Linguistic Analysis

Simple negation in natural languages represents a complex interrelationship of syntax, prosody, semantics and pragmatics, and may be realised in various ways: lexically, morphologically and prosodically. In almost all spoken languages, the first two of these are the primary realisations of syntactic negation. In contrast, in many signed languages negation can occur without lexical or morphological marking. Thus, in British Sign Language (BSL), negation is obligatorily expressed using face–head actions alone (facial negation) with the option of articulating a manual form alongside the required face–head actions (lexical negation). What are the processes underlying facial negation? Here, we explore this question neuropsychologically. If facial negation reflects lexico-syntactic processing in BSL, it may be relatively spared in people with unilateral right hemisphere (RH) lesions, as has been suggested for other ‘grammatical facial actions’ [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 307; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence)].Three BSL users with RH lesions were specifically impaired in perceiving facial compared with manual (lexical and morphological) negation. This dissociation was absent in three users of BSL with left hemisphere lesions and different degrees of language disorder, who also showed relative sparing of negation comprehension. We conclude that, in contrast to some analyses [Applied Psycholinguistics 18 (1997) 411; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence); Archives of Neurology 36 (1979) 837], non-manual negation in sign may not be a direct surface realisation of syntax [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 143; Language and Speech 42 (1999) 127].Difficulties with facial negation in the RH-lesion group were associated with specific impairments in processing facial images, including facial expressions. However, they did not reflect generalised ‘face-blindness’, since the reading of (English) speech patterns from faces was spared in this group. We propose that some aspects of the linguistic analysis of sign language are achieved by prosodic analysis systems (analysis of face and head gestures), which are lateralised to the minor hemisphere.

In this article, the link between migration, community forming and language change of the Urak Lawoi’ (UL) people is made evident. Descriptive and comparative linguistic research, conducted since February 2010 in several Urak Lawoi’ communities on Thailand’s Andaman coast  has supplied most of the data. Some additional data have been selected from earlier research, notably that by Amorn Thawisak (1986).
Urak Lawoi’ is a highly adaptive language that has developed alongside other Malay languages from the Malayan group (which also includes Para Malay languages such as Minagkabau and Temuan). Like the vocabulary of other Malay languages, such as Johor-Riau, Jambi, Kedah, Bengkulu and Pattani, that of UL is for the greater part cognate with the modern standard Malay (SM) languages, the most well known of which are the national languages of Malaysia (Bahasa Malaysia; BM) and Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia; BI)3. When spoken, UL cannot be properly understood by speakers of SM. This is, however, primarily due to certain regular sound changes. By comparing UL with other Malay languages, and by considering loans in vocabulary and grammar which have occurred over time, we can define the place where the Urak Lawoi’ originated as a people, where they went from there, and in which places they chose to settle semi-permanently before making Southern Thailand their permanent domicile.
The Urak Lawoi’ have a lot in common with other Malay people, but there are also many things in which they differ. Originally a nomadic sea people, they have hardly been indianized and never been islamized, and until today hold on to their own animistic beliefs. Nomadic as they were, the Urak Lawoi’ have been in contact with many other peoples and cultures, and though they never yielded to complete adaptation to a dominant society’s values, and only recently gave up their nomadic life style, they were to a great extend influenced by the groups they came into contact with. Many of these influences are reflected in the Urak Lawoi’ language. Urak Lawoi’ has loaned from Sanskrit, SM, English (directly and via SM) and most recently from Thai. So even though no written sources about the ethnic homeland of the Urak Lawoi’ exist, by tracing linguistic development and influences we can trace back the path to their place of origin - which lay along the eastern coast of Sumatra - with comparative ease. This paper offers to point out how migration, community forming and settlement of the Urak Lawoi’ is mirrored in their language.

A Text-To-Speech (TTS) system is a computer application that is capable of converting typed text into speech. This paper contains description of working of a TTS system along with architecture of the system and various available TTS systems for Indian Languages with comparison of these systems on the basis of the methods used by them for speech synthesis. TTS system generally involves two steps, text processing and speech generation. Synthetic speech may be used in several applications, like, telecommunications services, language education, aid to handicapped persons, fundamental and applied research etc. TTS involves many challenges during the process of conversion of text to speech. The most important qualities expected from speech synthesis system are naturalness and intelligibility. The general architecture of a TTS system and different waveform generation methods are discussed in this paper. A scheme for developing a TTS system for Punjabi Language is also included in this paper.

Desde los postulados de la lingüística funcional, este artículo analiza el tratamiento de las funciones semánticas dentro del estudio de la predicación. Para ello, precisa las clasificaciones ofrecidas en las gramáticas del español, compara terminologías y señala los vacíos conceptuales en la descripción y explicación de la estructura argumental. Se propone en el trabajo un modelo de gramática funcional actancial para la descripción y análisis de las funciones semánticas, correlacionando conceptos como: argumento, valencia, función sintáctica, función semántica, caso conceptual, relaciones intercasuales… Vinculando los tres componentes indisolubles del lenguaje –sintáctico, semántico, pragmático–, este trabajo se orienta hacia la construcción de una gramática del significado que contribuya tanto a la teorización como a la enseñanza de la lengua.

Palabras clave: predicación, función semántica, módulo actancial, gramática funcional

Semantic functions in the argument structure of the gramatical sentence: towards an actantial typology in Spanish

This article analyzes the semantic functions in the predicate from the postulates of functional linguistics. For that purpose, it determines the classifications offered by Spanish language grammars, it compares terminologies and points out the conceptual gaps in the description and explanation of argument structure. This work proposes a model of functional actantial grammar for the description and analysis of semantic functions, by correlating concepts such as: argument, valence, syntactic function, semantic function, conceptual case, intercase relations… By linking three components which are indissoluble in language –syntax, semantics, pragmatics–, this study aims for a grammar of meaning that contributes not only to the theoretical field, but also to language teaching.

Keywords: predicate, semantic function, actantial module, functional linguistics

Sentence alignment consists in estimating which sentence or sentences in the source language correspond with which sentence or sentences in a target language. We present in this paper a new approach to aligning sentences from a parallel corpus based on a cross-language information retrieval system. This approach consists in building a database of sentences of the target text and considering each sentence of the source text as a "query" to that database. The cross-language information retrieval system is a weighted Boolean search engine based on a deep linguistic analysis of the query and the documents to be indexed. This system is composed of a multilingual linguistic analyzer, a statistical analyzer, a reformulator, a comparator and a search engine. The multilingual linguistic analyzer includes a morphological analyzer, a part-of-speech tagger and a syntactic analyzer. The linguistic analyzer processes both documents to be indexed and queries to produce a set of normalize...

This study analyzes the inaccuracies of the Cebuano Visayan language in the SunStar News Editorial Dalaygon ang Kausaban. It aims to idealize the inaccurate orthography, syntactic system and morphemic structures of content words found in the textuality. Findings of the study reveal fifty-seven misspelled words which involve the use of inaccurate vowels, the absence of hyphens for glottal stops, and the lack of apostrophe in contracted words. Moreover, there are three inaccurate sentence constructions with a subject-predicate sequence instead of the predicate-subject system of the Cebuano Visayan language. Meanwhile, the morphemic structure of content words reveal that majority of the Cebuano words are formed by affixations that affect the grammaticalization of ideas and concepts. The study concludes that the Cebuano Visayan editorial of SunStar News reveals a textuality of inaccurate orthography, syntax, and morphemes. The study recommends the use of one common standard form of the language in mass media and in Cebuano Visayan language classes for linguistic accuracy.

In this paper, we discuss lemma identification in Japanese morphological analysis, which is crucial for a proper formulation of morpho- logical analysis that benefits not only NLP researchers but also corpus linguists. Since Japanese words often have variation in orthography and the vocabulary of Japanese consists of words of several different origins, it sometimes happens that more than one writing form cor- responds to the same lemma and that a single writing form corresponds to two or more lemmas with different readings and/or meanings. The mapping from a writing form onto a lemma is important in linguistic analysis of corpora. The current study focuses on disambigua- tion of heteronyms, words with the same writing form but with different word forms. To resolve heteronym ambiguity, we make use of goshu information, the classification of words based on their origin. Founded on the fact that words of some goshu classes are more likely to combine into compound words than words of ot...

V članku je predstavljen jezik v koledarju Dober Pajdás kalendárium, ki je v prekmurščini izhajal med letoma 1922 (Naš Slovenski kalendar) in 1943 in ki velja za prvi posvetni koledar v Prekmurju. Urejal ga je Franc Talanyi, ki je poleg stalnih rubrik koledarja sam napisal tudi večino leposlovnih prispevkov. Na jezikovni ravni se pojavljajo številne glasoslovne in oblikoslovne značilnosti, ki so v prekmurskem narečju izpričane še danes (npr. zaokroženje samoglasnika u v ü (süša), otrditev palatalnega l' (posztela), končnica -oj pri pridevniški sklanjatvi v dajalniku in mestniku ednine (tvojoj materi, pri toj zsenszki) idr.). Opazne so nedoslednosti pri zapisovanju glasov, npr. refleks za stalno dolgi in nosni ǫ je lahko ou ali o (okoulik, Boug, kokot, szto), za stalno dolgi jat pa e, ê ali ej (bezsati, peneze, tê 'ti' (3. os. mn.), pripovejst, brejg). Za prislov skoraj Talanyi uporablja tri različice, in sicer szkoro, szkorom in szkoron. Nedoslednosti se kažejo tudi na pravopisni ravni, predvsem pri pisanju skupaj oz. narazen (npr. ne prineszé in neprineszé). Na skladenjski ravni je opazen zaznamovan besedni red, ponavljajoči se stavčni členi in prevlada krajših, enostavčnih povedi. Na leksikalni ravni je bilo ugotovljeno, da je z današnjega vidika precej ekspresivnega izražanja, odkritih je bilo nekaj frazemov (da bi ga kokot vgyo 'naj ga koklja brcne', brüsziti jezike 'spretno govoriti'). Pojavlja se značilno panonsko besedje (npr. kmica, lagoji, šuma, vgojdno, krščak), germanizmi (npr. štala, familija, gvant), nekaj je madžarizmov (npr. beteg, fajta). Kljub temu da se na jezikovni in vsebinski ravni koledarja še čuti madžarski vpliv (rabljen je madžarski črkopis, mestoma je zaslediti madžarske besede, imena mesecev so v nekaterih letnikih zapisana v madžarščini, pomadžarjena so prekmurska krajevna imena v rubriki Szenya, prav tako je nekaj leposlovja napisanega v madžarskem jeziku), je Dober Pajdás kalendárium po prvi svetovni vojni precej prispeval k ohranjanju identitete Prekmurcev, saj jim je prinašal kvalitetno čtivo v prekmurščini, ki je bila zelo blizu njihovemu govoru.

The opinions of second language learning (L2) theorists and researchers are divided over whether to use authentic or simplified reading texts as the means of input for beginning-and intermediate-level L2 learners. Advocates of both approaches cite the use of linguistic features, syntax, and discourse structures as important elements in support of their arguments, but there has been no conclusive study that measures these differences and their implications for L2 learning. The purpose of this article is to provide an exploratory ...

This paper focuses on the language processing tool being developed at our centre and briefly describes two of its applications. CATCG, our morphosyntactic analyser, is designed to deal with general written Catalan text. In CATCG the whole processing task has been divided into specific subtasks and for each one of them we try to apply the best strategy available. The most relevant properties of our system are its robustness, the fact that we have given reusability a very high priority, and the goal of acquiring linguistic information by fully automatic means. The paper is structured as follows: section 1 and 2 explicate and describe the global architecture of CATCG. Section 3 shows the output of CATCG and gives data on its performance. Section 4 describes two projects to which CATCG is being applied: BancTrad and PrADo. Section 5 presents our plans for future work. Section 6 closes the paper with some conclusions. 1. CATCG: A modular architecture CATCG aims at providing an automatic ...

This paper addresses some of the issues learned during the course of building a written language resource, called ‘Peykare’, for the contemporary Persian. After defining five linguistic varieties and 24 different registers based on these linguistic varieties, we collected texts for Peykare to do a linguistic analysis, including cross-register differences. For tokenization of Persian, we propose a descriptive generalization to normalize orthographic variations existing in texts. To annotate Peykare, we use EAGLES guidelines which result to have a hierarchy in the part-of-speech tags. To this aim, we apply a semi-automatic approach for the annotation methodology. In the paper, we also give a special attention to the Ezafe construction and homographs which are important in Persian text analyses.

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.

В статье представлен анализ лингвокультурных особенностей академического дискурса на примере русскоязычных и англоязычных научных статей. Сделан вывод о том, что такие параметры, как ориентация на читателя / автора, ориентация на форму / содержание, уровень вовлеченности читателя в дискурс отражают социокультурные традиции конструирования академического дискурса. Очевидно, что для публикации научных статей в англоязычных источниках русскоязычному автору необходимо знать англосаксонские традиции конструирования академического дискурса.

This work aimed to study the verbal generations of four groups with different types of wine expertise: professionals, connoisseurs, consumers, and trained panelists. Participants performed an association task and a definition task with the vin de garde concept. Lexical resources and types of discourse were analyzed. Wine professionals and trained panelists used descriptive terms while connoisseurs and consumers used words referring to time, cellaring and to subjective judgments. Panelists and consumers produced experiential discourse and were uncertain in their knowledge regarding the vin de garde concept. Wine professionals and connoisseurs were confident in their knowledge, and their discourse explicitly relied both on collectively shared knowledge and individual experiences. Moreover, connoisseurs produced an objective discourse oriented toward wine. A linguistic analysis accounts for expertise as reflected in verbal generations. This work underlines the multidimensional nature of expertise that relies on various skills regarding wine.► Verbal expertise related to wine includes a specific lexicon and a type of discourse with both normative and experiential aspects. ► Connoisseurs have a type of discourse close to that of professionals, but a lexicon more similar to that of consumers. ► Trained panelists have a type of discourse close to consumers, but they have acquired a specific descriptive lexicon. ► Domain-specific expertise involves several skills that can be independently acquired.