Unfolding #Anonymous on Twitter

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical investigation of the range of actors, issues and sub-groups related to the hashtag Anonymous on Twitter between 2012 and 2015. Complementing existing studies that have provided in-depth accounts of Anonymous from a specific point of view, this research provides an overview of the network related to the discursive construction of Anonymous on Twitter from a synoptic standpoint. In particular, the analysis covers three dimensions: the structure and dynamics of the #Anonymous interaction network; the range of issues that Anonymous has been associated with; and the relation between Anonymous and its offshoots. This research provides a descriptive characterization of the topological and semantic complexity of Anonymous and invites to reflect on the simplifications that our vocabulary and methods entail vis a vis the complexity of digital entities delimited by and individuated through hashtags.

Semantic and Pragmatic Implications of Inaccurate Translations of Shari’a-Court Phrases & Sentence Extracts into English

The present paper aims to highlight the semantic and pragmatic implications of the inaccurate English translations of Gazan shari’a-court phrases and sentence extracts. The researchers analyze the translations of five shari’a-court phrases and five sentence extracts from shari’a-court documents of different shari’a courts in Gaza Strip. The descriptive analytical approach was adopted to conduct this research paper. The texts used in this paper are extracted from a thesis on the linguistic difficulties Palestinian translators face when rendering shari’a-court terms in which the researchers participated as a master student and a supervisor. When selecting the source texts, the researchers consulted an assistant professor in law to identify the legal phrases and sentential extracts which require specific familiarity with shari’a-court terms. Then, the selected texts were given to four Palestinian sworn translators who rendered the translations which were afterwards analyzed by the researchers in light of explanations of the legal meaning of the shari’a-court terms by the law specialist. The findings of the selected translations, five phrases and five sentential extracts from fifty phrases and thirty-five sentential extracts in the original thesis, show that the inaccurate translations of shari’a-court terms have semantic and pragmatic implications which are mainly reflected in semantic loss and pragmatic ambiguity which lies in lack of specific reference to intended persons. The researchers recommend integrating specific contents in legal translation courses to better familiarize student translators and trainee translators with the semantic complexity of shari’a-court terms and the practical methods which can be adopted to translate such terms into English. Attention should also be given to the legal terms which are characterized by culture-based meanings.

Semantic Differences between Verb-Nominal Collocations and Corresponding Verbs (As Exemplified by Collocations with Verbs Ispytyvat’ / Ispytat’)

The following article focuses on semantical differences of verbal-nominal descriptive predicates constructed by verbs ispytyvat’ / ispytat’ from their lexically adequate verbal correlates. The Russian linguistic tradition describes such collocations as verbal periphrasis, and this leads to a misjudgment of their semantical particularity. Our main goal is to describe the differences due to state semantical independence of the collocations from the verbs. The study showed that an emotional state described by descriptive predicates with verbs ispytyvat’ / ispytat’ presupposes no explication, which differs them from some lexically adequate verbal correlates. It reveals an intra-subject nature of their semantics that can be manifested in a specific actant structure or in its implementation. It is also worth noting their semantic complexity and an important role of verbal component: different meanings of the verbal component cause different semantics of whole collocation even with the same nominal one. Thus, particular meaning of a nominal component and of a verbal one makes up semantics of a whole construction. Many types and examples of semantical discrepancy between the verbal-nominal descriptive predicates and their lexically adequate verbal correlates leads to the necessity of describing their semantics departed from the verbal correlates’ meaning and of the refusal to consider them as means of verbal periphrasis.

A complexity hierarchy-based solution to the clausal subject puzzle in Turkish

This paper presents a novel analysis of subordinate clause structure in Turkish, focusing on subordinations formed by the following three suffixes: the infinitival -mA(K) with tenseless and (ir)realis usages, and -DIK/ -(y)ACAK with a (non)future temporal specification. We present a classification aligning each form on the Implicational Complementation Hierarchy (ICH) proposed in Wurmbrand and Lohninger (2020), which provides a solution for the subject puzzle observed with these clauses: only infinitival -mA(K) clauses with their (ir)realis use are compatible with being the subject of a transitive verb. We propose that (ir)realis infinitival clauses belong to the situation class in the ICH, and that this middle class is of the ideal semantic complexity and syntactic size for a clausal subject in Turkish.

Les mots et les savoirs : complexité

The contribution addresses a topic discussed since the 17th century by philosophers, logicians and lexicographers: to what extent does the semantic complexity of certain words convey knowledge of the extralinguistic world? What influence does this knowledge have on the coherence of a text? Conversely, another type of complexity must be taken into account as well, the one starting from things: what linguistic devices are adopted to express this complexity in an efficient way? The relationship between the complexity types and knowledge has been investigated by different strands of research in the humanities and is becoming a focus of multidisciplinary research.

Going city

In certain varieties of Dutch spoken among young people, the preposition and determiner in locative and directional PPs can sometimes be omitted. We argue on the basis of language data taken from Twitter and intuitions of young speakers of Dutch that nominal arguments in these constructions do not have a DP layer, the absence of which leads to a special interpretation. The option to omit the preposition is related to the structural and semantic complexity of the verb. The bare construction is possible only with simple verbs, and not with manner-of-motion verbs. We present an analysis that accounts for the non-pronunciation of prepositions in directional predicates by claiming that they can be licensed through incorporation into the verb. This type of incorporation is blocked if the verb is structurally complex.

Method for Assessing the Complexity of Mathematical Reasoning in Educational Texts (on the Example of a Physics Textbook)

The article offers the method for assessing the complexity of mathematical reasoning in various educational texts. It provides for counting the number of mathematical statements (or other elementary judgments) in the conclusions being drawn and taking into account the semantic complexity of the terms denoting the quantities included in the formulas. This allows to calculate the heuristic complexity of the text, depending on the number and complexity of mathematical conclusions, and find the heuristic indicator. To determine the semantic complexity of the entire text and the mathematical reasoning presented in it, a computer is used, which refers to a dictionary-thesaurus – a special file containing terms with an indication of their complexity. This takes into account the volumetric complexity of the formulas, the number of elementary sentences (equations) in mathematical reasoning, as well as the fact that some premises (formulas) are absent, and the pupil must guess before them on his own. Several examples of using the proposed method for analyzing text fragments in physics are considered.

Content Word Production during Discourse in Aphasia: Deficits in Word Quantity, Not Lexical–Semantic Complexity

Although limited and reduced connected speech production is one, if not the most, prominent feature of aphasia, few studies have examined the properties of content words produced during discourse in aphasia, in comparison to the many investigations of single-word production. In this study, we used a distributional analysis approach to investigate the properties of content word production during discourse by 46 participants spanning a wide range of chronic poststroke aphasia and 20 neurotypical adults, using different stimuli that elicited three discourse genres (descriptive, narrative, and procedural). Initially, we inspected the discourse data with respect to the quantity of production, lexical–semantic diversity, and psycholinguistic features (frequency and imageability) of content words. Subsequently, we created a “lexical–semantic landscape,” which is sensitive to subtle changes and allowed us to evaluate the pattern of changes in discourse production across groups. Relative to neurotypical adults, all persons with aphasia (both fluent and nonfluent) showed significant reduction in the quantity and diversity of production, but the lexical–semantic complexity of word production directly mirrored neurotypical performance. Specifically, persons with aphasia produced the same rate of nouns/verbs, and their discourse samples covered the full range of word frequency and imageability, albeit with reduced word quantity. These findings provide novel evidence that, unlike in other disorders (e.g., semantic dementia), discourse production in poststroke aphasia has relatively preserved lexical–semantic complexity but demonstrates significantly compromised quantity of content word production. Voxel-wise lesion-symptom mapping using both univariate and multivariate approaches revealed left frontal regions particularly the pars opercularis, IC, and central and frontal opercular cortices supporting word retrieval during connected speech, irrespective of word class or their lexical–semantic complexity.

The processing of semantic complexity and co-speech gestures in schizophrenia: a naturalistic, multimodal fMRI study

Schizophrenia is marked by aberrant processing of complex speech and gesture, which may contribute functionally to its impaired social communication. To date, extant neuroscientific studies of schizophrenia have largely investigated dysfunctional speech and gesture in isolation, and no prior research has examined how the two communicative channels may interact in more natural contexts. Here, we tested if patients with schizophrenia show aberrant neural processing of semantically complex story segments, and if speech-associated gestures (co-speech gestures) might modulate this effect. In a functional MRI study, we presented to 34 participants (16 patients and 18 matched-controls) an ecologically-valid retelling of a continuous story, performed via speech and spontaneous gestures. We split the entire story into ten-word segments, and measured the semantic complexity for each segment with idea density, a linguistic measure that is commonly used clinically to evaluate aberrant language dysfunction at semantic level. Per segment, the presence of numbers of gestures varied (n = 0, 1, +2). Our results suggest that, in comparison to controls, patients showed reduced activation for more complex segments in the bilateral middle frontal and inferior parietal regions. Importantly, this neural aberrance was reduced in segments presented with gestures. Thus, for the first time with a naturalistic multimodal stimulation paradigm, we show that gestures reduced group differences when processing a natural story, probably by facilitating the processing of semantically complex segments of the story in schizophrenia.

On the Use of the Likert Scale for Assessing the Didactic Complexity of Educational Concepts

The problem of assessing the semantic complexity of educational concepts, which is equal to the number of words needed to explain their essence, is considered. The following attributes of concepts that affect their semantic complexity are highlighted: 1) the possibility of observing the designated object in everyday life; 2) the possibility of experimental study at school; 3) the possibility of perception of the designated object by the senses; 4) the physical complexity of the object, depending on the number of constituent elements and the connections between them; 5) the degree of entry into the thesaurus of graduates of the first, fifth and eleventh grades; 6) the frequency of the word use in the Russian language. The concepts that denote objects of living and inanimate nature are selected; the category of complexity is determined for each concept by the method of pair comparison. Their attributes were evaluated on the Likert scale with 5 gradations; the correlation coefficients between the attributes and the complexity level, as well as the corresponding linear regression coefficients, are determined. A mathematical model is constructed that connects the complexity of concepts with the values of their attributes; it is shown that due to errors in attribute estimates, it does not allow us to accurately determine the semantic complexity of the concepts. An algorithm for evaluating the concepts complexity based on their division into three groups, depending on the frequency of use in the Russian language, is developed. The results of the evaluation of the semantic complexity of the selected concepts that can be used as reference points are presented.