Stanislav Lem on the philosophy of language: recovery from fragments of phrases

This article examines some of S. Lem’s statements about his philosophical and worldview positions regarding the mysterious nature of language and the linguistic sign, the connection between language, mind and reality. The main goal of the paper is to understand what texts on the philosophy of language the Polish thinker read and what attitude he has formed towards them. Lem is the follower of an analytical intellectual culture that focuses on the naturalistic worldview and the consequences of the “linguistic turn” in Western philosophy. For Lem, language is not only an interesting philosophical object, but also a complex precise instrument of his own creative thinking. In this regard, the philosophy of language for a writer cannot be based only on logical-linguistic atomistic methodology. Lem seeks (and finds) in his contemporary interdisciplinary methods ways to combine realistic and anti-realist positions. Many concepts, such as “the effect of semantic transparency”, “polymorphic language model”, “variation model” are quite correlated with modern theories of language and require additional philosophical comments.

L2 competence in Chinese correlative connectives: A case of discontinuous discursive formulaic sequences

This study explored second language (L2) competence in discontinuous discursive formulaic sequences, namely Chinese correlative connectives (CCCs; e.g. yīnwèi . . . suǒyǐ ‘because . . . so’), in relation to the determinants of formulaic sequence acquisition by scrutinizing L2 Chinese learners’ performance on two controlled tasks. Mixed-effects modeling showed that frequency exerted both positive and negative effects on the task performance of L2 learners on CCCs. Contingency (i.e. the co-occurrence of two constituent connectives) posed a tremendous challenge to the use of obligatory CCCs by L2 learners. In contrast, semantic transparency and first language congruency had a positive effect. The effects of these determinants on L2 performance were qualified by their interactions in different categories of CCCs. The results also indicated that learners were sensitive to frequency and contingency determinants at both construction and constituent word levels. This study enriches our understanding of L2 competence in formulaic language and provides unique insights into L2 learners’ knowledge of CCCs.

Cognition of Graphical Notation for Processing Data in ERDAS IMAGINE

This article presents an evaluation of the ERDAS IMAGINE Spatial Model Editor from the perspective of effective cognition. Workflow models designed in Spatial Model Editor are used for the automatic processing of remote sensing data. The process steps are designed as a chain of operations in the workflow model. The functionalities of the Spatial Model Editor and the visual vocabulary are both important for users. The cognitive quality of the visual vocabulary increases the comprehension of workflows during creation and utilization. The visual vocabulary influences the user’s exploitation of workflow models. The complex Physics of Notations theory was applied to the visual vocabulary on ERDAS IMAGINE Spatial Model Editor. The results were supplemented and verified using the eye-tracking method. The evaluation of user gaze and the movement of the eyes above workflow models brought real insight into the user’s cognition of the model. The main findings are that ERDAS Spatial Model Editor mostly fulfils the requirements for effective cognition of visual vocabulary. Namely, the semantic transparency and dual coding of symbols are very high, according to the Physics of Notations theory. The semantic transparency and perceptual discriminability of the symbols are verified through eye-tracking. The eye-tracking results show that the curved connector lines adversely affect the velocity of reading and produce errors. The application of the Physics of Notations theory and the eye-tracking method provides a useful evaluation of graphical notation as well as recommendations for the user design of workflow models in their practice.

Grounding semantic transparency in context

We present the results of a large-scale corpus-based comparison of two German event nominalization patterns: deverbal nouns in -ung (e.g., die Evaluierung, ‘the evaluation’) and nominal infinitives (e.g., das Evaluieren, ‘the evaluating’). Among the many available event nominalization patterns for German, we selected these two because they are both highly productive and challenging from the semantic point of view. Both patterns are known to keep a tight relation with the event denoted by the base verb, but with different nuances. Our study targets a better understanding of the differences in their semantic import.The key notion of our comparison is that of semantic transparency, and we propose a usage-based characterization of the relationship between derived nominals and their bases. Using methods from distributional semantics, we bring to bear two concrete measures of transparency which highlight different nuances: the first one, cosine, detects nominalizations which are semantically similar to their bases; the second one, distributional inclusion, detects nominalizations which are used in a subset of the contexts of the base verb. We find that only the inclusion measure helps in characterizing the difference between the two types of nominalizations, in relation with the traditionally considered variable of relative frequency (Hay, 2001). Finally, the distributional analysis allows us to frame our comparison in the broader coordinates of the inflection vs. derivation cline.

A technique for evaluating and improving the semantic transparency of modeling language notations

The notation of a modeling language is of paramount importance for its efficient use and the correct comprehension of created models. A graphical notation, especially for domain-specific modeling languages, should therefore be aligned to the knowledge, beliefs, and expectations of the targeted model users. One quality attributed to notations is their semantic transparency, indicating the extent to which a notation intuitively suggests its meaning to untrained users. Method engineers should thus aim at semantic transparency for realizing intuitively understandable notations. However, notation design is often treated poorly—if at all—in method engineering methodologies. This paper proposes a technique that, based on iterative evaluation and improvement tasks, steers the notation toward semantic transparency. The approach can be efficiently applied to arbitrary modeling languages and allows easy integration into existing modeling language engineering methodologies. We show the feasibility of the technique by reporting on two cycles of Action Design Research including the evaluation and improvement of the semantic transparency of the Process-Goal Alignment modeling language notation. An empirical evaluation comparing the new notation against the initial one shows the effectiveness of the technique.

Is “New Culture” a Proper Translation of Xin wenhua?

For several decades, we have been witnessing a profound renewal in our understanding of the “New Culture Movement”. However, the aptness of “new culture” as a proper translation for xin wenhua 新文化 has almost never been discussed. The present paper argues that uniformly translating xin as “new” and wenhua as “culture” tends to blur the picture instead of making it clearer, for by so doing one unconsciously endorses the narrative of radical Chinese intellectuals while silencing other voices. Furthermore, the article puts forward the idea that terms such as wenhua 文化 encompassed a “multiplicity of potential readings” that have much to do with the transformation of Chinese language at the beginning of the 20th century, and with the emergence of a new conceptual repertoire. In their attempts to appropriate xin wenhua and turn it into a seemingly coherent movement with an agenda, Chinese intellectuals were fighting a war over the topic of “civilization/culture”, but also, and perhaps primarily education. Yet, by employing the term “culture” in academic writing today, we tend to produce a historical dissonance for their use of this term is not our own: we thus fall into the trap of semantic transparency, and forget that the concept of “culture” has a problematic history in both China and the West. By questioning the use of wenhua with regard to the May Fourth Movement, I provide evidence that the accepted translation of culture can be problematic if one does not clearly spell out the meaning located behind it, as the Chinese wenhua often did not mean “Chinese culture” in our modern, all too modern, anthropological sense.

Comparison of motivation of the Russian and Chinese terms (based on the material of linguistic terminology)

One of the paramount peculiarities of the Chinese terms is their sinicization. Sinicization of the term is often viewed a translation and adaptation of foreign language terms to the specifics of Chinese language. This implies that the new word is being rooted in the Chinese “soil” and subsequently recognized as Chinese native. The subject of this research is the peculiarities of Chinese and Russian linguistic terminology. The goal is to compare the motivation of Chinese and Russian linguistic terminology and determine the influencing factors. The research material was collected from the Dacihai Dictionary and the Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary, and consists of more than 6,000 terminological units. The article employs the methods of description, comparison, and continuous sampling. The scientific novelty lies in determination of the factors that influence the motivation of Chinese linguistic terminology, as well as in its comparison with Russian linguistic terminology. The conclusion is made that Chinese terms have stronger motivation than Russian terms. On the one hand, Chinese characters are the ideograms that convey the thought in a motivational form, and offer more opportunities for increasing semantic transparency. On the other hand, the syllabic characteristics of Chinese language limit the possibility of transliteration of foreign words. With the exception of proper names, the Chinese terminology features a very few transliterated or partially transliterated terms.