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Second-hand consumption is often seen as a way of reducing one’s ecological footprint. In an attempt to find out how the representations of second-hand consumption in discourse have evolved over time, a corpus study of the word second-hand is carried out on the basis of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1820–2019). Frequency is considered, as well as collocates, which show the types of second-hand items that are mentioned in different time periods and which indicate how positively or negatively connoted second-hand consumption is. Together with a more qualitative approach, this analysis reveals variation in the frequency and connotations of the word second-hand, and some long-lasting stigma which survives for example through comparisons. The article ends with some suggestions as to how the image of second-hand consumption could be improved.

In order to transition from a monolingual foreign language course to a multilingual one, all the elements that are connected to students' cognition should be taken into consideration in order to facilitate this shift. Working with classes of French as a Foreign Language involving 11-12 yearsold Greek students, our study revealed that by switching to multilingual teaching, students' representations of language(s) start to emerge; these representations had in most cases been hidden, incoherent and fossilized in teaching monolingual classes. While considering metalinguistic awareness, a variable that is central to our research, as a prerequisite for resolving problems emerging in a multilingual educational context, this article seeks to show that the representations language learners make of themselves and their learning constitute metalinguistic reflection at a macro level, which may influence how metalinguistic awareness functions when performing multilingual tasks. This paper focuses on the processing of qualitative data: meta-discourse analysis of the learners participating in our study led us to establish a typology of representations that enabled us to highlightwhat aspects to focus on in the classroom so as to prepare students to reflect on language more intensively. This involved guiding learners towards modifying their representational framework, by addressing deficiencies and correcting their representations characterized as "unproductive", in order to take full advantage of multilingual teaching/learning situations. © 2020 Katerina Krimpogianni, published by Sciendo.

Background: In the Big Data era there is an increasing need to fully exploit and analyse the huge quantity of information available about health. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies can contribute to extract relevant information from unstructured data contained in Electronic Health Records (EHR) such as clinical notes, patient’s discharge summaries and radiology reports among others. Extracted information could help in health-related decision making processes. Named entity recognition (NER) devoted to detect important concepts in texts (diseases, symptoms, drugs, etc.) is a crucial task in information extraction processes especially in languages other than English. In this work, we develop a deep learning-based NLP pipeline for biomedical entity extraction in Spanish clinical narrative. Methods: We explore the use of contextualized word embeddings to enhance named entity recognition in Spanish language clinical text, particularly of pharmacological substances, compounds, and proteins. Various combinations of word and sense embeddings were tested on the evaluation corpus of the PharmacoNER 2019 task, the Spanish Clinical Case Corpus (SPACCC). This data set consists of clinical case sections derived from open access Spanish-language medical publications. Results: NER system integrates in-domain pre-trained Flair and FastText word embeddings, byte-pairwise encoded and the bi-LSTM-based character word embeddings. The system yielded the best performance measure with F-score of 90.84%. Error analysis showed that the main source of errors for the best model is the newly detected false positive entities with the half of that amount of errors belonged to longer than the actual ones detected entities. Conclusions: Our study shows that our deep-learning-based system with domain-specific contextualized embeddings coupled with stacking of complementary embeddings yields superior performance over the system with integrated standard and general-domain word embeddings. With this system, we achieve performance competitive with the state-of-the-art.

In this paper, we study the presence of French/Franco Provencal (FP) diglossia in FP literature, whether original texts or translations. We discuss: 1) the presence of French passages in ‘classical’ FP literature in the western part of the FP region; 2) the bilingual writing in the contemporary novel of the Savoyard writer Pierre Grasset and the differentiated possibilities offered by each language; 3) the staging of diglossia in the translation into Gruyère Francoprovençal (canton of Fribourg) of the Tintin album L’affaire Tournesol (Engl. The Calculus affair).

China, a multinational country with 56 nationalities, has a complex linguistic configuration with more than two hundred languages within its borders. The prestige and hegemonic position of standardized contemporary chinese relegates the languages and cultures of the 55 ethnic minorities to the shadows, in contrast to a state policy that advocates the “flowering of the 56 nationalities in the great family of the Chinese Nation”. In the current context where China tackles controversially the ethnic issues and where we are witnessing an accelerated urbanization and globalization, this thesis aims to highlight the language practices, glottopolitical interventions, language representations, and sociolinguistic identity of Tibetans in their aspirations for educational and social success in mainland China, specifically in Shandong province – our field of research. Our reflection is based on a sociolinguistic survey, carried out with a group of Tibetan students attending school in Shandong, quantitatively and qualitatively., La Chine, un pays multinational qui possède 56 nationalités, présente une configuration linguistique complexe avec plus de deux cents langues dans son sein. Le prestige et la place hégémonique du chinois contemporain standardisé relèguent les langues et les cultures des 55 minorités ethniques dans l’ombre, en contraste avec une politique d’État prônant la « floraison des 56 nationalités dans la grande famille de la Nation chinoise ». Dans le contexte actuel, où la Chine aborde de manière polémique les questions ethniques et où on assiste à une urbanisation et une mondialisation accélérée, cette thèse a pour but de mettre en lumière les pratiques langagières, les interventions glottopolitiques, les représentations des langues, l’identité sociolinguistique des Tibétains dans leurs aspirations pour la réussite scolaire et sociale en Chine continentale, plus précisément dans la province du Shandong – notre terrain d’enquête. Notre réflexion se base sur une enquête sociolinguistique à la fois quantitative et qualitative réalisée avec un groupe d’étudiants tibétains scolarisés dans le Shandong.

The creation of word embeddings is one of the key breakthroughs in natural language processing. Word embeddings allow for words to be represented semantically, opening the way to many new deep learning methods. Understanding what information is in word embeddings will help understanding the behaviour of embeddings in natural language processing tasks, but also allows for the quantitative study of the linguistic features such as grammatical gender. This thesis attempts to explore how grammatical gender is encoded in word embeddings, through analysing the performance of a neural network classifier on the classification of nouns by gender. This analysis is done in three experiments: an analysis of contextualized embeddings, an analysis of embeddings learned from modified corpora and an analysis of aligned embeddings in many languages. The contextualized word embedding model ELMo has multiple output layers with a gradual increasing presence of semantic information in the embedding. This differing presence of semantic information was used to test the classifier's reliance on semantic information. Swedish, German, Spanish and Russian embeddings were classified at all layers of a three layered ELMo model. The word representation layer without any contextualization was found to produce the best accuracy, indicating the noise introduced by the contextualization was more impactful than any potential extra semantic information. Swedish embeddings were learned from a corpus stripped of articles and a stemmed corpus. Both sets of embeddings showed an drop of about 6% in accuracy in comparison with the embeddings from a non-augmented corpus, indicating agreement plays a large role in the classification. Aligned multilingual embeddings were used to measure the accuracy of a grammatical gender classifier in 24 languages. The classifier models were applied to data of other languages to determine the similarity of the encoding of grammatical gender in these embeddings. Correcting the results with a random guessing baseline shows that transferred models can be highly accurate in certain language combinations and in some cases almost approach the accuracy of the model on its source data. A comparison between transfer accuracy and phylogenetic distance showed that the model transferability follows a pattern that resembles the phylogenetic distance.

This work is a reflexive analysis about the links between language and affect. From a study of the oral productions of three plurilingual persons followed by the study of self-confrontation interviews, this study aims to understand the links between language and emotions and to give a hint of answers to the following questions: do we express emotions the same way in the languages that form our verbal repertoire? What are the factors that could justify the possible differences of the expression of affect?; Ce mémoire est une analyse réflexive sur les liens entre langage et affect. À partir d’un corpus formé des productions orales de trois personnes plurilingues ainsi que d’entretiens d’autoconfrontation, ce mémoire cherche à comprendre quels sont les liens entre langage et dimension affective et tente de donner des pistes de réponses à la question suivante : exprimons-nous nos émotions de la même manière dans les langues qui composent notre répertoire verbal et quels sont les facteurs pouvant justifier des éventuelles différences d’expression de l’affect ?

A neural language model trained on a text corpus can be used to induce distributed representations of words, such that similar words end up with similar representations. If the corpus is multilingual, the same model can be used to learn distributed representations of languages, such that similar languages end up with similar representations. We show that this holds even when the multilingual corpus has been translated into English, by picking up the faint signal left by the source languages. However, just like it is a thorny problem to separate semantic from syntactic similarity in word representations, it is not obvious what type of similarity is captured by language representations. We investigate correlations and causal relationships between language representations learned from translations on one hand, and genetic, geographical, and several levels of structural similarity between languages on the other. Of these, structural similarity is found to correlate most strongly with language representation similarity, while genetic relationships---a convenient benchmark used for evaluation in previous work---appears to be a confounding factor. Apart from implications about translation effects, we see this more generally as a case where NLP and linguistic typology can interact and benefit one another., 8 pages, accepted for publication in Computational Linguistics (squib)

Cet article analyse le traitement des anglicismes dans un corpus de bandes dessinées québécoises contemporaines ainsi que les informations issues de questionnaires soumis à des auteurs et à des éditeurs, afin de porter un regard sur les pratiques concernant ce traitement et sur leurs représentations. En premier lieu, nous avons examiné les corrections apportées sur un album. Ensuite, nous avons effectué un classement des types d’anglicismes selon leur traitement et nous avons comparé nos conclusions aux résultats fournis par les questionnaires qui semblent indiquer une approche pragmatique et généralement accueillante de la part des auteurs, et plus normative de la part des correcteurs éditoriaux., This article analyses the treatment of anglicisms in a comics contemporary corpus from Québec as well as the information extracted from a special questionnaire that we have submitted to authors and publishers, in order to compare language practices on the matter and their representations. First, we have examined the corrections made by correctors on an album. Then, we have classified the anglicisms which were highlighted as such by correctors according to different types and we have compared our conclusions with data coming from the answers to our questionnaire. These seem to indicate a pragmatic and generally inclusive approach by the authors, more normative by the editorial correctors.

Les espaces périurbains intéressent la sociolinguistique car ils interrogent les catégories classiques. En analysant des discours épilinguistiques de jeunes du périurbain ainsi que leurs pratiques langagières, nous montrons que la proximité et la continuité des usages entre ville, campagne et périurbain contraste avec des écarts symboliques souvent revendiqués par les locuteurs, en lien avec des stratégies d’identification et de distinction. Cela amène à mettre en relation la mobilité des sujets et la circulation des formes linguistiques., Periurban spaces are objects of interest for sociolinguistics as they raise questions about sociolinguistic categories. Relying on questionnaires, individual and group interviews of young residents in towns surrounding Grenoble, we focus on their discourses about spaces and elements of their practices. Results show a gap between on the one hand the proximity and continuity of language use among city, countryside and periurban inhabitants and on the other hand the claim of strong symbolic differences.

Language categorization in sociolinguistics has become more and more abundant and complex. Whilst this action helps defining language characteristics in precise contexts, it also increases differences in how languages are perceived through collective social representations. The aim of this PhD is to show the relevance of an inclusive approach to languages in a local context, thus creating links between linguistic situations and communities commonly though apart. Two regional or minority languages have been recognized in Scotland, Scots and Gaelic, and hundreds of other languages are used, including Polish, the language mostly spoken after English. In the context of Brexit and movements for independence from the United Kingdom, Scotland displays a positive attitude in discourse regarding increasing diversity. Also, educational policies are currently promoting plurilingualism and language learning in order to put an end to English monolingualism. One of the strategies that is used is to value languages locally in use. The sociolinguistic issue of this PhD has been directly tested on a project which follows this strategy, the multilingual poetry competition Mother Tongue Other Tongue. It offers Scottish primary and secondary school pupils the opportunity to put in practice their plurilingual and pluricultural competence using a language of their repertoire. All languages are considered equal. Our analyses focus on two corpora: the productions submitted to the competition and transcripts of the interviews conducted with children who participated in this competition. The results show that the Mother Tongue Other Tongue experience changes children’s social representations of the languages of their environment, converging towards an inclusive approach to languages, even if they remain aware of the symbolic value of each language when it comes to choosing a language to learn. The message these children carry must be taken into consideration in this field of sociolinguistics.; La catégorisation des langues en sociolinguistique est de plus en plus foisonnante et complexe. Si cette action permet de mieux caractériser les langues dans des contextes précis, elle engendre également une différenciation accrue au niveau des représentations collectives des langues. L’enjeu pour cette thèse est de démontrer la pertinence d’une approche inclusive des langues en contexte local, créant ainsi des liens entre des situations et des communautés linguistiques habituellement considérées comme séparées. Deux langues régionales ou minoritaires, le scots et le gaélique, sont reconnues en Ecosse, et des centaines d’autres langues sont pratiquées sur le territoire, dont le polonais, première langue parlée après l’anglais. Dans un contexte concomitant de Brexit et de volonté d’indépendance du Royaume-Uni, l’Ecosse affiche un discours positif à l’égard de la diversité croissante. En outre, un mouvement prend de l’ampleur visant à promouvoir le plurilinguisme et l’apprentissage des langues, afin de favoriser une sortie du monolinguisme en anglais. Une des stratégies consiste alors à valoriser les langues déjà présentes. L’enjeu sociolinguistique de cette thèse a été testé directement sur un projet qui s’inscrit dans cette stratégie, le concours de poésie multilingue Mother Tongue Other Tongue. Il propose aux enfants d’écoles primaires et secondaires écossaises de mettre à profit leur compétence plurilingue et pluriculturelle en arborant une langue de leur répertoire. Toutes les langues sont alors mises au même niveau, sans hiérarchie aucune. Nos analyses reposent sur deux corpus : les productions soumises au concours et les transcriptions d’entretiens menés auprès d’élèves participants. Les résultats montrent que l’expérience de Mother Tongue Other Tongue donne lieu à des changements dans les représentations vis-à-vis des langues présentes dans l’environnement de l’élève, convergeant alors vers une approche inclusive des langues, même si, en ce qui concerne l’apprentissage, celui-ci reste conscient de la valeur symbolique de chacune des langues. Le message que portent ces enfants doit être pris en considération afin d'élargir cette partie du champ d'application de la sociolinguistique.

This thesis questions the way the Surrealists' linguistic conceptions, both explicit and implicit, gave language a central role in the movement's attempt to overthrow the established order. With the goal of subverting post-war mainstream thinking, the Surrealists seized language to transform society : through a new use of language, thought was to be freed from inherited obstacles and men were to be emancipated, so as to « change life » and « transform the world », as proclaimed in Rimbaud's and Marx's respective slogans. This « surrealist revolution » used language as its main weapon to refuse norms, reject all preconceptions and undermine the old representations conveyed by language, as they were seen to constrict mental space and bar creative apprehensions. The aim was to disrupt conventional linguistic patterns, to give speech heterogeneity and thus to prevent mainstream thinking from intruding into the linguistic chain, not by changing the material of language as the basis of our thinking, but by changing the way we use it, in order to transform our relationship to the world. The articulation of those political and poetical ambitions is the cornerstone of our research work, which explores the Surrealists' quest for unrestrained, free thought, founded on their strong belief in the power of words over things.; La thèse interroge la façon dont les conceptions linguistiques – explicites comme implicites – des surréalistes ont conféré au langage la fonction d’opérateur principal d’un bouleversement de l’ordre établi. Dans leur entreprise de subversion de la pensée dominante d'après-guerre, les surréalistes se sont emparés du langage pour transformer la société : un nouvel emploi du langage devait libérer la pensée d'entraves héritées, et émanciper l'homme, afin de « changer la vie », de « transformer le monde » selon les mots d’ordre de Rimbaud et de Marx. Cette « Révolution Surréaliste » s’est dotée du langage comme arme première pour affirmer le refus des normes, s’extraire du déjà-pensé, et laisser dépérir les vieilles représentations véhiculées par le langage, qui bornent l’espace mental et portent atteinte aux capacités créatrices de l’imagination. Il s’agit de perturber les structures par trop évidentes de la langue, d’intégrer de l’hétérogénéité dans la parole pour empêcher la pensée dominante de s’immiscer dans la chaîne linguistique. Non pas changer le matériau de la langue, fondement de notre pensée, mais changer l’usage que l’on en fait, pour instituer un nouveau rapport au monde. C’est donc l’articulation des ambitions politiques et poétiques qui est la pierre angulaire de notre recherche sur cette affirmation éclatante du pouvoir des mots sur les choses, et sur la quête inébranlable d’une pensée libre, puissante, qu’a constitué l’aventure surréaliste.

This thesis questions the way the Surrealists' linguistic conceptions, both explicit and implicit, gave language a central role in the movement's attempt to overthrow the established order. With the goal of subverting post-war mainstream thinking, the Surrealists seized language to transform society : through a new use of language, thought was to be freed from inherited obstacles and men were to be emancipated, so as to « change life » and « transform the world », as proclaimed in Rimbaud's and Marx's respective slogans. This « surrealist revolution » used language as its main weapon to refuse norms, reject all preconceptions and undermine the old representations conveyed by language, as they were seen to constrict mental space and bar creative apprehensions. The aim was to disrupt conventional linguistic patterns, to give speech heterogeneity and thus to prevent mainstream thinking from intruding into the linguistic chain, not by changing the material of language as the basis of our thinking, but by changing the way we use it, in order to transform our relationship to the world. The articulation of those political and poetical ambitions is the cornerstone of our research work, which explores the Surrealists' quest for unrestrained, free thought, founded on their strong belief in the power of words over things.; La thèse interroge la façon dont les conceptions linguistiques – explicites comme implicites – des surréalistes ont conféré au langage la fonction d’opérateur principal d’un bouleversement de l’ordre établi. Dans leur entreprise de subversion de la pensée dominante d'après-guerre, les surréalistes se sont emparés du langage pour transformer la société : un nouvel emploi du langage devait libérer la pensée d'entraves héritées, et émanciper l'homme, afin de « changer la vie », de « transformer le monde » selon les mots d’ordre de Rimbaud et de Marx. Cette « Révolution Surréaliste » s’est dotée du langage comme arme première pour affirmer le refus des normes, s’extraire du déjà-pensé, et laisser dépérir les vieilles représentations véhiculées par le langage, qui bornent l’espace mental et portent atteinte aux capacités créatrices de l’imagination. Il s’agit de perturber les structures par trop évidentes de la langue, d’intégrer de l’hétérogénéité dans la parole pour empêcher la pensée dominante de s’immiscer dans la chaîne linguistique. Non pas changer le matériau de la langue, fondement de notre pensée, mais changer l’usage que l’on en fait, pour instituer un nouveau rapport au monde. C’est donc l’articulation des ambitions politiques et poétiques qui est la pierre angulaire de notre recherche sur cette affirmation éclatante du pouvoir des mots sur les choses, et sur la quête inébranlable d’une pensée libre, puissante, qu’a constitué l’aventure surréaliste.

The piece's aim is to describe the teaching and learning of French as a Foreign Language (FLE) in Colombia using the University of Caldas as an example. It is about identifying what is lacking, the needs and proposing what is necessary to remedy the situation. We will first describe the situation of FLE and develop theoretical concepts that guide this work : intercultural, representations, stereotypes, FLE teaching, etc. Furthermore, we describe our methodology based on the study of two fields. The first one is composed of two bodies of work: students and teachers of the University of Caldas. Each data consists of two surveys, a sociolinguistic questionnaire distributed to 258 students and 20 semi-structured interviews; a questionnaire distributed to all the FLE teachers of the university and an interview of all these same teachers. Finally, the body of the second field consists of 6 expatriate Colombian FLE teachers who have settled in France. The quantitative study of the questionnaires, and the lexicometric and content study of the data help us to describe an educational context where the intercultural does not have enough emphasis in the teaching of FLE, where the right material and the right conditions to aid the development of this skill do not exist and where representations of learners and teachers can negatively influence the motivation for learning French. Moreover, the second field confirms that the teaching of FLE in Colombian Universities does not transmit intercultural and pragmatic skills to evolve as one would receive living in France. From these results, we will make didactic and political proposals for improving the teaching/learning of FLE in the Colombian universities and for the development of the status of French in the country., Ce travail propose de décrire le contexte de l’enseignement/apprentissage du FLE en milieu universitaire colombien à travers l’exemple de l’université de Caldas, d’en identifier les manques, les besoins et de faire des propositions pour y remédier. Pour ce faire, il s’agira de décrire la situation du FLE en Colombie, puis de développer les notions théoriques qui guideront ce travail : interculturel, représentations, stéréotypes, didactique du FLE, etc. Nous décrirons ensuite notre méthodologie basée sur l’étude de deux terrains. Le premier est composé de deux corpus : étudiants et enseignants de l’université de Caldas à Manizales. Chaque corpus est constitué de deux enquêtes, un questionnaire sociolinguistique diffusé auprès de 258 apprenants et 20 entretiens d’étudiants ; un questionnaire diffusé auprès de l’ensemble des enseignants de FLE de l’université et l’entretien de tous ces enseignants. Enfin, le corpus du deuxième terrain est composé des entretiens de 6 professeurs de FLE colombiens installés en France. L’étude quantitative des questionnaires, et l’étude lexicométrique et de contenu de ces corpus nous aident à décrire un contexte d’enseignement où l’interculturel a peu de place dans l’enseignement du FLE, où le matériel et les conditions requis facilitant le travail d’une telle composante font défaut et où les représentations des apprenants et des enseignants peuvent influencer négativement la motivation et l’apprentissage du français. Par ailleurs, le deuxième terrain permet de confirmer que l’enseignement du FLE dispensé dans les universités colombiennes ne transmet pas les compétences interculturelles ni pragmatiques pour évoluer en contexte réel. A partir de ces résultats, nous ferons des propositions au niveau didactique comme politique pour l’amélioration de l’enseignement/apprentissage du FLE dans les universités colombiennes et pour une mise en valeur du FLE dans le pays.