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The hypothesis that all languages are equally complex often invokes a trade-off principle, according to which if a language is more complex in one particular domain, it will be simpler in another different domain. In this paper, we use data from WALS to test the existence of a trade-off between two specific domains: morphology and syntax. Contrary to widespread views, we did not find a negative correlation between these two language domains, but in fact a positive correlation. At the same time, this positive correlation seems to be driven by some language families, and it disappears when one considers purely morphological and purely syntactic features only. We discuss these findings in relation to ongoing research about language complexity, and in particular, the effects of factors external to language on linguistic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores descriptions of natural landscapes excerpted from two travel books, namely, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas, by Paul Theroux, and Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus, by Robert D. Kaplan. The paper aims at analyzing how certain linguistic choices in a given stretch of text conspire to construe the ambience of descriptive passages of natural landscapes in travel writing. This will be carried out by combining insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Frame Semantics (FS). I will be focusing on the ambience of the natural depictions, that is, the sense of the natural world evoked in the reader's mind by the language of the text. This will be dealt with by examining the lexical choices made by both authors, paying special attention to the adjectives. The excerpts under investigation have been selected since the descriptive language in them evokes frames and conceptual domains, which, in turn, yield a series of metaphors. These metaphors summarize the tone of the travel books, that is, the authorial texture and, especially, the ideological stance of the authors. Paul Theroux displays a more empathetic approach to the surrounding nature and its people, whereas Robert D. Kaplan adopts a more distant, analytical stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos is the property of Studies about Language / Kalbu Studijos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Google Translate is a machine translation service that is frequently and actively utilized worldwide. Sorani Kurdish, otherwise known as Central Kurdish, was officially added to Google Translate in May 2022. At the outset of the launch of Sorani Kurdish translation services, it is crucial to evaluate the quality of the translation and pave the way for improvements, if necessary. Taking into consideration both linguistic and cultural aspects, this paper aims to critically assess the accuracy of English-Sorani Kurdish translations produced by Google Translate. For this purpose, the paper has adopted a textual analysis approach based on the notion of equivalence to critically analyze samples of translations generated by Google Translate. The results suggest that Google Translate is largely accurate at morphological and syntactic levels but improvements are needed to overcome the minor deficiencies detected in rendering future perfect and perfect progressive tenses, third conditional sentences and passive tenses (especially in the case of progressive and perfect progressive tenses). With regard to the semantic level, Google Translate has proved accurate in processing non-equivalence terms and polysemous words, but it has assumed an utter failure in translating idioms and proverbs. With regard to the cultural level, in over third-fourths of instances, Google Translate renders English cultural terms into Sorani Kurdish accurately, whereas in nearly one-fourth of instances, it offers inappropriate translation. As far as English into Sorani Kurdish translation is concerned, Google Translate can be deemed effective as a supportive translation tool but it is far from being perfect, and continuous improvements will be needed to respond to the errors and deficiencies unearthed in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of surprise frames in judicial opinions of the HKSAR. Specifically, it examines the semantic variation of surprise frames and the discourse purposes for which they are used. In doing so, it explores the underlying interactivity of surprise frames by distinguishing between performative expressions of surprise (those that emanate from the current author's reflection) and descriptive expressions (those that report on another's sense of surprise). Recognising that legal discourse scholars often neglect lower courts, the paper contrasts opinions from three levels of court in the HKSAR. Genre and court-specific patterns emerge: a key similarity is that all three courts, performatively and descriptively, most often use the TYPICALITY frame. Key differences include a significantly greater use of the TYPICALITY frame by the appeal courts in relation to the trial courts; more qualitatively oriented analysis shows that the use of surprise frames maps onto the common law standard of review, i.e., the appeal courts largely use surprise frames to focus on legal issues. In contrast, the trial courts focus on facts and evidence. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the main findings for researchers and professionals. • Surprise frames in the majority opinions of 119 HKSAR court cases analysed. • Three levels of court are analysed. • A distinction is made between performative and descriptive frames. • All courts used the TYPICALITY frame most frequently. • Appeal courts focus on legal issues, trial courts on facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to offer a unified account of Place as a central theoretical notion across different disciplines. We show that while psychology, geography and other sciences have been converging to a unified view of this notion, linguistics still offers a fragmented perspective. Consequently, place names lack a full-fledged analysis that connects this category to the psychological concept of place. We propose to overcome this impasse by introducing a multi-modal Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) account of place as a conceptual construct and place concepts as specific instances of this construct. We show that current variants of DRT permit us to model place names and their senses, i.e., the meaning(s) that individuals associate with Sydney. We then model non-linguistic place concepts, i.e., the mental representation(s) that individuals can have of the city carrying this name. We present a model of the relation between linguistic meaning and conceptual content via the notion of anchoring relations applied to place. We pair this formal treatment with a morpho-syntactic account of place names building on current generative syntax treatments of proper names. Once we have a morpho-syntactic and semantic model of place names, we use a frame semantics treatment to account for lexical relations among place names. We test the overarching model on a set of recalcitrant problems afflicting current linguistic and multi-disciplinary treatments of place. These are the grammatical complexity and lexical content of place names, place concepts and their networks, and inter-subjective, communicative models of place in discourse. By solving these problems, our account integrates several frameworks (DRT, conceptual analysis, generative syntax, frame semantics) and connects several disciplines (linguistics, psychology, geographic information science, communication models) via a novel, multi-modal account of place. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical import of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of structural change in relative clauses in heritage speakers of two varieties of Venetan, a northern Italo-Romance language. It will be shown that appositive and restrictive relative clauses are not structurally distinguished in Brazilian Venetan, while they display different structural properties in Italian Venetan. It will be proposed that the phenomenon described in the paper does not depend on transfer from another language and it is not exclusively a matter of processing. The approach presented here aims to account for structural change in syntactic terms, without resorting to extra-linguistic factors. Heritage grammars are autonomous systems and follow predictable paths of language variation, as such, variation may take place at an interface level and at a syntactic level alike. This does not exclude possible influences from the dominant language, which, however, do not need to be taken as the only triggers of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the prosodic patterns of complex DP structures in Xitsonga by looking at penultimate lengthening in DPs with marked and unmarked word orders of different types. We discuss the underlying syntactic structures and prosodic realizations of Xitsonga DPs. We are particularly interested in the way in which recursion applies in the Xitsonga DP, where it surfaces in DPs with multiple modifiers of the same or different categories that appear in fronted (i.e., pre-nominal) positions. We propose that in Xitsonga nominal constituents move to a left-periphery-like position within the DP domain and that this position matches to a focus-marked phonological phrase. This type of phonological phrase is forced to remain in the phonology even if the one-word phrase violates the Binarity constraint. We argue that the penultimate lengthening effects found in Xitsonga with the reordering of DP internal elements are best analyzed as showing sensitivity to this focus-marked phonological phrase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines switch reference (SR) in A'ingae, an understudied isolate language from Amazonian Ecuador. We present a theoretically informed survey of SR, identifying three distinct uses of switch reference: in clause chaining, adverbial clauses, and so-called 'bridging' clause linkage. We describe the syntactic and semantic properties of each use in detail, the first such description for A'ingae, showing that the three constructions differ in important ways. While leaving a full syntactic analysis to future work, we argue that these disparate properties preclude a syntactic account that unifies these three constructions to the exclusion of other environments without SR. Conversely, while a full semantic account is also left to future work, we suggest that a unified semantic account in terms of discourse coherence principles appears more promising. In particular, we propose that switch reference in A'ingae occurs in all and only the constructions that are semantically restricted to non-structuring coordinating coherence relations in the sense of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punctuation, of paramount significance in written discourse analysis, is a highly developed system which modifies linguistic forms on phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic strata in written texts. Nevertheless, until recently, it has not received ample attention due to remaining in the shade of prosody or grammatical relations. In the last few decades, strikingly, it has been established that a genuine conception of the written language is impracticable if punctuation is not taken into consideration. Meanwhile, cross-linguistic studies have been recommended by some scholars (e.g. Little, 1986; Krahn, 2014); thus, though some studies have been conducted comparing the English punctuation system with that of other languages, there is a dearth of studies exploring this crucial aspect of written discourse in English and Kurdish. Therefore, drawing on Krahn's new paradigm (2014) which treats punctuation as an independent linguistic feature of the written modality, the present paper aims to cross-examine the punctuation system in both languages in a quest for outlining any similarities and differences that the two languages uncover in this area. More specifically, the study seeks to answer these questions: 1) How are the punctuation marks different or similar in English and Kurdish? 2) Does the punctuation system exhibit the same level of complexity in both languages? 3) Are all the punctuation marks manifested in English realised in Kurdish either and vice versa? The paper is purely based on a qualitative research approach. The results show that the two languages bear significant similarities and differences in the manifestation and employment of punctuation symbols. Yet, the punctuation system in English is more complex than Kurdish. Punctuation in the static and dynamic axes instantiates an area of considerable divergence between the two languages-though some similarities are predominant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a task in natural language comprehension. It assesses machine reading comprehension based on text reading and answering questions. Traditional attention methods typically focus on one of syntax or semantics, or integrate syntax and semantics through a manual method, leaving the model unable to fully utilize syntax and semantics for MRC tasks. In order to better understand syntactic and semantic information and improve machine reading comprehension, our study uses syntactic and semantic attention to conduct text modeling for tasks. Based on the BERT model of Transformer encoder, we separate a text into two branches: syntax part and semantics part. In syntactic component, an attention model with explicit syntactic constraints is linked with a self-attention model of context. In semantics component, after the framework semantic parsing, the lexical unit attention model is utilized to process the text in the semantic part. Finally, the vectors of the two branches converge into a new vector. And it can make answer predictions based on different types of data. Thus, a syntactic and semantic attention-guided machine reading comprehension (SSAG-Net) is formed. To test the model's validity, we ran it through two MRC tasks on SQuAD 2.0 and MCTest, and the SSAG-Net model outperformed the baseline model in both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Domínios de Lingu@gem is the property of Dominios de Lingu@gem and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper provides a syntactic analysis of two types of compounds in Greek: synthetic and phrasal compounds derived from agentive nominalizations of verbal strings containing an internal argument of the verb. The analysis is couched within a 'morphology as syntax' account and uses independently motivated syntactic tools to show that both types of compounds are derived in syntax proper without any need for a separate morphological component. The differences in the syntactic properties of the two types of compounds are explained with reference to the 'size' or 'complexity' of the projected internal arguments, which can be either 'roots', in the case of synthetic compounds, or unquantized nominals projected as NumPs, which require special licensing conditions in the case of phrasal compounds. Differences in prosodic and semantic interpretation are also explained with reference to phase theory and the type/number of phase domains within the structure of the two types of compounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'mathematical language' Automath, conceived by N.G. de Bruijn in 1968, was the first theorem prover actually working and was used for checking many specimina of mathematical content. Its goals and syntactic ideas inspired Th. Coquand and G. Huet to develop the calculus of constructions, CC ([1]), which was one of the first widely used interactive theorem provers and forms the basis for the widely used Coq system ([2]). The original syntax of Automath ([3, 4]) is not easy to grasp. Yet, it is essentially based on a derivation system that is similar to the Calculus of Constructions ('CC'). The relation between the Automath syntax and CC has not yet been sufficiently described, although there are many references in the type theory community to Automath. In this paper we focus on the backgrounds and on some uncommon aspects of the syntax of Automath. We expose the fundamental aspects of a 'generic' Automath system, encapsulating the most common versions of Automath. We present this generic Automath system in a modern syntactic frame. The obtained system makes use of λD, a direct extension of CC with definitions described in [5]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interrogatives are conventionally associated with the act of requesting information. Several researches have been carried out on the syntax of standard Yorùbá (SY) and its dialects but with little attention paid to the syntax of interrogatives in CY dialects and the comparative analysis of interrogatives in the standard dialect and Central Yorùbá (CY) dialects especially under the confines of the latest theoretical requirements. This paper therefore, investigated the syntax of interrogatives in SY and the CY dialects with a view to comparing how they both form their interrogatives. Data were sourced using primary and secondary methods. These were subjected to syntactic analysis within the theoretical framework of the Minimalist Program (MP). Interrogative features setting CY dialects apart from SY were identified: CY dialect operate yèsí/ìsí "who" in the place of ta used by SY (to question human referents). Focus markers are also optionally dropped in CY dialects unlike their SY counterpart. Also, CY dialects use the question noun (QN) kí for both non-human referents Kí lo rí "What did you see?" and maner Kí o ṣe gbọ́ "How did you hear?". Among the similarities identified is that both CY dialects and SY do not observe Attract the Closest Principle (ACP) when they stack QNs in their constituent interrogatives. Therefore, many of the items that in SY take their sources from its dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to language studies has been applied to languages such as English, French, Russian, Malay, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The indigenous languages in Africa that have gained scholarly attention in NSM studies are Ewe, Fulfulde, Amharic, Likpe, Wolof, Giryama, and Igala. Akan, the most widely spoken language in Ghana, has not been explored. This paper explores the extent to which the translation equivalents of the set of semantic primes are expressible in Akan, with special reference to the Asante Twi dialect. Sentences or sentence fragments that exemplify the allowable grammatical contexts of the NSM primes were used as data. The claim in NSM research is that semantic primes are universal or near-universal meanings that can be expressed as lexical units or morphemes in every language. We found that in Akan, almost all the lexical equivalents correspond in a straightforward manner with the English primes and their syntactic frames. However, the semantic prime MOMENT seems problematic to posit and thus, needs further investigation. The set of NSM semantic primes in the Asante dialect of Akan can serve as a valuable tool for descriptive linguists, especially semanticists, to analyze Akan culture-specific meanings and test their semantic equivalence with the corresponding vocabulary in English and other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novice Geography researchers need to be acquainted with the rhetorical move structure and organization of scientific research article abstracts (RAAs); yet there is a lack of studies investigating the linguistic realizations involved and their connections to the rhetorical move structure in Geography RAAs. This paper conducted a multidimensional analysis to explore phrase frames/collocations and move length and their connection to the rhetorical move structure and sequence in 190 Geography RAAs from journals indexed in the Web of Science Master Journal List. The move structure was investigated employing Hyland’s (2004) move scheme, Introduction-Purpose-Method-Product-Conclusion. The results revealed that Geography RAAs have a five-move structure, consisting of three “essential” moves whose functions are to present Purpose, Methods and Results, and two “conventional” moves, whose functions are to present Introduction and Conclusion. The findings of the multidimensional analyses indicated that the moves that occurred most frequently in Geography RAAs (Purpose, Methods and Results) occupied most text space and included more phrase frames. The findings indicate the importance of combining investigations of the rhetorical move structure in a particular genre with an exploration of the linguistic realizations in each move as this may provide both researchers and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) tutors with valuable resources for understanding the rhetorical and linguistic characteristics of specific RAA types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study on German compounds which have -stoff ('stuff /material/matter') as their head. The basic claim is that the head noun narrows down the range of interpretations by introducing a pragmatic scaffold which we pin down as a conceptual script. We obtained a data set by querying a large corpus selecting 4,026 nominal Stoff-compound lemmas. Using the 100 most frequent compounds as our development set, we observed 72 substance-denoting, five fabric-denoting and 11 knowledge-denoting compounds (corresponding to the basic meanings of Stoff in isolation according to standard dictionaries). From the observation that substance compounds (e.g. Farbstoff 'colouring agent'; Impfstoff 'vaccine') cluster around two events, synthesis and application, we induce a script consisting of these two event frames connecting three kinds of states. A Stoff-compound may thus be expected to denote an entity which is either the starting material of a synthesis (Rohstoff 'raw material'), an addendum in synthesis (Süßstoff 'sweetening agent'), the product of synthesis and, at the same time, an occasion for application (Kunststoff 'synthetic material'), or the instrument of application (Sprengstoff 'explosive'). As for fabric compounds (e.g. Seidenstoff 'silk fabric'), we argue that fabrication is a special kind of synthesis. Knowledge compounds (e.g. Lesestoff 'reading material') arguably result from a metaphoric transfer to the immaterial domain, with the two events acquisition (counterpart of synthesis) and contribution (counterpart of application). In this article, we test the obtained model against two test sets comprising 50 compounds with medium and low frequencies, respectively. Since it turns out that almost all test items successfully integrate into the script, our study provides support for pragmatic theories of compounding, according to which the interpretation of a compound is crucially guided by stereotype knowledge associated with the given compound's constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the non-contiguous phraseological profile of Microeconomics research articles, specifically focusing on key lexical frames within the Discussion section. Key lexical frames are non-contiguous recurrent expressions with variable slots unique to specific contexts such as genres or disciplines. The analysis is based on a corpus of Discussion sections from research articles published in four leading Microeconomics journals between 2017 and 2022. Using the KfNgram program, four-word lexical frames were identified and refined according to exclusion criteria. The resulting list of lexical frames was compared with a general corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, yielding 43 four-word key lexical frames unique to Microeconomics. These frames were analysed following the structural classification by Gray and Biber (2013) and the functional taxonomy by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010). Structurally, most key lexical frames were found to be function word frames, while functionally, they primarily served referential functions. The findings reveal significant phraseological variation, encompassing both lexical and grammatical constructions unique to the field of Microeconomics. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of discipline-specific academic writing and have important implications for English for Academic Purposes pedagogy. In particular, this research aims at improving the learners' part-genre awareness and competence. By identifying and analysing key lexical frames, the study provides valuable resources for enhancing the teaching of academic writing in Microeconomics, particularly for non-native English speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rebranding of reggaetón towards Latin urban has been criticized for tokenizing Afro-Caribbean linguistic and cultural practices as symbolic resources recruitable by non-Caribbean artists/executives in the interest of profit. Consumers are particularly critical of an audible phonological homogeneity in the performances of ethnonationally distinct mainstream performers, framed as a form of linguistic minstrelsy popularly termed a 'Caribbean Blaccent' that facilitates capitalization on the genre's popularity by tapping into the covert prestige of distinctive phonological elements of Insular Caribbean Spanish otherwise stigmatized. This work pairs acoustic analysis with quantitative statistical modeling to compare the use of lenited coronal sibilant allophones popularly considered indexical of Hispano-Caribbean origins in the spoken and sung speech of four of the genre's top-charting female performers. A general pattern of style-shifting from interview to sung speech wherein sibilance is favored in the former and phonetic zeros in the latter is revealed. Moreover, a statistically significant increased incidence of [-] across time shows the most recent records to uniformly deploy near-categorical reduction independent of artists' sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. The results support the enregisterment of practices popularized by the genre's San Juan-based pioneers as a stylistic resource—a reggaetón voice—for engaging the images of vernacularity sustaining and driving the contemporary, mainstream popularity of música urbana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weakly supervised temporal language grounding (TLG) aims to locate events in untrimmed videos based on natural language queries without temporal annotations, necessitating a deep understanding of semantic context across both video and text modalities. Existing methods often focus on simple correlations between query phrases and isolated video segments, neglecting the event-oriented semantic coherence and consistency required for accurate temporal grounding. This can lead to misleading results due to partial frame correlations. To address these limitations, we propose the Event-oriented State Alignment Network (ESAN), which constructs "start–event–end" semantic state sets for both textual and video data. ESAN employs relative entropy for cross-modal alignment through knowledge distillation from pre-trained large models, thereby enhancing semantic coherence within each modality and ensuring consistency across modalities. Our approach leverages vision–language models to extract static frame semantics and large language models to capture dynamic semantic changes, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of events. Experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that ESAN significantly outperforms existing methods. By reducing false high correlations and improving the overall performance, our method effectively addresses the challenges posed by previous approaches. These advancements highlight the potential of ESAN to improve the precision and reliability of temporal language grounding tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Syntactic awareness is the ability to monitor and manipulate word order within sentences. It is unclear whether children with dyslexia have syntactic awareness problems, as there are mixed results in the literature. Dyslexia is typically classified with very poor word and nonword reading and phonological processing problems are often observed in this population. It is conceivable that a phonological deficit could strain memory when performing oral syntactic awareness tasks. Here we examine if syntactic awareness problems are observed in children with dyslexia once phonological processing and memory skills are controlled. Methods: Real and nonword reading efficiency tests determined reading level. Children with dyslexia (n = 25) were compared to typically developing children (n = 24) matched for age (M = 8;8) and nonverbal abilities. Syntactic awareness was measured with an oral word order correction task (e.g., Is baking Lisa and her son in his room sleeps). Tests of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and verbal working memory were also administered and served as controls. Results: The dyslexic group performed worse than typically developing readers on syntactic awareness and this group difference persisted once phonological memory and verbal working memory were controlled. However, after controlling for phonological awareness skills, there were no group differences on the syntactic awareness test. Discussion: The results suggest that phonological awareness problems in particular might be responsible for syntactic awareness difficulties in dyslexia and future studies should control for this. The results are discussed within theoretical frameworks on the nature of oral language deficits in dyslexia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigates the interplay between strategic goals and calculative practices, specifically Customer Profitability Analysis (CPA). Drawing on practice-based theories, the research aims to understand how managers strategize with CPA, including the balancing of financial and strategic objectives and the interplay of institutionalized practices with individual practitioners' actions. Design: The study uses a qualitative, revelatory, and exploratory case study approach at the sub-organizational level in a manufacturing company. The researchers compare CPA practices across six departments, guided by a phenomenological research design. Data collection methods include informal conversations, qualitative observations, written documentation, numerical evidence from the accounting system, and interviews. Findings: The study offers four novel findings to the field. First, it highlights how managers employ procedural and interactive strategizing to reframe CPA practices. The sophistication of CPA practices increases with unevenly distributed customer volume, high customer-specific, controllable overhead, customer-to-customer interaction, and service complexity. Conversely, the sophistication of cost-focused CPA practices tends to decrease with diverse strategic goals. Additionally, CPA become more effective through the utilization of non-financial information, employee empowerment, localization, and strategic alignment. Second, CPA can be adapted through integrative strategizing where managers avoid using it as a financial benchmark for strategic initiatives. Third, accountants actively seek intermediary roles to incorporate arguments from strategy and marketing to balance strategic objectives–contrary to their portrayal as myopic guardians of profitability. Fourth, the localization of CPA practices to front-line employees compensates for a lack of sophisticated CPA practices. Future research: Future research should, investigate the adaptation of calculative practices in different cultures, and industries. Exploring additional contextual factors such as uncertainty, management characteristics, and linguistic framing of practices would be beneficial. Examining the interactions in utilizing CPA practices between front-line staff and customers would shed light on their effectiveness. Lastly, investigating the role of consultants in diffusing such practices would offer valuable perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asset tokenization, a financial practice that generates tokens based on distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain, is a representational practice in which token issuers establish artificially devised sign relationships between tokens and assets, despite some issues and complexities of blockchain. Human confidence in this practice is critical for its successful implementation. This article suggests that human confidence in blockchain is supported and circulated by the doxa of blockchain, which the article frames as a linguistic phenomenon where people talk more about how to use a given object than about the object itself. By paying attention to the artificially devised sign relations between tokens and assets and confident stance-taking toward blockchain by users, the article argues that a linguistic approach is necessary to understand how human confidence makes asset tokenization happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Linguistic Research / Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of Bogazici University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Dependency distance has increasingly become a key measure of interest in cross-linguistic corpus studies from multiple perspectives. Based on a syntactically annotated corpus of 400 PhD dissertation abstracts written by native English (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2) academic writers, the current study investigated the mean dependency distance (MDD) variation across language backgrounds and disciplines, which is followed by a grammatical description based on fine-grained indices related to particular syntactic structures. The findings include: (1) L2 academic writers produce an averagely longer MDD than L1 academic writers because of their heavy use of prepositional phrases; (2) The MDD of the linguistics abstracts is significantly longer than that of the physics & chemistry abstracts because of the relatively higher syntactic complexity of the language of linguistics. The findings suggest that MDD can effectively differentiate academic texts with different language backgrounds and disciplines, that both L1 and L2 academic writers write under the constraint of dependency distance minimization, and that L2 PhD dissertation writers have achieved native-like writing proficiency in extending nominal structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies have highlighted the close link between language and society (Fairclough, 1992) and demonstrated the impact of Covid-19 on language (Mahlberg and Brookes, 2021). There are no studies to date that have examined the changing representations and conceptual shifts of freedom in the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic years, which are expected to be affected by government policies on Covid-19. The present study aims to fill this gap. Specifically, the objective is to examine the conceptual evolution of freedom in the years 2019 and 2021 and to interpret it in the light of socio-historical issues derived from the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study is a corpus-based investigation undertaken on The Sun Corpus (TS), i.e. a self-compiled corpus including newspaper articles published in the UK during the years 2019 and 2021. Media including newspapers are, indeed, influential discourses that shape the public view of particular events, current issues, and play "an important role in framing how people understand and respond to" contextual happenings (Brookes and Baker, 2021, p. 1; see Baker et al. 2013). The analysis reveals that there is a shift in the use of the word freedom, which is depicted as an enjoyable experience in 2019 and seen in a negative shade in 2021. These results support the social conceptualization of language and reveal aspects that are of particular concern in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992), aiming to examine how socio-historical aspects frame the linguistic representations of social issues like the Covid-19 disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the decipherment of the Maya script expression T78: 514 and its various substitutions. The author discusses different proposals for the meaning of T78: 514, including "fellow, companion," "portrait, property," and "spear-fellow, spear-edge." They argue that the most viable solution is a pair of near-homophones that represent the relationship between a captor and a captive in military contexts. The article also considers the possibility that T78: 514 is connected to the concept of "sacred service for the gods." The author provides linguistic and archaeological evidence to support their interpretations. [Extracted from the article]

Humans can flexibly extend word usages across different grammatical classes, a phenomenon known as word class conversion. Noun-to-verb conversion, or denominal verb (e.g., to Google a cheap flight), is one of the most prevalent forms of word class conversion. However, existing natural language processing systems are impoverished in interpreting and generating novel denominal verb usages. Previous work has suggested that novel denominal verb usages are comprehensible if the listener can compute the intended meaning based on shared knowledge with the speaker. Here we explore a computational formalism for this proposal couched in frame semantics. We present a formal framework, Noun2Verb, that simulates the production and comprehension of novel denominal verb usages by modeling shared knowledge of speaker and listener in semantic frames. We evaluate an incremental set of probabilistic models that learn to interpret and generate novel denominal verb usages via paraphrasing. We show that a model where the speaker and listener cooperatively learn the joint distribution over semantic frame elements better explains the empirical denominal verb usages than state-of-the-art language models, evaluated against data from (1) contemporary English in both adult and child speech, (2) contemporary Mandarin Chinese, and (3) the historical development of English. Our work grounds word class conversion in probabilistic frame semantics and bridges the gap between natural language processing systems and humans in lexical creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution addresses a set of phenomena attested in the dialects spoken in Piedmont, including Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties, and in West Liguria, concerning the interaction between subject and object clitics. Complementarily to these phenomena, we find the interplay between the realization of the 3rd person clitic and the auxiliary. More specifically, we will investigate the object-for-subject mechanism in the Piedmontese and Franco-Provençal dialects, the one of subject-with-object in some Franco-Provençal dialects and their possible interaction with the auxiliary. In some Piedmontese dialects, the alternation between be and have affects the distribution of subject and object clitics; in particular, the 3rd person clitic can occur in all persons, where it can be ambiguous between the subject or the object reading. The relation between the verb and the realization of its argumental clitics, and the interaction between auxiliaries and clitics are the main topics of this work. Our approach relies on the idea that clitics are the realization of φ-features associated with v and T and that auxiliaries are not functional elements but verbs with lexical properties. The theoretical frame we follow is the formulation recently proposed by Chomsky, based on the operation Merge and the Labeling Algorithm, leading to a more appropriate conceptualization of morpho-syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the personal factors underlying online sharing of moral misleading news by observing the interaction between personal values, communication bias, credibility evaluations, and moral emotions. Specifically, we hypothesized that self-transcendence and conservation values may differently influence the sharing of misleading news depending on which moral domain is activated and that these are more likely to be shared when moral emotions and perceived credibility increase. In a sample of 132 participants (65% female), we tested SEMs on misleading news regarding violations in five different moral domains. The results suggest that self-transcendence values hinder online sharing of misleading news, while conservation values promote it; moreover, news written with a less blatantly biased linguistic frame are consistently rated as more credible. Lastly, more credible and emotionally activating news is more likely to be shared online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neural machine translation (NMT) has been bringing exciting news in the field of machine translation since its emergence. However, because NMT only employs single neural networks to convert natural languages, it suffers from two drawbacks in terms of reducing translation time: NMT is more sensitive to sentence length than statistical machine translation and the end-to-end implementation process fails to make explicit use of linguistic knowledge to improve translation performance. The network model performance of various deep learning machine translation tasks was constructed and compared in English-Chinese bilingual direction, and the defects of each network were solved by using an attention mechanism. The problems of gradient disappearance and gradient explosion are easy to occur in the recurrent neural network in the long-distance sequence. The short and long-term memory networks cannot reflect the information weight problems in long-distance sequences. In this study, through the comparison of examples, it is concluded that the introduction of an attention mechanism can improve the attention of context information in the process of model generation of the target language sequence, thus translating restore degree and fluency higher. This study proposes a neural machine translation method based on the divide-and-conquer strategy. Based on the idea of divide-and-conquer, this method identifies and extracts the longest noun phrase in a sentence and retains special identifiers or core words to form a sentence frame with the rest of the sentence. This method of translating the longest noun phrase and sentence frame separately by the neural machine translation system, and then recombining the translation, alleviates the poor performance of neural machine translation in long sentences. Experimental results show that the BLEU score of translation obtained by the proposed method has improved by 0.89 compared with the baseline method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frame Semantics includes context as a central aspect of the theory. Frames themselves can be regarded as a representation of the immediate context against which meaning is to be construed. Moreover, the notion of frame invocation includes context as one possible source of information comprehenders use to construe meaning. As the original implementation of Frame Semantics, Berkeley FrameNet is capable of providing computational representations of some aspects of context, but not all of them. In this article, we present FrameNet Brasil: a framenet enriched with qualia relations and capable of taking other semiotic modes as input data, namely pictures and videos. We claim that such an enriched model is capable of addressing other types of contextual information in a framenet, namely sentence-level cotext and commonsense knowledge. We demonstrate how the FrameNet Brasil software infrastructure addresses contextual information in both database construction and corpora annotation. We present the guidelines for the construction of two multimodal datasets whose annotations represent contextual information and also report on two experiments: (i) the identification of frame-evoking lexical units in sentences and (ii) a methodology for domain adaptation in Neural Machine Translation that leverages frames and qualia for representing sentence-level context. Experimental results emphasize the importance of computationally representing contextual information in a principled structured fashion as opposed to trying to derive it from the manipulation of linguistic form alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We also considered the diachronic relationships between locative and copular verbs and found that in Type II languages (mainly represented by a subset of Sinitic and Hmong), the source of locative verbs is the copula: Copula > Locative. (Saul and Wilson 1980: 72) ht It appears more plausible in terms of regular semantic change for a two-argument dwell verb to undergo semantic shift to a locative and thence to a copula rather than postulating that a dwell verb directly evolves into a copula and then reverts to a two-place locative verb. Keywords: existential and possessive verbs; locative; Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area (MESEA); polysemy sharing; semantic typology EN existential and possessive verbs locative Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area (MESEA) polysemy sharing semantic typology 1 82 82 01/18/22 20220101 NES 220101 1 Introduction Over the past century, the relationship of existence and location to possession has been the subject of a vast field of research including studies in both linguistics and philosophy. Apart from the Type II languages, where the copula shares a form with the locative verb, the copula is always distinguished formally from the other three verb categories in Type III and Type IV (that is, from locative, existential and possessive verbs). 5.1.3 C opular > Locative Pathway (ii) When the source of a locative verb is I not i a Postural or Dwell verb, locatives may be diachronically linked with copulas in our Asian survey. [Extracted from the article]

To date, frame-semantic theory has been applied to various domain-specific discourses, such as legal, economic, and even oenological discourses. Yet, epidemiological crisis communications form a domain-specific discourse tradition which has been left untouched by frame-semanticists. As such, we will conduct a descriptive pilot study which will consider some of the frames present in these texts. To this end, we collected a pilot corpus of Dutch COVID-19-related crisis communications from the Belgian government, which according to previous research (Liégeois, Mathysen 2022) can, in fact, be regarded as epidemiological crisis communications. More concretely, we considered the frames in which five terms - virus, coronavirus, COVID-19, epidemie and pandemie - inherent to this domain could occur and investigated the following three research questions: In which frames do our five target terms resurface within this domainspecific discourse tradition (RQ1)? Which functions do these frames fulfil within this domain-specific discourse tradition and can other domain-specific features (e.g., regarding the FEs of these frames) be found (RQ2)? Can these frames and their functions be linked back to the communicative strategies singled out by previous research on these Belgian epidemiological crisis communications (RQ3)? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]