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Given the disruptions the COVID‐19 pandemic has engendered in people's professional lives, the importance and contribution of certain workforces has been under particular scrutiny. In England, the teaching profession has been under particularly close public scrutiny, with concerns that teachers' perceived social appreciation may have decreased throughout the pandemic. Thus, the current study examined the trajectory of teachers' perceptions of how much society, policymakers and the media had valued the teaching profession throughout this time. With an initial sample of 24 primary and secondary teachers in mainstream state schools in England, 54 online interviews took place at three time points: when school buildings were partially reopened for the first time (June 2020), when they were partially closed for the second time (February 2021) and when they were fully reopened for 16 months (July 2022). Three themes were identified in the data using a longitudinal trajectory analysis based on reflexive thematic analysis: 'initial admiration from local communities progressively waned', 'continuous government disrespect towards teachers' and 'initial media vitriol towards teachers was sustained'. Implications for how teachers and other stakeholders in education can most effectively work together for the benefit of the health and effectiveness of the teaching profession and the educational system are considered in the context of the associated risks when teachers have low levels of perceived social appreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Purpose: Translators encounter significant challenges when dealing with the structures of Quranic euphemisms, particularly in effectively avoiding ambiguity of meanings in the target text. This study aims to investigate ambiguity in the translation of Quranic euphemisms into the Malay language and identify effective approaches to address it. Methodology: The present study employed a descriptive analysis, adapting Olimat's (2018) Evaluation Model of Euphemism Translation in the Quran and Newmark's (1981) Semantic and Communicative Theory. Six samples were meticulously chosen with the purpose of effectively capturing ambiguities in the translation of texts related to the domain of sexuality. This study presents each Quranic euphemism in its original Malay translation and a literal English translation, aiming to enhance comprehension and promote a deeper appreciation of the nuances and subtleties in the translation of Quranic euphemisms. Findings: The findings revealed notable deficiencies in accurately conveying the intended meaning in certain translations, despite the implementation of parentheses to facilitate explicitation. Additionally, some translations fell short of fulfilling the lexical function of the words, leading to discrepancies and insufficiencies of information in communicating the contextual meaning. Furthermore, certain translations did not align with the target language context. Contributions: Translators need to employ strategies such as contextual analysis, cultural adaptation, and clarification through additional explanatory to minimize ambiguity in the translated text. Overall, five main aspects need to be considered in the translation of Quranic euphemisms: conveying the true meaning, adherence to grammar rules, effectiveness in word selection, preservation of euphemistic style, and appropriateness of translation approaches. The findings of this study offer valuable insights to Quran translators, specifically those involved in the field of Arabic-Malay translation and pave the way for future advancements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research attempted to investigate the semantic effect resulting from the synergy or merging of the lexical and contextual meanings to clarify intents. With the aim of reaching the intent of the analyst, the book Sharh Al-Radhiy ‘alaa Kaafiat Ibn Al-Haajib as a linguistic reading blog was used. The objective of the study was determined by tracing the two lexes (meaning) and (denotation) besides their derivatives in the book in a pursuit to elaborate the different meanings contained in it. To this end, the research was divided into a general introduction and a brief preface that talked about the debatable relationship between lexis and meaning, in addition to two parts where the first section is concerned with meaning and its derivatives (I mean, it means...), and the second which is concerned with denotation and its derivatives (signifier, signification, it signifies). At the end of the study, a number of results were reached at, with the most important being that Al-Radhiy made use of the word (meaning) in different usages, some being lexical and the others being contextual, in which the intents of speech and the aims of the discourse are clearly manifested. These usages carry the following meanings: signification, the lexical meaning, manifestation of terminology, and interpretation. Further, he used the word (denotation) in the book having the sense of (meaning) to some extent, implying (indication) often, and inferring (evidence) rarely. Moreover, the research refuted the use of the ancient Arab grammarians of denotation as being the meaning, and to their view of the former as synonymous to the latter. This is due to the fact that their use of it in the sense of (meaning) on the one hand, and on the other hand in the sense of the denotation causes a lot of ambiguity and vagueness. And perhaps it does not at present conform with the rules of terminology that stipulate the use of a single term to denote a single concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I offer a new characterisation of what makes a dispute merely verbal. This new characterisation builds on the framework initially outlined by Jenkins and additionally makes use of Stalnaker's notion of 'common ground'. I argue that this 'common ground account' can better classify disputes as merely verbal, and can better explain cases of playing devil's advocate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent advances (e.g. Cheshire 2007; Pichler 2010; Denis 2015), discourse-pragmatic variables continue to challenge variationist theory and methods. An overarching dilemma concerns multifunctionality, raising difficulties for semantic equivalency and the circumscription of the variable context. In this article we present a case study to illustrate that deconstructing a discourse-pragmatic marker into its composite parts reveals clear criteria for disambiguating its principal function and its contextually derived functions. The discussion centres on the pragmatic marker eh in Canadian English. We illustrate that its multifunctionality is derivable from four parts: principal function, syntactic context, prosodic context, and discourse context. Our deconstruction uses a two-pronged methodology, drawing on storyboard elicitation and sociolinguistic interview data, which mutually reinforce our theoretical arguments. Under this transdisciplinary lens, the exponents of form and function become predictable, constrainable, and systematically derivable for probabilistic modelling within and across speech communities. (Confirmationals, multifunctionality, pragmatic markers, eh, speech acts)* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To successfully comprehend a sentence that contains a homonym, readers must select the ambiguous word's context-appropriate meaning. The outcome of this process is influenced both by top-down contextual support and bottom-up, word-specific characteristics. We examined how these factors jointly affect the neural signatures of lexical ambiguity resolution. We measured the similarity between multi-voxel patterns evoked by the same homonym in two distinct linguistic contexts: once after subjects read sentences that biased interpretation toward each homonym's most frequent, dominant meaning, and again after interpretation was biased toward a weaker, subordinate meaning. We predicted that, following a subordinate-biasing context, the dominant yet inappropriate meaning would nevertheless compete for activation, manifesting in increased similarity between the neural patterns evoked by the two word meanings. In left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), degree of within-word pattern similarity was positively predicted by the association strength of each homonym's dominant meaning. Further, within-word pattern similarity in left ATL was negatively predicted by item-specific responses in a region of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) sensitive to semantic conflict. These findings have implications for psycholinguistic models of lexical ambiguity resolution, and for the role of left VLPFC function during this process. Moreover, these findings demonstrate the utility of item-level, similarity-based analyses of fMRI data for our understanding of competition between co-activated word meanings during language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Semantic ambiguity is typically measured by summing the number of senses or dictionary definitions that a word has. Such measures are somewhat subjective and may not adequately capture the full extent of variation in word meaning, particularly for polysemous words that can be used in many different ways, with subtle shifts in meaning. Here, we describe an alternative, computationally derived measure of ambiguity based on the proposal that the meanings of words vary continuously as a function of their contexts. On this view, words that appear in a wide range of contexts on diverse topics are more variable in meaning than those that appear in a restricted set of similar contexts. To quantify this variation, we performed latent semantic analysis on a large text corpus to estimate the semantic similarities of different linguistic contexts. From these estimates, we calculated the degree to which the different contexts associated with a given word vary in their meanings. We term this quantity a word's semantic diversity (SemD). We suggest that this approach provides an objective way of quantifying the subtle, context-dependent variations in word meaning that are often present in language. We demonstrate that SemD is correlated with other measures of ambiguity and contextual variability, as well as with frequency and imageability. We also show that SemD is a strong predictor of performance in semantic judgments in healthy individuals and in patients with semantic deficits, accounting for unique variance beyond that of other predictors. SemD values for over 30,000 English words are provided as supplementary materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contextual grammars are introduced by Solomon Marcus in 1969 based on the fundamental concept of descriptive linguistics of insertion of strings in given contexts. Internal contextual grammars are introduced by Păun and Nguyen in 1980. For contextual grammars several descriptional complexity measures and levels of ambiguity have been defined. In this paper, we analyze the trade-off between ambiguity and complexity of languages generated by internal contextual grammars. The notion of a pseudo inherently ambiguous language with respect to two complexity measures is introduced and investigated. These languages can be generated by unambiguous grammars which are minimal with respect to one measure and ambiguous if they are minimal with respect to the other measure. An open problem from [15] is solved in this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese. Our results showed that listeners used the prosodic cue to make a structural prediction before hearing disambiguating information. Importantly, the effect was limited to cases where the visual scene provided an appropriate context for the prosodic cue, thus eliminating the explanation that listeners have simply associated marked prosodic information with a less frequent structure. Furthermore, the influence of the prosodic information was also evident following disambiguating information, in a way that reflected the initial analysis. The current study demonstrates that prosody, when provided with an appropriate context, influences the initial syntactic analysis and also the subsequent cost at disambiguating information. The results also provide first evidence for pre-head structural prediction driven by prosodic and contextual information with a head-final construction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reports two experiments using sentences with a temporary ambiguity between a direct object and a sentence complement analysis that is resolved toward the normally preferred direct object analysis. Postverbal noun phrases in these sentences could be ambiguously attached as either a direct object or the subject of a sentence complement, whereas in unambiguous versions of the sentences the subcategorization of the verb forced the direct object interpretation. Participants read these sentences in relatively long paragraph contexts, where the context supported the direct object analysis (“preferred”), supported the sentence complement analysis (“unpreferred”), or provided conflicting evidence about both analyses (“conflicting”). Self-paced reading times for ambiguous postverbal noun phrases were almost equivalent to the reading times of their unambiguous counterparts, even in unpreferred and conflicted context conditions. However, time to read a following region, which forced the direct object interpretation, was affected by the interaction of verb subcategorization ambiguity and contextual support. The full pattern of results do not fit well with either an unelaborated single-analysis (“garden path”) model or a competitive constraint-satisfaction model, but are consistent with a race model in which multiple factors affect the speed of constructing a single initial analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguous loss has become a standard theory for understanding the impact of situations where the presence of a family member is subject to ambiguity. A number of studies of ambiguous loss have been made in a range of situations of ambiguity, but almost all have been firmly located within a Western cultural context. Here, ambiguous loss is explored in a different cultural context through a study of the families of persons disappeared during Nepal's decade-long Maoist insurgency. Through the use of qualitative research methods, a sample of families ( n = 160) of those disappeared during the conflict has been studied to understand the impact of disappearance. The results of this study are compared with the expectations of ambiguous loss theory to test its relevance in the Nepali context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual system is tasked with extracting stimulus content (e.g. the identity of an object) from the spatiotemporal light pattern falling on the retina. However, visual information can be ambiguous with regard to content (e.g. an object when viewed from far away), requiring the system to also consider contextual information. Additionally, visual information originating from the same content can differ (e.g. the same object viewed from different angles), requiring the system to extract content invariant to these differences. In this review, we explore these challenges from experimental and theoretical perspectives, and motivate the need to incorporate solutions for both ambiguity and invariance into hierarchical models of visual processing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambiguity involved in interpreting numbers and words is central to Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche's (this issue) claim of “powerful spin” in the Wampold, Minami, Tierney, Baskin, and Bhati (2005) re-analysis of their meta-analytic findings on the placebo effect in medicine. Meta-analytic results reported by the two sets of authors are nearly identical, yet their conclusions differ dramatically. In our comment, we discuss the findings of the respective authors and consider options for representing and interpreting the magnitude of meta-analytic effect size estimates. We conclude that although the meta-analyses described indicate that placebo effects do exist and cannot be dismissed as unimportant, given contextual information, it is consistent with existing research to describe the obtained mean effect size for placebos in medicine as small in magnitude. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 63: 391–399, 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]