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This essay delves into the multifaceted nature of the Tagalog word ano, examining its usage in various contexts and its impact on communication within Tagalog-speaking communities. Three cases of ano are discussed in the essay. The first case pertains to ano accompanied by ostension; the second, pertains to ano accompanied by context clues; and the third, pertains to ano without any ostension or context. In Tagalog communities, ano, despite the lack of ostension or context, is sometimes still used in everyday conversations, presenting the problem of how meaning or understanding of the word ano is still possible. The third case of ano will be further divided into two: IT-ano (ibang tao-ano) and HIT-ano (hindi ibang tao-ano) providing the difference between strangers and acquaintances. By relying on Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of what it means to understand through language-game, this essay discusses how a vague word such as ano gives rise to meaning and understanding. This approach to clarify meaning will relate to the levels of social interaction found in Virgilio Enriquez's idea of pakikipagkapwa. The analysis will proceed by referring to hypothetical scenarios involving the use of the term ano situated in the everyday conversational use of language by Filipinos. The mode of analysis takes the perspective of the author, who is a native speaker of Tagalog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines communicative competence by studying several representative models. After examining some inherent defects with today's communicative spoken English teaching, the author highlights the importance of strategic competence and proposes a shift to interactional competence because conversational strategies can be best acquired and studied in the light of complete conversational loops. The author also proposes a model for the teaching of spoken English and demonstrates how conversational strategies function throughout the whole conversational loop. It is also hoped that spoken English testing should take the form of bi-directional or multi-directional conversation among candidates so that the teaching of conversational strategies can better promote the development of interactional competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the functioning of a very numerous group of lexemes synonymous to the adjective fajny 'such that I like (a lot)', which can be found in the language of contemporary teenagers, e.g. fajowy, super, spoko, cool, słit (sweet), odjazdowy, wypasiony, epicki, zajebisty, zacny. It analyses the conditions and methods used to multiply this category of lexemes in the teenage slang -- which has these days a powerful impact on general Polish. The points of reference are the phenomena characteristic of slang: expressiveness, fashion, richness of synonyms and tautonyms. These questions are considered against the background of current cultural and linguistic changes (structural processes, borrowing, colloquialization, vulgarization and devulgarization, word play). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies 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.)

Abstract: In 1 [1] The following abbreviations are used in this paper. 1sg: first person singular; 1pl: first person plural; 2sg: second person singular; ASP: aspect; CSE: Colloquial Singapore English, DEM: demonstrative; GEN: genitive; LOC: locative; ICE-SIN: the International Corpus of English, Singapore English database; NEG: negation; NUS: National University of Singapore; NZ: New Zealand; PART; particle. Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), the default usage of the word can is congruent with that in Standard English. It functions as a modal auxiliary marking epistemic, deontic, and ability meanings. Additionally, the word can is used as a pragmatic marker in sentence final position in CSE. One such function of can represents a pseudo-tag question marker, as in the sentence, ‘Borrow me $5 can?’, which translates to Standard English, ‘Can you lend me $5?’ 2 [2] This example was publicized as a part of the Singapore Government''s Speak Good English Movement 2010/2011 themed “Get It Right” (). Another pragmatic function of can is as a discourse marker. Discourse markers are a highly noticeable feature of CSE, with its rich inventory of available particles including lah, lor, leh, wat, hor, meh, and mah, on which a number of scholars have reported. This paper investigates the pragmatic uses of sentence final can in these two functions. Because the positions of pseudo-tag can and discourse marker can overlap, it is at times ambiguous whether can is behaving as pseudo-tag or a discourse marker. I suggest that (1) pseudo-tag question use of can is a type of a calque transferred from CSE''s Chinese substrate languages, and (2) discourse particle can is an innovative feature that developed from semantic expansion of the word ‘can’ in CSE under the influence of ‘can’-equivalent terms in the Chinese and Malay substrate languages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper aims at exploring the history of the translation of the children's literature in the four periods, that is, the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican China, the May Fourth period, the Anti-Japanese War period, and the period after 1976, and finds that each period has its own characteristics in the translations. The paper also studies some strategies that the translators usually adopt and illustrates the accordant merits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is to describe the Spanish construction parar de + inf, an aspectual verbal periphrasis which expresses the interruption of the event referred to by the infinitive in affirmative clauses, and the continuity and repetition of this event in negative clauses. Parar de+ inf is a verbal periphrasis whose consolidation in Spanish occurred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The study on this structure is therefore associated with recent linguistic changes. Parar de + inf is a verbal periphrasis characteristic of the colloquial language, which has complicated the study of the real use of parar de + inf. The language used in situations of communicative proximity is under-represented in the corpora. Thus, estimates of the frequencies of use of linguistic forms associated with colloquial language forms should be taken with caution, as frequency of use may differ significantly across discourse traditions. In this regard, it is important to think about the role of frequency data in historical studies of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the development of front rounded vowels and its sub-dialectal variations in the Puxian dialect of Min. Front rounded vowels are found in both Eastern Mm and Puxian, but their distributions in the two dialects are different; in addition, Puxian also has sub-dialectal differences. In this paper, I argue that the front rounded vowel [y] was introduced into Puxian via lexical borrowing from Northern Guanhua and Eastern Mm. Puxian further developed rounding harmony, which resulted in [yɒŋ, øŋ] (corresponding to [iɔŋ: uan] in Southern Min). The feature combination [-back, + round] was also employed to preserve the phonemic contrast of both colloquial and literal strata in the phonological system, and [ø] final was formed then. In other words, front rounded vowels entered the Puxian phonological system at different times and through various routes. I give three factors which influenced the sub-dialectal variations of finals in Puxian: 1) differing speed and spread of sound change among sub-dialects, 2) phonological rules which applied to different domains, and 3) maintenance of systemic contrast via successive adaptations of finals in some sub-dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advertisers are increasingly using urban slang and other non-standard forms of Swahili to reach out to a broader audience in the densely multilingual Nairobi. Influenced by social and linguistic shifts in the city, and keeping pace with trends in other societies, Nairobi advertisers are gradually transforming the advertising discourse as they seek to reach out to newer consumers. Specifically, by incorporating non-standard Swahili into the ads, advertisers not only reinterpret the identity of the product and enhance the societal attitudes towards the urban slang, Sheng, but they also redefine the traditional language roles in Nairobi. The shift in discourse transcends commercial advertising and is also evident in HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. Advertisements such as Zii 'No way [to sex]', Ni poa kuchill 'It's cool to chill (abstain)', and kuME2U 'to me-to-you' are but a few of a growing number of memorable ads that take full advantage of the Nairobi's language contact environment. While focusing primarily on the use of slang in contemporary Swahili print advertisements, this study traces language shifts in Swahili ads printed in Kenya over the last three decades. In so doing, the study seeks to understand the social and linguistic factors that influence such change, and its impact on the Nairobi speech community. The study also discusses the different types of contemporary Swahili print ads, focusing attention on language use, tone, and themes. The paper concludes that certain forms of non-standard Swahili are emerging as the language of positive, albeit deviant, role models who imbue a product with local appeal and prestige. The adaptations in the language of advertising are driven by social and linguistic realities in the city and largely motivated by the marketers desire to reach a broad audience. More significantly, is the realization that HIV/AIDS Awareness ads are acknowledging the sensibilities of local culture, with slang helping society save-face while engaging the youth in public dialogue on 'taboo' topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of dative subjects in the construction of anteriority in the Russian language. The paper provides a semantic-syntactic characterization of the difference between two variants of the construction of anteriority with an infinitive predicate, namely sentences with and sentences without dative subject. The extent of influence of stylistic conventions on linguistic system is being analyzed.

Copyright of Transport (16484142) is the property of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University 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.)

Abstract: Conversation is commonly described as an ordered and linear phenomenon. Using an extreme example of talk-in-interaction in a European Union consultative institution, this paper proposes a methodology which makes it possible to analyze also discontinuous and chaotic features of conversations. The communicative interaction in this setting constitutes a process which is not directly translatable into ordered sequences of relevant elements. On the contrary, it achieves its goal of elaborating a collective opinion in a chaotic way that can be described as multiple processes developing in parallel. The conversations appear as a collection of units with a particularly complex configuration that does not conform to the classical structures of linguistic exchanges and communicative dynamics. The paper focuses on how to describe the incessant discursive fluctuations, by identifying topical changes within speakers’ interventions and from one speaker intervention to another. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The research presented in the paper addresses conversational telephone speech recognition and keyword spotting for the Lithuanian language. Lithuanian can be considered a low e-resourced language as little transcribed audio data, and more generally, only limited linguistic resources are available electronically. Part of this research explores the impact of reducing the amount of linguistic knowledge and manual supervision when developing the transcription system. Since designing a pronunciation dictionary requires language-specific expertise, the need for manual supervision was assessed by comparing phonemic and graphemic units for acoustic modeling. Although the Lithuanian language is generally described in the linguistic literature with 56 phonemes, under low-resourced conditions some phonemes may not be sufficiently observed to be modeled. Therefore different phoneme inventories were explored to assess the effects of explicitly modeling diphthongs, affricates and soft consonants. The impact of using Web data for language modeling and additional untranscribed audio data for semi-supervised training was also measured. Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) keywords are a well-known challenge for keyword search. While word-based keyword search is quite effective for in-vocabulary words, OOV keywords are largely undetected. Morpheme-based subword units are compared with character n-gram-based units for their capacity to detect OOV keywords. Experimental results are reported for two training conditions defined in the IARPA Babel program: the full language pack and the very limited language pack, for which, respectively, 40 h and 3 h of transcribed training data are available. For both conditions, grapheme-based and phoneme-based models are shown to obtain comparable transcription and keyword spotting results. The use of Web texts for language modeling is shown to significantly improve both speech recognition and keyword spotting performance. Combining full-word and subword units leads to the best keyword spotting results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unrivalled virtue possessed by Ion Creanga is that of revealing and using the creative force of popular words. The writer creates in a popular style, keeping the regional phonetics, the easiness of the colloquial speech, the proverbs and sayings. The "spoken" character of Ion Creangă's language manifests itself with the greatest strength in idiomatic expressions. Any passage from Ion Creangă's work - be it a long or a short one - contains such stylistic particularities. The paper attempts to emphasize the relevance of the combination of the two stylistics: the so-called literary stylistics ana the linguistic one, for the understanding of Ion Creangas way of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Maetagused is the property of Estonian Literary Museum, Department of Folkloristics 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 research discusses the underapplication opacity, namely counterbleeding, of non-local compensatory lengthening in Modern Colloquial Persian, a style of informal speech in Iran (mostly in Tehran) motivated by moraic glottal consonants in the postconsonantal position in the coda. It concludes that building a moraic structure occurs before segmental changes, such as glottal deletion, Flop, and Spread (i.e., double flop), through weight-by-position. After building the moraic structure of coda consonants, a postconsonantal glottal is prone to deletion, resulting in a floating mora that precedes coda consonant flops while delinked from its mora. In this environment, stem vowels can spread to the neighboring mora and lengthen. Stratal OT is capable of accounting for counterbleeding through strata with different sets of OT constraints established on the basis of Persian morphology. The first stratum ensures the construction of the moraic structure before any segmental change, while the second stratum is where the counterbleeding order is covered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Patients’ education is a vital strategy for understanding a disease by patients and proper management of the condition. Physicians and academicians frequently make customized education materials for their patients. An artificial intelligence (AI)‑based writer can help them write an article. Chat Generative Pre‑Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is a conversational language model developed by OpenAI (openai.com). The model can generate human‑like responses. Objective: We aimed to evaluate the generated text from ChatGPT for its suitability in patients’ education. Materials and Methods: We asked the ChatGPT to list common dermatological diseases. It provided a list of 14 diseases. We used the disease names to converse with the application with disease‑specific input (e.g., write a patient education guide on acne). The text was copied for checking the number of words, readability, and text similarity by software. The text's accuracy was checked by a dermatologist following the structure of observed learning outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy. For the readability ease score, we compared the observed value with a score of 30. For the similarity index, we compared the observed value with 15% and tested it with a one‑sample t‑test. Results: The ChatGPT generated a paragraph of text of 377.43 ± 60.85 words for a patient education guide on skin diseases. The average text reading ease score was 46.94 ± 8.23 (P < 0.0001), and it indicates that this level of text can easily be understood by a high‑school student to a newly joined college student. The text similarity index was higher (27.07 ± 11.46%, P = 0.002) than the expected limit of 15%. The text had a “relational” level of accuracy according to the SOLO taxonomy. Conclusion: In its current form, ChatGPT can generate a paragraph of text for patients’ educational purposes that can be easily understood. However, the similarity index is high. Hence, doctors should be cautious when using the text generated by ChatGPT and must check for text similarity before using it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copper raw materials have not been identified as a critical raw material for the economy of the European Union (EU). Demand for metal for use within the EU is satisfied mainly by imports of raw materials in various processing stages and from recycling. Imports include not only copper concentrates, but also refined metals, alloys, and intermediate and finished products. In terms of EU imports, mining supplies represent a minor share of demand. It is likely that copper demand will grow in the coming decades and that global as well as European reserves of copper will be depleted more rapidly. For Europe, no complete and harmonised dataset presenting estimates of total EU copper resources and reserves exists, with the exception of the attempted Minerals4EU project. In colloquial language, many imprecise concepts aim at describing reality. Classic probability tools cannot be used to describe imperfect information. There are no sharp thresholds between the boundaries of many measurements; instead, smooth transitions are observed. This gradation between full and partial membership and non-membership is not included in classical set theory; thus, the capacity for describing such effects is provided by fuzzy set theory. An attempt is made in the present paper at a fuzzy description of the copper reserve base in the EU countries. The basic terminology of fuzzy sets is presented and useful logical operators are indicated. The copper reserve base in the EU countries was assessed in relation to world reserves and an appraisal of this base within these countries was carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overlap between idioms and clichés is one of the problematic meaning issues. This overlap can simply be detected in online as well as academic sources. The existence of the overlap between idioms and clichés springs from the absence of a model that can work out some demarcation boundary between them. The present study aims at drawing a demarcation line between these two essential colloquial elements by resorting to linguistic features, contextual functions, nature of community of practice based on interlocutors' relationship, and the degree of informality to fulfill this purpose. This study makes use of a qualitative approach to carry out the process of analysis based on a model designed to assist the procedures of determining the features of each element. With reference to data, the analysed idioms and clichés have been extracted from 20 discourses (10 written texts and 10 recorded interactions) of 10 different topics. The most significant concluding points come in three angles: structure (an idiom is mostly a part of a meaningful statement, whereas a cliché is mostly a full meaningful statement by itself); function (idioms are usually used for three different purposes: emphasis, creativity, and persuasiveness, whereas clichés are used either to simplify the idea or to state an idea without exerting any effort by making use of overused statements and common ritualized expressions); and informality ( Idioms are detected in less informal discourses compared to clichés). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English has evolved into an internationally-used language due to the increase in the number of its learners. With the growing demand for English learing, over the last 30 years, the topic of Native English-Speaking Teachers and Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers has become a topic of debate. Thus, the purpose of the current mixed method study was to find out students' and teachers' perceptions and attitudes towards NESTs and NNESTs in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Since students' and teachers' attitudes and perceptions have not been explored about this issue, this study might benefit learners, teachers, stakeholders, and recruiters. In the study, student questionnaires and teacher interviews were administered to answer the following research question: What are students' and instructors' perceptions and attitudes towards NESTs and NNESTs, and what strengths and weaknesses do they identify about NESTs and NNESTs? The participants were 345 university students, and 24 EFL teachers. The quantitative data obtained from the student questionnaire were analyzed through SPSS V. 25, and the qualitative data from the teacher interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings revealed that the students prefer NESTs over NNESTs. However, they also showed positive attitudes towards NNESTs. Similarly, the teachers believed that NESTs and NNESTs have their positives and negatives. The NESTs were preferred for being fluent, natural speakers, and being better at colloquial language. In contrast, NNESTs were thought to excel at having a stronger connection with students, being sympathetic, and understanding students' needs and difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of discourse-connective que (DCQ) in five varieties of Spanish and across four different discursive genres. On the one hand, we show that DCQ is not only a spoken phenomenon but at the same time mainly restricted to colloquial language use. On the other hand, the results show that DCQ is more entrenched in the Peninsular variety than in the Latin-American varieties (Mexico shows the lowest overall frequency). Moreover, we also analyze geographical variation regarding the position in which DCQ is located in the turn of the speaker (heading the turn or not), distinguishing between three different profiles associated with specific regions: i) Spain, where DCQ is mostly found in initial position, ii) Argentina, the Caribbean and Mexico, where DCQ is primarily used in non-initial position, and iii) Chile, where DCQ is almost equally distributed between initial and non-initial positions. Finally, we also attested differences across language varieties regarding the type of turn in which DCQ occurs (initiation, preferred response and dispreferred response) and the internal structure of the turn (utterance in a complex turn vs turn extension, for multiturn units). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper attempts to establish the evidential character of the special prosodic configuration associated with direct reported discourse (DRD). A variety of expressive meanings have been commonly attributed to this marked prosodic configuration of DRD (such as expression of stance, emotion, mimicking, alignment). However, the concurrence of pragmatic/expressive meanings together with evidentiality is very frequent in ‘non-evidential’ languages like Spanish. Therefore, we argue that the prosody in DRD also signals ‘reported’ or ‘quoted’ discourse and, therefore, the presence of evidentiality. To provide evidence for this latter claim, 449 instances of DRD have been extracted from a corpus of (Iberian) Spanish colloquial conversations containing c. 150,000 words, and their prosodic behaviour has been observed. The data reveals a marked prosody in the majority of DRD instances in our corpus. Especial attention has been paid to the examples of DRD with no explicit introductory marks (e.g. verba dicendi ), since 100% of them are prosodically marked. Here, the marked prosody is the only indicator of the source of information. Consequently, it stops being a redundant trait (concomitant to the presence of introductory verbs or marks): it becomes prominent and its use is not optional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this papers is to observe how the oralidade is present in the written speech, falling back upon the journalistic language, much more receptive to those transformations and exemplifying with picked up texts of the newspapers Folha de S. Paulo and Jornal da Tarde, as well as of the magazines Veja and Época. For so much, firstly I will make a brief sketch on the contemporary journalistic language, focusing its main tendencies, beginning the discussion starting from the paper of the “composition manuals” and its philosophy as vestiges of a grammatical purismo, not always proceeded precisely by the journalists. To proceed, I will make a parallel one among the two modalities of the language: the oral and the writing, tend for base the collected material and aiming the main marks of the oralidade in the journalistic speech. I will look for to evidence as such marks they favor the journalist’s involvement with the reader, in a supposition dialogue that reminds, for times, the oral narrative.

This study had as its goal to investigate how nonnative speakers (NNSs) of Spanish were able to perform pragmatics which in various ways resembled that of native speakers (NSs). The study focused on three advanced NNSs of Spanish who had contributed data six years earlier to a corpus of NS and NNS speech acts of complimenting, apologizing and refusing. The purpose was to do a contrastive analysis comparing the pragmatic performance of NNSs and NSs in order to capture both similarities and areas where highly competent NNSs displayed knowledge gaps, however subtle. The subjects responded to a language background questionnaire regarding their learning of Spanish and also completed a learning style preference survey. They were then asked to revisit their earlier performance in pragmatics from the corpus data and to describe the strategies that they used to produce their highly-rated performance in Spanish pragmatics at that time. The findings revealed ways in which the three subjects differentially imitated NS behavior, and provided insights as to how they arrived at native-like behavior in their facial expressions, use of clicks, physical contact practices, colloquial language, and cursing. The subjects' reported learning style preferences appeared to be generally consistent with the strategies that they reported using for dealing with the pragmatic features of interest, such as the way that they dealt with cursing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The History of Al-Uthman perfectly illustrates the events and happenings of the Ottoman government from the beginning of its emergence to the time of Ragheb Pasha. It also includes the events taking place after 1744. Besides its historical value, this work provides the audience with valuable knowledge about the social situation of the people, the behavior, and actions of the Ottoman rulers, cultural changes, and the way of thinking and the viewpoint of people during that era. The author of this work, Ahmad Judet Pasha, was born in 1823 in Bulgaria and was a very prominent and influential person in the Ottoman government. The translator is Mohammad Hossein Khoei and as said by his own words, he tried to translate this work by the order of Naser al-Din Shah in 1900. The prose of this work, excluding the introduction, which is an artificial one, is in colloquial language and is one of the anonymous texts of the Qajar era. There are two manuscripts of this book, both of them date back to the thirteenth century. However, the first version is complete and the second version is incomplete. Due to the importance of the Qajar colloquial language in the changes and developments of modern Persian, the present study aims to investigate the position of the author and translator and its translation style so as to elucidate the worth of this anonymous historical version alongside its linguistic significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observation that neurological illnesses follow recurrent hits to the head was tempered by the terms that first called the diseases into scientific existence: "punch-drunk," "slugnutty," "slaphappy," "goofy," "punchy," and a host of other colloquialisms accompanying class identities. Thus the discovery of disease and its medicalization ran straight into a countervailing belief about losers—losers in boxing, losers in life, losers in general. To medicalize such individuals was to fly in the face of a culture that made them jokes. Yet a subculture began to emerge around pathological understandings: first in medicine, then in journalism, then in the courts, and finally with patient accounts about illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the challenges in translating artist Andy Warhol's American-English writings into Indian languages. It discusses difficulties in translating time-bound terms, inventive use of idioms and colloquialisms, unusual names of places and people and historically specific descriptions and including in "Diaries." It analyzes the complexity of translating Warhol's visual art language and persona into a verbal language which are necessary for cross-cultural communication.

In this paper, the performance of secondary level learners from ten schools affiliated to Punjab School Education Board (PSEB) and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in district Barnala, Punjab with regard to speaking in English was examined and compared. 200 participants (100 each from schools affiliated to PSEB and CBSE) of grade 10 from ten schools (5 each from the two boards, and 20 students per school) were selected through random sampling procedure. The data, in the form of audio-recordings, was collected by administering a variety of questions to them regarding their day-to-day life. The analysis of the data was done on the basis of five components- Pronunciation, Grammar, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension. A significant difference in the performance of learners from the schools affiliated to the two boards was observed when 't-test' was applied to the data. Furthermore, the performance of the students from the two boards in five sub-skills of speaking was analysed by comparing their average scores against each skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Miedzy Oryginalem a Przekladem is the property of Ksiegarnia Akademicka Sp. zo.o 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 tries to reevaluate the notion of linguistic error in the light of modern research on standard language, linguistic variation and the history of contemporary Hebrew since its emergence as a vernacular at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. We ask why Israelis perceive their Hebrew speech as faulty or bad and whether this perception is appropriate. We then discuss linguistic variation—synchronic and diachronic—and how acknowledging it as an inherent characteristic of language should affect our view of language and language education. Finally, we try to see how we can overcome preconceptions and do research not only on written Hebrew but also on its spoken varieties, so that they receive their proper place in our life and culture.

Abstract: Generally inquiries through Web forms and e-mails are increasing. These inquiry texts usually include many informal ex- pressions use of the colloquial style and many omitted words. An omitted word causes the meaning of a sentence to become ambiguous and makes the reader misread and misunderstand a context. In this paper we propose a method to predict omitted words from context and knowledge using topic information. From the results of evaluation experiment, we have confirmed that some of our methods can predict omitted words at the accuracy rate more than 40% for the expression that we used in the experiment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Luiz Vilela's fiction, centered in the common man's daily life, built with colloquial language, simple syntax and plots of trivial appearance, has, under water that seem placid, subtexts that elaborate meanings, deepen senses, question truths, satirizes the common sense and discuss - approaching, among other themes, philosophical and religious subjects - the men to be ontological and historical figure. This paper shows these aspects in the work of the fictionist Vilela, having as corpus the short story "Um peixe", of the collection Tarde da noite (1970). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to advance in the study of the formal features of the radio comments, a genre that appeared in Spanish talk radio programming in the late 90s and that has now become a key piece in any news, sports or entertainment program. From a more particular perspective, we are interested in analyzing the colloquial register as a stylistic constant that can be found in many comments, despite being highly planned texts, to humanize the texts, making them closer and more familiar to the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a method for automatically transforming faithful transcripts or ASR results into clean transcripts for human consumption using a framework we label speaking style transformation (SST). We perform a detailed analysis of the types of corrections performed by human stenographers when creating clean transcripts, and propose a model that is able to handle the majority of the most common corrections. In particular, the proposed model uses a framework of monotonic statistical machine translation to perform not only the deletion of disfluencies and insertion of punctuation, but also correction of colloquial expressions, insertions of omitted words, and other transformations. We provide a detailed description of the model implementation in the weighted finite state transducer (WFST) framework. An evaluation of the proposed model on both faithful transcripts and speech recognition results of parliamentary and lecture speech demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model in performing the wide variety of corrections necessary for creating clean transcripts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura 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.)

In this paper we intend to contribute to the study of conversational humor in everyday conversation under an interactional perspective. We show the co-construction of humor among friends based on the concept of frame (Bateson, 2002), taking into consideration the lamination of frames (Goffman, 1974; Tannen and Wallat, 2002 [1987]; Gordon, 2008) and contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982) in conversational sequence. We have used as data the audio recording of three meetings among friends, in which they prepare tasty meals, totalizing 16 hours of recording. We have evidenced that (i) conversational humor may work as a laminated frame masking requests, (ii) the participants are aware of their abilities to manipulate frames, using simultaneously play and another type of interactional frame and (iii) requests masked by play frames are not necessarily attended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of International Social Research is the property of Journal of International Social Research 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 is based on an investigation of the standard - colloquial debate among the four official languages, English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay in Singapore. The aim of the study is to examine (1) major steps/movements in the history of Singaporean language policies that have been influential in forwarding the debate in the country and (2) how this debate has been reflected in the country's educational policymaking. Expanding on Gupta's (1989, 1994, 2001) "diglossia model", the study examines the diglossic "H" - "L" relationships among the languages to understand the standard - colloquial issue in the country. The outcomes of this study reveal that (1) the standard - colloquial debate can be extended beyond the "Singlish" - Singapore Standard English (SSE) question to the other three official languages, and (2) the Singapore government's drive for standard language usage marks significant shift in language use and attitudes of the speakers towards the vernacular languages in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of literature is related to the perception of language and style. Literary works are thought to live by virtue of a series of language contexts which mutually modify one another. Without subjecting D.H. Lawrence's work to minute language analysis, certain points can be made that illustrates how language functions in his literary creations. Consequently, our paper's aim is to explore some of the miscellaneous dimensions of D.H. Lawrence's language and style focusing on specifically chromatic effects of: his affectionate irony and transparent words; his highly sensuous adequate to paint language; his essentially visual, vivid and sometimes hard, violent style full of sensation and presentation; his mixed colloquial and formal style with a tone varying from the informal and intimate to the distant and abstract soft modulators; his almost impressionistic extravagance of colors, sounds and movements; his metaphorical, suggestive, stylistic ornamentation, etc. We would also like to show that even a slight attempt to analyze D.H. Lawrence's language reveals the peculiar force and the uniqueness of his style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the pragmatic functions of diminutives in colloquial Jordanian Arabic (CJA) in the light of Brown and Levinson''s model of linguistic politeness. Analysis of naturally occurring data of diminutive use shows that, as an extension of their central use with children, diminutives in CJA have taken on the pragmatic functions of expressing a pejorative attitude, showing affection and endearment, intensifying the speaker''s emotions, hedging an utterance, minimizing imposition, showing modesty and avoiding bragging, and asserting intimacy in joking contexts. A peculiar use of the diminutive in CJA is for mild insulting realized through marking the diminutive on a proper name in antagonistic contexts. It is noted that the diminutive is mainly hearer-supportive, boosting the force of the utterance in positive politeness contexts while mitigating the force of the utterance in negative politeness contexts. The diminutive in CJA is thus used both as a positive politeness strategy, oriented toward expressing affection and endearment and establishing a friendly context for the interaction, and as a negative politeness strategy aimed at minimizing imposition and softening negative statements. These pragmatic functions reflect the role of diminutives in colloquial discourse as a device utilized to mark, establish, or assert social relationships. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika 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.)

Abstract: This paper critically reviews three Relevance Theory (RT) ideas on connectives: the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning, connectives as strictly procedural elements, and monosemy as the best explanation of multifunctional connectives. These three ideas underlie the description of connectives and related sets of markers within RT. Data from colloquial conversations, however, provide evidence which calls these ideas into question. Therefore, it is argued that conceptual and procedural features can coexist within a single marker, that the concept of apposition markers should be reconsidered, that conceptual expressions can connect two utterances, and that polysemy provides generalizations which are lost in a monosemic approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika 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.)

The cultural and linguistic unification of France was a long and difficult process, but it was also a very effective policy. While today nobody questions the monopoly of the French language, several ethnolinguistic movements claim the protection of regional cultures and languages through a specific education system. This paper compares the outcomes produced by these mobilisations through three patterns of institutionalisation: the centripetal model, the centrifugal model and the no institutionalisation model. By so doing, we intend to propose an analytical model of variables which orient collective action for the defence of regional languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abbreviated utterances of different types are widely integrated into the spoken language, and must therefore form an integral part of its description. Four aspects of abbreviated utterances are examined in this article: 1. Modes of Construction—whether the utterance is a result of omission or of compression 2. Discourse function of the abbreviated utterance 3. Context—does it depend on the linguistic or circumstantial context, or is it context-independent 4. Degree of conventionalization—is it one-of-a-kind, a production phenomenon, does it belong to the domain between production and grammar, is it composed in a fixed pattern of the spoken language and classified as "grammatical," or is it an idiomatic expression, a part of the lexicon of spoken Hebrew. The initial study presented in this paper suggests that there exists regularity, at least partial, in the combinations and cross-combinations of the four aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Language modeling for large-vocabulary conversational Arabic speech recognition is faced with the problem of the complex morphology of Arabic, which increases the perplexity and out-of-vocabulary rate. This problem is compounded by the enormous dialectal variability and differences between spoken and written language. In this paper, we investigate improvements in Arabic language modeling by developing various morphology-based language models. We present four different approaches to morphology-based language modeling, including a novel technique called factored language models. Experimental results are presented for both rescoring and first-pass recognition experiments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]