Gender and Ethnicity Bias in Medicine: A Text Analysis of 1.8 Million Critical Care Records

Gender and ethnicity biases are pervasive across many societal domains including politics, employment, and medicine. Such biases will facilitate inequalities until they are revealed and mitigated at scale. To this end, over 1.8 million records from a large US hospital were evaluated with natural language processing techniques in search of gender and ethnicity bias indicators. Consistent with non-linguistic evidence of bias in medicine, physicians often focused on the emotions of female compared to male patients and focused more on the scientific diagnoses of male compared to female patients. Physicians reported on fewer emotions for Black patients versus White patients and physicians demonstrated the greatest need to work through diagnoses for Black women compared to other patients. This work provides evidence of gender and ethnicity biases in medicine as communicated by physicians in the field and requires the critical examination of institutions that perpetuate bias in social systems.

An Assessment of methods and techniques used in Forensic Linguistics

The following paper aimed to evaluate the techniques and methods adopted in forensic linguistics. The paper is divided to 5 sections the first section discussed a brief background of the topic while the second chapter aimed to review literature from previous studies. The third section depicted the methods and techniques incorporated in carrying out this research. The fourth section analysed the data gathered for this paper while the last section concluded the paper. It is seen in this research that Courtroom speech, courtroom translation and interpretation, comprehensibility of texts and legal documents, including police cautions issued to offenders or suspects, and the use of linguistic evidence in court procedures are all part of forensic linguistics.

The affect bias in the metaphorical representation of anticipated events

When talking about anticipated events, speakers can conceptualize them either as destinations towards which they are moving or as entities moving towards them, which correspond to the Ego- and the Time-moving metaphors, respectively (cf. ‘We are approaching Christmas’ and ‘Christmas is approaching’). Research in psycholinguistics has shown affective valence, i.e. whether the conceptualized event is perceived as positive or negative, to be one of the factors that modulate metaphor choice; positive anticipation is preferentially associated with Ego-moving expressions, whereas negative anticipation is predominantly associated with Time-moving metaphors. This paper sets out to test if the time-affect association surfaces in naturally-occurring language use when both metaphorical patterns are available. By focusing on the temporal usage of the verb approach, we provide linguistic evidence in favor of such an affective bias in time representations. In addition, the language data point to a semantic preference for a particular type of event (i.e., personal vs social) under each metaphorical pattern. We interpret this finding as preliminary evidence for a possible semantic bias in time representations to be further investigated.

Implicatures in Altfatah Nando’s Short Movie Terlanjur Mencinta

YouTube has been flooded with contents within a movie genre, mostly the products by junior creators. It is therefore important to appreciate their works to maintain their creativities and innovations. Positive responses to such literary works are also required to improve their quality writing. The current study was aimed at identifying and at the same time construing the implicatures found in each act of the movie entitled “Terlanjur Mencinta” directed by Alfatah Nando. George Yule’s pragmatic theory (1996) was used in relation to implicatures caused by conversational maxims (Grice, 1975) supported by linguistic evidence-based contextual interpretation, namely utterances and stage directions. Findings show that generalized conversational implicatures were identified, namely 12 implicatures in which 42% was due to violation of manner maxim, 33% attributed to that of relation maxim, 17% due to that of quantity maxim, and 8% due to that of quality maxim. In addition, 4 conventional implicatures were found in the monologue. The study concludes that the implicatures can be easily understood through the contexts of situations. It is recommended that future researchers can formulate the ideal proportion and distribution of implicatures in a particular text in terms of quality, employing comparative rhetoric and a special research instrument.

Dravidian poem translated into Pali? Apadana-atthakatha/Visuddhajanavilasini |(534 13-537 28, vv 12–48)

This article examines a poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana which expands on the poem attributed to Kaludayitthera in the Theragatha; the poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana did not make it into the final canon. The hypothesis of this paper is that the poem may be a popular Dravidian song adapted to Buddhist use and translated into Pali, and this is the primary reason it was excluded from the canon. This conclusion is based on several factors. 1) The author of the Pali poem was not well versed in the Pali language and made constant mistakes in translation. 2) Gratuitous repetition; the poem itself is not very good poetry, containing the kind of needless repetition one associates with a popular song. 3) 13.4% of the words in the poem are direct lifts from Dravidian words; this compares to only 3.9% of the words in the Theragatha poem itself, of which this poem is an extension. While this does not prove that the source was a Dravidian poem, it raises the probability quite significantly. In addition, this kind of literature—making lists of biota in the natural world for comparison, personification and poetic effect— is common in Dravidian Sangam literature. 4) The poem contains wrong or awkward phrases in Pali which can be better understood as Dravidian imports, and 5) an extensive and growing body of linguistic evidence shows that the adoption of Dravidian terminology into Buddhist thought and practice was not an uncommon occurrence. It has long been assumed that the Buddha spoke more than just Indic languages, and that his oral teachings in Dravidian or Munda languages were lost. Although this poem is probably not in itself a teaching of the Buddha, but a popular Dravidian song adapted for Buddhist purposes, its analysis is the first attempt to show that some Pali transmissions may be adaptations or translations of indigenous languages; the ramifications and conclusions of such a hypothesis, if proven, open up a whole new area of Buddhist studies, i.e., the transmission of the Buddha’s teachings through indigenous, non Indo-Aryan (non-IA) languages.

Using Historical Glottometry to Subgroup the Early Germanic Languages

Historical Glottometry, introduced by Kalyan & François (2018), is a wave-based quantitative approach to language subgrouping used to calculate the overall strength of a linguistic subgroup using metrics that capture the contributions of linguistic innovations of various scopes to language diversification, in consideration of the reality of their distributions. This approach primarily achieves this by acknowledging the contribution of postsplit areal diffusion to language diversification, which has traditionally been overlooked in cladistic (tree-based) models. In this paper, the development of the Germanic language family, from the breakup of Proto-Germanic to the latest period of the early attested daughter languages (namely, Old English, Old Frisian, Gothic, Old High German, Old Low Franconian, Old Norse, and Old Saxon) is accounted for using Historical Glottometry. It is shown that this approach succeeds in accounting for several smaller, nontraditional subgroups of Germanic by accommodating the linguistic evidence unproblematically where a cladistic approach would fail.

Criticism of the Neo-Classical Salafı Understanding Forming the Discourse of Religious Exclusivism An Evaluation on the Specifics of the Critiques Aimed at Fakhr al-Dın al-Razı Regarding the Epistemological Value of Language

Al-Rāzī stated that specific criteria should exist for interpreting religious texts, with one of the two in particular prioritizing the conflict of ʿaql [reason] and naql [revelation]. Accordingly, he developed the theory of the hypothetical nature of linguistic evidence. According to al-Rāzī’s theory, literary evidence have been exposed to possible errors from transferring al-nahw [lexicography, morphology, and grammar] rules to the present day; different linguistic possibilities such as figurative speech homonymy and transfer of meanings (naql al-lugha) are likely to have occurred in the process. Therefore, religious texts do not express certainty when qarīnas [contextual clues] are absent. Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, leading names in the neo-classical Salafī understanding, described the view that literal evidence does not express ʿilm [definitive knowledge] but rather expresses Ûann [speculative knowledge] as taghūt [an idol], criticizing it to have a marginalizing and exclusionary style. The present article will examine the discourse of religious exclusivism produced within the framework of the hypotheticality of language and will show that this discourse is caused by Ibn Taymiyya’s and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s words being misunderstood. This study will first explain what is meant by religious exclusion and provide the intellectual background of the theory of the hypotheticality of language. Next, it will cover Ibn Taymiyya’s and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s questioning of al-Rāzī’s religiosity, and finish with how the accusations against Rāzī had stemmed from a misunderstanding of his ideas.

Yak Domestication: A Review of Linguistic, Archaeological, and Genetic Evidence

Yak, a species of bovid uniquely adapted to high-altitude environments, plays a critical role in the life of the inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau and neighboring areas. There is currently no consensus on when these animals may have been domesticated. In this paper, we review the archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence relevant to this question, and suggest that the domestication took place following hybridization with taurine cattle from the end of the fourth millennium BCE. This study also shows that the original domesticators of yaks included not only the ancestors of the Tibetans, but also Rgyalrongic speaking people from Eastern Tibet.

Cultural history of the Pacific and the bark cloth making in Central Sulawesi

Archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists are now in general agreement about the prehistory of the Austronesian-speakers, but most details are still obscure. The Philippines and the eastern part of Indonesia have received very little attention in research into the cultures of the Pacific region and the settling of the area by the Austronesian peoples. Based on ethnographical and linguistic evidence, bark cloth making has generally been regarded as a common feature of early Austronesian culture. Ethnography informs us that bark cloth making was known in large areas of Southeast Asia and Oceania, and also in Africa and Central and South America. The importance and position of bark cloth as part of the culture of the Austronesian people is illustrated by the persistence of its manufacture in many places. In this paper I examine in some detail the bark cloth production of the Kaili-Pamona speakers in Central Sulawesi (Celebes) and discuss how the study of their bark cloth may add to research into the cultural history of the Austronesian peoples. I argue that the vitality and important position of bark cloth as part of the culture of the Austronesian peoples is largely due to its central role in religious rituals and social practices. Thus, it is associated with the most sacred powers which represent the continuity and immortality of the society.

Introduction

This chapter describes how the book departs from the existing historiography that concerns the work of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. In short, the approach here is to focus on intellectual contexts and linguistic evidence. This excludes the usual treatment of these authors in terms of their methods and models, and it also forecloses the study of their work in relation to ‘classical political economy’ since this category is a retrospective invention of Karl Marx that he coined for the purpose of establishing his supersession of these writers. The implications of the general revision attempted here are far-reaching, especially in relation to the propriety of approaching past thinkers in terms of their ‘method’ and the nature of political economy as a vocation in the early nineteenth century.