A Quantitative Study on English Polyfunctional Words

This paper reports quantitative research on the parts of speech of English words using the data from British National Corpus. Most of the part-of-speech investigations focus on the rank-frequency distribution. However, in English and many other languages, we can find that partd of speech can be ambiguous. For example, hope can be a noun and a verb. Such words are called polyfunctional words, while other words, which belong to only one part of speech, are called monofunctional words. The number of parts of speech that a word belongs to is referred to as polyfunctionality. First, we study polyfunctionality distribution of English words and find that the Shenton-Skees-geometric and the Waring distributions capture the data very well. Then, we group words according to their part of speech,e.g., monofunctional nouns, like Saturday, and polyfunctional nouns, like hope (noun, verb) compose noun group, and try to work out a general model for all the groups. The result is that the extended positive binomial distribution captures all the groups except the article group, because of the sparsity of the data. Last, we study the diversification variants. Since there are polyfunctional words in each group, e.g., in a noun group, a polyfunctional noun may also be a verb, we consider the verb function as a diversification variant and try to model the rank-frequency distribution of variants with the Popescu-Altmann function, as used in the previous investigation. The results show very good fit for all groups exzept conjunction group.

An Author’s Contrastive Dictionary as an Experimental Lexicographical Form

At the turn of the 21st century, a new trend appeared in lexicographic practice. It was named contrastive lexicography. Contrastive dictionaries proved useful first of all as necessary reference books in learning and teaching foreign languages, and translating. In another domain, folklore lexicography, contrastive dictionaries became dictionary projects of linguafolklorists from Kursk, Russia. The method of comparative description tested on the folk material was applied to the literary text. This led to the idea of creating an author’s contrastive dictionary. The poetry by Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet was chosen as the material of the tentative dictionary. The article describes the stages of the dictionary compilation and its original micro- and macro-structure. An essential macrostructural issue of the dictionary is the choice of words and the order of entries. It is accentuated that the topical, not alphabetic, structure of the dictionary enables to reveal the consistency and the inner hierarchy of single fragments of the poetic world picture and helps to identify their place in the poets’ idiolects. The authors of the dictionary employed the cluster approach. The cluster is understood as a group words which belong to different parts of speech and are linked semantically, functionally and derivationally. The dictionary comprises eight clusters which represent three massive fragments: World of Nature, World of Human and World’s Characteristics. Special attention is paid to dictionary entries of a double unit type. If an entry contains no comparative part, the unit turns into a left- or right-sided “lacuna” type entry. For poetic language description, the authors of the dictionary used the parameter structure of a dictionary entry; this structure comprises compulsory and optional components. The syntagmatic zone of a dictionary entry, which reflects all textual word links within the poetic line and the neighboring lines, was thoroughly analyzed. The research potential of an author’s contrastive dictionary is illustrated by several examples. It is noted that this dictionary is experimental and there are prospects for contrastive dictionaries of different genres, in line with the trends of modern author’s lexicography. Contrastive dictionaries are concluded to be of use in studying the author’s idiolect and in revealing the compared writers’ language uniqueness.

Teaching Turkic-speaking school students the morphemic structure of the word in the Russian language classes: ethno-cognitive approach

In a modern Russian school, together with Russian-speaking school students, children of migrants study, for most of whom are native Turkic languages. For foreigners, traditional lessons should be supplemented with corrective lessons in Russian as a non-native language, the effectiveness of which will be high provided that an ethno-cognitive approach to teaching is followed. Learning the morphemic structure of a word based on an ethno-cognitive approach is the subject of this study. The aim is to develop methodic recommendations based on the analysis of the features of the morphemic structure of Turkic words, to identify possible difficulties in mastering the morphemic structure of the Russian word by Turkic-speaking students, and to highlight methods and techniques based on the principles of consciousness and the development of students’ cognitive abilities. Two main difficulties in the field of the morphemic word structure for foreign children are highlighted: Russian inflection and morphological ways of word formation: prefix and prefix-suffix. When working with these topics, the teacher should develop students’ ability to think analytically, comparing and identifying the essential features of a linguistic phenomenon, make assumptions and find confirmation for them. Mastering inflection will be more effective if you group words thematically, work according to ready-made patterns and models of inflection, increase the number of tasks “for substitution” and “for replacement”. The following stages of work on concepts are substantiated: analysis of linguistic material and highlighting the main fea-tures of a concept; generalization of signs, establishing a connection between them and introducing the desired term; concretization of concepts based on new linguistic material.

Hand-written Russian-Chinese Dictionary from Collection of the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences

This article is dedicated to the analysis of a hand-written Russian-Chinese dictionary kept in the Manuscript Research Department of the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The author identifies the principles of compilation that were used in the dictionary, and discovers the purpose of its compilation. The manuscript was gathered by Illarion K. Rossokhin, one of the first Russian teachers and translators of Chinese and Manchu. While in China, Rossokhin not only studied Chinese and Manchu languages, but also taught Russian language at a special school for Chinese officials. In this article, the author attempts to establish when the dictionary was written. As a result of the study, it was suggested that the compilation of the dictionary could have been started in China and finished in Russia. It was found that the manuscript does not have a unified structure. There are many repetitions and it is possible to note a tendency to group words according to thematic characteristics. The manuscript can be separated into three parts: the first part where there is some effort to group words in an unified structure; in the second part we can see a normal grouping in a unified order without titles; in the third part thematic paragraphs have titles. Creating a dictionary that was convenient for use by people who studied the Chinese language is one the possible reasons for utilizing a thematic structure. It is clear that dictionary was influenced by Chinese “category dictionaries” (leishu). The author’s analysis of the dictionary shows that it was used to teach conversational Chinese and it could also have been a source of information on the basics of Chinese grammar.

A CASE STUDY OF PROSODIC PHRASAL GROUPING AND INTONATIONAL PROMINENCE IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

In language acquisition, children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances. In line with that, as a case study in this research, I analyze two particular aspects of prosody in a child’s language acquisition, i.e. prosodic phrasal grouping and intonational prominence. In the first aspect, I investigate whether the child uses prosodic phrases to group words together into interpretable units. In the second aspect, I analyze whether the child uses intonational prominence to focus marking prosody. The result indicates that both aspects are used by the child.Keywords: language acquisition, prosody, intonation, phonetic cues.

On the width of verbal subgroups of the groups of triangular matrices over a field of arbitrary characteristic

The width [Formula: see text] of the verbal subgroup [Formula: see text] of a group [Formula: see text] defined by a collection of group words [Formula: see text] is the smallest number [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text] such that every element of [Formula: see text] is the product of at most [Formula: see text] words in [Formula: see text] evaluated on [Formula: see text] and their inverses. Well known that every verbal subgroup of the group [Formula: see text] of triangular matrices over an arbitrary field [Formula: see text] can be defined by just one word: an outer commutator word or a power word. We prove that [Formula: see text] for every outer commutator word [Formula: see text] and that [Formula: see text] except for two cases, when it is equal to 2. For finitary triangular groups, the situation is similar.

The Role of Prosodic Breaks and Pitch Accents in Grouping Words during On-line Sentence Processing

The present study addresses the question whether accentuation and prosodic phrasing can have a similar function, namely, to group words in a sentence together. Participants listened to locally ambiguous sentences containing object- and subject-control verbs while ERPs were measured. In Experiment 1, these sentences contained a prosodic break, which can create a certain syntactic grouping of words, or no prosodic break. At the disambiguation, an N400 effect occurred when the disambiguation was in conflict with the syntactic grouping created by the break. We found a similar N400 effect without the break, indicating that the break did not strengthen an already existing preference. This pattern held for both object- and subject-control items. In Experiment 2, the same sentences contained a break and a pitch accent on the noun following the break. We argue that the pitch accent indicates a broad focus covering two words [see Gussenhoven, C. On the limits of focus projection in English. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge: University Press, 1999], thus grouping these words together. For object-control items, this was semantically possible, which led to a “good-enough” interpretation of the sentence. Therefore, both sentences were interpreted equally well and the N400 effect found in Experiment 1 was absent. In contrast, for subject-control items, a corresponding grouping of the words was impossible, both semantically and syntactically, leading to processing difficulty in the form of an N400 effect and a late positivity. In conclusion, accentuation can group words together on the level of information structure, leading to either a semantically “good-enough” interpretation or a processing problem when such a semantic interpretation is not possible.

Research on Second Language Learning Strategies

Second language (L2) learning strategies are specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that students employ—often consciously—to improve their own progress in internalizing, storing, retrieving, and using the L2 (Oxford 1990b, after Rigney 1978). Strategies are the tools for active, self-directed involvement that is necessary for developing L2 communicative ability (O'Malley and Chamot 1990, Wenden 1991, Wenden and Rubin 1987). Hundreds of L2 learning strategies exist and many are well recognized and used regularly by students. In a given class of students, for example, Lázló will seek out conversation partners. Iike will group words to be learned and then label each group. Marijke will give herself encouragement through positive self-talk before getting up to give a speech in the target language.

Countable lattice-ordered groups

A lattice-ordered group is a group and a lattice such that the group operation distributes through the lattice operations (i.e. f(g ∨ h)k = fgk ∨ fhk and dually). Lattice-ordered groups are torsion-free groups and distributive lattices. They further satisfy f ∧ g = (f−1 ∨ g−1)−1 and f ∨ g = (f−1 ∧ g−1)−1. Since the lattice is distributive, each lattice-ordered group word can be written in the form ∨A ∧B ωαβ where A and B are finite and each ωαβ is a group word in {xi: i ∈ I}. Unfortunately, even for free lattice-ordered groups, this form is not unique. We will use the prefix l- for maps between lattice-ordered groups that preserve both the group and lattice operations, and e for the identity element. A presentation (xi;rj(x) = e)i∈I, j∈J is the quotient of the free lattice-ordered group F on {xi: i∈I} by the l-ideal (convex normal sublattice subgroup) generated by its subset {rj(x): j ∈ J}. {xi: i ∈ I} is called a generating set and {ri(x):j∈J} a defining set of relations. If I and J are finite we have a finitely presented lattice-ordered group. If we can effectively enumerate all lattice-ordered group words r1(x), r2(x),… in xi; i∈I}. If I is finite and J (for this enumeration) is a recursively enumerable set, we say that we have a recursively presented lattice-ordered group. Throughout Z denotes the group of integers and ℝ the real line.Our purpose in this paper is to prove the natural analogues of three theorems from combinatorial group theory (5), chapter IV, theorems 4·9, 3·1 and 3·5-in particular, theorem C is a natural analogue of an unpublished theorem of Philip Hall (4).