Symbolism of the image of love in the poem “La steaua” by M. Eminescu as an object of linguo-cognitive research

This research is devoted to the study of the linguo-cognitive specifics of the linguistic nominations of manifestations of love in the poem “La steaua” by M. Eminescu. The study of linguistic representations of the concept of love as multifaceted and ambiguous from the point of view of its emotional nature of feelings on the material of a poetic work is interdisciplinary by its nature, being at the junction of such scientific disciplines as: cognitive linguistics, literature and psycholinguistics. The purpose of the study is to identify and study the verbalized fragments of the image “love” in the poem “La steaua” by M. Eminescu and to establish their associative-figurative potential. To achieve the above-mentioned goal, a number of tasks were outlined: to identify and classify the key conceptual dominants of the poem “La steaua” by M. Eminescu; to establish the structure and semantic content of the image of love in the poem by describing its frame structure; to determine the individual author’s specificity of the interpretation of the artistic image of love on the material of the analyzed poem. As a result of our research, we identify frame structures that are activated by verbal units and convey a specific stereotypical situation. We come to the conclusion that the features of the verbal embodiment of frame structures are directly related to the individual author’s perception of the image of love, his personal and emotional characteristics, as well as culturally determined associations with the concept of love.

Emotionalisation of contemporary media discourse: A research agenda

This special issue continues the discussion of the role of emotion in discourse (see Russian Journal of Linguistics 2015 (1) and 2018, 22 (1)) which, as testified by the burgeoning body of literature in the field, has become more prominent in different spheres and contexts of public life. This time we focus on emotionalisation of media discourse. We highlight the intensification of emotions in media and, showcasing contributions from international authors, critically reflect on constructions, functions and pragmatic purposes of emotions in media discourse. Our aim is to investigate emotions in the media from semiotic, pragmatic and discursive perspectives against the contemporary socio-political background in which traditional notions concerning the role of media are being noticeably changed. In this introductory article, we also put forward an agenda for further research by briefly outlining three main areas of exploration: the logics of media production and reception , the boundaries of media discourse, and the semiotic resources deployed to construct emotionality . We then present the articles in this issue and highlight their contributions to the study of linguistic representations of emotions. We then summarise the main results and suggest a brief avenue for further research.

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>

Dynamics of Values in American Election Discourse

The article presents the results of a corpus-based analysis of axiological characteristics of political discourse. Applying the method of identifying keywords in a corpus the authors described the dynamics of the American election discourse dominant values in the period from 1952 to 2016. The research material comprised the texts of American presidential election commercials from seventeen campaigns. The texts were compiled into three corpora according to three historical periods: period I – 1952–1972; period II – 1976–2000; period III – 2004–2016. It was found that the invariant values represented in the texts of election commercials of all the historical periods are: "prosperity", "patriotism", "progress", "social justice" and "security". The listed values receive a variable linguistic expression in the texts of each period. It is shown that the evolution of the value component in the presidential campaign discourse manifests itself in the change of actors within the opposition "us – them", in variation of their linguistic representations, in modification of value dominants of discourse and in transformation of language means conveying evaluative meaning. The main set of value orientations of the discourse remains relatively constant, the changes are revealed in the model of conceptualization of the values and their influencing potential in the election communication.

AN ANALYSIS OF TURKISH AND RUSSIAN TEACHERS’ OF ENGLISH APPROACHES TO EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES

The purpose of this study was to determine teachers’ approaches to Marzano’s effective instructional strategies (MEISs), as defined by Marzano, Pickering and Pollack (2001) in the secondary schools in Turkey and Russia and tell whether they differ or not. In this study survey research – one of the quantitative approaches – was carried out. The participants for the study were 54 teachers of English in Turkey and 40 teachers of English in Russia. “The Effective Instructional Strategies Questionnaire” and an open-ended questionnaire were used to gather data. Data was generated utilizing content analysis and non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test. The results related to the first and second research questions revealed that there were partial differences between Turkish and Russian teachers’ approaches to Marzano’s nine effective instructional strategies and to usage of these strategies. Turkish teachers place less importance than Russian teachers on such strategies as summarizing and note taking, homework and practice, generating and testing hypothesis. As to Russian teachers, they do not espouse strategies in the category of non-linguistic representations as much as Turkish teachers do. The results of the study showed that Turkish and Russian teachers’ approaches and the usage of the strategies differ.

LANGUAGE PRACTICES AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES IN THE TRANSMISSION OF THE LANGUAGE IN THE AZERBAIJANI COMMUNITY IN MOSCOW

Целью настоящей статьи является анализ условий и факторов, влияющих на передачу и сохранение азербайджанского языка в азербайджанской общине города Москвы в среде хорошо интегрированных и социально успешных мигрантов первого и второго поколения. Работа вписывается в проблематику языковых контактов в городе в аспекте социолингвистической динамики поддержания и сохранения языка. Выбор азербайджанской общины был обусловлен сложностью ее социальной структуры, развитыми связями внутри сообщества, наличием языковой среды в различных доменах, сложной социолингвистической конфигурацией используемых языков, включающей отношения между литературными и диалектными формами азербайджанского языка и русским языком. Использование и передача языка молодыми азербайджанцами рассматривалась с учетом символического и инструментального измерений языковой ситуации. Анализ как реальных языковых практик, так и языковых идеологий носителей идиома позволил решить две задачи: выявить направления динамики использования и передачи азербайджанского языка в условиях миграции и проанализировать, насколько желания носителей языка, их аттитюды и языковые репрезентации соответствуют реальным усилиям по поддержке и сохранению языка. Методология исследования включала проведение социолингвистического анкетирования (70 анкет) и серии исследовательских интервью с представителями общины (6 интервью). Интерес к уровню владения и передачи языка в молодом поколении обусловил деление информантов по критерию возраста на две когорты: от 18 до 29 лет и от 30 до 65+ лет. Далее анализировались и сравнивались языковые практики этих когорт. Результаты исследования показывают высокую сохранность и уровень передачи языка, высокую лояльность его носителей и положительный тип репрезентаций в обеих когортах. Вместе с тем в молодом поколении отмечается повышение роли русского языка, сдвиг в использовании диалектных и литературной форм азербайджанского языка, в социальном образе языка отмечено превалирование символических репрезентации и оценки языка аффективного типа. The purpose of this article is to analyze the conditions and factors influencing the transmission of the Azerbaijani language in the Azerbaijani community in Moscow among well-integrated and socially successful migrants of the first and second generation. The research complies with the problem of linguistic contacts in the city in the aspect of the sociolinguistic dynamics of maintaining and preserving the language. The choice of the Azerbaijani community was due to the complexity of its social structure, developed connections within the community, the presence of linguistic environment in various domains, a complex sociolinguistic configuration of the languages used, including the relationship between the literary and dialectal forms of the Azerbaijani language and the Russian language. The use and transmission of the language by young Azerbaijanis was considered taking into account symbolic and instrumental dimensions of the language situation. The analysis of both real linguistic practices and linguistic representations of native speakers of the idiom made it possible to solve two problems: to identify the directions of the dynamics of the use and transmission of the Azerbaijani language in conditions of migration and to analyze how the desires of native speakers, their attitudes and linguistic representations correspond to their real efforts to support and preserve the language. The research methodology involved a sociolinguistic questionnaire (70 questionnaires in total) and a series of research interviews with community representatives (6 interviews). Interest in the level of language proficiency and transmission in the younger generation led to the division of informants according to the age criterion into two cohorts: from 18 to 29 years old and from 30 to 65+ years old. Further, we analyzed and compared the language practices of these cohorts. The results of the study show a high preservation and level of language transmission, strong loyalty of its speakers and a positive type of representations in both cohorts. Meanwhile, among the younger generation we observe the dynamics of linguistic practices towards increasing the role of the Russian language and a shift in the use of dialectal and literary forms of the Azerbaijani language; symbolic representations and overvaluation of the affective type prevail in the social image of the language.

Sentence first, arguments after: Mechanisms of morphosyntax acquisition

Natural languages contain complex grammatical patterns. For example, in German, finite verbs occur second in main clauses while non-finite verbs occur last, as in 'dein Bruder möchte in den Zoo gehen' (“Your brother wants to go to the zoo”). Children easily acquire this type of morphosyntactic contingency (Poeppel &amp; Wexler, 1993; Deprez &amp; Pierce, 1994). There is extensive debate in the literature over the nature of children’s linguistic representations, but there are considerably fewer mechanistic ideas about how knowledge is actually acquired. Regarding German, one approach might be to learn the position of prosodically prominent open-class words (“verbs go 2nd or last”) and then fill in the morphological details. Alternatively, one could work in the opposite direction, learning the position of closed-class morphemes (“-te goes 2nd and -en goes last”) and fitting open-class items into the resulting structure. This second approach is counter-intuitive, but I will argue that it is the one learners take.Previous research suggests that learners focus distributional analysis on closed-class items because of their distinctive perceptual properties (Braine, 1963; Morgan, Meier, &amp; Newport, 1987; Shi, Werker &amp; Morgan, 1999; Valian &amp; Coulson, 1988). The Anchoring Hypothesis (Valian &amp; Coulson, 1988) posits that, because these items tend to occur at grammatically important points in the sentence (e.g., phrase edges), focusing on them helps learners acquire grammatical structure. Here I ask how learners use closed-class items to acquire complex morphosyntactic patterns such as the verb form/position contingency in German. Experiments 1-4 refute concerns that morphosyntactic contingencies like those in German are too complex to learn distributionally. Experiments 5-8 explore the mechanisms underlying learning, showing that adults and children analyze closed-class items as predictive of the presence and position of open-class items, but not the reverse. In these experiments, subtle mathematical distinctions in learners’ input had significant effects on learning, illuminating the biased computations underlying anchored distributional analysis. Taken together, results suggest that learners organize knowledge of language patterns relative to a small set of closed-class items—just as patterns are represented in modern syntactic theory (Rizzi &amp; Cinque, 2016).

Semantic Structure in Deep Learning

Deep learning has recently come to dominate computational linguistics, leading to claims of human-level performance in a range of language processing tasks. Like much previous computational work, deep learning–based linguistic representations adhere to the distributional meaning-in-use hypothesis, deriving semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics. However, current deep learning methods entail fundamentally new models of lexical and compositional meaning that are ripe for theoretical analysis. Whereas traditional distributional semantics models take a bottom-up approach in which sentence meaning is characterized by explicit composition functions applied to word meanings, new approaches take a top-down approach in which sentence representations are treated as primary and representations of words and syntax are viewed as emergent. This article summarizes our current understanding of how well such representations capture lexical semantics, world knowledge, and composition. The goal is to foster increased collaboration on testing the implications of such representations as general-purpose models of semantics. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.