Language, Physicality, and Mantra

Chapter 2 examines the nature of mantra. It first explores ideas of mantras as magic utterances and examines ritual language. This leads to a theoretical discussion that argues against Staal’s assertion that mantras are not speech acts. While Staal’s work is useful for understanding mantras, the chapter claims that the Netra and Svacchanda Tantras anticipate his argument and offer a counterexplanation. The perspective they offer is unique to these two texts, and the Netra Tantra’s twenty-first chapter provides a philosophically rigorous examination into the composition, characteristics, power, and productiveness of mantras. The Netra Tantra offers a tripartite explanation of mantras as formless, disembodied, and embodied or unmanifest potential, potential, and limited potential. This discussion presents the most important feature of mantras: that no matter their form (or lack thereof), the mantra and the deity are inseparable. This too helps explain the importance of encoding the mantra within the text. The chapter ends with a brief section on the practicalities of mantric recitation, namely, in the eleven types of sequences that protect the mantra from impurities such as mispronunciation or incorrect usage. Further, it presents a type of semantic analysis called nirvacana that uses the roots of words to demonstrate the eternal nature of the text itself.

Lexical and semantic errors in the English language teaching in homogenious groups

The present research paper discusses the issues of identifying common lexical and semantic mistakes in Kazakh pre-intermediate EFL learners studying in homogeneous groups at university. Words are viewed as powerful tools and when used correctly, words may evoke different feelings and emotions and cause various actions. It’s important to learn how to spot difficult words, correct them timely, and master lexical competence teaching to use the words correctly. The data of the study were collected by learner’s EFL teacher from their final essays. Thirty-one essays were used as the instrument of the study to obtain real language from the participants. The authors of the study hope that the results of the conducted research would contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of lexical and semantic errors in English language teaching which will help teachers to elaborate the differentiated tasks and ways of explaining new vocabulary preventing students’ misunderstanding. Furthermore, the results of the presented research can serve as guidance and be used in compiling EFL textbooks for Kazakhstani students. As a result, researchers managed to classify lexical and semantic errors in English language teaching, identified frequent errors, and described their causes. The findings of the research illustrate that the participants of the study make errors of word choice and incorrect collocations the most. Moreover, incorrect usage of the preposition and literal translation from L1 are included in the frequent mistakes

Language ideologies and self-Orientalism: representing English in China Daily travelogues

While there is plenty of scholarship on the spread and study of English in China, scarce attention has been paid to representations of English in tourism discourses about China. This article aims to explore language ideologies undergirding representations of English language use in 253 travelogues from China Daily published since 2000. Findings show that most prominently in China Daily “standard” English was represented as a lingua franca for travel in China, a language of prestige, and a means of Othering. Some places are demarcated from others due to the lack of English-language services. Chinese people’s way of using English was reduced to Chinglish, a pejorative term indicating inappropriate or incorrect usage of English. Chinese use of English was thus ridiculed as an inferior Other. This critical discourse analysis of tourism discourses about China emanating from within the country demonstrates one facet of Orientalism – self-orientalism. CD’s self-orientalist strategies were embedded in oppositional East-West ideologies that set an inferior China against a superior West.

Cognitive propositions and semantic expressions

Building on their well-known act theory of propositions, Soames and Hanks have proposed a theory of what it is for sentences to express propositions, thereby answering a central question about the foundations of semantics. The basic idea is that for a sentence to express a proposition in a language is for speakers of the language to use the sentence to perform the act that is the proposition. I argue that this general account of expression fails to explain how incorrect usage is possible, how what sentences express differs from what they implicate, how unused sentences can express propositions, how compositional meanings are possible, and how to specify who the speakers of L are without circularity. I go on to show how these things can be explained within the structured cognitive proposition framework.

Investigating Preposition Usage Problems of English Language Education Study Program Students

As one of the English grammar elements, prepositions might be considered difficult for students of English as a foreign language (EFL). Many studies on this topic have been conducted but it remains problematic and unresolved. Accordingly, the researchers aimed to explore the prepositions in this paper. Gathering the data from fifty acknowledgments of undergraduate theses of the English Language Education Study Program (ELESPA) of a private university in Yogyakarta, the researchers analyzed preposition usage problems that occurred in the acknowledgments. Results showed that three main problems involving the use of prepositions, namely the misselection of prepositions for, in, and to, insertion of prepositions about and to, and omission of prepositions about. Factors causing the problems were investigated and it was found that students’ first language (L1) influenced the incorrect usage of English prepositions.

New scientific approaches to evaluating accessibility of routes for disabled persons

The article presents the results of the study of the concept of «accessibility». It is shown that the term is used as a property and a figure of speech. In the form of a figure of speech, the concept contains the accessibility property, as well as properties and factors that affect the level of accessibility. Methodological approaches and results of field studies confirming the possibility of evaluating and describing the accessibility in terms of numeric expressions are presented. Field experiments were carried out in Rostov-on-Don and Novosibirsk with the participation of more than 90 respondents. Formalized mathematical definition of route accessibility for disabled is given as well as examples of defining the values of accessibility for certain categories of disabled people. Justification of feasibility of describing the accessibility of routes by means of level scale which excludes the drawbacks of binary system of accessibility evaluation is given. The incorrect usage of object-oriented approach for evaluating accessibility for disabled at different territories and transport systems is confirmed.

Responsible AI and moral responsibility: a common appreciation

Responsibility is among the most widespread buzzwords in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Yet, the term often remains unsubstantiated when employed in these important technological domains. Indeed, notions like ‘responsible AI’ and ‘responsible robotics’ may sound appealing, for they seem to convey a sense of moral goodness or ethical approval, thereby inciting psychological connections to self-regulation, social acceptance, or political correctness. For AI and ethics to come together in truly harmonious ways, we will need to work toward establishing a common appreciation. In this commentary, I breakdown three varieties of the term and invoke insights from the analytic ethics literature as a means of offering a robust understanding of moral responsibility in emerging technology. While I do not wish to accuse any parties of incorrect usage, my hope is that together researchers in AI and ethics can be better positioned to appreciate and to develop notions of responsibility for technological domains.

ACTIVE PROCESSES IN MODERN RUSSIAN IN THE LIGHT OF DETERMINANTAL ANALYSIS

The authors of the article discuss the possible ways to analyze the facts of mass modern Russian speech, which are traditionally considered from a normative-didactic point of view, from the standpoint of systemic linguistics, that is, applying analysis of the relationship between the determinants of a language of a certain morphological type and particular phenomena at all levels of linguistic structure. Such facts include, for example, violation of case coordination, use of nominative case instead of indirect, occurrence of the plural in abstract nouns outside the formation of concrete figurative meanings, incorrect usage of verb voice forms, luck of correlation between subject and verbal participle, lack of correlation of wordorder structure of a sentence to the communicative (thematic-rhematic) structure of an utterance, the misuse of synonyms, etc. The method of determinant analysis of languages developed within the framework of a systemic typology allow researchers to identify the tendency to break down inflectional connections between words at a formal and substantive level, which is surely fixed in modern Russian, and increase the analytical methods of constructing a phrase. The deformation of the inflection of the Russian language, caused by the growth of the national, social and cultural heterogeneity of the linguistic group, while retaining such parameters of the external determinant that determine the inflectional grammatical type, like the scale of the linguistic collective and the mode of communication, not only makes it difficult to express complex meanings, but also makes them ultimately account unclaimed in society, reducing the continuity in the transfer of socially significant experience. The authors focus on such problems as comparing the typological standard of inflectional languages and characteristics of the grammatical system of the Russian language, the correspondence of the accepted literary norm to the typological ideal, the correspondence of mass speech practice with the literary norm, the factors changing the frequency of grammatical forms, the interaction of external and internal determinants of the modern Russian language. The theoretical basis of the article was developed in the second half of the 20th century, but still not widely known in linguistics the systemic linguistic concept of Professor Gennady Prokop'evich Mel’nikov, which revealed large prospective for the synthesis of special linguistic disciplines, as well as linguistics, semiotics and computer science.