The Concept of Distributivity In Old High German and Middle High German Texts

Quantification and numbers, numerals and number words have been in the focus of research on different levels of linguistical studies. The mathematical thinking and understanding of primitive arithmetical manipulations have been covered from both the mathematical and psychological points of view. The concept of distribution developed from the ability to group objects and belongs to the second wave of the mathematical understanding of primitive people. Being one of the first concepts developed in the human consciousness it stayed un-nominalised until the development of the number consequence paradigm. The distributive constructs existing in the Modern German language are a result of development from the Proto Indo European through the Proto Germanic, Old High German, and Middle High German languages. However, the modern standard concept of distributivity is built on the preceding word – i.e., a number of colloquial variations keep being used in some German dialects.

Conceptual representations in bicultural bilinguals: An ERP approach

We investigated conceptual representations for translation word pairs in bilinguals who learned their languages in different cultural contexts. Mandarin–English bilinguals were presented with a word, and then a picture, and decided if they matched. Both behavioural and ERP data were collected. In one session, words were in English and in another they were the Mandarin translations. Critical pictures matched the prior word and were either biased to Chinese or Canadian culture. There was an interaction of test language and picture type in RT and errors in the behavioural data, and in five components in the ERP data, indicating that the task was easier when the culture depicted in the picture was congruent with the language of the preceding word. These findings provide evidence that the specific perceptual experiences that bilinguals encounter when learning words in each language have an impact on the semantic features that are activated by those words.

A Rose by Any Other Verb: The Effect of Expectations and Word Category on Processing Effort in Situated Sentence Comprehension

Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a (more or less) expected critical word. According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word (e.g., a verb or an adjective), which then reduces processing effort on the critical word (e.g., a referential noun). Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the reduction of uncertainty (i.e., the generation of expectations) simply does not modulate processing effort-or whether the particular subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure used in these studies (which emphasizes the referential nature of the noun as direct pointer to visually co-present objects) accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment 1 (a Visual World Paradigm study) and Experiment 2 (a Grammaticality Maze study) both replicate the effect found in previous work (i.e., the effect of visually-situated context on the word which uniquely identifies the referent), albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word—whether it be a noun or a verb—reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations.

Probabilistic reduction in relation to social message predictability

Language is a system of message transmission, which conveys a variety of messages including both lexical messages and social messages. It has been demonstrated that lexical messages are realized with phonetically reduced signals, when they are contextually predictable. For example, a word may be produced with shorter duration, when it is more predictable given a context such as a preceding word and a following word. This message-oriented reduction can be encapsulated by positing that a speaker is required to balance two biases: a bias for maximizing the accuracy of message transmission and a bias for maximizing the efficiency of message transmission. This raises a question: Does a speaker balance the two biases in relation to social messages? The aim of this study is to address this question, and advance our understanding of the message-oriented probabilistic reduction. We will explore the social-message-predictability effects by examining the phonetic redundancy in a variant in New Zealand English loanword phonology, a tap sound [ɾ]. It is demonstrated that the duration of this rhotic variant is affected by the social message predictability given a loanword.

Word Sense Based Hindi-Tamil Statistical Machine Translation

Corpus based natural language processing has emerged with great success in recent years. It is not only used for languages like English, French, Spanish, and Hindi but also is widely used for languages like Tamil, Telugu etc. This paper focuses to increase the accuracy of machine translation from Hindi to Tamil by considering the word's sense as well as its part-of-speech. This system works on word by word translation from Hindi to Tamil language which makes use of additional information such as the preceding words, the current word's part of speech and the word's sense itself. For such a translation system, the frequency of words occurring in the corpus, the tagging of the input words and the probability of the preceding word of the tagged words are required. Wordnet is used to identify various synonym for the words specified in the source language. Among these words, the one which is more relevant to the word specified in source language is considered for the translation to target language. The introduction of the additional information such as part-of-speech tag, preceding word information and semantic analysis has greatly improved the accuracy of the system.

que, ue, ne, ce

Latin grammarians held that the enclitics que, ue, ne, and ce caused the accent of the preceding word to fall on that word’s final syllable, regardless of the quantity of that syllable. Some modern scholars have regarded the grammarians as somewhat inconsistent on this point, or have noted that relevant discussions occur only in late works. But differences of opinion have focused especially on whether to consider the grammarians’ view worth serious attention in the first place. Chapter 6 considers Latin grammarians’ discussions first and foremost on their own terms: what do grammarians actually say about que, ue, ne, and ce, and what do they mean by it? The chapter also returns to the question whether the grammarians are telling us something serious about Latin, and if so for what period of the language.

Phonetic-Form constraints in Arabic coordination

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

Now you hear it, now you don't: Malleable illusory vowel effects in Spanish–English bilinguals

Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences, e.g., perceiving [stið] as [estið] (Cuetos, Hallé, Domínguez & Segui, 2011), but this illusion is weaker for Spanish speakers who know English, which lacks the illusion (Carlson, Goldrick, Blasingame & Fink, 2016). The present study aimed to shed light on why this occurs by assessing how a brief interval spent using English impacts performance in Spanish auditory discrimination and lexical decision. Late Spanish–English bilinguals’ pattern of responses largely matched that of monolinguals, but their response times revealed significant differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, and between bilinguals who had just completed tasks in English vs. Spanish. These results suggest that late bilinguals do not simply learn to perceive initial [s]-consonant sequences veridically, but that elements of both their phonotactic systems interact dynamically during speech perception, as listeners work to identify what it was they just heard.

The “Sons of Seth”

This article is focussed on the question how to interpret the phrase בני שית in 4Q417 1 i 15. The analysis is based on a novel reconstruction of the preceding word, which is only poorly preserved. The common reconstructions (namely ‪עולות‬, עו(ו)נות or עלילות) have a negative meaning. Hence, the בני שית are understood as a group that will be punished by God due to their sins. However, it is also possible to reconstruct עבודת in 4Q417 1 i 15. In contrast to the other suggestions this word not only fits the gap properly, but is also attested several times throughout 4QInstruction. Following this reconstruction, 4Q417 1 i 15f. indicates that the reward for the “ser[vic]e of the sons of Seth” has already been determined. Consequently, 4QInstruction uses the term בני שית in a positive way to denote the elect and builds on a tradition that praises Seth as well as his offspring.

Word Sense Based Hindi-Tamil Statistical Machine Translation

Corpus based natural language processing has emerged with great success in recent years. It is not only used for languages like English, French, Spanish, and Hindi but also is widely used for languages like Tamil, Telugu etc. This paper focuses to increase the accuracy of machine translation from Hindi to Tamil by considering the word's sense as well as its part-of-speech. This system works on word by word translation from Hindi to Tamil language which makes use of additional information such as the preceding words, the current word's part of speech and the word's sense itself. For such a translation system, the frequency of words occurring in the corpus, the tagging of the input words and the probability of the preceding word of the tagged words are required. Wordnet is used to identify various synonym for the words specified in the source language. Among these words, the one which is more relevant to the word specified in source language is considered for the translation to target language. The introduction of the additional information such as part-of-speech tag, preceding word information and semantic analysis has greatly improved the accuracy of the system.