation ◽  
National Language ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Regional Language ◽  
Optical Character ◽  
Active Research ◽  
Active Research Area

Optical Character Recognition has been an active research area in computer science for several years. Several research works undertaken on various languages in India. In this paper an attempt has been made to find out the percentage of accuracy in word and character segmentation of Hindi (National language of India) and Odia is one of the Regional Language mostly spoken in Odisha and a few Eastern India states. A comparative article has been published under this article. 10 sets of each printed Odia and Devanagari scripts with different word limits were used in this study. The documents were scanned at 300dpi before adopting pre-processing and segmentation procedure. The result shows that the percentage of accuracy both in word and character segmentation is higher in Odia language as compared to Hindi language. One of the reasons is the use of headers line in Hindi which makes the segmentation process cumbersome. Thus, it can be concluded that the accuracy level can vary from one language to the other and from word segmentation to that of the character segmentation.

scholarly journals Language Security Problems: A Historical Survey

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Jia Hongwei
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
National Security ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Regional Language

<p align="LEFT">This paper, grounded on historical facts of</p><p align="LEFT">language policies worldwide, reviews the</p><p align="LEFT">evolution of language policies in Great Britain,</p><p align="LEFT">United States, Germany, France and Soviet</p><p align="LEFT">Union in terms of national security, analyses the</p><p align="LEFT">achievements of language security at home,</p><p align="LEFT">reconsiders the current situation of language</p><p align="LEFT">security in China, and points out the weaknesses</p><p align="LEFT">of language security problems in China: (1)</p><p align="LEFT">stressing on macro-level researches, (2) standing</p><p align="LEFT">still over literature review, (3) lack of the</p><p align="LEFT">researches based on ethnic areas and</p><p align="LEFT">cross-border regions, (4) short of the studies of</p><p align="LEFT">language security problems over internet</p><p align="LEFT">media, and (5) language security problems in</p><p align="LEFT">ethnic areas and regional language security</p><p>strategy to be done.</p>

scholarly journals Facebookland: the bizarro-linguistic world

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
Monica Bors ◽  
Anca Ignat
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Social Network Sites ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Television Commercials ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Common Parlance ◽  
Linguistic Structures ◽  
Large Category

Abstract This article investigates the dynamics of contemporary Romanian, focusing on various linguistic structures typically used on social network sites, through which the specific content and interaction strategies are being deployed in virtual communities. The article is part of a larger project devoted to the study of linguistic impoverishment (affecting both the vocabulary and the grammatical structure of the language), social networks being only one of the areas where these “uglified” linguistic structures come from: the mass-media (both print and broadcast), advertising (outdoor, indoor, television commercials), Internet forums, corporate jargon, etc. The structures under scrutiny are mostly loan translations (i.e. calques) from English, false friends, hybrid constructions and, generally, lexical and grammatical oddities (sometimes even in the source language), which, nevertheless, due to frequent use, have entered the active vocabulary of a large category of speakers and are therefore becoming pervasive in everyday conversation. The proliferation of these ‘mongrel’ structures in common parlance is also the result of their migration, on the principle of communicating vessels, to other areas of interpersonal and public communication, that of advertising in particular. Moreover, their oddity and inappropriateness are now beginning to pass unnoticed, as more and more speakers are treating them as legitimate linguistic forms, which often end up being recorded in dictionaries. Our approach combines theoretical insights with practical solutions and the pragma-linguistic perspective with the translator’s corrective input.

Deep Learning for Trilingual Character Recognition

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-58
Author(s):  
M. Yashodha ◽  
SK Niranjan ◽  
V. N. Manjunath Aradhya
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
English Language ◽  
The State ◽  
Corresponding States ◽  
National Language ◽  
Private Organizations ◽  
Regional Language ◽  
Multilingual Ocr ◽  
Regional Languages

As India is a multilingual country, in which the national language is Hindi, regional languages still exist in each of the corresponding states. In government offices, for the purpose of communication and maintenance of files and ledgers, the languages preferred are the regional languages and Hindi. As corporate offices and private organizations also exist in the country, these bodies mainly prefer the English language with the regional language in recording documents and ledgers. So, in this regard, in India a document contains multilingual texts, and there is a need of a multilingual OCR system. In this article, a trilingual OCR system is developed using deep learning for supporting English, Hindi and Kannada languages, the regional language of the state Karnataka.

scholarly journals SENTENCE AND ITS POETIC SYNTAX IN BAYATIES OF AZERBAIJAN

HOMEROS ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Gülqız Hacıbala ADILOVA
Keyword(s):  
Research Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
National Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Grammatical Structure

Bayaties attract attention with their poetic perfection reflecting the subtleties of the national language, the specific features of the phonetic, lexical and grammatical norms of the literary language of Azerbaijan. The purity of the vernacular, the richness of the vocabulary, the fluency of the grammatical structure are also clearly felt in bayaties. As the research work is also called "Sentence and its poetic syntax in bayaties of Azerbaijan", the sentences in the bayaty context will be studied directly from the linguistic poetic point of view.

scholarly journals Picard: a mal aimé among regional languages?

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
David Hornsby
Keyword(s):  
National Language ◽  
The North ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Regional Language ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Regional Languages ◽  
Status Enhancement ◽  
North And South ◽  
Official Recognition ◽  
Territorial Unity

ABSTRACTAlthough often seen as a medieval rival to French, Picard has received far less official recognition and support than more celebrated regional languages such as Breton or Occitan. A shared history and high degree of linguistic similarity with the national language appear to have engendered a perception that it is simply ‘bad French’, but for supporters such Eloy (1997) Picard remains potentiellement une vraie langue, worthy and in need of status enhancement initiatives enjoyed by other regional languages. Promotion of language status for Picard, however, is found to be fraught with practical difficulties, not least of which are a lack of territorial unity and major cultural differences between the north and south of the picardophone area. Equally importantly, the discourse of languagehood fosters notions of linguistic purity which ignore the extensive mixing of local, supralocal and national elements that has always been evident in Picard writing and speech. This in turn engenders linguistic insecurity, notably among urban working-class speakers, whose speech can all too easily be caricatured as both ‘bad French’ and ‘bad patois’, with obvious consequences for intergenerational transmission. The well-intentioned promotion of Picard as a regional language may therefore, perversely, be detrimental to the very varieties it serves.

Multilingualism and Education in South Asia: Resolving Policy/Practice Dilemmas

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 258-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suresh Canagarajah ◽  
Hina Ashraf
Keyword(s):  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
National Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Policy Practice ◽  
Regional Language

This article focuses on the multilingual educational policies in India and Pakistan in the light of challenges in implementation and everyday communicative practices. The challenges these countries face in the context of the contrasting forces of globalization and nationalism are common to those of the other communities in this region. Both India and Pakistan have adopted versions of a tripartite language formula, in which the dominant national language—Urdu in Pakistan, and Hindi in India—along with a regional language and English are to be taught in primary and secondary schools. Such a policy is aimed at accommodating diverse imperatives, such as providing access to schooling to everyone regardless of their mother tongues, developing national identity through competence in a common language, and tapping into transnational economic resources through English. However, this well-intentioned policy has generated other tensions. There are inadequate resources for teaching all three languages in all regions and social levels. Certain dominant languages enjoy more currency and upset the multilingual balance. Furthermore, as people integrate English into their repertoires in recognition of the better-paid employment opportunities and communication media associated with globalization, language practices are becoming more hybrid. To resolve such tensions between policy and practice, some scholars propose a plurilingual model indigenous to the region. Rather than compartmentalizing languages and demanding equal competencies in each of them, such a model would allow for functional competencies in complementary languages for different purposes and social domains, without neglecting mother-tongue maintenance.

The segmentation of speech and its implications for the emergence of language structure

2001 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Lyon ◽  
Bob Dickerson ◽  
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
Keyword(s):  
Building Blocks ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Linear Sequence ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
Effective Transfer ◽  
Transfer Of Information ◽  
Machine Readable ◽  
Efficient Decoding

This paper reports a phenomenon supporting the hypothesis that the emergence of structure in the evolution of language was a staged process. To develop a grammatical structure it seems necessary to first have discrete constituents which can be the building blocks of a hierarchical system. By analysing observed speech we show that the development of a linear sequence of grammatical constituents has its own advantage, before a possible next stage when constituents are integrated into a hierarchical structure. A stream of speech sounds has to be segmented to allow for breathing. This segmentation has further developed in a certain way that makes it easier for the hearer to decode than if it were not segmented, or if it were segmented in an arbitrary manner. Well known tools from Information Theory are employed to analyse the ease of decoding speech. Segmentation depends on prosodic discontinuities, such as pauses and intonation marked by tone unit boundaries. These discontinuities usually mark groups of words with some syntactic cohesion, such as phrases and clauses. We show that in a modern corpus of spoken language observed segmentation facilitates the effective transfer of information, while lack of segmentation or arbitrary segmentation imposed on a stream of words makes decoding less efficient. This supports the hypothesis that the necessary constituents of a grammatical structure may have evolved as a consequence of developments favouring more efficient decoding of a linear stream of spoken words. The source material for this investigation is taken from the prosodically marked up Machine Readable Spoken English Corpus (MARSEC).

scholarly journals Beginning and Completion of Events in the Russian and English Language Picture of the World and Features of their Perception in the National Language Consciousness

Discourse ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-127
Author(s):  
T. N. Osintseva
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
National Language ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Semantic Approach ◽  
Linguistic Representation ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
The World

Introduction. The question of the correspondence between the linguistic representation of concepts that make up the national linguistic picture of the world and the linguistic consciousness of the nation is examined on the basis of the concepts of the beginning and completion of the event. The grammatical structure of the language puts the native speaker in the framework of the concepts formed earlier and limits the choice to accessible language means.Methodology and sources. In order to determine the peculiarities of the perception of the event structure by native Russian and English speakers, as well as to establish how much the scope of concepts coincides or differs in national language pictures of the world, a comparative analysis of the dominant elements of the functional semantic fields of the beginning and completion of the event was used.Results and discussion. The analysis of linguistic means was carried out on the basis of the functional-semantic approach. Psycholinguistic analysis of linguistic consciousness was carried out on the basis of data from associative dictionaries of the Russian and English languages. The study also provides information on the structure of the event and statistical data describing the linguistic representation of the beginnings and completion in Russian and English at all levels from grammatical to syntactic.Conclusion. It was found out, that the source of semantic originality of the means of expression of beginning and end, constituting the corresponding functional semantic fields, can be not only differences in the grammatical system of the language, but also cultural-conditioned discrepancies in the scope of the concepts themselves. This means that the psycholinguistic features of concept perception in the national language consciousness have a direct impact on the choice of language means when translating or using the language as a means of communication by bilinguals.

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