Psycholinguistic Experiment and Linguistic Intuition 1

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-188
Author(s):  
Virginia Valian
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra T. Bayanova ◽  

Introduction. Color terms constitute a most archaic lexical stratum of any language. Being characterized by vivid ethnocultural specifics, those serve as important elements to the linguistic view of the world. Goals. The paper seeks to analyze semantic features of the Kalmyk color term улан ‘red’ and its German translation equivalents. Materials and Methods. The work explores Kalmyk folktales recorded by the Finnish scholar G. J. Ramstedt during his 1903 scientific expedition to the Kalmyk Steppe. The analysis of the color term comprises both general research methods and specifically linguoculturological ones, such as linguoculturological and conceptual insights into folklore texts. Results. Impacts of color in world perception of the Kalmyks — just as for any other nation — are diverse enough. The folktale texts recorded by G. J. Ramstedt contain a total of five shades of the color, the lexeme улан ‘red’ being largely characterized by positive semantics. German translation variants are not always complete semantic equivalents of the color term which results from that color denoting lexemes — and those of red in particular — are integral to a certain ethnic worldview, this leading to some ambivalence of the color under study. Conclusions. The lexeme улан ‘red’ in its first nominative meaning denotes a color of an object, e.g., red proper, scarlet, ruddy, etc. In the Kalmyk language, it also serves to denote the prototypic color of blood and is often used to describe animal coat colors. The Finnish scholar employed different German translation means. In most cases, the selection of translation equivalents depends on the translator’s associative/visual thinking and perception of the world, as well as on lexical, semantic and morphological patterns of Kalmyk and German. Folklore texts are structured specifically, and a translator needs utmost attention and linguistic intuition to avoid any inaccuracies when communicating a color paradigm from the original text. The challenge be tackled by a translator of color terms in a folklore text is that he/she is supposed to bear both the linguocultures examined.


2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Toutanova ◽  
Aria Haghighi ◽  
Christopher D. Manning

We present a model for semantic role labeling that effectively captures the linguistic intuition that a semantic argument frame is a joint structure, with strong dependencies among the arguments. We show how to incorporate these strong dependencies in a statistical joint model with a rich set of features over multiple argument phrases. The proposed model substantially outperforms a similar state-of-the-art local model that does not include dependencies among different arguments. We evaluate the gains from incorporating this joint information on the Propbank corpus, when using correct syntactic parse trees as input, and when using automatically derived parse trees. The gains amount to 24.1% error reduction on all arguments and 36.8% on core arguments for gold-standard parse trees on Propbank. For automatic parse trees, the error reductions are 8.3% and 10.3% on all and core arguments, respectively. We also present results on the CoNLL 2005 shared task data set. Additionally, we explore considering multiple syntactic analyses to cope with parser noise and uncertainty.


1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 209-218
Author(s):  
Henk Ruessink

After a selection from the remarks made by students about their preferen-ces towards writing in the I-mode, the YOU-mode or the ONE-mode, I propose two hypotheses: 1. There is a certain connection between the degree of self-experience and self-responsibility (primary existence) and the choice to speak or write in the I-, YOU- or ΟΝΕ-mode, but apparently it also holds that the choice of one of those modes restricts or elaborates the space a person has to express himself. More generally stated: There is a certain interaction between the way of existence of a speaker or writer and the way of self-denomination in his utterances. 2. There is a certain connection between the degree to which a speaker or writer a) has knowledge about himself and wants to be responsible for his feelings, thoughts and acts; b) guards or unveils his intimacy towards a hearer or reader; c) wants to be involved in or responsible for a process or activity outside his body; and the way he denominates himself or the outside process or activity in his utterances. I give some examples of ways of linguistic alienation, and propose an arrangement of the degrees of alienation in the same way as is done in language for local distances: HERE THERE YONDER SOMEWHERE NOWHERE I I, as a.. YOU ONE NONE (self) (increasing self-separation) (self-ignoring) (self-eliminating) I expect that children with a very sensitive linguistic intuition, draw conclusions about the reliability of adults from the way they use alienation codes; that human beings are or become strangers to one another, or are more attached as friends and lovers by using alienation codes or direct human language; that relational, social and economic victims advertise themselves as potential victims by the way they use alienation codes and do not recognize their potential oppressors by the way they use alienation codes. The main field of linguistic study as human linguistics lies in making clear what the differences are between direct human language and alienation codes.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Chen ◽  
Jiansheng Guo

The place of Mandarin Chinese in Talmy’s two-way typology of motion expressions has been a focus of debate. Based primarily on linguistic intuition, some researchers consider Mandarin a Satellite-framed language, and some others consider it a Verb-framed language. This paper reports results from analyses of three different types of data from speakers’ actual language use in narrative discourse (one from elicited adults’ spoken narratives, one from written narratives in nine contemporary novels, and one from elicited children’s spoken narratives from ages 3 to 9) that suggest otherwise. Specifically, Mandarin shows a unique discourse style that matches neither Satellite-framed nor Verb-framed languages. The data provide evidence for categorizing Mandarin Chinese as the third language type: an equipollently-framed language. It is argued that examination of language use in discourse can provide insights for solving nutty problems that may not be resolved by merely looking at static linguistic structures.


Author(s):  
Tetiana Yefymenko ◽  
◽  
Viktoria Maistrenko ◽  

The purpose of the paper is to identify linguistic abilities to master foreign languages in students-translators. This research was conducted based on the methods and methodology of observation, comparison, analysis, functional and descriptive methods. In order to solve this problem, the achievements of linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, methods of teaching foreign languages were analyzed, as the study of the phenomenon of linguistics ability is based on them. Linguistic ability includes some specific abilities such as foreign language ability, language guessing, language intuition and communication skills. The result is the formation of a linguistic personality, in particular, the bilingual personality of the translator in a dialogue that has the ability and skills to use the language in all its manifestations in different situations of intercultural communication; the ability to understand and assimilate someone else's way of life and behavior in order to break ingrained stereotypes; skills to expand the individual picture of the world by involving in the "language picture of the world" speakers of the studied language. Value/originality. The development of language abilities is possible on the basis of individualization, differentiation of the learning process and increasing motivation for learning a language. It is necessary to clarify that the presence of communication skills, linguistic intuition and ability to languages is absolutely not enough for a full-fledged foreign language communication, and even more so for characterizing a secondary linguistic personality, in fact, its development is the leading goal of teaching a foreign language for translation students. Linguistic giftedness and ability for languages are only a prerequisite for the formation of intercultural competence and the development of a secondary linguistic personality.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-54
Author(s):  
Richard Sproat ◽  
Alexander Gutkin

Abstract Taxonomies of writing systems since Gelb (1952) have classified systems based on what the written symbols represent: if they represent words or morphemes, they are logographic; if syllables, syllabic; if segments, alphabetic; etc. Sproat (2000) and Rogers (2005) broke with tradition by splitting the logographic and phonographic aspects into two dimensions, with logography being graded rather than a categorical distinction. A system could be syllabic, and highly logographic; or alphabetic, and mostly non-logographic. This accords better with how writing systems actually work, but neither author proposed a method for measuring logography. In this article we propose a novel measure of the degree of logography that uses an attention based sequence-to-sequence model trained to predict the spelling of a token from its pronunciation in context. In an ideal phonographic system, the model should need to attend to only the current token in order to compute how to spell it, and this would show in the attention matrix activations. In contrast, with a logographic system, where a given pronunciation might correspond to several different spellings, the model would need to attend to a broader context. The ratio of the activation outside the token and the total activation forms the basis of our measure. We compare this with a simple lexical measure, and an entropic measure, as well as several other neural models, and argue that on balance our attention-based measure accords best with intuition about how logographic various systems are. Our work provides the first quantifiable measure of the notion of logography that accords with linguistic intuition and, we argue, provides better insight into what this notion means.


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