Ironical edification

The paper deals with ironic edification – autosemantic utterances which contain critical evaluation of human shortcomings expressed in derisive assertion of absurd, or pretentious, or malicious behavior certain people manifest. They make a specific class of proverbs, aphorisms, and miniatures of modern network discourse. They are heterogeneous and vary from profound observations of human character up to banalities used to amuse a down-home partner, from witty phrases up to acid black humour. They are very common in everyday conversations and serve to help interlocutors express their understanding of hidden manipulations they are exposed to. Structurally they may be simple and composite, the former are integral sentences expressing a certain attitude to norms of behavior, the latter are judgments which consist of two parts, in the first part a certain positive norm of behavior is expressed, and in the second part it is denied. Their integral semantic content is a frame which expresses a concessive juxtaposition of values, pragmatically they promote important assumptions about realistic evaluation of human nature, and their most relevant syntactic feature is a ludic allusion to well-known texts or events.

Number in the Mental Lexicon

This chapter discusses the representation and processing of grammatical number in language comprehension and production. Grammatical number is regarded as a syntactic feature stored with a word's lemma, i.e. the syntactic word, in the mental lexicon. The chapter discusses the representation of grammatical number in the mental lexicon and how this feature is selected. Comparisons to other grammatical features, such as grammatical gender, are also made. Moreover, the chapter reviews experimental work both in the area of language comprehension and language production to shed light on the processing of grammatical number in human cognition. The chapter closes with a report on recent experimental work conducted on Konso, a Cushitic language spoken in the south of Ethiopia. In Konso, the number feature interacts with the gender feature. Data from picture-naming experiments demonstrate that so-called plural gender should be interpreted as a gender feature rather than as a number feature.

Movie recommender systems using hybrid model based on graphs with co-rated, genre, and closed caption features

A movie recommendation is a long-standing challenge. Figuring out the viewer’s interest in movies is still a problem since a huge number of movies are released in no time. In the meantime, people cannot enjoy all available new releases or unseen movies due to their limited time. They also still need to choose which movies to watch when they have spare time. This situation is not good for the movie business too. In order to satisfy people in choosing what movies to watch and to boost movie sales, a system that can recommend suitable movies is required, either unseen in the past or new releases. This paper focuses on the hybrid approach, a combination of content-based and collaborative filtering, using a graph-based model. This hybrid approach is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of combination in the content-based and collaborative filtering. The graph database, Neo4j is used to store the collaborative features, such as movies with its genres, and ratings. Since the movie’s closed caption is rarely considered to be used in a recommendation, the proposed method evaluates the impact of using this syntactic feature. From the early test, the combination of collaborative filtering and content-based using closed caption gives a slightly better result than without closed caption, especially in finding similar movies such as sequel or prequel.

A “língua desportuguesa”. Próclise no português angolano e no português moçambicano

The expansion of proclisis in contexts that typically exclude it in European Portuguese has been described as a syntactic feature that characterizes Angolan Portuguese. This article studies the presence of this feature in the literary language, based on a corpus of texts by Angolan and Mozambican authors, representing two generations: authors born in the colonial period (the Angolan Pepetela and the Mozambicans Mia Couto and Paulina Chiziane) and authors born after the independence of their countries (the Angolan Ondjaki and the Mozambican Lucílio Manjate). The study results show that proclisis has a stronger presence in the works of Angolan authors than Mozambican authors, suggesting that the shift towards the generalization of proclisis is more advanced, socially widespread and accepted in Angolan Portuguese than in Mozambican Portuguese, although it is visible in both. It is in non-finite domains that the contrast between the two African varieties is more evident. Not only is the frequency of proclisis to the infinitive higher in the Angolan Portuguese corpus, but only there is proclisis to the past participle attested. Comparing the two generations of writers, we see a significant rise of proclisis to the infinitive between Pepetela and Ondjaki and it is in Ondjaki’s works that proclisis to the past participle occurs. Regarding the Mozambican Portuguese corpus, however, there seems to be a regression in the advance of proclisis between Mia Couto and Manjate. A closer look at Rabhia, by Manjate (2017), suggests that young speakers with a high level of education may perceive the spread of proclisis as a socially marked feature.

Is China English Transforming into Nativization Stage? A Case Study of ‘modifying-modified’ Sequencing in China English

As China English is gradually identified as a variety of world Englishes rather than an inauthentic deviant from the standard English, a number of research has focused on discussing the existence and codification of China English. Most of the studies concluded that China English is undergoing nativization process in mainland China. However, the previous studies mainly discussed the lexical features in China English. The study aims to discuss the extent to which the codified syntactic feature in China English is used and accepted. Therefore, the present study adopted a corpus-based approach to analyze the use of a codified syntactic feature, ‘modifying-modified’ sequence in China English. Over 1,685 sentences in two corpus were identified and compared. The result shows that despite the fact that the codified syntactic feature has been localized in Chinese context, it is not widely accepted as an appropriate variable, which may indicate that China English has not reached the nativization stage.

THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SYNTACTIC FEATURES BETWEEN INDONESIAN AND ENGLISH DENOMINAL VERBS

This paper aims to describe the comparison on the syntactic feature of denominal verbs of the Bahasa Indonesia and the English. The syntactic feature defined as a presentation of transitivity (and valency) on the construction of derivated verbs. Based on observation (simak) method formulated by Sudaryanto (2015), the data taken from the usage of Bahasa Indonesia and tha English on written forms. Based on Contrastive Syntax approach designed by Hickey (2017), the result shows two descriptions of comparison, namely the similarities and the differences of syntactic features. First, the similarities are (a) transitive feature and (b) an intransitive feature. Second, the differences are (a) the bitransitive feture of bahasa Indonesia, (b) the markers of transitivity of Bahasa Indonesia and the English and (c) the grammatical relations of the English denominal verb. For further study, researcher may pay attention on detail analysis of the role of denominal verbs in sentences construction of the Bahasa Indonesia and the English.

THE USE OF PREPOSITIONS IN ARABIC AND ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Arabic and English are derived from different language families. While Arabic belongs to the Semitic family, English belongs to Germanic languages (Alhaj, 2015). Consequently, these two languages are supposed to have dissimilar prepositional structures. The methodology used in this study to comprehend these variances and resemblances regarding prepositions in Arabic and English, the researcher conducted a comparative study among these two prepositional systems. The objective of this paper is not to prove or disprove this claim. Its main focus is finding out how this syntactic feature is dealt with in English and Arabic in general and the contrast in the use of prepositions in both languages. To achieve this aim, the research makes use of the English categories of prepositions and gives the Arabic equivalents, in some cases, there is no Arabic equivalent because English prepositions are more than Arabic ones.

Probing Brain Activation Patterns by Dissociating Semantics and Syntax in Sentences

The relation between semantics and syntax and where they are represented in the neural level has been extensively debated in neurosciences. Existing methods use manually designed stimuli to distinguish semantic and syntactic information in a sentence that may not generalize beyond the experimental setting. This paper proposes an alternative framework to study the brain representation of semantics and syntax. Specifically, we embed the highly-controlled stimuli as objective functions in learning sentence representations and propose a disentangled feature representation model (DFRM) to extract semantic and syntactic information in sentences. This model can generate one semantic and one syntactic vector for each sentence. Then we associate these disentangled feature vectors with brain imaging data to explore brain representation of semantics and syntax. Results have shown that semantic feature is represented more robustly than syntactic feature across the brain including the default-mode, frontoparietal, visual networks, etc.. The brain representations of semantics and syntax are largely overlapped, but there are brain regions only sensitive to one of them. For instance, several frontal and temporal regions are specific to the semantic feature; parts of the right superior frontal and right inferior parietal gyrus are specific to the syntactic feature.