Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Grammar Of Approximating Number Pairs (Anps) In Mandarin Chinese, Xuehuai He

Pomona Senior Theses

"There are twenty or thirty people." What exactly does this mean? Is it exactly twenty or thirty, or is it an approximate range? What about "twenty or twenty-six people"?

Approximating number pairs (ANPs) are a kind of approximative expression that takes a number pair and expresses a quantity close to it. There are constraints on the structure and choice of numerals: many combinations would be ungrammatical or denote a precise disjunction rather than being approximative. Studies like Eriksson et al. (2010) statistically generalized the grammar of ANPs through corpus studies on select European languages. However, these surface-level generalizations fail to …

Larson's Musical Forces In Schlenker's Music Semantics, Mick De Neeve

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Larson’s musical forces of gravity, magnetism and inertia link music to metaphors of physical motion. Schlenker’s music semantics is based on similar physical world associations. Because Larson’s forces are about note movements towards harmonic stability, his framework implies note groupings at stable boundaries, given common cadential harmony. These groupings with forces assignments can then be viewed as musical events in Schlenker’s approach, and mapped to structure-preserving external (world) events as required for this author’s semantics. To this end, Schlenker’s truth definition, specifying when an event is ‘true of’ a musical expression, will be adapted. The synthesis amounts to what Schlenker …

Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those …

The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer

Doctoral Dissertations

Even is a focus-sensitive semantic operator that introduces a presupposition about likelihood. Under many semantic accounts, even’s likelihood presupposition requires the sentence with even to be less likely than a set of contextually-relevant alternatives. On one hand, even’s presupposition is complex, and this complexity may cause delays in processing. On the other hand, despite—and indeed because—of this complexity, even has the potential to be highly informative to readers. In this dissertation, I investigate whether and how even interacts with lexical predictability in online processing. If comprehenders are able to rapidly process even, they may be able to …

Syntax And Semantics Of Music: Preface, Philippe Schlenker, Jurgis Skilters

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

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The Impact Of Semantics And Syntax On Lexical Retrieval In Individuals With Aphasia, Marta M. Korytkowska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nearly all people with aphasia (PWA) report difficulty with lexical retrieval (i.e., anomia). While there are several tasks used to measure lexical retrieval, each poses different degrees and types of challenges. For example, some studies have found that PWA performance varies depending on the type of lexical retrieval task. The tasks that have been used include lexical retrieval in isolation tasks (such as picture-naming), lexical retrieval in sentence level tasks (such as narration tasks), and lexical retrieval in sentence-completion tasks. Some studies have found no differences between the accuracy of lexical retrieval in isolation and at the sentence level (e.g., …

The Language Of Mechanical Support In Children: Is It ‘Sticking’, ‘Hanging’, Or Simply ‘On’?, Julia Marie Hauss

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Research has found that children begin to differentiate in the terms they use to encode support. In English, BE on, the Basic Locative Construction (Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; “put on” in dynamic events) tends to encode support-from-below (e.g., cup on table), whereas lexical support verbs (e.g., hang, stick, tape, glue, etc.) tend to encode mechanical support. We see this differentiation in semantic space by six years of age (Johannes et al., 2016). Although this differentiation occurs, we can still use BE on to encode all types of support, just as we can use a variety of lexical verbs (e.g., the …

Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones

Masters Theses

Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …

Semantic Orientation Of Crosslingual Sentiments: Employment Of Lexicon And Dictionaries, Arslan Ali Raza, Asad Habib, Jawad Ashraf, Babar Shah, Fernando Moreira

All Works

Sentiment Analysis is a modern discipline at the crossroads of data mining and natural language processing. It is concerned with the computational treatment of public moods shared in the form of text over social networking websites. Social media users express their feelings in conversations through cross-lingual terms, intensifiers, enhancers, reducers, symbols, and Net Lingo. However, the generic Sentiment Analysis (SA) research lacks comprehensive coverage about such abstruseness. In particular, they are inapt in the semantic orientation of Crosslingual based code switching, capitalization and accentuation of opinionative text due to the lack of annotated corpora, computational resources, linguistic processing and inefficient …

Social Verbs: A Force-Dynamic Analysis, Pavlina Kalm

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation provides a semantic analysis of verbs that describe social events, i.e., events in which participants interact with each other on a social level. The following broad semantic categories of verbs are discussed: verbs of communication (e.g., tell, say, advise), transfer of possession verbs (e.g., own, give, buy), social role verbs (e.g., work, hire, imprison), verbs of interpersonal interactions (e.g., fight, meet, bully), and verbs that denote conceptual relations between entities (e.g., differ, symbolize, indicate). Despite their prominent status in the lexicon and frequent use in everyday situations, linguistic accounts of social verbs are …

The Economics Of Information And The Meaning Of Speech, Charles W. Collier

Catholic University Law Review

In common usage the communication of information is not sharply distinguished from the use of language or speech to make factual or propositional statements. So it should come as no surprise that one of the main legal justifications for protecting speech--that it underwrites a “marketplace of ideas” and thereby contributes to the search for truth--has strong parallels in the economic theory of information. “Indeed,” as Kenneth Arrow writes, “the market system as a whole has frequently been considered as an organization for the allocation of resources; the typical argument for its superiority to authoritative central allocation has been the greater …

A Corpus Study Of The Development Of The Adjective Phrase In French Children, Avery Elizabeth Baggett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis I attempt to answer three questions:

H1) Do children use proportionally more prenominal or post-nominal placement of adjectives than adults?

H2) Are children more conservative or more creative in their behavior in alternating prenominal and post-nominal placement of adjectives?

H3) If colored terms are more frequent in child speech will they pattern more like prenominal adjectives or more like post nominal adjectives, as in adult speech?

To do this, I examine two general semantic viewpoints, opting to use Scontras & Goodman (2017) subjectivity hypothesis. Next, I provide a general overview of First Language Acquisition research and then …

Linguistic Personality Of A Translator, Yana Arustamyan

Philology Matters

The article discusses the problems related to the specification of the levels of linguistic personality of a literary translation. Translator’s linguistic personality is a subtype of a linguistic personality, which is always limited to a special social function and conditioned by the ideas, style, linguistic peculiarities and preferences of the source text author. Therefore, a literary translator represents the reality that was perceived through the prism of a source text author’s mentality and cognitive experience, but with the attraction of own cognitive baggage and understanding of the foreign culture. The topicality of the research is conditioned by the necessity of …

The Functions Of Standard Introductory Words In Mediatexts, Shakhodat Usmonova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Background. The article analyzes the stylistic features of standard introductory words used in newspaper texts in Uzbek and English. It has also been suggested that there is a standard similarity in the introductory words that connect sentences in Uzbek and English newspaper texts, and these words are often significant as they come at the beginning of a sentence. All analyzes were compared using examples of Uzbek and English newspapers. Methods. Introductory words in modern newspaper text is a powerful means of representing the author of a newspaper text, explication of dialogicity, as well as reproduction of the features of colloquial …

The Lexiculture Papers: English Words And Culture, Stephen Chrisomalis

Anthropology Faculty Research Publications

The Lexiculture Papers is a collection of scholarship on English words and culture. Each of the 62 chapters was originally authored by a student-scholar in the course, Language and Culture, at Wayne State University, between 2013 and 2020. Each chapter is a short social and historical description of a single English word in its cultural context, principally since 1800. Using a combination of historical linguistics, etymology, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis, the papers analyze English-speaking social life through the lens of specific words.

The Semantic And Acoustic Voice Features Differentiating Neutral And Traumatic Narratives, Yosef Shimon Amrami

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a quantitative and qualitative exploration of how one linguistically communicates emotions through an autobiographical narrative. Psycholinguistic research has affirmed that linguistic features of a narrative, including semantic and acoustic features, indicate a narrator’s emotions and physiological. This study investigated whether these linguistic features could help differentiate between trauma and neutral narratives and if they can predict autobiographical narratives’ subjective trauma ratings (STR). Qualitative analyses of the positive and negative evaluative statements were also conducted, which indicated the narrators’ thought processes during recall. Twenty-two Spanish-English college students participated in this study and narrated both traumatic and neutral narratives. …

Development And Functions Of The Internet Terminology: Abbreviation And Nomination, Dilfuzakhon Saidkodirova Senior Teacher, Phd

Philology Matters

The rapid development of science and technology, production, globalization and integration processes in the world, the intensive interaction of world languages create the basis for the continuous enrichment of the vocabulary of languages. It should be emphasized that the effective use of the extensive experience gained in the world linguistics, in the study of the Internet terms in Uzbek and English, the creation of dictionaries and, to some extent, the editing gives good results.The system of the Internet terminology has its own specifics. The study of terminology brings to the idea that the phenomenon of figurative use of terms is …

The Emptiness Of The Present: Fronting Constructions As A Window To The Semantics Of Tense, Petr Kusliy

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is devoted to the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English and the phenomenon of the Sequence of Tense. It provides and analyzes previously unobserved data from verb phrase fronting constructions in which the simultaneous interpretation of a present tense embedded under a matrix past tense is available. These data are theoretically unexpected and challenging because most theories of English tense disallow this interpretation for Present-under-Past configurations. An account that captures the new data is proposed. It establishes a connection between the simultaneous interpretation of Present-under-Past and the mode of semantic composition between a verb and its complement. …

Linguocultural Aspect Of Investigation Of English And Uzbek Idiomatic Expressions, Bozor Safaraliev Professor, Gulandom Bakieva Professor, Nafisa Nasrullaeva Professor

Philology Matters

The present article is devoted to investigation of English and Uzbek idiomatic expressions or phraseological units which contain culture-related information. They were divided into main groups: idiomatic expressions with the structure of knowledge related to religion, myths and legends, literature, geography, history and culture. They convey significant information about people’s way of life, religious principles, historical events, geographical places, etc. Theoretical part of the article is proved by numerous examples of English and Uzbek idiomatic expressions which were chosen for linguocultural approach of investigation. The objectives of the research: English and Uzbek idiomatic expressions with linguocultural content. The following methods …

On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, And Computational Study, Jiangtian Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched …

Automatic Learning Of Document Section Structure For Ontology-Based Semantic Search, Deya Banisakher

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modeling natural human behavior in understanding written language is crucial for developing true artificial intelligence. For people, words convey certain semantic concepts. While documents represent an abstract concept---they are collections of text organized in some logical structure, that is, sentences, paragraphs, sections, and so on. Similar to words, these document structures, are used to convey a logical flow of semantic concepts. Machines however, only view words as spans of characters and documents as mere collections of free-text, missing any underlying meanings behind words and the logical structure of those documents.

Automatic semantic concept detection is the process by which the …

Competing Semantic And Phonological Constraints In Novel Binomials, Eli George

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This experiment investigates why certain pairs of words, called “frozen binomials” always appear in the same order. It uses an electronic survey that asks subjects to determine what order they would prefer to say pairs of certain words. Specifically, the experiment tests whether it is the sound of the words or the meaning of the words that determines their order. While the data was inconclusive, it does suggest the existence of deeper rules for the ordering of these words.

The Semantics Of Article Acquisition, Emily G. Renie

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

Accurately using articles has consistently been a difficult task for English language learners as articles are often treated as solely grammatical forms rather than also recognizing as representatives of complex semantic properties. This paper aims to synthesize individual research on semantic factors which influence article acquisition and explore how they interact with each other. This paper especially focuses on how native and second language speakers of English acquire and understand the concepts of definiteness and specificity and explores these features within the framework of Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar. This paper examines the Fluctuating Hypothesis (FH) and its use as …

Poetics, Not Pragmatics: Understanding Metaphors In A Poetic Context, Savannah Marciezyk

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to explain why the leading theories of metaphor fail when applied to metaphors which appear in poems. The ability to understand the true meaning of a metaphor in conversations relies on understanding speaker intention and extralinguistic context. This paper argues that because such material is not available to the reader of a poem, theories which rely heavily on pragmatics to explain metaphors cannot be successfully applied to metaphors which appear in poems. This paper makes use of the views on metaphor by John Searle and Paul Grice, and discusses how meaning is constructed in …

A Publicist Discource As A Conceptual Linguistic Unit Forming The Base Of The Text, Dilfuza Teshabaeva Doctor Of Science, Professor, Shahodat Usmonova Teacher

Philology Matters

The article discusses the features of a publicistic style, justifies the standard of this style, which is based on the transfer of the socially significant information. Publicistic discourse was also analyzed as a conceptual unit of the text. The structure of speech in a journalistic text also depends on the consistency of the linguistic units, which contain conceptual and evaluative units. One of the main features of the press is a trend towards social assessment. It is obvious that newspaper language is not intended simply to describe objects and events by their nature, but to give them a certain assessment …

Analysis Of Linguo-Cultural Peculiarities Of The English Idioms With The Component Of Flora, K. T. Alimova

Central Asian Problems of Modern Science and Education

This article is devoted to the study of linguistic and cultural characteristics of English idioms with the flora component. The purpose of this study is to analyze linguo-cultural peculiarities of the idioms of the English language with the components of flora considered the methods and approaches to the research of idioms and their possible classifications, as well as their etymology and semantics.

The Head-Quarters Of Mandarin Arguments, Hsin-Lun Huang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation looks at the syntactic distributions of various Mandarin arguments and develops an argument structure that takes into account the arguments’ semantic types. Theories of argument realization mostly build on a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic positions of arguments and the thematic relations they bear to the verb in the underlying structure. And this correspondence is rooted in the assumption that the argument positions in the verb’s projection must be saturated before other semantic compositions can take place. This dissertation argues that the saturation requirement can be alleviated, depending on whether languages make a morphological distinction in their syntax. …

Replacing The Flawed Chevron Standard, Brian G. Slocum

William & Mary Law Review

Judicial review of agency statutory interpretations depends heavily on the linguistic concept of ambiguity. Most significantly, under Chevron, judicial deference to an agency’s interpretation hinges on whether the court determines the statute to be ambiguous. Despite its importance, the ambiguity concept has been poorly developed by courts and deviates in important respects from how linguists approach ambiguity. For instance, courts conflate ambiguity identification and disambiguation and treat ambiguity as an umbrella concept that encompasses distinct forms of linguistic indeterminacy such as vagueness and generality. The resulting ambiguity standard is unpredictable and does not adequately perform its function of mediating between …

Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Primes, Universals, And Syntax With Data From The Semantic Field Grace In The Old Testaments Of The King James Bible And Martin Luther’S German Bible, Mary K. Bolin

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This paper examines the use of "Semantic Primes" or "Natural Semantic Metalanguage" (NSM) as developed by Wierzbicka and Goddard, comparing it with other techniques of semantic analysis and applying to the semantic field "Grace" as defined by Bolin (1999) in the King James English Bible and Luther's German Bible.

The Way You Make Me Feel: Semantic Response Behavior Following A Status Prime In The Context Of Romantic Relationships, Robert James Konefal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Intimate Partner Violence is a potential result of an imbalance within a romantic relationship that comes with grave consequences. Often, abusers find that their higher status position assists them in their ability to harm someone with a lower status position, which thereby leading to higher likelihood of aggression. It is currently unknown whether or not people who verbalize this status imbalance through semantic choice will have a higher likelihood of aggressing. The power of suggestion is a strong phenomenon. Not only can semantics be used in priming to affect various types of behavior such as emotional responses (Hansen & Shantz, …