Which animal is big? Aging-related effects on the controlled retrieval of information

The efficient use of knowledge requires semantic control processes to retrieve context-relevant information. So far, it is well established that semantic knowledge, as measured with vocabulary tests, do not decline in aging. Yet, it is still unclear if controlled retrieval -the context-driven retrieval of very specific aspects of semantic knowledge- declines in aging, following the same fate of other forms of cognitive control. Here, we tackled this issue by comparing the performance of younger and older native Italian speakers during a semantic feature verification task. To manipulate the control demands, we parametrically varied the semantic significance, a measure of the salience of the target feature for the cue concept. As compared to their young counterparts, older adults showed a greater performance disruption (in terms of reaction times) as the significance value of the target feature decreased. This result suggests that older people have difficulties in regulating the activation within semantic representation, such that they fail to handle non-dominant (or weakly activated) yet task-relevant semantic information.

Worldview in Gothic Story by E. F. Benson “Gavon’s Eve”

The issues of creating a picture of the world in the story of the English writer E. F. Benson’s “Gavon’s Eve”. It is concluded that the picture of the world is organized by two external chronotopes: the chronotope of the Scottish village of Gavon, the chronotope of the Pictish fortress and the internal chronotope, concentrated around the consciousness of the narrator. Attention is paid to the functioning of forms of artistic space and time, built on the principle of binary oppositions. It is shown that spatial correlations between external and internal, far and near, western and eastern have an increased semantic significance in the narrative. Particular attention is paid to the role of the spatial categories of up and down, revealing the author’s concept of the eternity of infernal evil. It has been proven that the key forms of artistic time are day and night, light and dark, past and present, which are traditional for Gothic subjects. The relevance of the study is due to the growing interest in the genre of gothic prose, which today is associated, in particular, with attempts to resist anti-humanistic, destructive trends in the life of modern society. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that the issues of artistry of Gothic stories by E. F. Benson is still underresearched.

Argumentative Communication in Rawdat Al-Muhebben wa Nozhatt Al-Mushtaqeen’s Book by Ibn Al-Qayyem: The Foundations and Mechanisms of its Functioning

This research seeks to unravel the components of the argumentative discourse in the Book of ʻRawdat al-Muhebbeen wa Nozhatt al-Mushtaqeenʼ - The Garden of Lovers and the Promenade of Longing People – by Ibn Al-Qayyem Al-Jawziyah. This is because this book has a moderate discourse with a sound Islamic thought that is characterized by its sustainability, popularity, realism, and interaction with the successive developments of the new age. This reflects the intellectual maturity the composing process has reached in the philosophy of love and its educational bases in every place and time. To explore the componets, properties, and the working mechanisms of an argumentative discourse in Ibn Qayyem’s book, the present work has been conducted using a pragmatic closeness approach among the three communication polars: (sender, receiver, and message). Through the third pole, the researcher attempts to interpret the text internally, shedding light on its philosophical and aesthetic semantic significance. Such a type of analysis helps reveal the logical argument that conforms to the spirit of the age during which the book appeared. This can be clarified by exploring the sender’s employed emotional arguments that are connected to the recipient and his persuasive realistic experiences. All the above discussion reveals the secrets of a discourse and its hidden points, establishes the values of a dialogue and persuasion, accepts the differences, and reconciles between the different opinions. Accordingly, an argumentative entery has been chosen as it represents a communicative act that is based on a set of interactive rules orienting interlocuters’ intentions.

Case Marking of Rava in Comparison with Bangla

Rava, also known as Kochakrew, is a Tibeto-Burmese language mainly spoken at the New Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri districts, West Bengal, India. Bangla/Bengali is an Indo-Aryan Language spoken primarily in India and Bangladesh. Here, language mixing occurs, and within which case beomes a salient phenomenon. Case marking i s traditionally referred as ‘‘a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads’’ (Blake 1994). The present paper aims to investigate how case is formed in both Rava and Bangla. It mainly undertakes a study of case as a nominal inflectional category in Rava and Bangla and accounts for the morphological and syntactic features of case and case marking with special emphasis on their semantic significance.

Deconstruction and fractalization of urban identity

The research, by referring to the Dur Untash city at the Symbolic level, seeks to answer the question that how in urban semiotics, the city's identity has acquired a semantic significance beyond its significance. The situation of the city expresses a state that any kind of dominant discourses has lost their accreditation capacity and authority, and the audience cannot rely on any of the currents that were considered as definitive. City identity is nothing but fractal games that there is no source of authority that indicates the fixed meaning of these formulas and this is a social contract. These contracts derive from the semiotic rules which is agreed upon in the community. In this game will be try to impose certain meanings on the city identity using the symbolic function; to internalize meta-narrative (internalization process) and in this way, the identity and the presence of the Dur-Untash city will be recorded in time and reach an immortal realm.

Converting typesetting codes to structured XML

Before XML, the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO) created complex typography using non-hierarchical, line-based typesetting systems characterized by “locator” files which contain lines of typesetting instructions. Our mission is to convert years of locator files that describe U.S. government bills, laws, and statues (etc.) into structural XML, valid to the United States Legislative Markup (USLM) XML Schema. This was and is complicated, as locator files, in addition to being completely presentation-focused, use stylistic differences to communicate semantic significance. Our iterative analysis grew the mapping specification in stages. The conversion itself is in two parts. First, Java converts the locator files into hierarchical XML (the JAVA lexical, syntactical, decomposition, and generational phases are the focus of this paper). Then XSLT improves the resulting XML. Quality control and testing required additional programming and the creation and maintenance of a large set of reference samples.

Thomas Tranströmer’s poetic syntax and its Russian translation

The article discusses the syntactic structure of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems that reflects the uniqueness of his poetic worldview and the depth of philosophical meaning. Chains of homogenous parts of the sentence, mostly with conjunctionless coordination, are used to reflect the infinite diversity of the outer world as seen through the poetic vision. In these conjunctionless coordinated chains of nominal parts of the sentence — attributes and objects — commas are used for rythmical and expressive purposes, stressing the semantic significance of every component, and facilitate preserving the alliterative sounding of the poem. By contrast, when objects of the outer world are depicted with a negative value as a chaotic mass, commas between the lexemes that refer to them, are absent. Tranströmer’s poetic syntax is also characterized by a special “density” of relative clauses introduced with the conjunction som, that often expand on the main part in the form of a nominal sentence. They often have a complicated syntactic structure with “cyclic” repetition of the prop-word. Another typical feature of versification in Tranströmer’s works is the use of elaborate syntactic compounds which include various constructions — extended predicative attributes, adverbial constructions with the preposition med, as well as complex objects with an infinitive. A special function in Tranströmer’s syntactic structure is assigned to colons and hyphens. The use of colons makes it possible to express what is only accessible to the poet’s inner vision — what is hidden in the past or the future, seen in a dream, and revealing itself in the distant space. The use of hyphens inside sentences and between them expands the limits of the outer world making its image multidimensional. Translating Tranströmer involves the use of syntactic transformations caused by the typological differences between Swedish and Russian. Lexical substitutions can also be found, including the use of Russian words of a higher register, for example, the translation of the relative pronoun som ‘which’ with the conjunction что meaning ‘which’ but in a higher register and typical of an epic narrative, allows for the preservation of the rythmic structure of the original.

Surname as a text-forming factor of dialect text

The article analyzes the structure of the East Slobozhansk dialect text, which motivates the origin of the nickname. The author argues that dialect texts on the origin, interpretation and history of rural nicknames have a similar structure, which allows in the text ‘origin of the nickname’ as a model of a separate class of texts with hierarchically organized prototype features (semiotic, structural, intentional, pragmatic and others) identify the following semantic and structural parts: nickname, word-motivator, motivational-interpretative text, additional evidence of the person, narrator, etc. The first two parts are usually required. Others may be either completely absent or characterized by varying degrees of detail. The motivational text usually provides a wide range of evidence about the features of mental traits, traditions, beliefs, preferences of the language community. Motivators of rural nicknames can be words of proprial vocabulary (name of father, mother, surname, reduced-loving forms of names of the bearer of a nickname, surnames of known actors, names of radio or TV programs) or appellation (names of birds, animals, any general names or derived adjectives, tokens used in children's speech, dialectisms, artificially created words, etc.). When a nickname occurs, there is a metaphorical rethinking of the meaning of the appellation. Texts about the origin of nicknames produced by a dialect carrier are based on the pretext (a certain event or situation in the life of the language community, which became the basis for the emergence of its own name; individual traits of a member of the language community, etc.). The macrotext „nickname” is a synthesis of thematic-semantic, pragmatic and functional-stylistic factors. It represents the intentions of the author, ie the purpose of creating the text of the nickname, the personal characteristics of the author, the nature of addressing. Most nicknames are characterized by stylistic and semantic significance, often crudely expressive. Therefore, the text, which explains the origin of the nickname, is marked mainly by a negative connotation, the center of which is the nickname itself, and on the periphery there are tokens that complement, clarify, express the nickname and the word motivator.

TO THE PROBLEM OF SEMANTIC CLASSIFICATION OF SUBSTANDARD LEXICAL UNITS OF MEDICAL ORIENTATION

This article is devoted to the classification of substandard lexical units of medical orientation in English and Russian from the point of their semantic significance. The study is based on the materials of the most authoritative English-speaking and Russian-speaking substandard lexicographic sources. The classification and standardization of medical terminology is currently receiving close attention both from the professional medical community and from the point of linguistic science. The classification of medical vocabulary and, in particular, medical terminology is presented in domestic and foreign scientific from a position of the morphological and syntactic structure and according to the methods of word formation. The problems of medical terminology are discussed in detail in the works of B. Dennis, A.I. Rudova, M.N. Chernyavsky and others, however, the studies conducted did not affect the vocabulary of the substandard level. In this regard, it is advisable to expand and supplement the proposed classifications taking into account the extensive language layer of non-standard vocabulary.

Detecting Paraphrases in Marathi Language

Paraphrasing refers to the sentences that either differs in their textual content or dissimilar in rearrangement of words but convey the same meaning. Identifying a paraphrase is exceptionally important in various real life applications such as Information Retrieval, Plagiarism Detection, Text Summarization and Question Answering. A large amount of work in Paraphrase Detection has been done in English and many Indian Languages. However, there is no existing system to identify paraphrases in Marathi. This is the first such endeavor in Marathi Language. A paraphrase has different structured sentences and Marathi being semantically strong language hence this system is designed for checking both statistical and semantic similarity of Marathi sentences. Statistical similarity measure does not need any prior knowledge as it is only based on the factual data of sentences. The factual data is calculated on the basis of the degree of closeness between the word-set, word-order, word-vector and word-distance. Universal Networking Language (UNL) speaks about the semantic significance in the sentence without any syntacticpointofinterest.Hence, these mantic similarity calculated on the basis of generated UNL graphs for two Marathi sentences renders semantic equality of two Marathi sentences. The total para phrases core was calculated after joining statistical and semantic similarity scores which gives the judgement of being paraphrase or non-paraphrase about the Marathi sentences.