From Semantic Metrics to Semantic Fields

Author(s):  
Maksym Vakulenko
Author(s):  
Баяманова М.С.

Summary: The article deals with the analysis of the interpretational field of the basic lexical units which represent the meaning of the concept “woman” in English and Kyrgyz languages and cultures. Comparative – contrastive analytical data of the most frequently used in both languages variants of the interpretation of the concept “woman” have been given. The semantic fields of nuclear and nearnuclear meanings of the lexical units, transforming the notion of “woman” in English and Kyrgyz languages and also the place and role of these notions in cultures and philosophy of the nations on the basis of mentality and traditional values have been studied and described. The situations of the use of this or that variant of the meaning of lexical unit. A comparative study of the definitions of the word “woman’ in English and Kyrgyz languages have been given. Key words: concept, woman, interpretational field, notion, definition, semantic field, culture, language, linguoculture, transformation Аннотация: В статье рассматриваются интерпретационные поля основных лексических единиц, репрезентирующих значение концепта «женщина» в английской и кыргызской лингвокультурах. Приводятся сравнительно-сопоставительные аналитические данные наиболее употребительных в речи обоих языков вариантов интерпретации концепта «женщина». Изучены и описаны семантические поля ядерных и околоядерных значений лексических единиц, трансформирующих понятие «женщина» в английском и кыргызском языке, а также роль и место этих понятий в культурах и философии народов на основе менталитета и традиционных ценностей. Приводятся ситуации использования того или ино- го варианта значения лексической единицы, проведено сравнительное изучение определений слова «женщина» в английском и кыргызском языках. Ключевые слова: концепт, женщина, интерпретационное поле, понятие, определение, семантическое поле, культура, язык, лингвокультура, трансформация Аннотация: Макалада англис жана кыргыз тилдеринде жана маданияттарында «аял» концептинин маанисин репрезентациалаган негизги лексикалык бирдиктер каралат. «Аял» концептин эки тилдеги кѳп колдонулуучу интерпретациялоо варианттарынын аналитикалык салыштырма маалыматтары изил- делип берилген. Англис жана кыргыз тилдеринде «аял» түшүнүгүн трансформациялаган лексикалык бирдиктердин түп нуска жана ага жакындашкан маанилери иликтелип каралган. Берилген түшүнүктѳрдүн элдик философиясында жана маданиятында, менталитеттин жана салттын негизинде эл арасына кеӊири тараган, элдик тилде жана маданиятта ойногон ролу менен орду чагылдырылган. Ар түрдү ситацияларда колдонулуучу тиги же бул лексикалык бирдиктердин маанисинин варианттары каралган, «аял» деген сѳздун англис жана кыргыз тилдериндеги түшүндүрмѳлѳрү салыштырылып изилделген. Түйүндүү сѳздѳр: концепт, аял, интерпретациялоо мейкиндиги, түшүнүк, түшүндүрмѳ, семантикалык чѳйрѳ, маданият, тил, лингвомаданият, трансформациялоо


Author(s):  
Anshelika Korolkova

The article deals with the interconnection and interdependence of phraseological semantic fields of Russian study of aphorisms in synchronic and in diachronic approaches. The correlation of phraseological semantic fields of Russian study of aphorisms is considered as their interdependence due to various factors (linguistic and extra-linguistic ones). The correlation of the phraseological semantic fields of Russian study of aphorisms is manifested in the existence of many antinomies. The natural linguistic antinomies of life / death / immortality or war / peace, or good / evil, or friend / enemy, or villainy / nobility are reflected in Russian aphorisms and have entered the corresponding phraseological semantic fields. The corpus of Russian study of aphorisms containsnot only antinomic aphorisms, but also antinomic relations that extend to the level of language and speech. Therefore, in Russian study of aphorisms there are phraseological semantic fields that implement these antinomies. In addition to the antinomic phraseological semantic fields in the corpus of classical Russian study of aphorisms there are other types of correlations. The keywords (concepts) of many phraseological semantic fields are closely thematically connected. When the number of units from one field is changed, the number of units in another phraseological semantic field also changes. Most phraseological semantic fields of Russian study of aphorisms do not show a zero correlation in either synchronic or diachronic approaches. This is due to, first of all, the universality of the aphoristic theme, with all the ideological and thematic uniqueness of the sayings used by Russian writers. However, a few phraseological and semantic fields of aphorisms by Russian writers may show a negative correlation, which is due to the diversity of the thematic groups that comprise them. A positive correlation of phraseological semantic fields, the most significant in the number of their constituent components, shows deep internal linguistic systemic connections in Russian classical study of aphorisms.


Author(s):  
Olga B. Ponomareva ◽  
Valeriya I. Orlova

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the basic concepts that make up the conceptual sphere of the novel “Of Human Bondage” by W. S. Maugham. These concepts act as cognitive dominants of the linguistic consciousness of the protagonist’s linguistic personality in the work under study. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that it is performed within the framework of a new paradigm of linguistics — the cognitive linguistics, which involves the study of mental and linguistic representations of thought processes that occur during the perception of information. Moreover, the novel “Of Human Bondage” by W. S. Maugham has not attracted the attention of linguists-cognitologists previously, which adds to the novelty of this article. In addition, the present study provides a comprehensive description of the basic concepts making up the conceptual sphere of the novel. The linguistic methods of representing various concepts in the analyzed work are determined by the national, personal, cultural, and psychological aspects of Maugham’s thinking. The authors employ a communicative-cognitive methodological analysis proposed by N. S. Bolotnova involving the modeling of textual and intertextual semantic fields of artistic concepts and the analysis of the conceptual sphere of a literary text. The universal concepts RELIGION, LOVE, PASSION, THE MEANING OF LIFE, which constitute the conceptual sphere of the novel by W. S. Maugham “Of Human Bondage”, are analyzed. The main result of the study is that THE MEANING OF LIFE concept is universal, not individual, and it includes other universal concepts, such as RELIGION, LOVE, PASSION, THE MEANING OF LIFE, conceptual metaphors and metonyms, symbols, and other words-associates, which constitute the broad figurative and evaluative periphery of the conceptual sphere of the novel.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Llaurado ◽  
Maria Antònia Martí ◽  
Liliana Tolchinsky

This paper outlines the compilation of a corpus of Catalan written production. The CesCa corpus presents a picture of the Catalan written language throughout compulsory schooling. It contains two kinds of data: Vocabularies of five semantic fields comprising 242,404 lexical forms and Textual data of four different discourse genres consisting of 207,028 tokens. Both vocabularies and the textual data have been morphologically analyzed and lemmatized. The corpus is freely available. This paper will outline the main features of the corpus and make some suggestions as to the uses to which the corpus can be put.


2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen ◽  
Karin Aijmer

The study of of course presented in this article has an applied, a descriptive and a theoretical aim. Since of course proves to be very frequent in English, learners will need to know what meanings the item has and in what pragmatic contexts it is used. It has indeed been shown that some learners tend to use of course in contexts where it is felt by native speakers to be inappropriate. In order to explain such inappropriate uses we need detailed descriptions of the semantics and pragmatics of of course. From a theoretical point of view such multifunctional items raise the question of whether semantic polysemy or pragmatic polysemy is the best explanatory account. It is argued in this paper that empirical cross-linguistic work can contribute to providing answers to all three research questions. First, the study of correspondences and differences between languages with regard to the meanings and uses of pragmatic markers is a necessary step in the explanation of learner problems. Second, the bidirectional approach to equivalents, which involves going back and forth from sources to translations, enables us to show to what extent the equivalents have partially overlapping pragmatic functions. An in-depth comparison of the semantic fields in which the translation equivalents operate is the ultimate goal. Third, the translation method helps to see to what extent a core meaning account is justified. In this paper three languages are brought into the picture, viz. English, Swedish and Dutch. The cross-linguistic data have been gathered from three translation corpora, i.e. the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus, the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and the Namur Triptic Corpus.


2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Behrens

According to traditional wisdom, reciprocal predicates can only occur with plural subjects. This is assumed either because the reciprocal predicates in question are constructed by means of a reciprocal anaphor, which is considered as being inherently plural and hence requiring a plural antecedent, or, if there is no binding requirement, the following principle of argument mapping is implicitly assumed: all participants of a reciprocal situation need an overt realization by the same highest syntactic argument. Since a reciprocal relation minimally involves the existence of two participants, and since (in the languages considered so far) the highest syntactic argument is the subject, this mapping principle leads to the idea that the subjects of reciprocal predicates should be confined to plural or conjoined phrases. In this paper, I will show that this principle turns out to be unrealistically strong, once real discourse data are considered, in particular from a cross-linguistic perspective. Under certain structural and pragmatic conditions, participants of reciprocal relations may be backgrounded and also suppressed, with the result that, in the second case, they will lack an overt realization altogether. It will be argued that there is a typological correlation between the following three phenomena: discontinuous reciprocals (where one participant is backgrounded and hence realized as an oblique phrase), “true” singular subject reciprocals (where only one participant is realized overtly, while the other is suppressed), and plural subject reciprocals, admitting the interpretation that each individual among the subject’s referents participates in a reciprocal relation with some other (unknown or arbitrary) individual that is, however, suppressed, i.e. not referred to by the subject phrase or any other phrase in the sentence. I will present data from four languages: Hungarian, German, (Modern) Greek and Serbian/Croatian. In general, a cross-linguistic approach will be favored which considers differences and similarities at all relevant levels of description, e.g. discourse pragmatics, verbal aspect, lexical-semantic fields, interfering effects of ambiguity, etc. in addition to structural constraints in marking reciprocity.


Author(s):  
Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen

AbstractIn this study, we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of network science in exploring the emergence of constructional semantics from the connectedness and relationships between linguistic units. With Mandarin locative constructions (MLCs) as a case study, we extracted constructional tokens from a representative corpus, including their respective space particles (SPs) and the head nouns of the landmarks (LMs), which constitute the nodes of the network. We computed edges based on the lexical similarities of word embeddings learned from large text corpora and the SP-LM contingency from collostructional analysis. We address three issues: (1) For each LM, how prototypical is it of the meaning of the SP? (2) For each SP, how semantically cohesive are its LM exemplars? (3) What are the emerging semantic fields from the constructional network of MLCs? We address these questions by examining the quantitative properties of the network at three levels: microscopic (i.e., node centrality and local clustering coefficient), mesoscopic (i.e., community) and macroscopic properties (i.e., small-worldness and scale-free). Our network analyses bring to the foreground the importance of repeated language experiences in the shaping and entrenchment of linguistic knowledge.


Comunicar ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (44) ◽  
pp. 187-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura López-Romero ◽  
María de la Cinta Aguaded-Gómez

This work is part of an R&D project involving thirteen Spanish universities in which needs and wants in the field of media education in higher education are studied in the areas of Communication (Communication Studies, Journalism and Advertising) and Education (Teaching, Pedagogy, Psychology and Social Education). The objective of this study focuses on analysing the college textbooks directly related to Media Education most used in Education and Communication,. The report has been developed based on six educational competence dimensions: language, technology, interaction processes, production and distribution processes, ideology and values and aesthetics. Using each of these parameters the scope of the analysis and the scope of the expression were taken into account, based on guidelines set by Ferrés and Piscitelli in their well-known proposal of indicators for defining new media competence and which is structured around two areas of work: the production of own messages and interaction with others. The results were obtained by applying a quantitative methodology through a content analysis of semantic fields. The main conclusions point to a greater presence of the «Ideology and Values» dimension, and almost non-existent representation of the «Aesthetics» indicator.El presente trabajo forma parte de un proyecto I+D integrado por trece universidades españolas en el que se estudian las necesidades y carencias en materia de educación mediática en el ámbito de la enseñanza superior, tanto en las áreas de Comunicación (Comunicación Audiovisual, Periodismo y Publicidad) como de Educación (Magisterio, Pedagogía, Psicopedagogía y Educación Social). Esta investigación centra su objeto de estudio en el análisis de los manuales universitarios más utilizados en Educación y Comunicación, en asignaturas directamente relacionadas con la educación mediática. Este informe se ha desarrollado en base a seis dimensiones competenciales mediáticas: lenguajes, tecnología, procesos de interacción, procesos de producción y difusión, ideología y valores y estética. De cada uno de estos parámetros se ha tenido en cuenta el ámbito del análisis y de la expresión, partiendo de las pautas señaladas por Ferrés y Piscitelli en su conocida propuesta articulada de indicadores para definir la nueva competencia mediática, que se ha estructurado en torno a dos ámbitos de trabajo: el de la producción de mensajes propios y el de la interacción con otros ajenos. Los resultados han sido obtenidos mediante la aplicación de una metodología cuantitativa, a través de un análisis de contenido por campos semánticos. Las principales conclusiones extraídas apuntan hacia una mayor presencia de la dimensión Ideología y Valores, y una casi inexistente representación de la dimensión Estética.


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