scholarly journals Meaning change in a petri dish: constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion charts

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hilpert ◽  
Florent Perek
Keyword(s):  
Petri Dish ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Meaning Change ◽  
Space Modeling ◽  
Semantic Shift ◽  
Vector Space Modeling ◽  
The Many ◽  
Linguistic Units

AbstractThis paper explores how the visualization tool of motion charts can be used for the analysis of meaning change in linguistic constructions. In previous work, linguistic motion charts have been used to represent diachronic frequency trends and changes in the morphosyntactic behavior of linguistic units. The present paper builds on that work, but it shifts the focus to the study of semantic change. How can motion charts be used to visualize semantic change over time? In order to answer this question, we draw on semantic vector space modeling to visualize aspects of linguistic meaning. As an analogy to this approach, the title of this paper alludes to a petri dish in which the growth and development of biological microorganisms can be observed. On the basis of diachronic corpus data, we monitor developments in the semantic ecology of a construction. This allows us to observe processes such as semantic broadening, semantic narrowing, or semantic shift. We illustrate our approach on the basis of a case study that investigates the diachrony of an English construction that we call the ‘many a NOUN’ construction.

The Nonconformist Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
John Owen

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.

scholarly journals Morphological Change of Dhaka City Over a Period of 55 Years: A Case Study of Two Wards

1970 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 30-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bayes Ahmed ◽  
Muhammad Rakibul Hasan Raj ◽  
KM Maniruzzaman
Keyword(s):  
Urban Form ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Morphologic Change ◽  
Dhaka City ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Many

Dhaka City has undergone radical changes in its physical form, not only by territorial expansion, but also through internal physical transformations over the last decades. These have created entirely new kinds of fabric. With these changes, the elements of urban form have changed. Plots and open spaces have been transformed into building areas, open squares into car parks, low land and water bodies into reclaimed built-up lands etc. This research has its general interest in the morphologic change of Dhaka City. It focuses on the spatial dynamics of urban growth of Dhaka over the last 55 years from 1952-2007. In the research, the transformation of urban form has been examined through space syntax. The aim behind using this technique is to describe aspects of relationships between the morphological structure of man-made environments and social structures and events. To conduct this research, Wards 49 and 72 of Dhaka City Corporation were selected as the study areas, of which Ward 72 is an indigenous and Ward 49 is a planned type of settlement. Being a planned residential area, the syntactic measures from this morphological analysis are showing quite unchanged and high values in all phases for Ward 49 and the physical characteristics of Ward 72 (Old Dhaka) still represent the past. The syntactic values are found to be higher for Ward 72 and than Ward 49. Higher values indicate that the street network is highly connective among each other. Time affects differently the layout of cities and the architecture of buildings. Of the many human creations, street systems are among the most resistant to change. This has been emphasized in this study, thereby facilitating the comparison of urban layouts across space and time. The interpretation of history in the light of quantitative accounts, as demonstrated in this study, will be of value to urban planners and urban designers for the future planning of modern Dhaka City.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/jbip.v2i0.9554  Journal of Bangladesh Institute of Planners Vol. 2, December 2009, pp. 30-38

Logistics management in China: A case study of Haier

2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Jason C.H. Chen ◽  
Binshan Lin ◽  
Lingli Li ◽  
Patty S. Chen
Keyword(s):  
Communication Networks ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Collaborative Advantage ◽  
Logistics Systems ◽  
Business Partners ◽  
Business Operations ◽  
Global Brand ◽  
The Many ◽  
Foreign Competitors

Chinese businesses began with a weak foundation in the intense world trade environment, similar to the many other companies that grew from developing countries. How were these Chinese businesses able to compete with foreign competitors armed with strong capital structures and efficient communication networks? Haier is an excellent example of how Chinese companies have successfully adapted to and prospered in the global economy, using information technology as a strategic weapon to improve its competitive advantage and further to create collaborative advantage. Haier's growth is miraculous: in less than two decades, it grew from a state-owned refrigerator factory into an innovative international giant. The company has become China's first global brand and the fifth largest appliance seller in the world. What are the secrets of Haier's success? Many researchers have conducted extensive studies on Haier's management and found the key is Management Information Systems such as e-Commerce and logistics systems that improve business operations between its suppliers, customers, and business partners. This article recounts the journey of Haier's achievements to excellence through its MIS, and provides analyses of the company's business model, the market chain management model.

scholarly journals William James and the Sustainable Transformation of Values, with a Case Study for Rethinking the American Dream

Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Croce
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
American Dream ◽  
William James ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Virus Spread ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Many

AbstractThis article addresses the call of the Psychology of Global Crises conference for linkage of academic work with social issues in three parts: First, examples from conference participants with their mix of bold calls for social transformation and realization of limits, a combination that generated few clear paths to achieving them. Second, presentation of Jamesian practical idealism with psychological insights for moving past impediments blocking implementation of ideals. And third, a case study of impacts from the most recent prominent crisis, the global pandemic of 2020, which threatens to exacerbate the many crises that had already been plaguing recent history. The tentacles of COVID’s impact into so many problems, starting with economic impacts from virus spread, present an opportunity to rethink the hope for constant economic growth, often expressed as the American Dream, an outlook that has driven so many of the problems surging toward crises. Jamesian awareness of the construction of ideological differences and encouragement of listening to those in disagreement provide not political solutions, but psychological preludes toward improvements in the face of crises.

scholarly journals Fieldwork on epistemic authority markers: What we can learn from different types of data

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Grzech
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Epistemic Modality ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Data Collection And Analysis ◽  
The Right To Know ◽  
Cognitive Study ◽  
The Right

AbstractEpistemicity in language encompasses various kinds of constructions and expressions that have to do with knowledge-related aspects of linguistic meaning (cf. Grzech, Karolina, Eva Schultze-Berndt and Henrik Bergqvist. 2020c. Knowing in interaction: an introduction. Folia Linguistica [this issue]). It includes some well-established categories, such as evidentiality and epistemic modality (Boye, Kasper. 2012. Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton), but also categories that have been less well described to-date. In this paper, I focus on one such category: the marking of epistemic authority, i.e. the encoding of “the right to know or claim” (Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada & Jakob Steensig. 2011b. Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In Stivers et al. 2011a). I explore how the marking of epistemic authority can be documented and analysed in the context of linguistic fieldwork. The discussion is based on a case study of Upper Napo Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon that exhibits a rich paradigm of epistemic discourse markers, encoding meanings related to epistemic authority and distribution of knowledge between discourse participants. I describe and appraise the methodology for epistemic fieldwork used in the Upper Napo Kichwa documentation and description project. I give a detailed account of the different tools and methods of data collection, showing their strengths and weaknesses. I also discuss the decisions made at the different stages of the project and their implications for data collection and analysis. In discussing these issues, I extrapolate from the case study, proposing practical solutions for fieldwork-based research on epistemic markers.

Words, constructions and corpora: Network representations of constructional semantics for Mandarin space particles

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen
Keyword(s):  
Clustering Coefficient ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Scale Free ◽  
Network Analyses ◽  
Semantic Fields ◽  
Text Corpora ◽  
Quantitative Properties ◽  
Local Clustering Coefficient ◽  
Linguistic Units

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.

Jeremiah and Inner Biblical Exegesis

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-308
Author(s):  
Dalit Rom-Shiloni
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
Prophetic Literature ◽  
Literary Evolution ◽  
The Many

Bringing inner biblical exegesis as a methodology to the study of Jeremiah has opened venues to discuss Jeremiah in two quite separate spheres: The book and its literary evolution, as well as the prophetic activity in its early oral-written stages. This chapter is aimed at presenting the great benefits and the many pitfalls that these cross-lines (of methodology and Jeremiah) provide for the study of the prophetic book, and not least, for the basic methodological presumptions of inner biblical exegesis as part of the study of intertextuality in prophetic literature. Focusing on interpretive (i.e., adaptation/actualization) techniques within the plethora of intertextual relationships, this chapter takes the utilization of pentateuchal traditions (rarely, texts) in Jeremiah as a case study, and calls to question some of the basic scholarly assumptions concerning Jeremiah: the differences of style (poetry and prose) and the options to differentiate the prophet from his followers/tradents/editors.

scholarly journals The local church as a non-governmental organisation in the fight against poverty: A historical overview of Bethulie 1933–1935

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Van der Merwe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Local Church ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
Organisation And Administration ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

Poverty is one of the greatest threats to society. In South Africa it is also one of the biggest challenges. This article starts with the challenges put to society by Mr Trevor Manuel at the Carnegie 3 conference. It then explores the possibility of if and how the church can act as a non-governmental organisation in the fight against poverty. A historical overview of the actions of Rev. E.P. Groenewald, during the drought of 1933–1934 in the Dutch Reformed Church Bethulie, serves as a case study of how the church can make a difference. It, however, also illustrates the many pitfalls on this challenging road. The article comes to the conclusion that the main challenge of the church in the fight against poverty is to act as a non-governmental organisation, which transforms values and assists society with good organisation and administration.

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