The National Specificity of the Proverbial Fund: Basic Concepts and Procedure for Determining

The article presents an attempt to define the basic concepts and proposes a methodology for identifying the national specificity of the proverbial fund of a given language in the synchronic plan. In modern linguistics, more and more attention is paid to the study of interlingual specificity / generality of proverbs, both in the theoretical (typological, language and cultural), and in the applied (linguodidactic, lexicographic) terms. However, in linguistics there is no special methodological apparatus for establishing and describing the national specificity of proverbs. The aim of the research is to develop and test the basic concepts and methodology for identifying the national specificity of the proverbial fund of the language in the synchronic plan. Research methods - interlingual comparison, structural and semantic modeling, ethnolinguistic analysis, language and cultural description. The research material was over 1,500 of the most actively used Belarusian proverbs (from its paremiological minimum, the main paremiological fund, the corpus of literary texts), as well as proverbs of the Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Romanic, Finno-Ugrian languages (more than 220,000 proverbs from the most authoritative paremiographic sources in 34 modern European languages). As a result of the study, it was found that for the differentiation of common with other languages and specific units of the proverbial fund of the language, the synchronic analysis based on the structural and semantic modeling of proverbs is the most objective. The linguistic content of the concepts national specificity of a proverbial fund, unique, international, universal proverb, national specificity of a proverb, national and language specificity, national and cultural marking of a proverb has been determined and verified. The methodology for describing the national specificity of a proverbial fund has been developed and tested. It includes the principles and methods of selecting the most representative units for analysis, the determination of the interlingual specificity / generality of proverbs, the ascertainment of their national and language, national and cultural specificity, the identification of the degree and nature of the national marking of the exact language proverbs. It is proved that the national specificity of the proverbial fund is qualitatively and quantitatively determined not by proverbs that are unique against the background of other languages, but by the national and language and / or national and cultural marking common (international and universal) proverbs of other languages.

Mutual impact of acoustic and linguistic representations for continuous emotion recognition in call-center conversations

<div> <div> <div> <p>The goal of our research is to automaticaly retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down to improve customer services. To compensate the lack of large annotated emotional databases, we explore the use of pre-trained speech representations as a form of transfer learning towards AlloSat corpus. Moreover, several studies have pointed out that emotion can be detected not only in speech but also in facial trait, in biological response or in textual information. In the context of telephone conversations, we can break down the audio information into acoustic and linguistic by using the speech signal and its transcription. Our experiments confirms the large gain in performance obtained with the use of pre-trained features. Surprisingly, we found that the linguistic content is clearly the major contributor for the prediction of satisfaction and best generalizes to unseen data. Our experiments conclude to the definitive advantage of using CamemBERT representations, however the benefit of the fusion of acoustic and linguistic modalities is not as obvious. With models learnt on individual annotations, we found that fusion approaches are more robust to the subjectivity of the annotation task. This study also tackles the problem of performances variability and intends to estimate this variability from different views: weights initialization, confidence intervals and annotation subjectivity. A deep analysis on the linguistic content investigates interpretable factors able to explain the high contribution of the linguistic modality for this task. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Mutual impact of acoustic and linguistic representations for continuous emotion recognition in call-center conversations

<div> <div> <div> <p>The goal of our research is to automaticaly retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down to improve customer services. To compensate the lack of large annotated emotional databases, we explore the use of pre-trained speech representations as a form of transfer learning towards AlloSat corpus. Moreover, several studies have pointed out that emotion can be detected not only in speech but also in facial trait, in biological response or in textual information. In the context of telephone conversations, we can break down the audio information into acoustic and linguistic by using the speech signal and its transcription. Our experiments confirms the large gain in performance obtained with the use of pre-trained features. Surprisingly, we found that the linguistic content is clearly the major contributor for the prediction of satisfaction and best generalizes to unseen data. Our experiments conclude to the definitive advantage of using CamemBERT representations, however the benefit of the fusion of acoustic and linguistic modalities is not as obvious. With models learnt on individual annotations, we found that fusion approaches are more robust to the subjectivity of the annotation task. This study also tackles the problem of performances variability and intends to estimate this variability from different views: weights initialization, confidence intervals and annotation subjectivity. A deep analysis on the linguistic content investigates interpretable factors able to explain the high contribution of the linguistic modality for this task. </p> </div> </div> </div>

When does the story matter? No evidence for the foregrounding hypothesis in math story problems

Math story problems are difficult for many solvers because comprehension of mathematical and linguistic content must occur simultaneously. Across two studies, we attempted to conceptually replicate and extend findings reported by Mattarella-Micke and Beilock (2010, https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.17.1.106) and Jarosz and Jaeger (2019, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3471). Mattarella-Micke and Beilock found that multiplication word problems in which an irrelevant number was associated with the protagonist of the problem (i.e., foregrounded in the text) were solved less accurately than problems in other conditions. Jarosz and Jaeger used similar materials but tested the more general inconsistent-operations hypothesis that association with the protagonist would interfere with multiplication whereas dissociation would interfere with division. They found partial support: When division problems were primed with dissociative scenarios, solvers made more errors, but they failed to replicate the associative findings for multiplication. In the present research, we conducted two studies (Ns = 205 and 359), in which we similarly manipulated whether irrelevant content was associated with or dissociated from the story protagonist. In these studies, we did not find support for either the foregrounding or inconsistent-operations hypotheses. Exploratory error analyses suggested that solvers’ errors were most often the result of calculation difficulties or inappropriate operation choices and were unrelated to the presence of associative or dissociative story elements. Our careful implementation of this manipulation and much greater power to detect effects suggests that the association manipulation in irrelevant text does not influence adults’ performance on simple math story problems.

The Citadel Itself: Defending Semantic Internalism

Semantic internalism is the view that linguistic meaning amounts to forms of conceptual instructions, and that the process of forming linguistic representations does not involve reference to extra-mental entities. Contemporary philosophy of language remains predominantly externalist in focus, having developed systems of extensional reference which depart from classical rationalist assumptions. I will defend semantic internalism using a broad range of case studies, accruing what I see at the most convincing arguments in its favour. Particular focus will be placed on exemplar cases such as natural kind and artifactual terms. Copredication via inherent polysemy will be used as a strong source of evidence for internalism, countering the received view of the externalist character of meaning. Overall, my aim is to comprehensively defend internalism against its critics and to push the exploration of linguistic content and meaning “back into the brain”.

The methods of studying emotive vocabulary

This article is dedicated to studying the lexical composition of language, namely lexical units that denote emotions. The choice of topic is substantiated by certain difficulties in creating the methodology for working with vocabulary, due to the amorphous nature of this language component, as well as the importance of studying the part of vocabulary that describes the emotional sphere of human existence. The subject of this research is the linguistic content of emotive lexical units. Emotive vocabulary is analyzed using several methods of linguistic analysis: method of semantic field, component analysis, transmission of meaning, analysis of significances, word formation, and method of inner form. The novelty of this research consists in application of comprehensive approach towards studying the linguistic content of lexical units denoting emotions. Special attention is given to the description of practical component of the used methods based on denominations of emotions in the English, Russian, German, and French languages. The author concludes on the need to develop a specific methodology for studying lexical material, and the cumulative application of these methods for the most comprehensive examination of the linguistic content of words denoting emotions in different languages.

The Opacity of Law: On the Hidden Impact of Experts’ Opinion on Legal Decision-making

It is well known that experts’ opinion and testimony take on a decisive weight in judicial fact-finding, raising issues and perplexities that have long been under scholarly scrutiny. In this paper I argue that expert’s opinions have a much wider impact on legal decision-making. In particular, they may generate a problem that I will call ‘the opacity of law’. A legal text, such as a statute or regulation, becomes opaque if a legal authority is not able to grasp its full linguistic content but is nevertheless in a position to use it, thanks to an expert’ opinion, in legal decision-making. When this occurs, not only do experts contribute to fact-finding but also to determining the content of the law. In the paper I analyse the linguistic and cognitive sources of this phenomenon, its characteristics and troublesome consequences, and the different kinds of opacity that may affect legal decision-making.